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> I just installed freeBSD I didnt like it...

I'm sorry...

> I wanted to see whitch was more solid freeBSD
> seemed nice but A lot of the basics just
> wouldnt work like *netscape* which hurt my
> feelings..

That's odd...I've used both the FreeBSD and Linux versions of Netscape here with out problems.

> ALso does anyone know where i can get the BSD kernel source?

If you are looking for an online reference, check out http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi. If you want to download the source, you can get 'ssys.*' from ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/FreeBSD/3. 2-RELEASE/src/. However, just remember that FreeBSD is more than just a kernel, it is an Operating System.

"Linux" is just a kernel to an OS. Most (all?) distributions using the Linux kernel also use utilities from the GNU project. If you ever download the source code to FreeBSD, you will notice along with the kernel source is the source to everything else on the system.

As far as Linux security, take a look at rootshell.com. Most of those are for Linux based systems. Needless to say, one stupid CGI script can defeat the security on any system.

I can't really speak about the stability of the systems... Just that FreeBSD developers tend to make this work first then mark it as stable. Linux kernels seem to add things all the time to stable versions without testing. On one system I administer which needs to be up 100%, I have stuck with 2.0.37 because of the problems still with the "stable" 2.2.x line. I'm not trying to bait people but Slashdot is the perfect example with kernel problems. I'm not saying this wouldn't happen with FreeBSD but most of the servers for pair.com have been up for more than a month. They claim 51,000,000 hits/day accross 125 servers which works out to Slashdot's .5mil/day rate.

PicoBSD is a version of FreeBSD which runs on low-end hardware. Something like the LRP.

And no, Slackware isn't BSD based. It is just like Redhat, Debian, and SuSE but with different init scripts and package management.

I tried to post this to the PC Week benchmark thread but Slashdot kept corrupting the URLs so I don't know if anybody read it. Of course it would be far more interesting to test FreeBSD with a similar configuration to the C't benchmarks. However although PC Week articles did not mention it FreeBSD (and Solaris 7) were tested in the same Mincraft rematch (and configuration) than Linux and NT. I read the report and results on the FreeBSD-hackers mailing list which you can browse at the list archives.

Here are the relevant bits:

Date: Wed, 23 Jun 1999 20:48:54 -0700 (PDT)
From: Julian Elischer
To: Karl Denninger
Cc: hackers@FreeBSD.ORG

Ok well here are some real numbers for you..
Win NT 4processors 1GB ram + raid array + IIS
webbench... 4000 transactions per second...

FreeBSD.. Identical hardware..
1450 transactions per seccond
Linux: 2000 per second
Solaris86 6000 per second


With Netbench:
NT blows us away.
(we're talking an order of magnitude faster)
I'm not going ot give real numbers as I don't have them readily at hand
but they are something like 12MB/Sec for FreeBSD vs 90 MB/sec for NT and
120MB/sec for linux. Matt has some patches that raise the 12 to 35 and
kirk has some changes that may raise the numbers to 70 or more,
and John has some patches that may add more again, but it's all theory,
and some of the patches have had less results than we expected.

With Uniprocessor things are a lot more equal.
but we still suck on netbench.

This is due to the exact form of netbench which is exactly nonoptimal for
FreeBSD.

Also becaosue of the GKL (Giant Kernel Lock) (see Solaris's results)

Basically there are some applications and benchmarks for which FreeBSD
will really suck. We're working on them but some things are just a result
of how we do things.

So don't assume that NT figures must be bad..
we have too many weaknesses in our own code to throw stones.


There was also an earlier account by Mike Smith of the ZD labs tests. Basically it seems that the test setup hit FReeBSD's bad points even more than it hit Linux's.

Maybe this is a lesser know fact because it didn't
appear in the PC Week stories but the FreeBSD people
were there too.

Mike Smith's ZD labs test update

Webbench results including FreeBSD and Solaris 7

The bottom line is of course that given this configuration and test setup neither of the free operating systems have much to boast about.

There's a relatively old windowing system called W, which is more like GEM than X11. To call it minimal would be putting it mildly.
Check it out:
http://www.modeemi.cs.tut.fi/~puujalka/w1r2.html
http://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/techfak/ags/ti /personen/itschere/w.html

The picoBSD distribution of FreeBSD manages to fit PPP, SSH, and W (with weyes, wclock, and a web browser called -don't laugh- wetscape) onto a single floppy.

