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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."
I'm downloading this and running a Beowulf cluster off of it.
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
where the fuck is that troll from the previous topic (MAME topic) who thought it was so god-damn important that this was released that he couldn't wait an hour for this?!?! Is it ok for us to kick his "I'm holier than slashdot" attitude in the teeth right now? Pleeeease
I was under the impression that BSD was dead?
Fuck them all bitches!
2nd post muahhhaaa !!!
got porn????
Why use FreeBSD when Linux seems to work better, and have greater support at the same time?
SMP support in this new version should rock, Freebsd never had good SMP support until now, If you are a SMP user check this update out! I know its beta but its well worth it..HUGE speed increases.
keanmarine.com
I know its lame, but its my 1st 1st post. Now its out of my system
Now that DP2 is here, I might as well jump in the CURRENT water again and give it a go again. The time that CURRENT _did_ work for me, it worked great and I considered it stable. I have been following/lurking the current@ mailinglist for quite a while, and it's been fun seeing al these cool new things appear.
Great work. I'm definately going to give this a spin.
Anyone have the link to the picture of that BSD daemon chick so I can masturbate?!?
It's in our interest to FUCK Palestine.
I have been running FreeBSD for a number of years now (ever since the 2.x days), and find it great. One thing I've noticed, is that there are no mentions of any graphical displays and applications included in the default install/release notes (i.e. KDE/GNOME support, office applications, etc.). Does anyone know why this is?
Someone take BSD and do a Mandrake version of it while at the same time keeping it all opensource and free. Ie make it really user friendly(Gui installer, admin tools etc). I'm surprised there has been no effort to do so. I mean beyond what Apple did I don't even hear any rumors of anyone even trying to do that.
I know BSD is a more thought of as a server OS, but I've heard plently of BSD users claim its makes a fine desktop as well. If that's every going to happen they definitely need to start working on making it more user friendly.
Is it one of those neato recursive acronyms like GNU and WINE?
BSD
Sucks
Dick
or what??
Kehsihba Kamuk Arhsim
This whole issue with BSD and the ammount of fervor behind it reminds me of a parable I'd like to share, not meaning to cause offense or shove doctrines on anyone.
Once in the land of Karjakistan, there was a great sultan who had no heir, his wisemen dispaired and decreed that the queen should be put to death that the king might marry another. In her desperation she called on the wisest guru of the land, Bobi-Son-Denobi (BSD), telling him he was her only hope. So BSD arrived at the palace and met Queen Needs-a-Leia and she told him of the problem:
"Oh BSD, you must help me, for my husband has not produced an heir for he will not take me into his bed!"
BSD was confused, what man would refuse a woman with such a large set of erm... kernals? So he searched for the answer high and low until he came to the master handler, Linux. Linux told him of a dark secret, how King Mesa Sofi (King MS) would sneak down into the animals cages and have wild escapades with the camels. BSD was shocked, the world knew MS was cursed but not so defiled, but still an heir needed to be produced, so he went back to the Queen and asked her to disrobe (hey, she did it for Jaba, right?). He gazed at her nubile figure, which seemed as if it were petrified, like Natalie Portman.
The answer was as obvious as steaming hot grits, of course he thought! I HAS THE SOLUTION!
And so BSD appeared before King MS, with Linux and the two approached the throne. "Your monopoliness," BSD began, "If you will view the naked body of your wife."
Need-a-Leia disrobed again her nude form shining forth, "You will notice her... um TCP/IP socket... looks a bit like the toe of a beast of burdan, a camel's toe if you will."
The King looked on and was pleased, and so the Queen bore him a son and was spared, BSD and Linux had saved the day.
The moral of the story is, Microsoft is a bunch of sick bastards who need to listen to open source and stop fucking livestock.
At present I use Windows, cause that's what 98% of the apps I use are written only for. But I do like learning about other OSes.
So on to my question (with a possible coda). I read in a BSD guide that "most" apps written for Linux will run under any of the BSDs. Is this true, or was this dude just plain misinformed? Only reason is I ask this is that most of the info I've seen regarding the Unix variants is that BSD is superior over Linux. If that's the case, why use Linux? Anyway, if anyone can answer this 2 part question in a quick, general way, it would be appreciated.
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these!
Soon as I saw the story on the front page I knew what awaited inside. Hundreds of posts from zitty geeks trying to be punker-than-thou by coming up with ever-more-obscure namedropping to make up for their lack of real style (or to pretend that they are actually old enough to have been involved). Drop the pretension kiddos. We all know that your Blink 182 CD is older than your copy of Bollocks.
