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BSD to Leapfrog Linux?
photozz writes "New from ZDNet about the coming of OSX and how some people see this as the rise of BSD, perhaps passing up Linux in numbers of users. " I'm still excited about OSX. I still am considering buying a mac to play with OSX... I mean, I can always install LinuxPPC if OSX sucks goat.
Repen your sins. Only jews, catholics, and homosexuals use BSD.
Sincerely,
Bob Jones III
i bought a used iMac just for the purpuse of playing with OSX. it is beautiful, easy to use (for a beta,)and just plain cool. FreeBSD it is not. Alot of stuff has been hidden and/or changed (like NetInfo taking control of alot of stuff.) But, I love it (even tho it uses 100% CPU everytime you move your mouse.) It's running apache and BIND great (iMonkey.panicNow.net). All system config files writen in XML... thats pretty cool too.... But Apple will never sell an x86 version, they want their hardware sales so badly, it'll never happen. Buy a used iMac, it's worth it for the Geek factor anyway.
You're right, there are a lot of blind folowers, but I'd like to consider myself somewhat diverse in what I know. I've worked with several unix's, SunOS, Solaris, HP-UX, AIX, IRIX, SCO, DG/UX, AT&T Sys3, free/net/open BSD, and a couple others that i can't remember.
After all i've done, I enjoy every unix, they each have their own personality, and I'm noding my head along with you. but I normaly try and work with linux as much as I can, it just has the feel i enjoy most.
I don't know anything about soft updates. I will go and do some research on it. Still, I've got 40Gig filesystems full of Oracle tablespaces and archivelogs, and they are on Veritas because I can't afford to wait for an fsck. BSD can't play in this space currently - I hope Apple changes this situation soon.
However, for the name server, an administrator wants uniformity. I recently had a situation where one group had name servers on Bind 4 OpenBSD, and everyone else was on Bind 8 - and each wanted to be a secondary for the other (each group had hundreds of domains). This is an extreme inconvenience. I wish the BSD team would audit and approve Bind 8, although I don't know anything about what's involved. You will also note that Red Hat installs Bind 8 as a caching server only, and I've seen networks with hundreds of UNIX workstations, all running such caching servers - named can be considered client software, although I understand that nscd can now serve a similar purpose.
As far as mature memory management goes (if I understand your point correctly), I think an administrator will try to avoid swap/paging on a mission-critical system. And how many high-capacity, heavy-load system run with a single processor?
Things have got to scale. Right now, both Linux and BSD fall short on this point. I look forward to the day when this is no longer the case.
I've never seriously used it, but BSD:
Some of these problems are easily surmountable, some are non-issues, and some are show-stoppers in certain situations. I hope Apple takes an active interest in migrating one of the JFS implementations into Darwin.
Does BSD have a multi-threaded IP stack? How does BSD perform on Mindcraft? Linux has been playing catch-up in this space for some time, and may have a big lead.
This is also not to say that other UNIXen do not suffer their own curious limitations. Solaris 8 now includes a JFS, but it cannot be used on the root file system and performance is rumored to be very bad. HP-UX includes Veritas, but it cannot be used on the /stand file system (where the kernel lives) and Veritas doesn't support ACLs where HFS does (if I remember correctly).
It's good that Apple is going to BSD UNIX. This was the best choice for an operating system migration. But their work, and the work for the BSD team as a whole, is far from over - POSIX certification was by no means the end of the line.
Those 8 core developers better not plan to sleep anytime soon.
Which of course explains why Wal-Mart is in on the Linux game.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Okay, define real content.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
[my] my website statistics [...] I get almost three times as many hits from Linux boxes than Macs....
...
So, according to your statement, Linux has 75% of the market, whlie Macs have 25%...
Now, let's go see Apple's take on the market, from their web site's statistics
C'mon...
Karma karma karma karma karmeleon: it comes and goes, it comes and goes.
Those hardware requirements are largely dictated by the Classic (compatibility) mode. If you're running Mac OS 9 applications, OSX loads it's own virtual old-school Mac to run them on. To get acceptible performance on these old apps requires setting aside a lot of RAM and swap. If, on the other hand, you're only running Carbon, Cocoa, and Darwin (terminal) apps, you can get away with less RAM. As you would expect with any *nix, the more RAM and swap the better. But really, if you're not going to run old Mac apps, you can get away with 64 or 96.
Of course, things sing w/ 256...
This is not a discussion about the popularity or worth of Linux compared to MacOS.
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Fuck the system? Nah, you might catch something.
Huh? This is basically a RTFM question. Basically you need to just download a floppy image from ftp.debian.org, write it to a floppy, boot, select network installation in the menu when it asks for it.
I'd really like to see or create a linux distro that makes the current source available via CVSup and has the ability to do "make world" to update the entire OS from source code.
Debain has apt which IMHO is better than downloading and compiling the source. You just say apt-get upgrade to upgrade the entire system. It downloads binary packages, which is good cause you don't need to wait for it to compile. (Especially on my 486 that I use as a firewall...). Installing packages is also easy -- apt-get install. You can also download source and compile it yourself (apt-get source). I guess cvsup && make world would be the equivalent of apt-get update && apt-get upgrade. make install in ports would equivalent to apt-get install. But one thing is not clear to me -- if you compile everything from source does that mean you need to keep source for every application on your machine? That would be a lot of space.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
dude, have you ever tried Debian? it has apt-get which automates installing & upgrading packages, and it can be installed over ftp easily (that's how I installed it last time).
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I'm using OS X Server 1.2 for dev purposes and I have to say that the early adopter community has been left behind. ie.
The current build finally supports gigabit ethernet and a few other things but doesn't even support SMP like the DP4 release of OS X does. None of the "issues" effect me directly but the they could easily effect people trying to do a wider range of work...
The real problem is that the kernel is currently a very quickly moving target and (I suspect) that the real hardcore BSD geeks and elbows deep in the OS X dev cycle.
Server OSs are prized for stability above all else and rather than devote the personnel needed to the Server side of the OS dev to release a stable version - Apple seems to have decided that OS X "consumer" is more important. And frankly they're probably right - without OS X client's success there won't be a company to support OS X Server and the revenue from OS X Server will not support the company through any delay that shifting personnel from the OS X project might incur.
Basically, I think Apple has made a business decision to stasis OS X Server while the entire company focuses on OS X consumer - and I find it hard to fault them for it... from a business standpoint.
RAMPANT SPECULATION AND RUMOR FOLLOW
I did over-read a post by some one who claimed to have worked with an interim beta version 1.3 and said it basically "sucked goats". He also said that a beta version 2.0 based on a much later kernel build was "about to be released:".
ALL of this was news to me and may a complete fabrication.
END RUMORS AND LIES
=tkk
Bill Gates - Creationist?!?
In any event, adding decent intel support would add a lot of potential consumers who might be willing to try it out but don't want to buy a new machine to do it on. Any half-assed attempt would, however, turn people off of it even if the problems subsequently got fixed.
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This is almost the same progression I took:
1994 : MkLinux on PowerMac 6100
(Begins CS degree at U of Rochester)
1996 : RedHat 4.2 on AMD K6
1997 : RedHat 5
1998 : FreeBSD 3 on same AMD
(Finishes CS degree - note OS enlightenment)
1999 : OpenBSD on AMD K6-3
2000 : OpenBSD on VPN - IPF firewall setup,
FreeBSD on SMP Dell 2300 with RAID.
It's evolution!
Linux has a great installed base then the Mac? Oh that is good. That is real good. Out of the 40 million Mac's still in use today. You must of read the book how to lie with statistics. But seriously..How do people get numbers on the installed base of Linux? Are they linux users just becuase the have a dual partition with Windows, and RedHat and or Mac and LinuxPPC. I know lots of people who have installed Linux. That doesn't mean they are using it. It is more of a curosity. On the server end it is a different story. Linux sucess has been at the server level. Mac's sucess has been on the desktop. With OSX, Mac's will have the power of a SGI or Sun workstation. Mac's also run Microsoft Office. If you compare Star Office MS Office you are comparing a single engine Cessna, to a Learjet. Mac OS X = Unix running Microsoft Office. Once the GTK port to Quartz is done I wont even need to have a Linux partion anymore.
Cheers,
Tomas
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True, but not in linux. But you can use MOL if you can manage to get the sound working in it.
yeah....performance. I've been using OS X PB as my primary OS for over a month. The 2D drawing is a bit latent....but i attribute that to debug code and optimizations to follow. AFAIK....if you take into consideration all the graphical bells and whistles in there....the beta code is prety darned fast. On the under the hood front...it takes a bit more time to launch some services than I expect...maybe it's a similar problem as 2D. In any case, the single most helpful thing you can do in OS X to speed things up is to not use the classic environment...that thing has a vsize of 1.5GB!!!! When I'm not using it, things are smoooothe :)
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
dad worked at the plant in fremont CA. QA for the drives. Got to take one home to play with
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
Remember your first computer? Maybe you were little, your dad brought it home. You were curious. I remember getting an apple IIe one day, and typing very long and polite requests for assitance at the prompt. I didn't know how it worked, but I was curious and intrigued. I tinkered with it, and I learned. Same thing happened when I got my first mac in late 1983...I was 8, and I tinkered with it and learned.
Imagine an 8 year old, next year, getting an iMac. She tinkers with it, and learns....only this time, when she finds Terminal.app, she's learning UNIX. What age were you when you used your first UNIX. If 8, would you have ever bought a windows box? Yes, the delicious, chewy UNIX insides of MacOS X are hidden by a crunchy GUI outside, but larval geeks will find it.
I think OS X's true contribution to computing is that an entire generation of children will learn UNIX. The easy to use GUI will not intimidate them....so they won't be scared away, and the ones who will be inclined to code will likely eventually be turned on to the fact that if they write if for the UNIX bits, they can share it with all their friends who use BSD and Linux.
Remember looking for warez at some point in your life? Imagine a legion of pre-pubescent coders making it so that nobody has to...using GPL.
Never mind the technical differences between this UNIX and that. OS X is the pony car for recruiting OSS coders before they can ride a bike.
"Let him go, Ralph. He knows what he's doing." --Otto Mann (simpsons)
I'm sick of evangelists who Know the One True Path to Enlightenment...
If You Meet The Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!
28. The most important things, each man must do for himself.
42. What do you know... for sure... anyway?
This end result (some response) depends on the mental faculties of your audience (generally low). That line of reasoning won't work with most Americans, as they are, well, slow.
Ah, you've got it, but in reverse. If I may quote a little more from texts on NLP*
So yes, you are dead right pointing out that the audience is going to understand based on their mental faculties, culture, individual traits etc. etc.
So NLP asks, what are the consequences of acting as if the meaning of any communication is the response you get?
Say, for example, that I want my partner to "feel loved", so I buy her flowers, but when I give them to her, she just says blankly "No thanks, I've nowhere to put them". Well, I could either get offended, or I could ask myself, "Well, to her, right now, 'flowers' does not mean 'I love you', so I wonder what does?", and maybe I realise, "Of course, she's only just moved into her new flat and everything is still in boxes... she has nowhere to put them, and I didn't think of that. Maybe she would prefer to be taken out to dinner instead..." So I offer to take her out, and she responds with a big hug and a kiss, saying "I'm so glad, I was dreading eating just a tin of beans tonight as I haven't got the cooker installed yet..."
* Neuro-Linguistic-Programming
According to Steve Jobs, it's to be pronounced "ten", not "ex".
> My guess is that although Apple has Aqua running on BSD kernel, Linux users will have no real difficulty either porting Aqua to Linux or just making Quazi-Aqua on Linux.
They won't be able to port it, as there is no way that Apple is going to release the source.
As for making a new Aqua, I would be really delighted if someone wrote a nice consistant user interface (such as Aqua is) for Linux, but I don't see it happening. Sure the KDE and Gnome people do their best, but they just don't have the attention to detail that Apple has. In amoungst it's other messes, that ins one thing that Apple has (usually) got right - a good user experience.
I'm using MacOS X Beta as my main OS and (mostly) loving it. It leaves Windows and the X based window managers I have tried for dead.
Oh, and yes, I tried LinuxPPC - trashed it to install MacOS X.
Ah, so you're saying that most people don't need floppy drives now, but they will later, after they "upgrade" to newer "technology." Ain't progress great?
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As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I suspect that this may be an "almost true". The source for the current(?) version of Darwin has been released, but they may well have wanted to have the option to close it in the future.
...
OTOH, perhaps there were other reasons. How would we know? Maybe they are just already familiar with BSD, and didn't want to write that off. Maybe the guy in charge of the project was a big BSD supporter. Maybe
We don't know. We won't know. At most we'll have somebody give us an explanation that we decide to believe. Live with it, it's not important. What's important is how we can use what is (or becomes) available.
If the info and tools needed to create interfaces are available, if compilers are available, etc. then practically speaking it is open enough. The benefit of GPL is that you can look at the future and say "and it will stay open!". BSD allows that decision to be postponed. NPL allows contributed code to be reused in a close product by the original developer, but ensures that everyone else has to leave it open. You look at your options, and at what you intend to do, and you choose.
Caution: Now approaching the (technological) singularity.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
That's fine, as long as it gets the name out there - see, I'm not like most OSS users, there is no such thing as selling out - it's called being succesful. Red Hat gets the Linux name out, I know a bunch of people who don't LIKE Red Hat, but it gets the name out, and that's the most important thing.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
I had been using Debian, with little experience
of FreeBSD, when some people here asked me to
build a FW box. They insisted that I use
FreeBSD because that is what some "bofh"
suggested. Since it is a NT/Netware place, and I
thought that them trying *nix was a good think,
I agreed to use FreeBSD.
<br>
<p>
Since I hadn't used it, I switched my main
machine to it. The installation was a snap.
Indeed, I, more or less, just moved my config
files over for user programs such as slrn, elm,
vim, pgp and ssh. I hardly knew the difference.
The only real difference is that there is
no svgalib with FreeBSD, so I have to use X11
more (to view
Best wishes,
Bob
I installed FreeBSD 3.4, and I did not have any problems with the installation. I did have some problems with some of the "packages", a few were missing and trying to install the more recent version did not "work" - seemed to be too much of a hassle. I also got my modem working, took me 4mths to get this done under Linux my first time round.
