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FreeBSD 4.1.1 vs. Linux 2.4
A reader writes: "This byte.com
article finds byte.com's Linux guru wondering why he isn't running
FreeBSD. 'Linux 2.4.0 is available for no money. So is FreeBSD. Linux uses
advanced hardware, so does FreeBSD. FreeBSD is more stable and
faster than Linux, in my opinion. We penguinistas sometimes believe
we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence
and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And
their OS is as fast as I have seen.
I have to ask myself why I don't just switch my server to FreeBSD.'"
Please only post if you know anything about the topic. Linux has the POSIX.4 realtime extensions also, but they don't help if the OS doesn't call schedule for 60 milliseconds, or leaves interrupts disabled for too long.
I get 2ms MAX latency on a P133 running Linux 2.4 + mingo's low latency patch. People have reported even better latency with 2.2 and the older patch.
Even plain old stock linux can get down to about 10 ms if you have SCSI disks.
FreeBSD can't really compete. They tend to optimize for throughput, which in most cases is mutually exclusive with latency. Throughput vs Latency is similar to speed vs memory use. Its one of the classic tradeoffs of software design.
All you linux worms get shit wrong including Moshe.
cdrom.com runs on...
This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
230-The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
230-FreeBSD, please visit http://www.freebsd.org for more information.
230-
That's all very well and good but most developers prefer BSD licenses because it allows them to profit from bsd code and to contribute on their own terms, instead of Stallman's.
If you have any hope of every releasing a product for money, dont even look at gpl shit.
AIX - great for db2
HPUX - rarely falls over due to system load (but SIGBUSS!!!) (ugly OSF)
Solaris - Wonderful if it isn't x86
FreeBSD - Wonderful with just the right hardware on x86
linux - Runs relatively nice on almost any x86 hardware
irix - I once new a guy who used that.
true64(digital) - ugly, but alphas are nice (OSF)
NT - great for Windows software
BSDi - for when freeBSD won't cut it
Plan 9 - I hear they run that in outer space
Hurd - RMS will love ya
Xenix - if it must be microsoft
SCO Openserver/Unixware - if you are insane
Multics - nastalgia
xinu - cool name
The point being hard... hardware matters... solaris is ugly on x86 but nice on *sparc.... you don't get something for nothing. FreeBSD IMHO does beat linux if the hardware is good. If the hardware is bad.... LOOK OUT!
An OS benchmark that doesn't benchmark system calls? Unless Linux or FreeBSD is somehow activating the "go fast" bits on the CPU that the other isn't, those benchmarks will run at exactly the same speed.
Does this guy know anything about programming? 1) long != float. 2) floating point is CPU-architecture dependant, not OS dependant 3) printf probably takes way longer to execute than a division statement. How many clock cycles does this idiot think FP division takes????
HAHAHAHAHAHA!!!! Go learn C. There's no way floating points ops are going to be generated by this. int and longs are integer types. 28.2 will be transformed in an long at compile time (if it's not optimized out).
Oh, well. I don't care who had what "first", all I know is I'm happy with Debian, thanks.
*yawn*.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
You could've thrown an "Oh, and Microsoft sucks, too!" in there for good measure.
- A.P.
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
apt-get update
apt-get upgrade
--
* CmdrTaco is an idiot.
"Remember when the U.S. had a drug problem, and then we declared a War On Drugs, and now you can't buy drugs anymore?"
(this is not a troll)
:)
But can you play quake on it?
I use linux for my desktop and server for reasons I'm sure I don't have to explain here. However, I wouldn't mind playing with *BSD. Thing is, in my desktop configuration I use it for the standard gnome/kde/etc stuff as well as my one game of choice, quake. I can definately still play with *bsd on the server side, but I'd also like to know if I can see how it works as a desktop environment[1]
[1] disclaimer - a desktop environment for ME that is, not necisarily anyone else
This question really depends on if you are looking to get your ass kicked or are just hungry :)
but wait, there's chkconfig (comes with redhat):
[root@tomato oliver]# /sbin/chkconfig --list ntpd /sbin/chkconfig --level 2345 ntpd off
ntpd 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off
[root@tomato oliver]#
sysvinit complexity woes gone!
I think the chkconfig with redhat 7 even allows you to manage xinetd services. sweet.
this is just like solaris's nca (network cache accelerator) which made its debut in 2.8, or maybe 2.7/isp pack.. it uses solaris doors to communicate with the userland web server, but I don't think any server but sun's web server works with it yet. dunno..
Fortunately, the tradeoff between the two (compatibility vs quality) is not on the order of Unix versus Windows. For most purposes, one Unix is pretty much equivalent to another.
I am sure that many of either userbase would have just started using Solaris if it supported common PC hardware sooner.
As things played out, Linux got there first.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...and people whine about Linux "fragmentation".
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
If you aren't going to collectively put the effort into seeing that your interests are seen to, then why should Linux developers give a damn? The code is open. It's there for you to "fix", if that is really the problem.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Linux is a COLLECTION of distributions.
Whereas FreeBSD has just the one.
If there's something you don't like about FreeBSD, your only reasonable option is not to use FreeBSD at all.
OTOH, a problem with Redhat only means that you avoid Redhat rather than Linux in general.
"Standardization" and "Fragmentation" both have thier benefits and drawbacks.
On the third hand, there were fixes available to address the holes that Ramen exploits before Ramen existed.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...just so you don't trigger any pedantics regarding whether or not code itself can posses liberty...
It is far more accurate to say:
Freedom of USER, not freedom of coder.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...just so you don't trigger any pedantics regarding whether or not code itself can posses liberty...
It is far more accurate to say:
Freedom of USER, not freedom of coder.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
...just so you don't trigger any pedantics regarding whether or not code itself can posses liberty...
It is far more accurate to say:
Freedom of USER, not freedom of coder.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Unless those applications and drivers can be shared between MacOS X and FreeBSD, then your rambling is meaningless.
Macintosh users will remain Macintosh users.
They will still see the world through their Finder. They won't magically become BSD users just because the guts of the OS changed.
MacOS X will use a different core API than xBSD.
MacOS X drivers will likely not run under any PPC version of xBSD, nevermind x86.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Sysadmin that asks himself "why I just don't switch my server to something else" should be thrown out from his work immediately. He obviously has too much time in his hands. Server OS should never be switched because "some other OS is cooler". Only because the present installation has some hard problems.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
A reference implementation is meant to be easily understood
:)
What the use of the reference implementation which nobody (outside RMS camp) can look at, let alone base on, without risk of being sued by FSF?
wide heterogeneity is the next best thing to homogeneity to ensure interoperability
Did you ever try to port something between Unix systems? If you did, you probably know that heterogenity is not so good if you have to support them all. It would be good if everybody would agree on most aspects, but in the reality it happens that everybody disagrees on most aspects, making porter's life a living hell.
Users of GPL'd code have more (and more secure) freedom
You know, users of the high-security prison cell have "more secure freedom" too. Until they want to get out. If you want to be out of the GPL cell, tough luck. You might never want - it's pretty comfortable one. But claiming it's freedom means not telling the full truth.
A system which offers the right to deny others their rights is contradictory
Why would it be? That seems to be just a slogan. I never saw any proof of this being contradictory. Even RMS doesn't claim this - it claims it to be morally wrong. Which means our moral differs, but that's OK - everybody has his own moral anyway.
And, BTW, not all proprietary s/w is crap. A lot of it is - but a lot of free s/w is too. There are pretty good for-money products (I'm writing some of them, surely
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
I'd disagree. In every software project that has limited resources, the more features you add the more concessions that you'll have to make in order to get those features. Having a small set of highly specific tools is always better. If you have one tool that tries to do everything, eventually your going to have to force a interface on one type of action that isn't the best way for that type of action.
I'm sure this is going to come accross as a Linux-loving "penguinista" who feels insulted, but a few errors and omisisons in this article have bothered me.
First, as many people have pointed out, his Netfinity 5100 does not have 768gb of RAM, but instead mb, but what I have not seen his his understatement of the ftp.cdrom.com server. It is not a PPro 200 with 1gb RAM and a RAID5, it's (by its own admission) a Xeon 500 with 4gb RAM and a 500gb RAID5 (And I seem to remember something about it being multi-processor, but I can't confirm that).
Also, yes the FreeBSD community are having their own party and more power to 'em. But one of the things I like about the Linux community's party is the guest list. We invite everyone and they can all bring something. The FreeBSD party seems to have gotten a little snooty in their admissions process and what people can bring to their little soiree (I know I spelled that wrong so shaddap). Also the FreeBSD party has two, count 'em two barbeques (If we're to stick to the block-party metaphore), one Intel IA32 and one Alpha. Linux has how many now? Let's see. Off the top of my head, IA32, IA64, ARM, Crusoe, M68k, PPC, Sparq, Sparq64, and for the company cook-out, S390. And those are just the "official" hardware. So when the venerable IA32 finally dies its justified death we won't have to scrap everything and start over.
Yeah we've paid a little speed price for that, but what we lack in speed we make up for in style. I love the modularization of the later kernels, and I use it heavily. Yeah it might add a little bit to my overhead, but I can load and unload all the drivers I need when I need them. I am not aware of any other OS where I can turn on my scanner and then load the SCSI driver and have it find the device without a reboot.
And we're still the "new kid on the block" as they like to point out, but we're also the second biggest game in town anymore (Behind the one in the North West).
And as many wise men have mentioned, technological superiority alone will win you nothing in the end.
Improvise, adapt, and overcome.
So the idea is once the computer is provisioned, it's put behind several locked doors and only X number of people have direct console access. These are usually people who have proven themselves not to be k1dd13z.
So, once it's sitting in the data center, it's that much harder to run a brute force attack on the root account.
Sure, a cracker could still get root by dropping into single user mode at the command line and changing the root password there, but if he/she is there, you have bigger problems.
-- The unsig...
But, unlike Linux and *BSD, if Be dies so does BeOS!
Yes Be...With USD 16,000.00 in revenue last quarter I am sure they will be around for a looooong time...
Well, Linus doesn't write code for JUST Linux, AFAIK he submitted a patch of some sort for FreeBSD once:)
Simple, you add yourself to the wheel group! And presto chango, you can su all you like.
NO he didn't. He said that he found that Linux performence improved when tunning the system. I did not read it to mean that the benchmarks were made after tunning the system.
-- You can be a geeklord too
Oh come on. When there is a well known, well documented performence bug in a x.x.0 release you can't very well do a benchmark and proclaim it is useful in showing people how a machine performs. The last benchmark on slashdot showed Linux ahead of Freebsd in web serving and behind on most everything else. Now we are seeing just the opposite go figure.
-- You can be a geeklord too
2.96 is the shipping compiler with redhat 7. I don't care if its based off swiss cheese. Redhat provides support for 2.96 (including bug fixes) so wether or not its offically supported by the "gcc developers" is pointless.
-- You can be a geeklord too
How was Linux optimized? I did not seem him change any /proc settings.
-- You can be a geeklord too
Did I read the report wrong or did Linux beat FreeBSD in Mysql and sendmail?
-- You can be a geeklord too
Yeah but it turns into a benchmark of who can load apache daemons faster.. rather then who can serv webpages the fastest :)
-- You can be a geeklord too
Unless you really *ARE* an 31337 h4x0r, there is not much point in running them on the desktop.
The two machines I spend my time in front of (at work and at home) are both Windows dual-booting with a unix. At home FreeBSD 4.1, and at work Debian. I think I probably would rank those OS's in terms of Desktop niceness and usability: Win2k, FreeBSD, Debian. This is out-of-the-box setup of each.
In terms of hardware support, Win2k supports everything, FreeBSD and Debian seem about equal, although I haven't bothered try to get my USB devices working on either since that seems a bit of a lost cause if it isn't a common device (it's a Plustek scanner, a Wacom Intuos and an MS Strategic Commander). As far as I can tell, both 'support USB' to the extent they can tell the devices are there, and not much more.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
Either Addison-Wesley or O'Reilly had a really nice set of 4 or 5 books describing BSD4.4 (or 4.4Lite) when it was released, written by the developers. They seem to have disappeared lately though - I guess they're out of print. 4.4 originally came out a good while ago now.
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
You don't get it. If remote root login is enabled, the attacker only needs to brute-force root password. If it is disabled, then you first need to break into a regular user account (and before that, you need to somehow find out the username), and then get root. The latter is considerably harder.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
...but not quite. Last I heard (and that was *two years* ago), cdrom.com got upgraded to a *single* Xeon 450 (or 500?) with 4 GB RAM. Also, the number of simultaneous conntections was increased to 5000.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
This is the way people at byte.com makes thousands of hits thanks to the 'slashdot effect', and the 'Linux vs FreeBSD' effect. It's clearly a flame war article.
C'mon people, FreeBSD is BSD, and Linux is... Linux.
That's too bad. I mean, we have, what? 4,000 packages available? And in up-to-date binaries.
So, since you answered an honest question last time: I really don't understand the insistence on compiling from source when that takes so much time, especially for big packages like X. I mean, there was a guy in another thread talking about how once a month he'd find time to do a "make world." I mean, that's great, but if I had to wait a month to get the latest gnome packages I'd scream. So... pre-compiled apt-get-able binaries for me. Why do you insist on building from source? Why do most of the BSD folks? Is it just because there isn't a better way yet? Or what?
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Oh, of course. I certainly wouldn't try to stop you from doing something bass-ackwards :) I was just honestly curious as to why. Obviously, very low-level control is great. I guess I just feel that Debian's QA is pretty high quality, and I don't really feel like I need all that much control over the exact options being passed to my build process. Whatever- to each their own. Enjoy ;)
~luge
IAAL,BIANLY
Sorry, man, but AGP is a kernel level thing.
Just lettign you know.
DRM is a kernel thing too.
Forgot about that, huh?
GLX is the driver, but thats not a whole lot of improvement if it can't render directly.
What driver are you talking about, exactly.?
Yea.
apt-get -b source gets the source and compiles it with whatever compiler flags you like.
Handy and dandy.
They have a linux workstation with True OpenGL in hardware using an nvidia Geforce II or Geforce2 quadro.
Not that expensive either.
Why do you assume that Debian GNU/BSD would GPL the kernel? The Debian project does not advocate one free license over another (with the exception of patch clauses), and there's not that many GPL-bigots in Debian. We also have no plans to include (much less GPL) a distro. As I discuss elsewhere on this page, if it happens, it will probably just be the kernel that Debian uses.
Why? GNU != GPL! Many GNU projects aren't under a GPL license, and Linux (the kernel) is not a GNU project.
I've always though that FreeBSD was incredibly userfriendly (and you are definitely right about the excellent documentation), I've just thought that it could easily capture the mainstream market on the desktop with so little work.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Well, yes, but I was thinking more of the Graphical Install--> GUI configuration tools of things like rc scripts--> Plus preconfigured menus for the user that include "must-haves" such as Gimp, LyX :-) (ok, I like it), Netscape, xmms, etc.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
The majority of the problems I have with are it's numerous libraries, mostly glibc. Linux isn't a drop in replacement for a FreeBSD server, there are a multitude of reasons why FreeBSD is better as a server, reasons ranging from it's network stack to it's ports collection. It isn't a matter of pulling the parts out and ading in the ones you want, if it was I would pull out the linux kernel, glibc and in the case of red hat and mandrake, RPM and replace them with the freebsd kernel and ports, but then I would have freebsd wouldn't I? So back to my original post, I'll stick to the right tool for the job and a kernel that doesn't try to do everything at once.
I work with both operating systems, more so with Free and Open BSD. My philosophy has always been, "Use the right tool for the right job". This is especially true with UNIX distros. UNIX has forked in so many ways for a reason.
I use freebsd on most of my servers, it's much more stable and easier to manage than most linux distros, emphasis on MOST. I run into a lot of issues with linux ranging from SMP issues in glibc to basic load problems and threading.
Now on the flip side of this coin, FreeBSD makes a horrendous desktop OS offering really poor sound card support and I have yet to come across a decent Xserver for my geforce card.
Use the right tool for the job, FreeBSD is a better server hands down for most purposes, Linux makes a damn fine server as well, especially when we talk about beowulf clusters. FreeBSD and Linux are not competing with each other, I think it's a shame that advocates of either operating system make it appear as if they are.
I don't like an OS that claims to be able to do everything, such as Red Hats Linux distro is doing. To me that shows a lack of focus.
In fact a good analogy came from a biker friend of mine who said:
"You can take a dirt bike on the street but it will perform better in the dirt. You can take a street bike and take it in the dirt but it will perform better in the street."
Just makes sense to me to leave FreeBSD in the dirt, and let Linux have the street.
I completely agree with you here.
The reason I will never use *BSD is entirely because of the license. Great technology, sure, but I don't want to see a return to the unix wars of the early 90's, and without a mechanism for enforcing freedom (i.e. the GPL) *BSD is doomed in our capitalistic system by standard corporate practice.
Yeah, MS may have used *BSD code for some of their TCP/IP utils, and great code it may be, but has *BSD gotten anything in return?
BSD users find BSD comfortable. What a news flash! Every day, I interact with a Solaris machine (at work), a Linux machine (at home), and a BSDi (at my ISP). As long as I set my shell to bash and have the GNU utils override the defaults where possible, I don't notice much of a difference between the three. There's the occasional nit, though, and I have fewer of them on Linux. Also, I don't need to install GNU utils to override the defaults there. So, for me (and it really is me that matters most when picking an OS for my desktop box), Linux is the right choice. For my friend down the hall from me, FreeBSD was the right choice for him for his desktop.
Perhaps characterizing BSD as being like a HAZMAT suit to me is a little harsh. It's more like I consider my firewall that way, regardless of the OS -- harsh, hard, and foreboding.
Anyway, I grew up mostly SysV. Is it surprising that BSD tastes funny to me?
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I'm using a Linux 486 box presently myself. I want / need more services on that box though. Load isn't an issue at all. Security holes are the main gripe. Typically, I like to run telnet (grr... I'm stuck with a couple places I can only telnet from, not ssh from), httpd, and squid, among other things. (At least telnetd is wrapped with a TCP wrapper so only a couple hosts can connect.) I also would like to run (but am rightfully afraid to) FTPD as it makes sharing files much easier. (I have some friends whose http proxy won't let them download files with certain extensions -- eg. mp3 -- but they can FTP just fine.) Every time I see a RH Linux advisory, I cringe.
Right now, I feel I'm reasonably secure as long as I don't enable sendmail, and keep FTPD turned off. Apache will be the same regardless of OS. SSHD doesn't change really, either. So, the OS doesn't matter too much. But still, with that many services running, it's tempting to use an OS whose goal is to be stable, correct, and by extension, secure. Linux simply lacks that maniacal focus.
FWIW, that machine still has Linux on it though. That whole inertia thing. :-)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
I think you have it backwards. MS-DOS was more like a userspace without a kernel. That's why each program of any substance ended up coming packaged with its own protected-mode extender...
Anyway, to drift ever so slightly back on topic, I too am somewhat interested in trying *BSD again. The last time I tried it, I had a working Linux box, and the FreeBSD driver didn't like my EISA SCSI card. (I've gotten a better machine since then for my desktop box, but that old beater still exists as my firewall.)
Most likely, though, I'll just end up going with OpenBSD on my firewall box and running Linux on my desktop machine. I'm more comfortable in Linux than BSD, and so I think I'll just use "the right tool for the task."
I guess the main thing is that I prefer the particular blend of BSD vs. SysV that Linux has, as compared to the solid BSD flavor of the *-BSD variants and the (mostly) solid SysV flavor of OSes like Solaris. I cut my UNIX teeth on an AT&T SVR4 box, but I also got a SunOS 4.x account shortly thereafter. So, early on, I got a taste of what worked best in both worlds. Linux, with its ecclectic "We take what works for us" approach seems to match my desires most closely. (And since I use Solaris daily at work, I'm probably leaning further away from BSD over time.)
So in the end, the machines I need to interact with regularly will probably be Linux boxes, and the machines I need to set up and forget about (and have just working) may end up being *BSD boxes. (Of course, my firewall box happens to be the one with the unhappy EISA card, so until it gets upgraded...)
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
You didn't read what I wrote really closely, did you? For my desktop machine, what matters most is that I find my computing experience comfortable and reasonable and get what I need to do done. I do that best in Linux. For my firewall box, I need something that's reliable, solid, secure, and stable. The consensus among a large number of people is that OpenBSD has a noticeable (and some would say significant) edge over Linux here. (Particularly if you install an overloaded Linux distribution which ships far too many holes.)
How is that not the right tool for the task?
It's sorta like saying, "I'm more comfortable in jeans, T-shirt and sneakers, so that's what I wear everyday. But when I'm out cleaning Superfund sites, I wear a HAZMAT suit." For everyday situations, comfort is more important. For hostile environments, having hardened, impervious gear is more important than comfort.
--Joe--
Program Intellivision!
Also, Debian sucks at ease of automated custom builds from source. For many people this is an issue, including me-- I typically need to setup packages with the precise options I want, and Debian makes it much tougher than BSD.
Just to reply to pary of this, I find deb just as easy for modifying source.. "apt-get source wget". Modify, build, and dpkg -i wget-whatever-level-it-is.deb.
To give up an OS because it doesn't seem to support some obnoxious script is baffling to say the least.
Unless you're plagued with an AZERTY keyboard I don't see much use to have that damm NumLock forced on you on boot.
You couldn't log in as root with ssh because by default, root logins are (and should be) disabled with ssh. This is a good thing.
Dennis
A lot of the issues you cite are human issues, rather than technical ones. People like to use the things they're comfortable with, even if something else is better. Linux has a greater marketshare than FreeBSD, but Windows has a much larger market share than either, should we use Windows?
:)
I would say that Windows out of the box is more friendly than most Linux or FreeBSD distributions, another argument for Windows? Certainly MacOS is "friendlier" than either.
This wouldn't be such a silly discussion topic if it didn't inavriably degenerate into a dick-waving fest. Both Linux and FreeBSD are good. Maybe one is faster than the other in some things, but so what?
Can't we all just get along?
Dennis
The same argument could be made as to why some folks use Windows instead of Linux. Not the best, just the easiest for them.
Keep the Classic Slashdot.
Because it runs on more platforms than Linux?
:)
Because it supports more hardware than Linux?
Because it scales well?
Because it is clusterable?
Because it has a journaling filesystem?
Because the fs performance rules so much?
Because so many companies work on the kernel?
Because there are THOUSANDS of applications?
Oh wait.... I mean Linux.
FreeBSD does have a nice (although less so than Debian IMHO) base system.
FreeBSD is stable. But no more so than Debian/Slackware/Anything-but-RedHat.
FreeBSD is fine for DNS servers and whatnot but it doesn't scale up or down like Linux does and the desktop is not (quite) up to par although Linux "Emulation" brings a lot more apps to it.
FreeBSD is still nice IMHO for a server or a workstation, but cannot compare to Linux in XPlatformness, scalability, desktop-improvement or feature-growth (and you can always not compile more features into it)
Well, I've used many OS's for servers, incl NT, Solaris, Linux, and freeBSD and the guy in the article did some pretty damn good tests. And I would say that his test claims sound quite founded. I've been developing exclusively on Linux since the Redhat 4.2 days and it's been getting better and better in that arena. However, for sheer power and reliability servers demand, freeBSD is a better choice. And I speak out of experience. Oh, and btw, freeBSD is not GPL'd for a reason, of which you, of course, don't know anything about!
FYI, FreeBSD 4.x includes a command called 'burncd' for burning CDs on IDE CD writers.
So there's one less excuse not to use it... :-)
Sold! I will be migrating to FreeBSD in the morning.
Sure, I've been considering it for quite a while, but I could never justify all of the work involved in switching platforms.
It will be a joy to switch. Thanke ye linux, I loved you.
domc
I need sound support on my servers because I have a little script that picks up the phone, dials the user and echos the string, "You have mail" to my speech synthesizer, which is connected to the phone. It does this when any mail for any of our approximatly 2000 clients come in. So you can see how important sound is to me.
I've tried OpenBSD twice, both times it didn't support my IDE controller. How's that for fine howdy-do?
No one is supposed to be standing at your machine. Physical security is important too.
What he means by the first bit is that a user must be in group wheel to su - this means if someone grabs a random account, chances are they won't be able to su to root, whereas in linux and other systems, anyone can, leaving you more open to brute force attacks. RMS described it in the GNU su documentation as being "fascist". I think he was being a moron.
-lx
http://www.freebsd.org/tutorials/new-users/article .html
That's slightly useful for a beginner, but other than that, the Handbook is the place to be. The book "The Complete FreeBSD" is pretty good too.
-lx
My understanding is that gcc does not do as good a job optimizing as some other compilers. Furthermore, even if this stuff did get optimized out, I don't see how it would change the outcome of this comparison.
GCC will get rid of something like that. I've seen it get rid of things a lot more complex, too, simply because they didn't effect the output (although how GCC figured it out is beyond me). That can, however, change the result of the benchmark, since the floating point makes it more compute-intensive rather than IO/mem intensive. Also, if the compilation for Linux and the compiliation for BSD didn't both do the optimization correctly, one would have to do the math and the other wouldn't, skewing the results.
There is a darned good reason why people write almost nothing in assembler any more. It's because optimizing compilers have gotten just as good as doing it by hand in assembly. Usually. If it's a RISC architecture, then the optimizing compiler can probably beat any human into a pulp for a program of any size. If it is a more feature rich instruction set, a human may be able to push enough into hardware that the compiler would miss. Don't bet on it, though.
I'm not much of a programmer or a sysadmin
Say... What's your IP address again? ;)
-Bon an off tangent, and to slightly correct you:
communism has been wildly successful as a form of government (various native american societies used them extensively for millenia). what you're thinking of, in reference to (i'm assuming) the USSR and china and the like, is called "socialism" and is a dismal failure.
-dk
-dk
Dream with the feathers of angels stuffed beneath your head.
So you're a professing ActiveUpdate bigot? Well, far be it from me to tell you you're wrong. ActiveUpdate seems to do its job quite well and with very little need for expertise on the part of the end user. My main reservation with ActiveUpdate is that I don't trust the company providing the service.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Last time I used Slackware it had a BSD init. Can't help with ports though...
I have a woman and money. Life is good.
THIS IS SO TRUE.
...
