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Debian NetBSD
bXTr writes "Interesting project over at SourceForge. Quoting from the website, 'Debian NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development and cannot currently be installed from scratch. Instead, a tarball of the current envionment is available and can be extracted into a handy directory on a NetBSD system.' Check out the reasons why they're doing it and some interesting commentary at DailyDaemonNews on this."
Two open source minorities combine in a brilliant flash of light Because we can. .
I don't see why not, we have lindows, and now deb-bsd, so it shouldn't be bad.
I thought NetBSD's motto was to port to anything and everything with a CPU (viz. NetBSD Dreamcast), not to get another operating system ported to it ;)
Disclaimer: Yes, yes, I know what they did and it's not porting an OS. I just found it sort of funny, in a 'tables-have-been-turned' sort of way.
-raph
personally, I would like to see a BSD distro with ports and all, but with a linux kernel.
I just installed FreeBSD recently and have to say i was blown away with how professional the installer was, very simple and powerful - not to mention the ports system.
debian is nice, apt-get is a great program and the net install is awesome, but I can't say I have much love for dselect. I think debian shows the most promise of any linux distro right now, but in terms of polish, I have to give it to FreeBSD so far.
At least Enron isn't the only group of people jumping off of sinking ships! About time Debian started moving to an operating system that doesn't have VM problems every other release. Go ahead! Mod this one down!
for those to lazy to click the link here is what it says:
Why Debian NetBSD?
NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a GNU-based operating system.
The Debian Hurd project demonstrates that Debian is not tied to one specific kernel. However, the Hurd kernel is still relatively immature - a Debian NetBSD system would be usable at a production level.
Lessons learned from the porting of Debian to NetBSD can be used in porting Debian to other kernels (such as FreeBSD and OpenBSD).
In contrast to projects like Fink or Debian w32, Debian NetBSD does not exist in order to provide extra software or a Unix-style environment to an existing OS (the *BSD ports trees are already comprehensive, and they unarguably provide a Unix-style environment). Instead, a user or administrator used to a more traditional Debian system should feel comfortable with a Debian NetBSD system immediately and competent in a relatively short period of time.
Not everybody likes the *BSD ports tree or the *BSD userland (this is a personal preference thing, rather than any sort of comment on quality). Linux distributions have been produced which provide *BSD style ports or a *BSD style userland for those who like the BSD user environment but also wish to use the Linux kernel - Debian NetBSD is the logical reverse of this, allowing people who like the GNU userland or a Linux-style packaging system to use the NetBSD kernel.
Because we can.
NetBSD is under a BSD license. Taking it and putting it under the GPL is no worst then a corporation taking it and making it closed source.
Plus, it should be interesting how it turns out.
To me, this is promising. I like to see cooperation between the Linux world and the *BSD world. Both have their advantages, and it'd be great if both would learn from each other more often. Perhaps this is an instance where some exchange of ideas could come about? Those responsible deserve a pat on the back.
Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit.
Slashdot is abusing its unlimited mod points to keep censoring this post!
This might be offtopic, but it is important to do something about it!
Some people truly don't understand the possibilities of things like porting. Or they have no idea what porting is. Porting, in case that is the case, is making software useable to many people on different operating systems and hardware configurations. Say you want to run a program, and you're running Solaris on a SPARC. But the person who originally wrote the program wrote it for Linux, on x86. Its useful, but not to you, since you don't have what it takes to use it. Now someone comes along and ports it to Solaris/SPARC. You can now use that program. Whee!
That is why Microsoft loses a customer base. Flexability.
Its also what's great about various *NIX distros. If there's something you don't like about, say Suse (just as an example, I liked Suse) - but like some other things about it. Now someone else comes along with a Suse-based distro, or just another distro altogether, which has more of what you want. Switch. Simple as that. Use whatever you want, however you want. But if you make changes, especially really cool ones, let other people use them, too. That's just being nice.
Flexability.
This is a great step but i would love a dselect and apt-get port for FreeBSD or OpenBSD, Two OS's that i have actually used.
Gentoo Linux has that, www.gentoo.org , it uses a ports style system, i'm not sure if it's a direct port of ports, or their own deal.
Photos.
Wow, so Microsoft is worrying about open source software like MySQL because of... um, could someone remind me?
is it just me or is it terribly pretentious to take the work of the NetBSD team, shove some debian/gnu stuff on top of it and call it a GNU-based operating system?
If you check out the mailing list archives, you can see the project has been ongoing (or at least discussed) since May 1999. It just until now to get it to the point where it actually sort of works.
I don't see any SQL Server or C# errors there. Here comes .Net, something that works!
Buddy, the MySQL settings are probably set to a low queue limit and since the queue limit is full it is rejecting all incoming connections until a spot is availble.
I know this from experience. They probably have set it down to a lower level because the system can't handle a higher queue level.
Ever heard of Linus Torvalds? Oh, and for the v2.4 kernel it's Marcelo Tosatti, for v2.2 it's Alan Cox. For v2.0, it's yours truly. It's hardly like anyone can get their code into the kernel. Anyone is free to submit patches though. That doesn't mean it'll get in.