I love how a whole new level of conformity has been created by the average bozo's efforts at individuality. It might almost work if your personal definition of individuality didn't depend so heavily on how you present yourself to others. I mean, what's the sense of being into bullshit like [insert pseudo-non-mainstream hobby here] if you can't talk about it to make yourself superior to your peers?
Kinda sounds like the Linux crowd, huh? "I'm so ALTERNATIVE by patching my kernel every day while you brainwashed Windows sheep meander in unenlightened tedium." Funny to think that if you had back all the time you spent tweaking and patching (for no good reason other than to say you have the latest version), you wouldn't know what to do with the workstation on your desk.
*sigh*
excuse the rant. caffiene has yet to be digested.
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!
"Why use FreeBSD when Linux seems to work better, and have greater support at the same time? "
1.Ports
2.Packages
3.easy update (make buildworld etc..)
4.The Devil not that fat fucking penguin
Gentoo linux takes care of 1-3. Yeah the penguin is a fag.. I agree.
That's some funny stuff!
Isn't BSD supposed to be dead?
:)
Just kidding.
I actually like the BSDs. I use FreeBSD's cousin, Mac OS X every day. I just wish they would port FreeBSD to PowerPC.
To anyone who actually played with this release, how stable is it? Is gcc3.2 really solid enough to be incorporated into a bsd release?
I love FreeBSD's ports and out of the box secure installation.
I love Linux b/c it has native jdk 1.4 support.
Hopefully FreeBSD will release a native jdk 1.4 soon..... The announcment was made almost one year ago that they got some legal agreement from Sun to do this..
there are plenty of cool penguins out there:
. pn g
.... penguins are robust ... and tougher than cutesy smiling "daemons" --- sheesh now where'd they get the idea for **totally* obvious mascot .... a cute little daemon with a "fork" ... haw haw ...
....
http://art.gnome.org/images/icons/large/Elysium
Plus, watch a friggin' national geographic special on penguins onece in a while and you may be impressed by a bird that can swim a extremely high speed spends all winter on an egg in Antartica cooperates with its fellows and escapes predation by seals sharks and killer whales
Stick a fork() init() it's done
Oops, I meant "Even though I had a bit lost TOUCH/contact with FreeBSD..." not "...a bit louch touch...". Quite a finger slip on the keyboard. Sorry.
BSD and Stephen King are dead.
Try somewhere far in the 7000's. You, sir, are several YEARS behind ;)
Would it kill the *BSD people to create some sort of easy to use installer like RedHat's? I've downloaded and sort of got installed (could never get X to work right) FreeBSD 4.6, but it took three times longer than my Redhat or Mandrake installes.
Microsoft watch out! BSD is catching up very fast to the winNT system.
.1 versions away from being on par with winXP in the number game.
Now at version 5.0, BSD is only
SMP is great too, first introduced with winNT 4 in 1996, 8 years later it is finally supported in unix thanks to freebsd 5.0.
I am very excited about these developments, I can see microsofts empire crashing very soon! rejoice! I am planning on running my new website off freeBSD 5.0, replacing my sturdy yet now obsolete win2k system.
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
Anyone know if Apple plans on updating their FreeBSD-based bits with this anytime soon?
Probably too soon for 10.3 to be based on this, but maybe 10.4?
Just ask ... yahoo ... netcraft ... and slew of other servers that rely on BSD. If you want a server and you want the best bang for the buck, freebsd is the best price out there. (free)
For all the trolls who say BSD isn't GPL, well duh, BSD is in itself a license. Sometimes you just gotta wonder. If linux was so wonderful then why would apple choose BSD for OS X and not linux? It's more than just the license, BSD is a very nice OS that is wonderfully stable.
Rule of Thumb, if it works in linux it will more than likely work in freebsd, and vice versa, well that is until you try to compile a kernel not of that OS :-) ... try it before you bash it.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
this dude is being a smartass
I use BSD everywhere. I sneak it into places where I work and impress the locals with it. And then it ends up in the server room. FreeBSD world domination! muhahahaha
Oh, and I never got fired for installing BSD somewhere :)
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-
Glad to see Perl has been given the axe in the base system. Now I won't have to have two Perl installs all the time (the base + the port).
Now if they could only do the same for Sendmail, BIND, and other junk.
Maybe I'm just more comfortable with systems like Red Hat where *everything* is in a package, but it seems silly to have this 3rd-party stuff in the base, especially if many people use the ports version anyway.