It's such a relief, after installing a port, or while struggling with some stoopid library, to type "man -k foo" and get USEFUL and RELEVANT information. This might be my number one reason not to switch to Linux.
XFS, on the other hand
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
How soon IS now?
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
I like the use of "we" in that sentence. Do you commit changes to the linux kernel, or are your contributions to linux in the form of brief slashdot postings?
(jfb)
To spur "enterprise Linux," Big Bang, the distributed two-phase commit.
Hence, eventually the popularity of Linux and the GPL with developers will mean that Linux will likely overtake the BSDs in performance in the not-too-distant future.
This comment would assume that the BSD's stand still. Since *BSD has been in active developement since the early '90s, and has a much larger installed base and list of contributors then ever before, I find this notion hard to believe.
Linux will of course improve, and so will the BSD's, and so will Solaris, and so will Windows, and so will...
Also I fail to see how and/or where BSD is doomed by anything, least of which is it's license. Considering that Apple is about to release MacOS X, which is based on Mach+FreeBSD, this "new" BSD will likely become the largest open-sourced OS* shipping. (* Yes, the upper level GUI is not open, but a GUI is not an OS)
Your statements basically boil down to either FUD or wishful thinking. But I fail to see any evidence that any such thing will occur.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Considering all of the projects that are announced, and then go nowhere fast. Or even more to the point the plethora of X/gtk/qt/kde/gnome/etc text editors and such. Having a ton of developers all creating their own wheel does not mean any of those wheels will be the end-all-be-all of wheels.
The most important point, that apparently you (and from what I've been seeing the past couple of years from more and more folks) miss, is that developing cross-platform applications or those that are easily portable to other platforms will produce a much more successful project then one tailor fitted to one specific platform. This has nothing at all to do with the license chosen, merely an increase in exposure to those hacking on different platforms.
Now, I'm assuming what you've been referring to as "more developers" is in the user-land application area. I know that there are a very few "core" Linux kernel hackers that work with Linus on each rev. Sure, many others may submit patches and enhancements, but it's this core group that decides what goes in any given release.
Each of the BSD's have there respective "core team" that performs the same functional purpose. The only real difference is that the BSD's encompass kernel & user-land code. Once again, anyone can contribute patches and enhancements, but only the core team can decide what goes in a given release.
Then consider that well written, portable user-land applications can run on either Linux or the BSD's without any regard to the license which each uses, and you completely lose the entire argument you're making.
I'm writing this post using Mozilla, running on FreeBSD 4.2-Stable, within a GNOME desktop, on top of XFree86. Each of these components has a different number of developers, each has a different license, yet all interoperate with each other without problem. So how is it that more GPL'ers writing applications then BSD'ers writing applications has anything to do with the success of any platform?
You basically do not have any basis for your comments. There are no differences in progress of Linux or any of the BSD's based on number of developers or license used. If you have a detailed study that draws such a conclusion, then please post a link and we'll all happily critique it for you. Lacking any such analysis, you're assertions are nothing but nonsense.
Finally, I never suggested that Linux was not more popular then BSD - but then again Windows is more popular then each but I would never suggest that it's due to Microsoft's license. We're not talking about a popularity contest here anyway though - and popularity can be quite fleeting.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Most likely, though, I'll just end up going with OpenBSD on my firewall box and running Linux on my desktop machine. I'm more comfortable in Linux than BSD, and so I think I'll just use "the right tool for the task.
this sounds more to me like give someone a hammer everything looks like a nail. You are useing linux because you are more comfortable useing it not because it is the best tool for the job.
I still like to use linux because I can run linux on my iPAQ handheld, my home desktop, my work workstations, and my 47 production servers. Again hammer nail principal but I still like it.
again look at what is being compared here:
speed one does a million miles an hour the other does one million and one miles an hour
one stays up for 76 years the other stays up for 80 years
one has had only 2 security violations the other has only had 1
the diffrences are so penny counting that just doesn't make sence to me to worry about it.
I use what I am the most familiar with.
run spell check your self i am on my way home right now
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Freedom of code not freedom of coder
got it?
good.
Paying taxes to buy civilization is like paying a hooker to buy love.
Which just goes to show that no license (whether GPL, BSD, or the Microsoft Word EULA) can solve the "asshole problem."
---
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Slashdotted again, maybe they should use "Slashdot Friendly" sign in front of their web page
I too have found the *BSD's to make excellent servers (I use an OpenBSD as my personal firewall), whereas the multimedia hardware support, and therefore desktop, has always seemed to have an edge with Linux.
The important thing that I try to remember is that it's not about which operating system is better, but which is better at a particular job.
Have you tried to update debian at all? I don't see the difficulty of apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade.
Remember Linux isn't Redhat. Not every distribution relies on rebooting to do a full distribution upgrade.
In /etc/ssh/sshd_config:
PermitRootLogin Yes
And because when I talk to the network managers at work, my fellow consultants/contractors, and my clients, they all talk about Linux, not FreeBSD. I've convinced a few of the wonders of OpenBSD and audited source, but many still compare Linux and FreeBSD in terms of market share: who is the bigger? Linux. Which is a customer more likely to ask for? Linux over BSD, but Solaris and AIX and HP-UX above Linux.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster, I'll be more inclined to switch. I like the ports project, but I like apt and Debian better these days (it's simply more convenient).
Spell it "Perl vs. Python".
...
Recently I read a manual document coming with Postgres, and according to it MySQL isn't worth any time spend in using or even developping it
Let's live each other!
Not only can it play Quake, but the emulation is handled better than on Linux.
I know, I've tested Quake III on both my FreeBSD 4.2-STABLE and 2.4 Linux machines... They both play well, but the Linux copy seemed a bit more sluggish.
Let's not be childish about this... Both are very good operating systems, FreeBSD is more server based (while leaning to Desktop), and Linux is more Desktop based (while leaning towards server).
Run FreeBSD as your server and run Linux as your desktop workstation, and you should have no problems.
Let's face it, it beats Microsoft (of course, so does a pad of paper and a pencil)...
The day Microsoft creates a product that doesn't suck, it will be known as the Microsoft Vaccuum Cleaner!
When (if?) Linux finally gets a journalling filesystem it might enjoy the same filesystem performance/reliability that FreeBSD already has.
Linux had a journalled filesystem for quite some time now. And as of 2.4.1 it's bundled with the official kernel.
Linux
NetBSD
If in doubt, research, then post. Or to quote the old addage "Measure twice, cut once", or in geek terms, "Search twice, post once".
>I realize you were joking but...
> MS would never say nasty things about the BSD's
> since their TCP/IP stack and kerberos are
> largely based on BSD code.
Kerberos as found in Win is based on code
under the BSD license. That is not the same as
"code used in BSD operating systems".
-- I'm as unique as everyone else.
Well, I've only used that CVS server a couple of times and it worked just fine. The FTP server (download.sourceforge.net) is one of the best mirror sites around, IMHO. And since opinions are the only things that really matter, I'll leave it at that.
-David
The only "advantage" that Hemos mentioned that FreeBSD has over Linux is that it's more stable and faster. Of course, the only backing he can give to that is that it's his personal opinion.
If FreeBSD is so technically superior to Linux, then why does Sourceforge run Linux? I'm surprised it's not constantly falling over since it's running Linux and all.
This seems to be more of a "I'm bored, what can I install and play with for the next hour" type post rather than a well-informed post.
-David
If your Linux box craps out every day then something's wrong with your setup. I use both Freebsd & Linux on servers and IMHO both are nearly perfect in terms of stability.
This can be cleaned up a bit. Once you have your kernel config file set up, just define KERNEL=YOUR_KERNEL_CONFIG in /etc/make.conf. If you also set the make.conf variables for your supfile and suphost, then your upgrade process becomes a simple matter of:
Personally, I have 1 and 2 in my weekly periodic script, and I just run mergemaster and reboot on monday morning when I get in.
The best way to explain the way I feel about FreeBSD is that it's like the best of Slackware and Debian, only more so.
That is EXACTLY WHAT LINUX IS! It's a KERNEL. Most of the tools you use are GNU.
And then you have to spoil it all in the very last paragraph by going for the easy extra points by saying "communism is baaaaaaad". I'm very disappointed of you.
I hate it when I am wrong. Fortunately, it doesn't happen that often. :-)
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
I'll bite. I love FreeBSD, but the upgrade path with packages just isn't that nice. If a new version of a port comes out, it is up to the user to figure out what needs to be done in order to upgrade. To work cleanly, this usually means uninstalling and installing the upgraded port, which can wipe out configuration files.
With apt & friends, it is automatic, and the level of user interaction is customizable. Very nice.
"If I am such a genius, how come that I am drunk and lost in the desert with a bullet in my ass?" --Otto (Malcom ITM)
--
Personally, I think licensing has little, if anything at all, to do with Linux's popularity as compared with *BSD. It's kind of ironic if you think about it - these days you go to the store and see shelves lined with various Linux distributions boxed up, but no *BSD. It's all (or mostly) GPL code in there, but the BSD license is inherently more corporate-friendly. If BSD had caught on instead of Linux - if the two were reversed in popularity, you can bet that all the companies would be loving the license. They could distribute their own value-added version of BSD without being forced to include the source code!
Instead, I think the reason Linux is so much more popular now is that it simply reached that critical mass of interested developers and users slightly before BSD did. After that it simply snowballed and people who may have been interested in BSD were attracted to Linux instead simply because they heard about it first.
Licensing issues aside, I think it's really too bad - I'd love to see Linux and BSD with more or less equal popularity. They both have their merits and advantages over the other, but the vast majority of people will never try BSD because they are comfortable with Linux. I was like this too - I used Linux exclusively for 7 years until I tried FreeBSD 2 months ago. Now I have it on my main machine and I don't see myself ever going back to Linux except on a secondary machine where I might want to keep it around to run the occasional program that won't run under FreeBSD's excellent emulation. But that's just my personal preference, having nothing to do with OS Religion. ;-)
Say hello to zMac.
The GPL doesnt place anything but GPL code under the GPL. Not through linking or any other way. However, _YOU MAY NOT DISTRIBUTE THE GPL CODE_, unless all the code can be distributed under the TERMS of the GPL.
There is no relicensing taking place. There is no enforced GPL on the other code. It is simply the GPL code that the GPL applies to. You can distribute the otherwise licensed code however you want, but if it does not have as lenient (or more lenient) terms as the GPL code, you may not distribute the GPL parts of the code.
GPL bashing often comes because of an incomplete understanding of how the GPL works (which is understandable, it isnt exactly clear until you've read it about ten thousand times and even then its easy to slip).
Precisely... I couldn't agree more with frob... To give an example of frob's point, suppose a member of a team purposely uses GPL'd code in a commercial, closed source project? Under terms of the GPL, the owner of all involved code MUST release the entire shebang. Quite a landmine. Imagine legions buried inside MS... laying mines all about... hehehe... no seriously, anyone could sabotage your project as his teacher threatened to do... Realisticlly though, I doubt something of this nature would never make it through the legal system involving any project of much size... say, where the offending GPL code constitutes only a small fraction of the source. Just trying to simplify the matter for those too Stone Philliped to digest their own info :)
A co-worker recently gave me his old 486, and I was psyched to set it up as a FreeBSD masq..., er I mean NAT box, but it turned out there wasn't enough disk space for the obligatory kernel rebuild. I may not be asking the question properly, but: Does anyone have any suggestions for setting up a FreeBSD NAT box on an old 486 with .le. 500M of storage? (I did get it to work under Linux, but that was no fun because I've done it before.)
PS: I really liked the old school, no nonsense feel of FreeBSD's setup program.
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Thank you, Brew Bird! PICO BSD is exactly the sort of critter I had in mind!
--
whuppy enjoys smelling like diesel fuel
Actually, Linux had USB support first in the form of uusbd. Unfortunately, no one really liked that implmentation and we started from scratch. Regardless, we have a much more complete implementation than FreeBSD's last I checked.
ok moderator (the one who modded as troll). this is funny.
use LaTeX? want an online reference manager that
-- john
Are you using 2.4.X? I believe that 4 GB limit on Intel HW is long gone (the 2.4.1 menuconfig help describes using the Intel Physical Address Extension (PAE, implemented on Pentium Pros and better) for up to 64 GB RAM, but I couldn't swear that it works:
my big problem is a motherboard with only 8 DIMM slots and it only claims to handle up to 512MB DIMMS, so that's the 4GB limit I'm up against. Maybe I'll just pop in a 1GB DIMM and see if the mb likes it.
That was just RedHat - NOT Linux.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
If you use the code internally don't distribute binaries then you don't have to release the source to your changes, so it really isn't about others using the code.
Frankly I don't see any problem unless you are a commerical software development house. If you are a commerical software house wouldn't it would be better to write your own code or use BSD-licensed code rather than mess with GPL'ed code?
The GPL works great for smaller, open-source projects because the point of many of those projects to to release code. If you don't care if others don't release any changes to your code, then stick to the BSD license.
--
You think being a MIB is all voodoo mind control? You should see the paperwork!
A man who wants nothing is invincible
And then I can add on to that the argument that I can boot directly off of my RAID controller in FreeBSD but I have to use a boot disk (or dos partition currently) for Linux. Small things like that make FreeBSD nice.
If they just had the good NVidia drivers that Linux has I'd be completely switched over, but my toy programming box needs 3d so it's a debian box.
Communism is a political affliation. In the united states it has a very small following. Communism has nothing to do with writing code.
On another note. While red baiting was very popular in the forties and fifties we as a society have luckily gotten past bit of ugliness. No need to revert to the bad old times now.
War is necrophilia.
"But, as a proponent of the GPL you have. You have told Gates that if he uses any of your code, he HAS to license his program (Windows) your way, or not sell it at all."
What is so wrong with that? All that does is discourage Bill Gates from using your hard work to better further his goals. Bill has a choice to use your code or not. If the cost of using your code is too high (relicensing windows) then he won't use it. This makes everybody happy. The coder is happy because Bill gates will not benefit from his code and Bill Gates can write his own code or use some BSD licensed code.
Honestly I don't see why this would offend anybody. You don't have to use GPLed code, nobody is forcing you to.
War is necrophilia.
I don't mind liberal jesus was a liberal too. If anybody wants to put me in that category I don't mind a bit.
War is necrophilia.
If you want code to really be free, things like this are always possible....shit happens.
Is a SoundBlaster Live generic enough for you? Good.
Oh please...spare me.
- GPL: the "we TELL you" what "free" means, leftist political license.
- BSD: The "free" as in freedom, Libertarian license.
Nuff saidMost people here would agree that (takes deep breath) alluding to a certain charming political group from Germany in the '30s and early '40s is an IMMEDIATE loss of any argument. Apart from being on the political left I don't think the Communists were all that different from the carefully alluded to political party. (Sheesh but that Law is a landmine!!) I propose that red baiting should be an equally losing tactic. Stalin's Law anybody?
Way back when I first clued in I tried to download and install FreeBSD. When the install failed miserably, I downloaded and installed Debian. It worked. Took me a day to get Xwindows running. Took a couple days to get my sound working. But it worked. If that FreeBSD install hadn't crapped out 2/3s of the way through I'd be doing the FreeBSD thing now, I'm sure. Alot of it comes down to personal history and what we have spendt the time with to gain experience.
It doesn't care if it's free or not.
Then why does everthing tend to a greater degree of entropy? The universe longs to be free.
Sounds like you had a bad experience with authority, and that colored your impressions. Is there a reason why you thought you'd have any input as to liscensing a class assignment? You don't think you owned it, did you? I think everyone should make an informed decision and liscence their code as they see fit. You confuse me because while a student (for material submitted as homework) you don't own that code. Rather as if I tried to argue with Bill Gates about how to liscense windows.
To say nothing of placing 16th out of the 16 industrialized nations in terms of basic literacy and math skills.
"We" includes users. Its an inclusive community.
Does anybody really support the one button mouse? Why? Three buttons with the middle a scroll wheel is my prefered mouse.
Well.. Someone else pointed out that it runs on plenty of arch's... But anyway. Every heard of Mac OS X... THAT's basically BSD with a NeXT derived GUI on top of it... So PPC works too...
Anyway. At the danger of being called a troll. Explain to me how a 'everything that remotly used our software must be open source' license (GPL) is better than a 'we basically don't care how you use our code. We just have fun making it' license (BSD)? Except if you are one of those 'information wants to be free' people that think open source will solve all problems in the software industry...
You're not comparing like with like. It is similar to this: "Wheras in *BSD you have to find the documentation for the specific version, in Debian it's all there". Nevertheless, the LDP is worth a look if you want Linux documentation.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
About a year ago, I installed FreeBSD 3.2 from an old CD a friend had given me. I did it just for kicks. I later added some accounts and removed or chmod 0'ed some setuid binaries. The next day I got an email from root telling me everything that I had done. I realize that this sort of thing could be done with Linux too, but the point is that none of my Linux boxes had ever done such a thing. And certainly not from a default install... EGADS -- NEVER !!!
Here I am a year later and I am very happily running FreeBSD on all dozen or so servers that I control. It truly is a wonderful thing to work with. For every remote root exploit or broken compiler that ships with RedHat (my old Linux choice), I have a new reason to love my new baby FreeBSD.
The ultimate testimony: I have installed 4.2-RELEASE on my home machine which I am posting from now. Haha, I feel like such a bad-ass seeing 'fxp0' instead of 'eth0' from ifconfig. That's my real motivation.
it doesn't even come with 3D hardware drivers for it's kernel
Maybe that's becaune support for 3D hardware is, on both Linux and *BSD, a driver the runs along X-Windows and is not compiled in the kernel ?
As for laptops hardware support, again FreeBSD has less hardware support than Linux... but then no-one gives a sh* about PCMCIA or USB support on a server either. What matters is NIC and controler card drivers, and BSD has plenty of them. Trust me, if so many heavy-duty sites and hosting company use FreeBSD and not Linux, there's a reasy for it...
3D driver, as said previously. So far neither AGP or DRM qualify as "3D driver" (you can't call them and ask "draw me a polygon here with this texture"). They are layers used by a 3D driver, but as far as I know OpenGL is not yet integrated into the kernel, and won't be in the future either.
I've never used any BSD, but almost all benchmarks I've seen show BSD faster than even 2.4 Linux; however, the Linux marketshare keeps going up and up, dispite BSD being faster (and therefore, better?). I wonder if BSD will eventually die off (or just shrivel) and leave the "slower" Linux to strive (a la BETA/VHS).
Also, consider QNX if you are looking for embedded technology or real-time operating systems. (it's FAST!) Try their 1.44 MB floppy---it boots up, presents a GUI, a modem-detector, a webbrowser with Java, and a few games!
If you're looking for an OS to tinker with, consider playing with Atheos, which is similar to BeOS in design (C++ object-oriented desktop operating system). I'm interested in supporting this project myself at some point when I have free time again.
As for myself, I run BeOS, FreeBSD and sometimes QNX on my personal box, with an OpenBSD server/firewall right next to it. I find that OpenBSD puts the network first all the time; Linux-using friends of mine commented once that they tried to burden it and found that it was serving X windows applications faster than their computer could keep up. This is a Pentium 233 w/ 128 MB ram and a 27.2 GB hard drive we're talking about, not the Athlon 750s with 256 MB of RAM my friends are using. And that's in addition to serving Samba, Squid (1GB!), FTP and SSH all at once. OpenBSD's in-fucking-credible. Mad props to Theo, the man is my God.
For my desktop though I'm mainly running BeOS because it pretty much does everything I need in a box that's not quite as network-aware as I would like (smb's manual still, X isn't supported in a real way yet). But it's a snappy interface that can multitask like you wouldn't believe, incredibly efficient and beautifully designed. Coding for it is fun too. It's all you could ask for, except for improved networking which is in the works and perhaps some UNIX odds and ends, like X support or serving. It's not a server OS. It's a desktop.
QNX would be fun if they would supply more packages with it. Lots of UNIX doesn't seem to compile right under it though; I'm not sure what the problem is, because QNX is considered a UNIX more so than BeOS and it has more problems compiling POSIX code. All I know is, QNX is the fastest UNIX on the planet, it feels like it's got to be at least 95% assembly to be so damn fast! And it has a fairly rich API for the GUI (Photon), though it is C-based.
OS's are somewhat of a hobby of mine; I'm downloading Solaris 8 Intel as we speak to try it out. I would say that the worst thing you can do is get stuck in a rut, unwilling to try anything out. I was a Linux-Mandrake devotee for a long time before last year; since then I just got sick of seeing the same screen all the time. More knowledge is necessarily better; I have complete config files for blackbox, AfterStep, and FVWM2, also used Sawfish/GNOME for a bit. Always try new things; the OS world is richer now than it has been in years thanks to the free software movement. Don't become a zealot if you can help it; it stops you from being open-minded.
Daniel
Being an open-source developer myself, I would personally never release any of my code under the GPL. And I encourage all the coders I talk with to do the same. And once they see the reasoning behind why, most will switch. They honestly want to give their code away for others to use as they see fit. You are not giving your code away if you are requiring something back.
I see where you are going with this, and if this is your belief then great. I'm not here to stop you, but I'd like to take a minute and explain some of reasons why people use the GPL.
I would never release anything under the BSD license. Why? Because it goes against my beliefs on what the OS movement is about. If I write a piece of code, I share it with the world for the benefit of the software world. If others improve upon the code, I would want them to do the same in gratitude for what I have helped create. This is what has made the OS movement so great, sharing our work for the benefit of the community. For this to work, my rights have to be protected by the license, and the GPL does just that. It gives me the right to share my code with others as long as they respect the idea that they must share their improvements in the same spirit. I agree there is less freedom in the GPL then the BSD license, but that's not important to me. I don't believe it benefits the community at all for someone to make improvements (notice I did not say changes) for the use of a privileged few. If someone feels restricted by my choice of license, then they can go write a similar program and use whatever license they want. I will wish him/her luck, and those who agree with said person can contribute to their hearts content.
Real freedom in software does not lie in any license, but the ability to chose the one you agree with the most. That's why I don't try to evangelize either, just inform those who are curious.The case with your teacher is rather disturbing since he is forcing your choice of a original license. If you really want to prove your point you could rewrite his code and license it under the BSD, giving students in the class the same choices programmers have today.
Cheers--
Too lazy to come up with a clever sig.
Er, i can choose freely from any hospital in this country as well without paying anything and last time i checked i live in a socialistic country. If there are better ways to get threated outside the country the govt will usually pay the entire thing. What was your point again?
(And like the average joe is qualified to choose in the first place, but that is a totally different topic)
WOW! Thats amazing! Just to give a contrasting experience:
I am glad I didn't have those kinds of problems with my ISP 3 or 4 years ago. running 5 FBSD Pentiums NFS mounting 2 DEC Alpha Servers to handle mail and web services for about 15k isp subs... (ohh, and the other 20 or so FBSD machines running independant web servers, admin servers, kerberos and RADIUS, and the alpha pager system. We put a limit on virtual web servers when apache finally supported them to 200 per machine... what a money maker!)
Even manged to get NIS working properly between the DECs and the BSD machines.
I also remember convincing (by way of example) most of DalNet that using linux was a silly idea compared to the number of clients they could get on FBSD. Same for our local EFnet node. After DAYS of tweaking linux, they managed to get up to 700 sim. connects, stock FBSD install went to 1000 without any problems... irc.phoenix.net is still there, if I am not mistaken.)
I personally use an old P100 as my Samba server here at the house for MP3s, never noticed any skips even with 3 machines activly using the share. (of course, I havn't touched that machine since I installed it a year and a half ago, it is still running 3.something)
Maybe something is broke in 4.2?
As long as there are people that want an OS designed specificly for thier needs, *BSD will never, ever go away. It is designed to impress you, it isn't designed to be cool, it isn't designed to gain marketshare. If I were to compare OSs to race cars, I would say *BSD = Group 2 Rally Cars, MS=NASCAR, and Linux = Outlaws!. Although, if things keep going the way they are going, MS and Linux are really starting to fall into the same category.
Xfree 4.1 works good with my Geforce 2 :> That was my last complaint!
Building from source insures it is going to work with the way MY system is setup. I think most of us that build sources also had bad experiences with some of the early attempts to do binary package Quality Control.
I guess it comes down to the: 'I KNOW this will work, and I have the kick ass machine, so I will fire up 10 compiles and come back in an hour to a finished job' rather than the 'hmm, some of these damn binarys are staticly linked and some are dynamicly linked and OH MY GHOD I HAVE TO START OVER!'
I had the latest versions of Freebsd and Rh Leeknucks and Redhat could not run my usb devices that I had and FreeBSD could. It shure seems like they did have the support before linux.
Regarding the punctuation flame, I was under the impression that the spelling "free'd" was acceptable (and proper) in English (not American) speaking countries. Given that the poster is from Scotland (as stated in her User Info), this would seem to support this hypothesis.
It's sad that some people seem to feel that flames of this sort are necessary.
- Mike
1) Perhaps there are even more users, and just the ratio of people having problems with it is a poor indicator of the number of users.
2) Apple, which has a fairly decent market share is basing their next OS off of this dead one.
I am glad to hear that you are open minded though.
"Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes."
-E. W. Dijkstra
the bsd startup script is more confusing and inconvient.
I've heard alot of bsd'ers stabbing sysv statup scripts (e.g. /etc/init.d/*), but having a single rc.conf seems much, much worse to me.
Comparing sources to packages is absurd, asinine, and just a flat out troll.
/stand/sysinstall's ability to install specific packages is IRRELEVANT! It's a system installer, not an exclusive package management system. Also, if you've ever worked with a 'BSD .tgz "package", it's a very simple thing... "tar -zxfC / blah.tgz" ... just unpack it to the root directory, and it's installed. Also, any time the ports package is used to compile something, it builds a .tgz so that you can use it in the future to install the package on that (or other) systems. THAT is smart.
Citing only a Debian-friendly example for how to get proprietary packages on Debian GNU/Linux only also serves no benefit, especially since it's an off-topic note anyways.
Also,
Want to know the best part? I can't stand FreeBSD. It drives me nuts. However, a lot of the things in FreeBSD are much more sane than typical Linux implementations. Mostly because "typical" Linux gets translated to Debian and RedHat... and although I respect Debian, It does some peculiar and proprietary stuff.
