Overview of the BSDs

zeekiorage writes "A good informative article about the various BSD OSs, their legacy, philosophy and importance on the ExtremeTech web site. Excerpt from the article: 'Nowadays, the term 'The BSDs' refers to the family of operating systems which were derived, to a greater or lesser extent, from BSD. The five best known BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin (which serves as the foundation for Apple's MacOS X). But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.'"

Comments

BSD

[glamslam]

I've always wondered why Linux gets the mainstream press and BSD is not well known. Is it the licence???

Re:BSD

[Krow10]

Blockquoth the poster:

Linux had timing. BSD has been around much longer, and its much more mature than Linux. Linux has GREAT marketing, BSD has (basically) none.

Its not about the technology, but about the marketing, the timing, and the media's embrace.

It is true that linux had timing, but it predates the tech boom era by a few years. Back in the day (early '90s,) linux could be downloaded anonymously without making any promises to anyone. There were still concerns regarding AT&T code in BSD at that time. Linux was just the easiest to get (from my perspective) in those days, and it was clearly and unambiguously free (beer.) This meant that it had a larger hobbyist install base than BSD, and that is why it is more popular now, IMO. All the stuff you talk about is true. But it wouldn't have happened if BSD had been as readily available as linux. BSD had the reputation of being a "real" Unix, and I would have chosen it over linux if I had been able to easily get my hands on it in '92. I suspect other early adopters would have as well.

-Craig

Re:BSD

[aussersterne]

It's because Linux is better suited to desktop PC's. I "grew up" on SunOS systems. At the time, they were super-cool to me... comparing my 286 DOS PC at home with the *nix systems in the labs was a humbling experience indeed.

But times have changed! The 386 processor made its way into personal computers, and with it... *nix!

But times haven't changed that much for BSD. *BSD ship as fairly vanilla-flavored, purist offerings. Great, if you like to feel like you're still running SunOS in 1991. Great, if you like to have to grab things from ports yourself.

But grab a Linux distribution and install it, and you've got nicely thought out dotfiles, GNU tools and a ton of other binaries out of the box to provide some basic level of user-friendliness (which is good, even for *nixheads) and you've got driver support for things like TV tuner cards and parallel port devices that are likely to occur on desktop PCs. Days of legwork are not required to get your system running like you like it.

By contrast, when using *BSD on x86, the user experience for me isn't much different from installing commercial Unixes like Solaris from media onto Sun hardware... I always spend a day swearing under my breath as I have to pound the 'net to download and in some cases compile all of my favorite tools and applications, rework a bunch of dotfiles/config files and so forth and so on, just to make the system behave as nicely as my Linux system did ten minutes after install. Some call preinstalling and preconfiguring applications like Linux distros often do "bloat" but I call it saving my time. I'd rather waste an extra 400MB (geez, what's that, like... a few quarters worth?) on my 120GB hard drive by installing software I might not use (but who knows, someday I might) than install a relatively bare operating system and then have to spend time selecting, browsing, downloading, compiling...

*BSD is great if you're running a headless server, but Linux has made *nix a viable out-of-the-box personal computing platform, as much as people like to bash Linux's desktop prowess when compared to Windows.

I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!

Re:BSD

[SN74S181]

I guess the short answer is that I use Linux because I just don't want to spend the time after installing *BSD to make it work and act like... Linux!


What a ridiculous tautology.

I use BSD because I don't want to have to spend the time after letting some Linux distro spew candy and BS onto my hard drive to make it work and act like UNIX.

The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

Part of the beauty of the BSDs is they follow the bloody standards that have evolved over the last 30 years of UNIX. I can pick up any good Administration book and find the info I need to get the features I am concerned with up and running.

Re:BSD

[Beetjebrak]

That's funny.. I switched to FreeBSD out of Win2K because I was unhappy with 2K. My experience with Linux distro's, and I tried many of them over the years, is that each of them is different from the other. This requires me to learn a great many different versions of Linux (yes I know, 7.3 is not the version numer.. it's measured by kernel rev. etc..). But in operation each distro is different. SuSE differs from Mandrake differs from Slackware differs from Redhat etc. I take FreeBSD, set up the bare bones system, and get to be there and see where everything goes when I install it. Afterwards I can just copy /usr/ports/distfiles to any other box I want similarly configured. This cuts a lot of the download times. I then start the compile with the make.conf set to the proper CPU type on that box. This makes a difference many times on Intel hardware! Then when that's done I just dupe all of /usr/local/etc to the new box, restart the necessary daemons and I have two identical servers.
I did try FreeBSD on a desktop, and no, it's not a very fast-paced OS for games or anything. But then again, if I want games, I'll buy a PS2 but that's just me I guess. I use my FreeBSD desktop now for basic office work, and to be able to test new stuff locally before deploying anything.
My point is that if you want to know where everything goes, BSD is great, Slackware Linux too, but that's the ONLY Linux I know that works like this. Admitted, I haven't tried Gentoo yet but portage sounds good.
Also I used to run a server on SuSE 7.3 because I needed it set up very quickly and indeed, nothing beats a GUI setup when it comes to quickly setting up. Fire and forget, so to say. But man, was I sorry!!
The network card kept failing consistently without showing anything in logs. Network card fried?? Surprisingly, no! I decided to take the whole thing down, install *BSD, and it's now been running solidly ever since 4.6.2 was made a RELEASE. I've installed about 25 different BSD servers overtime during the past year and NONE of them required a reboot for any reason other than planned upgrades or hardware failure and some of those take LOTS of punishment 24/7.
I wish I could say the same about my Linux experiences, and I actually did try many times ever since RedHat 6.0 came out.

