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Then came linux and now the *bsd users have had it and are beginning to come around. I applaud them for selling and marketing and creating hype about there product which is what they should of done 20 years ago.

Ask Linus about this. The reason we couldn't "be" is because BSD was the subject of a lawsuit. I believe Linus can be quoted as saying that if such lawsuit did not exist, neither would Linux.

Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.

More FUD. See the core team list and the FreeBSD CVS committers list. Both of these groups of people can commit directly to the CVS repository, effecting what people use in FreeBSD directly. No permission from God (Linus) or Co-God (Alan) is necessary under FreeBSD. Additionally, many people use the send-pr facility to submit patches to repair software in FreeBSD. One of the people listed in the core team or committers will then respond, and if it is "OK", the patch supplied is committed (perhaps with modifications) to the source tree.

Also, FreeBSD consists of both userland (/bin, /sbin, /usr/bin, /usr/sbin) and kernel. Since they're all kept in one place, both are constantly and consistently updated. I find this to be very beneficial to FreeBSD.

Try http://www.freebsd.org/~3d/

It's a few days out of date (No 3.3.5 yet), but I'm sure the avid gamers will figure it out... Or look at http://glx.on.openprojects.net/

Like most third party software, the source code used for FreeBSD (the other BSD's) and Linux is the same, and so the feature set is pretty much the same.

Regards,
-Jeremy

...didn't the *bsd flavors of unix had what, 20 years to get their act together and yet let windows and proprietary unix os's come in without a care in the world

20 years ago, you had to get a license from AT&T to get BSD, as large parts of the code in BSD were based on AT&T UNIX code that hadn't been replaced. They weren't out for World Domination at that point - but, then, Linus Torvalds wasn't our for World Domination when he started working on his kernel, either, as far as I know....

and now the *bsd hackers are pissed at linux users and the whole computer world for ignoring them.

There may well be *BSD hackers who are pissed at Linux users and the whole computer world for appearing to ignore them, but

1. not all BSD hackers are;
2. not all Linux users are ignoring BSD and much of the computer world isn't ignoring BSD, either, as the Wall Street Journal article this thread started out with shows.

They screwed up bad on marketing it, selling it, creating hype about it, and giving it to users.

To what extent did the Linux community "market it, sell it, and create hype about it"? And where did the "marketing, selling, and hype" about Linux come from? I'm not sure it all came from "the Linux hackers".

Linus invented linux because he couldn't get a unix os for his 386 pc. freebsd either couldn't run on it or it was accessible at the time.

FreeBSD (and the other freely-available BSDs) have always run on PCs, as I think FreeBSD and NetBSD both came from 386BSD which was a port of Net-2 to, err, umm, the PC.

IF I am correct (I could be wrong). The group of *bsd hackers bickered among themselves and fragmented and made a terrible mistake. THe mistake was it wasn't involved with the IBM pc when it first came out.

The first attempt at a completely-free BSD (with all the AT&T code either replaced or blessed as "OK to give out") was, I think, 386BSD, whence came FreeBSD and NetBSD; the "386" in "386BSD" referred to the 80386, because it was a BSD port to the PC.

The *bsd group didn't let outsiders contribute code so users who wanted a more powerful OS had to buy a separate OS more proprietary OS like sun os, irix, aix. The fragmentation in unix itself began.

"The *bsd group" of those days was the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and they certainly did accept contributions from outsiders. However, not all the stuff Sun, SGI, IBM, etc. did with either AT&T UNIX code or BSD code was necessarily sent back to Berkeley by those companies, and not because the Berkeley folk wouldn't accept it. You can't solely blame Berkeley for the existence of N different flavors of UNIX....

Unix was crazed by the IS departments until the early 1990's when unix completely became fragmented, proprietary, expensive, and unix companies began bickering among themselves

That all happened well before the early 1990's; UNIX was well-fragmented by the mid 1980's, with several different proprietary variants, from vendors who largely sold it on their own boxes rather than on, say, IBM-compatible PCs - UNIXes for PCs had existed for a long time, but I don't know how well IN/ix ran on 8088-based PC's (yes, 8088, the one with segmentation but no memory protection), but I suspect it may not have run well enough to push DOS out of the way, and I suspect the same may have been true of the UNIXes for 286-based PCs, although I think Xenix (yes, the Borg's own UNIX, later handed to SCO) may have had a decent market share for small business computers and the like.

The *bsd crowd ignored bill totally instead of pointing out there fallacies and marketing there OS and they still haven't learned from there mistakes and the source code was still closed and the users ignored average users and were real snotty.

"The *bsd crowd", if by that you mean the folks at Berkeley and their successors on the {Free,Net,Open}BSD projects, weren't spearheading the commercial UNIX movement - as far as I know, they were building free OSes for their own purposes, which I think was largely what the Linux community was also doing when they started.

Guess what! Windows took over everything and NT 3.51 came out next and began to steal the unix market.

Said market was the commercial UNIX market, not the free UNIX "market"....

Linux has buzz

Linux has software companies distributing it; for whatever reason, there's no equivalent of Red Hat or SuSE or Caldera or Pacific HiTech or... filling that role for {Free,Net,Open}BSD (no, Walnut Creek CD-ROM isn't in that position, as far as I know), although there is BSDI selling BSD/OS.

"The *bsd community", if, by that, you mean the developers of {Free,Net,Open}BSD is probably more like the Debian community than like Red Hat or SuSE or... in that regard (although the Debian folk aren't necessarily the official "owners" of all the components that go into their distribution - they're the official source of versions of the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc. that go into a Debian release, but they're not the official home of the Linux kernel or GNU "libc" or...).

Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.

The FreeBSD Core Team does have 16 members, but the core team, as the list linked to say, "constitutes the project's ``Board of Directors'', responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape" - they're not the sole developers of FreeBSD code. The same probably applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD. There are 151 additional "FreeBSD Developers" "who have commit privileges and do the engineering work on the FreeBSD source tree", and, according to the Contributing to FreeBSD page in the FreeBSD Handbook

Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

Again, the same may be true of NetBSD and OpenBSD; I'm less familiar with those projects.