Bottom line: Easier than most Linux distros.
RedHat is simpler to work with
Corel is much more difficult, "senses" video card and set it too high.
Mandrake - not enough freedom, autosense seemed retarded.
Debian - weird.
Woe be on to them, all who rise against poor people, shall perish in a the end. Buju Banton
The rebates that apple has been offering on their G4's are probably indicative of a new product release in MacWorld SF. I imagine that prices for existing products will come down considerably following the conference. So waiting until end of January will probably save you quite a bit of cash.
Surprisingly, all but the DV Edition of the iMac are shipped standard with only 64 megs of ram. Apple doesn't like to increase the base level of ram, and that annoys the crap out of me. A few months ago I bought a dual processor g4, and instead of adding an additional 512 module through apple (who was selling it for $1350), I bought it elsewhere for $429. Apple has finally lowered their RAM prices a bit, and the memory rebate helps, but I'd still rather go elsewhere for components.
OS X public beta runs very smoothly on my new machine, but I imagine it could be quite a bit faster, and will be once the debug code has been removed. I can run all my MacOS applications in the Classic environment, with a slight slowdown in speed, but they still work.
Monty
it runs on pretty much evrything from amiga to VAXes.
Laurent
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Dev elpizw tipota, dev phoboumai tipota eimai lephteros http://euclidian.org
.. they will of sold one to me. :) I am waiting until after xmas for the prices to come down a bit before I get a G4.
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"I like the fact that if you modify the source you return the code back to the community."
This is no different than the BSD License. Where does the BSD License say that you CAN'T?
Sure, someone can come along and put your code into something and change it and not give their changes back, but who cares? You're still doing your thing.
In fact it's in a company's best interest NOT to keep their changes private since they'll just have to follow the moving target that your continuing work provides. Whistle/IBM does exactly this with the work they do on the Interjet. They continually contribute to FreeBSD (Julian Elischer is a commiter and one of the brains behind the Interjet.)
Some would argue that they're taking advantage of you..making money off of your hard work. This is a hypocritical argument. If it was about the money, why are you writing free software?
So you have to ask yourself...why do you write free software? Because you want to? Or because you have to?
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
Linux is not a descendant of UNIX. It is an original work birthed by Linus after his unhappy experiences with Minix (also an original work.)
Look at the UNIX family tree some time.
While neither are "UNIX" for trademark reasons (Damn that Open Group), BSD has at least a historical claim to the name (Even though no AT&T code exists any longer in the modern BSDs.)
(This is not a judgement, but a factual correction.)
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
You could have linked to the Bull argument just as well article. My iMac and PowerBook have worked great. OS X PB on my powerbook has been awesome.
"I don't think it's selfish, to eat defenseless shellfish." -NOFX
One wonders what Apple's distribution partnership will look like. There will certainly be alternatives out there there though. For example, check this out; GNU-Darwin Distribution
proclus
Shouldn't be too difficult to achieve ?!? Andy
Depends on what you mean by "Aqua." If you mean "Aqua" as in the theme, then you can probably get something that looks (though not works) quite similar to Aqua for Enlightenment. If you mean anything else, than the answer is that it's not very easy at all.
- Scott
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Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
I agree with you, and have had experience with most (not Tru64, SCO, or Irix though).
But you mispelled a few:
HP-UX should be: PHUX
AIX: Aches
Just my experience with those two makes those names much more appropriate... I'm not too much on calling Solaris "Slowlaris" as I use it on Ultras all day and I can't testify to any sluggishness compared to Linux..
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Some people want battles, fragmentation, fights; they must witness that, talk forever about it, and imagine some more if there is not enough to fill their apetite. There is nothing to do about it, it's a fact of life. Unfortunately, those people have the bad habit of speaking louder that the rest of us, thus becoming a distraction, and the very source of what they fear. Oh well...
Define BSD. FreeBSD and NetBSD have different kernels, too. And some different userland utilities.
BSD isn't being worked on anymore. There are a few descendants of it, and generally, people refer to these descendants as "BSD" or "the BSDs" or "*BSD", etc. The fact is a lot of code is based on FreeBSD 3.x and NetBSD, as well as many other systems, and obviously plenty of new code.
I'm at an OSX/java conference in Spain right now, and I just find it interesting. It seems like people just post for the reason of posting; and when they're in a bad mood, they bash on something with an audience to watch.
What does one expect, when the information is volunteer-based? It's a good thing, it's a safety valve for some people who are frustrated.
For anyone's information, FreeBSD on the mac rocks, I'm running on a MacOSX build that's probably less than a week old and while there are bugs, its much less than one can expect with the first version of Windows releases. The dock (analogous to the Start bar) is very inconvenient for multiple windows, and I don't think they will change this design for the next release.
What else to say? Pretty, since they use lots of alpha shading (transparency, that is). Nice to use when it becomes stable. You can probably treat programming graphical apps for it as like programming for a window manager that happens to be closed-source but more stable. (Do you want to program for that? Up to you.) The languages of choice will be Objective-C and Java, with nice graphical tools so you can do the UI in a day and the underlying logic the next.
(A score one with six replies? Hmmm....)
.but it really helps if I can GET to the bash first!
MacOS bit:
That USB problem you have? It happens. On revision A systems. On B systems. On the towers. On Powerbooks. I could go off at length about the problems with USB, but you've already noticed them.
Linux bit:
IMHO, the best way to get a newbie into Linux is to have a distro with an installer that Just Works. RedHat accomplished this nicely on the bastardized demon engine of a PC I tried it on at work- though it failed to recognize my 3com 3C509 NIC as a 3com 3C509 NIC, which pissed me off a bit.
The MacOS doesn't come with a manual- it doesn't need to. There ARE help files for the woefully inept, but they're about as useful as a "* for Dummies". I know enough about the bash to type "man [whatever]" and take notes when I have problems...
I've fiddle dee-deed with Be, MacOS (6-9), OSX Server and the Beta. I've piddled with IRIX and Debian, and I've successfully installed Red Hat (wow. I'm so cool.) . I've installed- and more importantly, UN-installed Windows in various flavors...
LinuxPPC is the only OS I've attempted to use that wouldn't even reach an install screen, and that gives it ALL the points off in my book. Everything I've ever installed on PPC architecture has been painless, and Be needed a bit of manual-reading to make it all go properly, but after that, I was home free and off in geekland.
The only way Linux is going to make a dent in wintel market share (aside from getting more games) is to make installing, upgrading, and maintaining something that your friend the Art Fag can do without having to ask you too many annoying questions. If this distro can't do something every other OS I've ever used CAN, then the problem is with this distro, not with everything else.
Oh, final note for Commander Taco (on the off chance he reads this and doesn't know already)- your favorite flavor, Debian, is available on the PPC. So there.
Save your money, at least for awhile. While I'm not a command-line junky, I had a bitch of a time with the OSX beta, and I dumped it off of my system after a week. Loading a 64 meg app just to load Simpletext? Uh? WAITING for windows to redraw? No control strip? No pop-up folders? Can someone tell me HOW this is an improvement?
While I'm not a *nix-head, my chances of being such are practically zero at the moment- LinuxPPC, IMHO, SUCKS FLAMING HORSE COCK. This is a biased an uninformed opinion formed by attempted installation of the latest version (linuxPPC 2000) on a G3/400 powerbook and a G3/300 tower. Even after formatting the powerbook EXACTLY according to the suggested spec, the thing still errored out on boot. I got lucky once, and instead of a repeated string of HDA errors, I got a kernel panic. Yay. Not to mention that the boot control panel included for MacOS use fucks up applescript.
Better luck with the G3 tower- I actually got into a graphical prompt, apparantly at which point the distribution decided that it really didn't like my mouse and completely hung. Solid.
HOW, in ANY CAPACITY, can an OS that has to be installed in a VERY EXACTING (re: unmeetable if you have bad sectors on your hard drive, or if you're not already formatted to spec) fashion, one of the requirements being formatting the drive from ANOTHER OS, be ANY sort of improvement over a system that Just Works?
Another point in favor of the existing MacOS:
I had backed the contents of my powerbook to my firewire disk prior to the reformat. Reboot, reformat, reboot again with the linuxPPC disk in the drive. I figured I wouldn't need to hold down the C key..... and the system booted from the firewire drive, just fine, completely operational, everything intact... (when the device does not, and never has, showed up in the System Disk CP) after getting really pissed of at the installation attempt on LinuxPPC and repartitioning my system again, I booted from a custom rescue disk and copied the entire system back over... booted back into it... and it's like the first three hours of my day hadn't happened at all. I even got rid of the legacy of scrud the MOSX beta install left behind. Yay.
My points:
MacOSX is a mess from what I've seen of it. I can't make any real judgements until it's been optimized and has gone out of beta, but the UI- the thing that keeps a lot of Mac users around- is so radically different from the classic environment... so totally like >EVERYTHING ELSE (sans Dock) that it makes me sick.
At least I can install it on a random partition- the only requirement is that your system is a G3 with 128 megs of RAM and 800 free megs of hard drive somewhere.
When apps get carbonized and useable without having to boot classic, OSX will be useable. Not nearly as functional, however- looking at it as a unix instead of the MacOS, however, it is quite exemplary from a GUI standpoint.
Linux PPC was completely unbootable- despite having read and followed the instructions EXACTLY, to the point of digging through my archives and pulling out an older version of Toast. The bootloader fucks with existing system processes on the MacOS and defaults to linux- meaning if your experience has been anything like mine, your system could look aud infinitum if you walk away from it during an attempted install. The hard drive has to be formatted in a very particular structure, which looks to be extremely arcane and unintuitive... and it really, really hates bad sectors, HFS+, and probably a lot of other things to boot.
As of the moment, the (unbootable) LinuxPPC and the (unoptimized, slow as fuck, RAM-hogging) MOSX are not even options for productivity. I'll stick with MOS9, as it's cheaper than shelling out for PC hardware that actually has linux support.
I find your ideas intriguing, and would like to subscribe to your newsletter.
- Have a picture
Apple could have picked BeOS, but picking BSD instead does a lot more good for OpenBSD, FreeBSD and even Linux.
I had to fight tooth and nail to get LinuxPPC on my gf's iMac. The bootable CD image supplied simply didn't work as they said it would. It turned out that the reason for this was that i had obtained (off a magazine cover-disk, no less) an iso image that was broken, known broken, but still distributed by LinuxPPC. There was nothing on LinuxPPC's site to say 'Hey guys, if you have this version of our distro, better get another one because it will refuse to install' Personally, i'd consider the front page of the site a good place for this sort of thing. The disk got all the way through booting, but then dropped you into the text-mode RedHat installer, which promptly failed in a very unamusing way. After trawling the newsgroup archives, i found out that the image i had was completely fscked, and had to download a new image. That was just the start of my problems - the disk i burnt (it could have been my CD-Writer, but, as a 4x SCSI unit it's been 100% reliable with other disks i've burnt, all of which have been happily read by the same iMac's drive) seemed to cause the CD-ROM drive in the iMac some major headaches, i kept getting IDE timeouts etc. on some of the files and theyd refuse to install with rpm. So i had to manually patch together all the packages in the distro using some files from the original (broken) distro, the working files from the new distro, and download some others that had conflicting versions between the two distro images (both LinuxPPC 2000). Then the USB mouse problems started ( USB mouse just doesn't work sometimes.. needs to be unplugged, and plugged into a different USB port to start working again, and i still haven't been able to get 3-button emulation working with the hockey-puck (not that i use it any more after swapping it for the new mouse (that keeps failing). There is no documentation to tell you that you need to use 15 bit color to get anything better than 8bit on an older (rev B i think) iMac, youre just supposed to know this i guess.. Again, trawling the newsgroups is the only way to find this sort of thing out. So, after spending several the best part of the weekend freaking out in fury at the incredible (sometimes seemingly insurmountable) problems installing this distro on the iMac, i finally have a working system. It hasn't failed me since, and my gf is very impressed with it's stability and speed compared to MacOS 9 which was a constant frustration for her. Would she, a mac-user, be able to install it by herself? Not a chance in hell. I've been tinkering with Linux for years now, and admin several linux boxen here at work, but this distro just plain sucks. Would i recommend LinuxPPC to my friends? Sicne none of my friends would be comfortable doing the necessary massaging to get a working LinuxPPC system together, no way. Please Mandrake, make us a PPC distro.
I gots ta ding a ding dang my dang a long ling long
I said "sort of" Linux-focused. As in "kind of" And not to the exclusion of News for Nerds and Stuff that Matters. And when I see CT write things like "Our little kernel", sure I think it's intentional. Anyway, I read the other posts. I don't think it's as bad as swordgeek makes it out to be.
I'd have to agree with you, I don't think the OS itself is all that slow... I think people do, however, perceive it that way. Sun is interested in keeping a certain level of purity in their codebase, as best I can tell.
/usr/ucb or /usr/5bin.
When I was first feeling my way around Solaris for instance, I was shocked to find out that there were apps I'd grown accustomed to having that weren't in the default PATH. Only after feeling my way around for a while did I even notice that a good portion of the "missing" binaries were in
They're serious about making sure stuff that's "not invented here" is given due credit by being segregated into its own directory. I think because of this they use some older or less efficient versions of programs (grep comes to mind, as the version that ships with Solaris is horrendously slow, even running on Enterprise servers) and this is what elicits that public opinion of the OS. The OS is not slow, some of the apps that come with it however could be a bit more snappy.
--
NeoMail - Webmail that doesn't suck... as much.
Dan
Dan
Drivers are released because hardware manufacturers want people to buy their hardware. It has nothing to do with the GPL: Windows drivers are free and Windows EULA is a far cry from the GPL.
Oracle and Wordperfect are both written from scratch. The release of them for Linux only is to reduce Q&A by targeting the more popular and buzz-word OS: and also knowing that a Linux binary can run on all modern BSDs.
Frankly, the attention Linux is receiving is not because of it's license. The cases of people contributing back to a project because they are legally bound to are rare; the GPL scares away more companies than it does attract. And those it does attract (read: Linux kernel) do so because it's in their best interest to work on it (hardware manufacturers) or because it's good PR.