Slackware Linux is a happy medium. It is structured BSD-style, is 100% bad-linux-implementation-compatible, and otherwise could easily be confused as being FreeBSD to the casual onlooker. It is also the only distribution I've found that works reliably and cleanly with other Debian/FreeBSD/OpenBSD/Solaris systems without any heavy tweaking. Of course, some tweaking is nice for marginal performance increases, but the point is that it's compatible and a quick performer by default.
Following logical standards is a Good Thing (tm).
.... um, i lost you after "0110100001101001".
No. Freebsd is just another free Unix. It may be used more as a server OS (IMHO because there is less hand-holding for newbies)
And this is why your OS will _NEVER_ get into the mainstream. If you want people to try your OS, guess what jackass, they have to atleast get in installed. Yes, some of the Linux distro's install's aren't the best, but they sure as hell are better than the FreeBSD install.
It did. Solaris has been supporting x86 since it was in the 2s (I forget the exact version). The easy access and open code of Linux were also key.
--jbRight, Redhat != Linux. Debian != Linux, Suse != Linux, Slackware != Linux, Caldera != Linux, and the list goes on and on. These are all distributions.
The kernel = Linux, plain and simple. Of course, without packages like binutils, etc., etc., you won't really be able to do anything with just the kernel, but it's still a simple fact.
If you're concerned with how much crap is getting installed by mainstream distros, and you have a little bit of time on your hands and want to learn something new, try http://www.linuxfromscratch.org. You'll be building your own linux implementation from the ground up (from source code), step by step. I discovered it last year and a distro hasn't touched my machine since.
I'm sure glad that Byte's linux guru runs insecure services on his server.
Yeah, but FreeBSD and GNU/Linux both use GCC. So neither has a leg up. So even if it was a flawed benchmark, which I don't quite see, it's on a level playing field. If it's on a level playing field, a flawed benchmark is still valid.
Public service announcement aside...
/etc/ssh/sshd_config (or /usr/local/etc/sshd_config, if you installed the OpenSSH port)
vi
PermitRootLogin yes
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
Yeah, you should probably stick with Linux for this situation. One thing Linux never had a problem with was being loaded with too much security.
Yeah, what better way to show your love for a particular editor than to stuff andover's pockets with money for a crappy shirt?
If the result of my code ending up in Windows was to make Windows faster, more stable, or safer to use in conjunction with other operating systems, I'm all for it.
AMEN!
I could care less if Microsoft's market dominance grows, shrinks, or remains the same! I just wish the troubles that most people seem to have with their OSs would get fixed. (I personally have relatively few problems, but I'm lucky, I guess).
I like BSD. I like Linux. I like them for different reasons. If I had to choose one of the two liscenses, I suppose it would depend more on what I was doing and if I care where it ended up. (It's really a moot point for me, since I don't share my source code. I'm normally ashamed of it.)
But my favorite analogy goes something like this...
If someone GIVES me something for free to do with as I please (say a wooden statue, maybe one that they carved), then I paint it and sell it, do I owe that person anything?
There is no right answer.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
On the daemon front, I've seen books available by mail, none in the bookstores.
My copy of FreeBSD came with a copy of The Complete FreeBSD.
Sometimes it pays to spend a little money.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
>>Most open source developers would rather not >>have their code end up in Windows.
>Being an open-source developer myself, I would >personally never release any of my code under the >GPL. And I encourage all the coders I talk
>with to do the same. And once they see the >reasoning behind why, most will switch. They >honestly want to give their code away for others >to use as they see fit. You are not giving your >code away if you are requiring something back.
I think I'd rather split hairs on this one. I don't agree with the GPL's "virus clause", but I don't like BSD's just giving away the family jewels. If someone likes my code and uses it in a propritary product thats probably fine so long as it doesn't come back to haunt me. I can just see Microsoft taking some BSD licensed code and use it to create some new closed source standard that we won't be able to use because of some copyright, licence, or patent issue! If it weren't for the changing legal climate I'd say that we didn't need the GPL virius, but now I'm not so sure!
OTHO I would like to see any changes made to my code that I release via open source. Getting something back? Maybe I don't want to make that required, but It would be nice if anyone who made improvements or bug fixes to my stuff would share it with me. All BSD demands is that you give someone credit.
The other nasty in the GPL is the restriction of using the GPL'd code with non-gpled code. Here the author is free to nullify the point. I can state something like "this code may be linked with any binary lib regardless of it's license". The GPL's hardass stance on this is what caused KDE to be banned from Debian for such a long time. Now that QT is dual licensed the problem is gone.
It is good if your code ends up in Windows. Sooner or later, you'll find a security problem in your code, you quickly fix it for FreeBSD, but the backdoor will be in windows for ages to come.
Practice shows it isn't.
More developers does not imply faster development! First, please make a difference between developers on kernel, tools, apps.
Most apps and tools are easily portable, so apps made for Linux appear as a FreeBSD port (KDE, GNOME, whatever).
Kernel: A single highly complex piece of software cannot use unlimited numbers of developers. Especially when/if it is not neatly modularized (like the Linux kernel is not), developers will get in their way, break each others' code etc. Adding more developers will even slow rate of progress.
What is more important is not the # of developers (well, you need a minimum amount, and both Linux and FreeBSD satisfy that condition) but the structure/organization and cleanlyness of the code. Messy code leads to difficult maintenance and overview, leading to slow development with lots of bugs. It decreases the # of developers that effectively work on it.
Linux has asynchronous metadata writes, deemed unreliable by most other UNIX vendors (on a crash, you can loose your filesystem or get inconsistencies). Others use either journalling filesystems (fast) or synchronous (but slower)
FreeBSD OTOH has synchronous metadata writes, or Softupdates which does a reordering of writes such that sudden power loss, even when not all writes have been synced to disk, the filesystem status is guaranteed to be consistent.
As a good side-effect, this makes fsck orders of magnitute faster. Just try fsck on a 40GB ext2fs filesystem and compare with a 40Gb UFS+softupdates filesystem.
Though technically different, softupdates somewhat behaves like a journalling filesystem. When (if?) Linux finally gets a journalling filesystem it might enjoy the same filesystem performance/reliability that FreeBSD already has.
So, it wasn't just my "impression"? Good. I never had the balls to tell anyone that, in my opinion, it appears as if the NFS server in Linux was somewhat broken, expecially wrt file locking.
Sigged!
You install the OS, then lock the sucker up tight in a server room. Then you log in remotely.
Think about this: no OS can possibly guarantee security without physical security. If you don't have physical security, what will prevent someone from opening up the box, refreshing the CMOS so it can boot to the floppy (you did put a password on the BIOS setup, didn't you?), booting from a floppy, and doing whatever he wants to (reinstalling the OS, copying files off of the disk, creating an account for himself)? Encrypted file systems can help a little bit...
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Do you still hold on to your cassettes because you don't want to have to learn how to operate those complicated CD players? Come on, I figured out what the ports collection was in under 10 seconds after doing a cd to the ports directory while just poking around my brand new FreeBSD install. After reading two pages of a book, I was CVSupping on a weekly cronjob. I've seen people putz around with the apt system... yeah, it works, but it seems to me kind of the cassette deck of packaging systems.
Or TrustedBSD.
Or the eclipse OS.
I'll tell you the story of my life.
Fifteen, clumsy, and shy.
Excuse me, idiot, but there is a single FreeBSD distribution. Just one. Not even two. Just one. One userland, one kernel, one distribution. Its nothing like Linux with its, many versions, many distributions, many differences in user software.
Just the one. One ls. One cat. One ps. one set of libraries. One kernel. One. Uno. Ein. Enna, Un.
O N E
Do you understand or have you become so totally brain dead from exposure to that abortion of a program loader called linux?
This is counter-intuitive but you can always try make upgrade.
You may consider the general community as a reason to choose something. You'll find your trolls in all of course. Some prefer the more "less talk, more code" and skill-driven attitude of NetBSD, or maybe the very weird culture that I enjoy in FreeBSD - a balanced "Let's try to do things right, and that means staying up to date, not falling behind but not living too close to the edge, copying ideas from other people's stuff, writing our own, and having fun while we're doing it" kind of attitude. I've had bad experiences with some online Linux communities, and with some online FreeBSD communities, and with some ... - their choice in operating system doesn't seem to indicate they'll be nice or nasty people. In my experience, people just "are", and there're many more things that form the person than simple OS choice.
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
Because some people wanted it? If I remember correctly, didn't FBSD get the base USB code from NetBSD?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
For the purposes PicoBSD serves, it needs server-like features. The most common uses I have seen are as routers, bridges, and dial-up servers.
It's a JOKE for crying out loud!!!
Try out fish, the friendly interactive shell.
768 GB of RAM? Is that a typo?
256MB x 3 = 768MB. That would only cost 3x71.50ukp (ie 214ukp total) over here, and the Netfinity can take 32GB of memory, I'd suggest it's a typo meaning 768MB.
Phillip.
Property for sale in Nice, France
I found the BSD's to be easier to set up and maintain. In the end that is what converted me. A day will come when tweaking the system is not what you look forward to, you just want something that just works.
Back on topic, I would rather be the person who can answer the basic questions about an OS than to be the one who has to ask for advice. Just because everybody speaks linux doesn't mean some aren't thinking about other OS'es.
A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.
No, stop, don't do it.... alright...
/etc/ssh/sshd_config file. There should be a rootlogin line, change that to yes and HUP the sshd process.
I believe it would be in the
If asked about it, I advised you not to do it.
The duke of URL did a quake benchmark. And FreeBSD running Quake via the Linux compatibility layer ran quake FASTER than the linux he benchmarked with. Not by much, but faster.
for $129.95+s&h or $75 at compusa, you can buy the 'FreeBSD Desktop'
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
All you Linux lovers (one of which I too have become) write for Linux.
/usr/ports updates things fine on my end.
And who's fault is it that people are not writing portable code? If you don't ask for 'linux binaries' to be supported on *ALL* Linux ELF machines, then how will vendors be enlightened enough to make sure that their code works with SCO/Sun/BSD *AND* Linux (in elf-format)?
Partly the preception that Linux == Open Source (and that is *ALL* that is Open source) and partly people are not taught to write portable code.
RedHat's "open source development labs", VA Linux's "Open Source developers network" do little to help expand the mind beyond the linux-only mindset.
And the teeny-boppers (mostly) do not WANT To talk to us old goats who wrote portable Unix code. At least this hasn't changed. But, if you *ARE* one of the 'old portable code' writers....have you tutored someone?
Granted BSD does have an awesome ports collection, it's just a tad outdated
Make update in
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Well then what is 'linux'? A kernel?
how useless then.
That's right. Linux is useless.
Ever tried using a kernel without userspace?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
That's just silly. There are lots of GPL'ed projects that are DOA, and there are lots of BSD licenced projects that dominate their niche.
I attribute Linux's popularity to Linus Torvalds: his charisma, and his ability to get people excited about his project and contribute to it.
It's a nice fantasy that if you are a totally antisocial wanker, you can guarantee the success of your lame project if you just choose the right licence, but I don't believe this for a minute. Other factors, like leadership skills and a good idea, are much more important.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Here are the key points why FreeBSD is better :
1. The mascot is way cooler, a little devil vs a lame ass penguin??
2. It has the word "Free" right in the name.. what's better then Free?
3. It emulates Linux, run those native Linux binaries..get 2 os's for the price of one, see point #2
4. Most lamers that run linux are script kiddies who don't know any better, the true 3l33t run BSD.
5. No lame names like Redhat and Caldera, which also cuts down on the holy wars about distros.
6. Corel hasn't tryed to get in the act with their own version, sure sign of a dead technology.
7. We don't worship one person (Linus) which parrallel's another software company (Bill).
Everything else it does.. well that's incidental...these are the things that matter.. :)
-b
NetBSD does have drivers for IBM and 3com tokenring cards.
Both. It's a typo in the article *and* a shitload of RAM.
Although it is still relatively early in this slugfest, I hereby invoke Godwin's Law. Although frob2600 makes some good points, he was sloppy.
For those of you who don't know what it is:
"As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches one."
A excerpt of the explanation from the Jargon File:
"There is a tradition in many groups that, once this occurs, that thread is over, and whoever mentioned the Nazis has automatically lost whatever argument was in progress."
You may read up on Godwin's Law from the FAQ.
Strictly speaking, frob2600 did not directly mention the political regime of the third Reich, but I believe that his post fulfills the spirit of the Law's requirement. Namely, in his zealous pursuit of proving his point he feels it necessary to unnecessarily compare the opposing view to one of the world's most hated political groups.
----
Do you even know anything about perl? -- AC Replying to Tom Christiansen post.
[In case you fail to fail to miss the point, like most mindless GNU drones, answer this question: How many successful protocols have their reference implementations licensed under the GPL?]
And how many are under the BSD licence?
Someone else has already pointed out the debian-bsd@lists.debian.org mailing list, where this is being discussed. Note that you can subscribe to it on the web.
M
GROGGS: alive and well and living in
With the GPL, an author forces all derivatives to be equally open: Everyone can read and modify the source, but to distribute any binary derivatives you must also distribute the full source with changes. Even to a completely new source statically linking to the original. There are no restrictions on use (execution).
With the BSD licence, everyone is free to make any changes and distribute them in any way they find convinient. There are no restrictions on use except for displaying a copyright notice of the original author.
Now what license is most free? Personally I believe BSD is more free, but when I code I want the benefits of the GPL/LGPL. However, I have no illusions about the fact that I am restricting others' freedom to my boundaries. Giving real freedom to others involves letting them get away with thievery, but that's not very convinient in practice. However, I have deepest respect for people who live in such ways that they don't restrict others.
People that bash other people for not living up to their expectations, are the same people who get disappointed when they give gifts. A real gift is one you don't expect anything in return for. Otherwise, it's just another transaction.
- Steeltoe
http://www.debunkingskeptics.com/
I think he means 'ports software' as in 'software that is in the ports collection'. The only reason I'm not using FreeBSD is that I can't/am-too-lazy to-make-work all those little nifty linux apps that I find in my travels around freshmeat etc. which aren't well known enough to be included in the ports collection. This is also true for official Linux distro packages too, but I can always compile from source, or use an RPM or something that the author has provided.
see thats where you went wrong.. Ports are the 'most up to date' from either CVSup or CVS.
The ports.tar.gz file will always be out of date , it is not made everyday.
And you dont have to rewrite apps for BSD , Most will run just fine. cept for some programs (ie. xmms, just needed some minor sound changes)
you are very true , but one thing you missed..
FreeBSD USB was in in the middle stages of linux 2.2. it came out in 3.1
uhm
yeah.. thats a good reason , even though freebsd supports it also..
so what was your reason again??
outdated? what the hell are you talking about 90% of the port tree (found here) is more up to date than freshmeat is , there is more ports in the port tree than debian has packages. about 4500 ports.
Do you live under a rock?
/stand/sysinstall.
csh is latest version
bash-2.04$ gcc -v Using builtin specs. gcc version 2.95.2 19991024 (release)
And yes , BSD does use the BSD make , but there is also gmake in the ports dir. you are not 'stuck with old UNIX make' .
and the way most people upgrade freebsd is with CVSup. you have the entire source tree on your harddrive (which is about 300meg , not a whole lot) and then make world , this upgrades everything. THEN you compile your kernel. So you should never lose the ability to compile a kernel. Also they dont just 'change' a major feature like that in the middle of a branch. They would wait. Like perl 5.6 is not in 4.x branch because it is a major change that will change alot of things , thats why its sitting in the 5.0-CURRENT branch.
Also you can do a binary upgrade. With
let me ask you this, how do you plan on getting the source to sed on a debian,redhat,slack,etc system? Much easier on FreeBSD system.
Yeah , your right. Debian was a bad example. =x
sysinstall is actually a great tool , packages are not quite as up to date as ports is. And yeah you can install say 'gaim' it would download gtk,gaim,etc etc. I pesonaly like to compile everything I use so i use ports. And no not 'all' ports are also packages , there is about 2800 packages and 4500 ports.
Yeah around 4000~ offical packages, then tons of unoffical.
I personaly dont mind compileing everything from source. And I know most other BSD users feel the same way , as you stated.
There is a better way (well not better just an alternative) there is a daily snapshot of freebsd on ftp://releng4.freebsd.org. people will use this instead of 'make world'. So there is tons of people who use 'binary only' freebsd or they wouldnt release an almost daily version of FreeBSD.
And for packages there is about 2800~ packages , they are a little out of date vs the ports tree. but so are alot of debian packages.
Also a PORT is alot easier to make (and faster) than a deb. you have to make a Makefile , and tell what the package is in a file , the md5. thats it.
thats a big reason ports are pretty 'upto date' and why i use them.
Also , this is the beauty of OpenSource.
FREEDOM!
you like one way , do it. you don't like it this way , don't do it.
not offical packages.
unoffical packages are totaly different.
yeah , i must agree with you there.
Debian is a Great flavor. I used it for a long time. I stoped around when 2.2 went stable.
Allthough I will use debian again.
Sorry, just pointing out that, unless I missed something, it's XFree86 4.0.1, now 4.0.2.
The article showed slightly better performance with MySQL and sendmail/fetchmail on linux because of an intentional tradeoff of speed vs. reliability that each system makes. The #1 bottleneck in any system is mass storage. Tuning this part will net you the largest gains for your effort in any loaded system. Power them off --unplug them-- in the middle of an extra trial and compare what you have when the system boots. Weigh that against your disk performance.
FreeBSD is configured to mount its filesystems *synchronously* by default. This is slightly slower, but you are *MUCH* less likely to lose a filesystem in a hard crash. Linux mounts its ext2fs filesystems *ASYNCronously*. Rerun the tests with both mounting synchronously, and then run the Linux async vs. the FreeBSD server running with softupdates to see the relative effects of the disk tradeoff.
You might also try sticking a couple of extra gig of RAM in the box and mounting /var on a filesystem in memory. That would (mostly) take away the factor of relative DMA/PIO hardware I/O performance in the disk drivers.
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
And you know what else them ignern't whaaht trash'll bleev? Why, lissen tah thee'is: Jesus wuz whaaht. He wern't no sand-nigger lahk them folks on teevee is always a sayin'. Lookit them pitchers of Jesus on yer granny's wall. That wern't no midl-eesturn sand-nigger. Why, ma pappy used ta say thet whaaht folk used ta live in them parts, but they got forced tah move up north on acount uh them sand-niggers.
Ah don't have issues now do ah?
--- Nothing clever here: move along now...
Thats why I chose Linux. I run Debian nad love it. I one heard one of the Free BSD developers say. "If you want a GTI then run Linux om your machine and if you want a truck then run FreeBSD". I want that sports car!
Mathias Wiklander mathias@wiklander.nu
(pedantic = true) what's that 768 millibits? Almost a full bit of RAM - should be quite a server ;)
XML causes global warming.
XML causes global warming.
Um, I never said anything about a fork with a different license.
Debian is a kernel with a whole bunch of extra stuff. The extra stuff includes shells, utilites such as ls and cp, compilers, debuggers, etc. that were written by the GNU project; a GNU environment. Richard Stallman insists that any distro that has a GNU environment should have "GNU/" in the name, and the Debian folks have chosen to do this. So, if a BSD distribution has GNU tools as well as the BSD kernel, if Debian were ever to ship a Debian based on it, I believe they would call it "Debian GNU/BSD".
If the BSD folks have their own BSD environment, and they don't use GNU shells and debuggers and compilers and such, then this obviously doesn't apply.
I can't speak for the Debian project, so I don't know whether they would try to change the license on the kernel or not. I never meant to imply that they would.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
I agree.. too many AC's just blurt out techno babble. I would like to kmow how its implemented in hardware and hardwired
umm BS ?
Sorry dude, Linux is the ugliest designed Kernel ever. It ignores the last thirty years of software engineering, and puts forth a technologically primitive system. I would argue that the NT Kernel is more advanced than it.
Microsoft broke the NT Kernel's elegance in 4.0 and 5.0, but it was a reasonably well designed kernel.
I mean, the reason I run Linux is that it is "fun" and I can get precompiled things like KDE right out of the box (and I don't get funky things like Cronolog not compiling on my machine like I'm picking up with OpenBSD).
If I don't run Redhat, I lose these advantages.
But, I pick up a poorly designed kernel.
Thanks, but no thanks. I think that Linux is the best hacked together kernel, but I find the design really inelegant.
Besides, I have no time on my hands, and this isn't on the top of my todo list. However, I'll check out the site and keep it in mind in the future, thanks.
Alex
>>Saying the BSD licence is more free than the GPL is like saying that a state without laws against kidnapping is more free than a state that does have them.
>That doesn't even make sense. It would be better put to say that the BSD is more free than the GPL the same way a state without taxes is more free than a state with taxes.
The two analogies are not mutually exclusive. The BSDL is like a state with no laws, taxes, or social safety net. I think certain third world countries would qualify for the description, but I wouldn't want to live there.
>With BSD you don't have to pay the 'state' anything. But with the GPL you are forced to pay the 'state' with whatever additions you add to its code.
With taxes you are forced to return part of your earnings to compensate for services that make it possible to earn money in the first place. Witht the BSDL you just take the fruits of others and run. The analogy holds.
Evan - needs to hit preview before submitting
psxndc
The emacs religion: to be saved, control excess.
get real...
ya, but you realize that when the linux guys start talking about desktop, what they really mean is "windows-like", right?
anyone know what the shared memory limit is on linux?
"what do you mean, not every user can su to root?!? How inconvenient!! and i have to set a root password? fuck that! I'm going back to linux!!1!!"
s k a z a t
Dada Mail - Program, Art Project or Absurdity?
Since I was recently lucky enough to score (inadvertantly, it was next in the queue) a xxx 666 (the xxx were actual letters) license plate, maybe I should switch to BSD. I'm thinking of painting a huge devil on the back, it can be the bsdmobile:)
jred
www.cautioninc.com
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I use flixging windows 98 for playing games, linux is not the platform to play games on. And IMHO X servers (at least 3.3.x and 4.x of XFree86 series) suck at multimedia. Yeah. Try to play DVD-movie or decent mpeg2 video with audio on any *nix or *nix-like system.
--
when everyone gives everything,
when everyone gives everything, then everyone everything will get
And updating FreeBSD is a lot easier than linux. Run cvsup to sync your sources, then a cd to /usr/src and a make world (or a two part make buildworld, make installworld), and your upto date. I love running FreeBSD. Don't have to worry about the server crashing (NEVER has).....
--
It's either on the beat or off the beat, it's that easy.
I moderate therefore I rule!
--
Unfortunately, I had to stop at the install when I found out that BSD has no support for Token Ring devices. Yeah, we may be behind the times, and we're working on upgrading our network to fast ethernet, but as long as BSD doesn't have any token ring drivers, it won't find its way into our server room.
It's a pity. I would've loved to have replaced our firewall with OpenBSD.
+++
+++
NO CARRIER
Then a couple of months later I needed to buy a new printer and the one I wanted charged $375 for their ethernet card so I decided to get an old PC out of the closet and get a 486 motherboard and and 66 cpu for a lot less. I installed that Linux disk and added netatalk and used it as a print server with 8 megs of ram.
As the years go by, I simply get upgrades from the net and compile. Now I use all that fancy X stuff on another PC for HTML and my server is a 133 486 with 16 megs of ram. There is no root password here.
I bought Debian to put on the Mac, but it sucks. I don't use any of that distro security crap here because I don't need to. I don't want to spend hours cracking overbearing security crap on my own network just because some distro thinks everyone is running on a community college network. I removed Debian from my Mac.
So, I use Linux because I started with Linux. If I had started with a BSD, I'd proably be running BSD now. I bet the new BSD distros are loaded to the gills with Too Much Security crap.
blessings,
"Only in their dreams can men truly be free 'twas always thus, and always thus will be."
--Tom Schulman
Cause the FreeBSD dhcp client stoped working since my ISP "upgraded" their dhcp server
and nothing i tried worked
thats the only reason i switched back to Linux
42
Linux uses double 4byte pointers and that limits a processes address space to 4GB, which results in about 2GB or so of physical memory(much of the address space is taken up by other things). You can get around this by using threads, or by special mmaping strategies. Most single processes probably shouldn't be using more than 4GB or ram anyway. This is mainly just a limitation of ia32 design and anyone who needs the ability to address more than 4GB should be using a 64bit processor.
Matt Newell
This article is very pointless in my mind. I don't know a whole lot about *BSD, but I know a bit about linux. First of all, they are testing the first version of a very major release, with a whole new VM, and they expect it to be properly tuned by default. It's not going to happen. Second, these two operating systems are very different beasts and behave differently in different conditions. I strongly believe that FreeBSD is the better choice for an out of the box web server, but for any site that needs real performance and has network administrators that know what they are doing, I would pick linux. Why, because using sendfile with the zerocopy patches, linux will serve much more content than freebsd. Then throw in Tux, then you really have a serious web serving machine that will be the performance leader every time.
For the desktop, Linux is always just a bit ahead of FreeBSD. The reason for this is because most developers are developing their stuff for linux and soon after it is ported to the BSD's. But linux does currently have much better USB support and video card support is also better when it comes to DRI.
Linux is just now catching up to FreeBSD in terms of performance, but Linux will overtake it and leave it behind in the coming months simply because there are many more people interested in linux.
Matt Newell
You're right about the system upgrade. From the welcome message at ftp.cdrom.com:
Welcome to ftp.cdrom.com, a service of Digital River, Inc.
There are currently 674 users out of 3000 possible.
This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5. The operating system is FreeBSD.
-dan
I've run FreeBSD and Linux both for many years now, had good performance and shoddy perfomance from both. I'd have to say that for Samba servers though, FreeBSD blows Linux away.
Paul
-pB
I can't be the only person who thinks that getting involved in the OpenBSD vs FreeBSD war is too much hassle :)
There's a place for all Operating Systems. The real reasons I use linux are because I am used to it, it's fast, stable, efficient, and does everything I need. The developer base for Linux is huge, all my company machines now use it, and it's what I'm used to.
For the time being, I see no reason to change. Perhaps when I get *some* free time, I'll play around with one of the BSDs, but for now, if it ain't broke, don't fix it. And Linux is far from being broke.
Sometimes, choice of OS is based entirely on hardware compatibility.
