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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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

FreeBSD celebrated its 10th anniversary this past november .

FreeBSD?

The contract that we signed with SCO specifically prohibits any party from discussing the economics of the transaction.

In other words, "This is extortion, and we're gonna take it!"

It is a huge disappointment to us that we would be thrown in the same bucket, so to say, with the SCO Group.

Would that be the "you owe us money, but we won't tell you what it is you're buying" bucket? At least SCO has the decency to tell us how much.

It is a huge disappointment to us that, after signing a secret blood contract with Satan, our friends shunned us, we grew horns and a tail (er...maybe not), and we ended up in Hell for all eternity. What gives?

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

... there's still FreeBSD. In the worst case scenario where SCO actually wins its legal battles making it difficult for people to use Linux any longer, FreeBSD could help lessen the sting. FreeBSD already has Linux binary compatibility and Debian is working on porting its tools for use with a FreeBSD kernel.

It's hardly desirable that SCO does succeed, but at least there are open source alternatives (and AT&T already resolved the issue of proprietary UNIX code in BSD with University of California years ago).

... there's still FreeBSD. In the worst case scenario where SCO actually wins its legal battles making it difficult for people to use Linux any longer, FreeBSD could help lessen the sting. FreeBSD already has Linux binary compatibility and Debian is working on porting its tools for use with a FreeBSD kernel.

It's hardly desirable that SCO does succeed, but at least there are open source alternatives (and AT&T already resolved the issue of proprietary UNIX code in BSD with University of California years ago).

... just use FreeBSD instead.

It is, however, available as a FreeBSD
port. Also several add-ons.

I have an in-car PC that runs FreeBSD.

It boots an EPIA 5000 from a 32Mb CF card and plays mp3s from any of the cds in the NEC 4 disk CDROM.

I hope to add a 7" lcd to it soon and see what I can make it do next.

Hopefully when my GPS mouse comes I can do some sort of homebrew routefinder

My fello 9fan Matthias has done a bit of a walkthrough with scripts for making FBSD fit in under 32Mb

Rotting corpse

FreeBSD Security Advisory

FreeBSD Advisory

Another FreeBSD Advisory (note comments)

OpenBSD Advisory

Then be enlightened.

Donning my flame-retardant suit right now, but:

FreeBSD's handbook does a fair job. The chapter synopses state at the beginning what you should know / be able to do before reading, and what you WILL know / be able to do when you're done. It also has a reasonably extensive and thought-out bibliography, divided into overall categories(users vs. administrators vs. developers, etc). Also, its mailing lists are, in my experience, populated by quite friendly people - even if they don't have information that helps me(which they generally do), I don't feel like I'm being looked down upon for asking, even for the basics.

Its installation can be a little hard for new users to grasp, especially the bit near the beginning about hard drive slices, but the information in the handbook helps ameliorate this. About the only thing I really miss from the install is a time estimate/percentage complete/whatever.

Getting X set up correctly is the first major hurdle I run into, but now I more or less know how to work around my computer's instabilities and get things running.

The AMD64 platform is currently a Tier 1 FreeBSD platform.

Current Tier 1 platforms are i386, Sparc64, AMD64, PC98, and Alpha.

Current Tier 2 platforms are PowerPC and ia64.

Current Tier 3 platforms are S/390(R).

All systems not otherwise classified into a support tier are Tier 4 systems.

All information lifted verbatim from the FreeBSD website most of it from Section 10 of the Committer's Guide, Support for Multiple Architectures

So expect as much support for AMD64 as you would for the standard PC version, the only thing keeping AMD64 back is it's not a widely distributed and therefore not as well tested.

For the record, FreeBSD's scheduler was already O(1), it just didn't handle SMP extremely well. The new ULE scheduler handles the SMP case much better, along with other nice improvements. See Jeff's paper at http://www.chesapeake.net/~jroberson/ULE.pdf

The release engineering team certainly does have high standards. Trying to live up to the stability reputation. But keep in mind that 5.x still is considered in testing and major changes can still be afoot that can cause instabilities. So please still keep in mind what -current means, http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html, and read the early adopters guide.