So in this case you don't really gain anything from the GPL. Whistle (IBM) and Apple (via Darwin) are the two most prominent examples of companies giving back. And who's to say if they would have been involved if the license was more restrictive?
-bugg
Why wouldn't the X based stuff work? There's an implementation for X windows (Tenon) with commercial support as well as a free X Server.
DB
There are threre environments in Mac OS X, Cocoa, Carbon, and Classic. Now you might have an argument that there aren't a lot of Cocoa apps out (mostly stuff that's been ported over from the NEXT platform), you might even have something of an argument for Carbon (though they've been coming fast and furious). You have no argument, and certainly deserved a flamebait when you look at the apps that run in classic. Given that you can compile and run a heck of a lot of the GNU software as well, it's quite likely that OS X in beta has more software that can run for it in binary and source form than Linux has right now.
The only advantage that Linux has is in applications that are released binary only for it and thus can't be tweaked and recompiled for OS X
DB
Ok, read it again,
"hand editing when you have better tools is silly. "
I didn't say that you needed to clunk 'through a bunch of menus'.
The particulars of wrapping all the config files in xml tags means that you can use any editor, including vim. It's just that primitive editors aren't going to be able to handle it as prettily, like you care about that.
This kind of data handling is exactly what XML is best for. Mac OS X is going to give you clear and pretty when you are unfamiliar with a package and leave the config files as text for when 'you know what you want to change' and you want to use vim.
DB
right now the terminal.app is scriptable. I would guess that sooner or later somebody is going to make it (or a drop in replacement) recordable. What that means is that any techno-savvy hackers out there only have to issue a start recording command, do their hack, stop recording and voila, a double clickable applescript to fix whatever itch needs scratching. As for editing /etc files by hand, isn't that what the xml tool is there for? hand editing when you have better tools is silly.
DB
Or they can release an easy to use set of business servers that run on the same hardware (x86) that is already deployed but without the CAL license requirements that prop up Microsoft's profits. Apple could get away with selling an OS X server for Intel for $500-$1000 and make out like a bandit because they would have a product easier to use than NT, more stable than NT, and cheaper than NT. Linux gets 2 out of three but Apple's positioned better.
Go ahead, price out a file & print server with Win2k for 200 people and you will see the price savings for the end user. Apple isn't in this market to any significant degree so there is no cannibalization and if somebody wants to spend $499 on an OS to run it on their desktop, I would guess that Apple's making more money as a software seller than they would have if it were an iMac sale.
DB
I'm sitting here in front of a Powerbook G3/400, while my B&W G3 500 (upgraded from 300 for $30 after I sold the g3/300 on eBay) serves files to a cluster of linux boxes via NFS from MOSX.. I haven't used a floppy disk for anything other than maintaining a few garbage Gateway and Dell machines for the last 4 years..
Your BIOS comment shows your ignorance. Macs, like Sun boxes I believe, use openFirmware rather than BIOS, and upgrading the OF is typically trivial (patches are typically shipped as small executables, run the executable, reboot the machine and you're done).
Here's a neat trick you can ask a Mac user to show you some time.. Launch the energy saver control panel under OS 8+, set the start up and shutdown/sleep schedule. Close the control panel. The machine will alter a few settings in OF. If you open the system disk control panel and click on the MOSX drive, before shutting down the machine. The OF will still watch the clock and fire up selected OS, even if you've told it to launch MOSX rather than OS 8+.. I've never seen a PC start-up and shutdown on its own, sure they can reboot, but I'm talking about effectively hitting the power button.
but that belief stems completely from my emotions and has nothing to do with reality.
I'm sorry, but you could have phrased your point a little better. Saying something has nothing to do with reality is basically saying it's wrong.
Which of course, is true... BSD r0x =-)
it's sort of a love-hate kinda score.
what scares me is how it went from score:3 funny to score: -1 funny in about 15 seconds. seriously.
The only reason Apple chose it over Linux was that they wanted a closed source OS. Which is fine-- Apple stuff has and will always be more expensive than PCs.
*bites*
Give me AMD and Suse/Mandrake/Redhat/Debian anyday.
So spare me the BSD vs Linux crap.. I'm sick of it.
Do not spread "09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0" over the internet, thank you.
I honestly don't understand the hype surrounding MacOS X
Those of us who were lucky enough to use (high powered for the time) NeXT machines and NeXTSTEP were hoping it was coming back.
No Unix-based system has come as close to being a really usable personal computing environment yet preserving (and extending in numerous ways) the benefits of a Unix environment and network integration (Mach IPC handles networks pretty transparently). I'm still waiting for NeXTSTEP services in another Unix GUI.
MacOS X 2.0 i would bet.
Apple wants it pronounced "OS ten" but just about EVERYBODY calls it "O S X." OSX 2 works.
- j
Well, you're right, that was heavy handed of me, and I apologise. I originally thought your post was flamebait, so I posted a flame in response. But now that I have read your reply, I understand your point better, and I agree with you about the subjective issues when choosing an OS.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The GPL does not give more rights to you, the consumer than the BSD licence; it gives fewer. Stallman argues that he has to restrict your rights as a consumer to do whatever you like with GPLed source so that he can prevent evil corporations from doing whatever they like with the same source.
So if you think that by running Linux, you are protecting your rights by avoiding impure, BSD licenced code, you are doubly deluded, because Linux distributions are full of BSD licenced code, and because you have more rights over that code than you do over GPLed code.
Not that this distinction matters. From a consumer point of view, the only choice that makes any real difference is between free/open source software products, and closed source software products. For example, it's true that Windows 2000 contains small amounts of BSD licenced source, which Microsoft does not redistribute. This is a good justification for boycotting Microsoft Windows. It is not a good justification for boycotting FreeBSD and choosing Linux instead. The FreeBSD team are not the bad guys here, and your Linux distribution may in fact contain some of the very same BSD code that is contained in Windows.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
The GPL has nothing to do with this. Apple could easily have built MacOS X on top of MkLinux, which they financed the development of. The GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have made any difference. It would not have made any difference to what parts of MacOS X were released as Open Source, since Apple has voluntarily released Darwin as open source anyways, despite its BSD licence. And the GPL on the MkLinux kernel would not have prevented Apple from closing the source of the MacOS X GUI.
We can only conclude that Apple picked FreeBSD over MkLinux because of its technical superiority, not because of the GPL.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
--
NetInfo connection failed for server 127.0.0.1/local
Under MacOS X Beta however, it reports
uname -s
Darwin
uname -r
1.2
I was waiting for someone to say that! For the most UNIX is UNIX. I'm a Linux user but I'm happy that Mac OS X will help BSD because it will be helping UNIX in general. A lot of people only see UNIX as a server OS and I think that if Apple can help improve the reputation of UNIX on the desktop then it can only help Linux.
I don't think /. is Linux-focused by intentional design, but rather for the reasons swordgeek mentioned. Linux currently has all the hype. If Linus had been hit by a truck at age 6, we'd probably be doing all this with FreeBSD instead.
Slashdot is "News for Nerds" not "News for Linux-heads". If nerddom moves on to something other than Linux, Slashdot will (more than likely) evolve with it.
Constitutionally Correct
I am a relative newcomer to the Unix/Linux/BSD scene but the recent installation of FreeBSD v4.0 was almost flawless. Compared to my previous experiences with Corel Linux v1.0 it was a breeze following the well documented instuctions and later the man pages. My biggest irritation has been with the KDE desktop, not the underlying OS. Maybe you should give it another try.
In the context of the original posters comments, there is little to seperate server and workstation in the future simply because workstation has a more advanced core, and all it would take to make a new, improved 'server' would be to bundle the right software to a workstation core. For a current server user that would look exactly like a 1.x to 2.x upgrade.
Trust me, I work with both Server and PB every day; they are basically different versions in the same product family.
After reading a /. comment a while ago about this issue, I've been pronouncing it as "Oh Sex". It's got a much nicer ring to it, don't you think? ;)
And how many of those installed Linux machines are crufty old servers sitting in the garage of some geek? I'm pretty sure that many more people *use* macOS than use Linux.
MacOS [X|10|ten].1, of course :)
--
Turn on, log in, burn out...
The current OS X Server has been discontinued and will be replaced by one based on the current OS X, which is very different. OS X Server 1.2 and earlier can't really be extrapolated upon.
I don't know how you can know what most of slashdot readers or posters have seen, based on a rather small sampling of comments. I've done use/development/administration in various degrees on Irix, HP-UX, Solaris (and way back, SunOS), OSF/UNIX, AIX, Ultrix, Linux, and *BSD*. Somehow, I don't think I'm special around here - YMMV.
XML causes global warming.
Yellow Dog is currently a "server" distribution, which means that it has limitations in the GUI area, but they're working on a more "consumer" distribution which may address the limitations I've found, which include limited number of colors (256 on my stock 8600 video) and a fairly limited set of accessory programs for doing things like burning CDs, etc.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
The problem is NOT that the 3c905B-TX isn't supported. It is. The problem IS that the 3c905B-TX isn't in the standard boot-off-the-floppy kernel, meaning that you can't then load the full distribution from an FTP server without compiling the 3c905B-TX into a new boot kernel, creating a new boot floppy, then installing via FTP.
The IPCC has purposely engineered a massive scientific fraud.
Sorry about you losing a moderation point. I had given it to you, and then had to speak out myself.
C.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
As the instigator of this thread...
What I meant by my 'moderator' bit was that I had just moderated someone else's comment in this topic, and by posting, I was undoing the moderation I'd done. I felt bad about that, because the post I'd moderated was quite thoughtful.
My karma? *shrug* It keeps going up and then leaking, hovering somewhere around 50. As long as I have the +1 bonus to use when appropriate, I don't give a rats ass. I've got better ways to measure my self worth.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Oops! I stand corrected. I'm used to seeing UnixWare in corporate environments (where it's fairly pricy to say the least!), and haven't looked at running it at home for a while.
Good to know. Thanks!
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I don't know about H-PUX (the alternate pronunciation); I quite like it. SAM is pretty good if you like administering with GUIs (and it's optional!), and most of the system is fairly straightforward SysV.
AIX is a contraction, of course, for A(in't Un)IX.
The ODM drives me crazy--very much like the Registry in a certain other OS.
Slowaris got its name when it first was put forth as a replacement for SunOS, which was (and still is) MUCH faster on the low end machines. Solaris is more efficient at what it does, but has a higher overhead.
So says I, but what do I know?
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
how does standard configuration have anything to do with them being alike or not alike?
is my '93 toyota mr2 (red) with 3rd party CD any different than a '93 toyota mr2 (white) with factory casette?
no, it just has a slightly different configuration
(and with an OS, you can change your shell or your cute little background image for free)
semantics are everything!
OS MAXIMUS
the macintosh is to be a republic again.
semantics are everything!
Really ? Can you show anything to back this up ? Any documentation ? Anything ?
UPS Sucks
A NIC not supported in the basic generic kernel ? I've been a BSD user since 2.2.5 and its always found my NIC's (even some pretty funky ones). Was it setup in a strange way or non-standard IRQ/Memory settings ?
UPS Sucks
That's their strength currently... As for desktops, its a matter of time. And since FreeBSD supports Linux applications many apps are available too. Its hard to determine use though since you don't need to register FreeBSD either (and since it only started to show up at places like CompUSA and BestBuy you don't have that aspect either). I bett that more people are using BSD than you think. They are also used in a few firewall boxes/routers/etc. too.
UPS Sucks
Oh man... This is insane. Where can I find part 1 of this shit? This story is so crazy I need to read the first part of it to better understand why it's so crazy.
You're tired of Slashdot ads? Get junkbuster now!
Actually From NeXTStep through OpenStep 4.2, it was only BSD 4.3 based, not 4.4-lite. It didn't get up-to-date BSD 4.4 until Rhapsody DR1.
--
J, Internetist
Demon leapfrogging Penguin? ;-)
Tigers respect lions, elephants and hippos. Maggots respect no one. (C) S. Dovlatov
Check out this article about some peoples recent experience with Macs.
Excellent post!
I recently had to put up with an intern who believed Linux was so next to Godliness, that it should be run on all hardware architectures as the one true OS.
This is something I've thought about a bit. There are already sites where you can download portions of the GNU software library, precompiled and in sun pkg format, for Solaris-Sparc and Solaris-x86. It might be nice if someone assembled and maintained a monolithic package which installed all (or nearly all) the GNU stuff in /usr/local or /opt/gnu so that you could simply set the appropriate bindir, mandir, libdir, and incdirs and have the gnu stuff first.
The gnu utilities and such are just plain better in every way than the majority of their ancestors. They make sense as your defaults in most situations. Obviously there are exceptions (like the SUNSpro compiler, whatever it's being called these days) but that's what the path is for...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Hey, like Taco, I'd like to get a mac & osx sometime too. It seems like it would be useful and fun to be able to develop programs for both platforms at once. (I don't think I'll do it, because of the aforementioned pricing problem, but if I end up having the money to spend, I'll go for it.) There's quite a contingent of slashdotters ... of whom probably at least 10% use Linux :) ... that feels the same way. Sorry, but there's no feud going on.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Give me a break, I said it was neat, then I added some factual info based on my personal experience. It is bloated, even if it's cool, and there aren't many apps. Yeah, you can compile all the console apps you want, but no X app is going to run.
As I recall from McKusicks book... the design of 4.4, NeXT stemmed from BSD 4.2, not 4.4. Of which most significantly different was VM management.
I don't believe NeXT and subsequent evolutions rejoined the 4.4 tree
I use a NeXT running OpenStep 4.2 and it does not use BSD style VM.
Just my few cents...
................................... Tom Tornado * Making things better since 1960 *
-BSD4.4-lite
NeXTSTEP 1.0 was released in June of 1989, that predates the release of 4.4BSD by almost 5 years. In fact, all releases of NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP used 4.3BSD. The only *STEP that ever used 4.4BSD was Rhapsody. Where'd you get your info, Jack?
MacOSX 1.x (Rhapsody 5.x [where x    -BSD4.4-lite
No. MacOSX uses a BSD layer based upon FreeBSD 3.2, not 4.4BSD.
Joe Average mac user may not know about it or care but some of the other mac users might. And this helps bsd.