If you're looking for the absolute maximum packed onto a single floppy, it's hard to beat tomsrtbt - Linux 2.0.36 and a whole heap of useful stuff, on a 1.7Mb floppy. It even has a floppy image (Memtest-86) included, so it's two diskettes in one! :-) No room for any windowing system though.

Does this floppy format really break certain floppy drives, and if so, how old do said drives need to be?

The closest shipping match to the Itsy are the Casio E-15 and E-100; with 69MHz/131MHz CPUs and 16M of RAM, they're somewhat larger machines than the 8M 486SX/25 I bought to run Linux 0.12, and you can get larger CompactFlash cards (IDE interface internally) than the 60M SCSI disk that was home for a few years. Both Casios are a bit bigger than the Palm III, although I suppose you could get an Everex Freestyle if you wanted the exact size.

If Digital---uh, I mean Compaq---had seeded the right places with proto hardware, I think the excitement about this project would be more justified. I'm glad they're finally releasing their port (dunno where, but this slide has it as a bullet); if nothing else, it will make work on other Linux PDA environments easier. But the commercial marketplace is serving up almost everything the Itsy hardware has except the prototyping ability today. That's where to funnel all that nervous energy you get when you think about how cool it would be to have a Linux PDA.

Please don't start an OS war because of this, but I have a suggestion. If you really want a stable operating system (you talked of 120+ day uptimes), why not get FreeBSD. Also, it has the ports collection which makes software easy to install, and shouldn't be worse than RPMs.
FreeBSD

Just my 2 cents.

Regardless, one would be best off using FreeBSD; it has far fewer exploits than the slashdot-preferred Linux.

Multiple layers of security is best for any machine; redundancy is the absolute key for security. You don't just have one level of restrictions which could be possibly exploited or tricked. For example, for ssh, restrict hosts in the sshd_config file, and compile in libwrap support, and use ipfw. By those actions alone, ssh is amazingly more secure.

In terms of web-specific stuff, make sure to closely look over your httpd.conf to see what is available to your users. You should also make an educated decision about if you want to allow CGIs.

Overall: Stay up to date with software versions.
--
Daniel Baker - dbaker@cuckoo.com - dbaker@distributed.net

Not to be anti-Linux, but have you considered migrating to FreeBSD? Other than FreeBSD's ability to run BSDi binaries (in case you have software that cannot be easily ported or is not open source) and Linux binaries, compile most applications with little or no changes, and similiar in many aspects of configuration, FreeBSD is, like, Linux, open source. In addition, FreeBSD has proven itself time and again running high-profile sites such as ftp.cdrom.com, www.yahoo.com, and even the Microsoft-owned www.hotmail.com. See www.freebsd.org for more information.

This is, of course, why Microsoft use Apache on an open-source operating system ( FreeBSD) on their massive Hotmail cluster. You can verify that here. Nobody, and I mean nobody, is pushing these servers to their limits in a production environment. When it comes down to it, the key issues are flexibility and reliability, and there you'll find that Apache is the market leader for a very good reason.

FreeBSD has a feature that allows you to have more filesystem than disk. It's actually pretty useful (argh, filled up / ).

Check the FreeBSD handbook entry for how to do it:

http://www.freebsd.org/FAQ/FAQ52.html#52

You'd have to see if Linux could handle it first. Ftp.cdrom.com runs on FreeBSD.

That's one of the biggest things I love about most other Unices (FreeBSD, in my case) - you don't need to deal with distributions. One command updates the entire system, and another builds it and installs it. Instead of downloading a kernel package or dealing with applying a patch, just download the newest version of each file from the CVS tree. It also makes patching much, much easier, since the source people know exactly which version of the file you're patching. FreeBSD has both CVSup (compressed, 'updated' mode only) and CVS servers availible for public use. See here for more information on CVS and CVSup and how the FreeBSD project uses them.

See http://www.freebsd. org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC

The sample USB configuration was removed Mon Apr 19:

Remove the lines for the USB support. It is not ready for public consumption.

• NetBSD : Runs on almost every architecture imaginable
  
• OpenBSD : Based on NetBSD, with high emphasis on security and buglessness.
  
• FreeBSD : Developed mainly for the x86 platform (with ports in the works for sparc and alpha); provides excellent speed and stability.
  

Check out http://advocacy.freebsd.org/ammunition/ -- there's a lot of information there that you might be able to use to sway your boss's opinion.

