FreeBSD XP^H^H 4.5 available now

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

Comments

Like they say...

[Anonymous Coward]

third time's a charm! ;-)
way to go, slashdot.

upgrades again

[Anonymous Coward]

time to upgrade again! yay.. something to do on wednesdays

freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried FreeBSD 4.4 and since then, it hasn't left my laptop and my desktop.
I like the fact that it is coherent and most of all, the stability missing from most linux distribution is amazing.

Good job!

Re:freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea because my linux laptop and desktop crash all the time. I can't believe how unstable it is. Maybe I should try BSD instead. It seems some much more stable and organized.

That or you BSD people are a bunch of jealous trolls who put down linux at every turn.

How about this, go sit in a dark room and close your eyes. Now chant "Someday BSD will be .0001% as popular as linux" over and over again. If you do this the rest of your life and keep up the FUD maye it will come true.

Actually on second thought just go Fuck Yourself.

Re:freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I didn't mean to offend you. I've said that *most* linux *distribution* were unstable. I didn't say that Linux was unstable or that BSD is better. I just like it. Now, it is not an affair of religion for me.

Re:freebsd is good

[essdodson]

I can't remember the last time that I've heard a BSD person of any status directly attack Linux. Linux is decent software, the problem lies with the licensing schemes. Have you actually tried it? Perhaps you'd understand why most BSD users rave about BSD and rarely mention Linux.

Re:freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea because my WINDOWS laptop and desktop crash all the time. I can't believe how unstable it is. Maybe I should try BSD instead. It seems some much more stable and organized.

That or you Linux people are a bunch of jealous trolls who put down Windows at every turn.

How about this, go sit in a dark room and close your eyes. Now chant "Someday Linux will be .0001% as popular as Windows" over and over gain. If you do this the rest of your life and keep up the FUD maye it will come true.

Actually on second thought just go Fuck Yourself.

Re:freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

Believe it or not, I've been using linux since slackware 3.0

Cool topic

[jrz]

Don't you just love the DEL/BS thing?

Re:Cool topic

[Anonymous Coward]

absolutely, its just a shame so many people don't get it. i guess you're fairly safe with this crowd though :)

Re:Cool topic

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's overused and lame. Might as well be saying "where's the beef" with each news posting too.

Re:Cool topic

[ninjanano]

Got FreeBSD? ;)

Re:Cool topic

[Patrick Dung]

oops
^H is backspace..

Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you call it XP? Anyway, I recently tried to install 4.4 on my Windows XP laptop. I used Partition Magic to shrink the NTFS partition, added a couple logical partitions, and when it came time to install, found out that BSD doesn't even recognize the logical partitions. Something about "slices". Settled for SuSE (which ain't all that, IMHO) Should I reconsider FreeBSD now? I run RedHat 7.2 on my desktop. (RedHat 7.2 and Mandrake 8.1 weren't easy to set up on the laptop either)

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

I think you should try to install the FreeBSD-partition slice onto a primary partition. The partition contains all subslices, which the system is installed onto (/, /usr, /var etc.). I have absolutely no experiences (XP :) with FreeBSD on laptops - the hardware acceleration for for instance X might be a problem (console should run fine).

Regards

Re:Why call it XP?

[Mister Snee]

For the record, logical partitions are a fictional creation of Microsoft and are extremely scary, unnecessary things which you should probably avoid when using a sane operating system. You can have up to four primary partitions -- extended partitions and "logical drives" exist to expand that. The (sane) idea was that, if you used your first three partitions and expansion to more was imminent or necessary, you'd throw an extended partition in the fourth and put as many logical drives in it as you needed. You know, hda1-4 ... then your logical drives are hda5 and up.

It's a nice idea but since MS-DOS you've only been allowed to make one primary partition, and after that you're forced to put in an extended partition and logical drives. Most operating systems need to be installed on a primary, so your best bet would be using the operating system in question to set up the partition table. Last I checked even XP won't let you add more than one primary partition, but I could be wrong.

I've had the same problem with Intel Solaris. Bleh.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

"... I have absolutely no experiences (XP :) ..."
XP stand for experimental.
as in Microsoft Windows eXPerimental.

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

Yes, Microsoft really rapes the harddrives of your computer with these incompatible solutions and filesystem standards. But as usual, it's a very common Microsoft-stratetegy - unfortunately.

Apropos Solaris ...
I have a copy of Intel Solaris 8 (acquired at CeBIT 2001) at home. I've tried to install it onto my AMD K6-II machine, but the kernel "crashes" during my installation tries. That really disappointed me! Are there any sites on the internet or books, which can help me solve this problem?

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hardware acceleration in X works fine as long as XFree86 supports the hardware. It should work on the same machines it works on with Linux.

XFree86 supports most laptops I've tried.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Mister Snee]

I feel your pain. :P Just about all the nightmares I've had with Solaris 8 were in installation. In some ways it can be as much of a partition nazi as any Microsoft OS (which made setting up the Win2k/Solaris multi-boot machines for a college lab a real joy...) and even with the filesystem aside it seems to try to foil you in every way possible.

The Intel Solaris installation process is one of those things that can just go wrong in so many different ways that I'd be remiss to even wager a guess of what could be causing the crash. ;) I guess it's a misnomer for your AMD, but there's a pretty decent Solaris on Intel FAQ out there. I don't know if it'll directly solve your problem but it's helped me out a bit in the past so it's probably worth a look.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had the problem with the Solaris x86 installer panicing. Basically I just kept trying until it finally worked. Once up it was rock solid.

My system is listed on the HCL by model name however. You might just be out-of-luck with that K6. Solaris is very picky.

Re:Why call it XP?

[dohcvtec]

You're on the right track resizing your NTFS partition, but you need to simply leave empty space on the disk for FreeBSD. That will make it happy (same for you :)

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

The truth is that FreeBSD is pretty much dead. It has been a failure in almost every respect. Don't waste you time.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought there was a troll under this bridge. Let me toss you a couple cases of AOL disks to keep you busy

Re:Why call it XP?

[Ded Bob]

I believe FreeBSD does not do logical partitions--features sneak past me all the time. :) Read this section in the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/install-steps.html

Basically, what most OS's refer to as a partition is a BSD slice. A BSD partition is just a sub-slice.

Here is a clip of it:

Each partition-that-contains-a-filesystem is stored in what FreeBSD calls a slice. Slice is FreeBSD's term for what were earlier called partitions, and again, this is because of FreeBSD's Unix background. Slices are numbered, starting at 1, through to 4.

Slice numbers follow the device name, prefixed with an s, starting at 1. So ``da0s1'' is the first slice on the first SCSI drive. There can only be four physical slices on a disk, but you can have logical slices inside physical slices of the appropriate type. These extended slices are numbered starting at 5, so ``ad0s5'' is the first extended slice on a disk. These devices are used by file systems that expect to occupy a slice.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD should best be installed in a primary "classical" partition. As you probably know, 4 such partitions can exist. FreeBSD calls these "slices" (e.g. /dev/ad0s1, ad0s2, ad0s3, ad0s4 for the first ATA/IDE hard disk). FreeBSD then divides its FreeBSD slice further into "BSD-style partitions" (e.g. ad0s1a, s1b, ..., b is reserved for swap). However, your logical partitions can be accessed by FreeBSD after installation (as e.g. ad0s5, s6, ..., you might have to "./MAKEDEV" them first).

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't use Partition Magic or fdisk to create specific slices - only to open the space for your BSD installation. BSD will create its own slices in that space.

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

It it possible with a Duron-based system instead? I know, K6 is a very old and slow processor-design, but anyway it is 100% Intel-compatible... maybe it could be my motherboard or disk-subsystem? (IDE, onboard)

Thanks for the urls ... I'll look at it!

Regards

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably has nothing to do with the CPU, but instead the BIOS. The certified list is generally brandname systems, and they tend to have better BIOS implmentations.

Anyway, when I hear "Super Socket Seven", I think "Buggy Shite". Linux and Windows just happen to have lots of engineers to work around the bugs. Good luck.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, and forget IDE and Solaris x86 - the drive will run in PIO mode. Get a SCSI disk (even an old SCSI-2 drive will be much better).

Re:Why call it XP?

[Sj0]

"... I have absolutely no experiences (XP :) ..."
XP stand for experimental.
as in Microsoft Windows eXPerimental.

You....don't get out much, do you?

Rule number 1: If you need to explain the joke, especially in this crowd, it's probably not nearly as funny as you think it is.

Rule number 2: If you feel the need to send us the same joke again, at least make it original!

bad example:

XP stands for unknown(as in X) Piracy.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Haven't used Solaris in the last couple years, eh? PIO 4 works just fine if you enable it and have a sane BIOS.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had the same problem with Intel Solaris. Bleh.

Trying using fdisk, it creates multiple primary partions just fine.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

AOL doesn't run on FreeBSD, ass clown.

Re:Why call it XP?

[jo42]

Noop. You got it all wrong.

XP stands for eXtreme Poop.

This is a very lame joke.

[Eskimo Bob]

Did you know that a simple name change could get more people to try FreeBSD, or at least get 'em interested in it.

FreeBDSM... Sure, they'd all be perferts, but hell... a user's a user.

Lame joke, I know. but I warned you.

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Basje]

Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'power user'. Lame again, I admit

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Max von H.]

Did you know that a simple name change could get more people to try FreeBSD, or at least get 'em interested in it.

Do OS X, Apple or Mac ring a bell?

/max

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[stevey]

Not to mention (re)booting, powering down, and hot-mounting USB toys ..

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeLSD would have me interested even more.

FreeLSD and OpenBSDM, now that combination would have me excited.

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[yobbo]

hot (partner) swapping

okay that one sucked :(

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Eskimo Bob]

Sorry, I don't know what a "Mac" is. Unless you mean the trucks.

And an Apple is something you eat, right? or is it a record company?

OS X? Not sure what that is, but I do know a guy named Oz X. Dongswiller. The X stands for Ignacious. He's odd.

I read slashdot using an Etch-a-sketch, the original laptop, that I managed to install the Amiga OS on. Hooray for me!

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

>Lame joke, I know. but I warned you.

I don't think that warning's good enough. Constable Klitorus read it anyway. I think you should put a large red sticker: "WARNING: Lark's Vomit!"

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[c_g_hills]

I really hope they will port it to the PC platform. It will bring together the user-friendliness of windows along with the stability of Unix :o)

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[syn3rg]

not to mention BIND (I know, beating a dead horse...)

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Sorry, I doubt they will. Apple's in the hardware business.

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Anonymous Coward]

Just like your dad.

Linux AHOLE

[Anonymous Coward]

You are a MotherFucker^H^H^H^H^H^HSucker for posting that subject line - arsehole.

Nevada Boxing Commission SUCKS

[the_furies]

They totally burned my man Mike Tyson, denying him that license. How's a man supposed to make an honest living?

He made a few mistakes, but he did his time , and now he's trying to get his life together. But it's obvious the Nevada Boxing commission only cares about money. This is racism, pure and simple.

Re:Nevada Boxing Commission SUCKS

[Anonymous Coward]

No. It is not racism. It is telling a no good
fuckwit that he cannot expect proper treatment
from anyone.

You idiots that throw the racism card every
chance yo get make me sick.

Re:Nevada Boxing Commission SUCKS

[Ralph Malph Alpha]

hay, youre smart. would you love me tonight?

tyson still freezes a good chicken nugget though. MMM, theyre the FINEST. buy some today, and enjoy them with somone you love.

Only one problem...

[ReluctantBadger]

There is only one problem with FreeBSD... It's not OpenBSD!!! Is Dave here?
No.
Dave?
There's no-one called Dave here!
YOU'RE MY WIFE NOW!

first post

[/Idiot\]

go on, i've never done one before :-)

Everyone has one first post in them...

Re:first post

[Fucky the troll]

Evidentally not you though.

FreeBSD is dead.

Re:first post

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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.

Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

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

Firewall?

[dorward]

I'm trying to find something to replace my Smoothwall instalation.

How does FBsd rate when it comes to ISDN?
Will it run OK on a Pentium 90 with 16MB of RAM?

Re:Firewall?

[Pengo]

try open bsd. I am running it on my nat firewall (cable) and it runs in very modest settings. (I am running on a p100 w/32 megs ram and base install was 60 megs). You can install it from floppy disk over ISDN in an afternoon. (Look at the web site www.openbsd.org for install howto).

Re:Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

An OpenBSD example can help you how FreeBSD scales for your biz.
A Pentium 120 with 48 MB RAM and a total 62 MB installation. 3 legged bastion host, making NAT for 130 WEB and ICQ maniac clients, protecting the DMZ with a heavy loaded Web server inside (2 requests per second). Making stateful inspection for the DMZ.

The only part expensive is the ethernet cards used in this box. Intel Pro100S, 51$ +VAT each (here in Turkiye).

ISDN support for {Free|Net|Open}BSD is really sophisticated. It's hard to experience problems.

Regards...

Re:Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

"with a heavy loaded Web server inside (2 requests per second)."

2 requests a second is heavy? Jeez, it's a good job that people make internet caches then that can handle thousands of requests a second.

Or did you mean that the box needs two people to lift it?

Re:Firewall?

[Nonesuch]

I agree. OpenBSD makes for good firewalls, right out of the box. I'm even starting to like 'pf'.

Part of 'secure by default' is that the base install omits a lot of fluff- this makes for quicker installs, and a smaller footprint.

...base install was 60 megs

One nice option for a firewall, there are plenty of cheap 64MB 'IDE FLASH ATA' devices showing up on Ebay, etc. These look like a laptop drive, work with any IDE controller, have no moving parts.

Compared to FreeBSD, there are drawbacks, the most glaring being the lack of SMP support.

Also, OpenBSD's installation process can be intimidating the first few times through. Where Free makes it easy, Open makes you think about disk partitioning and other low-level issues.

Re:Firewall?

[Pengo]

Also, OpenBSD's installation process can be intimidating the first few times through. Where Free makes it easy, Open makes you think about disk partitioning and other low-level issues.

Without sounding like an elitist, (which I am clearly or qualified to be), though the instalation was a bit awkward, it was direct and forward. After getting it installed, it was VERY easy to setup the configuration. All you really have to do is follow the instructions on the website. I had a machine setup in 2 hours (downloads and all w/floppy based install), after never touching the distro before thats not bad. Within 3 hours (and another helpful howto) I had the box hardened. Before the end of a long working day I had a VERY impressive set of rules setup to block various types of traffic, I understdood the difference between a stateless and statefull firewall and most importantly I understand why all the rules in my PF config where there.

I just find it nice knowing that there OBSD crew is working overtime to help me sleep better at night. At this stage in my career, if I am using and deploying open source solutions.. my judgment and credibility is on the line. I can't blame it on Scott or Bill if something goes wrong.

Cheers

Re:Firewall?

[markyd]

Am running FreeBSD 4.4 on 486-DX50 with 16Mb fine. Servers as an internet gateway for 4-5 users over a 56k dialup no problem.

Re:Firewall?

[DreamerFi]

and for those of us without the geek knowledge, I've set a smaller distribution, based on NetBSD, up as a firewall at www.dubbele.com.

Re:Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhhh 4-5 users over a 56k dialup is the problem.

Re:Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

Compared to FreeBSD, there are drawbacks, the most glaring being the lack of SMP support.

NetBSD should have basic SMP support for i386, Alpha, and VAX in the 1.6 release. It probably will not be perfect at first, but it will be there. But hey, what sane person would set up a dual processor machine as a firewall (besides that l337 16 year old down the street, that is).

