[NMLUG] Matt Bowie's Corner

[brians.outfit at gmail.com (Brian Rodgers)]

In this installment of my notes on alternative operating systems, I
give my initial impressions of FreeBSD.  I also want to let everyone
know about the open source computer emulator QEMU.

For my initial foray into BSD, I installed a stock FreeBSD via the
minimum install CD.  The CD is less than 50MB, and performs the
majority of it's install via the internet.  There is a text menu based
install procedure.  I have time to explore all the options, and there
are alot of them.  Luckily, it gives sensible defaults, so you can get
a basic system up and running without having to know much about how
BSD works.  After waiting a while while it downloaded the system via
FTP, I rebooted into a functional (console only) FreeBSD installation.
 At this point, I was satisfied I could install a basic FreeBSD
system, so decided to try out PC BSD.

PC BSD was even easier to install.  A few mouse clicks, and a complete
FreeBSD installation, including KDE, was up and running.  This ease
means that you don't have as many options as with a stock FreeBSD, but
it's intended to give you a working Desktop BSD installation, and it
does just that.  Other things can be added later if desired.

PC BSD includes it's own package management system, which resolves the
issue of library dependancy problems.  Any program you install via
it's package manager installs the program in it's own directory, and
installs a copy of all required libraries in this directory as well. 
This prevents the conflicts between package versions that sometimes
occurs when you update a library at the cost of more disk space. 
There are not many programs available for this new package manager
yet, but the ones that are there make installation as easy as on
windows.  Go to the website, download the PBI to your desktop, then
click on it to run.  It will download and install the program, and
your ready to go.  Uninstalling is just as easy.

But the point of installing FreeBSD was to compare it to Linux
distributions, especially Gentoo and Kubuntu.  So after looking at the
PCBSD package manager, I decided to install the normal BSD package
management system, ports.  Typing "cvsup /root/post-supfile"
downloaded the ports tree to the machine.  After that, both the
standard BSD install methods were available.  pkg_add allows you to
install precompiled binaries quickly (when they're available). 
"pkg_add -r nano" (the -r telling it to download it from a remote
site) installed my favorite console editor, so I could edit config
files (I've never bothered to learn vi).  It's fast, it's easy.  I'd
been looking at qemu earlier, so I decided to see how that installed. 
"pkg_add -r qemu" showed that it wasn't available as a binary package.
 So time to try out ports.

"cd /usr/ports" gets me to the directory.  Now to find the package. 
"make search name=qemu" showed that qemu was in portage, as well as
the kqemu accelerator.  They are both in the emulation directory.  "cd
/usr/ports/emulation/qemu" gets me to the right place to install. 
"make install clean" should download the sources, build it, install
it, then clean up any temp files.  A quick look at the Makefile shows
that it can take the WITH_KQEMU and WITH_HACKS configuration
directives to build it with kqemu support and IDE DMA support.  So
"make WITH_KQEMU=1 WITH_HACKS=1 install clean"....whoops, install
failed.  kqemu requires the kernel sources, which are not installed by
default with PCBSD.  Simple to fix, run sysinstall, choose to install
packages, choose src, choose sys.  It downloads the FreeBSD kernel
sources.  Retrying the install works fine this time.

Under Gentoo, the process is just as easy.  emerge -s qemu (or use one
of the faster versions, like eix or esearch) shows several qemu
packages and kqemu are in portage, but marked unstable.  Adding
"app-emulation/qemu-softmmu" and "app-emulation/kqemu" to
/etc/portage/package.keyword allows the install.  adding
"app-emulation/qemu-softmmu kqemu" tells portage to install qemu with
kqemu support.  Typing "emerge qemu-softmmu" starts the install.

I don't know if Kubuntu has qemu in it's package management system,
but if it did, install would involve starting up aptitude, doing a
search for qemu, clicking install, then choosing commit.

At this point, qemu w/ kqemu acceleration is installed on both Gentoo
and FreeBSD.  kqemu requires a module to be loaded to take advantage
of the acceleration, so we use "kldload kqemu".  Under linux we would
have used modprobe kqemu (gentoo requires modprobe kqemu major=0). 
Different names, just as easy either way.

