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Interview With The FreeBSD Core Team
Gentu writes "OSNews features an ultra interesting and in-depth interview with three members of FreeBSD's Core team (Wes Peters, Greg Lehey and M. Warner Losh) and also a major FreeBSD developer (Scott Long). They discuss issues from the Java port to corporate backing, the Linux competition, the 5.x branch and how it stacks up against the other Unices, UFS2, the possible XFree86 fork, SCO and its Unix IP situation, even... re-unification of the BSDs."
Go calculate something
Talk about 'last words'!
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
It is, the interview was really a seance
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
OSS is part of enlightenment?
Since when?
What a surprise-- a well-written, usefull, and interesting article by Eugenia. Have pigs indeed spouted wings?
Here's a good analysis of the various BSDs from last september. It gives a great background on the BSDs and it'll help explain why the BSDs should be re-united (or not.)
Why do I h8 apple?
With BSD, or most any other Unix system including Linux distributions, you get a time-tested and proven base upon which all the system's services rest. You get a well-understood system upon which hundreds of thousands of people have built upon, and millions of people have hands-on experience using. You get not only an operating system, but a thoroughly proven model for maintainability, ease of administration, and security.
Windows 2003 Server is a new and unproven offering from a company whose past successes in marketing have been dwarfed in the public eye by the harms due to their failings (see, e.g., Nimda, SQL Sapphire Worm). Nobody has years or even months of experience on Windows 2003 Server, and its frequently accurate technical documentation cannot match the depth of understanding which Unix professionals bring with their platform.
You could choose Windows 2003 Server, and your staff might be able to make it work for you. But what will you do in two years? BSD, Linux, and the rest of the Unix heritage will still be going strong -- but if history is any guide to the future, Microsoft will be running ads touting Windows 2005 Server, a new and equally unproven platform, and telling you that 2003 Server is a piece of unstable trash. What kind of a future is that for your business?
linux has cute geeks too.
http://150.101.112.216/temp/geektwins.jpg
FreeBSD is a great OS, if you get to know it. There's a lot of documentation available, and I thought I'd just share with you my experiences with FreeBSD.
Which version to install.
4.x or 5.0? 4.x is the stable series and 5.x is in development. It suffers of what's been called a chicken and egg problem described here. Think of 5.x as Linux 2.5 series. 5.1 when released(scheduled for release in june)to will be the start of the new stable branch. If you want stability choose 4.x. Bleeding edge? 5.0.
You can download the ISO's from here:
You generally only need to download the first ISO
Installation:
The installer is text based, but dont let it scare you off. The partition layout is a little different than what you may be used to but it's all described in the FreeBSD handbook here
The installation will leave you off with a pretty basic system and you're ready to install:
Ports
Ports is a very powerfull way of installing new programs and manage installed programs. You almost never run into dependency hell. A very powerfull tool to help manage ports is portupgrade. A short introduction is available here and to ports in general here
Documentation.
FreeBSD requires some time to get to know but the FreeBSD Handbook, provides a great introduction to FreeBSD. Sites also worth a visit is Freshports.org to keep you updated about new ports, and BSD dev center
If you give FreeBSD an honest try it will pay off. Most of the applications avalible for Linux also compiles on FreeBSD, and in general I find it more easy to find documentation, thus making it more easy to maintain.
...or, in reading through this, does Greg 'groggy' Lehey come off as a bit of a prick?
Please excuse my ignorance, but why would I choose FreeBSD over OpenBSD? OpenBSD is more stable and secure. Why take the extreme step of using a *BSD distro if you're not goning to with the most secure one. If you value ease of use, why not go with some advanced flavor of Linux or even *GASP* the latest version of Win2K Server.
Where BSD needs to copy Linux is in the packaging systems. First, you need so many different ways to package a program that half of every development team is devoted just to making all the variations. Then, you need a dumb public who only recognizes one of those systems, as a hint here they should choose the one with the worst dependency techniques of the group. Once this is complete a group of people who are completly unreleated to any section of the development of BSD have to get together to make a BSD-SB. This group should continue the tradition of choosing the worst variants of how things are done and make them the new standard. Finally a small group of hard core BSDers need to get together to create a new distirbution which will not be BSD-SB compliant, but will be based on a cool idea for software distribution that they saw implemented in Gentoo. Then the circle of popular unix clones will be complete.
Note to the people with no sense of humor: don't read this comment.
Devil Ducky
MY peers would get out of jury duty.
What the HELL are you talking about?
Heck, even jdk1.4 is in the ports, and even native!
They're porting FreeBSD to Java? Wow, that's impressive. What OS do they run the JVM on?
I wish I could find this webpage again. (Google's not responding and I'm too busy to wait.) Anyhow, some guy had a great quote which IMHO accurately summed things up as far as free operating systems go. Went something like (in random order)
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
The Debian guys are porting NetBSD (for x86 and alpha) and FreeBSD (for x86) for use with their existing Deiban system. Since both these are in their early stages the pages contain not much detailed information.
Any comments or enlightening information would be great.
A couple of more specific questions:
Thank you.
GrimReality
2003-04-28 21:01:19 UTC (2003-04-28 17:01:19 EDT)
Not for everything. Windows beats Unix if you want to run Photoshop. :) I was talking specifically about server systems, where reliability and understandability of the system is crucial. I think the Unix edge is not merely the Unix architecture, but also the history and deep understanding which Unix professionals bring. It just isn't possible for a culture to have that kind of deep understanding of a system that has just been released -- no matter how featureful it may be.
