BSDi In 'Survivor' Final Four

Daemon News reports that the Software Development Times names BSDi a 'survivor' in the software industry. A must-read story for those interested in the financial growth of this BSD company.

Comments

Any BSD news is good news.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I'm not a BSD bigot. I follow no OS religion, I have not anointed myself at the feet of the Daemon or the Penguin. They are tools people. There are many more important fights in this world than splitting the hairs on which free 32 bit UNIX based operating system with the same base toolchain rulez and rockz.

The thing I don't like is how hard it is to get BSD news and info. I can go to a local bookstore, they have 6 different Linux distros. That doesn't count the scores of Linux books. For FreeBSD, one book, the Official FreeBSD book, and that's got an old version (4.0) that they upgraded from 3.4 when 4.1.1 came out. Drives me nuts.

Maybe I should stop whining and fill the void myself, but I don't have the time nor resources right now.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[SirGeek]

Atleast now you can find FreeBSD in stores like CompUSA and even BestBuy.. Thats a start.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[Baki]

This is typical. FreeBSD is more cohesive, less chaotic than the Linux world. You should consider it a plus that there is one, official FreeBSD book, and one (official) "distribution".

The official book (and the documentation included with FreeBSD or available on www.freebsd.org) is all you need. No need to compare scores of books for hours to see which one is the best.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[bugg]

Well that 4.0 CD probably has source on it, which makes it not terribly difficult to upgrade.

4.0 is fairly recent for a CD starter. My latest CD around here is 3.2, and I use that only when I must.. it's just really easy to upgrade from there, or to install FTP to begin with.

For most purposes, 4.0 is a great introduction. As for only having one book, as another poster pointed out, the concern should be on quality, not quantity.

Oh, and neither Linux or FreeBSD (or any other BSD) are married to 32-bit CPUs ;P

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[Ded Bob]

There is a possibility that someone might start an English BSD magazine. Go here for a discussion concerning it.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[Espen Skoglund]

Not entirely true. The FreeBSD book does not go into any details concerning, e.g., the internals of the kernl. That is, you do not have any books like ``Linux Kernel Internals'' or ``Linux Device Drivers'' for FreeBSD. This is useful for people who wants to play around inside FreeBSD, and also for teaching purposes. Here at my university (at least in the group that I'm working in), we organize seminars with undergrad students doing case studies of specific platforms. Since we are doing (operating) systems research, we tend to do these undergrad seminars on operating system internals. Problem, of course, is that we tend to have a hard time finding good books on the subjects (except for Linux). The thing that comes closest to what I am really looking for in BSD is the BluePrints section in Daemon News.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

OK, where do I find the documentation on the undocumented Kernel config params in LINT? There's one that looks cool, VM coloring based on cache size. Supposedly makes the VM subsystem MUCH better on memory allocation and paging. Is this in the book? No, I find it wandering the net. Does it explain the cache values and when to use them? nope.

Nobody will read this anyway, a day old BSD story isn't news.

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[Anonymous Coward]

1) The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Unix Operating System

A good one for internals ;)

2) UNIX System Administration Handbook

covers FreeBSD. *blam* thats 2

3) The official FreeBSD book

*unf* 3

4) /usr/src/* && /usr/include/*

*booyah* thats 4 =D..

Re:Any BSD news is good news.

[Baki]

Hey, I read it, even after a week!

OK some newer options aren't described yet. They are considered new and experimental, thus only the kernel developers themselves know the details. In time some of these will move to mainstream and be properly documented (has always happened in such cases).

Tired of press screw ups

[sirket]

Why are articles like this always published without doing any research. How could the author state that NetBSD, and OpenBSD were products of BSDI? They are in no way related .... oh well.

-sirket

Hah!

[dcs]

You *wish* the official book was all you need. It isn't. There are scores of topics that are not documented in it and which are _specific_ to FreeBSD, and, thus, not covered by general Unix books (like books on bind, sendmail, *sh, etc).

what the hell?

[zentex]

To quote the article: "BSDi's four product offerings support both Intel and Sun SPARC technology and are developed from the BSD/OS code. They include Free BSD, Net BSD and Open BSD as well as BSD/OS."

what the hell? perhaps i missed some earth-moving mergers, but since when did the big bad BSDi own Open and NetBSD? The article makes it seem to the laymen that they own all the distro's...We all know that the modern versions of all the Distro's spawned from 4.2BSD-Lite...but am i wrong to assume this was given by UCBerkeley, and not some newly formed company called BSDi?

Damn the mdeia!

fwiw, i hate BSDi (the company) for thier insolance...Love the software and the nifty marketing hype thou :P

NO SPORK