Debian kFreeBSD

A few days ago I installed Debian/kFreeBSD on my home server. It had been running opensolaris for years, but doing just about anything on that system was a complete pain in the ass. I had been meaning to give Debian/kFreeBSD a try, but had been putting it off thinking the changeover would break a lot of things, or I would have trouble importing the ZFS pools.

The other day I had some free time so I gave it a go.

I downloaded the mini.iso and dd’d it to a spare usb stick. The kFreeBSD ISOs support both cd and hard disk booting like the linux images. The install took about 40 minutes(including the time taken to download everything).

After that I expected to have a few problems.. but everything worked. I was able to install zfsutils and import the zfs pools. Debian/kFreeBSD doesn’t currently support nfs, but it was easy enough to install samba.

I’m left with a speedy, lightweight system, with thousands of packages and full security support:

root@pip:~# df -h /
Filesystem            Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/ad0s1             35G  596M   32G   2% /

root@pip:~# free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          2026        222       1804         17          0          0
-/+ buffers/cache:        222       1804
Swap:            0          0          0

root@pip:~# apt-cache search ""|wc -l
26258

Other than a few utilities working a little differently (the main one I noticed was netstat not taking the same flags) it feels exactly like a debian/linux system. But with ZFS.