As for the VM, yes, there have been problems (mostly with corner-cases, though), but v2.0.xx has a stable VM, v2.2.xx has a stable VM now, v2.4.xx has a stable, if somewhat unoptimal VM now, and v2.6 will hopefully have Rik van Riel's VM, which shares a lot of similarities with the VM from FreeBSD, but with some Linux-specific adaptments.
So please, don't spread FUD.
Is this still true with recent kernels from the (snigger) stable branch?
--Giving to trolls for the benefit of us all
Because we can is the spirit behind all great or not so great endeavors. You can never tell what might come out of it.
photosMy Photostream
So how long before they declare that we have to start calling it GNU/NetBSD?
I wonder if the project is still going.
Well I agree with you that it's promising, but do remember that the Debian project is not Linux, but a GNU operating system. There is Debian GNU Linux, and there is Debian GNU HURD, and now (apparently) Debian GNU BSD.
" Theres a core group in charge of what goes and what stays."
Actually, in Linux it's the same (f.e. Torvalds, Cox, Tosatti).
And with BSD carrying the BSD license, anybody can take the code and do anything to the code. And with the freedom the BSD license gives to everybody, the 'takers' don't even have to contribute anything back, not even credits.
Guess how we ended up with so many different *BSD versions? Yes, the BSD license, and the tight control of the people running some of the BSD projects have created multiple forks already.
Some people think that all that is good, others think that is bad, which is one of the reasons why there always will be BSD _and_ GNU.
Personally, I haven't made up my mind about that yet, but I use Linux because it has Debian and interesting developments such as the vservers patch (=jail++).
Debian for *BSD is a good thing, it will make it easier for Debian-users to give *BSD a try.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
works for me
Photos.
Grow up. No, the code has not been stolen in any way (and for that matter, using it wouldn't be stealing anyway, because of the license... But that's beside the point.) Rik van Riel has been talking a lot with the FreeBSD VM-wizards, and looked at the FreeBSD code. He has then developed a VM of his own for the Linux-kernel.
Oh, and it's not like *BSD is totally free from influence from the Linux-kernel... Just face it, the point of open-source is to help eachother out.
How's that for your hardcore, commie conspiracy?
Slackware, the daddy of em all - still alive and kicking. Very BSDish install, similar package handling, BSD init. No ports system last I checked :( but a very friendly system otherwise for compiling from source. http://www.slackware.com
Gentoo, a newcomer, to oversimplify a little the idea seems to be Slack+Ports. Haven't used it yet, heard some great things, sure looks promising. http://www.gentoo.org
Also another similar project that was just recently reported here - sorcerer linux. Don't know enough about it to differentiate it from gentoo, the ideas seem very similar unless I'm missing something (quite possible, haven't had the time to try either.) http://sorcerer.wox.org/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Does anyone have any specs on the differences in kernel performance between NetBSD and Linux?
which piece of news do you think is more insignificant ?
well, what's significant is that we can run NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on NetBSD on Debian on . . . .
segmentation fault. core dumped.
Awww, shucks. I was having fun
The previous has been a secret message to my comrades.
Really, the convergence of Debian package management, GNU utils and NetBSD kernel isn't all that special and WILL NOT create a stronger, unified, easy-to-use UNIX variant.
Please, try Mac OS X; there's every advantage to it without all the traditional UNIX disadvantages.
My hope is that OS X will unify the BSDs into its proper place - at the top of the OS food chain. Many Free/Open/NetBSD users are coming to that conclusion as are many Linux users, beset with flaky kernels and horrible OS packaging.
Apple OS X and the *BSDs will be our answer to WinTel/Linux obsolescence.
Why do the Open Source people always have a lame excuse when their shit breaks/doesn't work?
Boss: "MySQL/Apache/Linux/(Your favorite OSS project here) just choked and threw up on itself."
Geeky OSS Admin: "Oh well that's because [yadda yadda yadda]. It's your fault. Jesus Christ, RTFM!!"
It's the snooty attitude and god damned elitism of OSS geeks that the IT/computing world can do without. For one thing I'd bet $100 that IIS + MsSQL (shit even Oracle) wouldn't have choked there. Clearly there was enough bandwidth, so don't blame it on that this time. Let's take a nice deep breath and say it together: MySQL fucking sucks. That's better. Anyone ever remember winamp.com always fucking being down cause of MySQL? Yeah. When will you OSS-heads realize that your free shit will never compare or scale to pay-software. Anyone who would even remotely consider using MySQL for any remotely high level traffic site is a fucking idiot. (Don't give me that "Slashdot runs MySQL" bullshit; they run a load balancing server farm the size of my garage...) Oh yeah, now I remember the phrase. "You get what you pay for."
For editing text files use Linux. For everything else there's Windows NT.
how would you pronounce that? "nut-bastard?"
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
If you don't need third party application support or kernel threads, however, FreeBSD has a much more solid, reliable kernel.
