[Tfug] Thoughts on FreeBSD 7.0

[christ]

Predrag, this might be for you.

So my Christmas with Linux is over. It ended some time ago when I just lost interest in it. If you don't remember, I loaded up xubuntu, and decided to run it for a while. I was impressed by it, and have to say that I think it is a grandma Nilly (was that her name) distro. I think it's most simply put by saying that any person unable to acclimate to this environment would have just as much trouble going from xp to vista, i.e. these are just the people that will always be bound to the tech-ish people for support. And you know, that's ok b/c I depend on them for knitting advice.

As for FreeBSD 7.0, it's been a relief, only in the sense that I don't have to live with the anxiety of dealing with the now completely unsupported release of 5.4, which I've been riding for too long now.

Unfortunately that's kind of where things end. Not because it's not good, it's just fine. I just can't tell the difference between 5.4 and 7.0. This is mainly because I only have an old HP parallel printer and a set of speakers attached to my system. What can I say, I don't buy a lot of new technology (I've never even used a usb device). Actually under 7.0 my printer doesn't even work, what's worse, is that the system actually panics and crashes when I try to print now. There is a bug report about it. It seems it has to do with polled and extended mode versus interrupt. I haven't been able to get it to print under polled and extended mode. You send something to the printer and it just doesn't crash now.

I'd also like it if flash worked. I know I'm supposed to scoff at that stuff b/c it's not open source and it just clutters the web and bandwidth, but the truth is that too much stuff out there uses it now, and surfing the web gets downright clunky sometimes when you refuse to go to a site just because it uses a flash intro. So I'm actually sitting here using the same version of flash that I used in 5.4 (version 7.0 r69). I'm curious to see how FreeBSD hackers manage a workaround to newer versions of flash now that it uses alsa (what did it use before?), or will 7.0 be the last version of flash to work on FreeBSD?

Anyway, openoffice doesn't work either. In FreeBSD it's up to 2.3 and when I try to close anything, openoffice hangs, forcing me to kill it, which results in loosing my document. That one hurt especially bad today when I discovered this by losing some great notes I had come up with about my senior thesis. I'm looking into abiword, but I don't know if it will save my documents the way I need to if I need them opened on someone else's Windows machine, since it doesn't give options for saving to different versions of Word like openoffice did. Since I also need support for excel-type stuff and potentially power point, I'm sitting here trying to compile the version of openoffice I ran on 5.4

It's not all gloom and doom though. Inkscape, gimp, bluefish, eclipse, scribus, xmms, mplayer and of course the more standard unix tools from vi to bvi all work ok. I just wish I could get some school work done.

I guess I'm saying I can't wait for my system to get old again.

-- 
christ <skeptikos at gmail.com>