FreeBSD support idea [Closed]

[micia]

Hi everyone,
This is a quite crazy idea that came up this morning while I was doing some programming using (and hating) PulseAudio.
I read some articles and documentation about the possibility to install and configure entirely Gentoo with a FreeBSD setup.

I used FreeBSD something like 2 or 3 times, I am not very expert, but I have been very interested in their choices and Operating System design, so I keep an eye on them.

My idea would be to do this in an automagic way with Sabayon. I will experiment this myself when I will have some spare time, what I would like to know is:

1) is it possible to use entropy in a FreeBSD environment?
2) is it possible to use entropy packages in a FreeBSD environment? Obviously a separate official/community repository would be necessary.
3) is it possible to extend the Sabayon installer to offer the choice of having a FreeBSD system rather than a Linux one (the partitioner would offer UFS/other filesystems instead of the default Ext ones).
4) would the Sabayon Team/anyone else be interested in such a thing?

I would find rather interesting to have this kind of choice, I think it would be the first binary based distribution to offer such configurability and freedom, it would be kind of unique.

[Quantum]

Nice suggestion indeed, i have been thinking about it ever since i install package from entropy and portage...
Being offered the added choice of BSD ports would be just awesome Go little red devil

P.S i was considering BSD before i chose sabayon...

P.P.S i know that using software from more than one-and indeed two- software sources can cause the device to explode, but i'll take care

[micia]

As far as my little BSD experience goes, emerge is very similar to the BSD ports, I think that emerge was actually inspired by ports.

I don't think it would be a good idea adding ports by default, but I think that the option could be considered (something like installing RPM using entropy), obviously if it is possible, the first thing to take care of would be the support itself

[joost]

Fork your own distro?

[micia]

Well, that is a possibility, but I find myself "at home" with Sabayon, I like it and I want to stay here
I am just curious about this and want to experiment with it, if it is a success, I'd like to share the results with this distro and, eventually, build up something that can be useful.
My time is very limited, so I don't even know when I could do such experiments.

My idea would be giving the opportunity to choose between Linux and FreeBSD, as you would do with the filesystem of your partitions or the Desktop Environment of your distro.
Obviously the FreeBSD/Linux flavour gets selected only once at install time, but that is just to illustrate my concept.
I don't know if it would be feasible to make it selectable after the installation part, since I don't know which filesystems are supported by FreeBSD, when I used it, it had totally different filesystems.

Since I seen a similar project in Gentoo I was thinking about "wow, it would be great if I could push the Sabayon LiveDVD in and install a nice Sabayon FreeBSD (<personal opinion ahead> without that $&£U"&")£/" PulseAudio), with entropy and portage at my disposal and try it out".

This would mean, of course, that emerge and entropy have to be compatible with FreeBSD (I don't know about emerge, but entropy seems to be like a fairly portable package manager) and that a FreeBSD partition and installation can be created from the Sabayon installer.

Maybe this could be something similar to a Sabayon FreeBSD spin...

[throdon]

I know I would download and would love to try it. Not much of a tester(I have a problem with reporting my results(( when a problem gets to hard I reinstall)) .) but I would try my best.

[micia]

Well, these 2 days I was using FreeBSD, I have to say that it works much better than Linux in many areas, its main pros on my laptop are:

- the wireless works so much better, its faster and the signal is more stable
- the CPU is much more "relaxed", the fan is less involved with no noticeable performance difference
- the process load is more balanced, even compiling ports while copying files and using many other applications at once didn't produce any slowdown
- I found the ports system to be much simpler than emerge, I like the idea of a simple makefile and a menu that explains and offers all the options that in portage are USE flags, also the idea of having the binary packages support so simple and builtin is just awesome.
- The stability and the documentation are impressive, I haven't used FreeBSD in something like 2 years and I was able to complete the installation and system setup just reading the installation help messages and the man pages of the commands and ports system.
There was no error whatsoever in the ports compilation I set up a complete Gnome installation at the very first try compiling each package from sources.
- very standard compliant, that is something I really like, no fancy behaviours, I found configuring things and running commands to behave as expected from a Unix handbook, even ports is no more than a make install && make clean

but the cons are:
- the hardware detection is non existent, I had to manually configure almost every peripheral on my laptop, including battery, power saving, touchpad, bluetooth and much more
- many packages rely on Linux emulation, I find it funny because if I wanted a Linux emulation, I would just have installed Linux
- filesystem detection and automount are much more difficult to configure, I am not sure why, probably something that needs to be smoothed around by my side, but I resorted to mounting manually many drives just because FreeBSD seems to like its own filesystems more

Unfortunately I cannot go any further trying it out, because ATI is too busy for providing a driver for FreeBSD... Since I have to use OpenGL for a project I am working on, this is a blocker.
I will install FreeBSD on a laptop with a ATI card that has no proprietary driver because ATI decided not to support older cards, so the open source driver is acceptable, or maybe on a PC with a Nvidia card.

I feel like the idea that I had originally is not applicable in practice, the ports system and the FreeBSD philosophy is too much different to be compared with the Linux organization and package management, so I think that a choice between FreeBSD and Linux is not possible.
I will mark this as [Closed] rather than [Solved] since I find it more appropriate, or isn't it?