--Sam Stephenson

Changes and other information about FreeBSD 3.2 can be found at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pu b/FreeBSD/3.2-RELEASE/RELNOTES.TXT, alongside hardware support and methods of obtaining the OS.


--Sam Stephenson

Oops. I seem to have mispasted something and missed it.

The link I screwed up on.

Sorry.

• FreeBSD license
• The BSD license
• The GNU GPL

• FreeBSD license
• The BSD license
• The GNU GPL

Why was this moderated down???

Posting as AC because I'm the moderator in question

Because, to the best of my knowledge it's not true. See JKH's original announcement at the FreeBSD web site.

Note: /. has probably mangled that URL. If you follow it, open it in a new window, then scan the URL for any spaces inserted by the posting process, and remove them.

I was regrettably forced to conclude that the posting in question was probably some sour-grapes posturing from a hairy-knuckled Linux user who mistakenly links the exposure of his favourite OS distribution with his sexual prowess, and therefore feels the need to beat off about it at every opportunity.

Since this is the new caring, sharing /., I knocked a point off it.

Hope that answers your question.

>>sadly BSD's are not currently in the position to threat NT's dominance... The real sad thing is that MS is already a heavy BSD user with Link Exchange, and people like Yahoo
depend on Free BSD to make their operations not only cost effective, but runable & stable!

Um, MIPS itself tried this some years ago; it was called "ARC" - the notion was to put together a standard for a commodity hardware platform that was not based on Intel's badly designed CPUs and outdated instruction set. Alas, the effort failed to garner enough momentum from the industry or interest from consumers, and so it died.

If you really want an alternative to Intel, keep pushing on Linux, NetBSD, FreeBSD, et. al. to port cleanly to as many different kinds of computers as possible. If we get the OS sufficiently independent of the hardware that you don't have to care what it is, you will be able to buy hardware with the best price/performance available, and the hardware guys will be freed from the tyranny of the "Intel Standard" to go and design better architectures.

While you're at choosing distributions, why don't you check out FreeBSD. I really don't want to start a flame war, I just want to notify you that linux isn't the only free unix (uh oh! a trademarked word!) out there, there are others. FreeBSD supports linux elf and aout binaries, it even can use linux mesa w/ glide support. Q3 test has been reported to work w/ full screen 3d on 3dfx cards under FreeBSD. So check the website and see if it's for you, though I must admit, linux has more hardware support and 3rd party support than FreeBSD, so linux might be a better choice if you have oddball hardware.

The OS: FreeBSD

David Greenman, the Co-founder/Principal Architect of the FreeBSD Project just posted a new picture of the new wcarchive, it is now available here.

Updated hardware description is also available here.

It would be amazing if someone could pull some nice effects with The Gimp and make a cool looking "ftp.cdrom.com theme" for Windowmaker or something...

> BTW, FreeBSD 3.1-RELEASE *cannot* go all the way to 4 GB without some serious tuning, so there you have.

Depends on what you consider "serious tuning". You need to grab a recent version of the boot loader (e.g. off of a recent FreeBSD 3.1-STABLE or 4.0-CURRENT installation floppy) and make three rather trivial modifications to the kernel source, as described in section 13.15 of the FAQ.

4.0-CURRENT as of late February (or eraly March) and 3.1-STABLE as of late April support large memory configurations out of the box.

Note that if you patch a 3.1-RELEASE system to support large memory configurations, you will lose BSD/OS binary compatibility. This has been fixed in 4.0-CURRENT and 3.1-STABLE.

FreeBSD. FreeBSD
Oh, and for the uneducated...
FreeBSD != a linux distribution.

-luqin

---

NFS compatability with IRIX NFS. For some reason (in my experience) SGI-TO-SGI NFS is way-faster than SGI-Linux.

This may be a "feature" of your PC's bus and ethernet card. Basically the SGI box can send packets to your PC faster than it can generate interrupts to handle them, overrunning the card. There is a section on this in the FreeBSD FAQ and Handbook

Here's a question for the some posters out there.

Occasionally I see someone post that *BSD is "in trouble" and will disappear sometime in the near future as other OSes take "market share."

Why do people make such claims? Is there any really strong evidence to support this? Please explain why *BSD is "in trouble."

Keep in mind that having little market share doesn't mean it will die. Imagine linux in .01 days, before all the commercial support. It still survived. And OpenBSD and NetBSD seem to be still alive, although they seem to be less popular than FreeBSD. Also, FreeBSD does have commercial users, and a more flexible license for businesses.
Aside from the often quoted examples of Yahoo! and Walnut Creek, there is a list of some others at the FreeBSD Gallery . And of course, this is not a complete list.