I don't know how many of the core team or the development team work full-time on FreeBSD, so I can't say that FreeBSD has 167 full-time and (some unknown number of) part-time developers (the latter being those who don't have commit privileges but who do contribute code) - and note that this does not say that FreeBSD has more people working on it than are working on Linux systems, as I don't know if those "30 full time people" counts only people working on the kernel or also counts people working on GNU "libc", GNU utilities that aren't also used in the BSDs, etc..

However, it does suggest that "freebsd has only 15 guys" is a big oversimplification.

There could well be more people working on the stuff that goes into a Linux distribution and that doesn't also go into the BSDs or that isn't also available for BSD (people working on XFree86 aren't "Linux developers", as their stuff goes into the BSDs as well, and the folks working on KDE, at least, aren't "Linux developers", either, as binary packages of KDE 1.1.1 are available for FreeBSD and possibly the other BSDs) than are working on FreeBSD, but this doesn't mean that FreeBSD, or any of the other BSDs, are ipso facto doomed.

I believe freebsd had the unix code already and was around over 12 years longer then linux

12 years before today is 1987; FreeBSD didn't exist then, and Linux didn't just show up today, so FreeBSD wasn't around 12 years longer than Linux. Much of the BSD code was around before Linux existed, but much of the GNU and other code that goes into a Linux distribution was around before Linux existed as well, so I'm not sure {Free,Net,Open}BSD had as big a head start as you seem to think (it did have one, as far as I know, but not a 12 year head start).

...didn't the *bsd flavors of unix had what, 20 years to get their act together and yet let windows and proprietary unix os's come in without a care in the world

20 years ago, you had to get a license from AT&T to get BSD, as large parts of the code in BSD were based on AT&T UNIX code that hadn't been replaced. They weren't out for World Domination at that point - but, then, Linus Torvalds wasn't our for World Domination when he started working on his kernel, either, as far as I know....

and now the *bsd hackers are pissed at linux users and the whole computer world for ignoring them.

There may well be *BSD hackers who are pissed at Linux users and the whole computer world for appearing to ignore them, but

1. not all BSD hackers are;
2. not all Linux users are ignoring BSD and much of the computer world isn't ignoring BSD, either, as the Wall Street Journal article this thread started out with shows.

They screwed up bad on marketing it, selling it, creating hype about it, and giving it to users.

To what extent did the Linux community "market it, sell it, and create hype about it"? And where did the "marketing, selling, and hype" about Linux come from? I'm not sure it all came from "the Linux hackers".

Linus invented linux because he couldn't get a unix os for his 386 pc. freebsd either couldn't run on it or it was accessible at the time.

FreeBSD (and the other freely-available BSDs) have always run on PCs, as I think FreeBSD and NetBSD both came from 386BSD which was a port of Net-2 to, err, umm, the PC.

IF I am correct (I could be wrong). The group of *bsd hackers bickered among themselves and fragmented and made a terrible mistake. THe mistake was it wasn't involved with the IBM pc when it first came out.

The first attempt at a completely-free BSD (with all the AT&T code either replaced or blessed as "OK to give out") was, I think, 386BSD, whence came FreeBSD and NetBSD; the "386" in "386BSD" referred to the 80386, because it was a BSD port to the PC.

The *bsd group didn't let outsiders contribute code so users who wanted a more powerful OS had to buy a separate OS more proprietary OS like sun os, irix, aix. The fragmentation in unix itself began.

"The *bsd group" of those days was the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and they certainly did accept contributions from outsiders. However, not all the stuff Sun, SGI, IBM, etc. did with either AT&T UNIX code or BSD code was necessarily sent back to Berkeley by those companies, and not because the Berkeley folk wouldn't accept it. You can't solely blame Berkeley for the existence of N different flavors of UNIX....

Unix was crazed by the IS departments until the early 1990's when unix completely became fragmented, proprietary, expensive, and unix companies began bickering among themselves

That all happened well before the early 1990's; UNIX was well-fragmented by the mid 1980's, with several different proprietary variants, from vendors who largely sold it on their own boxes rather than on, say, IBM-compatible PCs - UNIXes for PCs had existed for a long time, but I don't know how well IN/ix ran on 8088-based PC's (yes, 8088, the one with segmentation but no memory protection), but I suspect it may not have run well enough to push DOS out of the way, and I suspect the same may have been true of the UNIXes for 286-based PCs, although I think Xenix (yes, the Borg's own UNIX, later handed to SCO) may have had a decent market share for small business computers and the like.

The *bsd crowd ignored bill totally instead of pointing out there fallacies and marketing there OS and they still haven't learned from there mistakes and the source code was still closed and the users ignored average users and were real snotty.

"The *bsd crowd", if by that you mean the folks at Berkeley and their successors on the {Free,Net,Open}BSD projects, weren't spearheading the commercial UNIX movement - as far as I know, they were building free OSes for their own purposes, which I think was largely what the Linux community was also doing when they started.

Guess what! Windows took over everything and NT 3.51 came out next and began to steal the unix market.

Said market was the commercial UNIX market, not the free UNIX "market"....

Linux has buzz

Linux has software companies distributing it; for whatever reason, there's no equivalent of Red Hat or SuSE or Caldera or Pacific HiTech or... filling that role for {Free,Net,Open}BSD (no, Walnut Creek CD-ROM isn't in that position, as far as I know), although there is BSDI selling BSD/OS.

"The *bsd community", if, by that, you mean the developers of {Free,Net,Open}BSD is probably more like the Debian community than like Red Hat or SuSE or... in that regard (although the Debian folk aren't necessarily the official "owners" of all the components that go into their distribution - they're the official source of versions of the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc. that go into a Debian release, but they're not the official home of the Linux kernel or GNU "libc" or...).

Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.

