Even before
installing PCBSD, I have thoughts on it. What is up with the slow mirrors?
I tried downloading
the new 9.1 Beta and stopped it, thinking that the mirrors must be overloaded
due to the horrendous download speeds I was getting.
I tried three and the
speed was abysmal. I cannot say exactly what the kbps rate was because I was
trying to download it through Chrome, and in the annoying bottom bar, it does
not give what the speed is of the files coming across. But after 1/2 hour and the
download was at 0.1 % of 3.4 GB, I stopped it.
So I tried
bittorrent. I started the download and went to bed. When I got up in the
morning, the download was done and I burned it to DVD, just to find out that
the file had been corrupted (no, I did not do a hash on it). Fortunately I
burned it onto a DVD-RW disc, so I did not make a coaster.
Now I am downloading
it with DownLoadThemAll through Firefox.
The download has been running for over 2.5 hours and it tells me that
average throughput is about 93 kbps. Come on! That is dialup speed x2! I don’t
pay for 20 Mbps from Cox just to download files at twice dialup speeds.
To the folks at
PCBSD--get or recruit faster mirrors. Or invest a few bucks in a hosting
service such as 1 & 1 that gives unlimited bandwidth for a low monthly fee.
I try to be patient,
but 93 kbps is unreasonably slow. These mirrors, that are so slow, are actually
an impedance to adoption of PCBSD, rather than a help.
Première partie
Later that same day:
PCBSD finally
completed downloading. After successfully completing the hash test on Windows 7
(the program that does this very nicely on Windows 7 is called File Checksum
Integrity Verifier (fciv.exe) I was off.
Upon boot-up, I was
asked the normal questions. Installation was a breeze. After installation came
the mandatory reboot.
The KDE desktop
looked very nice--exactly what I expected. I configured it to work with my
wireless network with little problems. It did take two tries before it
connected to my network via WPA2 encryption. Why there was a delay, I do not
know. But it finally got its IP address from the router and all was well.
The first thing that
I noticed is that when trying to launch vital KDE applications, KPatience and
KMahjongg, the windows would not display. The Window frame would show KPatience
or KMahjongg at the top, but inside, the windows were blank.
After a few moments,
there was a system notification stating that there were updates ready to
install. One of those updates was for KDE—something about memory access.
After all of the
updates were installed, the display problem with KDE went away.
This is unacceptable.
9.0 should never have been released with such a problem built-in. To be honest,
this turned me off. If there was a known issue in KDE in regards to how it
interacts with PCBSD, then why not fix the problem and make THAT fix the 9.0
release?
Though I know that
PCBSD is a volunteer-based project, one needs to consider the people who are
downloading and using it as being customers. One always wants to make the
customer experience as enjoyable as possible. If my laptop had not been
connected to a network upon startup, this “issue” would have been a
deal-breaker for most people, except for perhaps the most masochistic of geeks.
Then I tried to fire
up Ardour. It said it could not find JACK and would not go further. I don’t
know JACK (pun intended). Should this have not been set up when PCBSD ran from
the DVD? Or if not at that time, upon first boot-up into the operating system?
To be fair, I do not know if this is a problem with PCBSD, or with Ardour. But
I know that the first time I ran Adobe Soundbooth on my other laptop, it never
complained about not knowing JACK or being able to use my laptop’s resources.
Deuxième Partie
I decided that this
might not be a fair review of PCBSD, since obviously many changes have gone
into the 9.1 Beta release. So I decided to just wipe my laptop to the new
version and start my odyssey there.
Installing 9.1 Beta
was much the same as installing 9.0. It asked similar questions and seemed to
go well. This time it asked me what desktop I would like to use. My Compaq is
no piker, but I like a snappy desktop. I find that KDE & Gnome just have
this extremely bloated feeling to it. IMO, on the same hardware, Windows 7 is
much more responsive that KDE is. It is a shame--I used to love KDE. But I
digress.
I choose Xfce for my
Window manager--light, quick, perfect. It installed without problem.
Upon the reboot,
while the desktop was loading, the machine locked up and went into some sort of
loop. See video for details.
The mouse was
responsive, and if Ctrl+Alt+F2 were pressed, it would take me out to the
command prompt. This tells me that the underlying operating system was okay, it
was just Xfce freaking out in some way.
But though the
underlying OS was fine, this is still PCBSD’s fault. Before a product is
released into beta-land, those types of kinks need to be worked out.
It is unacceptable to
release in beta an OS that has an included Windows Manager where the two do not
work together--in an alpha release, perhaps. Give the geeks something to work
on.
I realize that this
damages my geek cred, but that is okay. I am 49 years-old. I remember playing
with Linux back in 1996, trying to figure out how to get it to see the floppy
disk that I just put into the computer. That was a challenge, then.
Now, I just want the
tech to work. I cannot be bothered with interrupts, dependency hells, DLL
hells, and the like. Perhaps PCBSD is too young to have such high hopes for it.
To be honest, most Linuxes are not there yet either.
Fini
And so, alas, for the
time being, my PCBSD test is over even before it has begun. For right now, I
will be heading back to Linux, trying out Sabayon Linux.
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