If linux ran on my laptop--- I'd use it
If BSD ran on my laptop---- I'd use it
If OSX ran on my laptop---- I'd use it
If Windows NT ran on my laptop--- I'd use it
If Dos 6.22 Ran on my laptop--- I'd use it
Unfortunately, the PoS won't run anything other than Windows ME.
If anyone has experience with the Presario 1700 series, let me know... I HATE WinME!!!!
Another unsatisfied customer.
--Ryan
"And if I could change the future,
Fight or flight its all the same
Live to die another day
--Ryan
Soft updates? WTF is that supposed to mean ... sounds suspiciously like the MySQL "RDBMS" doesn't actually write anything to disk in that situation. Not particularly useful if you don't like losing customer orders. Anyway, I'm sure I'll be flamed if I'm wrong ...
I don't know, ever tried to maybe... do strings on ftp under windows ? -smile-
-mutter- something something something...
Why can't both licenses exist in the world simultaneously?
Look at the world. GPL is like a hive of Borgs, assimilating the world. One by one OSS must cave in into the GPL doctrine, like Trolltech.
BSD-license can coexist with any other license, well apart from GPL, which doesn't go well with any other than... yup, GPL!
GPL is just like a union-thing. Membership is "voluntary", just say goodbye to your job then, if you don't wanna be a member
GPL is just as "free" and tolerant as... Microsoft.
No, give me a free license instead.
Bjarne
apt-get source package-name; edit what you want to edit; run debuild. It really isn't that difficult if you take some time to learn the dpkg-dev build environment. Hell, you might even find that you can build/maintain your own debian packages! WOuldn't that be horrible? More than a couple times I have customized packages that diverged from the main debian distribution. Where I work, we actually maintain a central repository of precompiled, custom packages. We maintain a lot of servers and distributing updates is a cinch! Don't have to worry about overwriting config files or anything. Just add your repository to /etc/apt/sources.list and you get the updates you need.
Oh well, what you call "easier to customize" I call "clumsy."
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I second that! Debian/BSD! Give me apt-* or give me death!
Hell, I would probably run Solaris x86 if it came in the form of a Debian distribution!
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
I have used it, and its clumsy at best. Plus it only works for "ports" software. And compile? Ick, we pay (HA!) Debian developers good money to compile/maintain "ports" for us. I have been "make install"ing .tar.gz packages since the first Slackware distributions, and i am tired of it.
Try updating your FreeBSD system from 3.1 to 4.1.1 in 1 hour through an ssh session and without a reboot (until you decide to update the kernel).
"The ports tree" really only gives a small portion of the full apt functionality.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
Great, but what about updating all the ports software you installed? What about preserving configuration files? What if you don't want to "make world" a whole distribution? Compile? Thats a joke. What is the point of having a distribution if you have to compile all your updates/additions? Debian developers spend a lot of time testing and maintaining dependencies between packages.
:)
Can you selectivly update packages? Roll back to older ones?
It would seem that the FreeBSD way is more that a little more complicated. Many of the features just are not there. But thats Ok. Its probably one of those things where you don't need it until you have it. I mean, I was perfectly happy with COMMAND.COM, freeing up conventional memory, allocating XMS memory, and programming using SEG:OFFSET addressing under DOS before I first installed Linux. Sure, DOS can use all 64MB of RAM in your computer, its just a little more complicated
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
If "ports" is one of the coolest things about FreeBSD, then I am afraid Debian really does have one up on FreeBSD. As I mentioned earlier, this feature is clumsy at best. Its a clever hack.
"ports" is simply a way of extending a basic installation... apt IS the installation. I would love to go on, but if you have never really spent time using/upgrading/maintaining Debian systems, you just have no idea. There is no point in trying explain it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
There are many reasons why I prefer Linux to FreeBSD. THe biggest is the fact that I love Debian. I have installed FreeBSD but the install is just too minimalist. I have run various versions of RH Linux and Slackware as well. What can I say, apt-get rocks! Oh and I absolutely despise the BSD startup scripts. I will trade a little speed for the power of Debian. There are the political issues of the GPL versus the BSD license. I really perfer supporting GNU.
If there was a Debian distribution build around the FreeBSD kernel, I would jump on it in a heartbeat, but until FBSD gets a better packaging, I am going to have to just say no to it.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death
IF in fact, as many penguinistas do claim in these forums, FreeBSD's SMP support is so inferior to Linux's, then why, in spite of this gross performance inhibition, was the FreeBSD box able to trounce the Linux box at all? Bad benchmarks be damned, if Linux's SMP is what I've heard it to be, it should've made a better showing than that.
9 little greeblys sitting on a plate...
Do not meddle in the affairs of dragons, for you are crunchy, and taste good with ketchup.
Good luck keeping the plate - the religious reich will be out to get you. If you do keep it, make sure to get a Lamborghini Diablo after the ipo...
(I know - waaaay off topic)
The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers. Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part 2, Act 4, Scene 2
like the average joe is qualified to choose [a hospital] in the first place
You believe the average person should be "protected" from himself, by disallowing the choices you feel may be too difficult for him, and which affect him alone.
That's why you are a socialist, and I am not.
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
If I post anything about FreeBSD sucking and Linux ruling, I'll get an automatic +1, Insightful, right? Also, for some more karma, I could say Linus is the man and Microsoft sucks, which, on a good night, could yield another +1 or +2, eh? Oh, the fun never ends! This truly is the land of opportunity!
______________________________
Eric Krout
If you celebrate Xmas, befriend me (538
I work for a major corporation. I can get corporate Support for Linux. All our major vendors natively support linux (Compaq, HP, Citrix, bCandid, Oracle, others). I can go out and buy HORDES of books on Linux. I can call RedHat for Priority support. I can call bCandid and they have Linux developers on staff.
HP is migrating to support Linux over HP/UX. Compaq is now selling Linux clusters. IBM has Linux on their s/390's.
Fine, you say you could care less about the server environment? I can (and have) bought Heroes III and Quake III for linux. I can install Ximian Gnome seamlessly and have an incredible desktop.
What's coming? xfs from SGI, IBM's Billion dollars of development. I can go grab a nightly build of mozilla precompiled (yes, there are milestones for FreeBSD, but I have to compile from source if I want the fix to the bug fixed yesterday, as opposed to a simple download and install for Linux.)
As for FreeBSD being faster, heh. I work at an ISP. We have 200,000 customers. We watched our FreeBSD boxes die one by one at 100,000. We're running Linux (and HP/UX) smoothly now, without issue.
And lastly, I don't like having to compile the entire planet every time I upgrade. Long past is the time when watching a make run is the way I want to spend my time. Give me a binary RPM to install. If I *want* to compile from source for some reason, I have the choice. not the other way around.
There seems to be no problem porting drivers to FreeBSD. For instance, FreeBSD had USB support in a stable version a whole year before Linux did. And ATA100 if I recall correctly (and I'm sure I'll be corrected if I'm wrong). *BSD developers seem to focus more on making it work than making it cool, but that's okay by me, since 9 times out of 10 I would much rather have something working instead of waiting for it to come out "real soon now."
---
"No problem. I have the capacity to do infinite work so long as you don't mind that my quality approaches zero."-Dilbert
Linux supports SMP on (at least) Sparc and Alpha. Which is why my SS10 is running linux.
Bah! The only thing this page concludes is that vi users have no taste in clothing...
I modded the Troll Investigation and I got
I like FreeBSD. I run Linux on all my home boxes (four) and haven't had a problem with them yet. However, I put FreeBSD on a box to do fileserving via Samba and NFS. Now granted these two protocols SUCK, I thought it might do better than Linux. I was mistaken. When the FreeBSD box tried to serve Samba-shared mp3's, it skipped, no matter how large I set the TCP_CHUNK or whatever size in smb.conf. Also, the NFS mounts were really screwed up when trying to mount from a SPARC Solaris NFS server. It kept timing out and remounting. Also, NIS+ sucked horribly. I even tried NIS (this was all client). So I guess what I'm trying to say is that once Linux got onto that same box, all those problems went away, and I just don't understand if FreeBSD is this rock-solid, own all OS for networking, why did it crap all over the place on simple networking issues? Just wanted to put my info in (this was FreeBSD 4.2 versus Slackware 7.1).
I too use Linux instead of BSD. There are a few reasons I do this. The first is the ease of securely maintaining my box on my limited schedule. I will fiddle with BSD sometime in the near future again, but for now I just needed to get what I needed to do done. The second is the documentation that Linux has. From what I have seen it is much more extensive than what I found when looking for BSD related info. Third is that I do many different things on my Linux Box. Networking, graphics, web page design, a few games, papers for school, e-mail, and web surfing are all handled by Linux for me. To make the switch to BSD on my main box would be silly and time consuming. I still look foward to BSD, but until I get more time to put it on my 586 it just ain't gonna happen.
Everytime you look at porn a devil gets their horns.
I also have the same problems with LILO on my first drive, but I switched to GRUB anyway. I guess the problem is really an installer deficiency. When they display that error message it should provide an "Aww, fuck it, install the damned thing anyway" option for those of us with l33t Swiss-army-knife bootloaders. :) GRUB can mount various partition types and boot Linux, BSD, and Hurd kernels anywhere on the disk(s).
It's an AMD Athlon system with a VIA chipset. The actual model number escapes me and I haven't got the docs for it handy. The drives are an IBM 16.8GB and a Quantum Fireball 30.0GB. I am trying to install on the first partition (slice) of the IBM drive, and when I try to create a disklabel for the slice, is when the error message pops up.
I'm grabbing an ISO of NetBSD right now, to see if I have any better luck.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
I'm an open-minded guy. I use Linux, love Linux, but decided it would be cool to give FreeBSD a try. Unfortunately, the damned thing won't even install on my second hard disk. Something about the boot code not recognizing it or something. With Linux and GRUB, I could install put-near anywhere. Any BSDophiles got any tips?
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
If you REALLY want to enable root login over ssh just edit you sshd_config file. It is found in /etc/ssh/ In it you should find a line like this:
PermitRootLogin noJust change the no to yes, then restart your ssh daemon.
Ninjas. Pancakes. Which is better? Discuss!
---
I generally distribute my (sophmoric) code under an AGPL license - That's "Anti-GPL".
It states (loosely; I rewrite it every time I release something) that my code may not be included in any GPL'd project. You may use it for any other gains, as long as you don't claim that you wrote it, and you don't even have to give me credit.
Stand tall! You, like me, seem to object to the viral nature of the GPL. I, of course, have written my own GPL anti-virus :) If you believe, like I do, that the GPL is a little too megalomaniacal, do as I do, and prevent your code from being snarfed into a GPL project.
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Let me start out by saying that I'm a bigger fan of BSD (though mostly Open, and not Free, net, or i) than I am of Linux, but I still think that Moshe is insane.
Linux runs on a damn sight more platforms than x86 and Alpha; Let's not forget 68k with no MMU, 68k with an MMU, PPC, ARM, some MIPS chips, and, well, a bunch of other architectures. I'm not saying this to say that linux is better than FreeBSD or anything, but it certainly runs on more architectures.
In all fairness, I'll mention that some of those architectures are broken right now; There are simple and obvious errors in kernel 2.4.1 which will not allow you to build, for example, a m68k kernel. If you want to do so, you should get the m68k-linux team's current CVS kernel.
Also, saying that Linux is an advanced BSD Unix operating system is something of a misnomer. First of all, Linux is a kernel. If you're going to say that FreeBSD is like Linux, you're going to be wrong; This is a nit, but it should be picked if you're trying to sound knowledgeable. Also, even if you're willing to overlook that, Linux is not BSD, exactly. One tends to use glibc with the Linux kernel, and glibc is not exactly a BSD libc. Then again, it's not SYSV either; But saying that Linux is a BSD is not true. It DOES however have BSD elements in it.
Debian is a current linux distribution. In fact, I'm running it on a Quadra 950. The installer is neither fancy nor slow. In fact, it was fairly speedy on my Q950, which is a MC68040 CPU at 33MHz, hardly the stuff speed is made of. (No cooking-down jokes, please.)
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
If I were going to try to stop the GPL with my license, I'd have to be a better (and more prolific) programmer than I ever plan to be.
Anyway, my goal is simply to keep my code from being infected with GPLness. You can sort of use my code in a GPL program anyway; Your GPL program can CALL it. That's perfectly acceptable. IIRC, if your package will not function without a GPL package, then your package must be GPL'd. I have no such restriction :)
--
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I keep hearing about people saying "Open Source is not a viable business model...yadda yadda yadda..."
These people don't get it.
Not very many people do.
The software is not important anymore!
The people who build solutions with it ARE important,and THAT is where the cash is made.
Now, what software is no longer important anymore?
Why the OS of course. Why is that?
Why? The same reason why IPX became unimportant in the network world the moment you hooked up to the internet.
OPEN STANDARDS.
The OS is NOW becomming a standard, just like TCP/IP, open and free.
Open Source is really, a movement of industry and individuals to OPEN STANARDS platforms.
You may have also noticed, that this is part of the maturation cycle of computer technology. Whole software subsystems, after many years of application support, are now being identified as BOILER PLATE and are now forming the basis for standards.
Why is that?
If you still haven't figured that question out, you should be selling cars!!
Shrinkwrap companies like Microsoft are in the business of selling boiler plate software.
Thats why they are SCARED, they realize that the OS, Office app market is matured to the point it is now pretty much a STANDARD.
Unfortunately for Microsoft and other shrinkwrap software makers in the OS, and Office apps marketplace, they are stuck on one platform.
One platform doesn't cut it if you are hooked up to the internet. Well, it does, if you don't wish to do any business with China, Japan, Europe..etc.
The ONLY WAY to do that, is to embrace OPEN STANARDS and if your company doesn't, you can damn well rest assured your competitors WILL.
Microsoft doesn't work that way. Why? because if they cannot tie you to thier platform or OS, that means they don't have an advantage over you in time to market, cost of development of these BOILER PLATE software products.
OPEN STANDARDS means the death of over 80% of Microsofts current revenue streams over the next 5 years.
I am just counting the days. At the moment, the internets infrastructure is too immature to support this direction NOW.
However, just like your telephone, the net will be as robust as your phone line one day, or cell phone, and when that day comes, this vision will be realized.
Nobody, in thier right mind is going to do business with any company that can't move and send data at a moments notice to a consumer, vendor, or anyone ANYWHERE 24x7, 365 days out of the year here on earth or out in space.
Trying doing that with an operating system that requires you to do business with a customer as long as they by 100 grand worth of microsoft operating system products FIRST.
My response to him would be great! Come here and install and YOU pay for it, meanwhile, I will install a POP3 server and Linux THANKS but NO THANKS!!!
Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
However I stand by my assertion that Linux is more popular, and I can only attribute that to the difference in licences.
As far as stating most developers would rather not have their code end up in Windows - just look at the kerberos fiasco. MS 'embraced and extended' kerberos, actually causing interoperability with UNIX systems to not work. Can you honestly tell me you would condone that as a BSD developer?
With more developers, Linux will progress at a faster rate than the BSD's. That's not to say the BSD's won't.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
So, tell me again, this is an acceptable use of your code as a BSD developer?
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
At the risk of being redundant, here are a few comparative advantages of FreeBSD over Linux, and vice-versa. Linux Advantages *Much* more commercial/developer support Microsoft:Linux::Linux:FreeBSD(::FreeBSD:OpenBSD). And I'm not only talking about tech support. I'm talking about developers adding and improving the operating system. This has huge implications. Many companies will be much more comfortable building a linux box than building a BSD one. The Java implementation, overall, is better. Hardware support is further along the way. There are more options for clustering, etc.
FreeBSD Advantages
Just because Linux has more people behind it does not mean it is more mature. Linux has a lot of things to sort out. First is its development cycle - things happen quickly, but with not enough thought. That's why you see kernel updates like every week. FreeBSD, on the other hand, has had more playing time, and its development philosophy is much more precise. The kernel isn't the only place this advantage manifests itself; the other is in the ports collection, which I like a lot more than the various packaging systems of linux. Also, FreeBSD is generally more reliable and fast under heavy loads.
You're wrong. Umm...NetBSD has basically *all* the platforms out there (like dreamcast)
Here's one reason I'm sticking with Linux, Linux actulally has good support for Java. Plus you have several VM to choose from. Several of which are very good. I can run anything from Tomcat, to WebLogic, from jEdit to JBuilder without a hitch. I can't do all of that with FreeBSD. All of that speed means very little when I can't run an application.
I was suprised to see that FreeBSD only supports JDK 1.1.8. I thought Mac OS had it bad but this is really bad for a UNIX OS to be so far behind with Java. Maybe with a little pressure, Apple will aid the BSD camp with their Java knowledge. The Java implementation in OS X is very fast and plays very well with Swing based Apps.
the benchmarks done in the original post were done on a dual box... so looks like freeBSD beats linux at smp.
I notice that freebsd site doesn't list video adapter compatibility on their hardware list.
I thought that the the video drivers were part of xfree/86 and so should work with Linux distros and bsd if xfree runs on it.
am i wrong? Gforce drivers are in xfree 4.01? and don't they work with freebsd as well?
Have you everheard of "su" the simple fact is you should *never* login as root at all but at all time login as a user and su or sudo to do things that require root. Then if you look at your logs and see a login as root you know there and then that you have a issue. Also most of the Apache developers run *BSD so just grab the source and compile. You should almost always compile Apache from source in any case.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
No if you would read my post you would see that I said you should NOT ever login as root locally either. You should always login as another user and then use su or sudo to become root. This is commonsense stuff comeon.
Cypherpunks: Civil Liberty Through Complex Mathematics. Those who live by the sword die by the arrow.
Ahh, but the emacs people have the same taste - there is the exact same shirt with emacs and vi switched, if you click on the "emacs users' version" link.
I don't have much to go on here...could you give the background to your arguments??
Damn...
PPro-200, 64M, adaptec 2940UW, and some fast-wide 5k/7k RPM drives...
no skipping.
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
No... like I said... no skipping. I'm typing this right now, in Netscape, and untarring a compressed Linux kernel... and tarring it back up...
no skipping.
And I'm still using a PPro200. Maybe it's 'cuz I'm only using an ISA SB16...
Now, on windows NT... I get audio skipping when moving windows arround...
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
Yes..but how do you define 'abusing it'? Anyone who buts their code under a BSD licence probably knows what that implies. If it gets reused by a corporation in order to make a profit then it's not abuse - it's something the author had intentionally made possible.
Rather a lot of them. In a (Free|Net|Open)BSD specific format and package manager which I, personally, prefer.
You can also install and use RPM and Linux binaries, if you wish.
I would wonder how many commercial apps will run w/o a hitch (ala Oracle, Sybase, Star Office, Netscape servers).
Well, Sybase and Star Office run just fine. As does, for instance, the Linux netscape binaries. I haven't tried Oracle or any Netscape servers.
But then I suppose the argument would be that glibc and binary compatibility is the great equalizer???
I have glibc on my FreeBSD machine - in /compat/linux/lib. Linux apps work just fine with it.
Ya know...you sound like a typical RPM junkie! Have people forgotten how to *compile* things the old way? Granted, I use the ports collection nowadays when I'm feeling lazy, but there are systems where I *have* to compile the old way (BSDi for one). Has everyone gotten so lazy that the thought of downloading the actual source and compiling is like asking someone to quarter thier sister?
:)
Somtimes I dont like the 'patches' or 'features' done by the ports maintainers...so I do it by hand.
and if you MUST login as root via anything, then you better belly up to Uncle Bill and move to redmond.
Linux (by default) is a security hazard...and I'm willing to bet that 90% of the 'Linux followers' don't know anything besides what Debian or Red Hat (etc, etc, etc) force feed them out of the box.
Why yes, I'm trolling the the Troll under the Fremont Bridge
NO SPORK
Appended to the end of comments you post. 120 chars.
FreeBSD runs X, its designed to run it from the console. It supports alot of sound cards. It has a graphical console based screensaver. There are plenty of "desktop" applications in the ports collection. It supports PPP. Sure it shines as a server, but pop Gnome on it with Gnumeric and ABIword and it makes a fine Desktop.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Well you don'ty get more windows like than KDE or gnome. Well unless you want exact look alike then go with fvwm95 but then no integrated control panel sounds etc. All run on FreeBSD. And considering linux emulation is rock solid in FreeBSD you can just use VMware anm boom you got windows
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
I have to ask myself why I don't just switch my server to FreeBSD.'"
Because FreeBSD is the great Satan?
I downloaded the source, and it dies on the Makefiles ... I found binarys that don't work.
I have been running Linux for quite some time now and would like to expand my knowledge a little with using it.
FreeBSD is a smaller distro, that I can install on my laptop without a problem. Its only got a 800mb HD. Installing something like rh 6.2, is a serious pain. Its got way to much crap that it installs.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
until (succeed) try { again(); }
Why wouldnt it?
As long as you comply with the (extensive) hardware compatability list, its as good if not better than Linux.
Ah, yes. Hardware compatibility. You will find that BSD 4 runs circles around Linux 2.4 on certain more compatible hardware, such as walnut shells and inner tubes. If you think Linux is better, it's just because you're using bleeding edge technology, like "Intel compatible PCs."
Bingo Foo
---
taken! (by Davidleeroth) Thanks Bingo Foo!
Argue semantics with someone else. It seems everytime one makes some argument on the GPL and distribution somebody brings up that you can always use the GPL protected code and not distribute your new creation if you don't want it under the GPL as well. I think common sense should have made obvious the fact that I was talking about code intended to be redistributed one way or another (read the parent).
Let's read from the GPL section 2b:
You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.
This means that linking to a GPL program or any portion of a GPL program requires that your software also be covered under the GPL (Yes, I am aware that if identifiable sections of your work are not derived from the GPL software, and can be reasonably considered independent yadda yadda yadda). This is why the LGPL was brought into existence, and this is what I maintain is an unenforceable clause. Any modifications to the original code certainly have to be released GPL, but linking is another matter. But we'll never find out until somebody has the time and interest to drag this sort of stuff through litigation.
Oh, and just so that you don't go playing semantics again, this means linking your software intended for redistribution.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
I really wish somebody with the time to drag this one through the system would challenge this. I've yet to hear one legal expert seriously believe that requiring all products that link through any means to a GPL piece of code must place themselves under GPL'd. There are a whole host of reasons why... However since GPL bashing would offend The Unslashdot Activities Committee, I'll leave it at that.
Education is a better safeguard of liberty than a standing army.
Edward Everett (1794 - 1865)
Look closely. Note CGI processes. When a CGI process that takes a minute to run chews up an entire PII Xeon, I'd call that CPU hungry. Some of the more bugged user CGI attempts would occasionally stick in a loop at 99% CPU. I'd call that hungry too. Two NICs were required simply because the first initial one had started to constantly collide, so I enabled the second and bound apache and exim to different interfaces. Problem solved.
I'd suggest you try working with busy production servers before passing judgement. Or, I'd wager, working at all.
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
isnt BSD linux compatable? not to mention that OSX is based on BSD. is BSD catching up and passing linux?
This is a test of the Emergency Fact Posting System. This is only a test.
::beeeeeeep::
Seven plus two equals nine
::beeeeeeep::
This has been a test of the Emergecy Fact Posting System. Had this been an actual thread on Slashdot, this system would have been delayed beyond all usefulness and fact-less posts would have already been moderated up. Read at your own discretion.
Only you can prevent inaccurate posts. Research first. - Smokey The Bear
768 GB of RAM
Five 18.2-GB disks via RAID5
That'll make one hell of a RAM disk.
You can cache your whole RAID array in it!
D'oh. Updates for this problem has been on redhat website since last july. if you had been responsible sysadmin, you would have get those updates when ramen was first time in news, around september.
ound the message used repetitively over and over still nothing grows silen
I must disagree. I used linux (slackware) for ~2 years, before making the move to FreeBSD. Generally, I found it hell to find docs for slackware. (i realise other distro's have better docs/etc)
Since moving to FreeBSD, I've found that I've learnt a hell of a lot more in the short time that I've been using it, compared to the time I spent with linux. I've also found that it's *much* easier to administrate.
Aside from the abundance of docs distributed with the release, and that on the homepage, I've found their mailinglists an invaluable source of information. A quick search of the lists, and one is generally furnished with something appropriate, otherwise, the community is always quick to respond to a post to freebsd-questions with concise and accurate information.
As for ease of administration, I must point you to ports and the make world process. If for nothing else (there was a lot more) these two things would have been enough to keep me away from linux forever.
When setting up a home server/firewall box a few years ago, the Linux/*BSD decision was made for me: I needed a driver for the AMD pcnet32 home lan card (i.e., the ethernet cards that run over your existing phone lines). Linux had it, BSD didn't. The BSD code is cleaner though.
Ever feel you just got screwed over on moderation?
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
However, I can give a real-world example here that illustrates why I'm in the Linux camp, at least slightly moreso than the *BSD camp.
My background is System V-ish. I started using UNIX with SCO, and have worked on AIX, NCR and Solaris systems, but not SunOS (though I readily admit I'm not a "guru"). Last year I was tasked by my employer to set up a NAT system so that we could re-route all our Customer Service employees machines through it and control what web sites they went to (in this case, none except the corporate web site). This was something I had little experience with, however, I wanted security so I downloaded OpenBSD and set about learning to use it.
It took all day to install on a 1 year old Dell P3/500. Once installed I found myself issuing commands that didn't work ("ps -ef", for example) or that didn't return what I expected. Not being familiar with the BSD area, I didn't know where to look for help, and what web pages I did find, didn't guide me quickly enough. A day and a half into the project we were no closer to finished than when we'd started, and the boss had promised HIS boss that we'd have it up within another day.
So I downloaded and installed RedHat. It went in flawlessly and I found the IP Masquerading How-To and followed it and was up in a few hours.
Now, I FULLY recognize that this was not a limitation of OpenBSD, but rather my own knowledge. Given more time, I could've made the BSD system work, and may even have been happier with it, but I didn't have the time, and the more System V-like environment provided by Linux made for an easier transition.
In fact, once I figured out "ps -aux" I tried it on my Linux box and was surprised to see that it worked there, too (it doesn't on the Suns at work). So it seems to be that at least one reason to use Linux is that it's tools work similarly to what you are used to, regardless of whether you come from BSD or SysV, whereas the BSD side is, naturally, not very SysV-like (a friend who has a BSD background phrases it differently. He says that "Linux takes the worst of SysV and BSD command syntax", but at least either syntax works!)