The FreeBSD Core Team does have 16 members, but the core team, as the list linked to say, "constitutes the project's ``Board of Directors'', responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape" - they're not the sole developers of FreeBSD code. The same probably applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD. There are 151 additional "FreeBSD Developers" "who have commit privileges and do the engineering work on the FreeBSD source tree", and, according to the Contributing to FreeBSD page in the FreeBSD Handbook

Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

Again, the same may be true of NetBSD and OpenBSD; I'm less familiar with those projects.

I don't know how many of the core team or the development team work full-time on FreeBSD, so I can't say that FreeBSD has 167 full-time and (some unknown number of) part-time developers (the latter being those who don't have commit privileges but who do contribute code) - and note that this does not say that FreeBSD has more people working on it than are working on Linux systems, as I don't know if those "30 full time people" counts only people working on the kernel or also counts people working on GNU "libc", GNU utilities that aren't also used in the BSDs, etc..

However, it does suggest that "freebsd has only 15 guys" is a big oversimplification.

There could well be more people working on the stuff that goes into a Linux distribution and that doesn't also go into the BSDs or that isn't also available for BSD (people working on XFree86 aren't "Linux developers", as their stuff goes into the BSDs as well, and the folks working on KDE, at least, aren't "Linux developers", either, as binary packages of KDE 1.1.1 are available for FreeBSD and possibly the other BSDs) than are working on FreeBSD, but this doesn't mean that FreeBSD, or any of the other BSDs, are ipso facto doomed.

I believe freebsd had the unix code already and was around over 12 years longer then linux

12 years before today is 1987; FreeBSD didn't exist then, and Linux didn't just show up today, so FreeBSD wasn't around 12 years longer than Linux. Much of the BSD code was around before Linux existed, but much of the GNU and other code that goes into a Linux distribution was around before Linux existed as well, so I'm not sure {Free,Net,Open}BSD had as big a head start as you seem to think (it did have one, as far as I know, but not a 12 year head start).

...didn't the *bsd flavors of unix had what, 20 years to get their act together and yet let windows and proprietary unix os's come in without a care in the world

20 years ago, you had to get a license from AT&T to get BSD, as large parts of the code in BSD were based on AT&T UNIX code that hadn't been replaced. They weren't out for World Domination at that point - but, then, Linus Torvalds wasn't our for World Domination when he started working on his kernel, either, as far as I know....

and now the *bsd hackers are pissed at linux users and the whole computer world for ignoring them.

There may well be *BSD hackers who are pissed at Linux users and the whole computer world for appearing to ignore them, but

1. not all BSD hackers are;
2. not all Linux users are ignoring BSD and much of the computer world isn't ignoring BSD, either, as the Wall Street Journal article this thread started out with shows.

They screwed up bad on marketing it, selling it, creating hype about it, and giving it to users.

To what extent did the Linux community "market it, sell it, and create hype about it"? And where did the "marketing, selling, and hype" about Linux come from? I'm not sure it all came from "the Linux hackers".

Linus invented linux because he couldn't get a unix os for his 386 pc. freebsd either couldn't run on it or it was accessible at the time.

FreeBSD (and the other freely-available BSDs) have always run on PCs, as I think FreeBSD and NetBSD both came from 386BSD which was a port of Net-2 to, err, umm, the PC.

IF I am correct (I could be wrong). The group of *bsd hackers bickered among themselves and fragmented and made a terrible mistake. THe mistake was it wasn't involved with the IBM pc when it first came out.

The first attempt at a completely-free BSD (with all the AT&T code either replaced or blessed as "OK to give out") was, I think, 386BSD, whence came FreeBSD and NetBSD; the "386" in "386BSD" referred to the 80386, because it was a BSD port to the PC.

The *bsd group didn't let outsiders contribute code so users who wanted a more powerful OS had to buy a separate OS more proprietary OS like sun os, irix, aix. The fragmentation in unix itself began.

"The *bsd group" of those days was the Computer Systems Research Group at the University of California, Berkeley, and they certainly did accept contributions from outsiders. However, not all the stuff Sun, SGI, IBM, etc. did with either AT&T UNIX code or BSD code was necessarily sent back to Berkeley by those companies, and not because the Berkeley folk wouldn't accept it. You can't solely blame Berkeley for the existence of N different flavors of UNIX....

Unix was crazed by the IS departments until the early 1990's when unix completely became fragmented, proprietary, expensive, and unix companies began bickering among themselves

That all happened well before the early 1990's; UNIX was well-fragmented by the mid 1980's, with several different proprietary variants, from vendors who largely sold it on their own boxes rather than on, say, IBM-compatible PCs - UNIXes for PCs had existed for a long time, but I don't know how well IN/ix ran on 8088-based PC's (yes, 8088, the one with segmentation but no memory protection), but I suspect it may not have run well enough to push DOS out of the way, and I suspect the same may have been true of the UNIXes for 286-based PCs, although I think Xenix (yes, the Borg's own UNIX, later handed to SCO) may have had a decent market share for small business computers and the like.

The *bsd crowd ignored bill totally instead of pointing out there fallacies and marketing there OS and they still haven't learned from there mistakes and the source code was still closed and the users ignored average users and were real snotty.

"The *bsd crowd", if by that you mean the folks at Berkeley and their successors on the {Free,Net,Open}BSD projects, weren't spearheading the commercial UNIX movement - as far as I know, they were building free OSes for their own purposes, which I think was largely what the Linux community was also doing when they started.

Guess what! Windows took over everything and NT 3.51 came out next and began to steal the unix market.

Said market was the commercial UNIX market, not the free UNIX "market"....

Linux has buzz

Linux has software companies distributing it; for whatever reason, there's no equivalent of Red Hat or SuSE or Caldera or Pacific HiTech or... filling that role for {Free,Net,Open}BSD (no, Walnut Creek CD-ROM isn't in that position, as far as I know), although there is BSDI selling BSD/OS.

