short review of PC BSD 1.4 by new user

[scanman]

Installed on Toshiba Satellite s6000. 1066MHz 256 RAM trident shared.

Installing PC BSD was fast. approx 20 min. After the instalation XP will not boot anymore windows/sys32/hal.dll is corrupted or missing. I have had to install XP again. Using GAG like boot manager. Now dual boot is not a problem.

PC BSD 1.4 is very fast compare to SUSE 10.1. Actually this is the reason I am not using SUSE any more. It was too slow on my old PC
Videofiles and MP3 - all works out of the box. Unlike SUSE where you have to make some changes which with my PC and fast ADSL connection took nearly two hours.
Installing the Printer HP Photosmart D6160 was very easy thanks to one old post of dracheflieger.
Installing software is very easy. You even don't have to download it. BSD takes all needed steps. Picasa, Skype, OpenOffice, Kbedic, Ktorrent, K3B, Firrefox. Everything is there.

Points where I need some advice

PC BSD will not see my FAT32 partition. I have such partition for to share files with Windows. Documents, videos etc. Unfortunately in "Storage media I can see only my NTFS partition but I am unable to write on it"

When I am typing I have to do it very slowly otherwise I got double letters all the time. I have tried settings-> peripherals-> keyboard but changes does not seems to "solvee thhe probleem".

Otherwise - congratulations for the great work.

[Charles]

Thanks and welcome

[antik]

Points where I need some advice

PC BSD will not see my FAT32 partition. I have such partition for to share files with Windows. Documents, videos etc. Unfortunately in "Storage media I can see only my NTFS partition but I am unable to write on it"

When I am typing I have to do it very slowly otherwise I got double letters all the time. I have tried settings-> peripherals-> keyboard but changes does not seems to "solvee thhe probleem".

Otherwise - congratulations for the great work.

Mount fat32 partitions manually- it is "feature" of HAL daemon not letting users to mount fixed disks with "too much fat".

# mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat

For keyboard I presume you got some IBM notebook or something. Buy new external keyboard or update bios.

[scanman]

Thanks forr your responce

Code:

# mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat

For keyboard I presume you got some IBM notebook or something. Buy new external keyboard or update bios.

pcbsd# # mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat
#: Command not found.

unfortunately it does not seems to work

About the keyboard. This is laptop as described in the beginning of the post. I don't think that external keyboard is option for me. It works fine with Windows 2k, XP, Suse, Knoppix, Ubuntu. May be there is other solution?

[Gerard]

Thanks forr your responce

Originally Posted by antik

Code: # mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat For keyboard I presume you got some IBM notebook or something. Buy new external keyboard or update bios.

pcbsd# # mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat
#: Command not found.

unfortunately it does not seems to work

About the keyboard. This is laptop as described in the beginning of the post. I don't think that external keyboard is option for me. It works fine with Windows 2k, XP, Suse, Knoppix, Ubuntu. May be there is other solution?

does the /mnt/fat directory exist? If not, you need to create it first

su
your password
mkdir /mnt/fat

more info on the FAQ database

[antik]

pcbsd# # mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat
#: Command not found.

unfortunately it does not seems to work

Unfortunately you don't know what are you doing.

"#" is root command prompt- no need to type it once more.

ad0s2 is first disk and second partition- what partition got fat32 on your computer is not my concern. And of course you have to make directory for mounting or just use /mnt.

[the_darkside_986]

Welcome. I also noticed how FreeBSD is exceedingly faster than most graphical linux distros, even though it is running KDE. (But Gnome is becoming the real memory hog, and starting to surpass KDE in resource usage it seems.) I installed PCBSD 1.3 on a system with a Pentium II and 256 MB and it runs as fast, if not faster, than Windows XP did on that system.

BTW, you must do an "su" in order to make that # appear in the FreeBSD's shell. But sometimes in csh, I must use bash because I don't know how to list commands starting with certain letters using csh.

[scanman]

Code:

su your password mkdir /mnt/fat

more info on the FAQ database

when trying faqs manual

kdesu kedit /etc/fstab
kbuildsycoca running...
pcbsd# kded: ERROR: : couldn't create slave : Cannot talk to klauncher

when trying via console

%su
Password:
pcbsd# mkdir /mnt/fat
pcbsd# mount -t msdos /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat
mount: Using "-t msdosfs", since "-t msdos" is deprecated.
pcbsd# mount -t msdosfs /dev/ad0s2 /mnt/fat
mount_msdosfs: /dev/ad0s2: Operation not permitted
pcbsd#

my disk is partitioned in following manner:
1. 15GB NTFS
2. 15GB FAT32
3. 10GB BSD
I am not sure if ad0s2 or ad0s3 is correct. First partition is ad0s0 or ad0s1. Which ad0s? have to be the FAT partition?