Does anyone have experience with BSD? How does it compare with Mandriva or Ubuntu in desktop performance? Is Alsa available (so Flash 9 will work)? I tried installing the latest rc (rc2) of desktop-bsd in vmware (dont know how this would be in a regular install though) but it seems rather slow, especially the package-manager, but couldnt get flash to work. Supposedly BSD is very fast but all tests refer to server usage, not desktop usage. I chose desktop-bsd because it has xorg 7.2 so I would be able to install beryl (on a regular install), whilst pc-bsd still only has 6.9

Yes, I do
ALSA (Advanced Linux Sound Architecture) NO.
Flash, yes
slow, no
I just use straight BSD when I use it, so package manager I use cli and don't know much about the gui stuff.

http://www.bsdguides.org/guides/freebsd/

http://www.openaddict.com/howtos.html

http://www.openaddict.com/installing_freebsd_6_2.html

http://www.openaddict.com/deploying_a_free..._2_desktop.html

http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtop...&hl=freebsd

Thanks for the links. I am pretty sure though that I saw libalsa in the repos.

nevermind...i had a question but then i read the first post and realized it was answered

desktop-bds, which uses free-bsd repos (like pc-bsd).

I sort off borked my install, it doesnt display fonts anymore and since I installed in vm-ware I cant even seem to ctrl alt f1 into a terminal...

If you're using vmware, go into the options, and set the hotkey to use CTRL-ALT-SHIFT instead of the default CTRL-ALT. Then, when you next restart the machine after a power off, you'll be able to get the console that you're after.