"The *bsd community", if, by that, you mean the developers of {Free,Net,Open}BSD is probably more like the Debian community than like Red Hat or SuSE or... in that regard (although the Debian folk aren't necessarily the official "owners" of all the components that go into their distribution - they're the official source of versions of the kernel, libraries, utilities, etc. that go into a Debian release, but they're not the official home of the Linux kernel or GNU "libc" or...).

Linux said that linux is made up of 30 full time and over 1,000 part time programmers who work on the kernel while freebsd has only 15 guys.

The FreeBSD Core Team does have 16 members, but the core team, as the list linked to say, "constitutes the project's ``Board of Directors'', responsible for deciding the project's overall goals and direction as well as managing specific areas of the FreeBSD project landscape" - they're not the sole developers of FreeBSD code. The same probably applies to NetBSD and OpenBSD. There are 151 additional "FreeBSD Developers" "who have commit privileges and do the engineering work on the FreeBSD source tree", and, according to the Contributing to FreeBSD page in the FreeBSD Handbook

Contrary to what some people might also have you believe, you do not need to be a hot-shot programmer or a close personal friend of the FreeBSD core team in order to have your contributions accepted. The FreeBSD Project's development is done by a large and growing number of international contributors whose ages and areas of technical expertise vary greatly, and there is always more work to be done than there are people available to do it.

Again, the same may be true of NetBSD and OpenBSD; I'm less familiar with those projects.

I don't know how many of the core team or the development team work full-time on FreeBSD, so I can't say that FreeBSD has 167 full-time and (some unknown number of) part-time developers (the latter being those who don't have commit privileges but who do contribute code) - and note that this does not say that FreeBSD has more people working on it than are working on Linux systems, as I don't know if those "30 full time people" counts only people working on the kernel or also counts people working on GNU "libc", GNU utilities that aren't also used in the BSDs, etc..

However, it does suggest that "freebsd has only 15 guys" is a big oversimplification.

There could well be more people working on the stuff that goes into a Linux distribution and that doesn't also go into the BSDs or that isn't also available for BSD (people working on XFree86 aren't "Linux developers", as their stuff goes into the BSDs as well, and the folks working on KDE, at least, aren't "Linux developers", either, as binary packages of KDE 1.1.1 are available for FreeBSD and possibly the other BSDs) than are working on FreeBSD, but this doesn't mean that FreeBSD, or any of the other BSDs, are ipso facto doomed.

I believe freebsd had the unix code already and was around over 12 years longer then linux

12 years before today is 1987; FreeBSD didn't exist then, and Linux didn't just show up today, so FreeBSD wasn't around 12 years longer than Linux. Much of the BSD code was around before Linux existed, but much of the GNU and other code that goes into a Linux distribution was around before Linux existed as well, so I'm not sure {Free,Net,Open}BSD had as big a head start as you seem to think (it did have one, as far as I know, but not a 12 year head start).

FUD, you ask? Yes!

2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

• GIMP
• Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
• nmap
• The XFree86 stuff
• Window Maker
• Eterm
• pdksh
• vMac
• jade
• XAnim

FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP

• The FreeBSD handbook
• The FreeBSD FAQ
• FreeBSD tutorials

FUD, you ask? Yes!

2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

• GIMP
• Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
• nmap
• The XFree86 stuff
• Window Maker
• Eterm
• pdksh
• vMac
• jade
• XAnim

FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP

• The FreeBSD handbook
• The FreeBSD FAQ
• FreeBSD tutorials

FUD, you ask? Yes!

2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

• GIMP
• Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
• nmap
• The XFree86 stuff
• Window Maker
• Eterm
• pdksh
• vMac
• jade
• XAnim

FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP

• The FreeBSD handbook
• The FreeBSD FAQ
• FreeBSD tutorials

FUD, you ask? Yes!

2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

• GIMP
• Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
• nmap
• The XFree86 stuff
• Window Maker
• Eterm
• pdksh
• vMac
• jade
• XAnim

FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP

• The FreeBSD handbook
• The FreeBSD FAQ
• FreeBSD tutorials

FUD, you ask? Yes!

2. Easy to upgrade. I have yet to see any tool surpass /usr/ports for pure ease of use. apt-get install "insert-name-here" is even easier and faster.

FreeBSD also allows binary package installation.
$ pkg_add ftp//:url_to_package

FreeBSDs package management is great but it is NO match to Debian GNU/Linux. Debian is even easier to upgrade.
1) You don't have to fix /etc by hand

This is nonsense. Package management has nothing to do with the /etc directory. FreeBSD uses CVSup for that, and there is an excellent port which can update /etc for you automagically called mergemaster.

2) You don't have to wait for hours for your stuff to compile (apt-get downloads binary packages unless told otherwise)

FreeBSD also has gradual binary upgrades for both the -STABLE and -CURRENT systems known as "snapshots". See ftp://current.freebsd.org.

3) You have to remake all your ports one by one after upgrading system. On Debian all packages are a part of distribution. If you upgrade system everything is upgraded.

What gives you this idea? I've got a whole lot of ports I've preserved across many dozens of FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT recompiles over several months:

• GIMP
• Many KDE apps (though I use GNOME mainly now)
• nmap
• The XFree86 stuff
• Window Maker
• Eterm
• pdksh
• vMac
• jade
• XAnim

FreeBSD handbook is great, but then most of the major linux distributions(Debian and RedHat) have such handbooks too (usually online too) + a huge collection of online docs at LDP

• The FreeBSD handbook
• The FreeBSD FAQ
• FreeBSD tutorials

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

So that's why one of the "CVSmeisters" from the Darwin project is a FreeBSD committer:

• CVS log of commit to CVSROOT/access
• Fred Sanchez describes what he'll do for the FreeBSD project
• It looks an awful lot like those two groups are working together to me.

Why fix it if it ain't broke?

So that's why one of the "CVSmeisters" from the Darwin project is a FreeBSD committer:

• CVS log of commit to CVSROOT/access
• Fred Sanchez describes what he'll do for the FreeBSD project
• It looks an awful lot like those two groups are working together to me.