It would be excellent if you could maintain different machines with different kernels as needed, but have everything on top of that be Debian (both because Debian is excellent, and because supporting a heterogenous OS environment is a pain best avoided if possible).
*blink*
I thought Debian was a distribution? That is, it's a kernel and assorted utilities. If we want to get right down to it, I always thought the kernel itself was the OS...
What makes a distribution is its installer and software management. That is, the main difference between SuSE and Debian and Red Hat is yast, apt, and rpm. So... They're porting apt to NetBSD? That's well and good, but is both unnecessary and not worth this fanfare.
In fact, the BSD world seems largely annoyed at these folks.
I personally don't see the reasons for this project, other than political. However, this is the beauty of the freedom of the BSD license.
Hot tip: Neither the words Anime nor Freak look good on a resume.
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
This is true of the kernel, but the kernel is not the whole deal. One of the major problems with Linux is *that* it's every yahoo for himself -- Cox and Torvalds and a few others do the kernel, the glibc people are a different bunch, the X consortium, the ISC, Apache Foundation, plus all those assorted little libraries, you know the type, it's a kinda neat library, but you've only found 1 app that needs it
So, where the BSD team is some 10-20 people who can all get in a room and hash out details and come out with a coherent ports system, or a standard place to put software (apache goes in
This is a weakness in the Linux system of cooperation. It's also a strength. Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it, also nobody can break the whole thing. Even if Linux and Cox between them decided to sabotage Linux, they couldn't, whereas one guy with cvs commit privileges on cvsup.freebsd.org could give himself a root shell on every BSD box on the planet. (Okay I exaggerate -- he'd get caught, probably, but that's only because most of the people working on BSD are good guys.)
ATTENTION: this user is attempting lame humor. Do NOT moderate this as funny, as it is lame.
Thank you,
The Slashdot Anti-Sitcom-Jokes Brigade
The thing I've always really liked about the BSDs is that they're complete and separate systems that include everything from the kernel to the userland tools, all integrated by one team. Compare with the Linux world, where you have a bunch of different distros that many people pretend are all the same OS (in spite of the fact that file systems are arranged differently, boot sequences are different, configuration is different, package management is different, userland tools are often different, etc.) because they happen to use the same kernel. The BSD way has always seemed a lot cleaner to me. The idea of seeing a myriad of distros based on the BSD kernels really isn't one that I like. I believe it's a step in exactly the wrong direction. Open source Unix needs more standardization, not more fragmentation.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
Wow, this troll is so inovative that I fell for it completely! You truly are a troll genius!
Feels right, but is it really wrong?
In the BSD world, we not only have the ports collection, we have the packages collection, too. So there's no need to compile everything from ports :-)
http://saveie6.com/
For the longest time, people would argue about how Linux isn't an operating system, just a kernel from which an operating system is made. Now people are going out there and taking a complete operating system, pulling a part out of it, and sticking it in the middle of what was normally a Linux distribution.
Linux is a Kernel without an operating system. NetBSD is a complete operating system where everything is designed to work together seamlessly.
What's next, DebiaNT?
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Did they just port apt and dpkg, and put up some Debian-packaged NetBSD binaries? Or have they moved to a Sys V init system, ported the Debian administration and configuration tools, and all the other stuff that makes debian distinctive? They explicitly say that NetBSD doesn't support runlevels, and looking at the package list, it doesn't look like much of the debian tools have made it yet.
If its just a different package system, its pointless. Less work, and more immediately useful results, would be modifying apt to work with the current binary package system (which actually does support dependencies, etc.), and the large number of binaries in this format already available.
If not, its a more questionable proposition. Arguably, its not really BSD anymore...it runs NetBSD binaries and uses that kernel, but the userland is basically Debian, ie, just like any Linux distribution. And most people who want that should just assume use Debian with the Linux kernel, which is a far more mature combination. Yes, for VAXen, toasters, slide rules and other more arcane platforms this won't exactly work, but Debian-NetBSD doesn't seem to have package for these platforms anyway.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I started using linux because it had the hardware support I needed, and support was 100x better. But it wasnt stable enough for my server, so I ran freebsd. But that was a few years ago. Ive always been able to explain to my friends who run BSD, that I need SMP support, so I run linux. But its also how linux has better configuration utilties and drivers. After using linux for years, I know where everything is, easy to setup and fix.
...' - Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
Now, Linux is rock solid, and I get to laugh at my friends who cant X setup on thier freebsd boxes. But then, by the time a good bsd distro will be out, newer and better linux kernels will be out, with new vm's and more features.
-
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
Not too long ago, someone made the comment on slashdot about the general progression of Linux users. As a users becomes more experienced with Linux, they tend to shift from:
Mandrake/RedHat -> Debian/Slackware -> *BSD
It seems that Debian is going to make that last transition a little easier.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
Geeky OSS Admin: "Oh well that's because [yadda yadda yadda]. It's your fault. Jesus Christ, RTFM!!"
/R-T-F-M/ imp.
You know you're a geek when you use UNIX abbreviations in speech.