Coupled with its OpenBSD-comparible security and a smaller minimum footprint than OpenBSD, NetBSD is also a wise choice for a small firewall.

Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Ziest]

The "BSD is dying" clown must be sleeping. Hey shit head! You are not doing your job. No BSD announcement is complete without a few dozen "BSD is dying" posts. So quit goofing off and get to work.

For the humor impaired, that was sarcasm.

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Metrol]

Hey now, you forgot all about the "Slashdot isn't Freshmeat" bitcher.

Not to fear I suppose, the clown and the bitcher will be around eventually. Death, taxes, and trolls.

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[yatest5]

At least all the boring 'BSD is great' schmucks turned up. YAY!

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Damn Straight! 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.

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Anonymous Coward]

freebsd is dead already. no need for 'dying' posts.

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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.

Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

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

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Pengo]

Next -> OSX ;-)

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently all the clueless and humor-impaired moderators are wide awake... :-p

Where's the DVD

[satanami69]

I thought they were making this on a bootable DVD? Isn't that the point of having access to the company's DVD burner. Daily archives be damned, I wanna play with a new OS on a single disk!

Oh well, I guess I'll just erase some Corel Linux CD-RW's.

Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.

Re:Where's the DVD

[gladbach]

interesting question. I wonder if they would make a dvd size iso... probably not, but maybe. I am willing to bet you have to buy it to get the dvd.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Metrol]

Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.

The FreeBSD folks have already done this, in very plain language.

For myself, I'm doing a cvsup now as I write this. Make world gonna start to cooking tomorrow night. I'm probably about 2 weeks behind the release as I try to update fairly regularly with the latest stuff.

The really good part about this is that all that stuff that's been held back for release is now gonna start flowing back into the ports tree and src directories. Yummy!

Re:Where's the DVD

[DrSkwid]

Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.

you need two floppies

kern.flp and mfsroot.flp

boot with them and choose a few menu items and it's off

all detailed at the freeBSD homepages of course

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Or you can take the files from the floppies, set up a network boot server and install over the network without having to boot the target machine using floppies or a CD-ROM. Requires PXE support, of course...

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

There's no escaping the simple truth: FreeBSD is a failure. So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.


There's a large portion of the bsd community that don't want you to run FreeBSD, based on this type of question. It's unfair, true, but you've not shown even the slightest interest in learning how to do something yourself. Check out www.freebsd.org, and READ THE DAMN HANDBOOK. Then, and only then, if you have questions, ask away (and provide sufficient details.)

Until such a time, I recommend you not run FreeBSD; you're not ready.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

go to ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/...4.5dist/
get install floppies ..kern.flp and mfsroot.flp
use dd command on any unix or linux box to make floopy install disks, select ftp install from sysinstall menue the rest will be very automatic, easy install.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

The DVD is manufactured and sold by FreeBSD Services Ltd, not the FreeBSD Project itself.

Re:Where's the DVD

[essdodson]

FreeBSD is still available on one CD. You don't need all the discs in order to use FreeBSD. They even have a sub 200mb lite disc available.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Anonymous Coward]

They've released the code, but the CDROM/DVD publishers are probably only now starting to print and shrinkwrap their wares.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Metrol]

There's no escaping the simple truth: FreeBSD is a failure.

Ahh man. I got mod'd down as a troll for agreeing with the fella that said you'd be around. Keep up the good work! A FreeBSD article just isn't a FreeBSD article without the "FreeBSD is Dead" guy.

Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your local mirrors for the ISOs

and waste a lot of bandwidth in the process. cvsup is your friend.

Re:Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[The_Rift]

I was going on the principle that people who are allready running FreeBSD would know about CVSup and linked to the mirrors for the newbies.

Re:Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, really? I don't consider myself a newbie and I do track -STABLE on all my boxes (well OK not the Windows XP one ;-) but I always get an ISO image of a new release as this is by far the easiest way to (re)install on a new box and get started.

Re:Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[The_Rift]

Is it even possible to do an install from CVS? I think it's fairly obvious the original poster was talking about upgrading.

Here's the text before it got slashdotted...

[warez_d00d]

Date: Tuesday, 29 Jan 2002 20:00:00 -0800
From: "Murray Stokely"
To: announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: 4.5-goat is now available

I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.5-GOAT, the very latest goat on the FreeBSD -STABLE branch of development. Since FreeBSD 4.4 was goatd in September 2001, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many system components, made several substantial performance improvements, and addressed a wide variety of security issues.

In particular, there have been significant enhancements in the areas of network communications and filesystems. FreeBSD 4.5 contains improvements to the TCP stack to provide better throughput. In addition, TCP performance is aided by larger default buffer sizes. Finally, FreeBSD 4.5 contains new mechanisms to mitigate the effects of TCP Denial of Service attacks.

The FFS filesystem benefits from a new directory layout strategy that has demonstrated significantly better performance for operations traversing large directory structures. Various bugs were located and fixed in the FFS and NFS code with the help of a filesystem exercising program originally developed at Apple Computer, Inc.

Those users doing fresh installations of FreeBSD should note some changes for newly created filesystems, intended to improve the "out of the box" performance of FreeBSD. In particular, sysinstall(8) now enables Soft Updates (a strategy for improving both performance and reliability of on-disk data structures) for new filesystems it creates and the newfs(8) program will now, by default, create filesystems with larger block sizes.

For more information about the most significant changes with this goat of FreeBSD, please see the goat section of our web site:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/goats/

There you will find Goat Notes, Hardware Notes, and a list of Errata.
Availability

4.5-GOAT is available for the i386 and alpha architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server.

We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from:

* ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
* http://ftp.au.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/
* ftp://ftp.dk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
* ftp://freebsd.nctu.edu.tw/pub/FreeBSD/

If you can't afford the CDs, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISOs, otherwise please continue to support the FreeBSD project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies have contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD :
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com
FreeBSD Services Ltd. http://www.freebsd-services.com
Daemon News http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

Each CD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4 CD set.

FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Lithuania, Latvia, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the Ukraine and the United Kingdom.

Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional mirror(s) first by going to:

ftp://ftp..FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD

Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.

See the FreeBSD Handbook for additional information about FreeBSD mirror sites.

The FreeBSD installation instructions have recently been significantly enhanced. Chapter 2 of The FreeBSD Handbook, available online, provides a complete installation walk-through for users new to FreeBSD.
Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the goat engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.5, including Compaq, Yahoo!, and The FreeBSD Mall.

In addition to myself, the goat engineering team for 4.5-GOAT includes:
Robert Watson Goat Engineering
John Baldwin Goat Engineering
Bruce A. Mah Goat Documentation
Steve Price Package Building
Wilko Bulte Alpha Platform Goat Engineering
Peter Wemm Ports Cluster System Administration

Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into making this goat. I would also like to thank the FreeBSD Committers (committers@FreeBSD.org), without whom there would be nothing to goat, and the many thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who contributed bug fixes, features and suggestions.

Thanks!

- Murray

Re:Here's the text before it got slashdotted...

[Metrol]

FreeBSD get Slashdotted? What, you think they're hosting on Windows or something?

Move along unfunny troll, move along.

Cute topic...

[Agent Green]

Though, I personally would have saved the XP comment for when FreeBSD 5.0 gets released sometime during Q4 this year.

If it weren't for the uptime on my server, (64 days...upgraded the mobo again), I'd be working on this one right now!

Re:Cute topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

Uptime? This is FreeBSD. Start worrying about your uptime when it gets to the 2 year mark.

Re:Cute topic...

[Anonymous Coward]

64 days? feh. Once you hit the half a year/year/2 year mark, then start worrying... On my dual CPU system:

9:19am up 359 days, 16:24, 6 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

Re:Cute topic...

[non-poster]

load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

I bet I could get more than a year uptime if I don't ever use my machine...

syncookies? only now?

[chrysalis]

I'm surprised to see that a new feature of that release is... syncookies. Doesn't Linux (and probably a lot of other OS) have that for years? Syn floods is a very old attack, and I can't understand why FreeBSD only implements syncookies now.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Pengo]

A) if you where to really setup a firewall to battle attacks/dos, etc, I would recomend OpenBSD. Second, you can compile into the kernel IPFilter which does support a stateful firewall configuration as well as acception and denyal of TCP packets based on the flag (SYN/ACK/FYN) etc. Once the rule has been accepted, the end packet stream is accepted into the state. I believe this is the same thing as syn-cookie, only better.) I hope someone reading this will give a bit more insight into the issue, because IANAFE (firewall expert).

In my experience the IPF and PF firewall configurations are the most simple, flexible and powerful to use, and can be found on freebsd and openbsd and probably the others.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, what the hell do expect from an obsolete, ancient code base which is developed in a closed fashion? FreeBSD is *irrelevant*, my friend. Hell, FreeBSD doesn't even support SMP, for Christ's Sake! My *god*, man.

(Yeah, it "supports" SMP. As in, when one CPU is running, the other is locked idle. And vice-versa. I hear their "AMP" support is pretty bad-ass though. )

If you humped over retards want to keep using FreeBSD instead of a real OS, by all means go jerk over all over yourselves at how "l337" you are for using it.

Losers.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[blafasel]

lol, mr. troll, you suck.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

amen brother.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[helixblue]

Yes, in fact, I remember quite clearly when Linux 2.0 got syncookies. I'd wager 2.0.27 or 2.0.28. The syncookies implementation was totally awful. I was a pretty newbie sysadmin at the time, and whenever someone checked POP3 mail on our mailserver.. it'd warn us about sending syn cookies, and that all the students were attacking the mailserver whenever they loaded Microsoft Internet Mail.

I didn't quite know what syncookies were. I just knew I didn't want them anymore after that. If it was an option in FreeBSD at that time, I would have laughed at the option, and subsequently turned it off. After other issues in 2.0.28 (was Linus drunk?), I tried FreeBSD by suggestion of my brother. Been pretty happy since.

I'm sure the issues I had have been long fixed in the Linux tree, and should be in the new FreeBSD implementation, I hope. :)

I'd check the CVS commits on the Linux kernel to give more precise info of the syncookies, but I can't seem to find them linked from http://www.linux.org/

Re:syncookies? only now?

[cperciva]

FreeBSD has had a syncache for quite some time now; it has never been clear which of the two is technically superior.

Now FreeBSD implements both commonly accepted solutions; I haven't looked at the code enough to say for certain, but I'd assume that syn cookies would be used in order to avoid connection loss only during *very* high packet rates (10^5+ SYN packets/second) since the syn cache works fine up to those levels.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Onc you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

why didn't you just cut and paste the "BSD is dying" troll and get it over with? :-p

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

I'm not sure how you went from syncookies to OpenBSD, but you did mention stateful inspection, so flame on!

Stateful Inspection(tm), stateful inspection, and TCP flag checks are not all the same thing. The INSPECT engine included in FireWall-1 is a dynamically-programmable state machine, capable of semi-complicated connection state tracking over a variety of connection-oriented (e.g. TCP) and connectionless (e.g. UDP) protocols. INSPECT is, in some form or another, patented. IPFILTER 's keep state clause (and IPFW's dynamic rules using the keep-state clause and the check state rule) also tracks connection state, but only for ICMP, UDP, and TCP, and it can only be changed by re-compiling the appropriate C code.

Here's the rant part: SIMPLY CHECKING TCP FLAGS IS NOT STATEFUL INSPECTION!! It's sometimes called stateless inspection and it means that a decision to pass or block a packet is decided on the characteristics of that packet alone. Allowing J. Random TCP packet to go through the firewall with a cursory check of the headers means I can do FIN or ACK scans through your firewall, and if you've got it set up to only log connection attempts, the scans won't even be logged. Suck!

As for stop denial of service attacks (aside: I hope to God I'm not the only person who has to figure out whether a person means the operating system or the network attack every time he sees those three letters), the only way to do that is to implement proper ingress AND egress filters on the gateway firewall or router. Needless to say, this is complicated, so most people don't bother.

Only you can prevent forest fires and improperly configured firewalls.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Pengo]

No flaming, just would like to know more..

SIMPLY CHECKING TCP FLAGS IS NOT STATEFUL INSPECTION!! It's sometimes called stateless inspection and it means that a decision to pass or block a packet is decided on the characteristics of that packet alone.

Well, based on what you just said.. I still am ok. My rules basically states, only allow the packet into the state if it a) meets the port/proto requirements, b) meets the TCP Flags (S/SA). You seem to know what your talking about , so I am asking.. wouldn't that block a FIN/ACK scan through the firewall, being that the state wouldn't be established unless you met the criteria?

Cheers

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

The rule you describe (only allow S/SA and keep state) would indeed block a FIN or ACK scan.

For example, I have the following IPFILTER rule installed on my firewall:

pass in log first quick on fxp0 proto tcp from any to 10.63.1.1 port = 3389 flags S keep state keep frags group 132 # wtsrv

This allows the initial SYN packet in, and tracks state from there on out. The next packet it allows through the firewall must be a SYNACK, and the packets following that must be ACKs, RSTs, or FINs. Once it sees the terminating FIN or RST, it removes the connection from the dynamic state. If it doesn't complete the handshake (SYN, SYNACK, ACK), the dynamic rule times out pretty quickly. If it does complete the handshake, I think the default timeout is on the order of a few days.

Sorry about the flame bit. It's just that so many people mis-understand stateful firewall rules that I try to explain it to avoid people getting confused.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

because this is the NEW and IMPROVED BSD is DEAD troll!!!

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Anonymous Coward]

I regularly go to NetBSD.org, and see the pathetic hodge-podge of ports they've managed to achieve. They've ported their OS to Dreamcast's and Amigas, and a whole host of obsolete boxes.

But it makes me wonder why people would expend effort banging their heads against old obsolete junk that no one is ever going to run? Old VAXStations and VMEBus junk? What masochist would even bother trying to get that stuff to run?

I wish these people would use their talents for productive things...they could be making their OS better, more stable and easier to use. Not to mention the fact that NetBSD, like the other BSD's is pretty thin on driver support for most modern hardware. Couldnt they be writing drivers for harware that matters?

And the whole ease-of-use thing is not something you can dismiss either...NetBSD is harder to get installed than six-year-old Slackware. I'd really -LIKE- NetBSD and OpenBSD to be more popular among users and hackers, but people like that want to program and run apps, not solve a Rubik's cube!

As for the Alpha hardware...well, Alpha has seen it's day come and go -- at least as far as hobbyist hardware is concerned.

Back in the days of the 21164 (and 21164PC, and the old Multias) there was a chance, a brief window, in which Alphas might have become mainstream hardware. But Digital committed corporate suicide, and now the Alpha line is completely out of sight, pricewise. You're not going to find anything comparable to the Sun Blade for under $1000 (which, admittedly, isnt a particularly power machine). Alpha 21264 EV67/EV68 machines are insanely expensive and the performance gap between them, and high-end PCs is now disturbingly narrow.

Now we hear that Samsung seems to be moving away from Alpha Processors, Inc...and is seeking partnerships for AMD hardware?

Some annoying old coot on Usenet keeps saying about how "PC's have out-evolved Unix workstations and RISC architectures in every way", and I'd take his bait and counter his arguments, but it's sounding truer all the time.

RISC along with NetBSD, and for that matter, *BSD in general, are dead.

FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[AntipodesTroll]

It turns out it is a good thing that 5.0-CURRENT was frozen, and they concentrated on 4.X STABLE. It means I dont have to worry about changing to a new 5.X branch.

