I’ve been using Linux & BSD since 1999, & whilst my distro of choice still serves me well, it is becoming a bit ‘tatty’ with all the additions to the menu - I like nice clean lines, & this NomadBSD has them - I’m just testing at the moment, but it looks like I may have found a better O/S for most of my computers - need to try it on a few more first yet…
Congrats to the team on producing the best ‘live’ BSD that I’ve come across.
My experiences so far, running ‘live’ from pendrive a bit flaky, runs quite well from USB2 pendrive, but is a bit temperamental from my Kingston DataTraveller G4 32GB pendrive.
However, once installed to my USB3 pendrive, all seems well.
I now also have NomadBSD 1.4 installed on two older laptops, an HP-G62, & a Toshiba Satellite Pro, both seem to be working fine, (early days, but I expect them to be OK in the long run).
Edit: It was great being able to copy data from an ext4 partition.
P.S. The HP-G62 is from 2010, & the Toshiba is from 2008.
You’re welcome - this looks to be the best version of a live/installable FreeBSD - I tried PCBSD in the past, & GhostBSD, but this is far better.
Last night, I managed to get it running on another old laptop, another Toshiba Satellite, but 32bit - I had to remove the drive & use another laptop to install it to the disk, because it wouldn’t boot the pendrive, (a fault of the laptop BIOS), but when I put it back into the old 32bit Satellite, it just worked, & that only has 1GB of ram!
I finally signed up for this forum because I find myself keep coming back at bsd. I am by no means a specialist, I even lack very basic unix skills, but something in BSD and its flavours always appeals to me. So I try to configure things, get tired of it, get mad at it, trow out the disks or reformat the machine and flash disk, only to find myself downloading a new image a couple of weeks later…
I just reverted back to 1.4 from 130R. I don’t know what they did, but they sure did something because now I could only get a 1024x968 resolution and with 1.4, out of the box, I got a 1440 resolution. That totally alters your experience with the system. Furthermore, although it never worked, now all of a sudden the Linux Browser GUI install decided to work after all on 1.4. And really all that has changed is that I switched from “usb wireless” to “fixed utp cable”. Weird…
Anyway, just saying that despite everything I really like Nomad BSD. It gives me a “Berkeley” that a mere mortal like me (no sysadmin, not a programmer, just a curious run of the mill computer user) can really use. I can browse and check mails, do my editorial work (that necessitates admin facebook pages and wordpress), even got my brother printer working, I can connect to some video pay sites like F1tv and Motogp, heck, I even have Netflix running now. You really feel like the alpha male if you can accomplish that on a BSD machine Although I have to say that whatever stupidities I pulled, the system never froze, broke down or lost any data. And that is very reassuring. Once I will get myself familiarized with the bits and bobs, I’ll look in all the server stuff.
I always keep ‘BSD’ in reserve, because of the undesired changes to the Linux distros, (systemd/pulseaudio, etc), but thought I’d found the ideal O/S with NomadBSD - unfortunately, I have had to return to Linux because of the lack of speed of the USB subsystem, which I use a lot.
This is the best live/installable BSD that I’ve come across though, so will keep it on a thumbdrive, & hope that FreeBSD can speed up the USB transfer rates sometime soon.