I make no comparisons of quality here, only state that when crunch time came I was able to use Linux to get the job done, and was unable to do the same with OpenBSD in the same timeframe.
Having said that, I still hope to experiment with the *BSD systems when there is less of a time crunch, but I wouldn't be surprised if many peoples first experiences are similar, BSD being more difficult to get started with, move to Linux and up and running very quickly (to be fair to the BSD folks, I had EXACTLY the same scenario with Solaris X86, which was very difficult to get running on hardware that RedHat autodetected and installed on with hardly any effort).
Ease of install, easily find support, large quantity of software that the user can install quickly and easily. These are ingredients to success (in fact, the exact ones Microsoft used).
But doesnt Linux support more arch's than bsd cause it only sounds like bsd supports i386 and alpha's. Now linux on the other hand supports lots more plus the GPL is alot better than the BSD license in my opinion. Just my 2 cents.
The Beaver The Best Things In Life Are Free And So Is Linux!
FreeBSD Handbook Sections 10.3.1 and 10.5.1 both answer this question. It took me all of ten seconds to find this.
Who's got the bad attitude? People who refuse to read the basic documentation for a system are just wasting the time of people kind enough to make themselves available to people with actual problems, and don't deserve help.
Here's a hint for the newbie:
If you're using FreeBSD, read the handbook (the installer asked you if wanted to look at it, so you can't really pretend you didn't know about it).
If you're using OpenBSD, read the FAQ and man afterboot.
In either case, read the man pages (man disklabel also has the answer to your partition limit question - in fact, it's in so many places I can't understand how you could possibly have missed it).
[I know it's hard for you linux types to understand the idea of centralized documentation]
I was gonna post that the only reason I use linux over FreeBSD is because of google.com/linux. But then I decided to not look like an uninformed idiot and tried google.com/bsd and felt like a dolt.
Install party anyone?
--Dave
And BTW, FreeBSD can't be installed on a Ez-Drive'd HD. Even Slinky could do that.
(As a side note: I'm downloading NetBSD pkg-iso:s 1 & 2 now...)
Save your wrists today - switch to Dvorak
I'm trying to avoid being OT as much as possible, although I'm sure I'm bound to fail and start a thread -- if anyone reads this, that is.
In my opinion, the reason Linux gets so much publicity is the bandwagon effect. I'm probably incredibly wrong, as always, but I imagine it was the first to surprise the media, and for lack of knowledge of other choices (not the supposed quality of other choices) people jump on with the Linux team.
Take a look at it from ORA's perspective for a moment: ORA wants money. If there are potentially tons of Linux people running the OS at home vs. many servers holding up various internet sites running FreeBSD, who is more likely to pull down documentation from a website and who is more likely to go out and buy a book? Being pro-BSD, and running it only as machines I classify as servers, I'm much more likely to go pull down documentation for something from the info pages, man pages, or the handbook where it's searchable and can be quickly made use of. If I were to stick a Linux machine on my desk, I'd probably run out and prefer a book simply because I could use that without having the machine turned on.
I'll try that one more time, because I'm sure that didn't make any sense. If I have a machine on my desk, I'm probably more likely to buy a book so I can read how to fix something with it if it's not working to pull down online docs. With FreeBSD having "the power to serve", I'd much more likely stick it on a server - and hence be able to draw on online sources quicker and easier than working from a book.
Maybe that's just a personal thing?
Again, on the driver front, is a server machine/OS likely to have Nvidia code for it, or a desktop OS?
www.arrogant.org - food for your brain
I used to be a DEC Ultrix (A BSD derivative) kind of person, and my thought by comparison to Linux is: A rather arcane system as far as sysmgt & configuration were concerned. I was sure glad when DEC shipped OSF/1 (now Tru64 I think), it was a much cleaner environment. Heck if I know if the current BSD is the same. I would wonder if the number of applications are available (in nice easy RPM format) for BSD. I would wonder how many commercial apps will run w/o a hitch (ala Oracle, Sybase, Star Office, Netscape servers). But then I suppose the argument would be that glibc and binary compatibility is the great equalizer??? mdw ;-)
well, I'm not particularly fond of GPL either, but that does not mean I'm fond of BSD.
I think that the way to go is LGPL - it seems a good job of encapsulating the power that the code author has:
It claims that 'if you make changes to a particular piece of code that is LGPL, you have to make *those* changes free when distributed.'
It is not viral like the GPL, but it also doesn't allow thugs like microsoft to 'embrace and extend' it.
horos
So, the question again: may I dare to ask why anyone would want more than 7 partitions in a single slice?
There have been reoccuring discussions among ports-people of how to deal with this, but to my knowledge nobody has produced any good solution to it yet. Of course, the Open Packages project looks promising -- uniting package maintaining between BSDs (including Darwin) and incorporating the various enhancements into one single base packaging system. It might even provide a good solution to the upgrading hassle.
Which was a pretty bad example since XMMS runs perfectly fine without any changes. ;-) If it does not, please tell me.
I'm not talking about building from source, i'm talking about building source.
ports or no ports there were still compatability issues. I installed my ports right from the ftp site and they were still outdated. not light years, but enough to make a difference when i couldn't do the same things as i could under linux. and i'm not about to go rewriting apps for bsd, at least at that time i wasn't.
this is the same as above...
ports or no ports there were still compatability issues. I installed my ports right from the ftp site and they were still outdated. not light years, but enough to make a difference when i couldn't do the same things as i could under linux. and i'm not about to go rewriting apps for bsd, at least at that time i wasn't.
Cite references, please.
But can you play quake on it?
Yep. The Linux emulation layer of FreeBSD is so complete, and a (small) number of 3d cards have 3d drivers for FreeBSD, that Q3A is quite playable under FreeBSD.
Ranessin
Hate to break it to you, but code has no feelings or desires. It doesn't care if it's free or not.
Ranessin
Nice try... Just because that's the direction it's naturally moving doesn't mean that the universe is "longing" for anything... Look up anthropomorphize sometime soon.
Ranessin
This is a typo. In a previous article (http://www.byte.com/column/BYT20001229S0005) hw talks about the same server w/ 768mb of RAM.
yeah it sounds like someone forgot to give you your pacifier.
// what do you mean that was the only copy...
It's good to see all the kids playing nice like here @ /.
// what do you mean that was the only copy...
Why was this modded up? This is the usualy typical anti-GPL rant. Hardly worth a five. Worth more like a -1. Please don't mod up this junk and ruin my slashdot morning.
I've played around with several of the distros, as well as Debian and RedHat, and the absolute most basic reason I use Windows over Linux is simply because I have an easier time finding out how to install, maintain, admin or fix some problem from the various Microsoft sites out there.
It's not really a matter of which is technologically superior, and I suspect that Linux may in fact be so. However, in the particular style of searching for information on how to accomplish a particular task, I've always found the Windows information quicker and easier than for the Linux way of doing things. Again, this doesn't mean that Windows is better, far from it. It's just easier for me to run thanks to the types of online resources I come across.
"FreeBSD's TCP/IP stack is faster than Linux's because it is implemented in hardware"
Please eleborate on this claim. As it stands now, without any arguments, this is a ridiculous claim.
Rogier
That's a good idea--I wish I had the experience to help. Not that FreeBSD doesn't make a good desktop already.
The existing installation option to install X with GNOME or KDE or any of a number of window managers is a very good start to what you're talking about. Beyond that, all ports require is that you know what program you want. "Su" to root, "cd" to the clearly-named port directory in the clearly-organized /usr/ports directory, and "make install" to automatically install the program and its dependencies ("make install clean" does all that and deletes the source code when it's done with it). As someone who knows little about UNIX of any kind, that sounds "super easy" to me.
By the way, FreeBSD has been my first experience with UNIX (1 month now). The fact is that it is possible for desktop newbies, and my opinion from personal experience is that it can be painless. In terms of sheer amount, there is more linux documentation (more books especially), but like linux, FreeBSD online documentation is quite complete and well-organized. (try "freebsd documentation" on google if you don't believe me).
"Frederick, is God dead?" --Sojourner Truth
But what annoys me most - the sources are packed together and split in chunks. So if you need the sources of sed, you have to download the sources of the whole /usr/bin!!!
My fuc###... Rewrite the license, so that it will include Windows (and others like...) OS that can not use the source code under any circumstances and this is the end of your worries. If you get other code writers to support this idea you (actually I ;p ) will be the winner (hopefully).
Cheers!
and screw the M$!
So, BSD is doomed because their code is used by Microsoft? Ummm, I think a lot of OS's use at least some portion of the BSD tcp/ip stack. A fairly large portion of them, as I recall.
Does this mean that every OS is doomed if Microsoft starts using their code as well? Theres something we all need to realize here. Microsoft may not do or say the smartest things sometimes, but they aren't going anywhere.
If Microsoft (or any other OS) wants to base their code on BSD, why is this a bad thing? I guess I could have totally missed the point here, but you seem to be saying source code shouldn't be released for really good products because someone might use it.
One of these days i'm going to find this 'peer' guy and reset HIS connection!
What do you mean "Not really"?
With the GPL, an author forces all derivatives to be equally open: everyone can read, modify and distribute the source.
With the BSD licence, incompatible changes may be made which no one may ever see. This is what the GPL prevents.
The rebuttal is quite simple:
With the GPL, a programmer is say he/she wants *all* users of that software to have the right to use and modify the source code. With the BSD licence, not all users have that right.
If you're planning to install FreeBSD, a helpful reference is the FreeBSD Cheat Sheets, which help replace Linux's HOWTOs.
Correct, under the GPL, any changes made to the TCP/IP stack would have to be released to the customer (and available to all developers everywhere).
But wait: just because the CODE is under the GPL, it doesn't mean the protocol is. Ooops. MS simply creates a clean implementation of the protocol, does an embrace and extend, and usurp the protocol.
We'll let you draw your own conclusions about what can happen under the BSD license.
i-name =twylite [http://public.xdi.org/=twylite], see idcommons.net
More BSD trolls. Damn, I thought W2k trolls were enough to infect /. :)- --
---------------------------------------------
You think Bill Gates is evil?
I use both FreeBSD and Linux and having used them both in an intelligent manner, all I can say is you are full of CRAP
...
Both BSDs and Linux have directly and indirectly contributed to each other's efforts.
>> 1. The typical Linux user is not worth associating with.
If FreeBSD does it for you then by all means go for it, use it and feel happy about it. Same to a Linux user.
If you dont use one OS cause of the reasons you said, then you are an idiot cause you fail to make use of the best of both worlds.
The number of the beast
I fart in your general direction
They stuck me in an institution, said it was the only solution, to...protect me from the enemy, myself
A long, long time ago....
In a Usenet newsgroup far, far away....
Lived the world's first motorcycle gang in cyberspace.
They were known as the "Denizens of Doom".
Their motto was "Live to Flame, Flame to Live".
... and it was a good motto.
Long Live the FreeBSD vs Linux flamewars!
Long Live "Geeky", the DoD's mascot!
(I wish I could post the ascii art of "Geeky" here, but you need to read the What Is The DoD FAQ to see that.
and for the intermission we're gonna have a 3 button mouse vs a 1 button hockey puck
/* oops I accidentally made a comment, sorry */
Perhaps to look a little more into the root causes of the problem, the problem is with fragile software systems which require frequent updates and maintenance.
Tim Maroney
Since you're not using you money we want you use it for you on things you couldnt immagine like crackwhores and such. Your arguement is like some kind of slave labor agreement "ok produce code we'll use it but never give you credit you nor anyone else will never know that xyz company has built upon your code." So next time someone takes your money and does something with it you "didn't" will you think "gee i'm glad they had the resources to take my money and invest in crackwhores for me" free code should stay free not free as in re-commented, patented and regurgitated. If at any point the code becomes unavalible I'd consider that not free if you're going to use it it should be avalible for distribution.
I hope you end up buying all the products you have "free" source in. You're a robot go develop code without ethics elsewhere.
Yes I have, I wasnt able to use su, because I wasnt part of the right group, I want to KNOW how to enable root access to the box via ssh, I know its bad form, and I realise that I should compile it, I just wanted to see a binary for it.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
This is true.
can you link me to some sites that will have this info in a format for a begginer?
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
One Thing I can say about linux is that newbieish people seem more welcome, asshole.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
That is silly, each has its own strengths and weakness's for a different job.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
How can I turn this on?
I want to do this so I can admin from the computer next to it with my web documentation.
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
I think many people choose Linux over FreeBSD simply because it has a more "revolutionary" feel about it. The license tries to protect it's freeness, the more distributed nature of development, plus the fact that their are distros for the windows newbie, such as Mandrake and Corel, distros for hardcore GNU's like Debian, and distros for those familiar to Unix but new to Linux. (Slackware)
Ashes of Empires and bodies of kings,
The truth about Michael
links VS lynx ;)
Why not a war of clones??
Let vi and emacs take some rest while xemacs and vim slug it out..
And the winner is..
The same things that can save linux can save *BSD.
True it might fade from the commercial stage, it might not be seen for a long time.
But as long as there is 1 copy of the source out there, it won't die. It will just sit on some harddrive, or CD until someone comes along and has a need and or interest in reviving it, then it can come back.
It's harder to kill something that has thousands of copies distributed and no restrictions on it's use then to kill some thing that a company controls and even decides it doesn't want to work with any more. Think Windows 3.1, or even 95 or any of a number of systems that have fell by the side.
Microsoft took the BSD code, added proprietary extensions to it (of course), and re-released it under thier all-powerful EULA. The BSD license permits this.
If it was Linux code it would be called theft, although it has been leaked that Microsoft has a team dedicated to auditing the linux kernel and samba especially in order to "inspire" thier own code.
In many ways, the BSD license is responsible for the success of Microsoft, because instead of coding themselves, it took less time to take someone else's free code, change the license and sell it.
For Servers: Linux 2.4 vs. FreeBSD 4.1.1
Why Isn't Moshe Running FreeBSD?
By Moshe Bar
February 05, 2001
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/v2.4/ LATEST-IS-2.4.1 29-Jan-2001 23:55 0k
Looks like he didn't use the latest stable linux kernel either.
Some journalist, all he had to do was connect to ftp.cdrom.com and get the server text file and jpg. That is not difficult research, and he couldn't do it.
This article is worthless, I want to see extremely detailed tuning specifications, tuned by people qualified to tune them, even Linusor some people from RedHat for god's sakes. I particularly like the bootup "benchmark", I can make Linux bootup for really long just by enabling dhcp and not having a dhcp server on the network. Let's get some details dude.
I realize FreeBSD may be faster for a lot of things, and it's possible that Linux might win a few too, I don't care, I just want to see a fair comparison for once, and that hasn't happened yet.
Please explain how a corporation can 'capture' *BSD? Does the code suddenly disappear when a corporation distribute a binary without releasing the source?
Yes, see Microsoft Windows TCP/IP.
Where's the source?
Let's settle this like civilised people. We will write a tux vs daemon fighting game ala Tekken that runs of both platforms, then settle our differences in that (perhaps include Jobs and Gates as well).
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Tux vs BSD devil.
(Makes me almost want to take up claymation or computer modeling.)
I agree with this sentiment, but I probably wouldn't let it keep me from tinkering with it. BSD is a valid piece of work, maybe there should be some mirrors with a Satan-free logo, no reason to trash BSD because somebody with a bad experience in their childhood became a computer coding Jesus-hater later in life. Those darn catholic priests maybe? :-D
Another interesting thing is that you got modded down for this, it speaks for the culture of this site itself. Folks here _do_ tend to be atheists, bringing along all the usual baggage being atheist requires, the usual lack of respect for property (copyright, patents, accountability), yet with the paradox of material lust (video games all the time with the usual murderous themes), constant focus on toys vs serious social themes, cultish fantasy worlds (anime being particularily popular here). Rarely do you see topics about "stuff that matters", except for all the geek kids filling their narrow attention spans with toys and fantasies and ignoring the big questions in life. Look what happens when JonKatz brings some serious topics, all the slashdot kiddies tell him to go away because he's taking up valuable screen real estate that could be better used by tacoboy's anime/hentai and video game articles.
But clearly I'm not one to begrudge the kids here, even the culture of greed and self congratulating ignorance needs a church to hang out in ;-)
I come from the world of Windows...MCSE 2k, I'm an exchange admin. To me, and I know it is because of extensive use, the win way of doing things seems fairly logical, I know and understand it. At home, I have messed around with various open source distros. Red Hat always seemed to kaka out on me. Debian ran fine, but seemed WAY arcane to me, as far as location of configuration files and whatnot. FreeBsd hit the spot. Very straight-forward, logical. I still have no idea what the hell I am doing with it, but it seems easier...I know it all depends on experience, but FreeBSD is my foot in the door of *nix's. Linux is just too damned varied it seems...
A followup question: If the IP stack is implemented in hardware, why wouldn't any OS installed on a machine with this "hardware" be just as fast? IIRC, Layer 1 of the OSI model is the only one that deals w/ hardware specs. Layers 3/4 are implemented in software.
Ceci n'est pas un sig
FreeBSD is just a peice of shit. Admit it. You will live better.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Sun boxes get the job done. PCs just hang under the load. Its a known fact.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Ask Nasa.gov.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
hehe. A sparc2 will whoop ANY pc based machine. I don't care what OS it is. Its all in Sun's hardware.
M$ stock dropped in 1/2 since last year. If you are a MCSE, you will be broke.
Heh :-)
I guess it shouldn't hurt to at least have tried it once... perhaps I'll do some kind of dual or triple boot setup on my next compu.
Moz.
see a Text Widget
Well, I've been a Red Hat user for quite a while.. even paid for a distro or two, but after the current interesting events I have decided to switch to another distribution.
:-) Bye bye, buggy Red Hat.
The next distro I install will be Debian
Moz.
see a Text Widget
Why is it whenever OSes, in particular UNIX-clones, are mentioned on Slashdot we end up with a daft slanging match between rival factions? Every OS is written to perform the task of separating the user from the complex and arcane world of computer hardware. They all do it in different fashions, but they all go for similar goals.
Only at the highest layers of abstraction do their objectives change, some are aimed at desktop users who know nothing about computers except pointing and clicking, some are developed primarily to offer services and therefore do not need highly capable and intuitive user interfaces.
IMHO, all of them achieve their goals respectably. Windows 9x is unashamedly a desktop OS, MS has never tried to hide this fact, and it does its job admirably. Most of the tasks you need to perform are very simple to do, and if you do not know how to do something, then based on how you did something else you can generally figure it out.
Linux/BSD are both UNIX-clones, and as such are not based on a desktop-oriented OS, they provide services of all kinds extremely well though. A good case in point is my place of employment, an ISP. Most of our servers are running some variant of UNIX, webservers have linux and mail servers/news servers have BSD, but all the workstations for the staff run Windows 98/2000 because it is still the best choice for the desktop user. I know people will scream KDE or GNOME at me but however slick they are as GUIs they rely on a server-oriented OS and you can tell.
I dual-boot at home between WinME and Mandrake 7.2 and I still haven't got anywhere near the functionality available to me in Windows working on Mandrake. I cannot think of a single task I perform that Mandrake does better than Windows: it does not seem to be much quicker, if at all; sound only worked after hacking text files (hardly an average computer user job); it is no more stable, simply because Windows has not crashed on me and nor has Mandrake; and the GUI, while being of a similar design, is different enough to slow me down doing stuff.
I suppose at the end of all this, comparing OSes is like comparing chalk and cheese. However much the OS companies trumpet about their particular product being easy to use AND powerful enough for enterprise server solutions, the plain truth appears to me to be that servers and workstations are too different to be combined into one, and there will always be fundamental differences that are difficult to overcome.
OK I've finished, you can start flaming now...
"I chose -- once again -- IBM's Netfinity 5100 server. This one is a dual CPU system with PentiumIII 900-MHz processors and 768 GBs of RAM. "
Thats either a typo or a Shitload of RAM
I grew up on Windows 3.11. And I think I'm going to ride it out...
*darth like voice* I am your father linux *whinney naisal voice* Nnnnnnooooooooo.. it can't be.. your source is nothing like mine!!! .. no there was no point to that interlude.. tension braker... :)
anywho (in classic tom baker style) the biggest point I have to make about any of this is: linux or *bsd the thing most of us are after is a stable operating system that is a functional alternative to most anything m$ has to offer... some free..others not... why are we arguing over semantics? yeah jim's *bsd whoops bill's linux on one point, and bills linux whups jims *bsd on another... woopie freak'n yehawwww... I say let everyone choose for themselves what is right for them and keep on coding.. I'd love nothing better than both platforms to gain huge ground and quake m$'s cushy little hiney... *shrugs* MHO and .02 worth.. (or converted to american... uhhhhh .00000000000000002E)
.sig under construction
I did not mention Python, OpenBSD, NetBSD, TrustedBSD, Theo de Raadt, et al. It was not because I forgot, it was because they suck and aren't worth mentioning.
______________
TIA for catching on to the deliberate sarcasm and/or irony of this comment, as well as the deference of comment by Anglophiles that undoubtedly tell me which/both/neither is appropriate otherwise.
--
The results thus far:
http://www.thinkgeek.com/stuff/vi-emacs.html
--
--
Yes, but why?
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
There are many reasons to login as root remotely, the same reasons to login as root locally. To setup a headless box on a network, to administer, to do many things you need root remotely.
And then the half-assed solution to not allowing root access remotely is "su" once you've logged in with a plain-jane account. Jeez, that'll stop evil people using root remotely - now won't it. It's like a "Are you sure? (Y/N)" prompt - it's becomes a stepping stone in the way when you want to do something rather than an actual security measure.
I have yet to hear a good reason why not to allow remote root logins - any takers?
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
But then I guess you're only talking about those "necessary applications" rather than those other toys.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
...and if they're standing there right at the machine they don't get tracked... genius! Sounds like something that should be tracked anyway. I don't see the point of blocking it remotely as opposed to locally yet.
Can you please explain what you meant by 1), I understand the terms but the sentence makes no sense to me. Probably because i'm an idiot, yes.
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
As the AOL kids say "LOL!"
No one is supposed to be standing at your machine? What? So how did it get there? - who installed the OS? - how do you install drivers or do any number of the things that require root - and if you can give those rights to a plain user who sets this up... root? And where is the person standing?!
Thanks for the description of the random account thing, though.
Ho ho ho!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
The same reasons that you may want root locally also apply to root remotely.
It's convoluted security at best to have three passwords instead of one (I say three passwords as you don't know the username: so you brute the "username/password then root's password" as opposed to just "root's password").
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
-- Eat your greens or I'll hit you!
Since you're comparing your "7.1" "version" of Linux to BSD 4.2 and Linux 2.4 which are OS/kernel distriutions, I assume you've made several major revs of the kernel all by yourself. Have you told Linus? (Surely you're not embarassing yourself by confusing distribution revs and kernels...)
Tell eBay about how Sun boxes get the job done.
Perhaps the byte article explains Tux's recent behavior, as reported here:
Wayward Penguin Treated for Depression
--Blair
GPL is like a hive of Borgs, assimilating the world.
And that would be bad because...?
If you don't like GPL, feel free to write everything from scratch. Rumour is, there's still a market for software like that.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
I could not have said it better!!
;)
I have also migrated from Redhat to OpenBSD. All the DNS, Mail, Database servers are now OpenBSD. I still use Redhat for my Servlet, JSP (Tomcat) servers. My biggest wish is that Sun and IBM starts porting JDK for BSD so i can run the latest version on an OpenBSD server.
OpenBSD is the most structured and cleanest of all Linux/BSD distributions i have ever tried. I love it!! It's almost plug and play
Simple, because it provides one less entry point into the system, and an extra layer of security. It puts root one extra step away from everybody.
There are many reasons to login as root remotely, the same reasons to login as root locally. To setup a headless box on a network, to administer, to do many things you need root remotely.
If it's stuff you can do manually, you can just log in as a regular user and su. No big deal.
If for some weird reason you really NEED to do automated root logins to a machine (which is pretty fucked up, but ssh can be set up for this using RSA keys), still, that's no reason to allow root logins from the whole net on your main ssh daemon-- you can still easily set up a separate sshd on a non-standard port, and use TCP wrappers to limit the machines allowed to connect to it to the bare minimum. Then again, if you are considering this, it's time to think seriously again about your setup.
Vive le Québec libre, 'sti!
Debian doesn't have a clear separation between development of the base system and 3rd party ports, as the BSDs do. If you stick to stable, this means that the 3rd party packages languish behind. If you run testing, it means your base packages are being updated all the time. With FreeBSD, your basic system remains the same for a long while, while you can track the newest versions of ports.
Also, Debian sucks at ease of automated custom builds from source. For many people this is an issue, including me-- I typically need to setup packages with the precise options I want, and Debian makes it much tougher than BSD.
Upgrading Debian and FreeBSD is not particularly tough for either-- for Debian you do apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade, while for FreeBSD you cvsup && cd /usr/src/; make buildworld && make buildkernel KERNEL=<kernel> && make installkernel KERNEL=<kernel> && make installworld and reboot-- for both systems you can do this remotely.
Apt is more advanced in many ways, but FreeBSD's system is easier to customize.
Vive le Québec libre, 'sti!
Hardly, why would I have been asking if I didn't already feel that way. My impressions were already "colored". My point with repeating this story, was that most GPL people are like this. And the GPL itself has the same attitude. You WILL do it our way, or we will find a way to FORCE you to comply. Trying to make me look like a childish person throwing a mindless tantrum is a nice tactic -- but it doesn't work in civilized society.
Is there a reason why you thought you'd have any input as to liscensing a class assignment? You don't think you owned it, did you?
Hmm, maybe you don't comprehend the level of assignment. I am not in high school where you write contrite little programs to calculate the sum of two integers or something like that. Yes, we have homework assignments like that -- but those were not the issue. The issue was the project at the end. My teacher acted like he was doing the class a favor by allowing us to GPL our code, because we could get it back later. He claimed that the major benefit of the GPL is that it would allow us to share our code. But he refused to allow the BSD, even though it met one of his criteria and we were willing to waive the right to see our code ever again. Why did we want that? Because these projects could evolve into a commercial and/or open-source project later on down the road. And if anything was GPL'd the whole code had to be. We did not want to have to rewrite all the code over again to release it under a license that we approved of. And since the professor is one of the contributors under the GPL, we would have to get him to sign an agreement to release the code under any other license -- since personally we would not own all the rights to it. When he realised how much he stood to lose from this, he backed himself into a corner and would not allow furthur discussion. The reason we went to higher ups.