It was kinda annoying that the FreeBSD guys obsoleted 3.X so quickly, they had only really just fixed the glaring issues with the ATA driver corruption problem and other important issues (that affected my use of FreeBSD 3.4 for fileserving) and then they went and obsoleted it.

If 4.X stays as the most current tree in STABLE for another year, hell, another 2 years, I for one will be happy. I dont see the 1-year cycle for major number increments as much really other than ticking over the most siginificant version-numbers. Stuff that gets MFC'd from CURRENT is usually good enough for STABLE, Look at Linus, he dosent feel a need to tick over the major version numbers for Linux. I'd stay with FreeBSD 4.x if it goes all the way to (say) 4.7 or 4.8.

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[neroz]

There will be a 4.6, and *possibly* a 4.7, but 5.0 will be -released before then. See this interview with one of the TrustedBSD developers for a good read on the status of 5.0. It also covers the fixes to 4.5.

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD really is dying

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

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Chicken Little has confirmed: The sky really is falling

Yet another crippling bombshell hit Terra today when recently NASA confirmed that the sky is falling. Coming on the heels of the latest JPLsurvey which plainly states that the atmosphere has lost volume, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. The stratosphere is most endangered of them all, having lost 1 angstrom of thickness over the past millenium.

Fact: The sky is falling.

Do you think the sky is really falling? That's what I think of your BSD troll... :-p

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot never ceases to amaze me; I can't begin to imagine why this post was modded "Funny"...

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[essdodson]

5.0-CURRENT was never frozen.

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[Anonymous Coward]

Attention: BSD 4.4 is actually BSD 8, but AT&T said "Fuck You" to Berkeley because it made System V which people would think BSD version 5 is AT&T UNIX System V. So FreeBSD is
BSD 4.4(BSD4+1+1+1+1), or BSD version 12.4, got it?

BSD is *dying*!

[Anonymous Coward]

or something to that effect.

;)

Re:BSD is *dying*!

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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.

Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

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

Re:BSD is *dying*!

[fdisk3hs]

Hello, you are my new bitch.

Time to give it a try?

[John Betonschaar]

Maybe I should really check out the FreeBSD FAQ & site & stuff, but hey, there's a lot of experts around here who can help me out, so I'll throw it in anyways:

Is it worthwhile for me to try FreeBSD now? I've already installed Win 95/98/2000, RedHat, Slackware,Suse,Debian & BeOS before and I still have an unfinished Linux from scratch install lurking around, but until now only Debian, Slack & Win 2000 stayed on long enough to make real use of them. ATM I'm running Debian w/KDE2.2 and I'm really happy with it, but hey, I still have a free 2Gig partition.

Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?

The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion ;-)

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll save you the trouble. I recently got bored
with debian and tried 4.5 for a while. Nice kernel,
but their foobarred packaging system just made me
appreciate debian all the more.

Throw the preemptable kernel patch into debian, make sure
you're running sid, and be happy that you've got
the coolest free software os around right now.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[CatherineCornelius]

If you've delved as far as Linux-from-scratch and are happy with Debian and Slackware, you might like to have a look at the Debian-BSD mailing list. There was an article here about it around a week ago. Most of the work going on is around a NetBSD port, but others are working on a FreeBSD port. It's at a very early stage where they're still debating what to do about libc (BSD) versus libc6 (GNU) dependencies in packages.

The list archives are here.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[jquirke]

Using FreeBSD after experience with Linux is actually a good idea. You will find it a bit more challenging than Linux, but the rewards will be *improved* stability and performance in general. (From my experience in various situations, especially under heavy load).

I know KDE2.2, XMMMS, and the MSN client will run fine. I also know most source-code apps will compile in general. Also, FreeBSD does have Linux binary compatibility (to an extent). However, if you don't thrash your machine much, you will probably prefer Linux.

In short, put some time into learning about it and FreeBSD really is a fantastic OS. I would recommend it to tech-savvy people anyday. And it's constantly getting better (not dying :-P).

--jquirke

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no escaping the reality that FreeBSD is a failure. So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Ded Bob]

Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?

KDE2.2: yes
XMMS: yes
OpenGL: yes
GeForce2: yes, but not hardware accelerated. Fortunately, it is being worked on: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html
MSN client: ?, there are Jabber clients for instant messenging with MSN.
LaTeX: yes
Java: in a few days. It is standard with FreeBSD (they paid the licenses fees). It is v1.3.
Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes

I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it worthwile for me to try FreeBSD now?

No. Here is why:

1. The 'Ports' system. Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little or no flexibility in regards to how packages are built, and has a nasty habit of installing unecassary dependencies. For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree. Notice how it insists on installing XFree86. You can't pass it any configure script options like --without-xfree or ---don't build-retarded-gui. Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you usually just wind up downloading the tarball and compiling it yourself, which seems to defeat the purpouse of a Ports/Package Managment system entierly.

1. Hardware support. Good luck getting hardware-accelerated OpenGL working on your GeForce2, or most other cards for that matter. Not that you would have anything to do with it if you did, save for perhaps have a nifty screensaver to look at. Don't even get me started on the terrible support for most high-performace sound cards/RAID Adapters and Gigabit ethernet adapters.

1. FreeBSD is a lousy server. Another myth of FreeBSD is its performance as a server. First, look at the terrible SMP performace compared to Linux, any commercial UNIX, or even Windows NT/2k/XP. Sure, this is supposed to be addressed once 5.0 comes out, but as it stands, FreeBSD SMP performance simply sucks. Lets also take a look at FreeBSDs security. FreeBSD zealots often like to rant about the superior security of FreeBSD compared to Linux or even comercial Unixes, however in reality the security of FreeBSD is little better than the aformentioned systems, (just take a look at the recent telnetd and ptrace() holes) and the CVS development system of FreeBSD is far more prone to security holes inadvertently working thier way into the code base than, say, Linux.

1. Worthless documentation.The majority of the documentation contained on the FreeBSD website is completley outdated, much of it dating back from the 3.x days. Also, it seems that no one bothered to alter most of the manpages since they were taken from the old 4.4 BSDlite. Take a look at the exports page. Notice how it tells you that you can authenticate an NFS exported filesystem by specifying the NFSKERB option in your kernel configuration. Now try that. Notice how it dosen't work. This is because that feature was present in 4.4 BSD, but no one bothered to update the manpage since it was ported to FreeBSD.

So I hope this sheds some lite on the shortcomings of FreeBSD that you otherwise rarely hear about. While this post is probably going to be moderated into oblivion, hopefully it will save at least one would-be FreeBSD user from making the same mistakes I did.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[rho]

I'd recommend giving a few hundred megs to a partition for FreeBSD. Since you're using your computer as a workstation, you won't see that much of a difference. It's not noticeably faster or more stable.

KDE, et. al. are just Unix programs. They work fine on BSD. The real difference is how you install it. Wait until you give the /usr/ports tree a try. The coolest way ever to install software.

*BSD is somewhat different from the Linuxes, especially RedHat. My last experience with RH was back at 6.2, but I got frustrated with its habit of tossing thing hither and thither all over the filesystem, and after my RH server was comprimised (buggy wu-ftp), I switched all my machines to Free and OpenBSD.

I, personally, prefer the BSD way of configuration, and I've been very happy since.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[hawk]

>Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes

SMP is not lacking, at least for x86.

>I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.

yes, and FreeBSD's loader can handle linux partitions.

hawk

Re:Time to give it a try?

[neroz]

SMP is not lacking, it's just poor. 4.x SMP uses that nice giant
lock, so only one process can be execute at a time (not parallel).

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Quill_28]

I am not an Unix expert, nor a programming one. I played around with Linux for a couple years on a casual basis. I have been working with FreeBSD for about 6 months. I like FreeBSD much better,nothing against Linux glad it's doing well, I just prefer FreeBSD. Some reasons: I got frustrated in all the different flavors of Linux. Do I use RPM or .deb's. Red Hat seems to have their own way of doing things. Along with this the documentation on Linux is harder to follow because of this. Again, if I wasn't a newbie it might not be a big deal. Also, the installation(at least using broadband) it much easier than Linux. I have found ports very easy to use, much easier than Linux, where there always seemed to be a dependency issue. Again, my inexperience may play a role in this opinion. FreeBSD seems to be better server OS than Linux. Linux seems to be a better workstation OS than FreeBSD. My Linux friends tell there are much more end-user apps available but I really just want X-Windows, web browser, e-mail, and a development envirnoment. I am not interested in doing cd-burning, mp3 players, graphic design, and the like. Sorry for the random thoughts, in all I just really like FreeBSD. Take it for what it's worth.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

> I am not interested in doing cd-burning, mp3
> players, graphic design, and the like
Too bad, because FreeBSD handles these tasks
equally well.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Ded Bob]

> > Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes

> SMP is not lacking, at least for x86.

He was asking about extra performance of FreeBSD over Linux. I wanted him to know that SMP is not quite up to par. As he did not mention SMP, I believe he will see very nice performance. I just didn't want others to assume SMP was stellar. When 5.0 comes out, I will have to consider getting me an SMP box.

> > I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.

> yes, and FreeBSD's loader can handle linux partitions.

Well, he did ask if LILO worked with FreeBSD. Personally, I use FreeBSD's loader.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

> cd-burning
To the best of my knowledge, FreeBSD doesn't implement scsi-emulation for IDE devices like Linux and NetBSD do, which means that one can't use the regular cd burning tools (cdrecord and cdrdao) with IDE cd recorders. I've never run FreeBSD on a box with a burner, so I don't know for sure, but someone here was bitching about it a few weeks ago.

Don't get me wrong, I like FreeBSD more than Linux, but I felt the need to point this out.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[essdodson]

I've never seen a situation where FreeBSD's bootloader has failed anyone using multiple OS's, it's very easy to install and 90% of the time needs no configuration.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[__past__]

Of course, you actually can run Java on FreeBSD - either in the Linuxulator, or even a native one. (Compiled on your machine! With your optimizations! Yay!)

The sad point is that it's a pain to install, due to licensing problems. To have native Java, you have to install the linux compat libs (basically a mini-RedHat), a linux-JDK, accept a NDA from Sun and download the JDK source, download a patch, and finally compile it. Of course, the last two parts aren't scriptable.

<flaimbait>Hopefully this problems go away when this propriatary Java shit is replaced by an open standard like C# and .NET</flaimbait>

Re:Time to give it a try?

[scrytch]

Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?

Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, sorta. Most apps for linux compile for freebsd out of the box, and if they don't, you just type 'linux bash' at a shell and install a redhat rpm. nVidia is never going to release a driver for freebsd, closed or otherwise (don't start with OSX, it's not even close to the same thing at that level), or sufficient specs to write one. There's native Java now, but I doubt they'll port a retrograde version -- it should be backward compatible anyway.

The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion ;-)

We may yet see the death of LILO and it won't be too soon. FreeBSD's bootloader is comparable to GRUB and then some. It'll load Linux just fine as well.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Arandir]

they're still debating what to do about libc (BSD) versus libc6 (GNU) dependencies in packages.

Why don't they just get a big stick and beat anyone over the head who doesn't code to the standards? That why you never need to worry about which brand of libc you're using. Frankly, everything in the FreeBSD ports tree that I've tried compiles just fine under libc. Even the GNU stuff.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

There s no escaping the reality that FreeBSD is a failure. So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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 shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[dcs]

Not sure if it would be worth your time trying FreeBSD. But if you do, PLEASE get rid of LILO! :-)

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

Your /. ID isn't terribly high, so I assume you've been here for a while. How is it that after dozens and dozens of BSD stories that people still don't know a damned thing about it? Unix, for the most part, is Unix. There's nothing Linux about KDE, XMMS, etc. Linux and "Open Source" are used together in sentences all the time by people who never give a moment's thought to ./configure && make install and frankly it scares me.

And now you ask if LaTeX! of all things is on FreeBSD? Dude, TeX (and friends) are OLDER than Linux! So is the X Window System!

The answer to your question "is it worthwile to try FreeBSD now?" can be found by asking YOURSELF that question. Is it worthwile? Would you gain anything? Not just in performance or stability, but would you maybe learn anything in the process? Would you maybe even find that you just 'like it' better and switch completely? Is spending the time learning another OS (course, it's still Unix so as long as you don't go into it with preconceptions it'll be easy) worth any rewards you may gain?

This goes for anything, and not just FreeBSD, and not just Operating Systems and computers.

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

"my Linux friends tell me there are much more end-user apps available [for Linux]"

That's an ignorant myth. A most there are (_literally_) a *few* more apps because of commercial software companies that sell closed source applications.

Thankfully, FreeBSD can run these as well under it's Linux ABI compatibility.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

There is support for this in -CURRENT and people have successfully manually backported a patch to -STABLE. Then again, the burncd utility that's included in -STABLE works just fine for IDE burning.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

Most apps for Linux ARE NOT "Apps for Linux". That's why they'll compile. And nVidia OpenGL support is working (though not in the install yet.) See other comments under this story for details and link.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Anonymous Coward]

Uhh, why don't you check your facts before posting misinformation? With the 4.x implementation, only one process can execute in the kernel at a time. This is not an issue for most real world situations, where processes happily execute regular (non-kernel) code in parallel. Sheesh.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[CatherineCornelius]

Why don't they just get a big stick and beat anyone over the head who doesn't code to the standards? That why you never need to worry about which brand of libc you're using.

Perhaps I should clarify: the question at hand is mainly about dynamic linking dependencies in .deb binary packages. You're right to state that properly written C source code doesn't cause any problems with either libc. It's also the case that the NetBSD libc contains several libraries that are normally packaged outside libc6 in GNU userlands.

Some of the source packages also have dependencies on, say, libc6-dev, and this has to be rethought where the package will compile perfectly well in the BSD environment with no GNU libc at all.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Quill_28]

It really dosn't matter to me, because I don't own a burner. Play mp3 off my win box, and suck at graphics :/

Native JAVA

[DrSkwid]

at last!!!1

now no fucking about with linux emulated Java

maybe now I can get java in Konqueror to work

and I know it's not new but maybe you linux heads might've missed it.

FreeBSD now has a third party script that will auto-update any ports you've installed.

cvs update to the lates ports list and run portupgrade -ra and ALL of your port instaleld software will be updated to the latest version and dependencies resolved and reset (and a tool pkgdb will do some pre upgrade checks)

It's great. I'm going on about it because I'm so impressed with it.

FreeBSD rocks

Re:Native JAVA

[billhuey]

It's being worked on by me and a number of other folks.

Native threading is in alpha and I'm currently working on the HotSpot compiler. ;-)

Re:Native JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

wooo.. you CLEARLY demonstrate the superiority of FreeBSD here!

maybe now I can get java in Konqueror to work

ooh.. it didn't work before? who cares. after years it does now and thats all that matters(tm)!! because freebsd is better than anything else now!!


FreeBSD now has a third party script that will auto-update any ports you've installed.

I'm IMPRESSED!!! Debian had that for years now, but now that they can do it with a 3rd-party script it's OBVIOUSLY better than anyting else!


It's great. I'm going on about it because I'm so impressed with it.

It sucks. I'm bashing it because I'm so impressed with it's superiority.


FreeBSD rocks

FreeBSD sucks.

Re:Native JAVA

[DrSkwid]

cripes, go drop an E and cheer the fuck up

Re:Native JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I use Debian on my workstations, and FreeBSD on my servers, and not only does Debian rock, but FreeBSD *also* rocks!

*Oh my fucking god!*

They both rock? Yes they do!

Oh, BTW, you suck, because I'm so impressed with your infantile crap.