So you do have to get the source for stuff you install; keeping it is up to you. I imagine source tends to take up less space than binaries. Doing 'make clean' to clean up object files can be useful. :)
But note that *BSD does have a concept of binary packages. OpenBSD ports now work by creating a package on your machine, then installing that; I imagine you can install packages off the net, although I haven't looked at that. And FreeBSD is said to have a build-server farm, building packages for all the ports every night. So I imagine binary packages are just as availables as for Linux.
Also note that "4500 ports" means 4500 different source programs handled, not lots of varying packages per source program.
As the inheritor of a real POS messed up sco box, i must agree that sco is one of the worst unix enviroments of all time.
I almost want to put nt on it...
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
You made the mistake of expressing an opinion. That's something that just isn't accepted around these parts. Especially when it is an opinion that doesn't just praise the almighty (whatever the story is about). It's really kind of sick the way the moderators cling to the "ideal" of slashdot, while completely ignoring the "intent" (which I thought was supposed to be a free-for-all of communication). Ah well, that's slashdot for ya.
Bite my yammer.
I'm running IRIX on the box next to me, I scrapped some old Apollos which ran HPUX last summer, I am selling some of my old Sun boxes... Once you get your hands into the different Unices, and then you see linux, you kinda say "bleh what the fuck is this piece-of-shit offering?". I absolutely LOVE the "and of OS X blows goats" comments - way to go Taco. Do you give head to ESR on weekends? Cause I can see you want to be just like him - Linus' Minister of Propoganda. And don't romanticise it. ESR/RMS/all of the single-minded GNU/Linux/FSF dicks out there need to open their eyes. And no, HURD is NOT the answer. HURD is, NOT UNIX, by definition. What _is_ the answer? Well I have a few acronyms I throw around:
1: LINTOO - Linux Is Not/Never The Only Option/OS
2: TOSTT - The OS Suits The Task
I run Linux, yeah. When I need the ability to run absolute shit. Actually, most of you people who say "BUT LINUX SUPPORTS MY -1DAY USB JUAREZ" need to get a handle on reality. The reality of GNU? It should be (these days) a paraphrase of the Perl motto:
AWYCDISLAWCSWSI - Any Way You Can Do It So Long As We Can Say We Support It
Is my personal baby (xMach) the answer? For some tasks, maybe? It's based on straight 4.4BSD-Lite. It's portable and open like real unix... It's designed with *gasp* low resource utilisation and *louder gasp* small disk footprint in mind. Now I know you Linux users just took a fucking shit seeing those phrases, so let me elaborate: An OS should not be using 1/2 of the system's resources to make a fucking pretty web browser window for you to jerk off to porn in. An OS should _not_ _ever_ come bundled with _UTTER CRAP_ like every KDE application ever written ( the AWYCDISLAWCSWSI syndrome again ). The base install of an OS does not need to have emacs. It needs vi. And ed. And that's it as far as editors. The base install of an os should consists of things that you NEED. I actually think this includes a C compiler, and Perl at the limits. Why? Some system config scripts may be in perl, and any self-respecting admin is gonna recompile the kernel, or at least need to install some things from source. And you know what else sucks? Having a "Web Server" install option that includes everything related (even vaguely) to the HTTP protocol. I want to prompt the user to install "Apache, mod_perl, and mSQL" seperately, not as one big lump.
Some day someone's gonna get it right. And it might just be me.
And I know I'm about to get modded down for Troll. So fuck everyone and everything, while i'm at it.
As always I keep it real, I speak my mind, and I speak the truth. I'm not gonna be a dick like Linus Torvalds and be fluffy about everything.
--
hrm? email jmallett@cotse.com - I'd like to have a word with you.
--
It's just simpler to have a bootable DOS Floppy that loads NOTHING and lets you flash things without worrying about memory managers or something else trashing your system.
Of course, this is a non-issue with Macs, as Apples upgrade policy has always been "Buy a new one".
Easily. I use no floppy's and have not for over a year now. If the computer I want to get information to is far away, I use the thing called "the Internet." If it is quite close, I use what we in the industry refer to as "a LAN." If all else failed, I use "a zip disk..." Floppies are too prone to errors, and do not store enough data.
Macx
As far as if OSX were to be ported to an x86... there was an article on Yahoo some time ago speculating about the close ties between Apple and Oracle and the fact that Apple might just be able to rewrite osx for other platforms w/o too much trouble. I imagine that they've since deleted the article from their servers, but it did raise some questions.
"I know I'll get modded down for saying this, but..." There... can I have more Karma now? Besides, it isn't as bad as the people who have 4, Troll- times like this that I wish people who were modded down had to suffer the consequences, not get ranked higher than legitimate posters. Was that Offtopic? Er, anyway, well, it's hard to say whether linux will really give way to bsd. It has much more name recognition that could help it with gaining market share. The big drawback, though, is the fact that most people have their "linux install horror story" from the first time. Seems the technical aspects would have to soften if Linux were to ever really challenge M$ in the open market (there, I said something about the topic. Happy now?). Could you imagine someone who's never used a computer before wandering into root? I don't even want to...
Look just because I made a humurous comment about your moderation didnt mean you had to mark mine as a troll also, the comment was relevant and insightful, with a sprinkling of humor....oh well i quess it was too much of a casserole of types to figure out so you just pulled troll out of your hat....
"...your future, make it a reality, all you have to do is fight for me"
If you have a newer (read: iMac or G4 series) PowerPC Mac, you can run OpenBSD/powerpc. For any other PPC system, try NetBSD/macppc. If you're running a 680x0 version Mac, see OpenBSD/mac68k or NetBSD/Mac68k. To compare with a linux distro for mac, try Yellow Dog Linux, Linuxppc.org, mlinux, or Linux/m68k. I believe Debian runs on macs, too.
Personally, my experience with linux was not so great (I used redhate 5.2 and 6.0 neither of which was very stable or powerful) so I would recommend BSD which is both (not to mention secure as all hell if your machine supports OpenBSD). Perhaps I will give Linux another go when I get another box to put it on. Honestly, it doesn't really matter, as long as you are committed to using a free Unix-like OS and are willing to put in the time to learn the OS, pretty much any BSD or linux will do. Just find what agrees with you most and what is best for your tasks.
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Will you please explain how to install over ftp? I just installed Debian, and the install disk gave me no such option. I was quite disappointed.
I ended up making a partition and dumped the base system *.tgz files onto it from FreeBSD. Then I used that to install.
I've been using it for the last couple days, and I think it has a lot of nice features. However, I prefer the out of the box feel of FreeBSD.
I'd really like to see or create a linux distro that makes the current source available via CVSup and has the ability to do "make world" to update the entire OS from source code. I love that feature of *BSD and I also love the ports collection, although it does need some work. I think OpenPackages is a very exciting project.
Yes, I am a FreeBSD zealot of sorts but I also love Linux. It's unfortunate that any BSD story on Slashdot is an almost guaranteed flame war.
You had me at "dicks fuck assholes".
Moderate:
-1, Something.
+1, Funny.
Then respond to your own post (anonymously) and your moderation will be undone while the "funny" remains.
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
No it isn't!!! Darwin is completely different from OSX Server. It's like night and day. OSX Server is basically NextStep. Darwin is a brand new OS with parts taken from various different BSDs. Looking at the driver archetecture of OSX vs. OSX Server shows one just how many changes have been made. One of the biggest difference is that OSX Server is based on Mach2.5 and OSX gets an upgrade to Mach3 - but there are more.
A previous post does an excellent job of detailing the differences of the two OSes. It's rated 5 and is quite long so it should be hard to miss.
This also explains why OSX Server isn't getting upgraded - it would be pointless with the new (ie: Darwin) kernel about to make its enterence.
Willy
i don't know- i'm just stupid. Don't look at me!
I would like to add IRIX to your list of bad OS's. I've been dealing with it quite a bit lately (I even own an SGI), and have been extrememly disapointed in its security among other things. Every month or so SGI sends out an update telling everyone to disable a particular service or chmod a setuid root program. The easiest thing to do is just blank out the inetd.conf file and install ssh. In a multiuser system, keeping root secure is basically futile and you just need to trust your users (or have a log server).
With that said, I also have a user account on some SGI supercomputers. They have a good sysadmin, and so are kept in good working condition. So it is possible to make Irix into a good OS, it just takes a bit of work. Plus, I'm afraid linux would likey croak on systems that big and complex. Irix has its place, even if it is a pain to work with.
Sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.
Yeah, I once wrote a negative comment about the GPL and got moderated down to -1 in about one hour. It's very interesting that a society that blames others to be lemmings without brains refuses to look one inch next to their own interest and respect others.
Don't get me wrong, I like Linux, but I certainly won't use it just because it's free (speech). I believe that everybody should use the tools that fit their task best.
(My regular machine runs MacOS X, my router FreeBSD.)
No - Windows has 97%. Everything else gets the remaining 3%...
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
If they are not intersted in SMP, why the hell are they selling multiprocessor machines to the masses? The current high-end machines are dual processors. To my knowledge, they are the first major Personal Computer manufacturer do that. They have every interst in having SMP working, and working well. The people doing graphics are one of the main market of Apple, those guys need processing power, this implies good SMP.
You (and many others on these threads) are forgetting that OS X isn't just about *BSD and Aqua ... it's also about the entire OpenStep frameworks, Objective-C, Administration which is XML based, and other items.
Those will be difficult to just port over to Linux. BTW, its LinuxPPC.
Many of Apple's first press releases specifically states it as "OS X (pronounced ten)"..........so it should be pronounced as "ten" (after all, that's what comes after OS9).
I hope it stays that way, I don't want to visit my mother a year from now and ask her if she wants me to install "Oh Sex" on her computer (at least that's what she'll probably hear).
One word : Windows
I nodded along word for word with your post. I understand what you're saying, and I see it evidenced every time I read Slashdot comments. I think you're an asshole anyways.
If anyone should stop acting high and mighty, its you. Everyone is entitled to their opinion. If you feel that someone is using flawed logic or is simply incorrect, point out what is wrong with that person's areguement. Don't shun them because they're not as seasoned as you. Maybe if you shared your divine knowlege of 'where the different systems shine', those poor, uninformed souls might finally reach your own level of enlightenment.
That you insinuate experience with HP-UX, AIX, et al. equates to guru status is absurd self-righteousness at its best.
If you were truely as enlightened as you proclaim, or if you even read Slashdot semi-regularly, you would realize that trolling solves nothing. Personally, I feel ashamed to even respond in this thread due to fear that people will respond to _my_ post.
From my own experience, your physical and mental health will likely drastically improve if you learn to better control your emotions, and not let the ignorance of others get you down. I would have committed suicide by now had I not learned to look past the shortcomings of others, and overcome my own personal flaws.
Better luck next time,
Nick
I get the impression that MacOS X is being marketed as a serving solution, not a desktop operating environment. This isn't a '*NIX on the desktop' issue. You could imagine that I am asking, "Why should I take any professional interest in MacOS when Linux, FreeBSD, and Solaris collectively offer me anything my company could possibly want in a UNIX?"
I'm talking about competition for favor between UNIX variants and look-alikes, not evalutaing MacOS X/BSD vs Microsoft or what my friends and family used to browse the web.
I simply don't see the attraction, other than shiney object syndrome. That is, something new and UNIXey, so it automatically grabs interest.
What warrents the excitement? That's all I want to know. :^)
Thanks,
Nick
> I could turn around and point out that in your kind, gentle, emotionally controlled manner you're being quite condescending.
Yes, but that was the intended perception. :-) I know I'm as flawed as the next guy (probably more, in fact), but we're all human.
> As for the HP-UX/AIX ==> Guru, that's not quite what I intended, although I see how it came across as that. What I meant was that (any single platform) =X=> Guru, and also that it's pointless (and socially harmful) to be a zealot when you only know one thing.
Indeed. I see what you mean, I only wanted to get my point across. I do see your point and agree whole-heartedly.
As far as zealotry goes, I tend to question anyone who has a strong belief in anything. :^) I think many zealots simply lack reason for some beliefs that they hold, thanks to misinformation or no information regarding the subject matter. Based on this observation, one of my personal goals is to become completely objective in my beliefs and personal understanding of things, and not pass judgement without sufficiently understanding facts and reason.
Not that I'm always successful. :-) I guess I've just given subjectiveness versus objectiveness a lot of thought lately.
> As for considering myself a guru, all I can say is HAH! I might achieve that status in my own mind the day I die, but not before. In the meantime, I'll keep working on it. :-)
I hear you - the same goes for me. :-)
Nick
maggard,
This is exactly what I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time. :-) Imagining MacOS X in the proper context, I can see what all the fuss is about.
Nice website, by the way. When will the 'High Ego' version be available? ;D
Thanks again!
Nick
I have tried to install BSD. I am not a newbie to unixland, having my hands on most linux distros and Solaris as well, but BSD is more frustrating to install than Debian. Many say it is not that hard, but in the handfull of times I have installed it, I have given up on the packages. This used to be a big concern for linux. Perhaps if *BSD was a bit more intuitive to install, more would use it.
I do admit that I would like to move away from linux. I want something that is a bit tighter and not so gripped with the political wars that are gripping linuxland.
I would also be far more interested in *BSD if it took a lead roll in the replacement of X. BSD is supposed to be able to act as a workhorse, managing its resources extremely well. A new lighter, faster GUI would be a perfect fit for this OS.
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
ok not worth counting anyone that is still running old software.
so we won't count anyone running red hat 5.2 or 6.0, no mandrake if it's under 7.0 same with suse 6.4 as it is outta date now! slackware 3.2? that's right out. anyone running a kernel that is under 2.4 is also out as well.
Come on! I'm not really all that biased I like Linux. I like most OS's that aren't windows. But at least get the numbers right and stop swaying them, it seems that Linux users are very Democratic in that if you complain long enough you will eventually get your way
Linux users are more and more seeming to have an "Amiga-like" attitude.
don't get me wrong I run drake but these numbers make no sense...
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
I dont know that many people using BSD, and if they are it's mostly for servers, not really for desktops. Minus all the OSX users, I think BSD probably has way less than half of the linux userbase.
