damn_registrars's Journal: I just might go back to FreeBSD

For some time I dual-booted my laptop between Windows XP Pro and FreeBSD. I was happy with this arrangement, though my wife never much cared for FreeBSD, largely because it flash in FreeBSD is about as useful as trying to make a squid fly.

So then when I bought a new hard drive for my laptop I decided to go for the new version of Kubuntu, as I've had good results with Ubuntu at work. I already knew that the newest version of flash was released for Linux so I figured I could probably resolve that issue fairly well.

Indeed, flash works nicely in Kubuntu. Youtube videos work and the flash-only websites that drive me insane work well also. So that is a win, but other problems that were not issues in FreeBSD are now significant in Kubuntu. Two in particular are about to drive me back to FreeBSD:

• DHCP doesn't work worth its own weight in donkey shit with wireless cards (or at least not mine). I have to manually invoke 'dhclient eth1' when I start up in order to get my wireless card to connect, even on an unsecured wireless network.
• CUPS doesn't work with my printer on a d-link DP-311P printer. I know this is an ancient wireless print server, but it worked great in FreeBSD and now not at all in Kubuntu. Same settings here in Kubuntu give the utterly meaningless error "/usr/lib/cups/backend/lpd failed".
• And on top of that the CPU overhead seems much higher in this configuration that it was in FreeBSD. I haven't done anything with the Linux kernel in ages, so I may need to look into hacking that into something leaner.

So in short, it appears that Linux has left me behind. Apparently since I don't upgrade my entire system every other year, support for my hardware is dropped quickly. Not sure why the Linux camp goes that way while the FreeBSD group largely leaves legacy hardware support on for much, much longer.

How can you go back to something that is dead?

[Real World Stuff]

Why the dual boot, just use XP pro.

Re:

[damn_registrars]

I'm pretty sure that FreeBSD has confirmed netcraft to be dead.