Although I had initially set out to devote more time with FreeBSD in the form of PC-BSD, it looks like the adventure ended abruptly with an update error, which was surprising since even the worst openSUSE or Fedora update has never prevented a Linux install from booting up properly. The error message was one of those obscure boot messages that even Linux users get from time to time, which turned out to be a common error with this PC-PSD release and one which annoyed several other users as well.
The fix is detailed in the PC-BSD forum and while the steps are fairly simple and might resolve the issue for some machines, the experience made me decide to switch back to FreeBSD instead. It was not unlike my early forays into Arch and openSUSE a long, long time ago when it was pretty easy to make a mistake and break the system. Perhaps another deal-breaker was that it's so rare that Linux distributions fail so badly these days at the essentials that PC-BSD's abrupt non-boot was a surprise considering that I was so early into configuration and the cause was a basic and minimal update.
I didn't feel too bad about the three or fours hours I spent running PC-BSD through its paces and it certainly gave me additional insight to FreeBSD in general. I still intend to set up a FreeBSD machine real soon but in the meantime, it's back to the safe and familiar environment of the Linux world.
0 comments:
Post a Comment