"I keep looking in the want-ads under 'revolutionary' but there don't seem to be any listings.. "
So, this turned into a *BSD vs. Linux conflict?
:)
Think about it for five seconds..........ready?
Ok, then we'll have a look at a weird weakness and strength of UNIX.
UNIX has always existed in many flavors, it started out with AT&T/BSD AFAIK.
Later, companies got licenses for creating their own type of UNIX, which resulted in hp-ux, irix, aix, xenix, sco unix, etc etc
What happens when a lot of people learn to use slightly different versions of an OS?
They get used to a certain environment ("look&feel") and therefore they prefer that specific unix variant.
However, free systems are of course often very welcome. BSD has a long tradition and should be counted as a true UNIX. Linux has never claimed to be "true UNIX", only UNIX-like...AFAIK.
(For you idiots out there, Linux is the KERNEL of a GNU/Linux system, and GNU was meant to become a true, free UNIX.)
IMHO, the problem is that most people using unix have different backgrounds and experiences. Let's say "Toby C. Hacker" (get it? to-be c hacker) started out with Digital Unix. After a while he got interested in the system itself and found a *BSD system with source code. (yeah!
Mr. Hacker early finds out that Digital Unix had some nifty features that BSD hasn't.
Later, when having a closer look, he realizes that the basic design of BSD is actually quite different; as a matter of fact it seems to be quite stupid. (!)
What should Mr. Hacker do now? Of course he builds another free unix system! With the look&feel of Digital Unix but with lot of source from BSD. After months of hard work, he has accomplished his goal, to have a "perfect unix", extended with the features he wanted.
Let's say Mr. Hacker has done a great job and other people also like his system. Then, someone might install "Mr. Hacker's original ultraunix". What will happen when "Born-Toby C. Hacker" downloads that unix and start playing with it? He will tune it, try other unixes and finally come up with his own "super unix".
*SIGH*
Why do you think there are so many different (and bad) Linux "distributions"?
It seems like everyone making a distribution, or a unix system overall, believe "they're right and know how things should be".
But, as we all know, the few distributions/unix-systems which are both mainstream *and* useful are those which started out early and haven't been f***ed up by layers of stupidity.
The result is that good systems that are liked by many people will survive. That's the strength. The weakness is that there will always be alternatives, and sometimes there will be really stormy fork-offs which splits the community.
Now I've said enough stupid things to get flamed to hell. Anyway, thanks for listening.
128MB isn't that much anymore, don't most systems come with 96 or 64 if they're cheap. That's just one memory module short. And I know that nobody seriously sells computers with just a 1.5 GB HD anymore. Given the yes, we-are-premium pricing an x86 OSX would use meeting the requirements would be no big deal.
You've heard of 3DS Max, right? That's Kinetix/Discreet, a division of Autodesk.
I am a Linux user.
However, I do see the validity that in many ways BSD is quite a bit more useful in certain applications then Linux is.
It all boils down to licensing issues. The BSD license allow corporations more opportunities to capitilize on their investment into the OS, while Linux leaves the corporations open to fear that they might not be able to turn a profit.
I personally prefer the GPL because it gives more rights to me, the consumer. That is why I will stick with Linux even if BSD manages to push it's technological advantage right thru the ceiling.
Free as in Stallman not as in Raymond.
Let me tell you what makes linux infinitely better than BSD.
GPL!
Case in point, BSD will gain absolutely nothing from the popularity of OSX. So all you "linux is not unix so screw any linux user with an oppinion" idiots, STFU.
OpenBSD on Mac68k was much easier for me to install than LinuxPPC on a 7300 or 9500.
Why do I say this is easier? Because the myriad packages presented by LinuxPPC's X-installer are overwhelming, and presented at the wrong time in the process. With OpenBSD you get a clean, secure basic install. Then you can install packages (pkg_add: roughly equivalent to rpm). LinuxPPC, by comparison, has its pants down, its hands duct-taped to its ankles, and an apple in its mouth.
I understand that this is somewhat apples and oranges. OpenBSD doesn't run on PowerPCs as well as on 68ks. And I haven't bothered with the X Window stuff on OpenBSD. In fact, I use LinuxPPC on 3 boxes, too. The X Window/Gnome system sucks on those, too (lots of goofy anomalies and slow-downs). But I don't use any of these boxes for desktop use. They're servers. Mac OS is my desktop OS.
So when Mac OS X releases, sometime in 2005, I'll be ready for it.
-B...
OpenBSD for Mac68K
NetBSD for Mac68K
I can't vouch for either of these on PPC. I use Linux on those boxes.
-B...
Hm.... You're not saying much here. "What it boils down to, from a user point of view, is that applications make an OS" Correct. That is why a unix(OSX) getting MAJOR app support from adobe, macromedia, M$,kinetix, quark, etc. is such a big deal. OSX will be the first *nix to get these kinds of apps. For print BTW, Macs still have a leg up if for no other reason than corrected gamma and system-wide color calibration.
Does anyone here actually use Mac OS X? I mean, more than just tinkering with it in a store or something?
OS X is full of eye candy and easy to use. In other words, it's designed for your average consumer; this is nothing new. Whether it's based on BSD or Linux seems irrelevant to me. Obviously if I ran a server of any kind I would be using a unix variant on x86 hardware for compatibility and speed, but in the internet/website design work that I and many other mac users do, I just need basic stuff. The difference between the systems does not matter to me at all, nor does it many to any current mac user. LinuxPPC is not really a viable choice for home use, since it's on an uncommon cpu and has few really valuable apps, and Mac OS 9 just plain sucks, so OS X is the only solution because I've been locked into this hardware loop with the PPC chip.
Most Mac users don't know anything about either BSD or Linux, and they just take what sjobs decides to give them, so they don't care. Keep that in mind.
uname -a
Darwin localhost 1.2 Darwin Kernel Version 1.2: Wed Aug 30 23:32:53 PDT 2000; root:xnu/xnu-103.obj~1/RELEASE_PPC Power Macintosh powerpc
and there's no floppy drive. How can one use a computer with no floppy drive?
I had warm bawls.
That was the one part that stuck out in my mind also.
Evolution? Gee, all I see is a trendoid trying to follow the Next Big Thing. Way to go! (And such kudos the U of Rochester should get for pumping out such "enlightened" souls as yourself)
If my house, I run suse, slackware, netbsd (pmax-mips, motorola, x86), openbsd, freebsd, solaris, sunos4.1.2, hpux, and aix. i have used like 12 other variants, yet when i say linux sucks, i get marked as a troll. slashdot sucks.
The one reason I prefer ksh to bash:
bash holds your command history in memory and doesn't write it to a file until you logout.
ksh (the *real* ksh, not pdksh) writes every command to a file as you run it.
Why is this important? On the machines I administer (about 50 RS/6000s and 7 Sun boxen), I constantly find myself typing a complex command at the prompt, only to realize after I run it that I forgot to su first. With bash, this means I have to retype the whole command, or cut-n-paste from X. With ksh, after I su, I just type "ESC K K", and I've got the command back.
Just to put in my $.02 for "favorite flavor of Unix": (1) Irix 6.x, (2) Debian GNU/Linux. The BSDs are nice, but I prefer apt-get to the ports tree. Least favorite: SCO (*shudder*).
--
I've noticed that too. Seems like the best way to get moderated up is to begin your post with "I know I'll get moderated down for saying this, but...."
I think there ought to be a new category of "moderator baiting" for which one can be moderated down.
--
I have been told by an Apple rep that the correct pronunciation is "ten".
--
I'm likely to stay with Linux, but I think it would be great if BSD took over a significant market share.
A lot depends on the Apple API and whether or not a desktop application written for MacOSX can be easily supported under the various BSDs. If yes, then BSD could easily take on Windows in the desktop market. Apple could position themselves as the vendor of "premium" BSD desktops specializing in publishing and media.
Unfortunately, I don't think Apple is far-sighted enough to allow this. They'll keep their API's private and try to grow their little piece of the market without giving up control. By the time they realize how foolish this is it'll be too late.
It is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail. - Abraham Maslow
I'm afraid I just don't see why there is such a flurry of discussion to the effect that OS-X will somehow "vitalize" the usage and understanding of the BSDs. From what I hear, MacOS-X represents a "pretty light" variation on BSD, combined with a horde of MacOS-oriented graphical tools.
As such, it decidedly won't come with the hordes of CLI and console tools you'd expect to see in the typical NetBSD / FreeBSD / OpenBSD installation.
I would think it a whole lot more economical, and likely more of a "Unix-oriented" learning experience, to head to CheapBytes and order CD sets for all three of the "free" BSD variations for IA-32, perhaps along with some of the O'Reilly BSD documentation. That'll cost a whole lot less than a G3 PowerMac, nay, that, including a wall-full of documentation, might well cost less than merely getting the MacOS-X license.
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
OS X suffers HORRIBLY from disk fragmentation.
You cannot currently tell OS X to use a separate partition for swap - so it swaps on it's main partition, and when you start running short of memory, (and when your disk has less than a few hundred meg of contiguous disk space) it runs horribly slow.
I hope that's fixed in the final release. I have 196 megs of RAM, and I run OS X on my 300 MHz beige G3 on a 2 gig disk. First week was fun. But it's gotten very slow. I will NOT buy Norton 6. There HAS to be another solution.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
ahhh, the DEFAULT shell in Solaris may be ksh, but among all of MY Solaris buddies, bash and zsh reign supreme. I don't think I know one person who actually uses ksh. Of course, my circle of freinds doesn't represent all Solaris users. I actually turned on most of them to bash.
ps is definately the most remarkable (and annoying) difference. gawd Solaris' ps sucks.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
As an NT, Solaris, Linux, FreeBSD, OS X, and Mac OS user, I will say that Apple has taken a step towards bringing the Unix core up to date - but it's a VERY small step.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
You are absolutely right.
One of the biggest complaints I've seen on all the Mac OS X dev discussions is that old-time Mac admins are having a HELL of a time adjusting to a multi-user OS. It is a MAJOR paradigm shift. From going to an OS where you are essentially root all the time, to going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod, figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root), etc. Lots of complaints. Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough. Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login. Apple has a LONG way to go before they can use the base OS X to reach that market. I'm not bitching about it, I LOVE OS X, it's great, I finally have a stable OS on my PPC-based machine, that lets me use all my old software. But it's non-trivial for non-technical people. You don't ask someone to pay $1200 for a machine, then expect them to jump through hoops to run it. Not in the mass market.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
"sort of" Linux-focused.
/.-ers, but there are a LOT of W9x users who simply just hate Microsoft, but don't have the technical fortitude to venture into Linux (or *BSD). There's even a *BSD section on Slashdot, so I really don't think that this site is anymore Linux centric. It's just that lots of Nerds use Linux. Linux is more accessible than BSD, but more nerdy than Win95. Simple as that.
it's "News for Nerds". Not Linux News. What percentage of articles are even about Linux? The polls say that Linux is the most popular OS of
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
hell, why bother with Linux at all then, why don't you just run Cygwin on NT, and get all the unix tools that way?
I'm sorry I unintentionally implied that ALL Win users were too stupid to use Linux. that wasn't my intention, I was making a demographic observation - that is MOST Win users. And by "technical fortitude" I don't mean ONLY smarts, I mean, ability to reconcile the problems they may encounter in their work environments (for instance, I CAN'T use Linux at work, because it's not a supported-by-IT platform for one, and two- many of the apps I need to use don't have clients on Linux (problem-tracking database, Outlook calendar for meetings, etc. ad nauseum).
But if I could, I would (or actually, I would probably use BSD). Because NT *does* crash and do weird things on me all the frickin time. It does get tiresome after 8 years.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
The point is not indefensible, and the reason is known. I'm arguing the point because it's true. check out my user ID#. I've been a member of slashdot long enough to know that though there's a large Linux faction on Slashdot, I'm not stupid enough to believe that Slashdot is a Linux site, or even a Linux-focussed site. Since I've joined, user ID's have gone from 4-digit to 6-digit. Most of those are Linux users. I'm not arguing that. But there sure are a lot of Win/BSD/Mac people here - they are a minority, but not an insignificant one. Lots of news on Slashdot pertains to Linux, but certainly not the majority, and the majority of Linux articles certainly aren't strictly about Linux. They're mostly peripherally related.
Personally, I don't even run or like Linux, but I am interested in many of the topics Linux people find interesting, because they pertain to:
Unix
Computer Industry/Technology
Internet
and the ramifications of the ongoing computer revolution, whether they're business, social, political, or trivial. It's all neat stuff, stuff that matters. To all of us. Not just Linux-heads.
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Perhaps I should read the article before commenting (naaah), but I realized one thing: how can an OS that runs only on Apple's G3/G4 hardware outnumber Linux's growing installed base?
;-) Congrats, Rob...
My thoughts:
1. OS X will only run on Apple PMAC hardware.
2. Linux can run on devices as small as a cell phone or PDA, or be as transparent as it is in the TiVo, a PowerPC Linux-based appliance.
3. The number of users of all these various devices (cell phones, PDAs, TiVos, etc.) may be hard to count, it may eventually outnumber the number of PMacs.
OS X may outnumber us for a while. But then again, it's not something I'm worried about. So what if it does? That means the PowerPC will get more attention, and everything from BSD to Linux should benefit from that.
A side note: I have played with OS X beta, and was surprised at how slow it was, even on a G4. I figure you can credit the Mach microkernel for that.
BTW, we're giving CmdrTaco the "Comment of the Year" award.
Haaz: Co-founder, LinuxPPC Inc., making Linux for PowerPC since 1996.
-- haaz.
That's a LOT of stuff to be bringing.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
You've a misimpression. Apple is first & foremost a desktop company.
Apple is really first & foremost, secondmost, and thirdmost a desktop company. With Mac OS X they finally have a viable server offering but that clearly has not been their focus. Indeed I can't for the life of me figure out where you got your misimpression. They did initially ship an OS X server but that's been dormnant & waiting to be supplanted by the upcoming full release of OS X. I bet they're hoping to move into the server space but clearly that's not their first target.
Apple's competition is consumer WinX and to a much (much) lessor extent consumer Linux et al. That's why everyone compares them. Server space tomorrow, but it's desktop today.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
I don't understand the exact nature of the problem, but that's what I've gathered from various postings on web sites and Usenet.
