Date: Fri, 24 Jun 2016 16:14:37 -0500 (CDT) From: "Valeri Galtsev" <galtsev@kicp.uchicago.edu> To: "Manish Jain" <bourne.identity@hotmail.com> Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Subject: Re: Bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3 Message-ID: <49382.128.135.52.6.1466802877.squirrel@cosmo.uchicago.edu> In-Reply-To: <VI1PR02MB0974EE59E723F9B6678BDAC1F62E0@VI1PR02MB0974.eurprd02.prod.ou tlook.com> References: <VI1PR02MB0974EE59E723F9B6678BDAC1F62E0@VI1PR02MB0974.eurprd02.prod.outlook.com>
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On Fri, June 24, 2016 3:24 pm, Manish Jain wrote: > Hi, > > I have a rather bad experience switching to SSD on FreeBSD 10.3 amd64. Things would have been much worse had the SSD switch not worked for my other OS - Windows XP, a bit surprising because XP does not support SSD TRIM. > > For my upgrade, there were 3 components which I upgraded simultaneously : > > 1) Keyboard -> LED backlit keyboard (Cooler Master Devastator, USB) 2) 2 GB DDR3 RAM -> 8GB DDR3 (G Skill) > 3) Sata HD -> SSD (Samsung EVO 500 GB) > > The keyboard upgrade itself failed for FreeBSD. The moment I switch on the > LED backlight light for the keys, console output freezes till I turn off the backlight. This is surprising because the keyboard works well on XP, which was developed almost 2 decades back. The reason this is important for me is because I love working in the dark, with no bright lights around. LED keyboards make that possible. Not just that, the keyboard looks sensational - particularly with LED on, when the thing looks futuristic. It's useful that you share that, but it doesn't resemble the subject... I know, sometimes it is really hard to make subject say what you will describe. > > So I resigned myself to working without the LED. Upon installation of FreeBSD and Gnome3, the desktop started crashing. I suspected the RAM to be defective and reinstalled the whole OS with the RAM switched to the original 2 GB - which was working flawlessly on previous FreeBSD 10.2 installation. Upon reinstall, things were much better, but then Gnome Tweak Tool just does not work. This makes it impossible to get the Applications menu and the Window list, which I find absolutely essential. > There is no way I can work the Activities system that Gnome ships with as > default. Hotspot makes things much worse, although I think there is an extension that disable hotspot. But first I have to get the Activities menu and the Window List, without which I just can't use Gnome. If I can't > get Gnome to work for me, FreeBSD itself becomes useless as a desktop OS. I suspect some hardware problems, maybe not fully compatible or flaky new RAM. Your SSD sounds really good, I exclude that just based on its reputation. I myself just switched to similar Samsung (only 1 TB) my laptop (FreeBSD 10.3; Fujitsu Ultrabook U904). All happily works and rock solid for me. I do not use Gnome, I use Mate instead. My laptop keyboard backlite turns ON and OFF without problem (I can see somebody already figured out what happens in your case). I didn't test/tweak many thing yet (and usually I only tweak a few)... Question: did you have the same everything (hardware wise and settings/tweaks wise) before you switched to SSD? As I for one can not see any reason to blame switching to SSD for this bucket of problems. > > So I crapped the FreeBSD installation and switched to Windows XP + Cygwin. > On XP, the whole thing works fantastically. My system is much faster, roughly 3 times compared to when I had the SATA HD. Now I am stuck with Windows XP, when the entire upgrade had targeted removal of XP and FreeBSD > as the only OS. Windows XP is not supported for quite long, and after the end of support there were several security problems discovered, which your unsupported XP is vulnerable to. I would recommend to relly quit on Windows XP. I have to use windows occasionally (I run it under VirtualBox on FreeBSD machines: laptop and workstation), nothing lower than Windows 7 can be safely run. Good luck making FreeBSD work for you! Even if it takes some effort it's well worth it. Valeri > The LED keyboard situation is unwarranted - FreeBSD should > by now be having support for USB LED keyboard. The Gnome situation is an equal concern. FreeBSD is famous for making sensible choices. The Gnome developers have screwed up the desktop environment with rotten user interface choices, and the thing now needs to be fixed with extensions and > tweak tools. This leads directly to inavailability of FreeBSD for me for the time being. I was prepared to go without the keyboard - I could have tried passing the USB commands to Widows XP hosted under VirtualBox. That > might have been possible, although I am not sure it would have worked. But > the additional Gnome problem leads me to > revert > to XP as the only OS for the time being. Hopefully things will be fixed > with FreeBSD 11.0. Luckily for me, I used MBR partitioning when > initializing the SSD - against the advice from this forum. Because of that, I was able to try out XP, rather than having to roll back the whole > upgrade. > > I hope developers at FreeBSD and Gnome become aware of my experience - I dearly wish things will be fixed ASAP. > > Thank you. > Manish Jain > > _______________________________________________ > freebsd-questions@freebsd.org mailing list > https://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions > To unsubscribe, send any mail to > "freebsd-questions-unsubscribe@freebsd.org" > ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247 ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
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