To be snarky about it: On Unix systems, novices know they have no idea what is going on, and experts know that they know what is going on. On Windows systems, novices think they know what is going on, and experts know that they do not know what is going on. That may make Windows experts more Socratic ("Socrates is wisest, because he knows that he knows nothing") -- but I would not want my enterprise database dependent upon Socrates.
Enjoy!
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
does Greg 'groggy' Lehey come off as a bit of a prick?
I've had many interactions with groggy, and he has been nothing but very professional and helpful.
OSX works on 5% of American (!) desktops(!).
:-)
Whereas FreeBSD + Linux is running on much less than 5% of American desktops. Who cares?
And it's not free.
Some portions of it are not some definitions of free. Some portions of it are not any definition of free. But I click the pulsing system update button and it updates my system, which is really really nice. Even nicer than the FreeBSD system, which wants me to rebuild MY ENTIRE SYSTEM when there's an OpenSSL bug fix.
And you don't get ports from FreeBSD (welcome to the hell when you want to install update anything from the opensource world!).
No, welcome to fink (fink.sf.net).
If you really need Java on really free OS
I don't, which is why I'm planning to move to OSX for my servers. Gentoo may be a fine Linux, but I've always preferred BSD for my servers. Dunno - I prefer Vanilla over Chocolate, too. Maybe there's a corrolation (and maybe I can't spell
Thanks for the pointer, I will check out Gentoo.
X works through the /dev/io and /dev/mem devices which allow priveleged applications to talk directly to the corresponding busses.
:) And XFree86 lives up to this, unfortunately.
/dev/io and /dev/mem just to play a song, do you? We have drivers for a reason. One nice thing about the Linux Framebuffer is that you can change the permission of your video with chmod.
Close enough. To me, "DOS-Style" means "App-can-take-your-system-down-Style."
The linux framebuffer is a kernel land driver, but it's not needed.
Of course it is not needed, it is just a better design. You don't think xmms should access
... huge make install nightmare.
/usr/ports/java/jdk13. /usr/ports/distfiles. /usr/ports/distfiles.
Huh?
Steps for native JAVA on FreeBSD:
1) cd
2) Execute make.
3) Download patch file from URL make provided into
4) Execute make.
5) Download source from URL make provided into
6) Execute 'make install'.
It is a little troublesome but still quite easy.
Back when I used to be called the Sun God (SunOS sysadmin 1989-1993), BSD/386 hadn't yet split, and Linux was in its infancy. A few years later, it was about time I get Unix onto my various Intel systems.
The question was, Linux or FreeBSD?
Today, the answer is a resounding both (FreeBSD runs perimeter firewall and fileservers, Linux runs my desktops), but back then, FreeBSD was the obvious answer.
Why? Because it was the most like good old SunOS 4.1 you could get on an Intel chip. That's a good thing? Fuck yeah! Before Sun abandoned beloved Berkeley Unix for the nightmare that was, is, and will forever be System-V, they had an OS on a platform of choice. Not just choice, but prime (and I don't mean Pr1me, either, god help us).
SunOS gave us a shockingly stable platform on the Motorola 68030 and SPARC chips. It provided some of the most stable TCP/IP around at the time. C-News (remember C-news?) rocked on it. C-News didn't have a prayer an the new-fangled AIX that we got to evaluate.
Graphics? Fuck yes. I/O bandwidth? Fuck yes. xbattle at 1am after closing the terminal room? Fuck yes.
And even then, it had lightweight processes, secure RPC, a super-clean dev interface, and other experimental features that we take for granted today.
Solaris arrived shortly on the seen, I changed jobs, and SunOS is just a memory for most of us grizzled Sun Gods now. But you can still see a lot of SunOS in FreeBSD. I even remember when the -a option appeared in ifconfig on SunOS. It appeared in FreeBSD very shortly, too.
Once the sources are downloaded -- and it is Sun's stupidity, that requires you to click-through the license before downloading, it is as simple as:
To install on multiple machines, you can follow up with After which, it only a matter of on each of your systems...BTW, I'm using the 1.4.1 -- it is certainly quite stable.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
This is such an important point! It's so easy to get tempted into playing feature-chase, especially when just about all IT-centric publications push this aspect in every publication, every ad, and every "news brief"^h^h^h^hpress release.
But advanced features are often worse than useless: not only do we have problems with bugs and leaky abstractions, but we have a whole army of professionsals to re-train, in the vain hope that THIS time, it will be different.
Notice that Microsoft's biggest problem these days is that it sold Windows NT/98 too well. Yes, that combination was technically inferior, but it was fairly simple, and once the bugs were worked out (3-4 years later...) IT departments finally got a hanlde on it. So, do they want to give up this comfort zone for a new slew of untested systems, and then aNOTHER new slew right after that? Heck no!!
This is exactly where FreeBSD has greater strength than any other OS, period. There are no sudden jumps in features, users don't have to re-learn everything 3 years later, and in fact FreeBSD 2.x, 3.x, and 4.x machines can easily be handled together, sharing almost identical configuration scripts, filesystem layout, etc...
(Notice that the parent comment in this thread looks like it was written by a Microsoft marketing executive? Hmm.... nah, it couldn't be.)
You might notice BSD is spelt with less letters
this gives it less overhead and hence makes it faster than the more cumbersome Linux, expecially once you Add Gnu to it
Linux sucks far worse than BSD.
Just ask Google:
BSD sucks 28,400 results.
Linux sucks 228,000 results.
It is quite clear that the users have spoken: Linux Sucks! Long Live BSD!