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FreeBSD an officially supported GNOME platform
GlockaDe writes: "FreeBSD is now a supported platform for the GNOME project. This means that now, new GNOME releases will not ship unless they successfully build and run on FreeBSD. The actual note is buried in these minutes."
Wow, you'd better tell all those FreeBSD users running vmware that. They're probabally going to be annoyed that they have to stop using vmware simply because you aren't allowed to port kernel modules?
/proc for everything? It's kind of like old DOS programming in that it's almost completely tied to the OS (and is not actually a standard, so it can change at any time) and platform. I can see using /proc occasionally when you don't have any other options, but it seems like some Linux programmers (not Unix programmers) like to use it in every damn program. It's really annoying for those of us who port applications.
I'll give you half credit though, vmware had problems in prior to 4-STABLE as of the beginning of the year, and won't run at all on anything prior to 4-STABLE.
Rant mode: On
By the way, what is the deal with everybody in Linux using
Rant mode: Off
Down that path lies madness. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with melting snowballs.
I read the internet for the articles.
GNOME is supposed to be a Unix desktop, not just a Linux desktop, so portability across Unices would be a goal anyway. I doubt that KDE had much to do with it.
I recently sent an email to Eazel support regarding some problems I was having with Nautilus. The response made it sound like there was something wrong, the email thanked me for my support at this "challenging time", yet I have not heard that Eazel was having any problems.
It is not my intention to start rumours, but it would be a real shame if they were having problems since Nautilus has so much potential, but is still somewhat unusable (too bloated, and too difficult to install).
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Hi,
Just thought I'd write a line about my experiences with FreeBSD. I recently ran (up until yesterday, actually) FreeBSD. I was up to 4.3-BETA.
My experience with XFree (and I was using 4.0.3) was that it was actually easier to set up under FreeBSD than it was on the various Linux distributions I've used. Apps ran great, everything worked more or less fine.
In the end, though, I wanted cdparanoia without getting involved in a major porting project (it's in the OpenBSD ports tree, but there are some differences between OpenBSD and FreeBSD) and I was tired of waiting for DRI support. Heck, maybe it was there, but I couldn't find it and anyone I asked was too busy being l33t to help (and hell, while I'm at it, there are just some times when telling someone you used to run Linux is a bad idea.)
I wish the FreeBSD crowd all the luck in the world because they've got a potential Linux killer, but they're going to have to step up the development process' speed.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
Nautilus may not be supported, but it builds and runs. It's an easier build on FreeBSD-release than it is on, say, Slackware-current.
Stating on Slashdot that I like cheese since 1997.
I switched my wife to FreeBSD a few months ago. The only thing she noticed was that her system no longer seems to freeze for a few seconds at a time under heavy loading.
This is mainly because FreeBSD was designed from the start with the attitude of "let's do it the Right Way", rather than "let's get this working, and re-write it later". That has the disadvantage that you don't necessarily get nifty new features as quickly as the Linux folks. Linux seems to support every piece of hardware ever made to varying degrees. However, if a feature is including in the current release, then you can bet that it works - I've yet to find an alpha-quality driver or system in FreeBSD.
Anyway, she runs Netscape, Mozilla, Gnome, Enlightenment, ESD, and pretty much all of the other apps that you'd want on a Linux desktop. She can't tell that she's not the Debian system that it replaced, except for the never-freezing difference.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Yes, it will; this FreeBSDzine article discusses it. (Hint: just because it requires help from the kernel, that doesn't mean FreeBSD's kernel can't provide that help, even if the kernel modules in question had to be written by somebody other than the people at VMware.)
No, that's not good enough - Wine runs native on FreeBSD.
You want to run Linux VMware on the FreeBSD running on VirtualPC, and then run NT on VMware.
Then you can run Hercules on NT (yes, it runs on Linux as well, so you could run Linux on VMware instead)...
...and boot the S/390 version of Linux on that.
No, wait, you do want to run Linux on VMware. Then you'd run the NT version of Hercules under Wine....
Man, you and the post you replied to must be IT management. One can tell by the way that you just don't get it and probably never will.
vim builds in DOS, but I don't think gvim (the GUI version) would run there.
I agree. Slack and FreeBSD are my personal favorites as well. They are both developed in the classical Unix style... KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid).
I did set the bootable partition back to Windows... "No operating system found".
Didn't try GRUB, but I'm not exactly hopeful enough to go through reinstalling Windows again :P
Thanks for the non-answer Mr. Smartypants.
BTW, I've done this with Linux and FreeBSD dozens of times with no problems.
I got to get around to trying this BSD....
There's just so much to explore and so little time.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Back when I ran OS/2 I once fired up a Win/OS2 session running a dos box running a commodore 64 emulator, on a 486.
The cursor blinked about once every fifteen seconds.