If we want BSD to automatically load the kernel when booting, we add
kqemu_load="YES" to /boot/loader.conf.  In Gentoo we would have added
"kqemu major=0"it to /etc/modules.autoload.d/kernel-2.6.  I'm not sure
about Kubuntu, but it's most likely similar to Gentoo.  Both methods
are pretty easy.

Ok, we now have qemu installed.  Installation was fairly simple under
both Gentoo and FreeBSD.  The reason I wanted to install it was to see
if I could get WindowsXP running inside Linux and FreeBSD at
reasonable speeds.  Qemu is a machine emulator, meaning you create a
virutal machine, and can run other operating systems inside this
emulator.  There are several others out there.  Bochs is really good
for debugging, but doesn't offer dynamic translation, so it's slow as
hell.  VirtualPC and VMWare are 2 commercial versions (they run faster
than qemu, but cost a fair amount).  Plex86 is OSS and fast, but only
supports Linux as a guest OS.  Xen is another open source one, but it
requires that the guest OS be modified to support it.  Since we can't
legally modify Windows, it's out.  So qemu is our only option at this
point.

So first I create a 10GB file to use as the virtual hard drive. 
"qemu-image create -f qcow Win.img 10G" does this on both FreeBSD and
Linux.  We then insert the WinXP cd into the drive and type "qemu
-cdrom /dev/cdrom -boot d Win.img" (-cdrom cd0 in FreeBSD) starts the
virtual system, and tells it to boot from the CD.  After a brief view
of the qemu bios screen, the Windows install screen comes up, and the
install proceeds like any other Windows XP install (more smoothly than
some).  Already, the speed hit is evident though.  The test machines
are AMD64 3200+ running at 2.2GHz, so a normal XP install goes by
pretty quick.  The install on the emulator takes significantly longer,
but it's not painfully slow.

After the install is complete, I did an install of Office 2000
(Including publisher), Acrobat reader, mcafee anti-virus (which
blows), flash and shockwave plugins for IE, and 30+ windows security
updates, and probably some things I'm forgetting.  Starting up Office
is takes a bit, but once running, it's perfectly useable.  The total
Image size with all this installed is 3.1G.

It's really cool to run Windows in a window, while still being booted
into Linux.  Plus, this image is totally portable.  All qemu installs
emulate the exact same hardware, so once a Windows XP install is
activated on the emulator, it can be used on any computer.  And since
it's hosted on Linux, I can create a new image on a test machine, then
push it out to every computer on campus overnight.  Or copy an clean
one to all lab machines to clean them up between semesters.

Ok, so back to FreeBSD vs Gentoo vs Kubuntu.  The package management
systems used by FreeBSD are impressive.  pkg_add gives you the quick
installation of binary distributions, while the huge ports tree gives
you the flexibility to customize your packages and install those which
don't have binary packages.  Add in the PCBSD package manager, and you
have alternatives to match every need.  Add BSD's legendary stability
and security and you have a really good system, whether you use it as
a Desktop or a server.

This stability does have a downside though.  FreeBSD has a much more
controlled release cycle.  The result is that the kernel and packages
are more stable and secure, but they tend to lag behind those
available in linux.  The ability to run linux programs under FreeBSD
using the linux compatibility layer reduces the impact of this, but
this doesn't work for drivers.  Both Nvidia and ATI release drivers
for linux, but only nvidia has any for FreeBSD (and these seem to lag
behind those in linux).  You will have to live w/o hardware
acceleration if you use an ATI card.  KDE 3.5 is already available in
both Gentoo and Kubuntu, while FreeBSD ports still has 3.4.3 in it.

In conclusion, PC-BSD is a perfectly usable Desktop enviornment giving
you plenty of options on how to install stuff, as well as stability
and security.  If you don't need bleeding edge versions of software,
it's a great OS.

qemu is a really cool program allowing you to run an O/S inside
another O/S (you can even emulate different hardware, to run MacOS
inside Linux or Windows).  If you don't mind that it runs about half
as fast as a native Windows install, it works great.

I'll write again once I have more experience with FreeBSD and let you
know if it will become my new O/S of choice, or if I'll stick with
Gentoo as my main desktop.

Matthew