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Posters being able to mod' down their own comments: great idea! That's a good suggestion for that guy who's asking for ideas on how to remake Slashdot.

Gentoo emerge: yeah I like their Portage thing. I've never really used Gentoo but I've had it recommended to me several times - which is when I heard about their ports thing. If I ever get round to it, Gentoo would be something I'd like to try (along with maybe LFS and Slack).

However, FreeBSD makes me very happy - it has the excellent ports collection (similar to Gentoo's Portage) and it's typically a real pleasure to use. Once you get into it, the syntax isn't really a problem. Occasionally I pull up a man page or two (another good thing on FreeBSD) but that's it. The only thing I find is that if I haven't installed anything for a while I get out of the habit of updating things and running checks (but that's just me being lazy really.)

I honestly wouldn't prefer a GUI for ports (even though I use Windows XP on a daily basis too). FreeBSD is just so well laid out in /usr/ports that it's quicker to type. Sometimes I reference the ports page or the relevant section of the handbook. It might look a bit daunting at first but for typical usage it's just cvsup to update the ports skeleton on the local box and then portupgrade (or cd'ing to the directory in the skeleton ports tree) to install your stuff and then a bit of housekeeping. Or there's sysinstall. I'd imagine emerge would be similar fare (the quality of either ports system depends on the port maintainers who keep the ports up-to-date and do any necessary customization).

But hey - if emerge this-is-cool delivered a cold one to my desk I'd have Gentoo up and running by tomorrow(!) and looping that line in a little script!

And with that, off I go; I've still got to rely on sneakernet to fetch my beer :)

A couple of OSS projects have tried and essentially failed to be stable BGP4 daemons before, but OpenBGPD from the OpenBSD team looks like it's set to succeed where others failed. I understand the FreeBSD team is already including it with their OS and there's supposedly porting work being done to other OSs.

Given the track record of the other OSS routing projects, I would think administrators would be dubious by now, but with OpenBSD's solid track record OpenBGPD should be a safe choice.

Debian dosn't follow the common software engineering practice of setting deadlines for relase cycles. They claim this is because it relies on volunteers. But this is "no excuse", because OpenBSD and FreeBSD rely on volunteers. OpenBSD has always had 6 months release cycles and this is what Scott Long (From FreeBSD) has said recently:
"By the middle of 2002 is was very apparent that we needed to start focusing on getting 5.0 released. Unfortunately, we fell into the trap of wanting to finish more features in order to feel good about 5.x. (...) New -STABLE branched will be made on a calendar-based time line (...) While as engineers we all tend to hate timelines, this does have a lot of positive aspects. First, it increases the predictability of the development both for our users and for our developers. Users can plan effectively for upgrades and testing/validation knowing that there will be major and minor releases at fixed times of the year. Developers can judge when to start new projects and when to focus on bug-fixing because there will no longer be the temptation to delay a release by a month in order to slide 'one more thing' in. This is not unlike most commercial OS vendors, and we've received a _LOT_ of feedback that this method of planning is desperately needed.
Link for the above here
These practices should be adopted in Debian too. If BSD development can do it, and it involves kernel developments, Debian can do it too (mostly userland hacks).

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

What if you set up your Linux system with User Mode Linux, or your FreeBSD system with FreeBSD jails, like modern hosting companies provide. This will provide your external customer/vendor with root access, but within a locked in virtual server. If your external vendor wants to maintain their database installation, fine: they have root on their own "machine", on their own IP, and there is very little risk to the larger system with real root.

The FreeBSD operating system provides the jail(2) system call and the jail(1) command for imprisoning a process and its future decendants. The jail facility is based on the chroot(2) implementation, but prevents well-documented means to escape chroot confinement, offering partitioning of the file system, process, and networking namespaces. The facility removes all super-user privileges that would affect objects not entirely inside the jail.

For more information read:

• Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson. Jails: Confining the omnipotent root. In Proceedings, SANE 2000 Conference. NLUUG, 2000.PDF, HTML.
• Poul-Henning Kamp and Robert Watson. Building Systems to be Shared Securely ACM Queue vol. 2, no. 5 - July/August 2004 HTML

Also the BSDs.

FreeBSD's port is also amd64. Same with NetBSD and OpenBSD. This is nothing new. There are other reasons why Debian is using amd64 as well. Two of their target platforms (NetBSD and FreeBSD, see here) use amd64 internally, as listed above.

