Need a little advice for i386 user

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donluca
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Joined: Thu Mar 29, 2018 8:47 am

Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by donluca »

Hi everyone,

I'm still dragging around a beautiful 10 year old ultrabook from Sony, a Vaio TX1HP with a 1.1Ghz Ultra low voltage Pentium M and RAM maxed out at 1.5GB.

Right now I have the original windows xp which it came with and rolling Linux Mint Cinnamon which runs stupidly good with the latest updates.

I've always been a Mac guy and when I found out GhostBSD I immediately fell in love with it.

Right now I have two images for my Vaio:

10.3 Release Mate
11.1 BETA1 (2017.08.29) Mate

After trying both in virtual machine, I have to say that I preferred the 11.1 beta (it looked more polished and somewhat slightly more performant) but the problem is that it doesn't have the pkg repos anymore, which leaves me with two choices:

1 - Using the GhostBSD 10.3 repo
2 - Using the latest FreeBSD repo

Which of those two would you recommend me doing?

Thanks!

P.S.: I know that from 11.1RC support has been dropped for i386, not holding any grudge, although it's seriously a pity since most of the netbooks around run on old 32-bit only Atoms, but I can perfectly see why it's such a pain to maintain all those repos and making sure everything works.

EDIT: out of curiosity, will you keep supporting and updating the 10.3 i386 repository? This might be something which would make me change my decision towards using 10.3.
Also, I've just tried the Xfce flavor of GhostBSD and holy moly, I'm liking it much more than MATE! Xfce has really come a long way since I first used it many years ago.
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donluca
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by donluca »

Just a quick update on the matter:

I've tried 11.1 Beta with Xfce on VM, disabled the GhostBSD repo (which doesn't exist anymore) and updated everything with the FreeBSD repo. Everything went great.

After I decided to upgrade to FreeBSD 11.1 Release and, again, everything seems to work nice!

Maybe this is how I'll do it on my machine, but any input on the subject would be greatly appreciated.
Hecktor
Posts: 27
Joined: Thu Dec 21, 2017 2:43 pm

Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by Hecktor »

I'd recommend just using FreeBSD.

It is pretty simple to get XFCE up and running and you are completely patched and up to date. I run windowmaker personally on my laptop with FreeBSD 11 and it works great.

It is difficult for GhostBSD to keep a 32 bit functional with so little staff.
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donluca
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by donluca »

I know, I've already tried but for some reason I reach a point during the configuration of FreeBSD where my PC starts kernel panicking at boot time and the text scrolls too fast for me to read anything :(

I've read something about ACPI, tried booting with it disabled but got another kernel panic.

On the other hand, for some strange reason, GhostBSD seems to work just fine, go figure.
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ericbsd
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by ericbsd »

Yeah, that is odd.

@donluca GhostBSD does not support i386 anymore, but 10.3 is set up on FreeBSD repository and you can update to 10.4 or upgrade to 11.1, but you will not have any of the GhostBSD ports.
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donluca
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by donluca »

Alright, thanks for the clarification!

I've just finished installing GhostBSD 11.1 beta, I've changed the repos to FreeBSD, updated all the packages, upgraded to FreeBSD 11.1-Release (from RC3) and everything is working great!

Right now I'm done wrestling with the wifi and it's working good as well.

Now I have to create some shortcuts with the Fn+F1-2-3-4 keys to turn up/down the volume and brightness (hopefully with a nice pop up like I had in Linux Mint with Cinnamon) and then I guess I'm good!

Thanks for your hard work, even if it will not support i386, it served as a very nice starting point!
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ericbsd
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by ericbsd »

I forgot one thing there is lib32 supports in GhsotBSD 11.1 and there is some user that have boot 64bit on 32bit machine.
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donluca
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Re: Need a little advice for i386 user

Post by donluca »

Oh wow, isn't the kernel 64-bits only? That sounds... curious. I'll definitely give it a go when i'll have some free time back on my hands.
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