Windows Conversion and Other Thoughts

Written by Michael Cole - October 4th 2015


This post is a bit hard to write. I definitely don't want to get into a versus argument, but I do want to mention some differences in the operating systems I have tried.

So to end the first windows machine conversion, I have decided without commercial software bluray playback just isn't great. I've also decided that a cheap bluray player is much simpler than the effort to try and make it work.

As far as observations, OpenBSD just didn't like this hardware so there isn't much more I can say about that. FreeBSD did everything pretty well, I had to recompile the kernel to get HDMI audio working, DVD playback worked well but required a port as the package is not built, and the show stopper was that the bluray file format would not work at all. Trying FreeBSD 11 was no different than 10 for my purposes.

The part I have not written about is that I also tried Linux just to see. The first thing I need to point out and give both OpenBSD and FreeBSD props over is that they have a USB image for download. With most Linux distros I found that you had to download the CD image and convert it to boot from USB. Even on Linux HDMI audio was disabled by default. It required a kernel parameter be passed:

radeon.audio=1 
			

The advantage on this one goes to Linux, instead of recompiling the kernel, you simply pass the parameter to the kernel on boot. And while we are on advantages for Linux, it supports the new UDF so it can actually mount blurays. Bluray playback is still problematic, but I won't get into that.

I think focusing on a specific goal is making me not enjoy the work as much. So now I'm going to start doing whatever I want again in whichever order I want to. I'm thinking maybe some more jails. It really depends on free time, etc. It still could be more Windows conversions. We shall see with time.