Better yet, you can also install this patch to alleviate the problem alltogether... It may require one of these other patches though (there are even more options, I had to pick three). But they aren't very hard to install :)

The times.allow and times.deny entries consist of a comma-separated list
of time periods during which the users in a class are allowed to be
logged in. These are expressed as one or more day codes followed by a
start and end times expressed in 24 hour format, separated by a hyphen or
dash. For example, MoThSa0200-1300 translates to Monday, Thursday and
Saturday between the hours of 2 am and 1 p.m.. If both of these time
lists are empty, users in the class are allowed access at any time. If
times.allow is specified, then logins are only allowed during the periods
given. If times.deny is specified, then logins are denied during the
periods given, regardless of whether one of the periods specified in
times.allow applies.

You could also use AuthPF and a cron script to write and remove /etc/nologin. from the system at given times.

## ADJUST TO TASTE - they're your kids! ##

0 14 * * * rm /etc/nologin
# go ahead and use computer till 4p. Then we have dinner
# and you kids do homework not needing online time
0 16 * * * touch /etc/nologin
# alright, chat with your friends for a bit or finish up your homeword
0 20 * * * rm /etc/nologin
# no more. Say goodnight to your friends and hit the sack!
30 21 * * * touch /etc/nologin

Remember root can login anytime (can also be overridden on individual accounts through login.conf with ignorenologin. You'll need to periodically check and force logouts (after a winpopup warning) based on the existence of this file.

You could modify the firewall/NAT rules directly via cron or some other method to your choosing (report cards online? Screenscrape the results and allow an extra hour for each grade point above a B-...)

You could block services on an individual basis. Web allowed all the time but chatting only from 2000-2100?? No filesharing untill after dinner?

There may be a PAM module that will restrict login based on time of day, week, etc.

You could use user accounting to record how much time they spend online. A weekly review with them.... You could restrict usage to hours/day, hours/week or whatever. When the time is all used up, access get's locked.

Is there a link somewhere, for a list of cards which will work, with Free as in speech Operating systems?

Sure. Try here

If you want to use something else, look on their prospective page under their h/w compatibility list.

Oh, and good luck. I've been fighting with this for over a week now.

As a heads up:
The D-Link DWL-520 does not work. At least, the one that is Rev. E1 does not (look by the UPC code on the back for the Rev.). It fails under the wi driver stating that the 'busy bit won't clear', whatever that means.
The Netgear WG311 is only sold with the v2 model now (small text on the back says v2), it's a completely different chipset (Texas Instruments), which is not documented, and not supported.
D-Link does the same cheap trick, they add a + at the end of the product identifier once the product becomes well known and gets good reviews everywhere, and replace the chipset with an inferior one on you.
The Netgear WG311T has the Atheros chipset, which works, but the Atheros chipset has serious issues with AMD/VIA chipsets. It locks up my machine every 5-10 minutes, and I mean hard locks. On Windows and BSD.
I'm now trying the Linksys Wireless Bridge (WET11). Haven't gotten it out of the box yet, though. Doesn't look too good yet.
Bottom line: Always search the internet before buying cards, but even that won't help you, as I've tried that myself.

If there is any way possible, just use RJ45. 100 feet if needed. Wireless and Open-Source just do not work well together, at least from my experiences.

None. The reason: they have excellent and commited developers. They use a unified code-base for all their drivers. Occasionally, they go out of their way to provide support even for less hyped operating systems (FreeBSD, for instance). This is an old thread, and FreeBSD with 5.3 has proper (proper for Nvidia's needs) tls implementation, but still, it is a good example of nvidia's commitment to work with open source developers on issues with their drivers.

So yes, the 'what if company X choses to no longer support opensource' has a ring of truth to it (and opensource advocates can always have it open in kwrite for copy & paste job for every newsbit about closed source drivers), but you always have to think about the specific case. Does nvidia have good support for their chipsets for linux/freebsd? Yes, it does, and these drivers are quite up to date with their windows counterparts. Are they willing to address various issues with their drivers? Yes they are. Are they willing to opensource their drivers? No. And that seems to bring out the worst of zealotry in opensource land. I'm not addressing this to parent post specifically btw, but to all who beat the 'company X suxorz cause they're proprietary' drum.

A lot of my family members and friends use Microsoft Windows and over the years I must have spent months fixing their systems myself or telling them on the phone what to do. I am tired as hell of playing the pro bono Microsoft support tech and I no longer offer any kind of support for anything Microsoft related to anyone. Period. My immediate family members now all have a dual boot system with their favorite version of Microsoft Windows and FreeBSD 4 with the following free software:

• KDE
• OpenOffice
• Sylpheed-Claws
• Opera
• FireFox

Keep in mind that all of the software above also has versions that run on Windows, so there is no need to use one application under Windows and another under FreeBSD. Great integration, no confusion, easier transition.

