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FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #2
noackjr writes "'The FreeBSD Project is proud to announce the availability of the second Developer Preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 (5.0-DP2). This
snapshot, intended for widespread testing purposes, is the latest milestone towards the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, currently scheduled for mid-December 2002.' See the announcement, early adopter's guide, and the release notes."
Jeremy Zawodny, who works at Yahoo, wrote an interesting article in his weblog a few months ago. It chronicles his experience with MySQL under FreeBSD and MySQL's problems with threading under FreeBSD. It will be interesting to see if 5.0 improves these things significantly.
6.02x10^23, baby!
If the application you want to run is one of the 5000 applications in the "FreeBSD ports collection", then a simple "make install" in the proper directory will download the sources, patch them for FreeBSD, compile and install. If you need to run something that is distributed as binaries only, then FreeBSD has support for the Linux ABI. I run Linux versions of Mathematica and Unreal Tournament 2003 with no problems at all.
I'm a FreeBSD user since three months, and I think FreeBSD is an excellent beginner's unix.
My unix adventures started with downloading Redhat and installing it. It took 30 minutes and I learned nothing. Then I sat there with a system that I had no idea how to configure to my taste. I disliked it and went back to Windows.
My next try was FreeBSD. Installing it took a couple of tries and it took at least a day or two before I was satisfied. But I learned a lot, mainly because of the excellent online documentation. Now I run FreeBSD on all my computers and I am not going back.
That being said, expect Linux to have better support for the latest and greatest hardware. (And expect Windows to have even better hardware support than Linux!) But I'm happy since the recent release of FreeBSD drivers for my NVidia card.
Linux is beginning to hit so big in corporate America that the software development effort to develop new applications and port existing applications to Linux is amazing.
This of course is just my opinion, but I would have to say that the development effort for Linux is outpacing that of the FreeBSD community.
I suppose the bottom line though is what works best for you? I would recommend that you take a look at both and decide for yourself which one works best for you.
Besides some small (and not so small) technical differences, the most significant divergence between BSD and Linux is the license model (and the underlying philosophy). Linux is a GPL kernel, with GNU tools providing rest of the system (thus GNU/Linux). The GPL license has a clause that says if one wants to distribute a modified version of a GPL'ed software, one must also include the modified source code. BSD however says you can do whatever you want with the program and its code, including selling your modified version without source code. All you have to do is include the BSD/UC Berkeley copyright notice. If you ever read the MS Windows copyrigth page, it includes the BSD Copyright. Yes, MS Windows has some BSD code.
A lot of other Open Source software are BSD styled. Others are GPL.
It's a matter of which philosophy you subscribe to.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
Here are some big ticket items in -CURRENT that you might want to check out.
;).. Recommended you use UFS2 for full extended attribute support.
:)
;(.. UFS2 is not yet bootable on i386 due to space constraints in the boot loader. No word on whether this will be fixed in time.
/pub/FreeBSD/development I believe. sparc64 is actually part of the DP release
/etc/rc.d. This is basically an import from NetBSD. scripts in rc.d, as opposed to the init.d/rc*.d method where the filename determines the dependency order, use a program called rcorder(8) to determine the order in which scripts are executed. rcorder determines the order by special headers in the scripts. e.g.
1) Filesystem Snapshots/Background fsck - On filesystems with softupdates enabled, fsck will be performed on the mounted filesystem (well, actually a snapshot) after the disk is mounted. This allows fsck to be run without affecting uptime along with the other obvious benefits of having snapshot support (dump comes to mind).
2) ACLs - Filesystem ACLs are included with FreeBSD now and can be set using the standard setfacl/getfacl methods
3) LOMAC - The LOMAC with DP2 is apparently old and seems intrusive. A recommendation from the author was to try the version of LOMAC from trustedbsd CVS. It is said to contain "99% less ASS"
4) MAC - I personally haven't tried it yet, however I plan to. Recommended you use UFS2 for full extended attribute support. This could/should rock
5) GEOM - A modular framework for disk I/O. This allows modules to be placed along the I/O request path in order to do nifty things such as filesystem encryption easily. There is an encryption module already written for this as well
6) UFS2 - UFS with extended attributes support and various code cleanup afaik. sysinstall will use UFS1 by default
7) SMPng - Have at it.. Last I heard, the speed increases weren't as significant as people seem to think they'll be. The groundwork is laid out though for future speed improvements. A lot of code has been moved out from under Giant (Big Giant Lock). That could have definitely changed though, as the last time I heard an SMPng update was at the kernel summit in SF. There are quite a few debugging options enabled in GENERIC, so you might want to take note of that.
