Trying Debian kFreeBSD Squeeze

Recently I tried out Debian kFreeBSD Squeeze as a VirtualBox guest. It ships with FreeBSD 8.1, which is quite old (according to Distrowatch it has been released in July 2010) but not unusual for Debian, because its stable branch uses "well tested" software. I confess that I am good in Linux but just a beginner in FreeBSD. ;-)

The installation process went quite smooth as usual for Debian. I partitioned the virtual disk in a root and a /home partition. If I recall correctly, the installation took about an hour. I also installed the XFCE desktop. Unfortunately, the screen resolution could not be set higher than 800x600. There are VirtualBox guest additions for FreeBSD, but not on the built-in virtual CD, they must be installed via ports. I did not have an idea how to install ports on Debian kFreeBSD, googling did not yield helping results and I didn't want to invest too much time in that. There is a package "virtualbox-ose-guest-source", maybe that could be used somehow.

XFCE 4.6.2 in Debian kFreeBSD running FreeBSD 8.1

IPv6 works basically, but DHCPv6 doesn't. "dhclient -6" never returns. So the interface has only one IPv6 address assigned via router advertisements.

The system takes about half a minute until I can see the login screen. Now there are 3.1 GB used on the root partition.

Other problems that occured:

• Trying to start Synaptic fails - it asks for the password (tried both the root password and that of my "normal" user), but Synaptic never appears. However, it is possible to do a "su" on the terminal and then type "synaptic" to start it.
• Restarting the system from GDM doesn't work (just does nothing).
• Logging in as root doesn't work in GDM (might be disabled for security reasons - I am certain that can be changed in some configuration file).
• I browsed the web a little bit with Epiphany, but then it suddenly stopped working. Also Iceweasel doesn't work reliably. Restarting the system did not help. After trying around a bit, I found out that all IPv6-enabled sites don't work, but those only serving via IPv4 work perfectly.
• ZFS is not installed by default, but there is a package "zfsutils"

Conclusion: Although there were some problems (some of them are my fault, maybe), Debian kFreeBSD looks promising to me. The possibility to use APT and its related tools like Synaptic is fascinating. The system runs fast and stable.

Epiphany and Iceweasel