These days, I could probably do that all that under Plex86 from within Linux. I'm just trying to figure out how to squeeze Wine into there...
Rob
Also, there hasn't been a "schedule" until recently (i.e. the last couple of months). There were goals and rough dates to shoot at, but no hard and fast schedule--you can't schedule that far in advance, you can only set goals. But in the last few months we have set a schedule and have done a pretty good job of sticking to our primary goal which was to release Gnome 1.4 before GUADEC. Barring any major issues this should happen.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
GNOME has run on BSD for quite some time; that's not the point. The point is that now it's part of the GNOME project's list of reference platforms. I avoid the use of the word "support" since there's no support in the traditional sense of the word from the GNOME project itself, but BSD is a compatible platform and officially considered in the release plans.
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Celebrate the finer things in life
From the Gnome (Ximian) Download Page:
"Please note: Ximian GNOME is not currently available for Mandrake 7.2. Users of Mandrake 7.2 are cautioned not to try to install Ximian GNOME on their systems."
I find it odd and infuriating that they can branch out to FreeBSD - a platform that GNOME was not originally designed to serve - when they haven't even gotten this right in one of the most popular linux distro's (in the US, anyway) yet.
"These are the thoughts that kept me out of the really *good* schools." --George Carlin
Whoever thought it was only for Linux? Linux is not GNU, and GNOME is a GNU project. If it can't run on any other platform besides Linux when happens when TGS is finally released?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
What is it with you and BSD? Why should you even care what other people are running? Did Theo insult you or something?
You spend so much time dissing BSD that it's like you're trying to compensate for some unknown inadequacy. Small dick? Small brain? What?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
And GNOME is different how?
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Okay, I'll feed the troll 'cuz I hate to see the little buggers starve to death...
although the source is open, the development team is not.
I seem to recall that only Linus Torvalds gets to bless kernel code with "officialdom". Funny, I heard that GNU operates in a similar way.
Furthermore the license allpws proprietary software to "steal" source code and use it.
The oldest FUD in the book. You cannot steal what is free. Try it sometime if you don't believe me. No matter how hard you try, you cannot take FreeBSD away from the FreeBSD Core Team. No matter how much you close, fold, spindle and mutilate it, it will still be there untouched and as pristine as before!
"Steal" is definitely not the right word.
What must be done is an opening up of the development process OR a GPL-style restriction on redistribution.
So, you're saying that they either need to be LESS restrictive or MORE restrictive? Which one is it!
Recently I became aware of two GPLd projects that are using some of my BSD licensed code. Fantastic! Great! Go Bulldogs! It didn't bother me one bit that my code was being used in alternately licensed projects. However, if the shoes were on the other foot, it could not have happened.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
KDE2.1 and the QT threading issues under X4 have been dealt with. Will@FreeBSD.Org committed fixes this past weekend.
Things have been fine under X3, and things were even ok under X4 for the first few days after KDE2.1's release.
I stopped using GNOME since KDE2's first release, so I can't comment on that.
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My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
yah! and you only have to download 400 packages or update your compiler and compile a metric buttload of source to get it working and it trashes your old 1.x kde install!
How we know is more important than what we know.
At this point, both HP and Sun have announced plans to (eventually) phase out CDE and replace it with Gnome as their primary desktop. HP, at least, has even committed to shipping Gnome with the next update to HPUX, due sometime mid 2nd half of this year...
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
what a co-incidence! Apple recently stated that they wouldn't ship any future version of Aqua until it compiles on Darwin! go BSD! ;)
- j
Since BSD is more of a server operating system
Really? Then can you explain this product?
FreeBSD the desktop version
If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
The Linux boom is leveling off and people are realizing that there are other systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD which are all rather nice.
Sure the BSD's do not focus on being desktop workstations but that does not mean the Gnome and KDE developers cannot make it work nicely as one. At times it is hard setting up X under BSD, but once it is running it is pretty sweet.
I use FreeBSD since it seems well rounded with tons of ported applications and many performance enhancements for the x86 platform while the other two main branches are happy producing a great server OS which runs on all kinds of hardware. I am unsure how well X and Gnome runs on those systems. I doubt many NetBSD users would feel bad if someone said XFreeBSD is hard to install onto NetBSD. One place that I know is using NetBSD has it running several large printers. I think they manage them through SNMP.
Pick the right OS for the job. I am glad FreeBSD works well as a server and can do the job as a workstation so long as I do not mind tinkering with it till the sound works.
FreeBSD continues to improve nicely. I cannot wait to see when 5.0 is released sometime in the next year or so. The integration of BSDi features like fine grained SMP will be great, even for a single processor. A nicely threaded kernel will be good for everything. Take that along with more development on KQueues and you will have a fine desktop platform and a database/web server.
