Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE Is Ready
ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.
1. cvsup r00lz for updating the OS
2. ports collection
3. single file (/etc/make.conf) for managing compile-time options and a master ftp server
4. VM
5. ports collection
6. no rpm or deb files
7. ports collection
8. linux binary compatibility
9. ports collection
10. softupdates
11. securelevel
12. make world
I converted all my computers from linux to FreeBSD about six months ago and never looked back. I find FreeBSD much simpler to manage, automate, and secure than any other *NIX (I haven't given OpenBSD a try yet).
There is no "journaled" filesystem since softupdates does a really good job and imporves the fs performance.
Oh, BTW, did I mention the ports collection?
'nuff said
The FreeBSD 4.4 news haven't been posted for more than a few minutes, there are (were when I started writing) 6 posts, and already people are following a very annoying thread. What I mean is the stupid (IMO) advice that *BSD (or Linux or any open source project) should do this and that, be like this and that in order to be more average user friendly and to gain more market share.
/., and most of all, don't complain so much about it. Instead, do something about it. Mail the developers this advice, or better yet, help code the OS, write the documentation, and in general, help improve it.
PEOPLE! Do you think that the people, or the companies developing with those OSes are not aware of those problems? That they have no clue whatsoever as to what the general public wants? That they simply refuze to make their OSes user friendly, just to spite the users, and stay in a tiny share of the market?
They want more users, and they're doing everything possible to make their experience as pain-free and easy as possible. That they haven't reached perfection is not a surprise. But don't give such stupid advice on
But even this is not very relevant, for I'm using Linux because it suits me, and I like it, no matter how small its market share. And no matter how user (un)friendly it is. I like it (and I've been running it for the past 4.5 years)
I know, I know. My complaining does not help either. But I'm not doing it every time such a story is posted (check my posts if you don't believe me). I'm just getting fed up with all this useless noise. I'd much rather hear about the technical issues with FreeBSD (I haven't tried it yet, I'm running Linux and OpenBSD), the user experience, the major apps that have been ported to it, etc. THAT would help me, and others.
- better responsiveness under heavy load - Linux 2.4.x with its VM problems is particularly bad in comparison
- smaller base software/dependencies; BSD libc is much smaller than glibc;
/bin/sh points to ash, so all shell and system scripts are ash processes (and not bloated bash processes); classic Unix tools are less heavyweight than GNU tools (Remember: you can use GNU tools, bash etc., but they're not a dependency) - mature device file system
- Clear separation of what belongs to the core OS & third party software (=ports system)
- Best package management for installing/compiling from source (Debian's apt-get src isn't there yet)
- Kernel features are fewer, but proven & tested (as opposed to many experimental or not-yet-mature drivers/subsystems/filesystems in Linux)
- standard file system is 64 bit, allowing big single files
- Package selections show that FreeBSD maintainers are real Unix afficionados (vim 6.0 available etc.)
- the whole system is/feels very solid and mature
What I dislike:- distribution/ports mixes free and non-free software (Motif etc.) without prompting the user what is free and not; bad not only for Free Software zealots, but also for people who want to make sure they can use software without limitations in their environment (FreeBSD looks as it is made by people for whom software freedom is a secondary concern)
- available for a smaller no. of hardware architectures than Linux (or use NetBSD on non-x86 platforms, but that's already a different OS)
- no journalling filesystems (no ReiserFS, no XFS), a very small number of filesystems supported
- no
/proc, no framebuffer device, no ALSA sound drivers, no hardware accelerated graphics in the kernel - much worse SMP support than current Linux kernels
. GNU/Linux feels more "modern" than FreeBSD, while FreeBSD is comparatively "conservative", but also more solid. Draw your own conclusions.gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I was skimming over the Handbook and I noticed something about an option to install Linux compatibility binaries. Question for BSD users: how good is this compatibility? Perfect, so-so, or somewhere in the middle?
In the ports directory you will find applications such as StarOffice (5.1 and 5.2), Netscape (linux version), linux version of Flash Plug-in and some more that work perfectly with Linux compat mode. What FreeBSD does is install a package (currently based on Redhat 6.1) and user a kernel module to provide binary compatibility, so it's no emulation. I've successfully ran Quake3 with h/w accel and all IPlanet products. Some other linux stuff you might run is e.g. acrored4 and the linux jvm. I'm posting this on a FreeBSD box using no other than Opera for linux.