--
If it's done right, you'll manage to get a fair few *nix apps compiled. Ok, so a lot of the X-based stuff isn't gonna work, but people have already got apache and stuff running on it.
--
SCO's UnixWare won't cost you anything?
...)
I guess if your soul isn't worth much to you, then yes it won't cost you anything.
(... spent the worst 6 months of my life doing phone tech support for SCO and Novell UnixWare
--- I do not moderate.
Here's perhaps a really stupid question: I was talking to someone about linux and macs and so forth, and they mentioned "OS Ten", turns out they were pronouncing "OS X" as if "X == roman numeral ten". Is this silly or what? Or was this the original intent? I was always pronouncing each letter "O S X" in discussions.
Am I ignorant? Or was this person way off base? Ever heard of this before?
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum viditur.
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
PowerPC is a great architecture, although not for everyone, it is definately filling a need.
:(
.asf and DiVX ;) playback is only available on x86 due to the use of Windows dlls run though an emulator.
pppLinux (debian-woody in my case) is very stable, runs X perfectly, and is fast. Almost every app I throw at it, runs on it. Gnumeric, Abiword, Evolution, etc. they all run fine. I can run MacOS under linux with the gpl'ed Mac On Linux, in the x86 world only vmware and plex86 have this capability. Vmware costs $$ and plex86 is not properly evolved yet.
PowerPC also has some other platforms you might not think about supporting too, how about AmigaOS? Darwin? BeOS? I'm sure the *BSD have support as well. I bought my PowerBook because I wanted a laptop without the Microsoft tax. I have never been more pleased by a purchase, although I did have an apple tax
My personal opinion is that if you are looking for a great system, with lots of stability, Risc architecture, and scability PowerPC is a great option. I definately recommended as a laptop, though desktops are good too. Having an x86 box around is of course never a bad idea, at least until more ppc users emerge. Case in point: currently
NOTE: i have heard a lot of people say "get tuxtops then" or such. I have not found any x86 laptops as nice as the apple powerbooks, none of the x86 boxen from such companies have hardware supported nearly as well as the powerbooks. Don't have to worry about WinModems on Macs.
Oh yeah, my powerbook looks stylish as well (especially the Debian bumper sticker on it)
We are in some ways debating the differences between Bach and Beethoven here. There are signficant stylistic differences, but at the end of the day both were classical composers who adhered to much of the same musical orthodoxy (or not, depending upon with whome you debate).
... why should we accept any less diversity in our computing lives?
Linux and *BSD are both descendents of UNIX, with vastly more similarities than differences. Both are beautiful systems in their own right, borrow from one another when appropriate, and have many of the same strengths and flaws.
Licensing flame fests aside (I was recently harangued by a BSD License bigot for releasing my -- unfinished, rough first draft -- Novel under the GPL-like Free Media License rather than a BSD style License) and OS religious bigotry aside, I work with both Linux and FreeBSD and, quite frankly, wouldn't want to be without either of them.
There is no one right way to anything, unless you subscribe to the Microsoft philosophy (one world, one internet, one OS, akin to Hitler's "ein Volk, ein Reich..." crap). None of us would want a steady diet of steak, without the occasional salad, potato, or glass of Merlot
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
Yes, but the greater point is that if Sun or a BSD distro included the 600MB of usual Linux Distro RPMs, it would be quite easy to create a setup that would be virtually indistinquisible from the average Linux install to the normal user. (The big exceptions being system level things like vitural consoles and the solaris mounter deamon. The other under-the-hood differences are handled by developers in a fairly transparent way.)
I would love to have an out-of-the-box installation of Solaris x86 that included KDE, mutt, GNU Utils, and so on. The big reason there isn't such a thing is not licencing, it's the fact that UNIX vendors (and maybe include BSD in there because of the old school aesthetic) have been rather bullheaded about making a nice, rich user environment, and instead have been stuck in a 1988-style time bubble, and are moving so many headless server that it's a low priority.
--
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
...are a bit exaggerated.
I ran OSX with 64 meg on my G3 for a while,
and the only thing that was really painfully slow was Classic. All the new stuff ran fine.
Besides, 128Mb isn't all that 'high end' any more...
A 128Mb PC(100|133) DIMM is going for ~$60 nowadays, and many consumer-level machines are shipping with that much anyway.
As for disk requirements, I don't remember what the base
install took exactly, but I don't think it was 1.5Gb.
Prolly more like 700Mb to 1G, if that.
And, like memory, disk is cheap. IIRC, 10Gb drives go for significantly under $100 now.
--K
---
I think that BSD is extremely cool. Please, PLEASE don't think I'm trying to start a holy war here. This is MY opinion - you have yours, and I respect that.
I prefer BSD over Linux.
OK, I can hear you all yelling at me now. Yes, I prefer BSD. I don't know why, but I do. I run OpenBSD as a desktop. I have found that the biggest issue I have with it is the ports tree - it just isn't big enough. No XMMS, no mozilla (C++ linker issue there), no Gnome. These are purely aesthetic things, though, and these ARE available on FreeBSD - but I'd never change from OpenBSD.
However, the biggest issue I have with BSD is this - there needs to be more user groups. I see Linux user groups and Linux shows everywhere, I see a BSD group maybe a few states away. I see BSD shows on the opposite coast of the US. I think that it needs to get *out there* more, and I think that Mac OS X will help get it more recognition, and I think that perhaps soon I will see more BSD shows and more BSD groups around.
Now, you may not agree with me - fine, think what you want.
Another issue I have is documentation. I would love for there to be more HOWTOs for BSD. I see lots of documentation on compiling kernels, but there is no user friendly way of doing it (such as make xconfig) (on another note - I enjoyed being able to download a tarball of the kernel source instead of using CVS). Also, I would like to be able to look at a HOWTO specific for the subject of installing a CDRW or getting other hardware to work - with compatibility lists on each thing.
I like BSD a lot on all other counts, though. Things will get better, its not a dead OS (which is what I thought when I first installed it, like it was just an old OS that some hobbyists kept going). It is probably at the same stage Linux was at when I first started using it (when redhat 5.0 was released). I expect to see a lot from it soon.
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
If you think you know what the hell is going on you're probably full of shit. -- Robert Anton Wilson
jdube is who
as their motto - "of course it runs NetBSD" - implies, you can run a non OS X BSD on your mac: NetBSD. if you have a G3 or better, and can run OS X, i'd recommend Darwin, if only because it needs the user base and the bug reporting/developing effort right now.
the fully righteous NetBSD will run on most macs, and will give you a better experience in most cases than even LinuxPPC, simply because of the parity between the releases / ports. netbsd/macPPC already runs on the G4 cube (as of the beta of 1.5) and just about everything back to the first PCI powermacs. silly nubus architecture...
i even have netbsd/mac68k (formerly macBSD) running on an LCii, which has given the little bugger a whole new lease on life.
- Entertaining Bits from the Ancient Kernel Tree
Um, Apple?
Isn't Mac OS X the reason for this discussion?
-jon
Remember Amalek.
I hate to say it, but are you on drugs?
With all this effort on Aqua and Quartz and other interface nicities, how could anyone in their right mind think that OS X is targeted at servers?
What warrents the excitement? That's all I want to know. :^)
The excitement is that OS X is going to be the first Unix that usable by Grandma.
-jon
Remember Amalek.
Current Macs ship with Mac OS 9, so the next version is Mac OS "10". I guess the name "Mac OS X" is more l33t. :)
cpeterso
Of course this begs the question, what comes after Mac OS X? Is it Mac OS XI or Mac OS 11 or ??
cpeterso
For example, you can get closed-source drivers from NVidia, Sigma Designs, Aureal, and dozens of other companies for Linux... but not BSD. You can get Oracle and Wordperfect for Linux, but not BSD.
Where is the industry interest in the BSD license?
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
Torrey Hoffman (Azog)
"HTML needs a rant tag" - Alan Cox
Check out http://mrcla.com/XonX/.
At GNU-Darwin, we are busily porting GNOME to Darwin X11. There are currently some problems with gnomelibs. You can check the progress here.
https://sourceforge.net/projects/gnu-darwin/
proclus
going to an OS where you have to su, understand chmod
Not unless you're installing Unix software, which I doubt Mac admins are doing. And if they are, there's nothing Apple can do to shield them from that. Your mother certainly shouldn't be installing MySQL.
figure out why the OS won't let you empty the trash (even as root)
No idea what this means.
Personally, I think these differences will kill Mac OS X as a consumer OS. They did a decent job of hiding it, but nowhere near enough.
Since we're still in beta, I think you're speaking a bit prematurely. Or perhaps you meant "as it stands now."
Apple needs to realize that OS X is a GREAT power-user OS, but it SUCKS as a home/desktop OS, because my mother-in-law will never understand having to login.
Fine, she doesn't have to. She can have it startup without asking for a login.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
No "perhaps" about it. All of the companies you list are Carbonizing their apps (or possibly rewriting them in Cocoa). Though I've never heard of Kinetix. Perhaps you mean Connectix?
I lamented the lack of games
Also, there are substanially more new games coming out for the Mac now than there were just a few years ago. I think you'd be suprised.
and I had to use substandard office applications
I think this issue has completely whithered away with the release of Mac Office 2001. It's getting rave reviews.
- Scott
------
Scott Stevenson
Scott Stevenson
Tree House Ideas
BSD may truly surpass Linux in the installed base, but I honestly doubt it will happen anytime soon. Why? Linux already has a greater installed base than Mac. Not to mention that mentioning *BSD to your PHB won't even get him to bat his eyelashes. You have to show him that new shiny Linux thing he has been hearing all about. I personally use Linux. I like Linux. I also like the *BSDs. They are extremely well built and enjoy a very active development... just like Linux. OSX will definitely do great things to not only bring developers to *BSD, but also to get the BSD name out among the masses. I surely hope that BSD gets more of the attention it deserves. It truly is an excellent operating system. That and Chuck just has so much more sex appeal than Tux. Anybody see the girls at ALS in the tight red spandex giving out horns? Yup... they made me "horny", too... *grin*
wolf31o2 Developer, Gentoo Linux Games Team
I'm not so sure. The GPL is a good choice for a business who wants its app to become the standard (so being Free and Open-Source is good), but doesn't want other businesses to be able to make derivative apps and not share the enhancements (so being copylefted is neccessary).
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
Just out of curiosity, where is this battle that you see?
A Slashdot headline of "BSD to Leapfrog Linux?" which pointed to an article on that subject. I didn't mean "a battle in the discussion threads."
From a user point of view, there isn't a huge amount of difference between varieties of UNIX: most importantly, it's easy to get them to talk to each other and share services. But in terms of the fit between a particular UNIX and its realisation on a particular hardware setup, there is the world of difference: existence and quality of device drivers, support for SMP, clustering services, file systems, etc.
Linux/XFree86 has established a near invincible lead in this area for the x86 architecture. I can't help thinking that UNIX on the PPC is always bound to be a niche phenonmenon. Now if OS/X were to be ported to FreeBSD/x86...
The problem with Apple just porting OSX to x86 is that one runs straight into the lack of hardware support I described. But if there was an OSX build on top of FreeBSD, then Apple would be able to make immediate use of the device driver support for FreeBSD, which if it is behind Linux, is still pretty respectble (and FreeBSD had a decent ATAPI CDROM-burner driver earlier than linux...)
I know you were probably well-intentioned, but I have to take offense to what you say:
"but there are a LOT of W9x users who simply just hate Microsoft, but don't have the technical fortitude to venture into Linux (or *BSD)."
I prefer Windows NT 4.0 to Linux. I really do. Neither of them crash on me, and NT has more apps and a much faster desktop. It has better OpenGL and multimedia support. It takes less RAM than my Slackware/KDE/GNOME combo, and if I didn't need some of the *NIX tools, I would not have Linux on my system. After finagling a lot with it, I am technically competent enough to use and admin it, but I don't really like too. That's a personal desicion, but I really hate it when everyone assumes that people only use Windows because they aren't smart enough to use *NIX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
MacOS X is not UNIX. Why do I have to be the first one to point this out.
A) Ports won't use the BSD API, they will use the MacOS API.
B) New apps won't use the BSD API, they will use the OO API.
C) Cross platform apps will write for the BSD API, and then port it only to Linux.
D) OS X is NOT open source. Any GUI app (ie all Mac apps) immediatly becomes tied to the closed-source sections of the OS.
MacOS X is BSD in name and core only. Everything exposed to the user is unique, and 90% of developers will never get to the BSD layer. As such, BSD won't become any more popular. Take a look at the Linux market. Porting between Linux and BSD essentially takes a recompile and maybe some tweeks, and despite the booming closed-source Linux app market, BSD is getting *NO* extra, native software. Don't get me wrong, I like BSD (FreeBSD) but I really think BSD users are getting their hopes up for what will essentially be another prioriatory OS from Apple.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
You're using circular logic. You say that Linux is more popular with companies because of the GPL, I point out that the BSD license is more favorable to companies, and you say that Linux is better because it is more popular because of the GPL.
Huh?
Why benifits does the GPL have over the BSD license for companies?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
Umm, what interest is the BSD license to closed source drivers? The GPL is not the reason Linux has gained in popularity. In fact, I'm pretty sure that most compaines would prefer to work with the BSD license (ie. the community doesn't raise a farakas for every non-GPL app that uses GPL code.) The reason Linux is popular is not the GPL (commerically, the GPL is more of a hinderence than BSD) but because it insipired a group of hackers, and was at the right place at the right time. Linux started as a project to bring UNIX to some guys desktop machine. It was a new project, and a cool think to hack, so people latched on to it. When OSS BSD was released a few years later, it was already pretty mature, and thus not as fun to develop. As a result of this, you get a determined group of hackers pushing Linux, and a mature group of old-timers pushing BSD. Guess which group has more of an ability to hype and push their software? Also due to the fact that it was hyping at just the right time (Linux pretty much hit the mainstream around the time MS had its problems with the DOJ) it caught on, and thus developers like NVIDIA, Sigma Designs, and Aureal (I don't think those drivers were ever released) have supported Linux. Linux has grown into a good system, but not because of the GPL vs BSD, but because of the type of developers that it brought in. If BSD had been hyped and pushed in the same way, then it would be in the exact same place as Linux.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
First, I agree with you. But at the same time I think everyone knows that /. is sort of "Linux-focused." And I don't think that's bad. There are other sites for Unix in gerneral.