You confuse me because while a student (for material submitted as homework) you don't own that code.
Hmm, a rather large and technical issue here. Does the code fall into the ownership of the teacher as a work under contract. From what I know, the courts have decided to allow each university the right to specify this. At my school, yes. Not all schools are like this, and I was fully within the bounds of proper conduct to try and find out. Making a blanket statement like you did about students not owning their code is always false. Some places specifically state that a student has full ownership and rights to all code the write.
Rather as if I tried to argue with Bill Gates about how to liscense windows.
But, as a proponent of the GPL you have. You have told Gates that if he uses any of your code, he HAS to license his program (Windows) your way, or not sell it at all.
I understand that you wish to discredit any sign of intelligable thinking that disagrees with your own. But, you don't have to be so blatent. Next time, rather than attacking the messenger -- try and make a point. Most people would appreciate it more.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
"wow can't belive the author of a great book and a core team member answered my question in less than an hour, try getting that from another OS :-) "
In all seriousness. Try asking at freebsd-questions. And if you don't get a response right away, you might have to try again in a day or two. The list gets around 500 posts a day, not all get caught the first time. [I am not telling you to post your message 50 times so it gets seen, post it once, and if you get no response in a day or two. Try again -- with a note attached explaining you know this is the second time. But, you thought it might have been missed.]
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Sorry to repeat that, it was in a message above that might not have been up when you posted this. But this is the reason why it could not be done. I would have to get every contributor's agreement to release it under the new license. Since he would not agree to that I am stuck. A better question I brought up to him was, "If you own some rights to the code, and you really want it under GPL, why can't you take our BSD'd code and release it under the GPL?" He would have the right to do that. He is the 'contractor' and he could change it if he felt it was nessessary to do so. But he refused to answer this. The point was made pretty clear by his actions: This is only going to be done my way! And if you won't do it my way... you will do it my way.
But you were almost right about that. As the _sole_ copyright holder you withhold the right to release it under any license you want, and as many as you want. But if you are not the sole copyright holder you must have permission from all the others before you do that.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
since personally we would not own all the rights to it
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Most open source developers would rather not have their code end up in Windows.
This seems to be the one factor that holds all Linux users into one group. They hate Microsoft and anything that could help Microsoft will hinder the open-source movement. I am not saying I love Microsoft; but, I don't disagree with them. I know this is a very unpopular opinion here. They please most of the people most of the time. Good for them. And now with Linux and the *BSDs people who are not satisfied with Microsoft have somewhere to turn.
One thing I see repeated over and over in this discussion is the scare tactic the GPL people love so much. "Some evil monopoly is going to take your source and sell it, and it will no longer be free." Yeah, they throw other details in there, but that is what it boils down to. Even though I said it before this bears repeating. Your code will always be free; what you wrote will always be out there. That is like saying if I burn my copy of the Hitchhiker's Guide, I am destroying all the work that Douglas Adams did and no one else will ever be able to enjoy it.
The funniest comment that was completely out there was the one about the whores.
So next time someone takes your money and does something with it you "didn't" will you think "gee i'm glad they had the resources to take my money and invest in crackwhores for me"
Hmm, I could have sworn I was giving them code, not money.
free code should stay free not free as in re-commented, patented and regurgitated. If at any point the code becomes unavalible I'd consider that not free
Here it is: The belief that my code will become unavailable because someone else is using it.
But back on topic. I know many people who love Unix and use Linux -- it is just that most of them love Linux more due to their hatred of Bill Gates. I am not saying that Linux is wrong, bad, or anything else. I am saying that hating Microsoft is a bad reason to defend a license.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Here we have the belief expressed again that some company including my code in a commercial release is going to make it unavailable. They can't change the license on the code I have written. So if they release my code they have to include the license with it. All I am telling them is that their added code does not have to be under my license. Please, a little common sense on both sides would save me from COBOL fingers.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
How can anyone say FreeBSD is faster than Linux. It just staggers the imagination. Linus writes code for Linux, not FreeBSD.
This is what gives it away as flamebait. No one could be that blind to the obvious. Of course, that whole part about the GPL being free was funny too. But I won't get into the GPL vs BSD license debate tonight.
As he/she said:
Bah! Dont believe everything you read! Think for yourselves.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
Hmm, maybe you missed this part. He knows what he is doing, and he is doing it on purpose to keep the GPL out of his code the same way the GPL tries to keep itself in other's code. I see no contradiction from the way he originally stated his belief.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
"THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
<author@domain.xxx> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you
can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think
this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return. Authors Name
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
"If you stuck 1,000,000 monkeys in a room for an infinite time -- they would produce all the works of Shakespear. They would also produce the GPL and the BSD license and all the arguments about them, and end up with more copies of each. Assuming they didn't start throwing their crap around and manage to beats themselves to death over the argument before the money in the corner writing Macbeth could finish."
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
I should be beaten with a stick until I confess my miserable karma hoarding ways. ;-)
Really, I don't care about the karma; I just like to voice my opinion.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
That doesn't even make sense. It would be better put to say that the BSD is more free than the GPL the same way a state without taxes is more free than a state with taxes. With BSD you don't have to pay the 'state' anything. But with the GPL you are forced to pay the 'state' with whatever additions you add to its code.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
vi vs. emacs
Personally, I don't think that there is any reason to object to LGPL.
Given a choice between GPL & BSD license, I would go with BSD, always. Given a choice with BSD & LGPL, I would probably go with LGPL.
LGPL has some advantages to it over BSD, if you've release code under LGPL, anyone can build over it, just like with BSD, but if they change your code, they've to give the changes back.
It isn't as agressive as GPL, and it gives the coder the advantage.
Can someone give me a good reason to favor BSD license over LGPL?
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Not really.
BSD license says that you must dispaly copy right notice.
This mean that if the user really wants, he can track down the original BSD code.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
> What is stopping MS from modifing the TCP/IP stack so that their desktops can only connect to their servers? Nothing.
100% hold of both server & client markts.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
Why can't he verify the facts first?
He claim that ftp.cdrom.com run on PII - 200, 1GB RAM & 500GB RAID-5
Here is how hard it was to find out what it *really* run:
ftp ftp.cdrom.com
Qoute from the ftp respone:
230-This machine is a Xeon/500 with 4GB of memory & 1/2 terabyte of RAID 5.
230-The operating system is FreeBSD. Should you wish to get your own copy of
230-FreeBSD, please visit http://www.freebsd.org for more information.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
IIS doesn't run in kernel space.
It's a service, that is all.
And, no, TUX 1.0 doesn't hold the SPECWeb99, it's TUX 2.0, closely followed by IIS5.
IIS6 will be able to run in the kernel, but not IIS5. And IIS6 will have it as an option.
Check www.spec.com for the fastest web servers, it has zeus, but I don't know if it uses FreeBSD.
--
Two witches watched two watches.
Which witch watched which watch?
*sigh*
Come back when you have a clue and a valid arguement. All you're doing is making both yourself and I look like morons. You for living, me for dignifying you with a response.
--
You may be stuck with Dubya,
but be glad you didn't get the Antichrist.
You may be stuck with Dubya,
but be glad you didn't get the Antichrist.
If FreeBSD and Linux didn't have each otehr to compete with, there would be alot less preassure for all the improvements and current quality of code everyone is enjoying. Neither is significantly better then the other, but all us *nix users win by having a choice.
...but it certainly doesn't matter here if he uses void or int. He could very well know that but be too lazy to write out those boring 'return 0' statements, and so just write void.
:)
and just why would you think he learned C in windows?
-- Cure for Cancer instead of SETI! (only w32 yet - mail and beg)
It's interesting to note that most of the responses here are in favor of Linux. Even more interesting that most of the reasons why amount to "runs on more hardware, has more software, more people use it." Furthermore, it's interesting to note that even those who put forth these reasons are quick to add that BSD may be superior in some ways.
I'm not at all suggesting that these people are wrong. I'd just like to suggest that these are some of the exact reasons why Windows users prefer it over the MacOS.
MacOS X throws another nifty spin on the debate. While it certainly doesn't make BSD support more hardware (or does it?), it does address the issue of small user base and possibly even software availability.
Imagine. In a few months time the most widely used desktop UNIX could be MacOS X. At the very least it'll be the most popular BSD variant out there.
Scott
--
You like your Macintosh better than me, don't you Dave? Dave? Can you hear me Dave?
Linux will never be better than FreeBSD because it lacks refinement. Every single release sees practically every subsystem rewritten. It's always back to the drawing board because no one actually spends enough time AT THE DRAWING BOARD. Three firewall interfaces in as many kernel releases? 2 SCSI systems? Rewritten VM nearly every time? TCP stack rewritten more times than I can count? I don't know WHICH fucking filesystem to use.
I'm a beginner when talking about BSD though I have "some" experience w/ Linux. I want to know a little about the BSD before downloading it(something more than, it's not Winblows, it's not easy, and all that crap tha anyone says to people beguining w/ BSD) I could start w/ a stupid question: What is the difference between all those different distributions of BSD? How much space would be recomended to use BSD like I'm using Linux(connect to internet, use apache, KDE, etc...)? The advantages of having BSD over linus I can see here, but if someone wnats to add some, that would be great!
Well Put
All the BSD documentation you need comes with the installation. I'm not kidding. The FreeBSD man pages are complete, comprehensive and the number one reason why I run it over Linux.
Linux documentation s u c k s.
Now, if man pages arent enough for you then, sure, Linux-My-First-Day-With-Linux-HOWTOs are for you.
There are really only two reasons I use linux, and they're not particularly technical. In technical terms I consider them to both be powerful modern unix's with rapidly evolving perfomance and facilities. BSD has a bit more heritage, Linux may have more developers, but I could probably be happy on either.
My first reason is the silly one. In the early days of Linux the *BSD crowd (plus SCO) were amazingly smug and arrogant. Very much, "Why are you weenies playing with your toy? No wonder you can't handle BSD.". Sure, this wasn't the whole community, but the BSD camp (at least here) was
full of "serious sys-admins" with this attitude.
Perhaps Linux has actually helped BSD realize that attracting new users is a useful part of an OS community?
The second part is focus and energy. And to an extent it's related to the user base. BSD people (used to?) focus heavily on servers and tweaked code. Interested in optimisation of performance and stability rather than agressive experimentation. I love the linux communities willingness to make agressive core changes and happily tilt at windmills. When Linus said, "let's target the desktop" most people thought he was totally nuts. But now with things like Gnome, KDE unix actually exists again as a reasonable, and improving, desktop. Likewise linux pushing to PDA's, super-computers, clusters...it's all very exciting.
Sure, BSD is capable of all these things as well. But I still think it was Linux that set the pace and forced BSD to come out of its shell and match it.
Come on already.
If you haven't figured it out, I'll let you in on a secret: the various BSD distributions excel at non-desktop uses. Unless you really *ARE* an 31337 h4x0r, there is not much point in running them on the desktop. Right now I'm using Windows on my desktop, in fact (although this is primarily because my Thinkpad's screen is hosed -- I do prefer Linux).
Meanwhile, if you run Linux in a very high-load, high-availability environment, I can almost guarantee that you will have more little problems than with FreeBSD. When every little problem turns into a page or an email in the middle of the night, you have to become a little wary of
Linux. I like Linux. I hack on Linux. I sure as hell don't run web server farms or firewalls on Linux. Choose the right tool for the job.
Your argument about books in the local bookstore is also spurious. It indicates that your bookstore isn't very good. Look for 'The Design and Implementation of the 4.4 BSD Operating System' or 'Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls'. All of these are well written and illustrate what's going on. I'll go so far as to say they do it better than any of the Linux books do. Look in the canonical Unix sysadmin's handbook, the purple 'Unix System Administrator's Handbook, 3rd edition'. What representative OSes have they chosen? FreeBSD, Linux, HP-UX, and Solaris. That's pretty mainstream, dude.
I don't think you're wrong to use Linux instead of *BSD on the desktop. I think you're wrong to compare them at all. BSD is for servers.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
And I've been saying it for years.
In every single instance where I've noted a difference between the BSD utility and the corresponding GNU utility, I've preferred teh BSD way. The options (none of that --fifty-charactar-option-string-instead-of-two, the information (e.g., ftp status line), man pages instead of that moronic info system, etc.
A linux kerenel with BSD utilities might interest me (but why bother?), but certainly not the other way around.
hawk
That certainly explains the relative popularity of Linux versus the *BSDs.
People do infact care if their sweat turns into corporate welfare. They might not care to protect their code in the most agressive manner possible. They don't need to.
That's something that gets glossed over by the pro-BSD camp. Most Free Software coders are more moderate than RMS and are accomodated well by the available licences.
All the BSD licences do is make it easier for Robber Barons to extract the equivalent of corporate welfare out of the generosity of Free Software coders. OTOH, the LGPL allows component sharing and the perpetuation of standards without giving corporations a free ride when it comes to embrace and extend (Winsock anyone?).
Most reasons to favor the BSDL over the LGPL are highly suspect. Also, there is usually no real need.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
You cannot license reference implementation under GPL, as far as I understand, since GPL is not a free license.
-- Si hoc legere scis nimium eruditionis habes.
The Debian Linux distro is supposed to become kernel agnostic, at least between the Linux and Hurd kernels. You'll be able to use either kernel in the relative comfort of your familiar Debian environment. Would it be so hard for someone to take that in the *BSD direction as well?
a xxx 666 (the xxx were actual letters) license plate, maybe I should switch to BSD
pictures, please...
I almost agree with you - I don't see the need for (most) servers to have a sound card. However, I disagree with your idea of using FreeBSD only for a server OS.
Recently, my wife's hard drive took a nosedive. It was no big deal, because her /home was NFS-mounted from our FreeBSD LAN server. All she lost was the Debian installation she'd been using, and a quick (well, as quick as a network install over ISDN gets) re-install and she was back up and running.
I decided to try an experiment, though. I wiped the freshly-installed Debian and replaced it with FreeBSD, adding the appropriate packages for X, gdm, Netscape (the Linux version running in compatibility mode), WindowMaker, etc. Know what? She didn't notice a thing. Her desktop looked, acted, and sounded exactly like it did before.
The only think she eventually discovered was that her mouse no longer gets jumpy during heavy loading - all of her apps even stay responsive (if slower) until the load goes back down.
I asked her if she wanted Linux back. She said that she missed having a little stuffed Tux on top of her monitor, so I bought her a stuffed Chuck. Now she's completely happy with her rock-solid desktop which never goes down, bogs, or otherwise interrupts her usage.
I like FreeBSD for the desktop. Almost every app you'd ever want is available from the ports collection, and almost every Linux app runs perfectly (except for the ones requiring kernel modules that haven't been ported yet). What more could you ask for?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
That seems pretty nice. It is a little more complicated in FreeBSD.
The middle bunch of steps on making a new kernel are optional, only needed in the unlikely event that you want something not compiled into the GENERIC kernel, but recomended as you seldom need anywhere close to all the stuff that is in GENERIC.
By following the handbook directions you can get the stable branch, the bleeding-edge branch, or one of the numbered releases, or a stable branch for a older major version. There are a few other choices as well.
It has packages, and ports. Mostly just the ports are enough. They are trivial to use (for example "cd /usr/ports/lang/smalltalk; make install" will fetch source for smalltalk, and all the packages it needs, patch them and install them).
Have you looked at the /usr/ports/x11/gnome "meta-port" for the GNOME integrated X11 desktop? Seems like what you want. I assume there is a KDE one as well.
I don't know of a way, there might be one. I havn't done many source upgrades, so it hasn't been an issue until lately. I havn't checked the handbook.
That is that the mergemaster step does. Deals with conf files you havn't touched, and gives you diff's for the rest.
I like to compile my world. I like to know for a fact that if I patch someting and recompile the only change is the patch.
It is faster for me to do that then download a new install image, and I have a 256K Frame-Relay, and a relitavly slow CPU. It seems like a better tradeoff to deal in compressed source then whole binary images.
Well, feel free to tell me how the other ones does it better. I wasn't saying FreeBSD is the ultimate, just that it ain't bad. I know for a fact it's VM system isn't as good as NetBSD's (NetBSD's UVM rocks, even if it needs to be tuned), it isn't as secure as OpenBSD, and you can't buy support for it as easily as BSD/OS. I've even heard Linux has a thing or two it's good at too :-)
First of all I think this benchmark is unfair. Even that being the case linux showed it can outperform Freebsd in mysql and sendmail. I believe this test was unfair in the following ways: 1) The author used the latest version of Freebsd, yet did not specifiy what distro of Linux he used. For this to be really fair, I think he should have used say RedHat 7.0 (with patches) (or any other distro based on glibc 2.2 compiled with -i686 extentions). 2) There are a number of well documented performance (bad paging) and stability issues with Kernel 2.4.0 which all have been corrected in 2.4.1-AC3. Because of this I think it would be more fair to either test 2.4.1-AC3 or wait until 2.4.2 and retest. 3) He should of used apache 1.3.17. 1.3.17 finally adds some Linux specific hooks to take advantage of v2.2+ kernels (see for details: http://www.apacheweek.com/issues/01-02-02). Now before the Freebsd crowd jumps up and down, I ask you to check the apache history file for all the Freebsd kernel hooks in 1.3.x apache compared to linux. On top of this, it would seem that the Linux kernel 2.4 adds even more functionality that apache could take advantage, but at this time does not. 4) I would like to see if using the version of Mysql and sendmail that comes with redhat 7 changes the results at all. These applications have been compiled with the 2.96 compiler which is supposed to effect performence to some degree. In summary I don't think this was a apples to apples comparision as the author used the latest and greatest Freebsd (not just the kernel) against an unknown Linux distro. I would be interested to see if Linux couldn't also pull ahead of freebsd in webserving with Kernel: 2.4.1-AC3, apache 1.3.17 and glibc2-i686.
-- You can be a geeklord too
The csh has been replaced by tcsh in the stable releases, but on all my boxes I replaced I use a statically linked version of bash as rootshell.
Drivers DO cause problems sometimes. The PCM driver for instance worked perfectly for mostowners of a SB-Live card, just on my particular hardware configuration it caused a kernel panic. Recently fixed in release 4.2. This kind of bugs are spotted and thus fixed sooner with moer widely used OS-es like linux.
As for socialized medicine, I would say that the reason is stupid mothers getting high on crack or having abortions rather than the health-care system. Really. At my job I make $30K, when my son was born, he had some problems, and we got to _choose_ which hospital to take him too. Not which hospital in town, but which hospital in the whole U.S. That doesn't happen with socialized medicine.
Engineering and the Ultimate
If you are running a server, when does it have time to be compiling packages?
Engineering and the Ultimate
You're missing the point. With a binary distribution mechanism, you can simply run the update, which takes 10 seconds, and then restart, which takes about 2. So, you are basically degraded for 10 seconds, and down for two. With source-only distribution, you've got to spend lots of time compiling. Depending on the package, this could take hours, especially on a loaded server. So, instead of measure degraded performance in seconds, its hours.
Engineering and the Ultimate
If you're having difficulty with the installer, I suggest taking a look and ensuring that all your hardware is on the supported hardware list (http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/install-hw.html). FreeBSD can definitely be picky about the hardware that it runs on. Also, you might try doing just a basic install, then cvsup'ing to get everything else.
I've often thought that FreeBSD could be a super easy Desktop OS with little work.
/. people have to mention the ports collection and how cool it is. Then, all the Debian people counter with how cool apt-get is. Both are very cool, but I have to say that FreeBSD continually impresses me with how complete the ports are.
Everytime someone mentions FreeBSD on
Some kind of a meta port that installs a userfriendly desktop along with a standard set of apps would be super cool.
I've always had an easier time of getting hardware working in FreeBSD than Linux, including soundcards and my video capture card (just add "device pcm" to the kernel config file for 99% of sound cards)
In my years of running both FreeBSD and Linux, I've only had one hardware snafu with BSD (if anyone can help, it's the integrated sound on the FIC AZ11 Mainboard. It only plays noise.:-( No IRQ conflicts that I can find)
I'd love to package a FreeBSD/GNUstep port with a nice installer for FreeBSD, but I lack a lot of programming experience. If anyone knows of a project similar to this, I'd love to hear about it, or if not, someone might be interested in forming a group?
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
Well, the 4GB cap on memory with an Intel processor on Linux is causing me some headaches at the moment (massive database stuff). If FreeBSD can do 768GB, I'm so there.
-"Zow"
Being an open-source developer myself, I would personally never release any of my code under anything but the GPL. And I encourage all the coders I talk with to do the same.
I see your point about making your code as free as possible, but I also don't want to see someone else taking my work, "embracing and extending" upon it, and then profiting off a piece of software that I originally intended to be free for everyone. The GPL guarantees that what I intended to be free will stay free.
And yes, communism has thankfully failed with politics, but socialism is doing quite well. Check out most of Europe, and then ponder why America, as the only developed nation without socialized medicine, has a higher infant mortality rate then Thailand.
Dated? The ports collection almost invariably tracks the very same sources Linux compiles from (and often has to apply patches to remove linuxisms from the code). Granted, ports aren't updated as quickly as linux packages are made, but it's a stretch and a half to call them outdated. You *have* updated your ports tree with cvsup, haven't you?
And isn't it nice BSD will run just about anything Linux can? Quake III for Linux runs just as fast under BSD as Linux (some say faster).
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Debian has tossed around the idea of a BSD distribution, but the idea usually dies off quickly. Debian GNU/BSD is unlikely. Although the BSD license gives Debian every right to fork the codebase and GPL it, it not only be a public relations disaster for Debian in garnering the ill will of the BSD developer community, the split would become technically enforced as well, since the GNU fork would find itself having to backport any changes made to the BSD codebase. I don't think Debian would be stupid enough to GPL a distro of BSD.
Yes, BSD has packages. Not great, but serviceable. BSD doesn't need apt, it has ports, which is based on a perfectly good dependency-management tool with support for pre and post-installation and hooks at any point of the build and install process. It's called make.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> I installed freebsd on a box and I couldnt get the newest version of apache for it...
S O-IMAGES/. Personally I install from FTP, but I've always had mad bandwidth whenever I've installed.
/usr/ports/www/apache13 contains apache 1.3.14. I haven't run cvsup since 17 was released a week ago (which immediately followed 14, there was no 15 or 16). Checking http://www.freebsd.org/ports, i see that the current apache package (and therefore port) is indeed 1.3.17. apache is compiled from the exact same codebase as apache for linux. it is likely to be bug-for-bug compatible.
/usr/ports/www/mod_php4 contains PHP 4.04pl1, exactly the current version of PHP.
sshd is configured by default to disallow direct logins of root, you are expected to su. This is fixable, one starts by reading the documentation for sshd. Don't mean to be snippy, but that's a feature.
ISO images of FreeBSD are available at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/I
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Just a note: step 5 and 6 have changed, they are now:
/usr/src
:)
5. cd
6. make kernel KERNEL=YOUR_KERN_CONF
7. make installkernel KERNEL=YOUR_KERN_CONF
One neat thing about FreeBSD's process is that it makes it easier to keep multiple kernel configs around. Linux's lets you save a kernel configuration file, but it clobbers an old build of a different configuration when you use the new configuration.
oh btw, you kinda forgot make world
apt-get upgrade is still pretty neat though, cvsup is nice for syncing the sources, but not too useful at telling you what's changed and upgrading single ports or pieces of userland at a time.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
> Some kind of a meta port that installs a userfriendly desktop along with a standard set of apps would be super cool.
/usr/ports/x11/kde2 and /usr/ports/x11/gnome? They're there. Takes freakin forever to compile it all, but they're there.
/usr/ports/devel/gnustep. Not too useful by itself, better to just install the windowmaker port and it'll install gnustep too.
You mean like
GNUstep already exists for FreeBSD BTW.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
If they didn't GPL the kernel, just perhaps the term GNU /BSD is a little mistaken. God damn people, read what I say for once.
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I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
Saying the BSD licence is more free than the GPL is like saying that a state without laws against kidnapping is more free than a state that does have them.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
People have been taking code under the BSD licence, doing essentially nothing to it, spend tons of money on marketing, and reap the rewards. The only thing that brought free software out of the closet that those who would steal from the public domain shoved it into was the GPL. If it weren't for that licence, nobody would even know free software existed.
Your argument is ridiculous and stupid.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
2 points:
/usr/ports/www/apache;make install. That's it. The current version is available within several days of the release.
a) You can always get the newest version of apache and php for bsd. Get a current version of the ports tree(use cvsup), cd
b) You can't ssh in as root because it's a *really* stupid thing to allow people to do. The BSDs, IMO, come with a far more sensible security setup than Linuxen and other SysV style Unices, e.g. group wheel, jail(), kernel security levels, etc. Security tends to make doing stupid things harder, that's pretty much the idea.
-lx
They all have their strong points, and their weak points. MS's various offerings are easier for people with little experience to use/admin. You can buy excellent support for Solaris. OpenBSD is very secure. NetBSD will run on just about anything.
Both FreeBSD and Linux are attempting to fill the niche of "fast feature-full Unix". FreeBSD (at least by these benchmarks) is a bit better at the fast part, but I think that Linux is more feature-full, and has better commercial support.
It really doesn't matter, anyway. Having two free Unixes that run well on PC hardware is better than just one. If every box out there was a Linux box, when (when, not if) somebody finds a new remote exploit, then everybody would be vulnerable. Similarly, an all-FreeBSD world isn't good either. A mix of different operating systems, all slightly better at their own little tasks, is more robust than a homogeneous environment. It was poor performance compared to NT that spurred many of the improvements in 2.4. It will be a wonderfull thing if 2.6 becomes better because FreeBSD's VM kicked the 2.4 VM's ass. It will also be a wonderful thing if FreeBSD can benifit from friendly competition with Linux (those mail scores seem a bit low. tsk. tsk. tsk.).
Competition and cooperation between the free OS's will lead to better free OS's. Encourage both as much as you can. Just remember that FUD spreading or any other pissing contest is not healthy competition.