RTFM
[Unix] Abbreviation for `Read The Fucking Manual'.
1. Used by guru s to brush off questions they consider trivial or annoying. Compare Don't do that then! .
2. Used when reporting a problem to indicate that you aren't just asking out of randomness . "No, I can't figure out how to interface Unix to my toaster, and yes, I have RTFM." Unlike sense 1, this use is considered polite. See also FM , RTFAQ , RTFB , RTFS , STFW , RTM , all of which mutated from RTFM, and compare UTSL .
-Metrollica
--Metrollica
Your complaints about NetBSD are a result of your experience with FreeBSD? These are completely different *operating systems* (not kernels, full operating systems).
Windowmaker is not BSD. If you have a problem with Windowmaker, go complain to them.
Which parts of tuning require five years of experience and/or a CS degree? I switched from Linux to NetBSD after I'd been using computers for about two years altogether, and have always found it easier to work with. Why? Because it's a whole operating system. If stuff goes into the kernel, it's released with userland support, all at the same time.
NetBSD is, IMO, the cleanest system out there today. Everything works, and moving forward is easy. Doesn't come with bash? So what? I don't use bash, so I'm pretty happy to not see it. I do like the standard bourne shell it comes with for running my scripts. I do use tcsh, so it's typically one of the first things I install from pkgsrc on a new machine.
``But pkgsrc is hard! You have to build the stuff yourself,'' you say? A ``make package'' at the top level will create binary packages for the current platform for all packages your configuration suggests you're licensed for. Port maintainers typically do this and provide binary packages for most things people would want. In fact, when NetBSD releases ISOs, they release pre-built package ISOs for i386, just to make it a bit quicker (it certainly can't be any easier).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
no linux! please leave bsd alone. we were doing just fine thank you, go make another revolution somewhere else. we dont want microsoft targeting us next. we are much happier having them use our code instead.
"i was saying gnu-rd"
As Richard Stallman has been saying all along, the OS is GNU, and the kernel it runs on, be it HURD, Linux, or now NetBSD, is just that: the kernel. Of course, Richard is now chorling at the thought of further showing the irrelevance of Linux, but if people call it the Debian Operating System (DOS???) instead of GNU, he'll quickly change his tune and go back to righteous indignation.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
Who can really blame them for starting to move toward *BSD and getting the Hell away from the AOL OS, er I mean, Linux?
I have to take this moment and pimp the upcoming
release of the postgresql RDBMS. Postgresql scales
much better than mysql, and is infinitely more
powerful from a data-management perspective. Oh
yeah, they'd also be better off using a real
language like (perl|python|ruby) instead of that
bloated, non-designed, non-language macro expander called php.
... cause a good old fashioned troll can actually
be true.
b
I've heard a lot of talk at the local ISP (who gave up Linux for FreeBSD) that *BSD is some how more secure (which IMHO is relative). Why would an ISP think such a thing? And, if infact it is somehow more secure, then isn't having the wonderful tools of Debian running on it very very good? Regardless, I think it's really neat to see Debian growing in all kinds of interesting directions.
At this rate there will be three independant open source platforms; Linux, *BSD and Debian. I see no real problem with this but I just don't understand the point. One other question; if Debian is the most pure Linux in an open source point of view why are they porting it to a more restrictive licensing scheme?
UNIX Airways
...
Everyone brings one piece of the plane along when they come to the
airport. They all go out on the runway and put the plane together piece
by
piece, arguing non-stop about what kind of plane they are supposed to
be
building.
Air DOS
Everybody pushes the airplane until it glides, then they jump on and
let
the plane coast until it hits the ground again. Then they push again,
jump
on again, and so on
Mac Airlines
All the stewards, captains, baggage handlers, and ticket agents look
and
act exactly the same. Every time you ask questions about details, you
are
gently but firmly told that you don't need to know, don't want to know,
and everything will be done for you without your ever having to know,
so
just shut up.
Windows Air
The terminal is pretty and colorful, with friendly stewards, easy baggage check and boarding, and a smooth take-off. After about 10 minutes in the air, the plane explodes with no warning whatsoever.
Windows NT Air
Just like Windows Air, but costs more, uses much bigger planes, and takes out all the other aircraft within a 40-mile radius when it explodes.
Linux Air
Disgruntled employees of all the other OS airlines decide to start their own airline. They build the planes, ticket counters, and pave the runways
themselves. They charge a small fee to cover the cost of printing the ticket, but you can also download and print the ticket yourself.
When you board the plane, you are given a seat, four bolts, a wrench and a copy
of the seat-HOWTO.html. Once settled, the fully adjustable seat is very comfortable, the plane leaves and arrives on time without a single problem, the in-flight meal is wonderful. You try to tell customers of the other airlines about the great trip, but all they can say is, "You had to
do what with the seat?
Sig you!
Oh my god...
Will someone please make the apple fanboy stfu!
What exactly is the ports system?