We owe much to id Software, without them OpenGL would have not been established widely on Win32. Now they have OpenGL, we have OpenGL and game publishers and other software companies will have it easier than ever to create powerful applications for both platforms.

Further it is a joy to have John Carmack working on the open glx Matrox driver. This guy is dedicated to the subject and certainly not only money driven.

Linux is uniting *NIXes. Solaris and FreeBSD already have the means to run some Linux programs, this makes Linux binaries "almost" a default format.

Well, as a former OS/2 user I have very mixed feeling on this subject, as OS/2 emulation for Win16 was so good that nearly no native app was created, in the end the death for that operating system.

FreeBSD's Linux emulation is very good. So you can run Netscape, RealAudio Player,Myth2 demo, Quake3 under that emulation layer. Like in the case of OS/2, Linux apps might actually run better under FreeBSD in some regards. You even get the same Linux headaches (like clib/glib madness) under the emulation. :-)

However it is just an option and not the native ABI and we will strive to keep porting and developing for FreeBSD. So we have native hardware acclerated XFree86 (2d) and Mesa (3d) versions and apps.

Drop me a mail at 3d@freebsd.org if you need more information.

No worry about FreeBSD. The Mesa/Glide combination has been in the ports collection for some time now, and we have the glx from openprojects.net working too, yielding accelerated 3d for Matrox G200/G400 and nvidia RIVA128/128ZX/TNT/TNT2 etc.
Grab it here:

http://www.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure for the upcoming XFree86 4 release will get ported to FreeBSD too.

And theres is more. Please subscribe to

freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org

to participate in the discussion of this exciting subject or send me an e-mail to 3d@freebsd.org if you have any questions left.

Add to that support for the Matrox G400, NVidia TNT2, ,,

See my comment above, on how to get it. Please use it and help testing!

.. and several others I'm not quite yet at liberty to mention (Work on these chips have just begun, and I don't want to get false hopes up!)- all with open source code and no black magic that would keep someone from implementing it under *BSD, etc. under any chipset that will work with an adapter.

Bet on it. If the information get freed it is just a matter of time that it will be implemented.

No worry about FreeBSD. The Mesa/Glide combination has been in the ports collection for some time now, and we have the glx from openprojects.net working too, yielding accelerated 3d for Matrox G200/G400 and nvidia RIVA128/128ZX/TNT/TNT2 etc.
Grab it here:

http://www.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure for the upcoming XFree86 4 release will get ported to FreeBSD too.

And theres is more. Please subscribe to

freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org

to participate in the discussion of this exciting subject or send me an e-mail to 3d@freebsd.org if you have any questions left.

Add to that support for the Matrox G400, NVidia TNT2, ,,

See my comment above, on how to get it. Please use it and help testing!

.. and several others I'm not quite yet at liberty to mention (Work on these chips have just begun, and I don't want to get false hopes up!)- all with open source code and no black magic that would keep someone from implementing it under *BSD, etc. under any chipset that will work with an adapter.

Bet on it. If the information get freed it is just a matter of time that it will be implemented.

No worry about FreeBSD. The Mesa/Glide combination has been in the ports collection for some time now, and we have the glx from openprojects.net working too, yielding accelerated 3d for Matrox G200/G400 and nvidia RIVA128/128ZX/TNT/TNT2 etc.
Grab it here:

http://www.freebsd.org/~3d/distfiles/glx

The Direct Rendering Infrastructure for the upcoming XFree86 4 release will get ported to FreeBSD too.

And theres is more. Please subscribe to

freebsd-multimedia@freebsd.org

to participate in the discussion of this exciting subject or send me an e-mail to 3d@freebsd.org if you have any questions left.

Add to that support for the Matrox G400, NVidia TNT2, ,,

See my comment above, on how to get it. Please use it and help testing!

.. and several others I'm not quite yet at liberty to mention (Work on these chips have just begun, and I don't want to get false hopes up!)- all with open source code and no black magic that would keep someone from implementing it under *BSD, etc. under any chipset that will work with an adapter.

Bet on it. If the information get freed it is just a matter of time that it will be implemented.

FreeBSD on Intel supports 4 GB of RAM. I don't know about Alpha. FreeBSD also supports files of up to 8 TB on FFS. Note that this is considerably longer than 2 GB.

Try this FreeBSD mirror for a FreeBSD .ISO image.

As always, please buy the CDROM and support good software if you like it and use it.

It's good to see these various distribution makers put out .ISO images. With IDE CD-burners plummeting in price down to $100-150, many casual computer users have the capability to use them. Also, when .ISOs are available, people are more likely to take a chance on a new OS/distro due to the convenience of having it all on CD and free of charge. (Got 2 Win98-using friends to try out RedHat 6.0 last month with my bootable CD.). The task of downloading 600 Mb worth of files is just too daunting for many newbies or casual users...

The developers it would attract are already engaged in various Gnu projects and Linux development itself.

It doesn't matter much to me what people claim about their code if they can't prove it. If they can, more power to them. If they're nice people, they'll say what they did, if not, it can probably be figured out.

(Anyway, everyone with a brain knows NetBSD is better than FreeBSD and BSDOS put together. ;^>)

(... please observe the smiley, kiddies.)

Mr Donkey wrote:
What I wanted out of switching to BSD is a more secure machine, so I decided to look into OpenBSD. The unsupported hardware I was talking about was multiprocessor i386 support in OpenBSD. (It really sucks not to be able to use the added processing power of a second CPU). I did not look into the other BSD's, cause the only reason I was looking at BSD as an alternative was security.

Although OpenBSD's undergone (and is undergowing) that much-lauded line-by-line security audit, all three others (Net, Free, and BSD/OS) benefit from the code kicked back into the base by that process.

FreeBSD, though it's perhaps a little less paranoically secure in a standard install, does perfectly good SMP and can easily be made even more secure than the standard OpenBSD install.

Want proof? Go look at the FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel, and this archive of the de-bsd-chat mailing list in which FreeBSD 3.1's SMP is described as outperforming that of SuSE 6.0's.

