Free as a bird

Here we are then. Saturday night and I’ve spent most of the day installing FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE on my PC instead of doing something fun.

Flatline, my Fedora Core 4 machine, has gone into some kind of psychotic death spiral, where after running yum-update it experiences a spate of disk errors and becomes unusable.

It could be that this is some kind of hardware problem, but that seems unlikely as the machine can take any kind of load in stress testing, but goes into cutter-teenage-goth-on-LiveJournal-mode after yum updates.

So it seemed like a good time to move over to FreeBSD since it’s the reference system for Mac OS X and my spiffy web host TextDrive uses it as well.

And so far so good. Installing FreeBSD is certainly … cough … different … from installing a modern Linux distro. Let’s just call the installer “relentlessly minimalistic.”

It is quite functional though, once you get past the early-nineties feel, and after some time installing the necessary ports (including rebuilding the kernel to get AppleTalk working), Flatline is once again a productive member of society.

It is my fervent wish to not have to touch it again for a long time.

P.S.

If you are running FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE and are having problems getting Subversion to install through the ports system, getting an error about apr-1.0 not being installed even though it bloody well is, issue

make install -DWITH_APACHE2_APR

instead of the regular make install.

Hopefully that will save some other poor soul an hour of his or her life.

D.S.