Where is the industry interest in the BSD license?
BSDi
Intel InBusiness Storage Station
Whistle They even mention contributing back code on the job listing link.
Yahoo
I believe BSDi, Whistle and Yahoo have all contributed code and fixes back to FreeBSD. I have no idea if Intel does or not.
Well, you do have a .sig here on /. that takes users toward your site. I'd be willing to bet that the Mac:Linux ratio at /. is much different than it is in the world at large. I'm curious as to what your statistics would look like if you were to remove all hits referred by slashdot. The subject matter of your sites may come into play as well. Sites about avation seem like they would appeal more to the type of person who would run linux than say Beanie Baby sites, which might appeal more to the iMac crowd.
_____________
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
Look at his posting past.
If Bob had proof, he'd mention the parts of Free/Net/Open BSD that have this problem. The source code is out there for ALL to see. Wouldn't take much to prove what he is saying.
Yet we'll never see proof....because Bob is a troll.
Bob posts start at 0.
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
I've played with MacOS X, and I'm very impressed. Here is a GUI that looks and feels amazing, and the underlying technology (Quartz) is a decade ahead of X11.
I plan to get a MacOS X machine running after the official release. That means I'll have 2 BSD machines to the one Linux machine.
But most of the Mac users I know are going to be rather slow to upgrade to Mac OS X. It's going to be several years before Mac OS X is running on the majority of the Mac installed base. And I doubt that your average Linux kiddie is going to fork out for an iMac or a Cube and then manually port his 200 favourite Linux utilities to MacOS X. So BSD isn't going to leapfrog Linux any time next year because of Mac OS X.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Don't forget that most "Linux machines" are also Windows machines. Linux on the desktop (as opposed to the server) is usually dual boot x86. This will skew your platform results in various predictable ways.
For my organization's web site, we get roughly 90% Windows, 8% Mac, 1% Unix (with all major spiders & bots excluded). Also quite predictable, due to differences in content.
And to get a compiler for Rhapsody you don't have to pay anything! MacOS X Server comes with a complete development environment (on the WebObjects CD). For MacOS X (workstation) you have to download the development software seperately, but it is still free.
The next incarnation of MacOS X Server will in practice be MacOS X (workstation) bundled with server components.
My Mac 512 got upgraded to a 512E and then a Mac Plus towards the end of the Plus' product life. (when the price went down.) My IIcx later became a IIci. I seriously thought of getting the IIci to Quadra 700 upgrade, but never brought it to that point. Just this year I changed the LaserWriter IINT I rescued from a dumpster into a IIf.
It was soon after that point where the upgradable models became fewer. By now, they've stopped completely. But this is a fairly recent development, not how it "has always been".
I started using Linux back in 94' because I wanted to learn Unix. Since then many new distros have come about and they just keep getting bigger. I decided to try OpenBSD as my firewall so I could see what all the raving was about. I must say the small amount of software and the easy configuration was very welcomed. I quickly figured out NAT, IPF, installed snort, and secured the machine. I think Linux is awesome if your learning because it introduces into all the preinstalled apps. However, once you know which services/programs you want to run and are concerned with having to much crap installed BSD makes a great alternative. I'm debating trying out FreeBSD as a workstation instead of Linux now.
Well, I deserved that to some extent. Of course,
:-)
I could turn around and point out that in your kind, gentle, emotionally controlled manner you're being quite condescending. Not to mention wearing your heart on your sleeve with the suicide comment. As much as mastery over one's emotions is part of maturing, so is a certain amount of reserve. Approaching strangers with your personal problems (or triumphs, for that matter) is...tacky in my mind. Judging other people based on one post is also fairly shortsighted--my physical and mental health are very good in fact! The blinders people often wear just annoy me sometimes.
As for the HP-UX/AIX ==> Guru, that's not quite what I intended, although I see how it came across as that. What I meant was that (any single platform) =X=> Guru, and also that it's pointless (and socially harmful) to be a zealot when you only know one thing.
As for considering myself a guru, all I can say is HAH! I might achieve that status in my own mind the day I die, but not before. In the meantime, I'll keep working on it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
I have used both PPCLinux and Debian on Macintosh hardware without difficulty. Since I believe that Debian is the better distro (mostly for the package system), and you've had no luck with LinuxPPC, I'd recommend Debian to you.
I have it installed on 2 ancient 68k macs, and my roomate runs Debian on a PPC as his main (bedroom) machine. The only time problems arise is when things like NES emulators make use of assembly code and can't run on the PPC processor, but other than that Debian has been completely usable and stable.
My only advice would be to "apt-get install aptitude" as soon as you have the basic installation finished, and never mention the word "dselect" again...aptitude is my preferred package selection GUI, but opinions (naturally) differ.
Sotto la panca, la capra crepa
WMBC freeform/independent online radio.
One of the Unix grognards at a previous job (you know the type: bearded, glasses, suspenders, covered in moss and cat5) said that the "Slowlaris" thing arose from the switch-over from SunOS to Solaris in that Solaris 2.0->2.(3?4?) had a lot of legacy stuff from SunOS (i.e. BSD utils running against compatibility libs) lurking within the sysV exterior. I have no idea if he's right (I was, what, 12 when that happened?), but on the face of it it sounds logical.
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
This is one of the reasons I bought my iMac.
The newer iMacs work well (iMac DV or above - $999 most places), but you will need an extra 128Mb stick of PC 100 memory - and maybe more. I'd say 192k is minimum since there are few OSX native apps yet, so a lot of things start up classic and slow down OSX.
You can get to the console, and OSXnews and the darwin sites have all the tips to get things going. There are a number of differences - you need to use NetInfo which configures in the Mac environment. And the GUI is innovative - not just the annoying eye-candy (Windows has the wait for the popup to fade out, OSX has a very quick, I'm minimizing to this position on the dock).
You need to get the public beta (or better yet, join the developer's program - some of the things you will want are on the devtools disk) - Darwin is free, but the beta is a nominal charge.
And you can run Xdarwin if you grow tired of OSX or nostalgic for plain X.
netatalk lets me mount my Linux system on my Mac, OSX/Darwin has NFS. Linux afpfs is one of those abandoned things and hasn't been updated to the 2.4 kernel (I did a little work and it could recognize my mac from linux but it wouldn't get the dirents/inodes right).
And I can use my iMac as my non hacked computer (ok, I've opened it up and it is running an ATAPI DVD hanging outside instead of the stock CD-ROM - I needed it until I got a firewire-scsi converter, but I do most of my surfing on the iMac, and even use it to log in to my Linux box to check email).
Bzzzt. EOF is not present in Mac OS X. (Yes, they fucked that too)
Apple just promised to release a ObjC EOF for Mac OS X after consumer releases (Which don't means anything, as apple promises have about no incidence on reality)
But, in the big picture, yes, Mac OS X == NeXTstep 6 (which much more bugs...)
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
Congrats Bob.
The 'stack frame buffer' idea is just neat. Too bad there as soo much humorless moderators out there...
Cheers,
--fred
1 reply beneath your current threshold.
My guess is that although Apple has Aqua running on BSD kernel, Linux users will have no real difficulty either porting Aqua to Linux or just making Quazi-Aqua on Linux.
It will take some time to educate all those cocky (IMO) mac-admins to use the REAL system such as FreeBSD. I do not think that Apple can get away with simply building a gui around "hands-on" system administration. Thus - it will be necessary to educate users a little bit to go over to "Anti-Mac User Interface".
But here is a chance for Linux - it can be more agile to offer new things (although sometimes not particularly stable). And I know plenty of Mac users who have already tried ppclinux.
Time will show what's best, anyway.
Go figure.
Just cruise the "ported applications" section of the website and you'll find hundreds.
Yes, I have used OSX. You're missing the point. I can get gcc, etc. But it doesn't ship on the CD's. And downloading over a phone line isn't free in terms of time, and in many parts of the world in terms of money. Second, as to porting, no, software will not port well from OSX -> *BSD. The only shared APIs are for command line apps, and when was the last time you saw a graphics-free mac app? Well, I'm waiting... As to the X-windows issues, you again miss the point. There are X servers, but the ones that will run inside Aqua don't come with the libs to compile against - they assume you're running remotely. The java servers are the same way. So to get an X program working, you have to install XFree (which can't run because it can't get the display), compile against it, and then run the binaries against another XServer running inside Aqua. You've betrayed the spirit of the Mac if you think that's an acceptable solution.
It's a shame, because while a use FreeBSD exclusivly on my laptop (KDE2 made freebsd a servicable workstation without LINUX emulation, thanks to KOffice), I'm certainly not adverse to the idea of having a commercial BSD with real apps. It just doesn't appear that OSX really fills that niche.
The obligatory link to Jordan Hubbard's Salon article and review of OSX is here. It's largly a rant about open source, but the second page covers the technical issues in a clear and unbiased way.
I was once a Mac user. Many moons ago I liked MacOS. I enjoyed using the various design applications around. I lamented the lack of games, and I had to use substandard office applications, but the design stuff was industry standard. Slowly I drifted toward the WinTel side as more and more of my favourites were ported across, until I eventually decided that I'd bin my Mac and go totally PC. I learnt the OS, and learnt all the new shortcut keys, and I never looked back.
What it boils down to, from a user point of view, is that applications make an OS. Sure, open source is good. A free base is nice too. But if the software simply doesn't exist then you can't use it. I've taught myself linux in my spare time, but only as a challenge. I could never use it for work because the things I do (web development and print media) aren't supported by the software houses as well as they are on a PC platform. Perhaps OSX will get support from Quark, Adobe, Macromedia, Kinetix and so on. But until it does, for me, it'll be little more than a nice distraction.
http://twitter.com/onion2k
Its not about the current userbase, instead its all about the PROJECTED usrbase. BSDs like FreeBSD are are making strides just as linux is. Plus with linux compatability it is certainly is a good OS. And fom having used it somewhat I can definately say it has desktop funtionality and is not just for servers. But what hell is a SLICE ? Strengh and honour !
Unless the Mac suddenly takes off of course, but I'll believe that when I see it!
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
That's my point: they are all somewhat different. So the very concept of "BSD surpassing Linux" because OSX gets used more widely doesn't make much sense.
Altogether, we should be happy. We have a good number of free, high quality UNIX-like systems. It seems pointless to engage in semantic debates about whether BSD will surpass Linux by the subtle historical argument of counting OSX as an implementation of BSD. For practical purposes, all these systems are very similar.
Kinda like soup is basically just water with some stuff added : )
(Sorry, couldn't help myself, its been a long day already.)
friends don't let friends use nt
Let's get drunk and delete production data!
The issue is not Linux vs. BSD, it is open vs. closed. I use Linux and look forward to trying the various BSD's when I have time. It is the openness of these systems that attract me. While I may play with OS X, I will never buy a Mac. I will not go back to proprietory systems. Now, if Apple were to open up the proprietory layers....
They're not devils they're daemons.
Normally I'm an advocate of "It's not 'FreeBSD vs Linux', it's 'FreeBSD and Linux' -- different tools with different strengths, use the right tool for the job", but frankly sometimes when I'm trying to use FreeBSD as the right tool for the right job I find myself wishing I could do it with Linux instead.
Linux is the de facto superior workstation OS (easier to work with, more features, more apps (not all of which run under FreeBSD's linux support)), but FreeBSD is the de facto superior server OS (stability, stability, stability).
I like FreeBSD for its stability under load, its
I've been poking around at the various Linux distributions for several years, and none of them that I've tried managed to shore up Linux's shortcomings, either, so I've continued to prefer FreeBSD for heavily-loaded servers, but I still think that The Real Solution is to develop a Linux distribution which makes it as good as / better than FreeBSD for server work. I've been wanting an excuse to work on the kernel anyway, and I might be able to do it on company time if I can pitch it to elbossman right. Look for Annie-Linux (I'm a big Eurythmics fan) in, oh, three or five years.
-- Guges --
I want to do this because I read some posts (like the parent; nothing personal, you just happened to remind me of this question of mine) that complain about some view of the traditional Slashdot user and I wonder what posts they are talking about. Sure, you see some "linux r00ls" posts, but if you exclude the blatant trolls, I don't remember reading that many. To be fair, I realize that I may have a mental filter when I scan the posts that makes the stupid ones (like what the parent post complains about) recede into the background and the posts that complain about them stick out.
Hopefully that makes sense. I can't tell if our perceptions of Slashdot are colored by preconceived notions of the types of posts we expect to find.
If someone gets bored enough to do this for a psychology/sociology assignment, let me know. :)
Perhaps they will grow up. :-)
The interesting thing is that many of these people tend to judge by the looks. This year I had several people who perceived my FreeBSD box running under Windowmaker as a Linux box. Obviously they associated something totally alien with a BSD box and did not really grasp the idea that under UNIX the GUI is portable. For them KDE or GNOME is synonymous for Linux (yes, arghll!)
So both "worlds" have many in common, but also important differences (BSD license vs GPL, rather centralistic development vs loose development..)
My belief is, that the BSD will benefit from the BSD license. It is more free and allows for cooperation with industry. The GPL might have its advantages, but is not really the optimum for world of free and commercial/closed software.
I don't buy that argument.. the same could be said for Sun, but they make an X86 Solaris. Why? At least partly because they know if people use it on x86 and get experience with it, they might then buy Sun computers knowing how much better it will/could be on it. There are other reasons too (so that admins who work on Sparcs can use Solaris at home too without the high cost of sparc machines), but that's one of the primary ones IMO.
Well, that works for Sun. Sun's advantage is it's highly scalable server software. This isn't the same as the desktop market. The kind of person who would buy a high end Sun server wouldn't be able to find the same performance in any current x86-based server. It's not just more, faster chips. There are a number of other reasons too.
