Revive an Old PC #4 - With FreeBSD 12

This is not a review of FreeBSD, just a demonstration that older computer hardware with a FreeBSD based OS installed can bring new life to the machine.
This is the last one, and I set it up as close to how my own main machine is set up.... there is a score of sorts at the end :-)
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Track: Jungle Mood — Peyruis [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
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Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported— CC BY 3.0
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Creative Commons — Attribution 3.0 Unported — CC BY 3.0
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Track: Rise — Airixis | Audio Library Release
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
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Track: Jungle Mood — Peyruis [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
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Track: Nature — KV [Audio Library Release]
Music provided by Audio Library Plus
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Song: Fredji - Happy Life (Vlog No Copyright Music)
Music provided by Vlog No Copyright Music.
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[bertnijhof]

For me an interesting setup, for my FreeBSD machine from the second paragraph.
I have a 2008 HP dc5850 ex-lease PC bought early 2014, it came with an AMD Phenom X3 8600b (3 x 2.3 GHz), a very slow 80 GB HDD and 3 GB DDR2 (667 MHz). It did run Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04 and 18.04 :). Over time it has been heavily upgraded to a Phenom II X4 B97 (4 x 3.2 GHz), 8 GB DDR2 (800 MHz), 2 x PCIe-x1 for SATA-3 and USB-3, SSD 128 GB, 3 HDDs 1.82 TB in total. It has been retired in May and the disk are reused in the Ryzen 3 2200G, approx twice the speed and twice the RAM size.

I use FreeBSD-12 + ZFS + XFCE + XRDP as backup-server since July and that runs on a Pentium 4 HT (3.0 GHz), 1.25 GB DDR (400 MHz) and a mix of left-over disks 3.5" IDE 250 + 320 GB and 2.5" SATA-1 320-GB

[fishmanloveslinux]

I really enjoyed this video. I was wondering are you using openbox or something entirely different?

[lucacagnolati]

Thank You for this video. Can You explain what differs from open-bsd?
And which is advantage of freebsd vs open BSD?

[hipwave]

This video came days after I salvaged a perfectly good pc that was literally just about to be tossed into the electronics bin of the recycling centre, and set it up with freeBSD 12 to act as a LAN backup unit- one PC to backup them all. A nice shiny black case with useless but cool leds, pentium E5300 2.60GHz, Asus motherboard, Nvidia dedicated graphics card, 4 Gb ram and a dvd burner, the only missing thing was the disk. It wasn't even dusty inside. Once in a week the other machines fire it up via WOL, connect with ssh, launch rsync and finally turn the system off, just a couple of bash scripts, ssh and cron do the job. People today throws stuff away like nothing.
p.s. I asked the dumpster people if I could buy recyclable stuff from them but apparently it is against the rules. I believe that whoever came up with these rules is a complete cretin.

[mrmiyagi]

The only thing missing from desktop is Xeyes

[hammer_]

I would go with a TrueOS-based flavor due to the superior updating/upgrading mechanism of TrueOS, which uses Boot Environments and snapshots to make it bulletproof. And it uses OpenRC, which should theoretically be better for desktops and which I'm curious to try. I would probably go with GhostBSD, since Trident's Lumina is hot garbage. And I liked NomadBSD -- I might make a USB stick of it now :)

[sainode]

Haii robo I tried to install on FreeBSD on old PC, I made boot USB but I get BIOS hang when I boot but other live disk of distros works, like Linux. Is it problem with my motherboard or usb ?

[pianokeyjoe]

Oh Robo..Where to begin!? lol! The PC featured here is not OLD, a P2 or P3 or even my P4 which I tried your directions for installing cde on freebsd 11.2, is an old PC. The one here is very modern and capable. But on subject with OLD pcs and freebsd. I found out that I can not startx in a old version of freebsd on a old PC. xinit keeps pointing to the wrong path for the xserver like this: " /usr/X11R6/bin/XFree86" and that last part is NOT in the system(/XFree86), so naturally xinit will errno 2 and fail to find and load X. This is for xfree86 3.3.6 from 2000. I tried the FreeBSD forums but I am not allowed to ask questions about unsupported versions of FreeBSD, so now what? I thought maybe I install FreeBSD 12 or even 11.3(since 11.2 has that bug of not finding the install DVD for offline package installs), but will 12 or 11 work on my P2 and P3 systems? Also, and this IS why I insist on older versions of FreeBSD and Linux to play with, The newer FreeBSD does not install or give you the options to install the packages you want or "distribution sets" as Free BSD 4.2 calls them, WHILE in the installer during the initial install process. Another thing I found out is the old versions let you delete or deactivate drivers and so on in the kernel BEFORE loading the installer so you do not end up installing stuff NOT meant for YOUR specific machine.. I may be missing something and maybe there IS a hidden EXPERT mode in 12 that allows such detailed installs, like the good old days, to do everything OFFLINE from the DVD only. I did find out also that CDE desktop is broken for 12 so I will have to go with MWM and various apps to make a motif desktop myself. Any advice here would be great!!

[oceania]

I would put Trident at number 1, reason being, it just works... where as I had issues with 'FreeBSD' Ghost, Midnight, Nomad I didn't try, and I like Lumina..

[simonecastellaneta]

That's not that "old"...! 64 bit processor, 4 gb ram! Replace HDD with an SSD and that thing will takeoff!!