5.x will get better and better as it approaches 5.3R, so while some of the problems running a -current release are lessened, one should still be aware of all this and the higher standard for fixing one's own problems when running 5.x. RTFM is not an insult when running 5.x, its simply a price of entry to a great OS.

actually if you had looked at http:www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html

You would have noticed that 4.1.1 was the first point point release in almost two years after the decision that they were unneccesary extra work.
For 4.1.1 it was decided it was worth it because of the expiring of the RSA patents, it allowed the security pieces to be more easily merged in for US users.

Almost seems like 5.2 was a bit of a rush job.

As Colin pointed out in a peer post here, 5.2 had quite a long release cycle. If you look at the 5.2 release schedule you'll note that we spent almost 2 months on it. Add in that 5.1 was released in June of 2003, and you have quite a long dev cycle. We did the best that we could to manage risks in the 5.2 cycle, but shortly afterward it became apparent that there were some significant bugs in certain modules that didn't gain much attention until after the release was made.

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

1. Tomorrow, Sun might decide to charge for a JVM. Then you will be screwed.

2. They might decide to drop Java, closing all future to all your beautiful programs.

3. What if Sun decide not to support your favorite platform? (Say BeOS, or Linux on PS/2, or HP48SX...)

Sun has copyrights on one of many JVMs, which is closed source, and they control the name "Java" by holding the trademark. This is all, and this is not enough to effectively control the use of the language, even if they wanted to screw customers.

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

The article was referring to Macintosh (or Mac) issues, and I'm wondering why you're capitalizing the word.

I see. Thanks. Basically that's what we usually do as well :) - I'm not proficient in gentoo. Its just that there is a gentoo box next to my table - my roommate's - which I use occasionally. He is a gentoo (and linux) newbie, so I thought there might be something we are overlooking. I hope one day (perhaps portage 2.bignumber - any word?) will implement real dependency checking (real as in both installing _and_ removing packages - the two main features of package management). Like pkg_deinstall. Especially like the notion of 'upward' recursivity.

this is going to keep hanging over the heads of everyone who uses Linux - or BSD for that matter.

It's already happened. Back in 1992, AT&T sued BSDI... The end result of the suit was that BSD was able to call itself UNIX and AT&T was able to keep the BSD code they had in System V...

Some time ago Doug Rabson posted a wishlist of features that would be needed to move FreeBSD to subversion (from CVS). Any idea on progress on these features? The site seems to be slashdotted.

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

WRITING There is limited writing ability. Limitations: file must be nonresident and must not contain any spaces (uninitialized areas); compressed files are also not supported. The file name must not contain multibyte characters.

Helevius

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

Myself and my partner have for the last 13 years been doing our best to raise our adopted son in the fine traditions of GNU/Linux and free software. Imagine my horror when, upon arriving home early from work yesterday, I caught my boy touching himself while looking at pictures like this!

Further examination of his hard drive (made easy by the numerous exploits possible with the Linux kernel) we discovered references to a despicable non-GNU OS and other subversive material.

What should we do? How can we guide our boy away from filth like this and back to the true GNU way?

-- Richard

As for your falacies regarding freedom and the BSD and GPL licenses, those have been dealt with thoroughly before, except to say that your attitude works well for a small project, but for a large project (especially a large, self-contained project like a whole OS), the GPL offers you the developer more freedom and protection from greedy folks than the BSD would.

Well, a small nitpick but there are large self-contained projects written under mainly the BSD license. The three examples are actually complete operating systems.
Sure companies use the code for their own products (You wouldn't believe how many hardware appliances are BSD based) but is that actually bad? I mean would you rather have all those appliances writing their own TCP/IP stack which will have lots of bugs and therefore make for shitty firewalls/routers/whatevers which companies will use anyway because it has such a pretty windows client or whatever, this will fuck up parts of the net imho.
I code under BSD myself because it makes for less stress for myself and for others. If you BSD license your code that version will allways remain open for other people to use, and thats what you want with open sourcing your app right? That people actually use it?