However, Apple is in the desktop market. The speed advantage of Apple hardware is a slight thing at best nowdays, while the price is still at a premium. I don't regret my purchase of a PowerMac G4 at the time I made it. It was far better than any x86 machine on the market at the time. Times have changed, but the prices have not. The price ratio is no longer worth paying on the merit of higher performance alone, and recent trends over the past few years should show anyone knowledgeable in computers that the public cares far more about low price than high performance. Witness the explosion of sub-$1000, then sub-$800, then sub-$500 markets.
What are the two reasons to buy from Apple, then? If you're new to computers, fashion is probably a factor. If you're not, then the Mac OS is the more important reason. You make the Mac OS available on cheaper albiet slower and less reliable hardware and most people won't care. They wouldn't pay the premium for Apple hardware, unless they liked the looks. Remember, I'm talking about normal, uninformed people -- not computer geeks like us.
That guts Apple's hardware sales. We saw the exact same thing when Apple allowed clone makers. Questionably superior or inferior hardware, offered for much less than Apple's offerings. Basically, it ate Apple alive. So, what does Apple have left? While dropping hardware would cut their costs, the vast majority of their profits come from their hardware. There are only a few OS-only companies. They usually either:
1) Try to sell their OS at a premium, with limited success (NeXT)
2) Lead some particular profitable niche market (QNX)
3) Supplant their OS research with other products (Apple, Microsoft)
4) Offer support for arcane, user-unfriendly OSes (*cough* Linux distros *cough*)
5) Flounder until they can do one or more of 1-4 or die (Be)
Apple has next to no other real compelling software to sell, like MS, and they no longer dominate any markets that Windows or other can't really compete in. The whole goal of the Mac OS is to make living off of support nigh-impossible, so their choices are to jack up prices -- which will chafe most cheap consumers (who are probably already paying for Windows anyway on x86 hardware) -- or they can take the nosedive to death. It really is that limited.
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
You know, wanting to keep parts of their system closed has nothing to do with the choice of BSD over Linux. Everything that Linux would've done (the BSD layer) is already open source. Everything else in the OS is just a user-space app. You can drop in a new copy of the Darwin kernel and not disturb a single thing in the system. The GPL in no way bars closed apps from being run on an open system.
The real reason Apple went with BSD is because Mac OS X is basically an updated version of NeXT's OPENSTEP OS that can run Carbon apps, has a new graphics sub-system, Java, and includes a few new apps like the emulation environment that runs Classic Mac OS programs. NeXTSTEP and OPENSTEP were based on BSD/Mach. All Apple did was update the Mach kernel and update the BSD 4.3 code to BSD 4.4 from some Free distributions.
Using Linux would've involved ripping out the UNIX underpinnings and replacing them for negligible gain. It was a smarter move to stay with what had been proven to work for NeXT. (Though I really, really wish that they'd adopt GNU syntax in the command-line utilities. It's so much better.)
If it's for-profit but free, you're not the customer -- you're the product (e.g., the Slashdot Beta's "audience").
By the same token, I'm pretty sure that most people would notice, and probably regret, if they were to be moved, without their consent, from one of these platforms to the other.
Carefree highway, let me slip away on you.
Linux was created by geeks, and despite the immense brainpower of said geeks, it's been difficult to get large numbers of non-geeks to use Linux as their primary home or buisiness desktop computer.
Think about it - how many friends/family do you know who use Linux as their primary desktop machines to use the Internet, file their recepies, write memos, do their taxes, etc.?
Apple is and always has been the most well-known innovator on the consumer computer hardware side of the market. When they lead, others follow. Cast aside arguments about the merits of their technology, but think about how many times their lead has been followed by other OEMs.
Now imagine the leader in consumer computer hardware using a BSD variant as their OS. Now imagine other hardware vendors thinking to themselves - hmm.. we could take a cue here, cast off the M$ shackles, and use a BSD variant on OUR machines.
Until BSD and Linux can get past the stigma of being seen as useful only to geeks, neither OS will take a significant bit out of M$ in the consumer market. Right now the only hardware vendor capable of spearheading that charge is Apple.
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
Here's a better article (I think) on BSD's rising star.
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As a matter of fact, I am a lawyer. But I play an actor on TV.
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LinuxPPC has the excellent implementation of Applixware and hopefully that will continue to happen, though of course there is some doubt with the recent decision by Applix to focus on server-side instead of the desktop app market. Supposedly StarOffice will be available for LinuxPPC but I don't think that has happened yet.
There was a reasonable comparison between Mac on Linux under LinuxPPC and the Classic environment under OS X which basically said that OS X does a better job intergrating the earlier OS's (just in a window) but they both are very reasonable.
It's psychosomatic. You need a lobotomy. I'll get a saw.
I honestly don't understand the hype surrounding MacOS X. So far, the fact that Apple is producing a UNIX seems to be the only lure to people like Slashdotters.
At best, we're being handed another UNIX that could possible have more compatability issues than any other. We already have four ring leaders in free UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems as it is, and they've all been around long enough to be proven perfectly functional in production environments.
I guess what I'm trying to ask is, can someone rationalize the community interest in MacOS X? What does it offer over other UNIX environments, other than yet another OS alternative? Why should I take interest in this? Apple has never offered anything to me personally or professionally. Why should this change just because they're releasing an operating system that beats with the heart of BSD? This seems like nothing more than a toy to keep people with Mac hardware laying around entertained, coupled with a boat-load of hype.
Look at it this way: I want to be interested in MacOS X, but I can't find any reason. Please help! :^)
Relating to the topic of the article, I don't see hype being quite enough to divert people's attention away from existing free UNIX operating systems (and non-free in the case of Solaris, which seems to be most popular down commercial avenues). All hope for MacOS X lies in whether or not it can perform as well or better than other UNIX alternatives when it finally hits x86. Providing adequate support for hardware, both natively and from manufacturers, will also be an important contributing factor. If MacOS X can't do this initially, I doubt people will ever take it seriously. Initial disappointment could have lasting repercussions if it does eventually become a scalabale and stable operating system. Linux and *BSD have more than proven themselves, but MacOS X hasn't been given that opportunity.
To say that 'BSD is likely to rival Linux very soon in total number of users' while MacOS X is still in development seems absurdly silly to me, more so considering that it currently operates only on a statistically unpopular (and thus far workstation-oriented) platform. I feel that Henry Kingman has grossly underestimated the popularity and portability Linux offers, both as an extremely stable serving environment, and as an evolving desktop environment. Not to mention the other (currently available) BSDs.
NickIn embedded devices, I'd bet. Does that matter? If OSX is BSD based, but Joe Average mac user barely knows about it, does that matter? What can Apple's involvement do to help proliferation of BSD? Apple isn't known for SMP, server market, scalability, etc, and on the desktop side, all the eye candy is being kept proprietary. So, other than a talking point, I can't see Apple aiding the BSD cause all that much.
Yes, streaming media services may be nice, but I am looking for something that could really cause heightened BSD deployments.
ostiguy, openbsd firewall user
MacOSX = Rhapsody 5.7+ Rhapsody = OPENSTEP for Mach (product code name change as of Apple buyout) OPENSTEP for Mach = NeXTSTEP (product name change as of Sun-NeXT co-released OpenStep spec.)
therefore (transitive property)
MacOSX = NeXTSTEP
The series, each of which is comprised of some version of Mach, BSD, Display Postscript, and Objective-C Frameworks:
NeXTSTEP 1.x
-BSD4.4-lite
-Mach 2.5
-DPS
-Objective-C + Appkit Framework
NeXTSTEP 2.x
-BSD4.4-lite
-Mach 2.5 + extensions
-DPS
-Objective-C + Appkit Framework
NeXTSTEP 3.0..3.3
-BSD4.4-lite
-Mach 2.5 + more extensions
-DPS
-Obj-C + Appkit + Foundation Kit (early kit)
OPENSTEP 4.0..4.2
-BSD4.4-lite
-Mach 2.5 + more extensions
-DPS
-Obj-C + New OpenStep frameworks + EOF
Rhapsody 5.x (Early Apple prototype)
-BSD4.4-lite
-Mach 2.5 + blah blah
-DPS
-Obj-C + OpenStep core frameworks (Codenamed Yellowbox) + extensions + EOF
MacOSX Server 1.x (Rhapsody 5.7) same as the above, but stabler.
MacOSX 1.x (Rhapsody 5.x [where x    -BSD4.4-lite
   -Mach 3 + fidly bits
   -DisplayPDF (Quartz)
   -Obj-C + enhanced OpenStep frameworks (Now called Cocoa) + EOF
BSD bits were taken from NetBSD and FreeBSD, with (I thought) some userland from OpenBSD.
EOF = Enterprise Object Framework - an Object-to-Relational Database adapter layer (very very good.)
OK, I'm about to find out if the points I've already given out in a thread get trashed now that I'm posting in it. (Note: If they do, then I apologise to the only person who's said anything
/.:
/., and they know (at least the good ones do) where the different systems shine. If you're nodding along with this, you know what I mean. If you're going, "but I'm not like that--he's an asshole!" then you're quite possibly _exactly_ who I'm talking about.
worthwhile so far on this article.) I just can't ignore this stupidity any longer.
Here's what I hear most of the time on
"I am a unix guru. I work with Linux linux linux linux linux linux linux (solaris) linux and linux.
I tried to install BSD once, but it didn't work so it sucks. I know, because I am a unix guru."
Most of you haven't even touched Unix as a field--you've played with different distros of a _single_ variant of Unix (which very pedantically isn't even Unix at all), which is about as significant as playing with the different versions of Win95. THERE'S A WHOLE SHITLOAD MORE OUT THERE, and almost NONE of you posters have even seen it, let alone know enough to comment intelligently about it.
Anyone played with HP-UX? How about AIX (eek!)?
Tru64 is kinda different too. Then there's SCO Unix (if you can afford it), IRIX, and so on.
It comes down to this: I'm sick of evangelists who Know the One True Path to Enlightenment, and feel that sullying themselves with broader knowledge (not to mention history) would be Blasphemy. Or maybe they're just scared to find out that Linux (or BSD, or even Solaris or ANY single OS) isn't the perfect, magic, foolproof solution to everything.
Naturally, there _are_ true Unix professionals on
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
OS X Workstation will be nice. But it really is a "Mac" approach to BSD. OS X Server on the otherhand, is what most of us think of when we compare NetBSD, FreeBSD, etc. to OS X.
We have an OS X Server (Rhapsody) here, supporting the networked filesystems. At first glance it seems pretty cool. But the SCSI drivcers (for a very popular PCI SCSI card, probably the most popular) are really alpha quality. They don't even support disconnect, which causes a kernel panic when you remove a tape from the tape drive, in use or not. And the only tape backup solution for OS X Server was pulled off of the shelves for legal problems. Even with that removed, under loads the computer randomly crashes, even without third party software (of which there exists little). To get a compiler for Rhapsody, you have to shell out tons for a developer's kit and membership. Linux is soon replacing that OS X Server here.
For Apple to propel OS X (and thus BSD) beyond Linux, they need to devote more attention to OS X Server than they have before. I understand Apple plans to do this when OS X Workstation is released, to make OS X Server more compatable with the workstation product, and therefor more useable. But I don't hold my breath- last I heard they were delaying it. Hopefully Apple will see the potential and avoid ignoring the Server product.
- popularity
- availability of a rich suite of apps
- whether the platform is stable (doesn't crash)
- speed/efficiency
- cost
At this point, Linux is way ahead of the other UNIX-like siblings on popularity, and also leads in app availability.I'm an old UNIX and BSD hacker and bigot (since the '70's), and I personally think that BSD is a better, more robust, more secure, slicker software distribution than Linux, but I understand that Linux has the upper hand in the market just because of more effective hype.
It might sound sensible to say "Why can't we all just get along?" or even "Why can't these Linux kids give UNIX/BSD their props?" but that matter is no more objective than OS preference.
Actually, there is quite a difference between
"UNIXalikes" maybe at the command line they are all similar, but even then there are significant differences by default. I'll just compare Solaris and standard GNU/Linux distros. The shell of choice in solaris is ksh, which behaves differently somewhat from bash, the linux favorite. Also, linux usually ships with GNU fileutils, while solaris does not. Just use ps on both and you'll realize that there are some fundamental differences in the way they interface.
In the GUI front, solaris still sticks by CDE, while Redhat tends to like to use GNOME, and mandrake uses kde.. Also, under solaris you basically get no VCs, which is also quite a large diff.
From the standpoint of development, the systems have really different behaving environments. Just try to use dlopen() under both and you'll see. Also, try to write a multi-threaded X app in Solaris and then port it to linux. Chances are, in linux, you'll get tons of async replies before you add mutexes, semaphores, and special X calls for threading. Solaris X environment is *much* more thread safe than XFree86.
No matter how you look at it, while "UNIXalikes" may be very similar, there are many fundamental differences that distinguish them and cause preferences one way or the other. All in all, things are probably about equal, just some prefer one style over another...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The differences between UNIXalikes are not worth quibbling about. From a user perspective and a programmer perspective, they are just about the same beast. It's like arguing about the radical differences between driving Ford Explorer and a Chevy Blazer (hint: there are none).
The only trouble here is that some people have religiously latched onto Linux and don't want to hear that it is 95% of something called UNIX, which has been around for nearly 30 years. They want Linux to be some kind of l33t inside secret. But in truth BSD and Linux are identical twins with different hobbies. That's not a put down of either system--or any of the other UNIXalikes such as Solaris--just a suggestion that this shouldn't be a feud.
Well, linux has already outnumbered *BSDs and OSX combined.
But that is largely irrelevant. With the introduction of autoconf, the open source components of these technologies will complement each other. Openssh was taken from openbsd to *BSD and linux. GNOME and KDE are largely linux developed, but work fine on *BSD.
The largest linux companies look at big business UNIX and Microsoft as the competition for different markets. *BSD and linux will both continue to grow at the expense of Microsoft and mainframe Unices. The market dynamics may have a few people going from linux to *BSD (and fewer going the other direction), but the changes in user base for linux and *BSD are coming not from each other but from Microsoft and mainframe Unix.
The media loves to play up battles, like KDE/GNOME, Redhat/Mandrake... but the reality is that KDE and GNOME help each other more than they hurt each other through competition. The same is true of Mandrake and Redhat. Any improvements made by open source companies in software lead to strengthening of all open source companies' software.