As I am having to use FreeBSD a lot at work now, I thought I would switch my home machine to it as well. I have used FreeBSD before, but I find it rather easier to use now I have found a bit more about it. The portinstall framework is less complete and nothing like as slick compared to Debian's package management, but it does reliably build stuff from source. And I rather like the idea of pulling the sources from the main distribution site, instead of getting the sanitised versions that Debian provide.

There were a few minor glitches. I have an SIS 7018 on-board sound chip, which did not work out of the box. But adding snd_t4dwave_load="YES" to loader.conf got it working (it's a cheap copy of the trident chip). And I am rusty at configuring XFree (well, x.org in this case) the old fashioned way — Debian's debconf interface to the X config is much nicer.

Of course, the best part of FreeBSD is the use of CVSup for updating. That is one fine program: like rsync it gives the impression of a very efficient and optimised transfer protocol.