Quoting Rahul Siddharthan :
> I've been away from FreeBSD for a few years -- I briefly gave

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> 7.0-CURRENT a spin last year, on an old laptop, but didn't

> stick with it.   However, I'll likely be getting a new laptop soon

> and I'm tired of linux (and especially tired of Ubuntu, which

> thinks it's smarter than me.)

>

> So I'm seriously considering FreeBSD 7.  On the plus side, I've

> done quite a lot of C programming (though not system-level)

> since I last used FreeBSD, so I can try some hackery if I need to.

> On the minus side, I don't want to spend all my time fixing ports

> or patching device drivers -- I'd rather have a system that just

> works, and lets me focus on my work.  Anyway, I have a  few

> questions:

>

> 1. My biggest peeve was the tendency to crash when pulling

>    out USB memory sticks (especially if they were mounted,

>    but sometimes even if they were unmounted).  Kris Kennaway

>    told me in a private mail that this has been fixed in 8-CURRENT.

>    Is that so, and has it been MFC'd?

Yes, that's fixed in CURRENT. I don't know if it is / will be merged =20

back to STABLE.
> 3. How good is Wine on FreeBSD?  Can I expect it to be almost

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>   as good as Wine on Linux?

It is not as good as Wine on Linux, but it's pretty good already. I =20

use it from time to time.
> 5. Do linux binaries that require ALSA (eg, flash plugin 9/10)

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>   work?

There's a very buggy port of flash 9 which crashes you browser _but_ =20

as you like to use wine, you can just run Windows Firefox with Flash =20

plugin 9/10 without problems.
>

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> 6. Can I run Windows Vista (likely to be preinstalled -- no

>   choice) under Xen or qemu?

Sorry, no support for Xen yet. AFAIK there is some work ongoing to get =20

VirtualBox running on FreeBSD, but I don't know the current status. =20

qemu runs nicely with kqemu-kmod. I don't know if you can run Vista =20

with it. I heard that XP doesn't run too fast with it but can be usable.
> 7. How good is power management, in particular cpufreq

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>   and ACPI suspend-to-RAM?  (I suppose the answer depends

>   on the laptop model.)

You are right here. It depends on the model. There are some problems =20

which prevent multi-core machines to resume after suspend, so you'd =20

need to disable all but one core.
FreeBSD is a great system, but you hit some of its weak spots here. ;-)
Lars