IMHO writing under the gpl makes it less fun to code for me because then I'd have to worry about other people using my code in a way the GPL's writers didn't intend.
GPL is fun to write an open source competitor to closed source in but I think standards will originate in BSD because if its in BSD, everybody can use it. This is one of the factors in how TCP/IP became the standard on the internet.

Or perhaps another FreeBSD - AMD64 is considered a tier 1 platform for FreeBSD. IA64 is not yet, but from what I've heard, the remaining "stability issues" are more about ABI stability that about not crashing.

Nice. Microsoft would love the irony: After they killed off the competition, the EU would replace them with a dead OS. Preferably running on the Amiga.

Necrophiliac geeks in Europe would rejoice too.

Thank you for the price quote on Microsoft software.

However, we feel we could save money for our clients, the taxpayers of Europe, by migrating our systems to FreeBSD.

Thank you,
EU Ministry of IT

(Microsoft sales officer mutters to himself: Lost another one to DyingTech.)

> And if FreeBSD can compile the c library, the c compiler,
> kernel, xfree86, qt, kde, python, perl, and many other
> packages in 2 hours on a p2-300 w/160MB RAM and a slow hard
> drive, then I would be amazed.


3 hrs! C compiler, C libs, kernel, perl, openssh, openssl, nntpd and everything in /bin, /sbin and some games (bind and sendmail if you want them). Other stuff too which I can't remember. Everything in the base system which you can browse in cvs.

So you're right, we're not strictly comparing like with like - especially since I've got 192MB RAM and a Samsung 32GB IDE HD so my machine will obviously leave yours for dead ;) To be fair too I've got a Celeron (one of the good ones) with a L1 cache addressed at the full clock speed of the chip.

Apologies for the broken links. Try reading about the makeworld process here.

For upgrading userland stuff, most FreeBSDers use portupgrade which makes things pretty easy and painless.

Anyway, give FreeBSD a try one day. It would be interesting to compare it with Gentoo and see which bits of each system are better. I think you'll find the performance a lot better which is important when you're on low end hardware and building all your stuff from source.

> The recent updating included building most of the
> system over again (for about 6 months only security
> related packages had been updated) which took about a
> week, but the system was still often usable while it
> was compiling (slow, but usable).


A week!! I just rebuilt this box (300MHz Celeron FreeBSD) last night. Buildworld took just under 2 hrs with -j4, kernel took about 20 mins and the whole job was done in 3 hrs: installworld, installkernel and mergemaster

Big ports I just rebuild over night. Rebuilds I might do once every 6 months. ie. every release.

> The recent updating included building most of the
> system over again (for about 6 months only security
> related packages had been updated) which took about a
> week, but the system was still often usable while it
> was compiling (slow, but usable).


A week!! I just rebuilt this box (300MHz Celeron FreeBSD) last night. Buildworld took just under 2 hrs with -j4, kernel took about 20 mins and the whole job was done in 3 hrs: installworld, installkernel and mergemaster

Big ports I just rebuild over night. Rebuilds I might do once every 6 months. ie. every release.

It seems to be Gentoo to me, it's always suggested when someone asks for a new distro(I won't say where though as I'm afraid of being laughed upon ;)), and everyone seem to be using it. I'm happy with Slackware and FreeBSD. I really should check our Gentoo, it might just work on my crappy 5 year old Wintel machine...

And BSD is not dying!!

Helevius

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!

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. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat!

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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

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. I mean 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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

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!

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. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat!

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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

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!

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. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?! Linux has nothing that can possibly compete. Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat!

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? Don't you wish you could get one of these? 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!

"Who needs DOORS, Windows or Gates?". We looked for, but never found, any more software packages with names relating to points of entry through barriers.

How about BSD Ports or Gentoo Portage?

Since KDE 3.2 already finished compiling on two of my machines (haven't upgraded this one yet), does that make me less of a Mad Zealot?

Don't confuse the FreeBSD ports with a packaging system. FreeBSD has its own nice packaging system. (If you've used Solaris a lot you'll feel right at home) The FreeBSD ports all create and install packages for you "behind the scenes", and you can install any package as binary on FreeBSD as simply as:

# pkg_add ftp://ftp2.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/5 .2-RELEASE/packages/archivers/rpm-3.0.6_8.tbz