Coupla questions on DragonFly as a desktop OS

[John Long]

On Mon, 2018-10-29 at 15:13 +0100, Michael Neumann wrote:
> On Sun, Oct 28, 2018 at 08:04:39AM +0000, John Long wrote:
> > Hi,
> > 
> > I have some miscellaneous questions on the way to finding a new
> > desktop
> > OS. Thanks to anybody who would help with this:
> 
> 
> Hi John,
> 
> Welcome to DragonFly :).

Thank you, Michael!

> 
> In general, don't expect DragonFly to be as polished as other
> systems,
> especially when it comes to desktop use.

I'm going through my desktop blues again. I have used pretty much
everything as a desktop and there is nothing current right now that
does all that I want while not doing anything I don't want. My needs
are pretty basic or so I thought, but stuff that is there should be
rock-solid.

DragonFly was interesting to me because I have experience with the "Big
3" BSDs and I was glad to see another one being actively developed. I
tried the first public version of Dfly and several subsequent releases
and I could never get it to run on any hardware I had! So I gave up.
But I came looking again.

> 
> I run it with success for a couple of years as my main desktop and I
> am
> happy with it.
> 
> > Acrobat reader: I have a lot of manuals in .pdf format and I
> > haven't
> > found anything I can tolerate other than acroread. I'm not saying
> > there
> > isn't anything good, I just haven't seen it. I don't need forms
> > support
> > or change tracking or any fancy stuff. I want 2-up display and I
> > need
> > internal links to work. I also have a bunch of .djvu but the djview
> > reader is mostly ok.
> 
> I use evince and I love it. okular is good IIRC when you need to
> bookmark pages.

Thanks, I'm going to try all the ones people have mentioned. If that
doesn't work I'll also try Windows acroread in wine.

> 
> > Computer languages: Are Fortran and Ada available? I looked in the
> > dports directory at UK Mirror Service and I didn't find any of the
> > common names (gfortran, gcc-ada, gnat (the language, not the bug
> > tracker)).
> 
> Ada should have damn good support as J. Marino uses it on DragonFly
> to
> write synth and ravenadm, two package tools.
> 
> lang/gcc6-aux supports both Ada and Fortran.

Wow! No wonder I didn't find it ;) aux!

I have been following the dfly mailing lists for years and years and I
saw that John Marino has been doing a ton of great stuff. And I knew he
had Ada going at one time. I just didn't know what to look for. This is
good news.

> 
> > Virtualization: Is there a way to run Linux in a VM?
> > 
> > HAMMER2: Is it possible to set up a root mirror in the installer
> > and if
> > not can I add a disk to mirror the root after installing? I don't
> > know
> > anything about HAMMER/HAMMER2 but I use ZFS on Solaris and I am
> > hoping
> > to get some of the same management features with HAMMER2, mostly
> > the
> > stuff about filesystems taking only the space they need, and having
> > good software mirroring that makes it easy to pull out a bad drive,
> > swap in a new one, and everything works with no data loss.
> 
> HAMMER2 is great, but for backup I still prefer the mirror-stream
> capability of HAMMER. Currently I backup HAMMER2 using rsync.
> 
> HAMMER/HAMMER2 uses logical replication instead of replication on the
> block level. With HAMMER1 I was able to stream any change to the
> filesystem to one or more slaves in "realtime". HAMMER2 doesn't
> currently have these features.
> 
> You have to setup these things manually. For HAMMER1 this was pretty
> easy. As I said, for HAMMER2 you have to use (e.g.) rsync to backup
> your
> files.

Ok, I'm totally lost here. I have some manpage reading to do. What I
like about ZFS is the ease of management. Some of the things that are
important to me is automatic mirroring or various forms of RAID. I
don't use it as a backup solution, I just want to know if a drive dies
the system will "resilver" it to use ZFS terms, you just pull out the
dead drive, put a good one in, and it rebuilds your mirror
automagically.

I want to be able to throw JBOD (just a bunch of disks) at the
filesystem and have it stripe and do various sorts of RAID and keep my
data and protect me from loss. I don't want to have to plan ahead of
time how much space various mountpoints or filesystems need. It should
all be suballocated from the pool of disks.

I would like it to compress (or not) my data and I should be able to
set this via the command line by filesystem.

There's a bunch of other stuff it can do but these few things I
mentioned are what is most important to me. I know ZFS is available on
Linux but I'm trying to keep away from the "L" word as much as
possible.
 
> 
> > Are web browsers like Opera and Chrome available? Don't get me
> > wrong, I
> > hate google bitterly, but Chrome's translation feature is handy
> > when it
> > works. I like Opera's UI but I can live with Firefox.
> 
> Chrome works best on DragonFly. Firefox is currently no longer in the
> ports, I guess because of Rust.

That's interesting. Both Firefoxes in packages are segfaulting
periodically for me and that is distressing. I prefer Opera actually,
Firefox second, and Chrome a distaaaant 3rd, only when I order stuff
online. I would appreciate if somebody who knows what's going on with
Firefox would chime in here and let us know the status and also if
anybody is aware that it is unstable.

The other thing that's happening and this is become a show-stopper is
apparently the USB keyboard driver does not get along with my keyboard.
If I leave a terminal in focus, eventually all kinds of control
characters, previous commands, etc will appear as if they're being
typed in. I am also unable to use the light controls for the keyboard
LEDs (Hyper X Gaming keyboard) at all when Dfly is running. I don't
need the gaming features, I bought this keyboard because it has Cherry
switches and a metal platern, it's a good solid keyboard. Anyway, that
is making it hard to use Dfly.

I will read up more on hammer and hammer2 when I can.

Thank you,

/jl