Please, just use the OS you like for the job you want to do, and don't pray for the death of excellent operating systems (OSes from unscrupulous companies like M$, bash all you want).

The good thing here is that those "real" high-end servers run Un*x. There is alomost complete source-code comatibility (meaning you can just type make in most cases) from Linux / *BSD to those systems.

the way all the system utilities pointed to one big executable were very strange. I like to know how much space ls takes up. I hope this isn't a standard configuration, but rather something done for this boot disk. However, it was odd.

It's done for the boot disk, and it's not odd if you stop to think about it.

If you've got 15 different small programs (even if they use shared libraries) some of the code (like the C run time startup) is going to be duplicated in all the binaries.

If you can merge all the binaries together, and choose which chunk of code to run based on argv[0] then you've just saved yourself a bunch of disk space.

Take a look at the FreeBSD manual pages and look for crunchgen for more information.

And yes, this is only done for the boot disk.

N

OpenBSD IPsec has been unofficially ported to FreeBSD, but if you want a better integration and compliance with the latest specs you'd better run OpenBSD directly. I really wonder why /. masses are so ignorant of something that the IETF designs in the public view and that OpenBSD implements for so long.

First, I'd like to point out that FreeBSD has, at the present, over 150 committers. These are the persons that have direct access to the source tree, and can directly make changes to it.

Second, if you want to contribute to something, FreeBSD has even a program to help you. send-pr.

If you still don't feel much reassured, please take a look at our contributors list. Unfortunately, we don't keep it up to date, so there is actually even more people whose contributed code has been imported into FreeBSD. You can find them in the cvs logs, though.

Standard answer is, "almost every book about Unix". FreeBSD is, of course, BSD. BSD books apply.

Check out http://www.freebsdmall.com, though. There is a book session there. I find it a little bit incomplete, but it's a good start.

Also, check out The Handbook, on http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html . It can also be downloaded in a number of formats, including pdf and ps, at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.ORG/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

Finally, http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html has everything (if you want to know what I mean by everything, check it out :).

Standard answer is, "almost every book about Unix". FreeBSD is, of course, BSD. BSD books apply.

Check out http://www.freebsdmall.com, though. There is a book session there. I find it a little bit incomplete, but it's a good start.

Also, check out The Handbook, on http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html . It can also be downloaded in a number of formats, including pdf and ps, at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.ORG/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

Finally, http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html has everything (if you want to know what I mean by everything, check it out :).

Standard answer is, "almost every book about Unix". FreeBSD is, of course, BSD. BSD books apply.

Check out http://www.freebsdmall.com, though. There is a book session there. I find it a little bit incomplete, but it's a good start.

Also, check out The Handbook, on http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html . It can also be downloaded in a number of formats, including pdf and ps, at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.ORG/pub/FreeBSD/doc/.

Finally, http://www.freebsd.org/docs.html has everything (if you want to know what I mean by everything, check it out :).

There's the FreeBSD Handbook, published by Walnut Creek. It's an excellent reference and covers many topics. It's also available at www.freebsd.org/handbook. In addition, there's #freebsd on efnet irc...just be sure that if you ask a question in there, you've first read the handbook section on the subject and any related man pages, or you're likely to be kicked quickly.

The BSD Daemon is the coolest mascot of all time. Here is some info on him. A penguin just doesn't do it for me, seems too laid back, not enough spunk.

Some VM100 FreeBSD code here.

A press mention of the VM100 in Byte

most of the software in FreeBSD /ports collection compiles with some tweaking on other unices like Linux. There is a lot of different ported software and maybe there is something unknown :>

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/japanese.ht ml

if you own a PC98 computer, etc. there is support for several PC98 cards in XFree86 3.3.3.1 and FreeBSD should enable you to compile X11 from source by just typing make install after cd to proper dir.

PS. I use OpenBSD and I just compiled X11R6 from the X11 dir, not on PC98 computer, but including fonts other than latin, I can read japanese encoded html pages in Netscape okai.

Regarding fbsd's smp, according to
http://www.freebsd.org/~fsmp/SMP/benches.html
At this point in development of the SMP kernel we do poorly in many benchmarks. We have been concentrating on other issues
such as stability and understanding of the low level hardware issues. As we start to work on areas that improve performance
benchmarks are useful for gaugeing our progress.