/usr/ports which is a whole tree of makefiles. So to install something, you just cd /usr/ports/category/WhateverYouWantToInstall/ && make && make install. All dependencies are taken care of automagically. The makefiles in these directories are smart enough to download whatever you need and then compile the source on your machine. So installing a new package doesn't take several hours of trolling newsgroups and searching for rpms.
More like, what are rpm users missing out on? With rpm -i package.rpm the user may or may not be able to install the intended software. There could be real dependency problems, as in kde2 needs qt2. There could also be bogus dependency problems since you may have compiled qt2 from source but rpm wouldn't know about it.
Enter FreeBSD and ports. A typical FreeBSD install creates a directory called
But you don't have to take my word for it. Check this out.
My experience is limited to Mandrake, Slackware, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, but when I need to get sh*t done, BSD, espescially FreeBSD is my first choice just because the ports tree contains nearly any software I'd want to run, eliminating the bottleneck that software installation sometimes turns into and letting me get to the task at hand.
As an aside, it seems like everything that Mandrake tries to be to "joe sixpack" who is just getting into trying linux on the desktop, BSD is to the sysadmin or programmer who needs to get a *nix platform up and running for a certain task. Compiling a custom kernel, installing software, modifying the init process, etc are at least as easy for the sysadmin on BSD as adjusting the screen fonts and changing the wallpaper are for a newbie in Mandrake.
The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everybody else. ~F. Bastiat
So it's basically the same thing which Sorcerer wants to achieve, right? Than maybe Sorcerer should just use FreeBSD ports instead of reinventing the wheel?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
sounds like a great idea.
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Mandrake/RedHat -> Debian/Slackware -> *BSD -> Debian
;-)
>but nobody controls the pot.
Which is good. If all the pot was in a central storage, what would happen if the police had a razzia!? My god [sic] man, stop and think.
(It's funny, laugh.)
The original proposal was for Debian OpenBSD:
Debian OpenBSD topic
Debian OpenBSD txt
DebiaNT is not so far fetched. It may even be useful to have all Debian packages ported to e.g. CygWin running under Windows to e.g. accelerate the development of POSIX and X on Windows. Having POSIX and X on Windows is useful also because it works as a bridge between the Open Source environment on *NIX platforms and Windows. Having Debians package system working on Windows/Cygwin too would make it even easier to use and upgrade the CygWin packages. It would also be easier to manage CygWin for the users, which now has a reputation of being a large monolithic chunk.
Think Embrace and extend strategy towards Windows!
Mvh.
Nils Ulltveit-Moe
*BSD -> Debian
Never. Ever.
I support it.
NetBSD runs on everything, right? Hardware-wise at least.
Now Debian runs on everything? Kernel-wise at least, and with NetBSD, hardware-wise too? Freaky stuff...
--Roy
Boss: "MySQL/Apache/Linux/(Your favorite OSS project here) just choked and threw up on itself."
Geeky OSS Admin: "Oh well that's because [yadda yadda yadda]. It's your fault. Jesus Christ, RTFM!!"
Boss: [ODBC Microsoft Access Driver]General error Unable to open registry key Temporary (volatile) Jet DSN
MSCE Admin: That's an occasional bug when using ODBC for Access, I told you we should reboot the server every day!! br>
Since even BSD is moving to RPM and RPM is the mandated package system for Linux Standard Base, this would be a good project for Debian to test the waters of current technology. It would allow Debian to transition to RPM on this hybrid testbed, working the kinks out in the process. This would allow the work to go forth without disturbing the current main Debian branch. Then when the time was right, the overall switch could be made smoothly to RPM. Now's the time to act!
I'm a bit confused here. Didn't the GNU community (what is pretty much what debian is) show it's openness to other kernels when it accepted the linux kernel while continuing on with the original GNU Hurd system? Even knowing it would slow down the progress of the Hurd?
I'm confused because the listy of reasons seem to suggest that it was in accepting the Hurd that states Debian is open to other kernels.
And even the Hurd is open to different micro-kernels! Mach and L4 are current micro kernel use efforts.
Sounds to me like you're illustrating what he's been talking about.
Linux has stolen bits of FreeBSD code before. They got into hot water though because they didn't include the BSD license text.
If you need to run Linux stuff on *BSD, you just install it and run it.
All the *BSD's have the ability to run Linux stuff through a hack to the loader (Obviously, its not officially called a "hack"). It works fine. There is no obvious performance penalty, and the stuff runs (although, I have to admit, it took a bit of work for me to get Star Office to work on one of the BSDs). NestCrap works as well as it does under Linux :-(
AFAIK, the ports/packages systems include DB2, Oracle, Star Office/Wordperfect, etc, and they are as easy to install as native BSD stuff in principle.
But IBM, if you are listening, Id still rather PAY for native BSD DB2 than use the free hack.And Larry Ellison, if you are listening: Up Yours
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
"One of the major problems with Linux is *that* it's every yahoo for himself"
/etc/ (grep anybody?), and the init.d scripts are in /sbin (s_bin_!!).
And I think that's good think, much better than a hurdle of people who act as if they are god and know everything better than anybody else.