The raw Windows partition is backed up in an image file created with dd, so if there's any Windows related trouble they can't fix on their own they just boot the special FreeBSD floppy which employs a simple shell script (using dialog) to let them backup or restore the primary partition image. If you need something more complex like Norton Ghost then I suggest you use the absolutely free and cool replacement called PartImage.

If they have any trouble while using FreeBSD they just click a special icon named "Call for help" which starts a shell script that sends a number of specially crafted packets to my computer's static IP, where such packets are logged in a special file which I see on my desktop (tail -f), so if I'm available I can log into their system via ssh within minutes of any sign of trouble and they do not even have to bother to email me, let alone use the phone to call me. It works like a charm.

I feel sorry for the people who buy Microsoft Windows and then call me to help them out when things go wrong, but I just can't afford to waste my life fixing what should not have been broken in the first place. Enough is enough.

According to MIGRATE5.TXT, the easy way using CVSup wouldn't exactly be optimal. (Section 5.2)

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

You say: "And we want developers back on our side. If there's more for us to do, we'll go do it,"

maybe then you can show some good faith and put some action behind those words? don't want to open up java any more? fine, then at least remove the ridiculous redistribtion limitations

since you're giving away the software, you're left to making $$ from hardware and services. try being a little more friendly with those seeking to buy your hardware, and maybe you'll see a resurgence in hardware sales

because of the tactics you've employed in the past, i chose to not buy an opteron system from you and instead opted for another vendor. change your tactics and perhaps you'll start seeing a resurgance of your customer base

FreeBSD has its ports, which can be automatically kept up to date, too.

FreeBSD has its ports, which can be automatically kept up to date, too.

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

IMPORTANT UPDATE: Please show your support for Ceren in this poll of Geek Babes!

Is it any wonder people think Linux users are a bunch of flaming homosexuals when its fronted by obviously gay losers like these?! BSD has a mascot who leaves us in no doubt that this is the OS for real men! If Linux had more hot chicks and gorgeous babes then maybe it would be able to compete with BSD! Hell this girl should be a model!

Linux is a joke as long as it continues to lack sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. Don't you wish the guy in this pic was you? Are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Wouldn't this just make your Christmas?! Yes doctor, this uber babe definitely gets my pulse racing! Oh how I envy the lucky girl in this shot! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Wouldn't this be more liklely to influence your choice of OS?

With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!

Don't be a fag! Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!

$Id: ceren.html,v 9.0 2004/08/01 16:01:34 ceren_rocks Exp $

Docs that are actually more or less equivilant to the Gentoo stuff you linked to:
FreeBSD faq
NetBSD guide
OpenBSD FAQ

As I said, the installation instructions on both are outstanding. Where the BSDs pull ahead is the man pages. Every aspect of the system is meticulously documented, in an accessible and concise way.

Gentoo specific things tend to be documented well, but things inherited from other Linuxes tend to inherit their documentation as well, which is poor. The Gentoo guides tell you magic invocations, sometimes even several alternatives, but the actual man (or info) page for the tool is just as weak as other Linuxes. It's a lot worse for the C library and system call man pages.

Gentoo docs are better than most Linuxes (at least the ones I've tried), but that's not saying much.

I know I'm probably feeding a troll, but I won't let you get away with bashing the best Gentoo feature. BSD docs are a huge pile of paper, when compared to the nicely organised, professional documentation on Gentoo.org. As much as writing stuff down, it's important to make it findable.

Just go and compare the sites.

> use it as a server OS, ie. no X

Use http://www.freebsd.org/. Small. Easy to install. Rock solid. Fully documented. Don't break every other week. Just works.

And, maybe more important, not subject to fashion linux-distrib-of-the-week-that-will-be-useless-in- 24-months.

BSD is UNIX. Not only that, it's one of the first UNIX certified operating systems. I can't tell you a great deal about the early days of UNIX, but University of California at Berkeley's computer science department did a lot of work with Bell Labs to create the original UNIX. UNIX is a certification and registered trademark, not a single operating system. There are different versions of UNIX, of course, and I understand the OS certification is a time-consuming and expensive process. Part of the advantage of the certification is that UNIX operating systems comply with a set of standard commands (and I think POSIX compliance is part of the whole process). Linux is not UNIX; you were correct in that statement.

You are apparently not bright enough to understand that share is a proportion. And BSD's proportion is shrinking (as is that of OS/2, AmigaOS, and other obsolete, marginalinzed operating systems), even though in raw numbers it's seeing an increase. The pie is growing faster than *BSDs piece, to put it into language you might be able to understand.