Mr Donkey wrote:
What I wanted out of switching to BSD is a more secure machine, so I decided to look into OpenBSD. The unsupported hardware I was talking about was multiprocessor i386 support in OpenBSD. (It really sucks not to be able to use the added processing power of a second CPU). I did not look into the other BSD's, cause the only reason I was looking at BSD as an alternative was security.

Although OpenBSD's undergone (and is undergowing) that much-lauded line-by-line security audit, all three others (Net, Free, and BSD/OS) benefit from the code kicked back into the base by that process.

FreeBSD, though it's perhaps a little less paranoically secure in a standard install, does perfectly good SMP and can easily be made even more secure than the standard OpenBSD install.

Want proof? Go look at the FreeBSD Symmetric MultiProcessor Kernel, and this archive of the de-bsd-chat mailing list in which FreeBSD 3.1's SMP is described as outperforming that of SuSE 6.0's.

Check out: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/

Jordan and a few others slaved to ensure that there were upgrade kits for those wishing to do an upgrade without a reinstall.

There are "kits" for 2.2.x -> 3.x available.

--

Jordan is right about the PR war, as far as he goes. However, in the BSD world, it's FreeBSD that is getting the PR; those of us working on NetBSD are even more obscure, despite the fact that NetBSD runs on a lot more platforms (i.e. CPUs/systems other than Intel) than just about anything.

The reality is that it's hard to get hackers to do marketing because they're not really good at it (and most of them know it), and the people who are good at it are either insufferable, or attempt to control the engineering side and thus have to be jettisoned.

Where does one find good marketing people who know their purpose and their place?

But seriously, FreeBSD is a very smart OS. When something goes wrong in FreeBSD.. you
can be sure that it's your fault. I can't always say that with linux.

Oh, nonsense. Read this. If I got bitten by this, how is it *my* fault?

But seriously, FreeBSD is a very smart OS. When something goes wrong in FreeBSD.. you can be sure that it's your fault. I can't always say that with linux.

AC wrote:

I think the easiest way is to write a short docbook tutorial which spells out the commonly used elements by usage.

Excellent idea. Please check out the FreeBSD Documentation Project Primer, and in particular, chapter 4.

That pretty much covers it, I think.

N

You might want to check out my pdamips page for a complete list of MIPS based pdas. Please send me updates if I'm wrong about that :-)

Re: Linux on the Aero, you may have problems getting enough technical data from Compaq to actually do this. It uses the slower 70MHz R3900 based MIPS processors (although I'm not sure if it uses the Phillips one, or the Toshiba one).

Finally, this is booting Linux to a standalone shell. Much more work is needed before this will be useful. NetBSD/hpcmips allows one to login to the machine over the network! However, to the best of my knowledge, it doesn't have an X server or similar beast running on it at this time.

Enjoy!

It already has. Look at the recent FUD that was discussed on linux-kernel, where a certain green@freebsd.org kept spouting nonsense about Linux running a BSD TCP/IP stack that Alan Cox had "stolen," when the reality is that it has and has always had (in official releases, anyway, because of legal issues with the Net-2 stack of *BSD) its own stack, written from the ground up.

UNIX is a server OS which is making inroads into the desktop marketplace. Windows/Mac OS are desktop operating systems making inroads into the server marketplace.

Windows and a few tag-along friends have been at a decided advantage where bridging the server/desktop gap is concerend. "Any moron can administer" (desktop) equals "cheap sysadmin." "Stable" (server) equals "fewer reboots in the typing pool."

Linux has helped further UNIX's position by adding "cheap" and "popular" to the list of features. Now it's time to really hammer on creating a solid target application environment and, most of all, to focus on ease of use.

There are already countless Linux distributions competing to create the easiest-to-install distribution. The key players know they need to get people up and running painlessly.

But KDE and to a lesser extent, Gnome, represent the next critical step. Fewer of the important players seem to realize (or know what to do about the fact) that ease of use and a consistent desktop are what are going to make or break the huge desktop market for them.

Linux-Mandrake seems to realize this, with their support of David Faure, and FreeBSD seems to be considering methods for a sneak-attack. (There are more KDE threads there.)

Linux or not, whoever can make themselves synonymous with KDE when KOffice and KDE 2.0 go public will have the desktop market locked. Execs will be tripping over each other to be the first to suggest the "stable" "cheap" "popular" and "EASY" OS for every last PC in the place.

Who's it going to be? Will they turn RH into a tiny, forgotten memory? ...will they still remember Linux?

The beautiful thing about OpenGL is that it is mostly platform independent. So you could start by adapting existing code, reuse the OS interfacing parts, and put in your own OpenGL code. Such code and lots of tutorials can be found at www.opengl.org and in the example directories of a Mesa distribution. (We owe Brian!)

Side note:
Interestingly enough the Win32 world seems to stay closed as it always have been, while there are many OpenGL demos for Win32 out there, few of those authors disclose their source.

Ultimately get the new Woo book for OpenGL 1.2 and the Kilgard book for the interaction with the X environment.

If you are interested in 3d graphics for FreeBSD watch the announcement for the upcoming 3d section on www.freebsd.org

Answer: Yes. The DRI is being ported to FreeBSD so some OpenGL support should be possible. However, most IHVs and ISVs will only be looking at Linux support, at least for the time being.

This sounds a bit like there is no much OpenGL sppport.
Let me clarify that we have both software rendered and hardware accelerated 3d for FreeBSD.

There is a Mesa version for GLIDE in the ports collection for some time now, and ports of the open GLX effort for Matrox (G200) and nvidia (RIVA128, 128ZX, TNT, TNT2..) cards are under public testing now. Works already very smooth with the usual gang of apps (xscreensaver, Mesa Demos, Flightgear ..)

And sure, DRI will get ported.

For more information send mail to 3d@freebsd.org

There is a setup called PicoBSD. It is a set of minimal distributions of FreeBSD that fit in 1.44 Megs. There is a router distro, firewall, dialup, among others.