10-20 people cannot know it all, neither can they force application programmers to stick with just this library, or that that program is 'bad for users because it uses a different library that nobody else uses'.
I'm one of those users that likes to decide himself what is best for him, I don't need a team of guru's to do that for me.
" or a standard place to put software"
That is not inherent to the development method of the GNU+Linux-based OS. I'd say that HPUX has a pretty tight control with a very limited development group contributing. Still, there are binaries in
"Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it"
Yes you can, and I can too. In my sytems, everything is perfect the way I want it, the whole thing is fixed. Crap stays out, good stuff goes in. I decide, and nobody else.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Excellent mod this AC up, post of the week.
Sir, please take a bow. I dont think I could have put it anywhere near as succintly.
For the average Open Sores Zealot, "there are none so blind as those who will not see. "
Curmudgeon
Just remember, Adolf Hitler was a socialist.
Yes, and your point? Timothy McVeigh (whatever) was a Christian, Oliver North was is a Republican and John Locke was an Anarcho-Syndicalist.
If it was an MS operation, it would be on $10k worth of hardware, connected via T3. When over stressed, it would collapse in a heap and wait for a re-boot.
In all known tests, OSS delivers more power on less kit, and fails cleaner, or someone was bribed.
If you can read this, thank a troll.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
Guess how we ended up with so many different *BSD versions?
As the saying goes :
two great things come from Berkley, LSD and BSD
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Does this mean that the "BSD is dyeing" guy is going to finally update his message to include Linux?
That would have to be probably the best bit of writing i've seen on slashdot for a while. I got strange deja vu to some other book i've read (no, not copied text, just the idea), but can't remember the title. Oh well.
> I don't need a unix timesharing system to listen to mp3s and use netscape.
Yes you do. if you want to do both at the same time.
So many versions of BSD vs. Linux distros?
Linux = 100+ distros
*BSD = FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, OS X Xmach.
What's wrong with Oliver North?
I once thought of making a Linux distro -- yeah, everyone has -- but short story shorter, I don't have that itch to scratch anymore, since I have sitting in front of me a box that's running just Win2k. I got cygwin, liked it for a while, and have grown to hate it. Slow, buggy, and now unreliable in config -- make stopped working, some weird interaction with shell quoting. Make is kinda important yunno. The DLL that every last damn cygwin program needs is also GPL'd, which ironically might violate the LGPL for a lot of binutils. Discouraging commercial apps from using cygwin might be A Good Thing anyway, since it's not a paragon of security (it uses a shm segment to keep state like fd's). So I'm switching to MinGW, which is much nicer in many ways, but it has an even worse system of distribution than cygwin's rather unimpressive kludgy installer (which for starters is impossible to use without a mouse)
... I would like to know if anyone else is working on such a thing for cygwin and/or mingw though.
So I am wondering, what about porting something like BSD ports or Gentoo's portage or Debian's apt to MinGW? They're all ostensibly architecture-neutral, right? Personally I am leaning toward ports, because it uses the right language for dependency checking (make), it doesn't require packages (great for embryonic distros that don't have everything in packages). Portage OTOH looks like it has transactional features ports does not. I don't want to get mired in trying to design The Package System To End All Package Systems
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I am not a NetBSD user, but I love FreeBSD like Madonna loves dick. Debian's pkgs are interminably behind the curve relative to the rest of Linux-land and this would only serve to slow down NetBSD's acceptance. As far as BSDs go, NetBSD aims for hardware-indpedence/multiple platform acceptance. It is already behind the curve as far as pkgs go. The Debian "keep it stable at the cost of progress" mentality might hurt NetBSD. Please keep these people away. They might come after FreeBSD and really dick up things. Luckily, OpenBSD has Theo -- who is just plain mean as shit -- to protect the very important security work that is done over there. I don't see Hubbard as such a crusader to stop the "everything-that-is-bad-about-linux" crowd from poking their heads in.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
This is not a video game. OSes are alot more complicated. I am saying the unix-world port software as common as getting coffee in the morning. They overlook the big picture where support, patch releases and all these non-technical customer-based issues get exponentially multiplied. Why do I got the feeling I am replying to someone who used to install TOMATO and POTATO versions of linux.
I guess of the three moderators all are bsd lovers? Because if they were not then they would say this is just trolling which is it.
Sorry but linux users are not "migrating to bsd".
You cannot even compare the linux user base to the bsd user base. Linux has many many many more users and servers out there. BSD is a fine system, but lets not kid ourselves, besides a couple of popular web sites linux(right or wrong) is the open source OS of choice for the majority. This is not even a matter of debate.
Unless of course every OS survey ever done is completely wrong. Doubtful.
Yes, and your point? Timothy McVeigh (whatever) was a Christian
What are you smoking... McVeigh is not a Christian - by his own words. He described himself as an agnostic or something. Well of course there is an excuse for not knowing that. Considering the quality of the media we are forced to use...
Oliver North - Iran Contra, and the CIA / Reagan / Bush / Negroponte death squads in Central America in the 80s.
