I’ve paused my experiment with FreeBSD. It’s good (some parts really good) but I got caught on a number of barbs such as power management and serial ports. I could have nerded harder, but there are other things I need to do. It did confirm my dislike of the shitshow that is software application management under Ubuntu and it’s derivatives, and it introduced me to ’naked’ Gnome which I actually quite liked.
Following on from yesterdays post I have fought and won with my printer (by cheating). It’s a Brother HL-L8260CDW, a network capable dual sided laser printer, and I had it working with Linux and OSX using CUPS. How hard could it be?…. @vermaden gave a very detailed answer to my plea on Mastodon. Ultimately not the solution, but a heap of info to point me in the right direction. I learnt how to mount OSX disk images for starters.
I used to run FreeBSD back around the time of version 5.x. The problem was I also ran at the time Mandrake/Mandriva Gentoo Windows 2000 IPCop firewall QMail Each of those had their own PC on 24/7 and the heat and noise got to me. I had bought my 2 week old daughter a PowerBook laptop1 and I was impressed by the BSDness of OSX 10.3 so I resolved to ditch all my noisy PCs and cut down to one or two Macs.