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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."
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
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.
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.
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.
1.Ports
2.Packages
3.easy update (make buildworld etc..)
4.The Devil not that fat fucking penguin
Because the FreeBSD core team is really building the OS, KDE and Gnome are userland applications are are out of the scope of the core team. KDE and Gnome is left as a port that the user can optionally install later (cd /usr/ports/x11/gnome; make install clean or cd to /usr/ports/x11/kde3; make install clean). In fact the FreeBSD team has been moving to streamline their installer recently be removing as many third party applications (perl) from the base system as possible and instead making them ports.
I read the internet for the articles.
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!
Try somewhere far in the 7000's. You, sir, are several YEARS behind ;)
Well, the native patchset for 1.4 for developers is available. There are no legal troubles afaik, but it just takes time to port.
Buying a Dell computer is equivalent to dropping the soap in a prison shower.
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
Here's a reason you might not hear from anyone else. FreeBSD is fast. It can make an old 486 seem like a Pentium 233MMX and a 733MHz PIII seem like a 3GHz P4. I'm serious, man. This has been my personal experience. Stop griping and try it. The installer isn't half as bad as the Debian installer and just about anything that can run on Linux can be recompiled for FreeBSD. Give it a shot.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power multiplied.
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.
Maybe i'll do gentoo again in the future, but definitely not now. Yes, it does do ports, but the ports tools are far from complete and almost useless. You can install a port using the portage tool 'emerge', but once it is installed there is no way to manage your installed ports. FreeBSD has a good variety of package management frontends. The pkg_* tools let you manipulate binary packages. The ports tree is based off of make files which makes versioning a bit of a pain, but there are tools that exist like 'portupgrade' which allow you to keep a current package/ports database _WITH_ version info. For some strange reason, there are changes appended to the changelogs of each port in gentoo without bumping the patch level of the port. This is insane! Thus it is not impossible, but a royal pain in the ass to keep two machines synced when it comes to package versions.
On to easy updates... A whole bunch of tarballs with patchfiles works for a ports system, but not the base system. FreeBSD keeps the entire base system in CVS. FreeBSD actually has a base system. FreeBSD has multiple branches of development. Maybe gentoo will mature to the point where they make a real base system and do real release engineering, but it currently isnt the OS of choice for me.
Also, because the development cycle of FreeBSD is significantly more sane than that of the Linux kernel and the base system/toolchain which never has and never will exist in one master repository, nVidia's drivers work on the -CURRENT development branch of FreeBSD from which this developers preview was taken. Change one line in one file, and they build flawlessly (or at least they can, hopefully on this developer's preview too). The drivers even register properly with devfs.
Do yourself a favor and try FreeBSD, then you can check the FreeBSD mailling list archive if something is broken, instead of searching for a fix with google. It'll save you hours.
Kan jeg få en pils, vær så snill?
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.
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Floccinaucinihilipilification - the action or habit of judging something to be worthless
Because KDE and GNOME are not a part of the operating system. In fact, they aren't a part of any Linux based OS either!
KDE and GNOME are third party software. You can find them in the ports system, along with 7000+ more third party packages. I would hate to see the size of the release notes if they had to document every change to every port and package!
p.s. Microsoft, GNU, and the Linux distributions have done an admirable job in obfuscating the definition of "operating system". Just because it comes with the OS does not make it a part of the OS.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
Um, exactly how much experience do you have with Gentoo? I've been using it as my only OS for several months now, and ports has served me not only in installing ports and whatnot, but allowing me to edit my ebuilds to test alpha-pre-rc software like I have a tendency to. Specifically, what don't you like about Portage? Do you realize there are extension tools (in gentoolkit) that add package management on top of emerge?
A deep unwavering belief is a sure sign you're missing something...
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
The "standard" NetBSD iso image contains everything you need to install for a basic desktop machine. It includes compilers, X Window system, etc. What it doesn't include is third party stuff like KDE, GNOME or Apache. That can be installed from the packages collection (akin to the FreeBSD ports collection, only a port is a different architecture in NetBSD terminology). If you can't or wont install packages from the FTP sites, then there are supplemental iso images for the i386 architecture that contain a massive amount of precompiled packages.
Chris
- Even with apt and deb, it's still all binary packages. I like the source-based approach better. (and yes, I know about src-debs. But honestly, what do you use more often?)
- Building a port yourself is trivial (it's just a Makefile and a list of files that get installed, basically), way easier than building your own debs. I find that on my FreeBSD system, there is way less software installed without being under control of the package management system than on every Linux system I used.
- FreeBSD doesn't try to be clever unless I tell it to, unlike, for example, Debians "alternatives". If I type "vi", I get vi, and not an end- and useless mess of symlinks pointing to whatever editor. The packages just work like the original authors intended, not like the packagers thought it would be better.
- Debian has more kinds of dependency. Ports just depend on something, or they don't (of course, what they depend on may depend on some options you choose), but they don't "suggest" anything. I never understood why this fine-grained dependencies are useful, I like the KISS approach better.
Of course, YMMV. More important than the differences are the similarities, however, especially that both systems "just work". Both Debian and FreeBSD are fine systems, and there really isn't such a great difference between them from a users point of view. Certainly not enough to justify holy wars.Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.