Is that enough?
Actually, the number of committers in FreeBSD is close to 300. But do not make mistake thinking that the number of committers represents the number of actual developers. FreeBSD has a GNATS system and and a number of developer-oriented mailing lists where everyone is welcome to submit patches. Think about the whole bunch of BSD nomads from Japan, all hiding behind handful of Japanese committers as an example.
Besides, FreeBSD is using a lot of "contributed" software, take 'bind' for example. BSDs only provide a glue to integrate such a software into the base system but try hard to feed all other changes back to original vendor. This allows them to minimize divergence with an 'official' package versions and eliminate associated support problems.
Actually, there already is Debian cygwin. :-)
why..
What happened to the concepts of diversity, hybrid vigor, competition, and cooperation?
With Microsoft we get a monoculture.
Are you suggesting the same for all other OSes?
If nothing else this project encourages and explores compatibility issues, source examination, bug catching, performance tuning, and a bunch of other things, if only because a new, fresh, set of eyes (Debian) is looking at old things (BSD), and the other way around, BSD people looking at Debian things.
This cross pollination can have so many surprising and unexpected benefits too. Like the fact that if the kernal is BSD and the userland is Debian... it means you could, besides a little project called Fink, place an entire Debian OS layer on top of Apple's Darwin or Apple's OS X.
Then there is the ports system, which sounds very good to me. It's currently a BSD thing, but there's nothing stopping it from running on top of the Debian-netBSD distro, with work, and therefore stopping it from working on GNU-Debian with just a little more work, with 'work' and 'little more work' being subjective here.
These are just obvious speculations on my part. Many more advantages can be found, I'm sure, of this type of project.
GPL Deconstructed
That's like
torch/fire place -> oil lamp/candle -> electric light -> oil lamp
Errors of our ways? Join the Apple crowd? Who are you kidding? The NetBSD project is going strong as ever and is doing just fine, thank you - with or without Apple.
Powerful inexpensive yummy hardware - G4 PowerMacs trump x86 by a long margin and cost much less than underperforming but expensive SPARC, MIPS and the PeeCee user's Holy Grail of DEC Alpha, which was intended to run WinBlows from the beginning and is dying anyways.The NetBSD project prides itself on portability and eschews focus on any one particular platform (unlike Linux, which seems to be obsessed with ix86 and PPC). Which archs does Darwin run on anyways? :-P
Regarding your statement about SPARC, MIPS and DEC Alpha; all of the above are far superior to Apple Macs implementation of PowerPC.
64-bit memory path? Slow I/O? Non-ECC main DRAM and cache? Hardly high-performance and worthy of comparison to SPARC/UltraSPARC, SGI MIPS or DEC Alpha.
BTW, as other posters have stated, DEC Alpha was NOT designed to run Windows NT but its own VMS operating system.
Get a clue before spreading more Apple FUD.
Many Free/Open/NetBSD users are coming to that conclusion as are many Linux users, beset with flaky kernels and horrible OS packaging.Whilst I cannot comment on Linux not having used it since 1.3, I can wholeheartedly state that having used OS X 10.1 extensively, I see absolutely no reason to switch over to OS X from NetBSD.
Personally I welcome the Debian project to the BSD community. To me, their GNUisms are much less objectionable than the Apple/Mac "based on Unix" hype and their decision to pursue a BSD-based distro reinforces their reputation for quality.
idiot. the code in question (well, actually it was a header file, which is an interface and hence not copyrightable in the US) was never part of the linux kernel.
Linux does use the BSD PPP compression code, however. It is properly attributed.
So how many binary incompatible versions of BSD vs. Linux distros?
Linux = 2 (libc5, libc6) and you can easily have both installed at the same time.
*BSD = 6: FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, OSX, Xmach. There are emulation layers for Free on Net, and for Free and Net on Open. OSX is off in its own little world, and I have no idea about emulation for Xmach...
Because you're too stupid to figure it out.
However, I do have to take issue with the original poster who gave no reasons (good or bad) as to why he would like to have the Linux kernel with the FreeBSD userland. Why are you hell-bent on protecting his non-argument?
Sigged!
Now I can get Coldfusion to run on NLEITNBUSXD (thats my name for it).
Sounds like nothing different than the various gnu & linux mailing lists and the Debian maintainers combined.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
"Could you tell the slashdot editors that?"
Are you making a point or enlisting my effort? If the latter, maybe a fork is the only solution (freedot.org? opendot.org?). If the former, your point is as strong as the repeated stories and MS-paranoia we regularly see here.
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
Yes, 3.5 inch floppies are outrageously substandard media by any god fearin' right-winger's definition.
It makes a world of difference when you are trying to implement something which touches both kernel and userspace at the same time, just as an example. Good luck finding central point of contact to discuss your patches :)
You wax poetically about how 'linux has better desktop support', yet you blissfully ignore that BSD has the BEST desktop support.
Mac OS X.
BSD has done what *linux has not. Offered a UNIX OS that consumers will actual BUY.
