[PC-BSD Testing] Flash drive

[Bill Leeper]

This is coming by way of an installation on an 8GB flash drive. While it 
does work I have to say I would be reluctant to recommend it.

1.  Installation takes a long, long, long, long, really long time. I did 
not time it but it was somewhere between 90 - 120 minutes.

2.  Booting takes a long time. I felt like I was starting Windows again. 
Hopefully subsequent boots will be faster.

3.  Once booted it runs pretty slowly. Kind of reminds me of the old 
Commodore/TI-99 days. Start up your program and go get your coffee. 
Actually, it is not quite that bad.

4.  I used aa 8 GB flash drive and was left with 1.4 GB according to the 
file manager. And the only extra stuff I installed was Firefox and K3b.

In any event, it was an interesting experiment. I may try and get my 
hands on a faster writing flash drive and see how much difference that 
makes. And it does get a bit annoying with my flash drive sitting there 
constantly blinking.   :-)

I notices a couple of strange things when I installed this. And I 
installed from the same DVD I used on the desktop twice. The 
installation GUI came up almost full screen which I do not recall it 
having done before. Also, when the system finally booted to the video 
setup screen it had my video card ID,d correctly but it defaulted to the 
vesa driver instead of the nv driver. It definitely has not done that 
before. Another curoius thing is that I am not getting the Konqueror 
slowness that I was having in the hard drive installation. i will check 
into that when I boot back into it.

Anyway, thanks for the great job Kris and team. This is a very 
interesting development. Now if we can just get a bit more speed out of 
it.   :-)


Bill