| PC-BSD® for Linux Users |
PC-BSD is based on BSD Unix, meaning that it is not a Linux distribution. If you have used Linux before, you will find that some features that you are used to have different names on a BSD system and that some commands are different. This section covers some of these differences.
Filesystems
BSD and Linux use different filesystems during installation. Many Linux distros use EXT2, EXT3, EXT4, or ReiserFS, while PC-BSD uses UFS or ZFS. This means that if you wish to dual-boot with Linux or access data on an external drive that has been formatted with a Linux filesystem, you will want to do a bit of research first to see if the data can be made available on both operating systems.
Table 1.4a summarizes the various filesystems commonly used by desktop systems. Note that the support and usage information may be incomplete; if you have experience with sharing data between filesystems, please create a wiki login account and add your usage notes to this table.
Table 1.4a: Filesystem Support Between Linux and PC-BSD
| Filesystem | Native to | Type of non-native support | Usage notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Btrfs | Linux | none | Btrfs, when complete, is expected to offer a feature set comparable to ZFS [wikipedia] |
| EXT2 | Linux | r/w through ext2fs(5) | |
| EXT3 | Linux | r/w through ext2fs(5). | However, EXT3 journaling is not supported. This means that you won't be able to mount a filesystem requiring a journal replay unless you fsck it using an external utility such as e2fsprogs. |
| EXT4 | Linux | r/o through ext2fs(5) | |
| FAT16 | Windows | r/w through msdosfs(5) | |
| FAT32 | Windows | r/w through msdosfs(5) | |
| HFS+ | Mac OSX | ||
| JFS | Linux | ||
| NTFS5 | Windows | full r/o, some limitations on r/w, through mount_ntfs(8) full r/w through ntfs-3g(8) |
|
| NTFS6 | Windows | r/w through ntfs-3g(8) | |
| ReiserFS | Linux | r/o through reiserfs(5) | |
| UFS | PC-BSD | binary compatibility at the read level with other Unixes, but since there is no standard implementation for the vendor extensions to UFS, Linux does not have full support for writing to UFS. [wikipedia] | |
| UFS+S | PC-BSD | ||
| UFS+J | PC-BSD | ||
| XFS | Linux | r/o through xfs(5) | |
| ZFS | PC-BSD, OpenSolaris | Linux port |
Device Names
Feature Names
Commands
| PC-BSD | Linux | Result |
|---|---|---|
| dmesg | lsdev | Discover what hardware was detected by the kernel |
| sysctl dev | cat /proc/devices | Display configured devices |
| pciconf -l -cv | lspci -tv | Show PCI devices |
| dmesg | grep usb | lsusb -tv | Show USB devices |
| kldstat | lsmod | List all modules loaded in the kernel |
| kldload <module> | modprobe <module> | Load a kernel module for the current session |
| pkg_add -r <package> | rpm -i <package>.rpm | Install a package |
| sysctl hw.realmem | cat /proc/meminfo | Hardware memory |
| sysctl hw.model | cat /proc/cpuinfo | CPU model |
| sysctl hw.machine_arch | CPU Architecture | |
| sysctl hw.ncpu | Number of CPUs | |
| uname -vm | lsb_release -a cat /etc/SuSE-release cat /etc/debian_version |
Get release version information |