AC wrote:

Won't Releasing this under GPL cause problems with intergrating with truely free OS's such *BSD's?

Possibly. There's a thread about this just started on the freebsd-hackers mailing list.

Matthew Alton is the person to talk to -- I'll not include his e-mail address here for spam reasons, but the post in which he announces he's working on it is http: //docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=269893+0+c urrent/freebsd-hackers.

You can follow the thread from that link.

N

Here's what Netcraft has to say about it: www.alltheweb.com is running Apache/1.3.6 (Unix) PHP/3.0.11 on FreeBSD .

Both Apache and FreeBSD are well-proven OpenSource software projects. I imagine this is going to be very stable ;)

But www.fast.no seems to be running Linux. Anyway...according to the Uptime List, FreeBSD has much higher uptimes than Linux. Looks like it is the choice of the folks that don't reboot. I think those are mainly to be found in commercial environments like this one. Quite funny - a search for my nick/handle only finds results on /. and [fm] :)

What MIPS mailing list had info about booting Linux on a MIPS-PDA ? I'm part of the linuxCE project, working on getting Linux up on teh Philips Nino (PR31700-based, which is based on the MIPS R3000) There is a bootloader now for the Vr2xxx, I believe, but no working bootloader for the Nino. I suggest you check out the linuxce project's mailing lists archives (see www.linuxce.org and go to 'developers'). Also, there is the PocketBSD project, which has a bootloader for Everex Freestyle and NEC MobileGear devices. I don't know the URL for that project right off -- it's based in Japan. You might also be interested in checking out Warner's MIPS-based PDA Info Center. Cheers, Routecoder (bscholl+@cmu.edu)

• Qmail's maildir format means that you the machine wouldn't bog down as soon as the users started getting large mailboxes - each mail is stored individually, and the pop daemon doesn't have to read through huge files to find out how many messages are there
• The fact that users' maildirs are stored in their home directory also means you can spread them across filesystems easily.
• the configuration and management of qmail scales a lot easier than sendmail's - much more sensible config files / config file names, seperate config files for different things
• global aliases are stored as seperate files (although you can use a hack to use the /etc/aliases format if you like) so managing aliases is easier
• Qmail is more secure ( http://web.infoave.net/~dsill/qmail-challenge.html ll/qm ail-challenge.html)

I say FreeBSD because I know that it's reputation of stability and fast networking are true from experience, but I guess Linux or another open source operating system (OS OS, heh) would do the job fine. I've seen a system at a commercial ISP running with about 15K users on FreeBSD & Qmail, which is why I'm recommending it. They switched from sendmail when it started becoming too slow because of massive mailboxes; every time a user with a 50Mb mailbox logged on the mail server would chug until it had gone through the whole file. If someone gets sent one 50Mb attachment, that means that the pop3d gone through 50Mb of data to say "1 New Message" - it's not an issue with the maildir format.

I guess you could achieve the same effect with a clustering solution, but I think that's probably unnecessary.

You might also want to check out postfix.

URLS:

• http://www.qmail.org/ - Qmail
• http://www.postfix.org/ - Postfix (by Wietse Venema)
• http://www.freebsd.org/

It used to be fine.. I notice the Japanese typically at these occasions:

• japanese activity in the ports tree.

• The FreeBSD Japan team on distributed.net scores high.

• you will find many japanese FreeBSD CDs/books at www.freebsd.org

One must state albeit, that there is a language barrier. Most of us Non-Japanese don't speak Japanese and the other way round English seems to be hard for the Nihonjin too. If they cross it, interesting things get revealed often, like a cute new mp3 encode (gogo), last week.

However this company, under its old name Pacific HiTech used to be the Japanese FreeBSD distributor, might be that this has changed.

It used to be fine.. I notice the Japanese typically at these occasions:

• japanese activity in the ports tree.

• The FreeBSD Japan team on distributed.net scores high.

• you will find many japanese FreeBSD CDs/books at www.freebsd.org

One must state albeit, that there is a language barrier. Most of us Non-Japanese don't speak Japanese and the other way round English seems to be hard for the Nihonjin too. If they cross it, interesting things get revealed often, like a cute new mp3 encode (gogo), last week.

However this company, under its old name Pacific HiTech used to be the Japanese FreeBSD distributor, might be that this has changed.

I have a FreeBSD system here with multiple BrookTree cards in it, and it works pretty well. Amancio Hasty and Randall Hopper did a lot of good work on making the Bt848 and 878 boards work for nearly anything you want. (Nearly any Hauppauge board, or most mainstream PCI 'TV' boards)

There are a few applications out there in the FreeBSD Ports collection for taking the output of one of these cards and doing useful things with it. One in particular is fxtv.

I wrote a tiny little program based on how fxtv grabs the frames to just update a .jpg every 30 seconds, and keep a history of the last 10 frames, and it works great for a webcam of this nature. There's really no reason you can't have as many of them as you have PCI slots.

Another option is to grab one of these from the Walmart Online site, that was mentioned in a story a few days ago on here. A sequencer like this will take 8 inputs, and cycle through all of them. Somehow time your webcam grabs to the cycle speed, and you could get by with only one digitizer card.

Dominican wrote:

The perfect example is the FreeBSD "Handbook".. the official online manual for FreeBSD. This Handbook is done with SGML and for someone to help with it the would first need to figure out/install the tools and then deal with SGML. Last time I tried to help with documentation there was barely enough info on what tools to get and even less in terms of SGML documentation.

Spot on.

That's why I wrote the Doc. Proj. Primer, available at http://www.FreeBSD.org/tutorials/d ocproj-primer/.

Feedback is welcomed.

N

I guess it's time for your weird day:

FreeBSD user groups

Probably the best advice I can give is to review the FreeBSD Web Site and especially the FreeBSD Handbook. Remember, you can always search the FreeBSD mailing list archives if you have problems.