Not only the *BSDs experience an increase in raw numbers.
The *BSDs are gaining market share.
These are the most recent data that can be found about it (June 2003).
This means that, "to put it into language you might be able to understand", the *BSDs piece is growing faster than the pie.

The FUD you GNU people are continuing to spread is just a display of how your community is pervaded by rotten politics. You're using exactly the *same* disgusting techniques applied by the corporations you hate so much.
What's even uglier, you use them against the BSD people, whose only crime is to believe in freedom and liberty (BSD license) rather than communism (GPL license).
Nope, it's not far-fetched - sadly.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/040474.html That's the first I could find. I had a better one that included OpenBSD as well, which many say has lousy performance but still schooled FreeBSD... I haven't found that link again. I'll keep you posted.

But seriously, if you're so smart, why not bench it yourself and prove me (and those other users) wrong?

At least my point has evidence.

If you can show me empirical proof that what I and many others are saying is rubbish, I'll take you seriously.

On the other hand, you Googled for "5.3" performance, even knowing 5.3 has been out barely a couple of days now. This problem has been around since much earlier in the 5 branch (exact point escapes me since I only started tracking recently, since late 5.2-CURRENT up to 5.3-STABLE a week or two before release) and if you had Googled for, say, "freebsd 5 slow disk" or something like that, your results might be more interesting. I suggest you try it.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/040474.html That's the first I could find. I had a better one that included OpenBSD as well, which many say has lousy performance but still schooled FreeBSD... I haven't found that link again. I'll keep you posted.

But seriously, if you're so smart, why not bench it yourself and prove me (and those other users) wrong?

At least my point has evidence.

If you can show me empirical proof that what I and many others are saying is rubbish, I'll take you seriously.

On the other hand, you Googled for "5.3" performance, even knowing 5.3 has been out barely a couple of days now. This problem has been around since much earlier in the 5 branch (exact point escapes me since I only started tracking recently, since late 5.2-CURRENT up to 5.3-STABLE a week or two before release) and if you had Googled for, say, "freebsd 5 slow disk" or something like that, your results might be more interesting. I suggest you try it.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/040474.html That's the first I could find. I had a better one that included OpenBSD as well, which many say has lousy performance but still schooled FreeBSD... I haven't found that link again. I'll keep you posted.

But seriously, if you're so smart, why not bench it yourself and prove me (and those other users) wrong?

At least my point has evidence.

If you can show me empirical proof that what I and many others are saying is rubbish, I'll take you seriously.

On the other hand, you Googled for "5.3" performance, even knowing 5.3 has been out barely a couple of days now. This problem has been around since much earlier in the 5 branch (exact point escapes me since I only started tracking recently, since late 5.2-CURRENT up to 5.3-STABLE a week or two before release) and if you had Googled for, say, "freebsd 5 slow disk" or something like that, your results might be more interesting. I suggest you try it.

Not at all. Maybe you should read the whole thread of that message, like the author of this comment did.

And this is how you support your "every bench says so", "FreeBSD 5.3 is crap" statements?
Welcome on my personal Troll list.

To who might be interested, this comment by a developer and this post by a competent user can shed more light on this issue.

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

And here, dear AC, is what the same poster (who happens to be a competent developer) has to say, just a few months later.

While he understands that this -STABLE release is *not yet* optimized for performance, he recognizes the huge performance gains that this design will allow in the future.

And go figure.. We don't hear him uttering "FreeBSD 5.3 is crap", we hear him acknowledging the validity of the (costly!) groundwork laid by FreeBSD developers.

Here's one.

i'm running an athlon64 2800 on an nforce3 motherboard on gentoo and all the integrated peripherals work great (although i haven't tested firewire, parallel, or serial, but they show up in dmesg so i think it's fine). i kind of stupidly bought a radeon 9200... but it works and it has dri and framebuffer support, so i'm ok. the 64bit thing works wonderfully, and they even have a 32bit emulation option in the kernel. just for kicks, i turned it off and rebooted... it went just fine, all except for grub (which is only available for 32bit archs), but the emulation works around that.
i picked gentoo because it had better support for nforce3 motherboards than freebsd did at the time. also, slackware's boot kernel didn't support my sata drive. debian would have done the job, but i don't really care for it. mandrake and suse also have 64bit distros, but they were not free as in beer when i bought this computer... you may want to check, if you like those distros. fedora core 1 has support for amd64, and there are most likely a few other distros too.
openbsd, netbsd, and freebsd support it too. if you want to run something weirder than that, athlon64 processors support 32bit stuff too, the slackware install kernel booted on my machine.

