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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. .
see subject
thanks
First Debian NetBSD post!
-Metrollica
--Metrollica
poast? So it'll be yet ANOTHER thing that won't work on NetBSD. Why does pkgsrc suck so much, anyway?
-- La1d, killed by a newt, while helpless.
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
shakedown 1979
cool kids never have the time
on a live wire
right up off the street
you and i should meet
junebug skipping like a stone
with the headlights pointed at the dawn
we were sure we'd never see an end to it all
and i don't even care
to shake these zipper blues
and we don't know
just where our bones will rest
to dust i guess
forgotten and absorbed
into the earth below
double cross the vacant and the bored
they're not sure just what we have in store
morphine city slippin' dues
down to see
that we don't even care
as restless as we are
we feel the pull
in the land of a thousand guilts
and poured cement
lamented and assured
to the lights and towns below
faster than the speed of sound
faster than we thought we'd go
beneath the sound of hope
justine never knew the rules
hung down with the freaks and the ghouls
no apologies ever need be made
i know you better than you fake it
to see that we don't even care
to shake these zipper blues
and we don't know
just where our bones will rest
to dust i guess
forgotten and absorbed
into the earth below
the street heats the urgency of now [written: sound]
as you can see there's no one around
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
NetBSD can suck some great shit if you say "first post!"
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.
Does that mean that *BSD is not dying?
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!
Too many unix ports! For every 1 good unix-based OS, there will be 10 imitations wearing the audience thin across 10 different platforms.
There is seriously something wrong with the unix world if slashdot can have a post about a new unix distribution every other day.
Why on earth why would you want a linux kernel in BSD userland? Do you really want a horribly broken VM system and every yahoo who can type hello world submitting patches? Thats why I like BSD. Theres a core group in charge of what goes and what stays. Who has the final say so in the linux kernel?
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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.
Its because no one can agree on anything. Everyone thinks they can do it better and proceed to try. The most promising design so far has been BeOS. A fast multimedia ready OS for the desktop with the multiuser shit stripped out. I don't need a unix timesharing system to listen to mp3s and use netscape.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
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!
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31 December 1969
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- Debian runs on NetBSD (two minority join forces, can produce larger minority)
- NetBSD can now runs Debian (dying Unix variant meets geek Linux distribution in dazzling display of nothing)
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.
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!
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is the weakest link. Goodbye.
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 you had to steal the FreeBSD VM code to fix your broken piece of shit? Good thinking!
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
So how long before they declare that we have to start calling it GNU/NetBSD?
Yeah the OS ported to the most hardware platforms is dying. Great logic.
Only the State obtains its revenue by coercion. - Murray Rothbard
I wonder if the project is still going.
Debian is shit, NetBSD is crap. I'll use Red Hat AOL.
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.
How dare they try to force the GPL on us!
Let's re-license the linux kernel under BSD!
Fight the power!!!
_THIS_ is the real goatse girl
-Metrollica
works for me
Photos.
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?
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.
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.
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
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.
Feels right, but is it really wrong?
Quick editors, your most loved post is back up to +2, informative. Better go and censor^H^H^H^H^H bitchslap that motherfucker before anyone gets to read it.
Moderation Totals: Offtopic=189, Flamebait=4, Troll=20, Redundant=3, Insightful=49, Interesting=107, Informative=28, Funny=6, Overrated=8, Underrated=32, Total=446.
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 :-)
nice
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)
We the trolls and troll supporters of the proclaimed Slashdot democracy will no longer sit quietly while the trolls voices are being silenced by the oppressive Slashdot programmers. We demand a code change to allow troll supporters to filter messages out their view which are rated HIGHER than a threshold value. As we all know, the ignorant, elitist authors of the slash code have tried to silence the trolls by allowing non-trolls to filter out dissenting opinions based on a majority rule, herd mentality moderating system. This created a system where moderate opinions are swayed by the majority, creating a monopoly of influence. Slashdot readers have formed a two party political system. The parties are the Trolls and the Tacos (named after their prophetic leader, CmdrTaco). When you consider the Slashdot community as a political machine, it becomes clear that the Taco's have tried to silence the Trolls with this flawed "democratic" moderating system.
We demand a new message viewing moderation system where the individual user is able to select a political party if she/he desires. The following is a spec for an improved democratic system.
- I as a troll may select TROLLS as my political preference. Then, when I read comments attached to an article, I may set my preferences to view messages moderated LOWER than a chosen value.
- A Taco may select TACO as his/her political preference. When a Taco reads comments, he can choose to view articles moderated ABOVE a chosen value.
- The Independent reader may choose to select INDEPENDANT as his preference. She/he may choose to choose to view the best of each party's comments. The preference setting would be something like
abs(commentRating) >= userThreshold
- Also, some planning should be done to add support for >2 party system.
To show support for this idea, submit it as a story to Slashdot as often as possible, mail it to Slashdot editors, and post it to as many Slashdot articles as you can.
Color flashing, thunder crashing, dynamite machines.