Just after compiling the perl port, do:
use.perl port <enter>
and you STABLE system will always use the perl from the ports. This will probably save you a headache or two when upgrading to CURRENT
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.
----------
Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
How long will FreeBSD run? Linux 2.0.x and 2.2.x would crash when the kernel scheduler counter rolled over after 497 days and uptime went back to 0. Does FreeBSD do that too?
I understand every BSD user's complaints about Redhat/Mandrake and the rpm package mess but how does Debian and apt-get compare? I figure that w/ the design philosophy and package system Debian has, it's quite comparable to all of the benefits of BSD. After installing Debian, I'm not ruled by my Linux box, I have time to do other things. Rock solid, secure (enough for me), and easy to update and install packages. Anyway, I'm still a newbie and ask newbie questions.
This guy is way out there
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.
Those of us with even more to live for just install Windows.
Linux couldnt run for 497 days even if we defined run as "load bash and futz with ls."
That's one of the funniest /. posts I've ever read!
Kernel threads are going to mean more than any other feature to FreeBSD 5. Benchmark performance may not increase that much because of kernel threads, but they'll allow many applications to be ported to FreeBSD. Now, a lot of programs that run on Linux, Solaris, and Windows, can't be ported to FreeBSD because of its inferior threading. Thread-intensive languages (most notoriously, Java) and database servers should be much more comfortable on FreeBSD 5, after it shakes down.
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
I'm thinking about running new FreeBSD on my (uncooled) Dual Xeon system - I haven't uptil now because of the lack of second CPU HLT instructions - Does anyone know what second CPU Idling is like in 5.0/5.0DP2?
Thanks
Just give it a few more months, maybe a year, and OS X will sync with FreeBSD 5 when it's stable. Just a joke, but mod me down if you must.
but I can give a better one. Buy a HSF.
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.
*BSD's are traditionally intended ( and still is from what i understand ) for the server arena, where stability and consistency are much more important then running ' the latest killer app'.
BSD is more entrenched in the backrooms of corporate America for this reason.
Now on the DESKTOP i agree, it lagged behind until recently. But now that you can run 99% of proprietary Linux binaries, and there is good desktop hardware support, even that point becomes moot and it becomes more of a matter of preference then 'better'.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
It's quite common, actually, for people to write bash specific shell scripts and distribute them as borne shell scripts. Jackasses.
FreeBSD is elite! It's already the best free operating system today and all the enhancements being added only make it even better.
Has anyone confirmed that the new SMP support works with Intel's new HT chips? It should, right?
Attention deficit disorder is a complicated issue, spanning several major... HEY LET'S GO RIDE BIKES!
PS. BSD is dying
YOU FAIL IT!
It's a long int, it rools over after 497 days, uptime returns to 0, and everything goes to hell. For real. Try it some time. It's an issue for industrial control and embedded apps.
It was (and is) on a webserver that's serving up 100k cgi-generated pages a day. It's like the old Windoze95 problem - you remember that - where Win95 would crash after about 30 days of uptime. Except Win95 was out for more than 2 years before they found that bug, it was never stable enough to run a month before. The difference is, Linux runs for 497 days. And I just took a Sparc2 out of service that was up for 9 years. Do that with Windoze.
I just LOVE MsGeek's site ! Especially the "fash" section , where I learned to cut the bottom off of an old shirt to use as a hair enhancement! Oh, and the "dance party" photos !
Of course, don't forget to read MsGeeks's emails ! Here you will discover how truly difficult it is to decide what to do on the weekends... have a pizza party? A fash party? Go to the mall with all of your friends? Have a sleepover and call boys on the phone ?
In short, if you haven't checked out MsGeek's site , you don't know what you're missing!
Unsuccessful
Flunk
Screwed up
Messed up
Lose
Backfire
Bust
Default
Disappoint
Fizzle
Let Down
/*added to avoid crapfilter. wdl;j;iasijdlkasjdkfl;jsedfl;kjsdl;fjl;asdf jl;kfjs;dkfj;asdfjkdfjl;dsfk;jd;kajdf;lkjsd;fkljsd sd;flj;ldfj;sldjfoipwehq du gpowqugoij gaoadgodgasgdsf sfdasdfsdf*/
Here's some more.
OS X uses mach which avie tevanian wrote at CMU. Mach has a BSD compatability layer so that programs could be used on it and so the mach people did not need to write servers for their kernel. Apple could never use Linux or a monolithic unix kernel because of how the architecture works. Mach and the BSD layer are running shared in kernel space, classic sits on top in it own server on the Mach kernel running in kernel space for performance reasons, as do the Cocoa and Carbon layers, quartz and aqua of course run on top of this. Say what you will about microkernels but they are flexible and make things much easier.