If you look closely, you may notice that most of my claims are directly against FreeBSD 5.3 (or often 5.x), except those places where something affects the future and past of FreeBSD (like that kbdcontrol/moused stuff).

This is about the physical limit, plus the extras that caching provides. FreeBSD 5 is about half as fast. This is the consensus - every bench shows it to be so.

Only one of seemingly infinite posts made on this topic: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/041009.html

This one has been impacting me for quite some time.

Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?

Most kinds of hardware that you would put into a server are well-supported in FreeBSD. USB devices generally work well. Ditto for RAID. Audio can be hit-and-miss, unfortunately, as FreeBSD is first and foremost a server OS. My SB Live works pretty well on my workstation, but I often hear annoying clicks and pops in the output that I know are not in the original file and while the system is under negligable load.

For full details, see the 5.3-RELEASE Hardware Notes.

Again, instead of bitching and making groundless general statements (i.e. Trolling. You say "every bench shows it to be so": I wonder which one, since FreeBSD 5.3 has been released 2 days ago...), why don't you take a *real* tour of the FreeBSD mailing lists, expose *your* problem(s) (providing all the required details, not a vague/generalizing post like the one you linked...), and then come back here and we discuss the answer they give you? That would make a lot more sense. IMHO.

Well this is just ridiculous. I get modded "troll" for dealing out harsh facts and observations, all because some mod didn't want to admit it anyway.

Just my 2 p:
Maybe you got modded Troll because somebody got tired of your bitching about an OS that introduced *a lot* of new features in this branch. The FreeBSD developers team undertook a very ambitious project, and the OS is *already* performing very nicely (here, again. It's true that any benchmark must be taken with a grain of salt, but I think it's enough to disprove whoever is oh so authoritatively stating that "FreeBSD is crap").

What's worst, you're blatantly ignoring that there's a *huge* room for performance improvement, since the Giant Lock still has to be pushed out of many subsystems. Hitting the -STABLE release means that it's production ready, not that it's as fast as it can.
Have a look at what Scott Long has to say on the development process. It could be enlightening.

FreeBSD (just as any other OS) can always use some constructive criticism. Your comments really look like puerile complaints.

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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

How the fuck can you niggers be gay when there are girls like Ceren out there?!

You're one of the lucky ones, then. I had it running pretty stable, but then I had very regular hardware (by some coincidence a lot of devs have Dells, and all of my machines are Dells too - yours as well :)). Regardless it was pretty poky and from what I read lots of other hardware was flaky.

For all of those who still don't believe me when I say FreeBSD 5.3 is a lousy release, see these links and decide for yourself:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/errata.html
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/www/en/relea ses/5.3R/todo.sgml (for history on problems and how they 'solved' them)
...and the mailing lists. It's scary.

You're one of the lucky ones, then. I had it running pretty stable, but then I had very regular hardware (by some coincidence a lot of devs have Dells, and all of my machines are Dells too - yours as well :)). Regardless it was pretty poky and from what I read lots of other hardware was flaky.

For all of those who still don't believe me when I say FreeBSD 5.3 is a lousy release, see these links and decide for yourself:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/errata.html
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/www/en/relea ses/5.3R/todo.sgml (for history on problems and how they 'solved' them)
...and the mailing lists. It's scary.

FWIW, I've also run Mathematica on FreeBSD. See also The Handbook.

And since there have been cases where GPL programmers *stole* BSD code (here), let me add that the BSD code is *not* public domain. So, even who "copies" it, must give proper credits to the author (here's the BSD license, for reference).

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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)

I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.

Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:

mplayer tv:// -tv input=1:driver=bsdbt848:norm=palbg:audioid=2 \
-vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb,hqdn3d -stop-xscreensaver

Recent Compaq/HP laptop users can't run FreeBSD. This problem has been known since July and still not fixed in this release. FreeBSD 5.3 (all betas, RCs, and the release itself), 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, all versions of FreeBSD 4 and 3 cannot run on Compaq Presario R3000Z and similar laptops, in either i386 or AMD64 mode. When is this going to be fixed? How come the patch exists.... works perfectly.... and isn't being commited?

Official Release Announcement

Bittorrent Downloads

For ftp mirrors, see announcement.

Official Release Announcement

Bittorrent Downloads

For ftp mirrors, see announcement.

what does mean? anyone? does this mean that 5.4 will be released shortly after 5.3 or that a patch will appear or that...?

As you can see here, gvinum is still broken, after almost one year.

Scott, I'm still waiting for my patches to be reviewed and committed. But hey, I guess Poul-Hennings new toys have higher priorities than actually fixing ULE problems.

HawkinsOS, for the adult in you.