Re:Native JAVA

[Metrol]

I normally don't comment on moderations, but what in the heck got the above message mod'd to a troll? Not only was nothing insulting in that post, he hit on some great points.

Having to deal with Linux emulated Java does suck. It doesn't integrate well with desktop apps that are compiled to run native on FreeBSD, like Konqueror or Mozilla. It's out of date, thus impacting stand alone apps like JEdit and server side apps as well. It'll be nice to see that Linux emulated Java yanked from the port tree. This is NOT about whether Linux is good or bad.

The "third-party" script being referred to is an implementation of even greater automation with installing and updating apps. The two key commands involved are "portupgrade" and "portinstall". For you Debian kinda folks this should look awful familiar...

portinstall gnome
portupgrade gimp

Essentially, an even smarter handling of apps building up from the infrastructure of the ports tree rather than trying to replace it. It works smooooooth too. apt-get, eat your heart out :)

Coupled with cvsup for keeping things all up to the minute, FreeBSD does rock!

Re:Native JAVA

[infinii]

I recently upgraded to 4.5-RC. When installing the /usr/ports/java/jdk13 port, it forced me to install linux-jdk13 first.

With this native JAVA, does it mean we don't need linux-jdk anymore? Should I cvsup and reinstall my port?

Re:Native JAVA

[DrSkwid]

y the troll thing got me wondering too

I've had two in two days that patently aren't

must've pissed someone off

I don't care though, I'm in the 45-50 cap zone anyway.

Sure Debian might have the upgrading problem sorted out
(but actually I doubt it's as good tbh but that's pure speculation)
but the other distro's don't.

The java thing is annoying for me as I've got a project waiting for a java applet and I can't get konq to use java.

For me FreeBSD brings me consistency and ease of use. Linux has the light but so what, strength to your Penguin. I moved from slackware to FreeBSD (sadly via NT 3.5-4!). I tried Debian but didn't get along with it. My real OS of choice is plan9 but I won't go on.

Re:Native JAVA

[drachen]

Yes, that's exactly what you should do.

Just cvsup then:
cd /usr/ports/java/jdk && make all install clean

and then to get JFC (Swing):
cd /usr/ports/java/jfc && make all install clean

Source of these instructions.

More info on Java for FreeBSD.

Re:Native JAVA

[drachen]

While my other comment regarding the jdk was correct, in regards to your question "does it mean we don't need the linux-jdk anymore?" which I neglected to answer. Yes it still depends on linux-jdk for compilation purposes as evidenced by the port's Makefile.

Re:Native JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

> portinstall gnome
> portupgrade gimp
will compile the ports, unless you specify the -P flag or something.

But there is a freebsd native (not 3rd party) way of doing the 'apt-get install' thing for years now.

you just do a :
pkg_add -r gnome
pkg_add -r gimp

And it will d/l the binary package from a freebsd mirror and install it. Check the pkg_add man page for more info.

Re:Native JAVA

[Anonymous Coward]

Late reply--

you'll want to make sure your ports are upgraded, look at using cvsup with ports-supfile.

cvsup!

[mat.h]

Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.

Or save some bandwidth and point cvsup to the RELENG_4_5 branch on your local cvsup mirror.

Something the release notes don't mention: Could someone please clue me in on the state of native Java on FreeBSD? There was an announcement in late December but I haven't heard from it since then. Having to install the Linux JDK to build a FreeBSD JDK can't be the last word.

Re:cvsup!

[Bender Unit 22]

Yes, good idea.
I just wish I could get it to work. I tried to follow the instructions in the handbook, It was clearly written by someone who knew a lot about how it worked, but, at least for me, the entire message did not come across. I guess if you already into it, the manual is pretty clear.

Re:cvsup!

[lertl]

Concerning native Java: According to this interview with Robert Watson it will be available shortly ofter 4.5-RELEASE. He says "it's in final conformance testing". HTH.

Re:cvsup!

[Anonymous Coward]

Java on FreeBSD doesn't work yet. So far it's at a very immature stage of development

Re:cvsup!

[bmoyles]

This is a decent explanation:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/current.php
Check out
http://www.freebsddiary.org/makeworld-script.php
for a nice makefile that pretty much does everything you need to upgrade too.

Re:cvsup!

[Bender Unit 22]

Hmm thanks,
I have just made a backup of my least important box. And it's now working on it.
I just had to update cvsup first, due to that "CVSup 1000000000 Second Bug". D'oh.

Can't wait to see if it will boot. :)

Re:cvsup!

[__past__]

Not that I really know what I'm talking about (hey - this is slashdot!), but I would guess that you will at least still need a binary JDK to actually build your native one. Quite a lot of important JDK tools are themselves written in Java (even Javac, IIRC), so you need some JDK to bootstrap.

You probably won't need Linux emulation any more, though. pkg_add -r name_of_native_jdk should suffice.

Insulting title

[Anonymous Coward]

One would think that after they entirely fucked up the first story, they could treat the second one with a bit of respect. But no, Nik had to go and give it that insulting article title.

Re:Insulting title

[Nik]

http://www.earthstation1.com/pgs/wbcartoons/des-it s_a_jo.wav.html

Hey Nik, that XP

[Dick Veiney]

crack is really lame^H^H^H^Hwitty!

4.4 installer

[boltar]

I love FreeBSD and wish I'd discovered it years ago instead of messing around with Linux worrying
about distribution problems but.... frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.
I hope they've fixed it for 4.5. It was the only thing that cast a cloud on the 4.4 release.

Re:4.4 installer

[gladbach]

4.5 sysinstall is still the same it seems to me. I just threw it on a dual box with an onboard intel nic, and a 3com gigabit fiber card, and the networking interfaces configuration just didnt want to work (as i wanted them to). I ended up having to edit the rc.conf myself to get networking to work correctly. dealing with that is the only problem ive ever had with it, (had same problem in 4.4 also)

Re:4.4 installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok, here's the deal with sysinstall: It's
not supposed to do anything more than a simple plain vanilla install. Want to customize? You need to cvsup, make world, etc., read LINT, and the defaults, and edit it by hand.

Do not rely on /stand/sysinstall for package management. Do not rely on /stand/sysinstall for configuration. It's a simple tool, for simple jobs. You need a GUI for installation? Run linux or Windows.

Re:4.4 installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Cast a cloud? I assure you, there is no casting of clouds in FreeBSD. Why the heck are you using sysinstall? Nobody but linux weenies use that. It's all in /etc/rc.conf, and the hand book, dude.

Re:4.4 installer

[parc]

Have you mentioned your problems to freebsd-config? I'm sure they'd love to know about your problems, since they're responsible for writing and maintaining the installation system.

Re:4.4 installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, don't use /stand/sysinstall for anything
other than a simple installation. Frankly,
if you're running FreeBSD, you should be prepared
to edit a file by hand. But unlike linux (which is just a kernel, with inconsistent user lands), FreeBSD is both a kernel and a user land. So the configs are CONSISTENT. Get on any bsd box, and you'll know where things are.

The FreeBSD distro is built in absolute simplicity. Read /etc/defaults to see what
the file defaults are. If you want to change them, copy the examples from /etc/defaults into /etc/. Look closely at /etc/rc.conf. YOU HAVE TO EDIT THIS BY HAND. If this is too much of a chore, then run a GUI based OS like Windows or (recently) many linux distros.

Re:4.4 installer

[Anonymous Coward]

Get on any bsd box, and you'll know where things are.

I don't know abou that, for example I want to start inetd, and enable it at boot time. Is it run out of /etc/rc?

grep -3 inetd /etc/rc

OK, it reads the variable ${inetd_enable}, and appends ${inetd_flags} now you have to look at the script to see where they are defined. OK, it sources /etc/rc.conf, and /etc/defaults/rc.conf, now I have at least 2 more files to look at.

I want to start inetd on most linux distros:

/etc/rc.d/init.d/inetd start

yes slack and debian are different, but at worst I need to read inittab to see where my rc stuff is run out of.

Re:4.4 installer

[Metrol]

frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.

It's not so much buggy as it is non-intuitive. Unlike the Linux installers I've seen, it doesn't provide a good step by step wizard for what things you do next. I guess you could call that buggy, but it's not like it doesn't work.

Robert Watson recently commented on this in an interview on OS News. There's apparently work being done now to get a more straight forward, and quite possibly pertier, installer up and ready for FreeBSD 5.0.

It's actually a great interview, worthy of it's own thread.

Re:4.4 installer

[Lazaru5]

The installer has always gone through a step-by-step installation as long as you choose the basic (or beginner, or whatever it is. I make world to upgrade and infrequently do a fresh install.)

Good experience with ISDN/FreeBSD

[absurd_spork]

I have been running an ISDN gateway with FreeBSD 4.2 on an AMD 5x86-133 which is roughly comparable to your Pentium 90 for some time. It works perfectly well. Compiling the operating system takes a bit long, but that's not much of a surprise.

ISDN support under FreeBSD is very convenient. It uses the isdn4bsd system, which is integrated into recent versions of FreeBSD. In my opinion, it's superior to Linux, partly because configuration is easier and partly because ituses user-mode ppp by default instead of kernel-based systems which are usually more difficult to configure and maintain. You have to see if your ISDN card is supported. Most passive cards are. Check the ISDN section of the FreeBSD handbook.

Re:Good experience with ISDN/FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Thanks Matt

[Anonymous Coward]

I really liked Matt Dillon in the movie "rumble fish". Now I wonder why doesn't he join linux development and help in that direction. I remember old curtis when he used to tell me "Son, when you have one stick you can break it, but when you have multiple sticks together you can't". Obviously, the linux folks can't go to BSD because nobody likes the "Berkley Board Of Directors".

Frans Crappola

Re:Thanks Matt

[Graspee_Leemoor]

That's "Berkley Beard of Directors"

graspee

The 'this-time,-with-feeling-dept.'?

[Alexius]

As a rabid Buffy Fan, I respectfully request this is changed to 'Once more with feeling', just because it would have made me laugh.

no point in freebsd?

[metrix007]

Personally, i dont see the point in any of the *bsd's, except for maybe netbsd and portability. for stability there is debian and slack, security, well any system can be made secure, so that leaves openbsd uesless. long live linux, which unlike the *bsd's is not dying.

Re:no point in freebsd?

[Anonymous Coward]

How strange! Now that's funny, I don't see the point in any of the Linux (GNU/Linux ?) distribution ! For stability there is FreeBSD, for security OpenBSD, which is secure by default and don't give you any headache. And NetBSD runs on everything.

Re:no point in freebsd?

[metrix007]

haha no arguments, how lame. we have freebsd which is not secure, openbsd which is too slow for performance, and netbsd which runs on a dreamcast. then we have linux with a better license, runs on stuff that matters, is secure, and beats freebsd in performance.

Re:no point in freebsd?

[Anonymous Coward]

then we have linux with a better license

Any benchmark ?

Re:no point in freebsd?

[Kwikymart]

Hahahaha, if anything.. Linux has no real place. Windows/OSX for the desktop, and BSD for the server. Linux is trying to be somewhere in the middle. By the way, "the *bsd's" were around long before linux was ever comprehended.

for stability there is debian and slack,

Thats not even an argument. You are just pointing out the most stable/server-like linux distributions. You are essentially saying that linux has an equivelant for everything BSD has. It also doesnt matter what distro you are using. The stability problem lies within the method of development of the kernel. Having big VM changes and fucking things up constantly in the "stable" branch is very unprofessional. Linux could actually be really good if it wasnt controlled by some patch-nazi.

long live linux, which unlike the *bsd's is not dying.

Ahahah, and linux users are complaining every time Microsoft posts FUD. Guess what "BSD is dying"-type comments are? Exactly the same!

Are some linux users really that insecure with themselves that they must rag on BSD and MS none stop? Please get a life, get a clue, and get a brain. BSD is not dying, and it never was.

Re:no point in freebsd?

[Anonymous Coward]

its not called a troll, its called a debate. Fucking biased mods who mod people down for healthy discussion.

Should I triy it?

[XRayX]

Should I, as a pretty experienced (Kernel compiling, configuration /etc) Linux User, give it a try?
I heard a lots of good things about FreeBSD, but how big are the differences to Linux (installation)?
X

Re:Should I triy it?

[BiggyP]

well, if you like the sound of it then try it, you'll never know if you should unless you do, I personally still prefer GNU/Linux, but BSD if fine for those who want it and prefer it for whatever reason, many companies produce partial binary kernel modules (with sources to compile loader against kernel) for devices such as modems and nVidia with their Graphics cards, i'm pretty sure things such as these and the GLX modules would not work with *BSD, i may well be wrong as i have not tried FBSD on a machine with such devices. Debian is the best option, especially with the pre-emptive multitasking patch.

Re:Should I triy it?

[Anonymous Coward]

don't!

the "bsd is not dying" trolls want to make you believe it is superior to linux, when in truth it's the opposite. if you're using your computer as a desktop, by all means leave linux on it and don't touch ANY *bsd.

Re:Should I triy it?

[rnyberg]

Why don't you decide for yourself? There is documentation on the installation process amongs other things at the FreeBSD project you know.

Re:Should I triy it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, if youre happy with watever you are using then stick to it.
I have to say that I have'nt ever used BSD.
If you change the kernel to *BSD and run the same user apps on youre desktop system would not give mutch performance gain over Linux (+/- 1% maybe).
Well i dont know.

The userland apps are most important.

Re:Should I triy it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for lss 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

Re:Should I triy it?

[neroz]

This is a blatant troll. Please, just make it down already.FreeBSD is *not* dying, it is gaining users. Probably due to all the problems with Linux 2.4, that, and the fact that it's just a really nice OS once you make the switch. Anyway, troll ahoy...

Re:Should I triy it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go ahead and give it a try, its free, so you have nothing to lose except a few hours of your time.

Don't be too surprised if you find that the breathless BSD advocates have led you a bit astray. Its a nice system, but generally you'll find that it has no particular advantages over Linux.

Well, I take that back, it does have one signifigant 'advantage'; less people use it, so if you feel that Linux has gotten too mainstream, you'll fit right in with BSD.

Re:Should I triy it?

[mxmasster]

Of course you should try it, you just might like it.

images01-la1# uname -a
FreeBSD images01-la1 4.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE #0: Tue Dec 19 11:36:03 PST 2000 root@images01-la1.ussearch.com:/usr/src/sys/compil e/images1219 i386
images01-la1# uptime
11:26AM up 407 days, 51 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.21, 0.27

Re:Should I triy it?

[cboscari]

You have my permission :)

Seriously, If you know your way around Linux (command line), you will have no problems with FreeBSD. I personaly prefer FreeBSD to Linux, mostly because "make world" is just plain fun to run. You synch to the current CVS tree, and away you go. Like most BSD based systems, Kernel configuration is done via a text file, which I prefer to the Linux way. I like that too.

The only big disadvantage I know of is lack of Accelerated Graphics for Nvidia chipsets, but others like Voodoo chips are supported. I ran Unreal Tournement (for Linux) in Linux emulation mode with one a few years back. I think the Nvidia support is being worked on, but in the meantime, 3d games are out. Almost everything else is the same. Gnome, KDE, gimp, samba, blah blah blah are avail, and can be compiled from source via the ports collection and installed. All in all, a good system. I like it.

Chris (FreeBSD since '97)

Re:Should I triy it?

[Arandir]

Yes, give FreeBSD a try. But don't go in expecting it to be just another Linux distro, because it's not. It's a real Unix in all but name. If you read the manual you shouldn't have too many problems.