Brennan Stehling - http://brennan.offwhite.net/blog/
The only BSD that matters now is MacOSX
BSD operating systems have a history of being licensed under free software terms. Mac OS X is not free software; on the contrary, it's proprietary software that runs on proprietary hardware, and you don't know how much copy "protection" is in the hardware and software.
It takes a visionary company like Apple to wash and scrub an awful GUI like X away.
X is only a network-transparent graphics subsystem. The GUI is provided by X toolkits and clients such as GTK+ apps and Qt apps. (The Qt (not QT) logo looks too much like a hammer and sickle.) I agree that the GNOME people have a lot to learn from Apple, and vice versa.
Will I retire or break 10K?
The above link is more than a month old, and what's noteworthy now is that Nautilus is not supported on FreeBSD. Nautilus is GNOME 1.4. To complicate matters, GNOME 1.4 is way behind schedule, and before this article on Slashdot, I don't think FreeBSD was a priority at all!
In short, this article should strong-arm the GNOME Foundation into delaying GNOME even more, for better or for worse.
(Please browse at -1 to read this comment.)
It's because it's much more sensible and true to the UNIX philosophy than sysctl is (everything is a file), and I wish more people would use it, if just to convince the xBSD developers to support it in addition to the traditional sysctl framework.
/proc rather than sysctl because it is, to them, a superior interface. I have to agree with this, using file I/O is a whole pile easier and unix-like than mucking around with sysctl.
/proc support is in there, it will quickly become popular. It just works better!
Linux supports both, and developers choose to use
There's no reason why any of the BSD's can't support it other than developer inertia, and for the BSD traditionalists, it doesn't have to be the primary kernel config interface, merely a compatibility option. However, believe me, once
Procfs represents data as text because again, that is the UNIX way. There are two things that are basically unique to UNIX systems, and they are that, in userland, everything is a file, and that plain text is a universal data format. Procfs adheres to this, sysctl does not.
/proc - those are control and information files (which belong in /proc), not the device interfaces. The actual device read/write interfaces are, as you'd expect, in /dev - /dev/agpgart on my Linux box. That's not strange at all.
/proc from time to time, yes, but not that often. In any case, sysctl has a similar problem - kernel interfaces do change, and the changes in the kernel are reflected in the sysctl interface. In fact, I'd argue that the fact that procfs forces a conversion to plain text makes it _more_ likely that the data format will stay the same, as it adds a layer of abstraction that sysctl does not.
/etc/sysctl.conf work flawlessly across FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and BSDI? I thought not, and that's even though they originate from the same codebase.
/proc is not actually generated from the kernel until the relevant file is open()'ed. So, the /proc tree takes precisely zero extra processor time and zero extra memory until you read or write something to it.
You misunderstand the AGP files in
The format (and location) of the data does change in
As for cross-platform issues, tell me, does your
And to your most relevant point, that binary to text conversion is slow and memory intensive. Well, this would be a problem if procfs was a real in-memory filesystem... but it isn't. The data inside
Are there any other arguments for sysctl and against procfs? It still seems like a case of favouring tradition over a superior design.
How come you got modded +4 funny and I didn't, when I pulled the first joke?
OK, technically I was wrong, but
Life sucks.
:(
Yours Sincerely, Michael.
now how about a ximian gnome release for freebsd?
why is this even news? gnome has been the the freebsd portlist for a while now. how many freebsd users do you know that would rather download something and do it by hand rather than use the port collection. btw, gnome compiles on freebsd fine. it's not a matter of worry if it's gonna compile, because it will. btw, to all you trolls, this has nothing to do with "bsd dying", as you so bluntly put it. this isn't even a linux vs. bsd war. this is a kde vs. gnome war. maybe all you linux users just wanna take jabs at a faster, more stable OS. you don't realize that most of us freebsd users could care less about what list we are on for being supported. check www.freshports.org if you would like to see what the freebsd community ports to itself without having to wait for lil announcements like this one.
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Tres_Status
stephen
If I'm not mistaken, you could run Gnome under FreeBSD with Linux compat, so I guess the only news is... Gnome won't be shipped if it doesn't compile? Sounds good but that doesn't do much for downloads of Gnome and all the dependancies, and if your on dialup ... (ouch). Either way its nice to see developers still focusing on the BSD's contrary to beliefs that BSD is dying.
csh-2.04# uname -snrm
FreeBSD ritalin.deficiency.org 4.1-RELEASE i386
360 degrees of Karma
I was making a statement in general, so there was no need to state this, I for one have been using FreeBSD, and OpenBSD since FBSD 3.2 and Open 2.6 so I'm pretty familiar with ports, the purpose of my initial post was to point out what I understood, Gnome wouldn't ship unless it compiled which is what I took it to be.
360 degrees of Karma
...I can run BSD in emulation using Virtual PC in Mac Classic mode while using OSX as my main operating system?
[Insert the usual disclaimer here]