Forum usage as advocacy

[bds]

Hi all --

the sentiment here really resonates with me. I'm still *so* wet behind the ears with PC-BSD -- more generally with *BSD -- but try not to let that stop me from taking a stab at trying to help some of the new users. Of course, my ability to help is limited. I can only hope, though, that one of you more experienced users is able to drop by at some point and help with the finer points of the problem.

@mwatkins:

Until *BSD has working suspend and resume on commonly sold current laptops and desktops (those supporting ACPI), marketing to the broader public is, in my opinion, pointless.

^^^ If there's one thing that occasionally makes me think I need to go over to "greener" pastures, it's this.

I think that there's some really positive work happening right now in this area of FreeBSD/PC-BSD; the Intel driver work, and recent patch work on suspend/resume. My problem is that, if the patches aren't built into a PC-BSD/FreeBSD release, I'm at a bit of a loss for PC-BSD kernel rebuilding. This is a personal learning curve & one I'm not quite ready to surmount, but once I am I'm looking forward to trying to help others with the same issues I'm facing now.

Cheers!

[mwatkins]

"Greener" pastures indeed.

Nope, I like the grass very much on the FreeBSD side of the fence which is why ACPI/suspend/resume, for me, makes it hard to justify running Linux. I already manage a number of FreeBSD boxen and have done for more than a decade now. Wow, didn't realize it was that long!

There is so much cool stuff happening in FreeBSD/PC-BSD land that I am really reluctant to swap my main work environment over to another. If I did, it might be to Arch Linux although I've not checked out that one yet but it does sound somewhat appealing to me.

As far as the original poster's thoughts, I suspect some percentage of PC-BSD questions end up being directed to the FreeBSD forum and that is inevitable given their common base. There seem to be quite a few newbies over there that perhaps should be experiencing PC-BSD as their first OS, anyway.

[bds]

I sift through the Freebsd forums & frequently find good information there. If I had one complaint, it would ne that the forum mods seem to be convinced that PC-BSD is a fork, and generally aren't willing to address questions. I wish that weren't the case, as I think it's a misunderstanding.

[mwatkins]

Until *BSD has working suspend and resume on commonly sold current laptops and desktops (those supporting ACPI), marketing to the broader public is, in my opinion, pointless.

Interesting... I've started up a new FreeBSD 9.1 beta install, and suspend is working.

Ive not tried acpiconf -s 3 in too many test conditions as yet, but it worked twice - once from the console and once while running X and dwm - and it has never worked before on FreeBSD 9 on this particular machine.

It may be that my configuration outside of the actual code changes has more to do with it, but even though I can't guarantee the config is identical, it should be very very close to what I had running on the last two installations.

Time to read change logs to see if there is any reason for this coming out of the 9.1 release, but first I'm backing up my config before i break it.