Bla, Bla, Bla, linus talks about performance and how he hates microkernels. Apple runs the servers in kernel space not in userspace like hurd, at most it is a 5-10% speed hit but it also allows for greater flexibility and makes it easier to maintain. Also the modularity of it makes updating things like BSD easy because the servers are not heavily connected elsewhere, the os is somewhat abstracted from BSD. Apple could put linux in the place of BSD easily but mach must stay or be replaced by a new MicroKernel.
Just remember apple does not use message passing servers running in userspace, they run BSD and mach in shared kernel space and the servers run in kernel space. So yes OS X really is not unix but it contains unix. I hope this clears things up.
Portage is really nice.
www.gentoo.org
ex FreeBSD user
I don't think that is correct.
Let me just say, I ran FreeBSD and Gentoo Linux on the exact same hardware and Gentoo boots in the same time and runs faster.
Please stop this childish A is better than B.
Both Gentoo Linux and FreeBSD are excellent OS-es that still needs further work.
Does FreeBSD 5.0-DP2 come with USB 2.0 or just slow USB?
2.4.x hasn't been out for 700 days, and uptime rolls over to 0 after about 500 days on 2.0.x and 2.2.x and I know for a fact that Apache slows to a crawl when that happens.
That's not going to happen.
The people who control the trademark will not allow you to replace the default installer, and still call the code FreeBSD, unless you donate the installer back to the project, and it gets accepted into the source tree in place of the default installer. Which makes sense, since the people who control the trademark are primarily there fore the sales of CDROMs which use the trademark.
When confronted, they give a nice runaround about how you can put your installer on a different CDROM, as long as you distribute their installer on CDROM #1, or add an option in their installer to invoke your installer, after you get part way into their installer, but both those options ignore the fact that what you're trying to do is avoid their installer entirely.
-- Terry
First of all, the servers in question aren't running 2.4.x or the most recent version of Slackware.
;)
Next, I didn't say they *report* an uptime of >700 days (they do not), only that they have been running without crashes or similar interruption for >700 days. But it is very easy to know power on, power off and unintended interruption dates because such data for these machines is all logged, in pencil, to paper.
They have been extremely maintenance free and yes, under load. I did not say that they didn't slow down (my god, how they can slow down) but they have not fallen completely over (a.k.a. hung/crashed) and that is all that matters.
Congratulations, you have very effectively debunked a pile of claims I never made.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW
"700 days uptime" implies 700 consecutive days without a reboot. If reboots don't count, I got a Win95 box with years of uptime. About Slackware - it's the only sane distro choice for a Linux server. The installer isn't brainless enough for widespread desktop acceptance, and I hope to hell PV never changes it.
less of a platform slut than NetBSD or Linux. About 1.5 of the architectures work fairly well, others coming along. As opposed to the mid twenties or early thirties for NetBSD; not quite so promiscuious, but not quite a prude.
Sorry if this is redundant, but I scanned through the posts and didn't find this anywhere else, which is interesting because I've always thought people have put some level of importance on this in getting Joe User off Windows. Anyway, I found this in "Kernel Changes"
PECOFF (Win32 Execution file format) support has been added.
How long has this been true? To what extent is this true? Does this mean faster-than-WINE emulation, or even emulation at all? Will I be able to install and/or run Win32 programs without thinking? I guess I could summarize like this: how much does this do?
If this is somewhere else, then if someone could just call me an idiot and point me to the thread, I'd be greatful. Or, if it's old news, then just ignore this. Thanks.
Danish != nationality
I wonder if Lamar Alexander #2 will try it out.
(Come on, somebody must have seen that SNL sketch.)
How many times does this neeed to be said?
MacOS X is an OS based on a Mach kernel with a FreeBSD personality. It doesn't mean that it is FreeBSD by any stretch of the imagination. It would be like me saying OpenUnix 8 is Linux because it has a Linux pesonality module.
Repeat after me, MacOS X is not BSD, it is a Mach based OS with a BSD personality!
BSD is badly designed!
That why it dying!
It's funny, I see a lot of people saying they switched from slackware to FreeBSD...
But seriously, many people have a hard time installing Red Had or Mandrake so I really wouldn't recommend them installing FreeBSD.
I personally prefer Debian, X can be a little troublesome to configure but once you get it configured it is a lot easier to maintain and upgrade and choosing to keep the stable packages gives you quite a stable system.
-Chris