Know what you want, find the best tool for the job, and learn how to use it. The best desktop OS is a BSD anyway, but doesn't run on x86. I'll switch as soon as my Athlon 1100 gets really obsolete!

Just my two 0,01

Re:BSD

[JDizzy]

Yeah, this is true...

"Condesending unix users" is the term I used to hear flote around. You also have to remember that FreeBSD didn't exist until 94, and linux started in like 92'ish. At the time, people would use BSDos as a cheap alternative to SunOS, and at the time SUNos was still BSD driven. Later on when Sun went to a SYSv frame-work from att, things started to change. Solaris hit the scean like a shockwave, and FreeBSD, and NetBSD were back to obscurity. In america, a bunch of small dial-up ISP's started to use FreeBSD as an alternative to Sun Unix, since it was free. This is what drove the BSD's to the point they are now. Now we have a much larger user base, and yet we are still supposedly dead according to your typical slashdot troll. WE have conventions each year where we decide what features will be worked on in the next year, and what features are good enought to insert into the existing dist's. We have heritage that dates back to Bill Joy implementing TCP/IP into the kernel, and everything in between then and now. Most importantly, we do not exist on a virus like license that entraps developers who wish to modify code (yes, I'm talking about GPL).

It is true that FreeBSD development is more based on a clique of developers than a rag-tag group of hackers that work on Linux distributions. AT one time, the clique was very exclusive, but now it is basically like the way it was for Finux in 97. WE are always gainning more steam.

Re:BSD

[sydb]

The base NetBSD download is about 60 megs compressed. I download and install that and I've got a working base system to adapt to my needs. Plus, there's one distribution of NetBSD, I can install it on my Intel boxes, my Sparc boxes, on about any odd hardware I find, and the .dotfiles and config is virtually identical. Compare that to the 5-35 different 'distributions' of Linux available for each architecture.

This is why Linux has Debian

Actually Net and Free BSD have (are getting) Debian too.

Which highlights that this whole fucking linux vs BSD argument is misnamed. Linux is a kernel. The userland is substantially GNU, with a plethora of third-party contributions and appropriations.

So everyone start comparing kernel features and lay off userland.

Re:BSD

[JoeBuck]

This is a personal perspective, others' opinions will probably differ. The lawsuit mattered, but it wasn't the only factor.

The explosive growth of Linux in the early days had more to do with personal dynamics than with much else. In the early days, Linus welcomed contributors and worked well with them, but no one could work with the Jolitzes, and the other early BSD projects were similarly elite, with a lot of backbiting going on between the various groups even in the early days. I am a UC Berkeley alum (EECS PhD) and certainly take a great deal of pride in all the contributions that came out of Berkeley, but I was also present at a number of Usenix BOFs where members of one or another of the BSD factions would bitterly denounce someone from another faction, all the while with the AT&T/UCB/BSDI lawsuit hanging over everyone's heads. In addition to the legal cloud, there were the personal relationship clouds, and in the end, free software is a highly social activity, one that the BSD people were never as good at as the Linux people.

When I saw the early Linux kernels I thought that the quality was way inferior to what the BSD folks had at the time, and I was probably right, but the Linux folks had an attractive spirit, they were getting better by leaps and bounds, and the BSD folks thought they knew better than anyone else and those outside the club weren't welcome. Linux had drivers for just about every cheap card around, and many of them were buggy but at least they were usable, and in many cases people reporting bugs got a usable patch within days. BSD had well-written drivers, but for far fewer devices, and usually only the kinds of expensive devices that sysadmins at universities (but not home users) had access to. Now I'm talking about the 1992-1995 time period here; since then things have shifted around considerably and all the competitors have drivers for just about everything. But it was the initial momentum that set the stage for what followed.

One place where the non-copylefted nature of BSD did seem to have an effect was in the suspicion that a lot of the Berkeley CS grad students had about the schemes (their version) of the BSDI folk, and the FUD that got spread around about what was being given back and what wasn't, especially given that a couple of folks were working for CSRG and BSDI at the same time. Between this rather unattractive clique-ridden gang of exclusive gurus, and the bunch of wild and wooly Linux folks who were just whacking away and learning as they went, the Linux folks just looked much more attractive to a lot of people.

