[PC-BSD Testing] Testing 7.1 RC1

[Kris Moore]

Yvan Martin wrote:
> First the good stuff:
> 1. Firefox and Thunderbird worked right away, which had not been the 
> case with the Betas.
> 2. I was not presented with a choice of nVidia drivers, but nv behaved 
> well which is all a normal user would expect.

There is no amd64 Nvidia driver for FreeBSD as of yet. We're still 
waiting for a few crucial things to be added to the BSD system before 
nvidia will release a driver for us:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/NvidiaFeatureRequests

> This was on my 64bit AMD desktop with 7600GT video card. I also noticed 
> there was no longer the four iterations of the WRITE_MIXER error I had 
> been seeing upon existing PC-BSD through the last few versions of the 
> 1.x series and the earlier 7.x versions. This being said PC-BSD 7.1 RC1 
> still does not know how to handle my M-Audio Revolution 5.1 Sound Card. 
> The volume is still 10db lower than on Windows or Linux and while I can 
> turn the volume up much higher the dynamics are simply not there and the 
> music sounds dull... plus for someone who switches between OSes, it 
> makes no sense to be running barely open for the other other OSes and 
> almost all the way up for PC-BSD to get a similar volume level (with 
> less dynamics). I realize the problem may well be with the FreeBSD layer 
> but this would keep me from using PC-BSD as my principal Desktop OS, at 
> least at this point in time... Kmix simply does not see the hardware 
> only the OSS driver.
> 
> At the same time I had to pull the 32bit version on my Acer Aspire One 
> netbook. The two previous versions would simply not run reliably: some 
> times the touchpad worked fully and would respond to taps and scroll 
> motiions... but most often, it would not and I was forced to use the 
> buttons on either side of the touchpad (which are awful on that machine).
> 
> Possibly worse was the fact that the wireless network worked at best 50% 
> of the time. I would only find out after booting into PC-BSD whether or 
> not it would work. In the end, it was simply too frustrating to keep 
> doing this... too bad because the OS showed promise in terms of response 
> on a netbook class machine, although the startup time was quite long.
> 
> I will keep trying to use PC-BSD on my desktop for now and maybe one day 
> revisit on the netbook PC.
> _______________________________________________

Unfortunately with these kind of HW issues, such as sound / network 
there's not a lot we can do at the moment, until the support is added 
into FBSD. The good news is that I'm hearing most of these issues are 
solved in FreeBSD 8. I plan on starting to do PC-BSD 8 snapshots 
sometime during the summer, so you may be interested in using those on 
these effected laptops when they are available.


-- 

Kris Moore
PC-BSD Software
http://www.pcbsd.com