Downloading FreeBSD

I'm downloading FreeBSD tonight. It'll all be here by tomorrow. I've got a big spare partition because I was finally able to migrate my root directory to a smaller partition, although I had to switch back to lilo to do it.

I'll install FreeBSD tomorrow on that spare 40G partition. I'll then see if I like it. I'll install all my favorite tools, see if I can do everything I need to do in it, and I'll decide whether to switch to it from Linux. I'll probably keep both, actually. Although I'll work in Linux more than on FreeBSD.

I'm told that FreeBSD doesn't quite have the SMP support that Linux does, among other things. That doesn't really matter to me. I don't have two CPUs (or even hyperthreading) on this laptop, although the Toshiba laptop has that. I may install FreeBSD there too, just to see which OS performs better with hyperthreading.

I've got a postgresql performance test case ready to go ;-).

So it's going to be a fun weekend. I'm very happy with Ubuntu just now. If I don't want to keep testing FreeBSD, I'll drop it for Ubuntu Feisty. Or I'll just split that partition and have Feisty and FreeBSD plus my workhorse ubuntu Edgy on the same box. If I can get a copy of Mandriva 2007, I may install that too. Either that or Mandriva 2006 had svk support built in already. I don't use svk a lot, but I definitely need it. So I may split the drive yet again :-).

This whole thing approaches lunacy. Fortunately, I don't actually have the time to try out all of that. I'll certainly test out FreeBSD. I'll almost certainly test out Feisty. Probably won't try Mandriva or NetBSD though. Although, I'm always ready to be surprised by myself.