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
BSD's FFS with softupdates could be considered to obviate the need for journalling.
Read Journalling Versus Soft Updates for a good Usenix 2000 paper comparing both approaches, which concludes that:
and that
Both methods achieve the same goals by different means.
The FreeBSD ports system is maintained seperately to the OS itself, and so you can generally install what ports you want. For popular software, the ports are normally updated within about one week of the release of a new version, although this varies heavily, epecially if the new version has some problems on FreeBSD.
For a lot of ports, you'll find that there are two versions in the ports tree, a "stable" version and a "devel" version. For example, the stable version of Apache is currently 1.3.20, and the devel version 2.0.16.
If your machine is slow, then you can install packages. These are built fairly frequently for the -STABLE branch, and can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/. Or you can use 'pkg_add -r apache' (for example), which will fetch the latest stable package for apache and install it.
Hope this helps. If you have more questions, then try reading Chapter 4 of the FreeBSD Handbook (linked in the story above).
Regards,
-Jeremy
My only gripe with FreeBSD is the amount of documentation available. You pretty much have to work out most things for yourself, there aren't the sheer number of different HOWTOs available like there are with Linux.
One thing you should remember is FreeBSD is better about keeping their manpages up to date and useful. One of the things that drove me nuts with RedHat was the sheer lack of manpages for many of the commands and almost all of the drivers (try running man 4 pcm in FreeBSD and it will tell you all about the sound driver). FreeBSD doesn't have as many HOWTOs because it doesn't need them, the manual has all the information you need in many cases.
I read the internet for the articles.
First off, this is not meant to be any kind of definitive list of items, nor a flame on any other OS. Nothing more than what has kept me using FreeBSD rather than Linux.
/etc/rc.1, I feel totally comfortable going in and working with FreeBSD's scripts and config files.
Not too long ago I decided to get NT off of a laptop I've got here and get a *nix on there. Although I'm far more familiar with FreeBSD I figured that a Linux distro would have a better chance of having hardware support. After reading many a glowing review of Mandrake, I decided to give it a try on here.
The Mandrake installer is every bit as nice as folks claim, and then some. Very professional layout, wicked easy drive partitioner, and all the rest of the steps that get you through the install. It picked up on the proper video settings, handled all the X, Gnome, and KDE installation without a hitch. It's pretty impressive stuff.
Then I got to mucking around with the software updating utility. Darn thing takes as long to load up as a full cvsup of the FreeBSD ports tree. It also didn't seem to store my settings when I didn't want to load software off a CD, constantly demanding for an install CD to be inserted before continuing. Aside from all that, even when I did manage to get it to pull from a network source, the packages seemed to not be updated very often. I guess I'm just spoiled by the constant, daily, hourly, updating of the FreeBSD ports tree.
All this I was willing to deal with to some extent, but then I ran into another small problem. I'll disclaimer this up front by saying that had I put the time into it I'm sure I could have fixed it. For some reason the fancy network config settings for Mandrake kept changing my IP address. It was about then that I decided to dig a bit into the actual config files to see about fixing this problem.
After a couple of hours staring at a large number of these files, in which each of them seemed way too complex for their own good I'd had enough. I just kept saying to myself, "This is nuts!" Even the Apache config got busted up into multiple files, adding complexity rather than removing it. This pretty much defined my next course of action.
FreeBSD boot floppies in, re-format to UFS, and a new OS on. The FreeBSD install is pretty straight forward for anyone to follow, but some of the hand holding isn't there. For instance, if you're looking to put a newer version of X on, you get to do a manual config. It does take longer to run through the install up front, but what I keep being reminded is that once it's all in there it's far faster and easier to tweak on things, and to keep them up to date.
In less time than it took to type this out this here laptop completed an update of the source files and ports tree. Later tonight I'll run the make world process and be up to date with the latest stuff. A new release is nearly a non-event for an already running system.
From a user's point of view, one of the biggest differences between FreeBSD and a Linux distro is that FreeBSD doesn't have any specific GUI tools for administration. There is no such thing as a "linuxconf" or "HardDrake" utility. This is offset by what I feel are far simpler and fewer config files that the user can edit directly. Where I feel lost even looking at some of the start up scripts in a Linux
I've heard a number of arguments stating the opposite of my view on this, but I'll leave those to the folks that hold that viewpoint. This is pretty much how I see it, if that perspective at all helps your understanding of some of the differences.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.