Though this may be out of date, there are notes in the 3.0 release readme that indicate that SMP is not yet done in freebsd. Comparing the two doesn't seem fair to either.

-Peter

There are some copyright issues with CMU which have "tied up" the NetBSD alpha port. I only say this because I witnessed a short "flamefest" on the FreeBSD-axp list in which some NetBSD folks cried foul about some code used, and threatened to call their lawyer friends at CMU about it. What I speak is true - look it up on Dejanews if you care to.

I also believe this is the reason OpenBSD "abandoned" their alpha port, see their page for more details.

I think that copyright issue is the one major hinderance to free BSD on the alpha platform.

cjs

No, because it is the only license that perpetuates the FSF concept of freedom at the expense of a concept of freedom held by many other people.

"Freedom" is too important a word to allow it to be exclusively defined by one person or organization.

Craig

... as you've handily demonstrated.

Linux is a desktop operating system; ask Linus, or any of your other advocates. What you need is a server operating system.

Like this.

Try Pico BSD for a one floppy version of BSD. Three different configs: Router, Dialup and Network.

luce

For me, NetBSD rocks. I love being able to build my entire userland by typing "cd /usr/src && make build". I love have a cool package system that automatically FTPs and builds requisite packages for me, from source. (I particularly love how every single binary on my box, with the exceptions of Quake II and Netscape, were built right here on my box!)

I like how unified NetBSD is. I started off using NetBSD because it was the only Unix that would run on my old mac68k hardware. I stuck with it when I got new hardware because I just like the feeling of wholeness and quality that NetBSD exudes. (I prefer it to FreeBSD, which is very nearly as good IMHO, and I definitely prefer it to Red Hat, which I tried once and rapidly removed.)

One thing that I'm curious about, that may be a mis-understanding on my part, is the package systems on non-i386 GNU/Linux platforms. How integrated are alternative architectures? On NetBSD, I can cd into /usr/pkgsrc and make pretty much any package on any platform, without having to ftp anything manually. Are things this slick on, say, Linux/Alpha or Linux/StrongARM, or does someone have to port each package and make it available for FTP somewhere, and hope that people can find it? That's my current impression.

The last point is that NetBSD (and FreeBSD, and I assume OpenBSD) does Linux emulation. With this, I can keep my comfortable, nice environment, and still use stuff like Quake that has only been released for GNU/Linux. (Or Solaris, in that case, but that doesn't apply.) That why, for instance, I wrote to Blizzard and said I wanted Diablo II to run under Linux. I told them that I was running NetBSD, but that NetBSD could run Linux binaries, and that a Linux-native Diablo II would be something I'd buy.

So, the upshot: It's cool that we're running on UltraSPARCS now. It's not half-bad hardware, in my experience, although IMHO you're trading quality for performance as compared to fast Intel hardware, which tends to be faster but which isn't half as meaty in terms of... quality.

PS: If you've never run NetBSD, give it a try. It's free, and it's neat.

Who are you kidding? According to the blurb about Stanford's matchbox-sized HTTP server, Linux can push a whooping 27 kBps across a PLIP line. I used PLIP for over half a year between my laptop and my home box, under FreeBSD 2.2 and 3.0, about a year ago. Sustained transfer rate averaged 80 kBps and peaked around 90 kBps.

Don't take my word for it - try it out for yourself: http://www.freebsd.org/

Yes, the removal of drivers at the end of 1998 was restored. No problem. But what have you done to prevent this from happening in the future, and with the same people?

Well, given that the root cause was lack of communication, perhaps you'd actually like to read the "State of the Union" message. I'm paraphrasing (and anyone who wants to can see the original at http://www.freebsd.org/news/sou1999.html but;

Intention to remove code must be posted to the appropriate mailing list first (-current or -stable) and ample time must be allowed for discussion.

Seems clear enough.

And at the end of the day, the person with final say is David Greenman, as FreeBSD's principal architect.

Gosh. One person with final control over FreeBSD. I'm shocked, I tell you. Shocked.

Oh. Wait. There's only person with final say over Linux as well.

Regarding election of fbsd core members, I would like to see those 160 developers you mention have a greater say in who their leaders are.

Sure. When are you going to get the chance to vote for Linus, or Alan Cox?

You're not, right? They're there because of technical ability. Funnily enough, so is the FreeBSD core team (and the NetBSD core team, and the OpenBSD core team).

If you thought that it looked like E0.15 sucked, would you try and vote Raster away from it?

No. Didn't think so.

N