I'd be happy to give FreeBSD a try, but I'm only going to do it when it's distributed by Debian. Yes folks, I'm afraid I'm another one of those apt-thing bigots. I've no particular desire to go clambering up the FreeBSD learning curve for its own sake, any more than I'm interested in doing the same with other Linux distros. Debian FreeBSD sounds like a fine idea to me, though.
proof, n. A demonstration that a conclusion is implied by certain premises and axioms.
Please explain how a corporation can 'capture' *BSD? Does the code suddenly disappear when a corporation distribute a binary without releasing the source?
Je ne parle pas francais.
1) One of the points with free software and napster is that me using/sharing the music/software has no effect on you. You don't lose anything by me sharing the music because you can still sell your copy. I keep hearing this argument cropping up again and again. Does it dawn on you yet what I'm trying to get at?
Microsoft using the BSD TCP/IP stack has no effect on *BSD. The code doesn't magically disappear because Microsoft use it.
How is this different from Redhat using GPL code? Or is the objection mostly because Microsoft is using the code?
In both cases, you have commercial entities using code, in such a way which the license allows them too.
instead of coding themselves, it took less time to take someone else's free code, change the license and sell it.
2) On the BIND thread, some people are suggesting forking the code and slapping the GPL on it. How is that different? Both times you go against the implicit wishes of the original author.
If it was Linux code it would be called theft
RMS calls it misuse, not theft.
Do you even code, or are you mostly one of those cheerleaders who don't contribute anything but flames?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Yes. Does UserFriendly ring a bell?
Je ne parle pas francais.
Where's the source?
I'm confused. So, the BSD people had rewrite the TCP/IP when Microsoft started using the BSD TCP/IP? Or did the fact that Microsoft starting using the BSD TCP/IP have NO EFFECT on *BSD at all?
Je ne parle pas francais.
out of curiousity, what were the bottlenecks in the linux kernel when you were poking with the performance and scalability tests?
:)
i have found smb on solaris/sparc to outperform smb on linux/i686 with approximately equal horsepower (333 ultrasparc2 vs. pentium 2 450).
i think it was the case that the memory bus and i/o bus were less latent AND had higher bandwidth on the sun than on the intel, but i never really got down to profiling it... (not to mention level 2 cache latency differences) all this aside, i had a feeling that it was actually none of these things (but rather the very efficient network stack in solaris 8) to blame...
i'm very curious to see your assessment
Peter
"Yes, this is not a real benchmark. But at least it shows some evidence."
/bsd/i) {
/linux/i) {
I.e. Yes, it is not valid to draw conclusions from, but I'm going to do it anyway?
Hint: Fake Benchmarks = spurious results (spurious means doubtful or unreliable).
Trusting them is bad.
Allow me to demontrate:
I will use the following non-scientific perl code to benchmark:
my $i;
if(`uname -r` =~
for($j = 0; $j 100;
}
print "The result is $i!\n";
}
if(`uname -r` =~
print "The result is some big number!\n";
}
Then I time that under linux and *bsd. Strangely, it goes much, much faster under linux. Sure, I've never claimed that it's a good benchmark, but at least it does show some evidence that linux is better than *bsd.
You'd think that people would be familiar enough with science that bad methods completely invalidate your data. (It stems from the fact that to be ignorant is better than to be wrong.)
They laughed at Einstein. They laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown. -- C. Sagan
more games area available for linux that wont run to well under FreeBSD ...
You have been caught in the hype of Linux, and missed the BSD boat.
Mainly I use Linux at this point because of the package management. Sure you can say BSD has the ports, but that is not really package management like rpm or deb. I know that not everyone like package manangement, but it is actually a benifit to some of us.
I do wonder why Linux does some of the things that it does. In particular why it is so common in the linux community to make it so difficult on upgrade. libc5 to glibc rpm 3 to rpm 4, etc. I hav ealso noticed that FreeBSD uses a better system configuration. Baasically on FreeBSD I am told that you have one config file that sets up weather or not to run X and weather or not to run inetd and all the services etc, where as Linux distros usually have so many in the rc scripts. This could be changed, but for some reason we like sys V style??
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
Interesting. I've often found the opposite. Whenever I have a problem I need to solve, I go to one of two places:
The FreeBSD Diary or the FreeBSD Handbook.
I like the diary because it's a collection of problems/solutions that actual users have run into. It's very practical. The Hanbook is basically the official documentation for FreeBSD. I like the Handbook, because whatever it says, is the way it is. I don't have to worry about "Will this How-To work for my distro?", because there is only one FreeBSD.
I've always had a bitch of a time finding the solutions I need under linux, probally because there are 90 million different ways to do things. That could be good or bad, depending on your viewpoint.
Your statement implies that only geeks that care first and foremost for the technical superiority of every aspect of the kernel, and its most direct subsystems, can be "True Unix Lovers". That's just arrogance. Plenty of extremely talented programmers, who "get" Unix and love it over anything else, would prefer Linux over FreeBSD simply because accessibility, support, ease of installation, and software availability are far more important criteria.
If the shoe fits, wear it.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
I suppose you can argue this, but what is an example of software that doesn't require frequent updates and maintenance?
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
perl -e 'print "Hello world\n"' does everything I need, and requires no frequent updates or maintenance, but it's not relevant to the issue of network security.
My basic point is that any sufficiently useful, networked program is going to require updates and long term maintenance. Only time increases stability and security, but only asymptotically. At all times does the sysadmin need to keep a careful watch. There are no software exceptions to this; not Linux, not Windows NT/2000, not OpenBSD, not Solaris, not anything.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
The problem with the Ramen worm was not with Red Hat, but with sysadmins that don't frequently update and maintain their systems. If you don't do that, it doesn't really matter what OS you use.
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In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
FreeBSD may be better than Linux for what it tries to be (which is a lot).
After a failed install of FreeBSD 3.1, I now have FreeBSD 4.2 running, though with a slight bit of trouble. However, 3.1 was a disaster, not because of the software problems that prevented it from being installed, but because of the attitude problems I encountered asking questions about it to resolve the problems. It is because of that I cannot choose to go with FreeBSD for project where it does seem to be technically superior.
As in the commercial business software sector, the free open software sector needs support, too. And FreeBSD is more lacking in this area than Linux is (though both certainly are), at least from the perspective of someone like myself who is already more familiar with Linux. Support for free open software comes online in places like IRC (analogous to an 800 code toll free number for fast responses to simple questions), USENET, and various mailing lists. However, I found all of these had lots of people with attitude. As expected, IRC was the worst.
Case in point. FreeBSD 3.1 didn't install on my system and stopped at an error message saying it could not find the CDROM (but it booted from it, and Linux, OpenBSD and Windows used that CDROM just fine). Lots of people said my hardware was broken (it was not). Lots more people said FreeBSD didn't support ATAPI CDROM on the IDE secondary master and followed that up with reasons why not, such as it was in violation of the standards (I went and looked, and no it is not). Ultimately it turns out the FreeBSD kernel works fine with such a CDROM; it was the installer program that failed. By the time I did find out, I was so disgusted by the people, I decided to not finish doing the install.
I came back with the release of 4.2. I ran into a simple problem and I immediately knew a way around the problem. But I wanted to avoid that workaround if I could. The problem was I had planned for 8 partitions, but disklabel only let me do 7 (partition "c" not counted). I asked on IRC if this was indeed a real limit or if there was a way to work around it. I had lots of wrong replies, including one person who said that was a limitation of SCSI (odd, since I'm using IDE). The most common was that my hardware was broken. Lots of people replied "I installed fine with one partition" even though I never asked "How many partitions did you install with?". Eventually, about an hour after I first asked, and 3 channel visits later, one person (thank you Metrol) finally provided me with documentation that showed there was indeed such a limit. So I went and changed my strategy to accomodate the limit (including a re-install of OpenBSD the same way since I was comparing these). But it left me with a renewed disgust for the FreeBSD community.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
--Ben
There can never be a GNU/BSD. BSD's nature as an integrated OS prevents it. The kernel and userland are designed to be integrated. Linux's nature as just a kernel LENDS itself to being packaged with other people's userland utilities (Whence distributions are born as everyone thinks their choice of userland is better.) The Debian developer who first thought up the idea of a GNU/BSD was forced to rethink his position. His misunderstandings about BSD's development were pointed out to him and made him change his mind. Follow the original thread on the matter.
If ls is ls and tcsh is tcsh, then what does it matter what userland you use? Or did you think tcsh isn't really tcsh on BSD?
But maybe the BSD folks don't want to do things the Debian way. (For example, I believe the /etc directory in a Debian GNU/Linux system
looks very different from /etc in a BSD system. The BSD folks probably like it just the way it is.)
It's not the "Debian way" but the SysV way. Debian, like just about every other Linux distro (Except Slackware which is BSDish) out there uses a SysV style init. BSD, being BSD, naturally uses the BSD style init. You just have limited Unix experience, which is ok, but your frame of reference suffers for it.
They still have a chance at winning me over: they just need to code up a BSD version of apt-get. (This implies Debian-style packages... does BSD even have packages?)
Be careful there, that's almost inflamatory. Of COURSE it does. The much touted Ports Collection is the preferred way to install third party programs, but pre-compiled packages (themselves made from Ports) are available. Does it really matter if you type "apt-get install postfix" or "pkg_add -r postfix" (for example)?
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
That is that the mergemaster step does. Deals with conf files you havn't touched, and gives you diff's for the rest.
Just to point out that mergemaster is specifically for upgrading FreeBSD's /etc. Third party (ie, "local") apps config files are installed in (typically) /usr/local/etc. Ports/Packages handles upgrades by installing the vendor supplied config files as "foo.conf.default". You would "cp foo.conf.default foo.conf" and edit it. Since "foo.conf" isn't in the Package List, it won't be deleted when you pkg_delete a program before "make install"ing a new version. You would then wind up with a NEW "foo.conf.default" which you would use to merge in any config changes into YOUR "foo.conf".
Automatic upgrades are not to be trusted IMHO. Software configs _and_ behavior can change from release to release. Blindly running any command that updates software without my knowing ahead of time what I'm installing is asking for trouble.
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
It doesn't EMULATE anything:
1) Most "Linux software" isn't "Linux software" but "Unix software" and compiles and runs on FreeBSD just fine.
2) FreeBSD has Linux BINARY support, so if the source isn't available (StarOffice, VMWare, etc) you can still run your choice of programs. It doesn't do this via "emulation" but by translating Linux syscalls into FreeBSD syscalls where everything is executed natively.
3) It would be _more_ accurate to say that FreeBSD emulates Linux as opposed to "emulating Linux software", but it's still wrong (See #2.)
Yes, your comment was pro-BSD, which is good, but your information is bad, which is not.
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
If I had to choose between one of the current Linux distros' fancy but often slow installers and FreeBSD, my choice would go to the latter. It is a simple, yet elegant and very fast installation routine that works without any hiccups.
I have to take exception to this claim. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few weeks ago, and since then, my only real gripe is with how awful the install was.
Woe to you if you try to configure the network via DHCP and the server doesn't respond, because it will completely screw up your install: subsequent attempts to configure the network will silently fail, and all the time you're wondering what's wrong with these network settings! REBOOT!
Woe to you if one of the FTP servers won't resolve. It'll sit there almost until the brink of eternity, determined to resolve this name, and if you try to interrupt it it will NOT take you back to the server selection screen, but rather REBOOT!
Woe to you if you get halfway through the install and the file transfer hangs. Just like above, you're forced to REBOOT and start over.
I've had a great time with FreeBSD, but their installer is their weakest point as far as I'm concerned.
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since when does linux run photoshop?
War is necrophilia.
Having Linux be the most popular free OS kernel and under the GPL is good for everyone, including the BSDs. It's insurance that control of the free OS world won't be captured by some corporation(s). It strongly encourages hardware vendors to make driver source code available. (You may not want to use GPL'ed driver code in *BSD directly, but it's still better to have that to look at than nothing at all...) And the popularity of Linux has driven the development of lots of userland software that, naturally, also runs on *BSD.
Don't wish Linux dead. It's the best thing that ever happened to *BSD.
As far as documentation for FreeBSD goes: http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/ Unlike Linux, freebsd has a standard documentation place. Whereas in Linux you must go and find the documentation for the specific distribution, in freebsd its all there. apt-get might be all good and all but imo using ports and /usr/src for upgrading and isntalling new programs is alot cleaner and better than installing everything as 386 optimized binaries (ala debian)
©o,,o©©o,,o©©©o,
[simon@forth simon]$ grep cvs /etc/services
cvspserver 2401/tcp # CVS client/server operations
cvspserver 2401/udp # CVS client/server operations
I'm old enough to remember when discussions on Slashdot were well informed.
you want people to try your OS, guess what jackass, they have to atleast get in installed
Unfortunately, you've completely missed the point, jackass. If getting into the mainstream (whatever that is, and assuming FreeBSD's not already there) means that we have to endlessly pacify all the clueless wannabes who don't know PCI from AIDS but want to be 1337 and run our OS, then by all means you can have your mainstreamity.
My point was that FreeBSD is a tool by smart people for smart people -- what Unix is supposed to be. The FreeBSD community expects you to either be intelligent enough to learn from the (quite good, but not for dumbasses) pre-existing newbie material, or to have learned Unix from somewhere else (I used Linux for a few years first). That is to say, we're more into making high quality software than holding the hands of people that really shouldn't be associating with us in the first place. You can have all the Linux for Dummies books you want -- FreeBSD however is not for dummies.
As for installs: to anyone who knows anything about computers and especially those who have installed some OS before, the FreeBSD install is dirt-simple. Minus file copying time, it takes as little as 2 minutes to install FreeBSD if you've done it a few times before.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
Most open source developers would rather not have their code end up in Windows
I beg to differ. IMNSHO, most open source developers (myself included) care less about who is percieved to be 'good' or 'evil' at the time and more about getting quality code out into the world. We wish to improve the state of the art of software and make our improvements available to anyone who wants to use them. So what if Microsoft uses my elegant, high-quality, BSD-licensed Foo Protocol code? The code still performs the same function for me and my community of developers; it has not been damaged by commercial use. In fact, many more people out there are benefitting from something that I wrote instead of suffering from some other, possibly dismal, implementation.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
FreeBSD is a pure server OS
No. Freebsd is just another free Unix. It may be used more as a server OS (IMHO because there is less hand-holding for newbies), but it's range of applications is more or less the same as that of Linux. A great majority of the software that compiles and runs on Linux will also compile and run on FreeBSD, equally well.
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
On the daemon front, I've seen books available by mail, none in the bookstores
... and port them yourself. Of course you can do that, because you're a g0d l337 ha>0r d00d, right? Otherwise you'd be running Windows
Look in other bookstores. I've seen "The Complete FreeBSD", by Greg Lehey, which is quite a resourceful tome for anyone new to FreeBSD, in two of the three major bookstores here. And this is in Oklahoma, even.
What you do get is the suggestion to take the drivers
This isn't just a BSD phenomena. What is one of Linus's more recent famous sayings? "Talk is cheap. Show me the code."
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SecretAsianMan (54.5% Slashdot pure)
Washington, DC: It's like Hollywood for ugly people.
If you do everything just because everyone else does, you might as well run Windows ;)
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
For "fastest, most cleanly written OS" I'd have to give the award to BeOS or QNX. Certianly not any *NIX.
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
But it is nice to see an article that represents the differences between the two well. I agree that Linux often has faster support for the latest and greatest hardware, which is why I use it on my desktop, but I wouldn't think of using anything besides FreeBSD in a server environment (commerical UNIXes aside). There really wasn't anything new in this article, as we've know that FreeBSD's network stack and VM subsystems are a lot more mature (and faster, yay!) than Linux's, but I will say that I've seen some impressive improvements with the release of 2.4.0 and now 2.4.1.
Interested in open source engine management for your Subaru?
And, we can see how much we would have gained by using the GPL. We would never have had Apple to deal with messing with our software, and who wants Darwin? Who cares that we're getting free software donated back to everyone for technical merits, not legal?
-bugg
a little problem...
CVS does NOT work behind a M$ firewall (or at least i didn't find a way to make it work)
with apt-get (or the redhat equiv) i can export http_proxy and ftp_proxy and everything is a-ok.
I searched (a little) in the CVS docs but i couldn't find what protocol/port it uses.
:(
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I've seen some impressive improvements with the release of 2.4.0 and now 2.4.1
:-) ) benchmark current records for 2, 4, and 8 processor IA32 machines. Tux 2.0 is out, and its major feature is performance improvements :).
The least of which is khttpd, which (like IIS) handles static web requests in kernel space, and (unlike IIS) passes more security sensitive dynamic content requests to a userlevel server, such as Red Hat's Tux.
Tux 1.0 holds the Specweb (also used by IIS for five years until MS got their arse whopped by Tux
I'd be interested in a benchmark of the fastest webs ervers avliable on both platform - say, Tux versus Zeus (easily the best proprietary webserver) on Free BSD. As for Apache... well, the mods I use work with Tux, so this benchmark doesn't interest me. Or the web portion of it anyway.
If Wordperfect 5.1 under DOS does everything you need it to, then it's a perfect example of software that `doesn't require frequent updates and maintenance.'
The thing about the GPL is that you don't give up any rights to your own code. The teacher has the right to release the class's code under any license the school will let him get away with.
However, unless you signed something, you own your own code, and the fact that it's been released under the GPL by someone else doesn't mean that you can't release it yourself under any license you choose.
Of course, if it was developed on the school's equipment they may claim rights to it.
So it's flamebait to post a POSITIVE review of FreeBSD? My God, you must love censorship.
Sure can, go read about mergemaster.
You can do many of the things mentioned (and more!) with /stand/sysinstall.
"FreeBSD was a peaceful home, but a little too boring, too staid. Linux is where the action was, where major progress was being made. There's no doubt that if you're looking for excitement and innovation, Linux is the place to be."
Yet, he claims "Since stability was paramount" as justification for not using the most aggressive optimization during compilation as well as refererences to the "patched together" feel of Linux.
From here, its hard for me to swallow the irony of praising the maturity and polish of *BSD and then going on to talk about these wonderful "NEW" things his gentoo distribution will have.
The one thing I don't like about FreeBSD is its use of the UFS filesystem. While UFS is more reliable and rugged than ext2, it's also mind-numbingly slow. It's possible to use a special UFS extension called soft updates, which is able to speed up the filesystem by aggregating IO operations into bigger chunks. While soft updates improves UFS tremendously, I can't say that UFS really outperforms ext2 in any way. Of course, it's more reliable, so FreeBSD ends up beating Linux in the filesystem war. Again, at least this is true when comparing older Linux 2.2 distributions to FreeBSD.
Indeed, this problem has been discussed times and times again: comparing ext2 in async mode (the default) and ffs in sync mode (the default) is comparing apples and oranges. You just have to see the results after a crash. The best comparison is with ffs in async mode, which shows no speed difference, or with softupdates, which is still more secure. The slowest filesystem I know is ext2 in sync mode: it syncs everything (while ffs syncs only metadata), so tar xf takes hours. Softupdates is hardly a special extention now-a-days; Not only is it more reliable, it can handle files bigger than 2GB :)
Now, if you talk about the future, when is coming the fsck-free version of soft-updates? I've seen it announced for 5.0. After all reiserFS was only introduced in 2.4.1 :-) By the way, I've seen a while ago a post on slashdot by a guy who was actually just intending to do that for Linux: fsck free softupdates, because this would be faster than a journaling file system!
I'm rambling I suppose but it's clear he's on the band-wagon.
FreeBSD is a pure server OS.
Really?
BSD Desktop edition
BSD Desktop Edition - Includes FreeBSD, The Complete FreeBSD Book, ApplixWare Office Suite 5.0, and Partition Magic (Special Edition)
Now that you know that BSD is a desktop OS, you don't need to run Linux, do you?
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
Because Linux' ext2fs doesn't do synchronous metadata updates (like FreeBSD's FFS) as default (ext2fs is incredible slow if it does this.)
Wich is fatal in case of crashes - there's a great chance you will lose mail if a crash happens after mail was received and bevor update drained the buffers.
To make the benchmark more fair (i.e. with same functionality on both OS) Byte should mount the filesystems with the spool and mail directories with synchronous metadata updates and repeat the test.
We might see bigger differences in the other benchmarks as well...
I'd like to find one link of solid evidence that Microsoft has ever used BSD code. I'd love for it to be true -- it would truly show the success of open source and the fulfillment of BSD's goal (that good code be used, regardless of the license.)
Keep in mind that the BSD license, until fairly recently (certainly until after the creation of NT/2k tcp/ip and kerberos code) did have an advertising clause. Can you find one instance where Microsoft fulfilled that? A multinational corporation like Microsoft doesn't take free code without dotting all its legal Is and crossing all its legal Ts.
As much as I'd like to believe that Microsoft did use BSD code, I can't do so without some proof. Too many people, it seems, have no such restrictions. Find me some proof so I can believe.
Jeremy
Looking for a Python IRC bot?
This public service announcement was brought to you by the letter 3 and the number e.
-c.
--
Casey
More scratches on the cave wall, thanks be to anonymity.
Nevertheless, I still would like to give it a try, so I'm going to put a little more effort into it next time and see if I can get it to work. btw, it doesn't want to install on a logical partition, so I'm having to use a second -- no, third -- drive for it. Then I'll boot it with grub :)
Since the potential payoff is very limited for me, I'm not much interested in learning my way around the BSD world. I'm spending my time learning my way around the Debian world, and I love it. The only possible way you would get me to run BSD would be if BSD were more like Debian.
Debian isn't particularly hard to get up and running, and once it's up it is so easy to administer. Did someone find a security hole in BIND this week? Fine; with a single command you can get and install the fixed version. In fact, with a single command you can get all the latest stuff. (The command is "apt-get upgrade" and you can specify which mirror it should get the stuff from; I use the University of New Mexico, for example. You can choose from "stable", "testing", and "unstable"; for servers you would probably only use "stable".)
The Debian project not only has the "Debian GNU/Linux" distro, they also have "Debian GNU/HURD". I can't think of any reason why the BSD folks couldn't make their own "Debian GNU/BSD" distro, and if they did, I would be willing to run servers with that. Why not? The vast majority of your day-to-day work is with system utilities, most of which come from the GNU project. If I were running BSD, I could still have my tcsh, the arguments to ls wouldn't be any different, and so on. How often do you really care which kernel you are running?
But maybe the BSD folks don't want to do things the Debian way. (For example, I believe the /etc directory in a Debian GNU/Linux system looks very different from /etc in a BSD system. The BSD folks probably like it just the way it is.) They still have a chance at winning me over: they just need to code up a BSD version of apt-get. (This implies Debian-style packages... does BSD even have packages?)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
After getting hacked, we switched our servers from Redhat to OpenBSD. Part of this was the security audit/out of box security, and part was the belief that a more obscure system is safer. We got his with a rootkit, and avoiding Redhat/NT means we are out of the mainstream and less likely to get slammed.
I would never go back. We still have Linux boxes for Development because the Redhat KDE Workstation install is a dream, but for a server, wow, I love BSD.
The BSD methodology is more sane. The startup process is cleaner and easier to manage. My system is more organized. The Ports are terrific.
For a Workstation where I want the newest toys, I might use Linux because it always gets the whiz-bang features, although I may toss FreeBSD on a box to play with.
However, with OpenBSD I know what's up, with Linux, I find that millions of things install everywhere. Besides, my OpenBSD FTP install now takes about 10 minutes after I learned the install process, the Redhat one still takes forever with it crashing about half the time.
I realize that Redhat != Linux, but it is the most common distribution and aims for the corporate market. I feel like the Redhat system is held together with chewing gum with rediculous numbers of scripts that are hacks to hold different systems together. I should try Debian, but OpenBSD has done what I want and I look foward to trying FreeBSD. I've done NetBSD and OpenBSD systems, and they have been less aggravation than Linux installs.
I love BSD now, and I won't go back.
Alex
Here's an article where a guy started working on his own Linux distro, converted to FreeBSD, then came back to Linux. Rather interesting, and a fair look at the pros and cons of each OS.
--------
-------
"Every artist is a cannibal, every poet is a thief."
"Actually, if security is your #1 concern, OpenBSD is your best candidate. Speed appears to be the FreeBSD specialty."
Gah! Brain fart on my part. I meant OpenBSD, I typed FreeBSD. I can't believe I did that...
"Always try new things; the OS world is richer now than it has been in years thanks to the free software movement. Don't become a zealot if you can help it; it stops you from being open-minded."
Absolutely! Always be willing to dive into the unknown, and come up with more insight than you had before.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
Same old question as OS decisions ALWAYS come down to.
What do you want it to do?
Do you want to run the latest open source programs on the latest hardware? Linux has better hardware support than anyone.
Do you want a support stream that you're willing to pay for, and need to run Unix on Intel? Sun's support is remarkably good.
Do you want the fastest and most cleanly written OS that's being developed? *BSD is your candidate.
If security is your #1 concern, FreeBSD specifically is the beast for you.
If you want to deploy a corporate desktop environment, WinNT is probably the only option you'll be given. (and may be the best!)
If all you want to do is play games, get Win98SE.
In other words, GET THE BEST TOOL FOR THE TASK AT HAND.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
*rofl*
This has always been an argument Linux users love to ridicule in Windows users... now the shoe is on the other foot!
No, it does not.
Clearly you are having a very hard time understanding my point. My point was that the Linux community is largely made up of hippocrites, not that one should always choose the technically superior technology.
Linux community has traditionally scoffed at issues like ease of install and the usability of the user interface. They made fun of Windows users that valued user experience over technical superiority. In the face of FreeBSD, they highlight usability issues because of Linux's technical inferiority. You can't have it both ways.
Personally, I don't see a real use for Linux. That would be because it does not match the things I value in an operating system. I am in the middle of replacing my only Linux component--my firewall--with OpenBSD. My clients are Windows 2000, and my servers are Solaris. Different OSes for different needs, all of which are better than Linux for each of those needs.
Oh, and with respect to the other joker who said...
yet another "all slashdotters must thing alike" comment (disguised as an "all linux users must think alike" comment).
Generalization is critical to human thinking and discorse. You have a valid point only if one or more of the following is true:
I never said "all" of anything. I used the term "Linux users" as a generalization of the concept I use in this post of "Linux community". This is a perfectly valid generalization as long as the things I say are true with respect to much of the Linux community, regardless of its truth with respect to any particular member of the Linux community.