What are the differences? Well that depends. What specific Linux distro are you comparing it to? All the Linux distros are different, so you can't really compare it to Linux as a whole, because that's just the kernel. Some distros don't even use glibc.

Installation is similar to Slackware and Debian. You won't get a fancy GUI that routinely misdetects your video card. It's very straight forward, sensible, and chock full of help.

Administration is uses sysinstall, which happens to lead a double life as the installer. No need to learn two programs when one will do. Similar to YaST in that regard. But you can also edit everything by hand in vi, and sysinstall won't undo you changes. You won't have a SysV style init scripts, but BSD (duh!) style scripts instead. I prefer the latter as it's easier to learn and understand. Everything in the base system is configured in one file, rc.conf. Apache, Sendmail, etc., still have their own configuration files though.

Installing software is similar to Debian and Gentoo. There are precompiled packages available, but the standard way is to use ports, which automatically fetches source, builds and installs. Using the cvsup and portupgrade utilities, keeping your system up to date is simplicity.

The GNU utilities aren't standard, so if you learned Unix the GNU way you may be thrown for a loop now and then. But if you learned Unix the Unix way, then you'll feel right at home. sh and tcsh are the standard shells, but just install bash if that's what you want. I prefer bash at the command prompt, but I write my scripts for plain vanilla sh.

Re:Should I triy it?

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Yet another AC writes:

> *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at
> this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

The same AC also says that there are "36400 FreeBSD users", "7000 users of OpenBSD", "1400 NetBSD users", and "700 users of BSD/OS", for a total of 45,500. Of course the *BSD_is_dead'ers have been saying that for a while. Hm, no mention of OS X, which is based on FreeBSD, and therefore is a *BSD.

In the last three weeks alone, the number of OS X users has shot up by 150,000! That's the number of new iMacs preordered, the first computers to be shipped from the factory with OS X (*BSD) as the default OS. They (and the new OS X running G4's) began shipping this past Monday. Check it out: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0201/28.imac.p hp.

The ongoing success of OS X, coupled with the frequent upgrades to the other BSD versions I've seen posted on Slashdot (including the one that started this thread), conclusively proves that *BSD is *NOT* dead, far from it. *BSD is alive, growing, thriving, full of vitality and hope for a bright future! Thanks in large part to Apple, *BSD can be enjoyed, not only by hobbyists, but by schoolchildren, scientists, parents, professionals in graphics, 3D, and film. Even by lawyers! ;)

Beyond time, beyond terror, beyond death, Mothra:
Your heart can reach...Life!

Linux is a better tinker-toy

[Pengo]

To be honest, if you are just using workstation apps, and not really using it for anything like a nat box, or the 'server in the closet tha never gets turned off' , it's probably not worth your time. The nice thing about playing with it, you get a feel of something different, which is a good thing. Linux ,, redhat, is not the end-all be-all of server configurations.

I had a freebsd box sitting my in closet for about 18 months, until I got bored with it and install openbsd. BUT, I don't really do any xwindows stuff on it.. basically web serving, outgoing email gatway, nat, proxy, and the place where I build my Python programs and scripts.

I guess to summarize my experience, *BSD is not a workstation supliment, but more a compliment. It will sit there and do it's job without much headache. Thats good enough for me ;-)

Re:Linux is a better tinker-toy

[Anonymous Coward]

I would also say that if you are looking for a "Pure Unix" console environment, FreeBSD is a great system -- working man pages, the Fine Manual actually exists, no SO hell, very clean and well laid out.

But FBSD pretty much considers all of the GUI stuff optional, so it's probably not the best place to start if want a graphical workstation.

Re:Linux is a better tinker-toy

[Arandir]

To be honest, if you are just using workstation apps, and not really using it for anything like a nat box, or the 'server in the closet tha never gets turned off' , it's probably not worth your time.

I have to respectfully disagree. There's nothing that Linux can do that FreeBSD can't. So why is there this perception that Linux is suitable for a workstation but FreeBSD isn't?

KDE, GNOME, Xmms, StarOffice, Java, Mozilla, Wine, etc., etc. I'm using FreeBSD as my desktop at home and my workstation at work. I couldn't be happier.

Then what is the point of 200+ linux versions?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well?

Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[antoniol]

I'm planning to build a new box, and would like to run FreeBSD on it. I've been searching for resources for hardware compatibility/recommendations on the 'net, but haven't found much. Nor do the Release Notes say much about that; nothing about MoBo/CPU, for instance. I'm considering the EPoX EP-8KHA+, but I'm not sure about a graphics card. AFAIK there are no nvidia drivers for FreeBSD. Not that I'll be playing any games, though. Any suggestions/pointers?

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Anonymous Coward]

Mother Board and CPU really don't matter at all (except for they are normally considered: head, size, power req. etc), memory, hard drive, cdrom, are all in the same category (don't especially matter to the OS).

For the Video, I always recomend ATI 128/Radeon, and most not-new soundcards should be fine as well, with SB Live being the top of the line.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Anonymous Coward]

NVidia cards are fine. Take a look at XFree86 documentation to get an idea about supported video cards.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is truly a failure. So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm an EPoX fan. They're price-performance leaders, and their quality and support is generally excellent. (They were the first to patch against the 686B bug.) However, they aren't immune to the failings of their providers, and lately it takes 3 revisions for them to get a board 100% reliable. (Contrast Abit or MSI, which get a board to 60% and 95% respectively, and then focus on pimping it... or Gigabyte, which flogs new designs so quickly that nobody can name the stable ones vs. the duds.)

I believe both the 8KHA and the 8KHA+ use Via's buggy KT266 chipset. The 8KHA2 series uses the fixed KT266A, but suffered a slight issue with supplying enough power to the AGP slot, according to Anandtech. Thus, the 8KHA3 series should be the 100% variant, and would be my pick- I believe those are out now, but I haven't checked.

Stay away from any KT266 (non A) boards; the KT133A performs as well. If you're insane about PCI performance, all Via chipsets are said to have some issues- I don't see these in my usage, but you'll see an edge with SiS if you want to run 2 RAID cards, a DSD audio capture board, and a few gigabit ethernet links off the same box.

When it comes to video, it depends what you want to do. I recycled my Matrox G200 into my current FreeBSD machine (EPoX 8KTA3, Thunderbird 850 with a bit of an FSB trick), and it's fairly excellent, although the console gets trashed when I run out of swap using X. (128MB/128MB. Go Mozilla.)

A G200 (or even more more advanced Matrox cards) can be quite cheap now, so if you don't think you'll be blasting up Quake 3 Arena, go for it. Matrox is definitely the most non-Windows-friendly manufacturer out there. I can't speak for the modern ATI kit, but they won't get my business after sticking me with a Rage II+DVD built onto a Gateway machine I picked up- a chipset is so bad that modes higher than 640x480 display strange scanline flicker (think of closed-caption artifacts sneaking through on your TV), seemingly variable depending on the contents of video memory. The patch from ATI? A knowledge base entry telling you not to run high resolutions.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[diamondc]

I have one of these SiS 630 motherboards with an integrated NIC and FreeBSD saw the NIC but could never give it an IP address. So I disabled the onboard NIC and put in an realtek 8139 in my computer, and FreeBSD didnt recognize the 8139 either. Also tried OpenBSD with no go. With Linux and Window the onboard NIC shows up just right. It helps with the SiS motherboard maker writes the drivers, though . I dont blame the BSD developers though, just shoddy motherboard makers

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Anonymous Coward]

nvidia support is an X issue. XFree_4 supports it alright (I have a GForce2 card). XFree_4 had to be installed from ports, I think it's now (as of fBSD 4.5-REL) the default X though.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[jandrese]

Hmm, that's odd. Did you try sending your problem to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list? This sort of hardware problem might be the symptom of something else you didn't notice (broken MII bus?). FreeBSD has support for the SIS 900 and SiS 7016 fast ethernet chipsets. FreeBSD also support the ReakTek 8139, even though it's a festering pile of crap. Either way, the 8139 should have worked (even if the onboard NIC is nonstandard). A quick mail to the list might have saved you a bad experiance here.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Ded Bob]

nVidia support is being worked on: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[hawk]

if you grub around at www.freebsd.org,there's a list of known supported hardware. Realistically, "most" mainstream hardware will work.

hawk

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[neroz]

nVidia cards should work fine if you just want 2D (AFAIK), and there is a drm-kmod port in the ports collection which installs the kernel module for DRM, which supports.. well here's the pkg-descr:

FreeBSD DRM kernel modules for the Direct Rendering
Infrastructure. With XFree86 4.0 they provide 3d
acceleration under X for 3dfx Voodoo3/5/Banshee,
Matrox G200 and G400, and ATI Rage128 and Radeon cards.

WWW: http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~eanholt/dri/

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[hearingaid]

There's a hardware compatibility list in the ISO. HARDWARE.TXT in the root directory gives it to you. Or: Here's the link.

Recently, they've started producing an HTML version of HARDWARE.TXT as well. Look for HARDWARE.HTM on the ISO.

Mirror site speed... no complaints!

[Nonesuch]

One benefit of being up early (not by choice) is that I'm getting some damn good download speeds from the official FreeBSD mirror sites, as in 773KB/s... that's over 6 megabits!

Not all of the sites have the full set of files (yet), I had to hunt around a bit to find the '4.5-install.iso'.

Don't trust my math on transfer speeds?

local: 4.5-disc2.iso remote: 4.5-disc2.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192.168.1.1,162,179)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for '4.5-disc2.iso' (631341056 bytes).
602 MB 00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
631341056 bytes received in 796.65 seconds (773.92 KB/s)

(Yes, that transfer went via a proxy firewall)

Re:Mirror site speed... no complaints!

[Anonymous Coward]

4.5-mini.iso was out there 2 days ago.

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD s dying

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 prctical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dead

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

cool

when it's dead can i have it?

:)

Re:*BSD is dying

[someonehasmyname]

First of all, Netcraft and The Apache Project use FreeBSD as their os. Hell, /. even uses a FreeBSD firewall.

Secondly, take a look at Netcraft's longest uptimes. I counted 6 out of 50 that weren't FreeBSD.. The 6 Non-BSD machines run IRIX, btw.

Marketshare-wise, between Yahoo's 4000 FreeBSD boxes, and all of Hotmail's FreeBSD mail servers, I think it's doing quite well..

There may be more local ISP's with their 5 machines running linux than there are running FreeBSD, but so what?

How many times have I compiled a "stable" and had it not boot?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: lost count

How many times have I rebooted after new kernel, and corrupted all mounted filesystems?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: 0, but I laughed like hell when it happend to you.

Even if FreeBSD did cease to exist, and develpoment stopped, I would still use it, because it is that damn good.

Oh, and considering DARPA is putting a bunch of money into furthering FreeBSD development, I don't see it going anywhere soon.

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT YHL HAND

Damnit..

[Night0wl]

I had just finished the first ISO.
I was about the finish the second ISO (96%)
and I had 3-5% on each of the third and fourth ISO's

and then they release 4.5... damnit...

*deletes 1+ gb of data, and begins again*

And this is all at a top of 15KB/s. And I can assure you it never got that high.

Re:Damnit..

[Anonymous Coward]

are you one of those dang-i-was-leeching-the-current-release-and-now-TH AT trolls or are you just unbelievably stupid?

Re:Damnit..

[Anonymous Coward]

are you one of those dang-i-was-leeching-the-current-release-and-now-TH AT trolls or are you just unbelievably stupid?

I dunno, who's the Anonymous Coward?

Re:Damnit..

[zaffir]

Heh, well i just spent 4 days getting FreeBSD up and running on my box (still can't get XF86 to work right) and then they release 4.5. I'm a newb to *nix in general, so upgrading is gonna be FUN. I'd like to get X going first though. Anybody know how to use XDM? :)

Re:Damnit..

[The_Rift]

If you already have the previous release up and running I would strongly advise you to read up on CVSup and upgrade that way.

The handbook has all the information you should need and if you're serious about using FreeBSD it's something you need to learn how to do anyway.

Re:Damnit..

[benedict]

You could just download the small (~200 MB)
install ISO and then get anything else you need
once the system is up.

Re:Damnit..

[Arandir]

The Handbook and FAQ have a section on setting up XDM. In a nutshell, there ain't no separate runlevel for a GUI login (why should there be?). Just edit your /etc/ttys file to turn it on, or shove a script in /usr/X11R6/etc/rc.d.

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD s dying

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 dcay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dead

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft officially confirms: *BSD is dying

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 sck 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

*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is official - Netcraft confirmes: *BSD is dying

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 planly 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

+3 Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Wonderful troll! That's the first time I've seen a goat troll get +3 in a while.

Re:+3 Informative

[Anonymous Coward]

Shows you how much care and attention the idiot moderators pay ... yuck, yuck. More goats please.

Failure and FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So why now? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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

Linus and vers. numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus doesn't actually *DO* anything worth bumping up the numbers.

2.x aout
3.x elf
4.x cam
5.x new smp

Linux - 2.4 - the kernel of pain
What will 2.5 be? The kernel of torment?
Then 2.7 The kernel of icy death?
3.0 The Kernel of eternal buring flesh?
@.8 could just be the kernel of itchy rash.

Re:Linus and vers. numbers

[uncl_bob]

What are you talking about?

Re:Linus and vers. numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Please put down the crack pipe.

Thank you.

Re:Linus and vers. numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

What about a kernel of 'burning urination'?

Robert Watson's interview about the release

[Anonymous Coward]

This interview with Robert Watson describes many of the new 4.5-RELEASE features, and talks about how they relate to the much more advanced work in 5.0. He also talks about how the Linux development targets relate to those in FreeBSD, and says he reads linux-kernel regularly. It
sounds like 5.0 should be incredible.

Crow is tasty. Eat some.

[Anonymous Coward]

http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=26839&cid=2896 959
Is it me, or do you have to be a bit brave or stupid to run an operating system that can't even provide working links to it's release notes? Just try clicking on 'i386' or 'alpha'.
Amazing how well the release works when it is an actual release eh there Mosch? How does crow taste?

Laptop

[daserver]

How well is apm or acpi supported in freebsd?

I know this is probably a dumb question, since freebsd is used mostly for server. But I know that some of you bsd trolls out there is running it. :-)

Re:Laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't bother. As most of us local experts know, *BSD is dying. This has partly to do with badly supported features like APM or ACPI, which won't get fixed up soon, because most core developers left the sinking ship. By all means: *BSD is dead. Please let it rest in peace.

Re:Laptop

[fyonn]

apm is supported reasonably well I think (I very rarely use apm myself) but acpi is not supported in STABLE or RELEASE. it's in 5-CURRENT at the mo and I don't know when it's likely to be MFC'd

dave

Re:Laptop

[Jordan Block]

apm works great, just add the device to the kernel
(device apm0) iirc, and enable it in rc.conf (apm_enable="YES") and away you go.

as for acpi, I have no clue on the support.

Logical partitions fictional

[k8to]

Yes, logical partitions are fictitional. So are all partitions. They're just conventions on how to share sections of the disk. Come to think of it -- files are fictitional, so are jpegs. etc.

Or did you just mean to suggest that the name logical partition is somehow less valid than logical drive.

Regardless of how problematic you view this system to be, it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks that can be shared among many operating systems on the x86 platform. You don't have to like it, but you'd think FreeBSD -- which is native to x86 -- would support it.

Re:Logical partitions fictional

[Anonymous Coward]

but you'd think FreeBSD -- which is native to x86 -- would support it.