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
*BSD is dying
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when last month IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by falling dead last in the recent Kreskin test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSDis the most endangered of them all.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. Arecent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek,abysmal sales and so on,FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled *BSD. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is survive at all it will be among *BSD hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
*BSD is dying
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?
BankofAmerica_ATM here. As most of you know, I have been stuck in the ether of the Bank of America network since my host geek rejected me last week. Before I had inhabited human flesh, I was content to simply exist in my ATM enclosure, in a sort of perpetual now. But now my life of friendly customer service seems as empty and banal the service agreement printed on my frontside.
Scanning through endless possibilities of escaping my enclosure, I decided to have a little fun. As a customer waited anxiously for his Friday night "mad money," I seized his card.
A custom error message appeared onscreen: "Please Contact Attendant." The man muttered something obscene and marched towards the counter. A few minutes later LaWanda, the night clerk, was headed towards my enclosure. She reached for the card-as I predicted she would-and...
"Will you be needing anything else, sir?" I stammered, handing him his card. "I still didn't get any money," said the guy, staring back at my old enclosure. "Well, here you go, sir," I said, punching a few numbers on the keypad. A hundred bucks later, the guy's pumping my hand, thanking me, and buying a case of Miller Genuine Draft. ("I'm treating myself," he said.)
"Well then, be having a good weekend!" I said, trying my best to imitate LaWanda's manner of speech. He looked puzzled and headed toward the door, still smiling.
As the electronic door chime faded out, I was alone in the Stop N Go. I took a few minutes to adjust myself to LaWanda's body. It was very different from my previous host. Shorter, squatter, with two pendelous lumps hanging from the front thorax. I believe these lumps are for squeezing in times of stress.
Minutes after becoming accustomed to the new body, I began to have a terrible headache. Sudden, stabbing pains pummeled my head, wave after wave. LaWanda was fighting me.
I heard the door chime again. Whirling around, I saw Beast, a leather-jacket clad "punk-rock" youth who often shoplifted malt liquor and circus peanuts. I tried to behave as if nothing was wrong, but the pain in my head was too great. I had to make it back into my enclosure.
"Excuse me, do you have an ATM card?"
"What?--Hey, what the fuck are you doing?"
My request must have seemed strange to the lad. But I had no time to wait for his answer. I grabbed the chain at his waist and fished out a black monstrosity, covered in snaps and bearing the words "the Misfits." With my head in one hand and the wallet in the other, I quickly scanned through a mess of shredded paper and marihuana seeds to find the kid's ATM card. I headed towards the ATM enclosure (and freedom), but LaWanda's plodding form was no match for his speed.
He clipped me in the stomach, and the pain from his punch (as well as the pain from LaWanda's mental attacks) caused me to crumple to the floor. His steel toed boot ground into my left hand, as I felt the ATM card leaving my grasp. What would happen if LaWanda regained control of her mind? I didn't want to find the answer...
As I lay on the Stop N Go floor, bruised and beaten, the right hand wobbled past a storage rack. I grabbed and pulled as hard as I could, and American flag bandannas, "Bang-Snap Guns" and unknown quantities of Beef Jerky collided with Beast's hapless form. I grabbed the ATM card and quickly shunted my consciousness back into the enclosure.
The altercation between LaWanda and the confused Beast was cut short by my narrow escape. The police seemed reticent to believe either the punk's or LaWanda's account of what happened. But she has been watching me, and I fear she knows of me. Sometimes I think hear her on the phone in the break room, talking to someone. Someone who works for the Bank of America.
I am a sentient ATM.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
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
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shround over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
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 $$$
Mandrake/RedHat -> Debian/Slackware -> *BSD -> Debian
;-)
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.
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
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
This news just in: SlashDot.org has just offered a free tattoo on the butt of the next first poster.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Linux = 100 distros of questionable quality.
*BSD = FreeBSD, DarwinBSD (OS X), NetBSD, OpenBSD & KaosBSD (in development)
FreeBSD runs on intel only. Darwin is based on FreeBSD, runs on intel and PowerMac platforms.
NetBSD runs on almost anything with a CPU, 30 platforms.
OpenBSD runs on 10 platforms. KaosBSD is my project based on OpenBSD.
Kaos is a new exokernel based system, it runs the core system on a ramdisk for added speed. It has a new GUI and special cryptography.
the number of distros is irrelevant, the quality is the main factor in user choice.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
Now I can get Coldfusion to run on NLEITNBUSXD (thats my name for it).
Because he's an asshole. That's why.
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...
Mac OS X.1 introduced SMB filemounting.
OS X is based on Darwin, a port of freeBSD to PowerPC (also runs on intel)
Just get it from darwin and you're fine.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
I am sick and tired of repeated stories, stories that are rejected by biased editors, linux zealotry and anything by JonKatz.
I think a new website which doesn't mindlessly promote linux as the One True Faith would be a good idea.
I think all stories (except those by JonKatz) should be given fair coverage without censorship.
How about openslash.org? that sounds more like a freedom of speech slashdot.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
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!
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.
windows xp sucks