8) sparc64/Itan{ic|ium} - If you have a supported hardware config.. Itanium is under
9) gcc3 - Nothing more to really put here.
10) New and improved rc system in
# PROVIDE: sshd
# REQUIRE: LOGIN
# KEYWORD: FreeBSD NetBSD
Ports, unfortunately, does not use this dependency system yet. However, last I heard, there will be a cutoff date at which time they should support it.
Some information may be outdated, but most of it should be correct.
Enjoy,
-JD-
Funny, I have quite the opposite judgement. I'm a huge FreeBSD fan, am typing this on my FreeBSD laptop in fact, but it now dual-boots Gentoo. One of the big selling points of FreeBSD, for me, was the ports system -- RPM is just so much of a headache -- but that was until I met gentoo. It has really gotten rid of many of the headaches associated with FreeBSD's ports: in particular, if you have a port A installed, and then port B pulls in a newer version of port A, the old version can be uninstalled automatically and safely in Gentoo without touching any of the new files. (In fact Gentoo now does it automatically.) And that's just one aspect: I like the fact that gentoo portage supports multiple versions of ports, that it generates the CONTENTS file automatically, and if your favourite port hasn't been updated to the latest version, you can often trivially do it yourself (you can also do that in FreeBSD but it's more complicated to get the CONTENTS right, and if you don't it won't uninstall cleanly). Now that I've used Gentoo for some time, FreeBSD's ports system is clearly showing its rough edges and deficiencies.
So why am I sticking with FreeBSD? Because it performs better (especially under load), and a lot of things just work better -- eg, I occasionally have problems with ppp or dhcp/cable modem in linux, never in FreeBSD. But gentoo has huge potential, in fact it's already a pretty spiffy system, I think. If I had multiple machines, I'd install FreeBSD on the "mission critical" ones and gentoo on the "play" ones (bleeding-edge software, multimedia, etc).
When my company was just starting out in late 1998, we deployed Linux for our custom S.E.D.D solution. It worked reasonably, aside from the occassional ext2 filesystem crash or kernel panic, which wasn't a big deal then since we had redundancy and weren't under heavy load. Unfortunately, when the load started increasing, so did the crashes and panics. The systems needed to be reinstalled every week. After messing around trying to get the 2.3.x series of kernels to work, I eventually had a cutting edge test server to see if the latest Linux offering could match up. It didn't.
I read about FreeBSD and downloaded the 3.2-RELEASE version. Since then I've tracked both STABLE and CURRENT, and I can say with conviction that any FreeBSD system is more stable, can take higher load, and is far easier to configure for hard-core use than is any Linux dsitribution, in my experience. The FreeBSD servers slowed (but even then, not as much as the Linux servers had), but didn't crash, even when far higher load was placed on them than was placed on the Linux servers we used to run. As a S.E.D.D company, we send millions of secure documents out per day, and also thousands at once. Since this IS Slashdot, and people here are Linux fanatics, I am not logged in with my username or password, since (a) I don't want to lose all of my karma and (b) I don't want childish Linuxbrats sending flames to me.
Linux may be ok for some, but for people who are trying to run their own companies, still have some sort of life, have other hobbies, like horse riding, and have girlfriends, Linux is not the ideal solution.
I was having similar problems with FreeBSD, regarding newer versions of ports, and portupgrade helps a lot in making this easy to handle. It's made managing things just so much easier. It's incredible, really.
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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
I concede that FreeBSD *is* more stable than Linux. However, the data you're using is nearly five years old, an eternity in the technology world. FreeBSD is certainly no longer an order of magnitude more stable than Linux, while at the same time both FreeBSD and Linux are several orders of magnitude more stable than Windows on "do-it-yourself" hardware found at small companies or in homes.
Of course, for controlled quantities like vendor-supplied hardware, all three can be very stable, though I'd still suggest that FreeBSD and Linux are at least an order of magnitude more stable than Windows.
And just to inject some of my own anecodtal evidence, on a volunteer basis I administrate several SMP x86 file and Web servers for NGO's/NPO's that 1) run Slackware Linux, 2) have uptimes >700 days and 3) have significant load a good percentage of the time with load spikes at times that can reach into the stratosphere.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW