FreeBSD - on a laptop

Recently I installed PC-BSD on my laptop. It was pretty decent, but it had some problems. I would have continued to use it if a kernel compile that I botched hadn't removed its ability to boot. I needed a new OS, and since I'm going to be out of town this weekend, I needed it fast.

I wanted an OS that had:

• Network security (I don't want to get cracked)
• Physical security (I don't want my data and RSA keys getting stolen or found with my laptop)
• Low resource desktop environment (my laptop has only 256 MB of RAM)
• Pleasing desktop environment
• All the programs that I use every day
• Powerful command line
• Stability
• Support for my wifi card
• Open source
• Cool factor

I've liked BSD since I first used it, so I wanted to give it a try on a laptop. It definitely had the network security - firewall or not (I wanted a firewall anyways). Physical security is reasonably easy in FreeBSD with swap and partition encryption. There is a wide variety of good looking and low resource use desktop environments in the ports collection - I chose Xfce. BSD, being UNIX based, has a great command line. My wifi card is supported natively by the if_ath driver. Here's the kicker - what's cooler than running FreeBSD on a laptop? I guess my mind was made up before I started deciding, but I really think it was a good choice.

Partitioning

During install, I added an extra 3 GB partition to be configured as my home partition later. I'd advise using more than this - I wish I had used more like 8 or 9 GB out of my 17 GB drive, as my home directory is likely to fill up fast.

Loading Modules

After installing the OS, the first thing I did was to set up my /boot/loader.conf:This loads the driver for my wifi card, ipfw (firewall), and the module used for encrypting my home partition. Some modules are loaded by default, so this is the list I have now:

Network Security

Security configuration was pretty simple too:Setting up ipfw can be decidedly confusing when you first start doing it. It took a few hours to come up with this rules script:In a nutshell: let anything on localhost work, allow needed network services to work, and let anything that's connecting to the net out.

Physical Security

Configuring encrypted swap was extremely simple. All I had to do was add .eli to the end of the device filename for the swap partition (in /etc/fstab). It was a bit more difficult to encrypt a partition, but it is well documented in the handbook. I'm quite happy with the results:

Programs

After setting up the basics, I installed a few programs from ports. To have a reasonably comfortable user experience on a computer, I need abiword, bash2, calc, cvsup-without-gui, eog, fastest_cvsup, firefox, gnome-terminal, kismet, portaudit, screen, scrot, xfce4, xpdf, and xscreensaver. Needless to say, this took awhile to compile on a 333 MHz laptop.

Success

People say Linux isn't ready for the desktop. The people who say Linux is ready for the desktop say BSD isn't. I don't know about Joe sixpack, but BSD is ready for my laptop - a lot readier than Windows or Mac OSX will ever be.