No, a partitioning standard ported over from some 80s VAX is clearly preferable. The reason is that everything invented after 1981 sucks, and *BSD will keep going until that is acknowledged.

Re:Logical partitions fictional

[Arandir]

...it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks...

No, it is not the normal way. It is the DOS way. FreeBSD isn't DOS, so there is no compelling reason for it to abandon the BSD way in favor of the Bill Gates way.

Keep DOS logical drives inside of DOS partitions, and let FreeBSD have BSD slices inside of BSD partitions. That sounds fair to me.

Well, we already have Midori Linux

[kriegsman]

Well, we already have Transmeta calling their OS Midori Linux -- a blatant reference to Fetish Diva Midori.

Geeks? Perverts? Who'da thought!?!

-Mark

Re:Well, we already have Midori Linux

[mickwd]

"I'm just a sweet Transmeta from Transexual, Transylvania....."

Or something like that.

Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forgive my inability to comprehend nit wit, I mean leet speak. But, I don't get it. What's up with the ^H^H^H stuff?

Re:Huh?

[Jonathan the Nerd]

Control-H (written as ^H) is the backspace character. So, in the example "FreeBSD XP^H^H4.5", imagine the person typing it wrote "FreeBSD XP", then backspaced twice and typed 4.5. It's basically the ASCII equivalent of strikethrough.

Re:Huh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well the real joke is the backspace key is often misconfigured on Unix systems so that it produces a ^H instead of erasing the character. (I think you can still see this on most Linux systems if you run xterm, for example)

Very wrong on XP and primaries.

[NNKK]

Win2k and XP both have no problem with letting you create additional primaries, or for that matter any configuration of partitions that the OS can understand. NT4 may or may not, I don't know.

^H^H^H??

[Anonymous Coward]

For those of us that don't understand nit wit, could some one explain what they mean with the ^H^H^H^H?

Re:^H^H^H??

[Vladinator]

It means Backspace.

Link is bad

[Vladinator]

It takes you back to the earthstation1 homepage...

Re:Link is bad

[Anonymous Coward]

try...
http://www.earthstation1.com/WBCartoonFiles/WB_W av s/its_a_jo.wav

What about the new JDK

[thedarkstorm]

I had thought it was announced that the new Sun Authorized JDK was supposed to be in this release, but I find no information on the readme or the site?

Re:What about the new JDK

[ebcdic]

The FreeBSD Java people now have a licence from Sun, but they have to go through a testing process before they are allowed distribute the system. It wasn't ready in time for 4.5.

For now, you have to download the source from Sun, apply patches, and build it.

Re:What about the new JDK

[Anonymous Coward]

For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Token Ring?

[Penguinoflight]

I hear that some olicom token ring cards are supported in 4.4, do they by any chance have ibmtr in 4.5?

Anyone know...

[Vladinator]

A good way to get it to dual boot the same way Win2k / Linux does? Specifically, one installs Linux and then lilo to it's own partition, uses dd to copy the first 512 bytes off the linux partition (naming it something like linuxboot.bin) and then adds a line to boot.ini like C:\BOOTSECT.LIN="Slackware Linux 8.0". This will cause Win2k to boot Linux, and since I already have that setup that way, I'd like to do the same with FreeBSD - but FreeBSD doesn't use lilo of course... Anyone have any ideas?

Re:Anyone know...

[Anonymous Coward]

it is described in the handbook

you copy /boot/boot0 or /boot/boot1

Re:Anyone know...

[Vladinator]

Excellent. Where is this handbook?

Re:Anyone know...

[Anonymous DWord]

http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html

Re:Anyone know...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to use the NT bootloader then you need to simply copy the /boot/boot1 file to your windows partition (i.e. freebsdboot.bin) and then every thing is similar in boot.ini

Make sure you don't use boot0. There are numerous web pages and email posts saying to use boot0, but they are wrong. boot0 will work sometimes. boot1 is what you want. I just banged my head with this until I found an obscure email in freebsd-hackers that said to use boot1. Worked like magic.

Re:Anyone know...

[Arandir]

You can boot FreeBSD from the NT bootloader, but be careful. There's instructions in the FAQ how to do it. The way the FreeBSD bootloader works, that boot sector needs to be from the root partition, not the MBR. I goofed, didn't read closely enough, and hosed my system.

If you have a choice, just bypass the NT loader alltogether and use Grub, Lilo or the FreeBSD bootloader.

Correction, and supported 3D accellerators.

[Anonymous Coward]

Er, s/non-Windows-friendly/alternative-OS-friendly.

The maintainer/author? of the FreeBSD DRM modules (kernel module drivers for DRI, XFree86 4.x.x's OpenGL accelleration system) has an overview of support, and documentation, at:

http://gladstone.uoregon.edu/~eanholt/dri/

Matrox Gxxx, 3dfx Voodoo3/Voodoo5, and ATI Rage 128 and Radeon are all said to work. Intel i810 integrated video is said to work on Linux but not on FreeBSD; SiS's line of cards is said to be unsupported by anything. ;)

Greatest Of All Time?

[davidhan]

is that what GOAT stands for? Don't call it a comeback.

YEAH RIGHT!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Posting ac becuase these editors are idiots...

I only submitted this a DAY earlier...


2002-01-30 01:10:04 FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE Out.. This time it's true... (bsd,news) (rejected)

BSD Must Die!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux Rules! All others are just getting in the way of the Ultimate System. BeOS is gone. BSD is next. Face up to it and focus only on Linux.

After that, it will be between the Evil Empire and the forces of Good.

Re:BSD Must Die!!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you? 12? 13?

Building a better BSD

[Jordan Hubbard]

The long-awaited release 4.5 is finally here! We have been hard at work providing the features you need to run a fast, stable, and secure system derived from the venerable 4.4BSD. Here are some of my favorite new features in release 4.5:

• New ATAPI driver. Our new ATAPI driver supports UDMA-133 on all major chipsets, and has been tweaked to interact well with the latest DVD-RW and DVD+RW drives. Coupled with a new revision of the soft update code, you can rest assured that your data is safe.
• Better NTFS support. Release 4.5 includes the ability to natively read and write to NTFS 5.0 filesystems, making it easy to retrieve your important files when you upgrade from Windows 2000 or XP.
• Better wireless support. FreeBSD has been updated to support all major 802.11b and 802.11a chipsets. The IEEE spanning bridge kernel module has been updated to fully implement software-based wireless access points - another FreeBSD first.
• POSIX capabilities. The support for least-privilege mechanisms in the kernel has been greatly improved by Roger Watson's recent work. Most binaries that were formerly setuid root now use capabilities instead, which provides a level of local security that has only been dreamt of on other unices.
• Better soft updates. Our soft updates filesystem code has been further improved. Soft updates set the standard for data integrity and performance. Why use a clunky, slow, unstable journaling filesystem like reiserfs when you can use a proven winner instead?
• Improved Linux emulation support. For those of you who prefer the stability of a BSD to the bleeding-edge trainwreck of Linux, this is a way to have your cake and eat it too. We have tested thousands of free and commercial products for Linux, including Netscape, Oracle 9i, and even TuxRacer, and have fixed all known incompatibilities.
• Java support. We now include a native, Free software Java VM and compiler. This removes the last roadblock to the use of FreeBSD in the enterprise.

We hope that you take the time to take release 4.5 out for a spin. If you run into any trouble, please feel free to join our mailing list and ask for help.

/Jordan

Re:Building a better BSD

[deep13]

Thanks for the facts Jordan!

Re:Building a better BSD

[dmelomed]

What a snob this guy is. FreeBSD could learn from ReiserFS, and viceversa. Furthermore, ReiserFS is not clunky, slow, or unstable (this was true a year ago with some versions). This is a type of fuddery you usually see from MS.

Instead of blatent factless FUD, why couldn't Hubbard just simply summarize technical advantages/disadvantages of softupdates and a journaling FS like ReiserFS? I think they just can't admit the fact of some filesystems' superiority (regardless of Linux distributions' duct tape "trainwreck" nature), and the lack of journaling support in *BSD. Softupdates can still lose data where journaling won't. They're unsuitable in situations where data must be written atomically, like SMTP servers. Then they wonder why *BSD has such small commercial backing - snobbery and prima donnas.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Detritus]

YHBT. Idiot.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

........the real Jordan Hubbard is user #3999, http://slashdot.org/~jkh/.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Thornae]

For those of you who missed the (as yet un-modded) AC above, this comment isn't the real Jordan Hubbard, and is thoroughly deserving of any Troll moderations it recieves.

It's a pretty damn good troll, though. Well crafted and subtle.

Native JDK

[ajcpi]

According to the release notes:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/relnotes-i3 86 .html:


2.3.2 Ports/Packages Collection
Due to delays in the certification process, native JDK support for FreeBSD will be released shortly after 4.5-RELEASE. An announcement will be made on the FreeBSD Web site, as well as the FreeBSD announcements mailing list , when the distribution is available.

I don't get it....

[deep13]

How is XP anything like freebsd 4.5? Are you so blinded by the "superiority" of linux that you see all non-linux operating systems as the same "enemy"? Is that the joke... you?

Re:I don't get it....

[panthro]

Who ever said XP was the enemy? I don't like using it. I also don't like using the philips screwdriver on my Swiss Army knife. But if someone called my favorite OS a philips I don't think I'd have a cow.

Re:I don't get it....

[Juln]

Well, one similarity I see is FReBSD is where MS rips their TCP stack from and who knows what else. In fact, I bet huge chunks of the OS have been based on or ripped from FreeBSD - everytime MS starts a project, they look to buy something already in progress, or even better, base it on a free set of code they don't even have to pay for.
Yes, the tcp stack in Win 95, 98, 2000, and ME came from FreeBSD - Fyodor of nmap fame notes in http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nma
p-fingerprinting-article.html :
TCP Initial Window (... ) This test actually gives us a lot of information, since some operating systems can be uniquely identified by the window alone (for example, AIX is the only OS I have seen which uses 0x3F25). In their "completely rewritten" TCP stack for NT5 [Windows 2000], Microsoft uses 0x402E. Interestingly, that is exactly the number used by OpenBSD and FreeBSD."

So, not only are they using ther freebsd tcp stack (already no secret), but they didn't 'completely rewrite' it as claimed, of course.
And thats how FreeBSD is related to Win Xp, because WinXp probably includes a lot of it.
Incidentally, this is also why Bill Gates 'likes' the FreeBSD license... and doesn't like the GPL at all...

Re:I don't get it....

[Anonymous Coward]

You have to understand though. Most recent FreeBSD converts such as deep13 switched from Linux because it got too mainstream for their 'l33tx0r tastes. That's why they have such a hair-trigger about Linux, even when it wasn't mentioned. Observe:

Nik: New FreeBSD out! yay!
incoherent advocate: No way man, Linux sux0rz! FreeBSD forever! I've been running it since 1976, unlike you Linux l00zerz.

Re:I don't get it....

[deep13]

WRONG!... FreeBSD was my first unix variant. ver 2.2.6 to be exact. I'm not l337... trust me on that one... just a part-time perl/web monkey.
I've used Linux and liked it but it simply was not as stable as FreeBSD as a server OS. We rolled redhat out a former employer (www.webhelp.com - feel free to DOS them). But for one reason or another every server eventually got reinstalled with FreeBSD.
We just got sick of bi-weekly kernel updates and bug fixes. Plus the ports collection kicks arse... much easier than rooting in rpmfind.net for dependancies!

Re:I don't get it....

[deep13]

the REAL source of my hair-trigger is all the *BSD is dying posts... is there a BOT or something posting that crap?... it's like the same message posted over and over again and it's really annoying.
I don't hate linux, I just like FreeBSD better. At least we have a choice, right?

Re:I don't get it....

[minus9]

My advice to anyone sick of bi-weekly kernel updates is don't update your kernel bi-weekly. The kernel police hardly ever come round to check you're using the latest verion.

Re:I don't get it....

[deep13]

yadda yadda yadda. wipe the foam from your mouth

Re:I don't get it....

[Anonymous Coward]

You're the one who comes off as the foaming-at-the-mouth lunatic however...

Re:I don't get it....

[deep13]

$me != "having a cow"

I just don't appreciate my favorite OS being compared to or even mentioned in the same breath as XP.

Re:I don't get it....

[deep13]

So what? MS appropriated some public domain source code and used it in their OS. Isn't the BSD license great.... you could do it too! Sure, go ahead... D/L BSD and build your own firewall, resell it and make millions. don't you wish you could do that with the GPL?

Already running it...

[erat]

I was running 4.3 until last night, when for some odd reason I decided to upgrade to 4.4. I ran cvsup manually to make sure I had the latest sources, ran "make world", then this morning I compiled a new kernel and rebooted.

Whaddaya know, it booted up as "4.5-STABLE" instead of "4.4-STABLE". Talk about pleasant surprises... I guess if I read my email before rebooting I would have known.

leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[hawk]

Some half-wit tags Jordan Hubbard with "troll" while explaining FreeBSD . . . next he can proceed to alt.folklore.computers and try to correct Dennis Ritchie on unix history (happened a week or two ago), accusePeter Seebach of not understanding basic C (happens fairly regularly).

At least there we get to have a little fun with it (find the Seebach/Crispin flamewar at dejanews [search for "popcorn" in title]), but not here.

Coldn't we add "funny" to fair and unfair for meta-moderation categories?

While we're add it, let's add "-1, twit" as a moderation option, as well as "-1, just plain wrong" . . .

hawk

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[Detritus]

Take the hook out of your mouth before you speak.

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[akharon]

I would have nailed him as a troll too. The real Jordan Hubbard is known as jkh, and has a uid of 3999. Anyone who impersonates someone else like this, whether they do it for good or bad, should be modded down.

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[hawk]

oh :)
in that case . . .

Still, though, I've seen other moderations that were funny.

hawk

What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see in freeBSD...

1. Fast boot ups
2. Ease of use
3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)
4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, gnome, something standard)
5. One tool for window manager configuration
6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals
7. One tool for system administration (printers, servers, security, user administration, updates,etc)

I know we all want options. I believe if we have no standards for window managers and such it will hold freebsd from moving forward at the speed I would like it to.

In my option freeBSD is the best server OS out. I think taking these options into consideration would help move a lot of people to freebsd or at least give it a try.

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[jo42]

No! Not another forking Linux!!

If you want all of that cr*p, get RedHat, Mandrake or Windows XP, but leave FreeBSD alone. I prefer a nice, tight & neat core OS that I can then add to as I want. You ever try to install a minimal RedHat or Mandrake? If I'm running a web/e-mail server, what the fork do I need TeX, GNOME, KDE and close to a 1GB of cr*p on it for?

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Lazaru5]

1. Fast boot ups

Boots as fast as Linux and faster than Windows.

2. Ease of use

It's as easy to use as any Unix. Get over it.

3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)

I don't know what you're talking about here. The GENERIC kernel, which is the one installed has support for all network cards already. A modem is just a serial device and doesn't need 'drivers'. All your typical PC hardware is also supported in GENERIC. That's why it's called 'GENERIC'.

4. One standard/exclusive window manager

This isn't a FreeBSD issue but a Unix/X one. It's the same situation on Linux.

5. One tool for window manager configuration.

If you mean to choose between wm's then this would seem to conflict with #4. If you mean to configure options for which ever wm you use, this already exists. GNOME and KDE (which are desktop environments more than window managers. GNOME runs on top of WindowMaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment, etc....), WindowMaker, etc all have their own window manager config tools.