Re:BSD

[LunaticLeo]

What an ingnorant and rediculous answer. I swear slashdot needs a high-user-id-filter.

I can give a much better and factually based argument for all all those dumb slashdoters who moded this junk up.

In the very early 1990s, AT&T and BSDi were just finishing up their copyright dispute (btw, AT&T was in the right on some things and BSDi on others).

The two people maintaining 386BSD were not accepting desperate pleas by BSDers to indegrate some IDE patches. FreeBSD started largely because of the 386BSD maintainers recalcitrance.

On the other hand, Linux was quickly gaining steam and it was a wild and woolly time. IDE support was in Linux 12 to 18 months prior to FreeBSD (at least in what each camp claimed was the "stable" version).

Developers with cheap PCs with IDE controllers flocked to Linux. Lots of newbies, and I was one of them, bought ISA IDE cards and new drives to replace their RLL drives, just to run Linux.

BSD was clearly more mature compared to Linux in the early days. I believe Linux started winning the Linux vs. FreeBSD debate around Linux 2.2. Both NetBSD and OpenBSD have less sofisticated features for very good reasons. NetBSD is port-anywhere, and OpenBSD is run by a paranoid schizophrenic (sometimes that is a good thing:). And while I said Linux wins (in my mind) vs. FreeBSD (scalabilty, features, drivers, speed, etc.); FreeBSD is still an excellent kernel and has a few very cool features that I wish Linux had. FreeBSD as a distribution is a very compelling product. Ports rule.

If the "Tech Boom Era" was a factor in the FreeBSD vs. Linux on cheep PCs competition, FreeBSD would win. During the "Tech Boom Era", most of the biggest Porn sites (porn is the biggest money maker, and driver of bandwidth), have traditionally run on FreeBSD because of its consistant stability under extreme load, and efficient TCP/IP stack. Yahoo was built on FreeBSD. UUNet was a MAJOR FreeBSD user. If the "Tech Boom Era" is anything to go by, FreeBSD should have "won".

Bottom line, both kernels (linux and freebsd) were/are on a geometric growth curve, Linux had 12-18 month lead time with IDE, that is why Linux "won".

Oh! and Linus Torvalds is a fucking genius. I am not sure what he is a genius at, but as an all around Project Maintainer he is a fucking genius.

Re:BSD

[Greebz]

Not a great example for the question asked:

(removed)>uname -sr
FreeBSD 4.6-STABLE

(removed)>tar --version
GNU tar version 1.11.2

an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbsd

[MobyTurbo]

This article seems to give the impression that FreeBSD is the only one that's not a niche product. Nothing could be further from the truth. NetBSD's attention to portability and "correctness" means that it often has the best-written drivers and is even more stable than FreeBSD, and as of 1.6 it now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, lots of things get copied from NetBSD because in line with Berkeley Unix's past it's a research and development oriented operating system.)

OpenBSD's attention to code audits also bodes well for overall lack of bugs; and its ability to have security features such as encryption of even the swap space makes it useful for paranoid executives or the government; and it's, as the article admits, great for firewalls because of that.

This article was good for bringing *BSD onto the radar screen of people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but if you read it you give the impression that nobody runs the other BSDs; something that the infamous AC BSD trolls try to accuse, albeit more crudely, all of the BSDs of being.

Not an accurate comparison to Linux

[Burdell]

But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.

Linux does not "rely on crucial BSD code to run." The Linux IP stack was a clean re-write (in part because at the time, the "free" BSD license was incompatible with the GNU GPL). There are some drivers that are developed cooperatively with FreeBSD and Linux (typically dual licensed under the BSD license and the GPL). AFAIK, the only code in Linux that originated in classic BSD is in a couple of the PPP compression modules, but that's hardly crucial code that is relied upon for operation.

Unlike most other operating systems (including most distributions of Linux), FreeBSD is extremely easy to install directly via an Internet connection. No CD-ROM is required, though one must download two 1.4 MB floppy disk image files and use them to create bootstrap floppies.

I only have to download one 1.4 MB floppy disk image file to install Red Hat Linux from the Internet. Does that mean RHL is twice as good? Not really (although it is ;-) ).

OT: What if I want BSD for my desktop

[Whatsmynickname]

To all:

I know this is off-topic, but I figured this would be the time to ask, and my intention is sincere not to inflame or get points, so here goes...

I know BSD is usually used as a server, but what if I want to use it as a desktop computer? Where can I get an office suite? Photo editor? Games? Does this OS have support for NVidia cards? USB support? How much USB support? USB drivers from vendors spotty? Or was BSD not intended to support these items?