PCBSD 9.1-RELEASE trial

[semin]

Tried to play around PCBSD 9.1 that was released recently. My thought was quite disappointed.

I first tried to directly upgrade from PCBSD 9.0 to 9.1 and ended up unable to boot the system. (It says fatal error and find no screens or whatsoever... should have taken a picture).

I then tried clean install using 9.1-i386-dvd and ended up with quite a few issues. Below is my system:

Laptop: Compaq Presario 2166ae (8.5+ years old!)
CPU: AMD Athlon XP-M 2400+
RAM: 1GB
HD: 120GB
VGA: Ati Mobility IGP (cannot recall the model for now)
Wireless: usb wireless dongle TP-Link TL-WN321G (worked on PCBSD 9.0)

1. First I picked xfce and Enlightenment 17 to be installed and then picked xfce [desktop] and Chinese_tw [language] when logging into the system. The interface, or more specifically the font, is utterly ugly. The English alphabets and numerals appear as huge as a Chinese letter. Same for Chinese_cn mode. In Japanese mode on the other hand these characters appear properly. (Will upload the screenshots somewhere later).
   
2. In xfce the bottom toolbar didn't have any icon; it's just a short empty toolbar. Also there is no top toolbar at all so I could only open a tool menu by right click on desktop.
   
3. The mouse cursor blinks when I move it around the desktop or everywhere. To be more precise it blinks with any of my action - I click on desktop (even if there is nothing on that spot) and the cursor disappears and I move the mouse a bit and the cursor reappears again. The blinking is rather obvious and distracting if I move my mouse slowly. This is especially annoying when doing my work as the cursor just disappears whenever I click on menu button in any application and I have to "call back" the cursor by deliberately click/move my mouse.
   
4. Then I tried to logout xfce and then login to Enlightenment 17. The Chinese_tw mode still looks unbearable, so I tried to logout and was about to login into E17 again but in English mode. Then alas E17 appears freeze - the E17 login splash screen seems still working (the light points in the splash screen keep bouncing) but it never get into E17 desktop forever. The harddrive seems no I/O. I had to switch to another terminal (Ctrl+Alt+F2) and reboot the whole system again. After reboot and try E17 again, it still freezed at the same stage.
   
   So I tried to re-install the whole 9.1 again but this time without xfce as well as Asian languages i.e. also installed E17 in English mode. But again after installation I was able to login to E17 desktop but then failed after logout and re-login (or reboot).
   
   Also in E17 the cursor blinks - both at post-installation configuration stage and on E17 desktop. This is obviously not due to E17 or xfce but more likely because of X or somewhere else.
   
5. The wifi didn't work - the icon appeared "associated" but the network actually was not connected so I could not even connect to AppCafe server. I have tried several settings but none of them worked. Also the network configuration appeared sluggish - whenever I clicked the "apply" button (regardless of whether I have done any change in the window) it just tried to restart the network and the system appeared freeze for awhile, and then ended up with nothing. This laptop used to be able to connect wifi on 9.0.
   
6. During the installation the system failed to set the monitor properly. Apparently it detected the Ati video chipset but somehow it didn't work. So I was forced to use vesa rather than other ati, ati-3d-enable etc drivers. Also I noticed that after the system tried to use ati driver and failed, the colour for all buttons in the following window appears funny. (Will upload the screen shot somewhere later).
   
7. Haven't tried audio yet as I am not able to access to the internet e.g. youtube to try it out.
   

Overall thought - quite disappointed.

I am currently downloading FreeBSD 9.1 and will try on the same laptop and see how it goes. Let's see how the PCBSD 9.1.1 would look like...


Regards,
Sam