And, like #4, this isn't a FreeBSD issue. Talk to your local window manager development team. Or hell, do it yourself.

6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals.

CVS baby (at least for the first part.) FreeBSD isn't a package based system so with the exception of 3rd party software (via Packages or the Ports Collection) What You See Is What You Get. You add and remove drivers by either recompiling your kernel or removing kernel modules that you've added. (In fact, build a very slim kernel and you can do nearly all via modules.)

As for 3rd party Packages that you've installed (Installed Ports essentially become registered Packages. In fact Packages are themselves made from Ports via 'make package' in /usr/ports/foo/bar.) You use the pkg_* tools. Ok, so it's not one single 'pkg_tool' command that does it all, but is it really that difficult to type 'pkg_delete' as opposed to 'pkg_add'?

7. One tool for system administration

Several such tools exist. Myself, I like vi(m).

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

You just couldn't possibly admit that there's ANY shortcoming in BSD or that there's ANY room for improvement, could you? Tsk tsk, how shortsighted.

That's the problem with too many people on this board. Their narrow vision limits them greatly and they come off as "fanatics" by vehemently defending whatever it is they love, even if logic dictates that there's a flaw in it somewhere.

Face it, BSD's config process could use some tweaking, so could Linux's, and so could Windows'.

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Lazaru5]

Certainly I could. There was nothing in my responses that was the least bit fanatical. I also wasn't defending anything or being apologetic in any way. Logic was present in every response.

#1. Sure, instant boot would be great.

#2. FreeBSD is as easy a Unix as any. This is not a biased or narrow view. I know full well that Unix isn't terribly user-friendly. I don't have to put a disclaimer in every single comment to cover my ass just so I don't offend ACs such as yourself.

#3. The question itself indicated an unfamiliarity with FreeBSD's support for hardware. Since no setup for specific hardware is actually required for installs. The context of the question implied this. This type of question often comes up when users do new installs because of the visual Kernel Config (boot -c followed by 'visual' at the config prompt will get you back into it on a running system) which would LOGICally fit within this context. The inexperienced new user is often confused by this screen and proceeds to deactivate every device they think they don't need. In fact, this screen can be skipped completely. The 'conflicts' indicated at the top are not real but only those that _could_ exist if you actually _had_ every device that was listed. If you skip it (I always do), the kernel automatically probes for everything (which I believe is what was asked for?). That (like I originally said) is what GENERIC is for. There's no chance that there'd be 'no drivers for hardware' because they already exist. Removing items from this 'setup interface' is actually the opposite of #3's request.

Of course LOGIC is not perfect. I could just have misunderstood #3, but that's only human, and not not a symptom of narrow visions or fanatiscism.

#4 and #5. Too obvious.

#6 also demonstrates some misunderstandings on the part of the poster. My answer is factual.

#7. There _ARE_ several such applications. There was a company with one at BSDCon 2000 but it's name escapes me. I suppose I could go out of my way and look it up (or find the sample CD I got) but then, so could you.

Of course, I don't know that it was you, but the tone of your response would indicate that it was. That, or you're just another fanatic with a narrow vision who sees evil and conspiracy where none exist. You have erred.

If I actually read comments on many Linux stories and saw an equally misinformed comment I would respond in kind in much the same way I did this one. My goal was only to inform the uninformed, nothing more. You should learn to relax.

What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see in freeBSD...

1. Fast boot ups
2. Ease of use
3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)
4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, gnome, something standard)
5. One tool for window manager configuration
6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals
7. One tool for system administration (printers, servers, security, user administration, updates,etc)

I know we all want options. I believe if we have no standards for window managers and such it will hold freebsd from moving forward at the speed I would like it to.

In my option freeBSD is the best server OS out. I think taking these options into consideration would help move a lot of people to freebsd or at least give it a try.

Licences

[DrSpin]

On my very own license benchmark, written in a mixture of bwBasic and perl 3.2, I made the following measurements

---------------- Min --- Max --- Mean
BSD Licence ---- 29 --- 30 --- 29.5
GPL ------------ 2 --- 169 -- 15
MS EULA -------- 1 --- 3 --- 2

all meaurements in BogoMegaLops

I have no idea what this means, but I am sure its a good idea.

Realistically, Only the BSD licence allows you to kill babies and make money with software. (Or was that make babies and kill money?) The others require hardware.

Re:Licences

[Anonymous Coward]

Smaller numbers are better...

install

[hawk]

You'd need at least the two floppies to bring the machine far enough to use tools like cvs.

I generally install from the three disks (there's an optional fixit.flp with lots of programs on it) by choosing an absolute minimal configuration, installing the cvsup package, then "make update" in /usr/src to get an up to the minute system.

hawk

If only...

[Anonymous Coward]

::Begin Dream::
(Insert blur/zoom/flashback effects)

bash# apt-get update

bash# apt-get install freebsd

::End Dream::

better yet . . .

[hawk]

download the three floppies, boot, and download everythign . . .

hawk

Crack pipe hit again

[Anonymous Coward]

If this same content were applied to Linux this message would get a -1:Troll. 5:Funny for such a stupid message is a clear signal that the crack pipe is being more than abused

Re:bleeding-edge trainwreck of Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Why is this not modded troll? This guy is obviously being an asshole.

"Why use a clunky, slow, unstable journaling filesystem like reiserfs "

and of course the "For those of you who prefer the stability of a BSD to the bleeding-edge trainwreck of Linux" comment

How about next time a linux kernel comes out, I post saying here are the changes and Oh BTW BSD's kernel sucks ass.

Will you mod me a 5, cause that is what you just did for him.

How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

You go fuck yourself :-)

Fucking jealous BSD Troll.

Have fun with your .0005% market share.

Maybe someday when your OS grows up it can earn a fraction of the market and popularity Linux has.

Loser.

Re:How about...

[Anonymous Coward]

You go fuck yourself :-)
Fucking jealous BSD Troll.
Have fun with your .0005% market share.
Maybe someday when your OS grows up it can earn a fraction of the market and popularity Linux has.
Loser.

Hey, AC! Listen to yourself. When has marketshare been an indicator for better? Think before opening your cake hole in future.

-- Penguin Kicka

TCP/IP improvements

[Anonymous Coward]

When will they be rolled into windows?

What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see in freeBSD...

1. Fast boot ups
2. Ease of use
3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)
4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, gnome, something standard)
5. One tool for window manager configuration
6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals
7. One tool for system administration (printers, servers, security, user administration, updates,etc)

I know we all want options. I believe if we have no standards for window managers and such it will hold freebsd from moving forward at the speed I would like it to.

In my option freeBSD is the best server OS out. I think taking these options into consideration would help move a lot of people to freebsd or at least give it a try.

+4 Informative?

[Anonymous Coward]

The power of name recognition is undeniable. Kind of like how all of the k5 readers consistently moderate Rusty's comments to 5.00.

Sad part is the troll is mostly right

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is good but in an area where stability and guaranteed performance counts BSD is where its at. Linux definitely has better support and a larger base of users and more cutting edge features but this comes at a cost. As for soft updates and UFS, to a large extent it is better than reiserFS, but XFS is equal or better. Generally soft updates and XFS feel more mature than reiser which still has rough edges.

Re:Insightful?!?!?!

[Mayflower]

Whomever is moderating this topic is being
really dumb. Slashdot should keep track of
his IP address and auto-moderate his posts to "-5:Ignorant".

Jordan's new account

[Roger Watson]

Jordan Hubbard, founder of the FreeBSD project, has asked me to post here to inform you all that he is indeed the original poster, and that he will no longer be using the "jkh" account. If you have any questions, please feel free to email us at our @freebsd.org addresses.

--rwatson

Even better TCP/IP performance?

[Sivar]

FreeBSD has long been one of the top performers--if not THE top performer--in TCP/IP. How they made a substantial improvement to code that has been maturing longer than the networking code for any other OS in common use today is amazing.
Can you imagine how skilled and bored the developers much be?

Unfortunately,it will take about 2 weeks for my 4.5CD to arrive, but all good things are worth the wait.

Speaking of Etch-a-Sketchs

[infinii]

About the time when Palm Pilots were taking off. Every manager and anyone important enough in our company started using them. Every meeting consisted of higher ups scribbling away on their Palms or reading email, avant-go, etc.

Well as a joke, I borrowed an etch-a-sketch and in the middle of a meeting. I pulled it out of my briefcase with the straightest face I could put on. Ignoring everyone, I started scribbling with it and the meeting just fell apart from there. The person speaking tried to ignore it and contine but the laughter from the rest was overwhelming.

Re:Speaking of Etch-a-Sketchs

[finity]

That's really funny! I did something similar involving a banana (instead of a cell phone) in the middle of a class one time.

Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Hurrah for FreeBSD 4.5, the best release of
FreeBSD ever. I've been running the release
candidates just fine for months. This is really
the nail in the coffin for Linux.

Re:Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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.

Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

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

Re:Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't fool yourself. Ask yourself: Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

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.

Re:Linux is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it worthwile for me to try FreeBSD now?

No. Here is why:

The 'Ports' system. Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little or no flexibility in regards to how packages are built, and has a nasty habit of installing unecassary dependencies. For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree. Notice how it insists on installing XFree86. You can't pass it any configure script options like --without-xfree or ---don't build-retarded-gui. Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you usually just wind up downloading the tarball and compiling it yourself, which seems to defeat the purpouse of a Ports/Package Managment system entierly.

Hardware support. Good luck getting hardware-accelerated OpenGL working on your GeForce2, or most other cards for that matter. Not that you would have anything to do with it if you did, save for perhaps have a nifty screensaver to look at. Don't even get me started on the terrible support for most high-performace sound cards/RAID Adapters and Gigabit ethernet adapters.

FreeBSD is a lousy server. Another myth of FreeBSD is its performance as a server. First, look at the terrible SMP performace compared to Linux, any commercial UNIX, or even Windows NT/2k/XP. Sure, this is supposed to be addressed once 5.0 comes out, but as it stands, FreeBSD SMP performance simply sucks. Lets also take a look at FreeBSDs security. FreeBSD zealots often like to rant about the superior security of FreeBSD compared to Linux or even comercial Unixes, however in reality the security of FreeBSD is little better than the aformentioned systems, (just take a look at the recent telnetd and ptrace() holes) and the CVS development system of FreeBSD is far more prone to security holes inadvertently working thier way into the code base than, say, Linux.

Worthless documentation. The majority of the documentation contained on the FreeBSD website is completley outdated, much of it dating back from the 3.x days. Also, it seems that no one bothered to alter most of the manpages since they were taken from the old 4.4 BSDlite. Take a look at the exports page. Notice how it tells you that you can authenticate an NFS exported filesystem by specifying the NFSKERB option in your kernel configuration. Now try that. Notice how it dosen't work. This is because that feature was present in 4.4 BSD, but no one bothered to update the manpage since it was ported to FreeBSD.

All of these points are indicative of a dying project. Fact: FreeBSD has failed

Warning! Parent is Offtopic!

[Anonymous Coward]

This post has nothing to do with the BSD 4.5 Release. Mods, you know where these Offtopic trolls belong...

Re:Warning! Parent is Offtopic!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yah, thanks for the tip. Very observant of you. Not like I was actually going for a +5 informative(??!) - just letting those who surf above 1 know that the post was a fake, which hardly rates being called a troll. However, seeing as the parent's been modded into oblivion, there's really no point in it still being up there.

Oh for a <retract comment> function.

Ah well. Since this is even more offtopic, I'm posting AC.

Yet your dream is a pale clone of the REAL

[Anonymous Coward]

su
cd /usr/src
make update
make world

Debian is just a follower. BSD leads!

OFFTOPIC!

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent is Offtopic, Moderators, you know what to do!

FreeBSD 5

[Fweeky]

I don't usually reply to trolls, but I haven't got anything better to do that I cba doing atm :P

> Well, what the hell do expect from an obsolete,
> ancient code base which is developed in a
> closed fashion?

Linus and friends approves patches to the kernel, does that make it's development model closed?

Having the core team approve commits to the base OS is no different to any other open source project, and just serves to keep the base system as high quality as possible.

As for old, since when has maturity been a bad thing for Unix?

> (Yeah, it "supports" SMP. As in, when one CPU
> is running, the other is locked idle. And vice-
> versa.

FreeBSD's current SMP support scales poorly because the kernel is based around a "Giant" lock, which prevents multiple CPU's from entering most of the kernel at the same time. However, except on systems where the kernel itself is heavily loaded, and/or on systems with lots of CPU's (4 or more), it's not a major problem.

FreeBSD 5, due out at the end of the year, will have Giant mostly removed, as well as things like kernel preemption and advanced userland threading. It'll scale as well as if not better than Linux.

It'll also have a new startup system based on NetBSD's (have a look at it, it's pretty cool - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/basesrc/etc/ ?cvsroot=netbsd), much improved random data generation, and a lot of other things that'll only really interest geeks.

Linux XP

[Anonymous Coward]

With Miguel's work on .NET for Linux, one should
more rightfully call Linux, Linux XP.

yay bsd

[syrinx]

I bought a CD burner the other day (finally joining the modern computer era, I guess). First CD I burnt was a 4.4-RELEASE install disc. Wiped out my router/firewall/etc (which was running 4.3) and reinstalled 4.4 from scratch (needed to redo partitions).

Time to do some CVSupping now, I guess. :)

OT: Why the 'Intel Pro100S' NIC?

[Nonesuch]

May I ask why you selected the Intel Pro100S for the ethernet cards for your BSD firewall?

I've got a couple of them pulled from some old Dell servers, just wondering if they are anything special... TIA.

Re:OT: Why the 'Intel Pro100S' NIC?

[megabeck42]

In my humble quest to see why Realtek 8139C cards were $10ea, invididually, and some people still charge real money for Intel, 3Com, and Adaptec (starfire) boards, I found that some of the more quality boards had bigger buffers, and more features.

But, not meaning to knock cheap chipsets, the C-Media 8738, the heart of most $30 5.1 soundcards, has a better SPDIF implementation than the SB Live (the C-Media can generate different clock signals, rather than resampling all output to 48khz. This is a big deal, when most streams are 44.1khz) The Midiman 2448, a professional quality Coax and Optical SPDIF card - is just a C-Media 8738, with a $200 pricetag. The Midiman 2496, btw, is just a card with an Envy24 chipset.

So, yeah, I don't have the facts to back it up - but, I know that the 100 meg interfaces in the Cisco firewall products are Intel i82559s. (Open up a PIX 515 sometime - how's that for a $7,000 pent 200?)

Yeah, Intel Nics are better than realteks.

Re:OT: Why the 'Intel Pro100S' NIC?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Intel 100S allows you to offload a bunch of processing to the hardware. The trick is that your drivers have to support it, and the Intel NIC department isn't very good about releasing specs. So odds are, there's no advantage on Linux or FreeBSD, but I can't say for sure. Search the linux-kernel list for "zero copy" for more info.

FreeBSD Ports

[Fweeky]

> Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is
> a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little
> or no flexibility in regards to how packages
> are built,

Most ports include all the options you need as make defines. If you need more, you can copy the makefile and edit it to your hearts content, and maybe type "send-pr" and submit a patch. Or you can just compile from bog standard source and have the rest of the ports tree use it because they look for libs, binaries and executables, not packages.

> and has a nasty habit of installing
> unecassary dependencies.

Such as? It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Debian, where the entire packages system is so complex and interdependent that it needs to go through years of testing before a release is concidered stable.

> For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a
> non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree.
> Notice how it insists on installing XFree86.