Great...a version of BSD that no-one uses, coupled with the elitist asshole version of Linux that always 2 years out of date. I can't wait to see this...
*WHO* uses bsd is whats important. Power to SERVE! bsd has a huge following in the serving community. For the desktop system, I believe that linux is stronger and makes more sense, but if I needed to serve 1000s of users per day or even hour(or minute), i wouldn't hesitate to choose bsd
I know I'll get flamed for saying this, since my post will be full of illogic, BUT...
:) None, I'm strange enough without substance abuse!!)
(e.g. anticipated reply "what crack are you smoking?"
I'm not going to mention the technical merits of Debian, they have enough advovates!
I broadly support the notion of open source, but it seems a fair percentage is taken up by duplication of efforts.
A fair proportion the linux crowd have adopted RPMs because redhat has corporate mindshare. Like it or not but Oracle, IBM and other big-guys are likely to agree on RPM for distribution. It's *easy* since they can form an support alliance with Redhat, whereas debian is a collective of volunteers.
Now everyone involved in a packaging responsibility will argue the merits of their system be it: BSD ports, deb, rpm, tgz, fink, openosx... (or in the Java universe, Java webstart!)
I'm not here to debate the merits of each, since no one will win that argument.
But it strikes me that the man in the street cares about ease of installation and not what distribution they happen to stumble across.
I read an interview where one of the BSD guys said that it would be nice to integrate the various ports trees of NET/Open/FREE, while keeping the distinct kernel. A logical extension of this would be to embrace their open source linux cousins too.
There's a project at openpackages.org which has similar thoughts to me.
What is missing is consensus. How about a summit for all you open source packaging gurus to consider a unified packaging model?
My dream...
Now maybe you can all have your own quirks underneath, but I dream of a day were installing software (source or binary) is seamless.
Pick a website, click install and voila!
Instead it seems you have package maintenance in oh-so-many-ways be it Net/Open/FreeBSD, Darwin (OSX), and all of the Linux distros.
Maybe then we can have a redhat/debian/*BSD etc core CD and a few other CDs full of open source goodies that will install on all the major unices regardless of flavor, and hopefully architecture (src compile if desired). Too hard?
Am I advocating a lack of choice? Maybe, but only to assist on the real focus, writing beaut software.
Good night and cheers!
Doesn't sound bad. Inside of the discussion website, you can have 'virtual communities' in which the members rate, accept, and possibly reject stories.
/., simply by having multiple sets of editors, and letting users 'subscribe' to particular groups of editors, or maybe a mode 'show me only stories accepted by at least three editor groups', and 'don't show me any story that has been reported dupe by a reader', and 'don't show me stories that match the following regexp'
Hmm, technically almost the same result should be possible inside of
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
I too run FreeBSD and debian/linux.
I would say package/port breadth is a tossup.
But I really like the separation of the upgrade
process into core and ports that FreeBSD has.
I have never made my machine unusable using ports. I have had some close calls with apt.
Also, my limited experience is that it is easier
to wedge things with apt-get than with ports
because problems show up during the build process
with ports, and the install process with
apt.
You may cry that that is an unfair comparision
since I could build packages from source on debian. But that is not the typical user experience.
This is the Coolest Thing since Debian GNU/Hurd. I love Debian. The is nothing that one could compare to it. Corel and Storm knew why they used Debian as a base, because it is simply the best and that is also the reason they failed, since you can't top it. And now another kernel. Thanks to all the developers who made and make Debian happen. Cheers
dselect is pretty hard to get started with, but it works fine when you get used to it (as most software). But I can really recommend console-apt which is a replacement based on an ncurses-interface. I use it all the time even though I know dselect really well.
Give it a try if you don't like dselect:
console-apt
that I can use apt-get on my toaster?
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Ever heard of Linus Torvalds? Oh, and for the v2.4 kernel it's Marcelo Tosatti, for v2.2 it's Alan Cox. For v2.0, it's yours truly.
So do you still get lots of requests for Debian Kernel Bugs?
Not really, something I consider a good sign. I've applied about 15 bugfixes since December 2000, and intend to add some 4-5 more before the release of 2.0.40.
Well, I don't know why he'd want that. Probably personal preference. Maybe he has hardware not supported by the FreeBSD-kernel, maybe he wants some feature of the Linux-kernel not available in the FreeBSD-kernel. But is that really interesting?! It can be done, the code is open-sourced, and a real hacker doesn't do things out of real use anyway, but out of the hackvalue.
Yes, the trolls had a good idea about a party system.
I think it would be best run as an extension of friends and foes.
Troll party, linux party, apple party, microsoft party, netscape party, liberty party, bsd party, etc.
It would save a lot of people the nuisance of Jon Katz, repeated stories of minor linux events, trolls and the like.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
In an interesting development over at slashdot, Deviant has been ported to NetTaco. This involves inserting the undigested kernels of corn from Taco's shit into the snot dribbling from his nose.
EDITORS: HURRY UP! by Anonymous Coward (Score:-1)
windows xp sucks