I hope you now better understand the role of generalization in human discourse.
In what way is the SMP support of Linux 2.4 mature? :)
Also, you're implying that mature performs better.
I, for one, can't understand your reasoning.
Regards, Tommy
A majority of my friends use FreeBSD, not Linux. You gotta choose friends :)
Regards, Tommy
This caught my eye:
Umm, didn't they pass the TB/day mark a while back (or at least go past it once)? Further, I could have sworn they did a hardware upgrade too (to a SMP Xeon box IIRC). FreeBSD is cool, but 1 TB/day is pushing a ppro 200/1G ram system a little hard for any OS...--
Fuck Censorship.
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
We will write a tux vs daemon fighting game
You could do a mod for GNOME vs KDE: Battle of the Desktops with Tux and the BSD daemon. Or you could just try XTux.
Like Tetris? Like drugs? Ever try combining them?
Will I retire or break 10K?
My understanding is that gcc does not do as good a job optimizing as some other compilers.
actually, gcc is one of the most proficient optimizing compilers around. i also dont see how "not scientific" translates to "any dumb mistake is permissible" -- if a floating point operation (which was certainly optimized away by ANY compiler) changed the results, how is it "all the same" ?
All in all, this is the best comparison between FreeBSD and Linux I've seen yet.
because it gives the results you want?
The first rule of Slashdot is nobody talks about Slashdot.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
TeX, vi, anything that can abstract itself away from hardware to run portably and is mature enough for it's users not desperately upgrading each week.
I live in India where Linux is easily available. Almost every month some PC mag. has a linux distro on it and costs just 2.5$ or so. To date... having gone to the biggest bookstores I haven't come across any book carrying FreeBSD. There's a LUG in every city in India, and every guy who uses is *nix is using linux. Everyone would then naturally want to use linux then.
I hardly think that a mortality rate of 29 is less than a mortality rate of 7. The country with the best rate is bermuda with 4 and Japan with 4. The last time I checked Japan was not socialistic. hmmmmm... Next time check your facts before being stupid.
Probably a bit redundant now, maybe I'll be reiterating what everyone else has said - but here are my experiences with linux and freebsd as server operating systems.
;-)
At one job I had, we had 36 linux boxes, all loaded with Redhat 6.2. They were used for fairly hefty DNA sequencing, replacing a much smaller set of dual processor linux machines, which got binned because they kept crashing continually (certainly down to earlier 2.2.x SMP - my home SMP machine has been fine ever since I put 2.4.0-testX on it). These linux boxes would _consistently_ fall over if they went far enough into swap (512mb in each one), or just decided to be upset about life for no apparent reason. There was never a time at which all of them were working, the networking would glitch from time to time, and I absolutely hated being involved with them. They were _very_ heavily hit though.
At this point, after such a damning description, I should probably point out that I love Linux, I've been using it at home now since about '94 - with very few problems at all, bar a few buggy kernel versions and the usual disarray when libc changes
Very shortly after being involved with the linux machines, I changed job - and ended up working at a place with a big freeBSD machine. 4 CPU, 2GB ram, two raid shelves. The raiding system used was software, as at the time of installation a driver for freebsd to talk to the raid cards didn't exist (it does now) - spread across 18 disks, 9 per shelf. The system in question was hosting an entire Virtual ISP. Over 100,000 active email users, each with webspace ability (though in practise I think only about 40,000 had done anything with it), and it handled the DNS for several hundred domains. The services were tuned to 150 exim processes, 150 apache daemons, a mysql server (ick - spit), as many ftp daemons as required, and of course the DNS server. It was using two network cards because it was so busy the initial first one (100mbit) had flooded. Despite the massive IO load the machine was seeing (remember the freebsd kernel was handling a raid 10 setup - thats a mirrored pair of stripes for those who haven't come across the higher numbers) from all the apache/exim servers hitting the disks, despite the number of mails it was processing at times, and despite the fact that many of the web users had hungry CGI processes, the machine was totally _solid_, and whats more - was under perfomance capacity by quite a margin.
That's why I would use FreeBSD for a server, every single time (or OpenBSD for things like pure DNS servers - also extremely reliable). These are not comparable tasks for the servers to perform - but they _were_ servers.
Im sure other people might have reversed stories of Linux triumphing, but thats my personal experience.
I'll leave you with one final nugget of personal experience. Around the time of Suse 6.0, can't remember which linux kernel that would be, I owned a cyrix 300 with linux on it, an ancient 486 dx2-66, a 33mhz HP9000 model 400 of some description, and a 33mhz SGI Indigo. The linux machine was the only with a 100mbit NIC in it, and I gave them all turns at being an NFS server for another machine I was setting up. Can you guess which was the slowest for NFS?
Sorry Linux, I _love_ you as a desktop OS, but there's an awful lot of catching up still to be done in the server area, where *BSD really rules like a king.
All IMHO!
james
--
ALL YOUR BASE ARE BELONG TO US!
Server, coporate, enterprise, whatever... Does it play quake3 at blazing speeds?
You posted this in the FreeBSD thread. Who do you think most people are going to root for? DUH! This is like asking if M$ software is any good in a Linux mailing list, asking life-long M$ users if Linux is too hard to use, and checking with a Cisco employee to see if 3COM's products are any good...
The problem with capped Karma is it only goes down...
SIG: HUP
On the other hand, having documentation with such gems as the following puts MySQL on pretty shaky ground:
RE: And what's this about no sound drivers? When was the last time you actually used a FreeBSD machine?
/dev/hdc from C:\
A while back - I tried installing it on my machine. It didn't recognise the sound card, and I couldn't get any of its sound drivers to work. And again, my complaint isn't about how godlike FreeBSD is or isn't - I'm talking about degree of available help for those of us who, as some charming troll mentioned somewhere else in this thread, are c0ckg0bblers not 3l337 d00dz or whatever, and wouldn't know ws023d/24 from
No matter how good you are at something, your competencies scale way down if you sidestep to an unfamiliar platform - hence it's pretty key to try and get support going, yeah?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I'm not running a server.
Your argument may very well be "well, in that case run Linux". There's nothing to say that I don't want to run a pure BSD system, but want to enjoy my sound card as well. I have a laptop, which most variants of Linux have problems with, even, and the "generic Soundblaster driver" doesn't work.
I realise you're making a specific point response to something I've said, and what you say is TOTALLY valid. But as a developer and enthusiast, I like something I can run on a lot of different machines, and which I can play around with, yeah?
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
I used to use BSD. I loved it, still do. There's just one problem with it. Software! All you Linux lovers (one of which I too have become) write for Linux. Sometimes as an afterthought you'll port to BSD. Granted BSD does have an awesome ports collection, it's just a tad outdated. Plus lots of stuff will compile on BSD and on Linux, but a lot of software won't. That's the sole reason I switched over. Software...
;-)
With a lot of new Linux 2.4 kernel improvments taken directly from BSD, Linux is shaping up to be as good a bet as BSD with the added benfit of all the programmers writing Linux code. But I still think the Daemon is cooler than Tux.
ahhh....but can it play Quake?
Yes
And who does Loki align itself with when they develop stuff?
BSD, of course
http://slashdot.org/bsd/00/08/15/1541250.shtml
Ranessin
It was the RedHat "ramen" worm that made me switch. I switched to FreeBSD 4.0. Other than the hastle of copying over 3GB files, it went very smoothly. I think he's right about the speed. Remote sessions seem much faster now. OK enough advocacy already.
std::disclaimer<std::legalese> sig=new std::disclaimer; sig->dump(); delete sig;
I've been tweakin linux kernels for a long time. Yet when it comes down to the dirty of having the server uptimes its always been freebsd (or BSDi). Good god i love linux for its nifty features, but when the same webserver on the same box, craps out every day on linux (2.2 or 2.4, tweaked), and lasts forever on freebsd, the problem answered itself. I wish linux had the stability in my application, but when 24/7 non-stop is my job, i'll stick to freebsd. Not as fast, not as pretty, or krad. but hey, it works. You may say my application is poor, or my hardware choice is poor, but when it comes down to explaining why the site was down to the CTO, "linux is cooler and faster" just doesn't cut it :)
The big wigs have solaris reliably as a minimum, with :) Intel/linux prices in mind, that leaves my only option to freebsd/bsdi at this point.
===sam=== free nessus vulnerability scan = www.vulnerabilities.org
I installed freebsd on a box and I couldnt get the newest version of apache for it... This is why I will be using linux, I would rather have it be BSD, but its sad that I couldnt get the newest version of php either, this bugged me. I also couldnt log in as root via ssh, why? I like BSD, but I really like the idea of linux, its so much easier and the software is more current. Then again BSD is rock solid and their version of apache isnt always going to have the same bugs as the other ports... What do you guys/girls think? should I just use bsd, or should I use linux with the new kernel? Where can I get ISO's for the dist. you suggest? Do they come as secure by default? I can install Freebsd and have it be secure with nothing open, redhat, well it cant. I would like to set up a linux box for a server, but it doesnt seem to want to happen with out much work, and I know that people will argue about how easy it is with linux, but thats not always true. Can anyone help?
Fight censors!
"Not my manner of thinking but the manner of thinking of others has been the source of my unhappiness." - M
If the result of my code ending up in Windows was to make Windows faster, more stable, or safer to use in conjunction with other operating systems, I'm all for it.
Part of my job as a Unix admin/integrator is dealing with Windows, and if I can do something to release fellow admins/integrators from the same hell I go through when one of these things breaks, all the better. I don't want a Windows-free world, I want a world where everything works properly.
--
All men are great
before declaring war
A government is a body of people notably ungoverned - AC
Much of FreeBSD 5's kernel development is focussed on improving SMP performance, particularly with respect to the TCP/IP stack. I don't know how long it will take for it to be declared stable, but I've had no real problems with the version that shipped in the 6-CD BSD box I found at Staples.
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
Wow, you sure did blow away everything I said with that. How did I miss that huge blindspot in my logic? Oh, wait. I didn't.
Yes, I know they are able to just sell your code without changing anything. But, they will almost never succeed at locking everyone into using their code that way. Because people will still be able to get yours for free. Remember, you have chosen what gets done with the code you wrote. Nothing, and I mean nothing, will change that unless you do it yourself (and even then -- good luck getting that opensource code locked down).
If they spend the money on marketing, I wish them all the returns in the world. They are putting something into it that I didn't and getting something out of it; which I should have no right to try and claim. I gave them my code to do with as they wanted. People can do that under the GPL just as well. I don't see a part saying anything about you seeing any of that money. Just the opposite in fact. Linux distros are the perfect picture of this. They don't change anything but they resell the programs. It doesn't profit the author any. He may get some code back later, but the same thing happens in the BSD world... we just don't force people to send the code to us. If they want their code to go far, they will try and get it added to the main base -- or distribute it themselves. It doesn't matter.
If it wasn't for the GPL "... nobody would even know free software existed." lol, that is a good one. I don't even need to respond to that. Free software has existed as long as computers have been around. No one needs the press to tell them it exists to justify its existence.
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
---
"Do not meddle in the affairs of sysadmins,
for they are subtle and quick to anger."
768 GB of RAM? Is that a typo?
Was that a joke?
The situations where Linux beats up on FreeBSD are rare. I know. I've seen a couple of them in live production. Most people won't. Ever.
You are exaggerating the importance of SMP, I think. Yes, 2.4 (and even 2.2) have Real SMP support, as opposed to FreeBSD 4 and earlier's "one processor for kernel space, one for user space" approach. (If that's not the God's honest truth, then it's somewhat pathetic that a quad-CPU box running threaded apps at 4.0 utilization only utilized two processors in the deployment I'm thinking of) Most users won't have to care about this if they're running x86 hardware. I have seen very few sites that needed scalable SMP and couldn't afford a Sun or Sequent box at the heart of their business. (and I simply don't trust Intel hardware for applications where I can only afford to spec a single unit in production; for clustering and server farms, it's fine)
Moreover, FreeBSD 5's SMP support is likely to be on a par with 2.4's. That's pretty damn good. I haven't seen many commodity 8-way Intel boxes, and I've never seen any non-Sequent 64-way x86 machines. Ever. (I've used plenty of the rest)
On dual-processor machines, especially webservers, I have watched FreeBSD kick the crap out of Linux. On quads, Linux does indeed beat up on FreeBSD. But most people are not purchasing 4- or 8-way chassis with an eye to expansion, the way people do with Suns (eg. 4500's with a single processor board, etc).
What worries me is that the same people who consider your post 'informative' are the ones most likely to come to the wrong conclusion.
Oh well. Anyone who believes everything they read on Slashdot shouldn't be making purchasing decisions anyways...
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
How about mature, working SMP support?
I swear, all these comments along the lines of "well, FreeBSD might be better for big servers, but..." comments crack me up. Fact is, Linux (particularly the 2.4 series kernels) trounces FreeBSD when it comes to scaling on high-end (read: SMP) x86 hardware.
FreeBSD is probably still better for single-cpu boxes (think Hotmail or Yahoo's server farms), though I haven't yet tested FreeBSD against a 2.4 kernel in this configuration.
Don't take this as a flame against FreeBSD; I cut my teeth on netbsd and 386BSD back in the day. I just find the lack of proper SMP support is a showstopper when it comes to deploying Free/OpenBSD in many environments.
-Isaac
I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. For Entertainment Purposes Only.
He explicitely said that these benchmarks are not scientific and are merely his opinion. Therefore, this error is permissible. Besides, this optimization depends highly on the compiler used. My understanding is that gcc does not do as good a job optimizing as some other compilers. Furthermore, even if this stuff did get optimized out, I don't see how it would change the outcome of this comparison.
All in all, this is the best comparison between FreeBSD and Linux I've seen yet. Everything else I've heard up until now was basically anecdotal evidence and hearsay. Yes, this is not a real benchmark. But at least it shows some evidence.
Notice how he says that tweaking Linux improved performance a lot. If anything, this shows that out of the box, FreeBSD is better tweaked for a server than Linux, which makes sence -- FreeBSD is primarily a server OS, while Linux is targeted for both desktop and server, and different distributions configure the kernel differently. What I would like to see is a benchmark of fully-tweaked Linux (once 2.4.x tree stabilizes) and fully-tweaked FreeBSD.
___
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
hey man , you should try windows.
tons of books and lots of sound drivers.
Hardly, why would I have been asking if I didn't already feel that way. My impressions were already "colored".
In which case, your example of your teacher is rather pointless, since it would seem you had already made up your mind about the GPL - just as he had about the BSD license.
My point with repeating this story, was that most GPL people are like this.
This is a ridiculous generalization. Have you talked with a majority of GPL supporters? Or even a small proportion? This is like me saying, "Most BSD supporters are fascists." No supporting arguments, no personal experience - just a blatantly provocative generalization.
And the GPL itself has the same attitude. You WILL do it our way, or we will find a way to FORCE you to comply.
That's just ridiculous. If you don't use GPL'd code in your own code, you have no problem. If you DO use GPL'd code in your own code, you should at least repect the license the author of that code put on it.
Trying to make me look like a childish person throwing a mindless tantrum is a nice tactic -- but it doesn't work in civilized society.
More than anything, this sentence makes me think of a teenager saying, "I'm not a kid! Don't treat me like one!" Please, grow up and respect the fact that some people like the GPL more than the BSD license, just as you prefer the opposite.
Linux support and documentation isn't the best out there. OpenBSD, for instance, has some of the best man pages I've come across. And the book, "Building Linux and OpenBSD Firewalls" was more than enough to help me install and configure a nicely tuned daemon firewall box.
However, not everyone goes about searching for information the same way, which in the end was my main point. For some, answers will come quickly through *BSD channels. For others, a particular Linux site may be everything they'll ever need. When I was playing around with different installs on a spare box, I never could find the information needed to get a particular sound card working, or to adjust this or that feature under FreeBSD, whereas I happened upon the solutions quickly for the current Debian setup I have now.
So, as I said originally, the main reason I use Linux isn't because of it's technological superiority or even better support, just that the layout of the user support channels happens to suit me better than it might someone else.
"
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"
A while ago I was issued a Dell Inspiron 7500. After taking a good hard look at the Linux distros out there (I was running Debian on my desktop at the time, I decided to put FreeBSD on the laptop. These were my major reasons:
Do I think FreeBSD is ideal for everything? No. I'm typing this from a Mandrake box I set up for my roommate to use.
Have I become a BSD bigot? Possibly. As I type this I wear a FreeBSD shirt and a tattoo of Chuck, the FreeBSD daemon.
You're right to be angry about the teacher. The choice of license should have been up to you.
Why can't both licenses exist in the world simultaneously?
Personally I look at it like this:
The BSD license gives the code away for anyone to do with as they will, relying on the kindness of others to repay the gift in terms of giving code back to the community and not abusing it.
The GPL license is more greedy by demanding payment to use the code in other projects. The payment is that you have to put your code under the same license.
In truth the BSD license is the more 'free' in terms of the coder, and does reap benefits (as one person put it, Apple didn't base Darwin on GPLed code), but I wonder if the greedier way of the GPL is more benificial to allowing the code to propogate.
(I'm just trying to leave aside the idea of which is better for the user or which is better for the programmer and just looking at it in terms of which is more likely to provide more code back to the general 'pool', but personally I believe both licenses can co-exist and serve different purposes)
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
Hmmm, there is clear evidence of a typo in the article. I certainly believe they meant...
'This one is a dual CPU system with PentiumIII 900-GHz processors and 768 GBs of RAM. The disks are under a RAID controller, letting the five 18.2-TB disks be visible under RAID5.'
...these boxes wouldn't scale otherwise, would they ?:)
Don't obfuscate quantity for quality. Sure when I go to Borders, I see about 5x the number of books on Linux; but all but two or three of them are on "Debian for Dummies" or "Red Hat Unleashed". They aren't really technical. I can't read Debian for Dummies and understand how Linux handles those new fangled zero-copy sockets. Now there are the couple of Linux kernel books but there is also the 4.4BSD red book. It explains the whole OS! Not just the kernel. If you've ever read the needs to be updated Complete FreeBSD by Greg Lehey it's like a happy medium between r33t k3rn37 d00dz and "How to tie your shoes the Linux way."
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
FreeBSD already emulates most Linux software out there. It runs my SBLive natively and perfectly. I didn't install it because I wanted it to do everything Windows does, I installed it because I wanted a kick-ass Unix system to run at home. I use it for a workstation at home and have it on servers at work. It is rock solid. Easy to Upgrade? Yes every morning it cvsup's that nights changes, fixes, to the src code. Then every month I run make buildworld and make installworld and I have the latest FreeBSD every bin freshened. I used Linux since 1993, since changing to FreeBSD I've had no desire to go back. The people who are complaining about lack of documentation and resources are being silly. Besides the brand name FreeBSD books out there, there are many resources and websites with step-by-step help for newbies. IRC especially has very knowledgeable people.
Faith: Belief in Truth. Superstition: Belief in Falsehood.
Okay, well, this only makes sense if you have several machines (I've never seen the appeal of dual-booting unix), but there are definitely comparative advantages to each OS.
For mail servers, DHCP, DNS, NFS, firewall, NAT, etc., FreeBSD means less headaches. I've got plenty of FreeBSD boxes that have never been down except for OS upgrades or hardware moves. You can lock them in a closet and never think about it again - it's like the golden days of Novell Netware all over again. And under intense loads, say, a well-utilized IMAP or Samba server, FreeBSD keeps its chin up far longer than Linux.
However, the problem with FreeBSD is that, let's face it, the userland is just not as friendly as that in Linux. You spend days installing all the happy-fun GNU tools with useful command-line arguments and post-1970 approaches to system management, and by the time you've done that, you've kluged together a system only a mother could love. So, for day-to-day messing around, Linux can be much friendlier.
Perhaps even more importantly, the new generation of commercial software is largely just not available for FreeBSD. Want to run Oracle? Domino? You can try to shoehorn them into FreeBSD's Linux emulation environment, but I can tell you from painful experience, it's not pretty - if it works at all. And when you try to do things like linking other third-party software against the Oracle libraries under Linux emulation, you'll spend weeks up to your eyeballs in Makefiles and header files. Not worth the trouble, even for the incremental improvement in stability.
So they both have their places, and they're both well-worth learning about. But I'd be quite suspicious of someone who claims that one is a "better" OS than the other - it depends far too much on one's specific needs.
"Patriotism is your conviction that this country is superior to all other countries because you were born in it." -- GBS
The errors call into question his overall credibility as a 'guru'.
He states that he has introduced floating point into the C program (to make it a tad 'tougher'), when he hasn't even done that! He's trying to asssign a floating point number to a long (which is an extended int, maybe he meant double?) so the compiler is just going to chop that number to a (long) int for him, hopefully at least giving him a warning which I guess he ignored. This guy holds a masters degree in CS?
Nobody is expecting him to come up with a perfect benchmark, but 1) he could at least know something about what he's talking about before he talks about it and 2) there's plenty of existing benchmarks for web performance that he could have used rather than creating his own questionable benchmark.
For what its worth, I run FreeBSD, not Linux, so it's not that I disagree with his results, just the way they were obtained.
The article said something about Linux performing much better after hand-tuning the VM, which begs the question, seeing as how FreeBSD tunes its own VM for good default settings, why can't Linux do the same? This is just like the IDE DMA situation on BSD vs. Linux -- FreeBSD has had autodma working forever on VIA chipsets, and Linux, even in 2.4, defaults to PIO mode on IDE disks unless you enable 'highly dangerous' code. Oddly, the I/O elevator in 2.2 has a sensible out-of-the-box setting, but 2.4 requires tuning with an arcane tool called 'elvtune' or something if you want an elevator at all. Seems like a step backwards to me, regardless of how technically superior the 2.4 way is.
Unix purists go on about how the kernel should never set policy, but that's rather silly. Really, the kernel-'enforced' policy is whatever the defaults are, as most users expect the default behavior to be intelligent. People install Linux all the time and complain about how they can't do anything without getting choppy audio and mouse movement, because IDE defaults to PIO. It's rather sad that people get bad impressions of Linux because of its braindead default settings for so many things, when it's capable of doing much more.
Maybe this is work for the distros to be doing, I don't know. I suspect most of them would prefer to pass the buck as well.
And what's this about no sound drivers? When was the last time you actually used a FreeBSD machine? Or, if you claim to be a FreeBSD user, have you not read LINT? There are tons of sound drivers. The pcm device runs many PCI and ISA cards. And what qualifies as "and the like"? My hauppauge WinTV card works better in FreeBSD than it did in Linux. The machine doesn't slow down when I watch TV. My USB mouse was spotted and configured as soon as I started the install. The ONLY thing I miss about Linux is the Nvidia drivers.
No, I'm not a FreeBSD bigot. I use both Linux and FreeBSD. If you look, I'm actually a Debian developer. They both have a place in the world. But, if you are going to post something, post facts.
J
Who moderates the meta-moderators?
From the article:
'I chose -- once again -- IBM's Netfinity 5100 server. This one is a dual CPU system with PentiumIII 900-MHz processors and 768 GBs of RAM. The disks are under a RAID controller, letting the five 18.2-GB disks be visible under RAID5.'
Damn. Makes my half a gig of RAM look very sad :)
"Mary had a crypto key, she kept it in escrow, and everything that Mary said, the Feds were sure to know."
Let's see a good clean fight.
Also on tonight's fight card:
GNOME vs. KDE
Perl vs. PHP
MySQL vs. Postgres
RMS vs. ESR
--
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS why did it get USB support before Linux did?
If FreeBSD is a server-only OS, what is PicoBSD all about?
Fact of the matter is FreeBSD serves multiple intrests as well. And it does them all reasonably well.
I've had plenty of people ask me if they should switch from MS Windows over to Linux. For some the answer is yes. But only if they're ready for the headaches that come with breaking from the pack. For others, I realise early on that they're going to be much more productive on a machine with an operating system that they're pretty much guarenteed to be able to be fixed by the local Best Buy.
It really isn't about which OS is the holy grail, perfect for all situations and godsend to all who use it. That's because such a beast doesn't exist. It's about finding the right tool for the job, and the right tool means not only the proper amount of control and features, but support and comfort for the person using it.
Despite what we geeks tell ourselves, an operating system is just a tool, not a lifestyle. Right? Right? Guys? Hello?
It's not really a matter of which is technologically superior, and I suspect that FreeBSD may in fact be so. However, in the particular style of searching for information on how to accomplish a particular task, I've always found the Linux information quicker and easier than for the FreeBSD way of doing things. Again, this doesn't mean that Linux is better, far from it. It's just easier for me to run thanks to the types of online resources I come across.
Your mileage, as always, may vary. Offer void in most major cities. Not to be taken internally, while pregnant, or running for Congress.
This, however, caught my eye:
long y;
y = 28.2839281;
x = 339829;
y = x / y;
Notice how I included some simple floating point arithmetic in the C program to make things just a tad tougher.
He admits he's no benchmark specialist, but any compiler worth its salt (and many that aren't) will optimize the floating point operations away. Also, since the result of the divide is never used, that will be optimized out, too.
I don't know what the real story is, and I do know a lot of knowledgeable people split on the Linux vs. FreeBSD issue. However, such a blatant error in benchmarking methodology gives me large doubts about this guy's credibility as a competent judge.
Well, I look at it this way. I can walk into any bookstore and get an O'Reilly book detailing how to write drivers for Linux, another explaining Linux internals in detail, yet more describing for newbies how to install same. There are wonderful distributions like Debian and (well, at least when they can make a release that allows you to get the kernel to compile) RedHat, etc etc etc.
On the daemon front, I've seen books available by mail, none in the bookstores. There's certainly a lot less in terms of choice. And you can forget finding sound drivers, or the like. What you do get is the suggestion to take the drivers from the Linux people and port them yourself. Of course you can do that, because you're a g0d l337 ha>0r d00d, right? Otherwise you'd be running Windows.
--- Jump!! Fire!! Bullet time!! - Lego version of the Matrix
FreeBSD is a pure server OS. Nobody has to worry about the other possible applications, it is designed purely for one purpose, and one purpose alone. It does it well.
If I were running a server alone, I would use FreeBSD. For any other purpose, I would use Linux. Each have their strengths.
They fuck you up, your mum and dad.
--Anticipation of a New Lover's Arrival, The