It used to want TK, which would want the XFree libs. That's no longer the case.

> You can't pass it any configure script options > like --without-xfree or ---don't build-
> retarded-gui.

For most people flags like -DWITHOUT_X11 etc are good enough. Otherwise scratch your itch and send-pr.

> Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you
> usually just wind up downloading the tarball
> and compiling it yourself, which seems to
> defeat the purpouse of a Ports/ Package
> Managment system entierly.

Making your own ports is trivial, pr's usually get resolved in a couple of days, and installing from source interacts with the ports system far better than any RPM/DEB system I've seen.

Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while. Sure, it's nowhere near perfect, but what is? Certainly not a binary package system with fragile dep issues and completely unaudited sources.

Re:FreeBSD Ports

[Lazaru5]

"Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while."

Sounds more like he never really tried it in the first place. Being able to customize Ports behavior has been a feature for nearly as long as the system has existed.

He just never bothered to learn it. There's no harm there of course, but then he's not allowed to bitch and moan afterwards.

Re:FreeBSD Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Being able to customize Ports behavior has been a feature for nearly as long as the system has existed.

Oh, gee, what a wonderful feature to add. I wish I could do that with source.

Re:FreeBSD Ports

[Lazaru5]

Are you referring to ./configure && make install? Wow, I never knew you could do that before. I wish I could change environment variables and install paths in the Makefiles myself.

Wait, or what if I could just type a 5 line gcc command?

I heard there's this low-level ASSembly thing-a-ma-jig so you wouldn't even have to do that.

What I _really_ wish for is a microscopic magnet so I could just twiddle the bits on the disk myself. That would rawk!.

You're so smart, I think you're really onto something here.

In other words, your sarcasm has not gone unnoticed. Of course you can customize software at compile time when building something manually. That, however, wasn't what the parent of my comment was talking about. They thought Ports were unflexible when the opposite is true.

Read this!

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, I'm not trying to flame you here but there's no point in asking anyone else whether you should try it or not. No one (but yourself) knows what your personal tastes are and can't say for sure whether you will enjoy using [insert random operating system]. The only way to know for sure is if you give it a shot yourself since you're curious, especially since it's free software.. you can't lose.

Please read, re-read and then read the FreeBSD handbook. It answers a lot of questions including the one you just asked, here is the installation section (complete with screenshots).

Personally I wouldn't go this route

[Anonymous Coward]

I would use the FreeBSD bootloader instead, you will get that option during the installtion process, look here for details.

I disagree with the installation remark

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think the OpenBSD installation process is intimidating at all, in fact it's probably one of the easiest/straightforward around.

Being a complete newbie to BSD (and linux too).. I installed OpenBSD 2.6 without a problem a couple years ago. Ofcourse I made good use of the resources available, I printed the entire FAQ, read it for 2-3 days at work and when it came time to start installing, I made sure I had this handy.

The only way I think it can look intimidating is if you dive into it not knowing what to expect and not planning on doing any reading. In fact, I'm spoilt after using the OpenBSD installer.. I wish FreeBSD had a text-only install too, navigating through sysinstall's menus can be a pain sometimes.

Re:I disagree with the installation remark

[Nonesuch]

AC Writes:

Being a complete newbie to BSD (and linux too).. I installed OpenBSD 2.6 without a problem a couple years ago. Ofcourse I made good use of the resources available, I printed the entire FAQ [openbsd.org], read it for 2-3 days at work and when it came time to start installing, I made sure I had this [openbsd.org] handy.

The only way I think it can look intimidating is if you dive into it not knowing what to expect and not planning on doing any reading.

I had built many SVR4 systems and a half dozen NetBSD/FreeBSD servers before I tried my first OpenBSD installation, and the first time doing the hand-entry of filesystems/partitions to get OpenBSD up was not fun.

In fact, I'm spoilt after using the OpenBSD installer.. I wish FreeBSD had a text-only install too, navigating through sysinstall's menus can be a pain sometimes.

Agreed. I do a lot of installs of OpenBSD on Sparc with just a serial console, and not needing to worry about terminal types and cursor key settings or alternate keys is handy.

One thing I really like about the Solaris 8 installer is they've gone back to the pure command line, no more 'Press F1 to continue`.

Not only is a command line a lot faster at low baud rates than a full-screen TUI, but the scrollback history is of infinite value to figure out where you went wrong when things start to go all wahoonie-shaped.

improvements by Matt Dillon

[glwtta]

is there also hot Neve Campbell on Denise Richards TCP/IP action? then it really might be time to switch...

Delete the ports collection and reinstall it!

[MavEtJu]

From the release notes:

The directory layout preference algorithm for FFS (dirprefs) has been changed. Rather than scattering directory blocks across a disk, it attempts to group related directory blocks together. Operations traversing large directory hierarchies, such as the FreeBSD Ports tree, have shown marked speedups. This change is transparent and automatic for new directories.

Automaticly for new directories. Better delete the ports collection and reinstall it!

BY YOUR OLD BUDDY PACHELL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.

An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.

Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).

The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.

Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".

The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.

I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.

Re:BY YOUR OLD BUDDY PACHELL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Why wasn't this modded to Flamebait?

I don't know where the author gets his information. I perform little maintenance on my Linux machines, and I haven't had any major problems with the system... ever.

I cohosted one of my servers at the ISP I worked at for 4 years. I ran my box continuously as a game server for over 2 years without any crashes ( building power went out and the battery backup went out around day 720 something ). Slackware 3.5 with a 2.0.29 kernel (if I recall correctly ) .

As for "Low Performance" tools that "Mangle Data" I never had any problem with Quake statistics, traffic statistics (MRTG) or any other tool I've used (nor have the tools I've had to write been slow). I also think that many of the system messages I've seen on the OS are entertaining AND informative. One of the reasons I enjoy the system is because I don't get error messages like "EXCEPTION ERROR 0X0243252342 AT 0253:4352134123, PROGRAM ABORT", Frankly, I'd rather see "OOPS! I Didn't get the allocated Memory I asked for. [Line 200 for the programmer]" At least at that point I have an idea of what went on without having to spend 3 hours looking up registers and memory location in dump files.

File system unreliability? I can't speak much to filesystem formats or error recovery, but I can tell you one thing: Don't rely on data recovery. Thats why you get a tape backup and backup (and TEST) frequently. I'd rather not have to explain to my boss while all of the 4th quarter budget plans went "Poof!". On the other hand, Didn't IBM port their major Journaling File System to Linux?

Steep Learning Curve? It took me 30 minutes to setup and use my first Linux box (a Redhat distro, somewhere along the lines of 3.x... I still have my RedHat 4.2 CD I got a year or so later) I didn't have any major problems, but maybe that was because I was surrounded with plenty of people who used Linux everyday.

Maybe the author has a point, afterall isn't Windows NT a testament to "high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards"?Not to mention the ease of support, low learning curve (is THAT why there are so many MCSEs?)...

GNL Debian/NetBSD (GNU's Not Linux)

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to replace all my Linux boxes now with FreeBSD. I'm tired of all the patches that patch the already patched patches. New kernel every other week. I just finished downloading one kernel and now a new one is out. Besides, I'm tired of the instability development only level of Linux, the kernel.
Too much hype, redhat is just like MS in the Linux world.
I wouldn't mind seeing GNL Debian/NetBSD move along quicker. GNL - GNU's Not Linux. Who needs Linus's kernel anyways? That's all it is after all! A kernel and nothing more! I think Debian is making a great move here. I'm tired of sloppy code, unstable, insecure kernels from Linus. *BSD all the way now!

Re:GNL Debian/NetBSD (GNU's Not Linux)

[someonehasmyname]

Exactly what I said to myself about a year ago.. I've been using BSD since, and haven't looked back!

Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[ewhac]

I have FreeBSD 4.3 on a little x86 pizzabox that will eventually become my firewall and Web server. I'd like to upgrade to 4.5. Everyone I meet says, "just run cvsup and recompile the world."

Er, uh... Well, first of all, cvsup doesn't appear to be installed by default (why the heck not if it's so integral to keeping the system up to date?). Second, "recompiling the world" seems like a fairly drastic and space-hungry step, particularly since I installed binary packages in the first place (and presuming that actual recompilation is involved). And third, all the docs I could find on FreeBSD.org are rather thin (and even way out of date) on this process.

Is there a HOWTO or a step-by-step tutorial for FreeBSD newbies to become conversant with cvsup, the ports tree, and upgrading packages?

Schwab

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[ctucker]

I'll take a crack at helping... First thing you want to do is install cvsup, so su to root, then cd /usr/ports/net/cvsup, then make install clean

Next, here's my cvsup script (which I have run via cron every Thursday):

su-2.05# more `which cvsupLatest`
#!/bin/sh
sed -e 's/CHANGE_THIS/cvsup9/g' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile > /tmp/stable-supfile && /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g /tmp/stable-supfile
rm /tmp/stable-supfile
#rm -rf /usr/ports/www/jakarta-tomcat/
sed -e 's/CHANGE_THIS/cvsup9/g' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile > /tmp/ports-supfile && /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g /tmp/ports-supfile
rm /tmp/ports-supfile

Running this will update the sources and ports in one go. Finally, I usually use the following to do the whole build world mess in one quick script (change REDRACER to the name of your kernel configuration file):

su-2.05# more `which makeworld`
#!/usr/local/bin/bash
(cd /usr/src/ && make -Bj 4 world && cd /usr/src/ && make -Bj 4 buildkernel KERNCONF=REDRACER && make -Bj 4 installkernel KERNCONF=REDRACER) >& /usr/src/makeworld.log &

Unfortunately, I've only given you a fish, not taught you how to fish, but it really just takes a little poking around to figure out what you need to do. Look at the handbook, especially chapter 9. Rebuilding world and kernel is less space-hungry than you might think, it seems to take more time than anything. Another good source of advice is the newsgroup comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[Lazaru5]

cvsup isn't installed by default because to build it from source requires Modula-3 and X libs, neither of which are part of FreeBSD and Modula-3 is fucking HUGE and would add upwards of 30 minutes to the world build time for Modula-3 and cvsup.

'make world' sounds scarier than it is, mostly for mythical religious reasons. It's not space hungry at all really. A full /usr/src is about 250M which you're likely to have anyway and /usr/obj (where the object files are during a make world) also gets to about 500M.

The fact that you installed binary packages is not relevant to building the world. FreeBSD is not a package based system (ala RPM, Deb, etc) and thus no portion of the OS itself is installed via a Package. 'make world' refers to rebuilding FreeBSD, not any 3rd party packages you installed so you wouldn't have to worry about them.

Freebsd.org/handbook is anything but thin on the process, and it's most CERTAINLY not out of date as it was updated to 4.4-RELEASE and 5.0-CURRENT for the recent 2nd Edition hardcopy publication (www.freebsdmall.com) handbook/makeworld.html has full step-by-step directions.

If you want to understand ports, the best source aside from the Handbook is 'man ports'. There's a man page for nearly everything in FreeBSD. You'd be surprised. Since Packages are just pre-compiled ports, they fall under the realm of the 'portupgrade' and pkg_* utilities. This is academic of course because there's no need to rebuild your packages after a make world unless you just happen to want newer versions of those packages (should new ones be available.)

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[Anonymous Coward]

You can install cvsup from sysinstall. Just go to /stand/sysinstall and then to the post-install configuration section and finally the net section under installing pre-configured software for FreeBSD. Sysinstall will take care of everything for you. The next thing you need to do is read the Handbook entries on Cvsup and make world. They are well done and easy to understand. If you have any other questions the people in #freebsdhelp on efnet are generally friendly.

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO? Yes

[Anonymous Coward]

Check out "updating Sources with CVSup at
http://www.mostgraveconcern.com/freebsd/

Install cvsup from the packages (/stand/sysinstall)

...Michael...

FreeBSD 4.5 systems

[Anonymous Coward]

Imagine a Beowolf Cluster of THESE!!!

Be sure to point out RedHat 7.2

[Anonymous Coward]

Note how RedHat 7.2, one of the 'improvements' is EXT3FS.

Now read the manual. Note how they DO NOT tell you how to make a EXT3FS, unless you do it during system setup.

Then, go read the man page on fs. Note how it was last updated in 1995.

Market the big EXT3FS improvement, then provide no documentation on how to invoke it.

Isn't Matt Dillon...

[n08ody]

that guy who came out on something about mary?

I guess open source software is useful enought for these Hollywood types.

Agree with your flamebait

[GCP]

I think C# takes the best of Java and adds a lot of goodies that many of us appreciate. Implementing C# for BSD or Linux is a matter of implementing an ECMA standard, just like ECMAScript (and unlike Java). I'd love to have a C# for GCC.

I'm not sure how much of .Net is going to be standardized, though, so it may have to be cloned. I hope that happens because I really like what I see of .Net and I REALLY don't want to use a Windows server.

Re:Agree with your flamebait

[__past__]

I'm not sure how much of .Net is going to be standardized

According to MS (grain of salt etc.), everything except WinForms and ADODB.NET.

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD?

[space_dude]

>1. Fast boot ups

It allready boots up faster then either linux or windows

>2. Ease of use

It all depends on what you define as "Ease of Use" it's pretty easy to use for me.

>3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC >hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for
>hardware install modem or NIC and download

Well lets not turn it into another Windows or RedHat

>drivers via cvsup and complete setup using >xserver)

Well the purpose of the FreeBSD group is to make a good and stable OS, not to make it pretty

>4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, >gnome, something standard)

That's not FreeBSD's fault, yes X and window managers are bundled with FreeBSD but they are technically not part of the OS (FreeBSD team doesn't write/support X/KDE/etc.. code)

>6. One tool for driver/software tracking and >installation/removals
>7. One tool for system administration (printers, >servers, security, user administration, >updates,etc)

I'd rather see a 3rd party do that and let FreeBSD
programmers wory about more important things.

Silly Title

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm quite upset by the comparison of FreeBSD to some silly pseudo OS with the letters XP in its name. Such a comparison demonstrates an unfathomable amount of ignorance.

For example, one could easily compare FreeBSD to Mac OS X. There has been a mutually beneficial, ongoing relationship between Apple and the FreeBSD project.

Use Linux

[Higher Authority]

There is no actual text in this response, it's all in the subject line. Ignore what's written here, unless you won't mark this as a flame.

<flame style="likely-offensive">

Let's analyze the facts.

1. Fast boot ups are already here. Oh, I'm sorry, is under 30s not fast enough for you?

2. Ease of use - c'mon. The interface is practically the same in all Unix operating systems, a command line and ... viola. What more could you want? (X, I know, that can be installed via *ding ding* the CLI!

3. There's not much wrong with the setup interface, except maybe it should spit out an estimated install size? That's about all I can think of right now. That and upgrading the X config stuff for 4.1, which is not really a big deal.

4. ONE EXCLUSIVE WM? Think about that one for a minute. That works completely against the point of alternative operating systems.

5. Okay, Linus.

6. Okay, Bill.

7. Okay, Gore.

Conclusion: You need help.

</flame>

"BSD is dying" is dying!

[Gordonjcp]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying.

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently IDC confirmed that "*BSD is dying" trolls account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all posters. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that "*BSD is dying" trolls have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict their future. The hand writing is on the wall: "*BSD is dying" trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for them because "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad.

All major surveys show that "*BSD is dying" trolls have steadily declined in market share. They are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If they are to survive at all it will be among the "hot grits" dabblers. "*BSD is dying" trolling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, it is dead.

Fact: "*BSD is dying" trolling is dead