Another excellent resource is the Complete FreeBSD Book, which costs about $40, but is well worth it. If you decide to go with FreeBSD, an Internet-based installation will work, but all the hard-core FreeBSD users have FreeBSD Disc Sets from Walnut Creek CDROM.

In the end, I guess it took me about a week of normal use to get accustomed to FreeBSD's way of the world. After a few days you'll start to notice that, in the ways that FreeBSD differs from Linux, those ways will make total sense from an implementation or an overall-system standpoint.

Probably the best advice I can give is to review the FreeBSD Web Site and especially the FreeBSD Handbook. Remember, you can always search the FreeBSD mailing list archives if you have problems.

Another excellent resource is the Complete FreeBSD Book, which costs about $40, but is well worth it. If you decide to go with FreeBSD, an Internet-based installation will work, but all the hard-core FreeBSD users have FreeBSD Disc Sets from Walnut Creek CDROM.

In the end, I guess it took me about a week of normal use to get accustomed to FreeBSD's way of the world. After a few days you'll start to notice that, in the ways that FreeBSD differs from Linux, those ways will make total sense from an implementation or an overall-system standpoint.

Probably the best advice I can give is to review the FreeBSD Web Site and especially the FreeBSD Handbook. Remember, you can always search the FreeBSD mailing list archives if you have problems.

Another excellent resource is the Complete FreeBSD Book, which costs about $40, but is well worth it. If you decide to go with FreeBSD, an Internet-based installation will work, but all the hard-core FreeBSD users have FreeBSD Disc Sets from Walnut Creek CDROM.

In the end, I guess it took me about a week of normal use to get accustomed to FreeBSD's way of the world. After a few days you'll start to notice that, in the ways that FreeBSD differs from Linux, those ways will make total sense from an implementation or an overall-system standpoint.

http://advocacy.freebsd.org/stor ies/pr_matrix.html

Regards,
Marc

claims theoretical support for 4 gigs at http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/FAQ51.html. Cdrom.com has some impressive stats too on their new box. The problem with trying ultra high-end stuff on PC hardware is the best you can really say to your boss is that it should work. Companies like Sun or SGI have already deployed hundreds (if not thousands) so you shouldn't end up with any suprises along the way.

Another alternative could be to buy a bunch of smaller (high end P2 and moderate memory+disk) clones and set a bunch of those up. New videos would be added to the servers in round-robin order and more popular videos could be placed on multiple servers. Now you would have one (or maybe more for reliability) redirectors which could redirect the request to the right server using mod_rewrite. Through the use of an external program (which would do a database lookup most likely), the user could be redirected to the proper server based on regular expression patern grabbing from the URL. See the "External Rewriting Engine" part in the Rewrite guide. It is also possible to transparently proxy the request so the user never sees http://www19.example.com/ugly/url/movie.xyz, but you probably aren't http streaming your movies anyway.

This is one of the points that BSD fans keep bringing up. "You can run Linux (and SCO) software on BSD, so why use Linux". Yet I have never seen the issue of performance brought up anywhere. Great BSD can run Linux software, the question is can it run it as well as Linux, and if not how much worse.

There's two questions here. First, how fast is it, and second, how complete is it?

To answer the first question -- FreeBSD's Linux emulation is as fast as FreeBSD is.

"Emulation" is the wrong choice of word really. To put it in fairly non-technical terms for a moment. When you run a binary on a FreeBSD (or Linux system, or other Unix system for that matter) the "image activator" examines the file to determine what to do with it.

Most Unices have an image activator that does one of two things. If the first two characters are "#!" then it recognises it as being a shell script, and does the right thing. Otherwise it loads the binary, fixes up any shared object references, and runs it as normal.

FreeBSD's image activator does something slightly different. As you know, program make lots of system calls, and in the binary these calls are specified as numbers rather than names (i.e., open(2) might be number 57). FreeBSD's image activator pulls in an array that maps these numbers to the actual FreeBSD system calls.

For FreeBSD native binaries these are one and the same thing.

If the image activator sees this is a Linux binary, it pulls in a different array. This might map the open(2) call from it's Linux number (34 say) to the FreeBSD number (57 -- remember, these numbers are hypothetical).

That's all. So this is not really emulation at all, but simply implementation of a different Application Binary Interface.

More more detail about this is available at the FreeBSD Handbook Linux section.

Because there's no emulation to slow the process down, resource-intensive Linux binaries benefit from FreeBSD's better handling of heavy loads. This is the main reason for the claim "Better Linux than Linux" that you'll hear bandied about.

Before you ask, no, I don't know of any benchmarks, because I don't know of anyone that's taken the time to do it. If someone in the UK wants to throw a spare hard disk my way, I'd be happy to do it.

As to the second question -- despite what some of the more enthusiastic FreeBSD supporters here have said (and my address is nik@FreeBSD.org, so you can expect some bias) FreeBSD's Linux emulation is not perfect. Some (very much lesser used) system calls are not properly mapped, and some have no direct FreeBSD equivalent. But the vast majority of software works with no problems (that includes things like StarOffice, WordPerfect, and Oracle, to name three of the big heavyweights).

In addition, a couple of people have just joined the ranks of the FreeBSD committers expressly to work on FreeBSD's Linux emulation, so it looks as if the final wrinkles will be ironed out sooner rather than later.

Hope that helps.

N

But of course...BSDi does, though commercial; FreeBSD has had support since 3.0 (see http://www.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/SMP.html ); and it appears as though NetBSD is working on it.

I'm _guessing_ that you installed FreeBSD 3.2 and then installed Netscape (maybe from the ports collection). The problem with this scenario is that 3.2 doesn't by default include a.out compatibility libraries and netscape is currently distributed as an a.out binary. You can remedy this by installing the compat22 distribution or enabling linux emulation and using the linux version of netscape :).

As for getting the sources, look at Obtaining FreeBSD. As another poster has already mentioned, the kernel is in the ssys portion of the source distribution (or in /usr/src/sys if you install the source as part of the install process).