TriedIT - Software and Hardware News and Reviews

I have been neglecting the BSD line of operating systems lately, but a new release of DragonFly BSD has come out and I figured this would be a good opportunity to try it out. I have never used DragonFly, but I used to use FreeBSD extensively (I still have it running a few servers) and I’ve also used OpenBSD and NetBSD in the day.

What is DragonFly BSD?

DragonFly BSD is a project led by Matthew Dillon and branched from FreeBSD in 2003. The reason for the fork was due to differing ideas about how the OS should handle multiple processor systems.

From the DragonFly website:

DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems.

DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating system as BSD and Linux and is based on the same UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly gives the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD series.

Booting and Installation

I downloaded the dfly-1.8.1_REL.iso.gz file from the link off DistroWatch and decided to try it in a QEMU virtual machine on my desktop. I was going to try it on an old Dell Optiplex at work, but didn’t get a chance to. So QEMU it was.

I setup QEMU with 1GB of RAM and 2 CPUs and booted it up.

The boot loader came up, and I chose the default.

DragonFly BSD install/live CD boot loader

The OS booted up and came to a login prompt. I logged in as root, and ran the installer command as specified.

DragonFly BSD login screen off live CD

The console mode installer worked beautifully. In this day of fully graphical installers built into live CDs it is nice to see a simple console-based installation program that is every bit as good as the graphical installers of pretty much all modern Linux distributions. FreeBSD has also had a simple installer and back in the 2.2.5 days of FreeBSD when I was using Slackware as well, the console curses based installer was hot stuff. DragonFly’s is reminiscent of those, except it has a nice ASCII image of a dragonfly as well, which was kinda cool.

DragonFly BSD installer. For complete installation screen shots, look here.

The only gripe I had with the installer was that the partition utility didn’t allocate my partitions properly automatically. I gave the OS a paltry 1.5GB of disk space but DragonFly gave me a 1GB of swap. I changed it to 128M and it was all good from there.

The installer at the end gives you a bunch of options for configuring your system. I set the timezone and the root password. It also gave the option to install some extra packages, which I tried. Unfortunately this failed.

DragonFly BSD’s post-install configuration screen, and an error message while installing the extra packages.

Anyway after the install and reboot, QEMU decided to give me problems, so I retried all that from VMware Fusion Beta on my MacBook Pro. I’m not sure why QEMU decided to start hanging up, but regardless the install went smoothly under VMware as well.

Using DragonFly BSD and software installation

Once DragonFly is installed, you have a very basic system. Not much other than the basic system utilities and vi are installed. This is pretty consistent with all the other BSD installs, except PC-BSD, that I’ve done. They aren’t typically geared toward the desktop user, though they certainly can be used as such (as PC-BSD has shown… check out my review of PC-BSD.)

DragonFly uses pkgsrc for its package manager, from NetBSD. pkgsrc is a way to install software similar to FreeBSD’s ports in that it makes it easier to fetch and build software for your system. It does include a number of pre-compiled binaries, however. pkgsrc also makes it easier to upgrade installed packages.

To use pkgsrc, first you have to download the pkgsrc tree using CVS. Instructions for all this are in the DragonFly handbook. I used CVS to download the pkgsrc tree, which took awhile since it had to download the complete tree the first time.

I decided as a first order of business to install X. I wanted to try to install the binary packages since compiling this under VMware would be annoyingly slow, besides it is nice to have binary packages. According to the DragonFly BSD handbook, the pkg_add utility which is used for binary packages, automatically fetches and installs all dependencies. Because of this I decided to install X by installing a window manager and hoped all the dependencies would be met.

I ran the command:
pkg_add ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-current/DragonFly/RELEASE/i386/All/blackbox70-0.70.1.tgz


This pulled in some dependencies but not the Xorg ones. So I now ran:
pkg_add ftp://packages.stura.uni-rostock.de/pkgsrc-current/DragonFly/RELEASE/i386/All/xorg-6.9.0nb3.tgz


Both instances complained of the packages being compiled for a previous (1.6.1) release of DragonFly, and not the one I was using (1.8.1).

After this I ran xorgconfig and got X finally working. (I had to figure out the mouse device was /dev/psm0.) This was pretty tedious because I had to use ftp(1) to see what the names and version number of the packages were so I could run pkg_add properly. In any case it did work despite the complaints by the package manager that the packages were compiled for a previous release of the distribution.

Xorg and blackbox running on DragonFly BSD

I then tried compiling a simple program, just as a test. I compiled vim, a nice simple text editor.

To do so, I cd’d into /usr/pkgsrc/editors/vim/ and ran bmake install clean. It downloaded a bunch of stuff (patches it looked like) and compiled and installed vim. I was going to install nano, but it wanted to download and install gettext which would’ve taken awhile under VMware. Regardless, vim took awhile to compile too. (but not too long…)

Final Thoughts

It was nice to try something different for a change and to give a BSD release that I haven’t used before a spin. The installer worked well and the package manager worked as advertised, but there was no flash to this OS. Everything you did had to be manually installed or configured.

Clearly this OS isn’t aimed at end users who want to install something and have it work. DragonFly BSD is more meant to be a testing ground for a new implementation of SMP code into the BSD line. It is certainly usable if you are willing to put forth all the work necessary to get it up and running. I feel it is also more suitable for servers which don’t need a lot of extra software installed other than the basics.

Personally I feel I have been spoiled with all the latest Linux distributions that aim to do everything for you right out of the box. Sure this is less techie, but I find I don’t have as much patience as I once did waiting for things to compile or having to manually install and configure everything by hand. Certainly DragonFly BSD will appeal to system tweakers and experienced users who like hand rolling everything. At one point I was that way, but now I’m just a lazy user who wants to be able to sit down at his PC and have his OS do everything without much fuss.

In any case DragonFly BSD certainly has its place and it is nice that is it working to add new technology to the BSD family of operating systems. It isn’t something I would use on a regular basis but maybe the advancements made to DragonFly BSD, if they are really good and worth porting, will make it to the other BSD operating systems and possibly Linux. If you want a BSD that is ready to go for the desktop user, check out PC-BSD instead.

Update: Check out another review of DragonFly BSD 1.8.1 that was written last night as well for another perspective, including getting KDE up and running under DragonFly.