Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 5.1 Released
LogicX writes "FreeBSD 5.1 is now available. Mirrors and press release are at FreeBSD.org. Enjoy." Here are the release notes for this new version. Update: 06/09 18:15 GMT by S : Here's a BitTorrent link at scarywater.net, and another BitTorrent link from the original poster.
Imagine a CLIC cluster of these running a Linux-powered wi-fi access point that is used by an Apache web server that is hosting a site advocating the legal fight against SCO and the RIAA/MPAA which shares files using an open source P2P client developed at MIT or Berkely and has an Nvidia graphics card with special drivers that make increase performance under the goatse benchmark test application!
in view of the fact that no one in their right mind uses this utterly dead OS.
I am so bummed. I really was looking forward to a release that included Java "out of the box."
It's too bad *BSD is dying.
Netcraft and some trolls said so. So it has to be true right? Right?
And not announce the release early thereby crushing the servers as in previous releases?
an Elegy For Java
I am a Java user
and I try hard to be brave
That is a tall order
Java's foot is in the grave.
I tap at my toy keyboard
and whistle a happy tune
but keeping happy's so hard,
Java died so soon.
Each day I wake and softly sob
Nightfall finds me crying
Not only am I a zit faced slob
but Java is dying.
Does it run lunix?
Shouldn't this topic be in the "BSD" section of Slashdot?
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
from the let-the-dying-begin dept.
but if SCO wins we might all be using BSD!
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is growing
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has risen yet again, now up to more than 30 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has gained more market share , this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is sending other OSes into complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by topping the charts in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Daemon to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a long and prosperous future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Server because *BSD is growing. Things are looking very good for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to gain market share. Red ink flows from Redmond like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most loved of them all, having gained 93% more core developers. The sudden and pleasant release of the long developed 5.0 only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is growing.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 70000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 70000/5 = 14000 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 7000 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (70000+14000+7000)*4 = 364000 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the release of OSX, cool new technologies and so on, FreeBSD is expanding into more desktops than ever. FreeBSD has become more than the sum of its parts.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily gained in market share. *BSD is very powerful and its long term survival prospects are very bright. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to improve. The progress achieved is nothing short of a miracle. For all practical purposes, *BSD is alive and kicking.
Fact: *BSD will kick your ass
. . .to get a subscription to one or more of the BSD's at www.bsdmall.com.
Particularly in the face of 5.x being ready for production, and OpenBSD losing DARPA funding.
Since *BSD is obviously dying, let's ./ it just like we do with SCO.
Download a large file from here.
or launch wget processes:
wget http://www2.freebsd.org/ports/os2/perl_inf.zip
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The release notes for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE contain a summary of recent changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 5-CURRENT development branch. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 What's New
2.1 Security Advisories
2.2 Kernel Changes
2.2.1 Processor/Motherboard Support
2.2.2 Boot Loader Changes
2.2.3 Network Interface Support
2.2.4 Network Protocols
2.2.5 Disks and Storage
2.2.6 File Systems
2.2.7 PCCARD Support
2.2.8 Multimedia Support
2.3 Userland Changes
2.4 Contributed Software
2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure
2.6 Release Engineering and Integration
2.7 Documentation
3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD
1 Introduction
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE on the i386 hardware platform. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
This distribution of FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the ``Obtaining FreeBSD'' appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
Users who are new to the 5-CURRENT series of FreeBSD releases should also read the ``Early Adopters Guide to FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE''. This document can generally be found in the same location as the release notes (either as a part of a FreeBSD distribution or on the FreeBSD Web site). It contains important information regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE, as opposed to releases based on the FreeBSD 4-STABLE development branch.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with ``late-breaking'' information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
2 What's New
This section describes many of the user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 5.0-RELEASE. It includes items that are unique to the 5-CURRENT branch, as well as some features that may have been recently merged to other branches (after FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE). The latter items are marked as [MERGED].
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 5.0-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
2.1 Security Advisories
A remotely exploitable vulnerability in CVS has been corrected with the import of version 1.11.5. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:01. [MERGED]
A timing-based attack on OpenSSL, which could allow a very powerful attacker access to plaintext under certain circumstances, has been prevented via an upgrade to OpenSSL 0.9.7. See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:02 for more details. [MERGED]
The security and performance of the ``syncookies'' feature has been improved to decrease the chance of an attacker being able to spoof connections. More details are given in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:03. [MERGED]
Remotely-exploitable buffer overflow vulnerabilities in sendmail have been fixed by updating sendmail. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:04 and FreeBSD-SA-03:07. [MERGED]
A bounds-
Which virtual machine/emulator is best for running BSD5 on a Linux host on x86?
This release is in memory of Alan Eldridge.
Ports worked out well until they broke during an upgrade. Switching terminals was just plain wierd, coming from the more logical Linux perspective, and I only had four of them (five with X-Windows when I could get it running.) I suspect I would have had a better time of it if I had gone scavenger hunting for that magical bit of hardware that wasn't too old or too new to work, but in the end I figured screw it -- just about any distribution of Linux seemed to install properly and run efficiently, so why torture myself?
So basically I've been running with Gentoo for the last couple of years. Has FreeBSD gotten any friendlier lately?
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
announcing themselves so much, else SCO could give a look to their code, and find it strickingly similar to their own...
Why not just use Apple's new operating system since (apparently) it's just like BSD but with a more useable desktop environment and the new Apple MusicTM utility?
Release 5.1 of a dying OS. Not since the last Leslie Nielsen film have I been so thrilled.
you know, the ones you said Iraq possessed "without a doubt".
meanwhile, Clinton lied about a bj, and he gets impeached.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
5.1 speaker support has been lacking from FreeBSD for years. I'm very excited this added this feature, since I can now using my speaker set-up to the fullest.
If the latest revalations regarding IBM's possible leakage of copyrighted Unix code into Linux have proven anything, it is that using any derivative of this outdated operating system is a legal disaster waiting to happen. Not only is Linux licensed under the anti-business GNU General Public License, but it turns out that commercial code may have been unlawfully added, making it illegal to use or distribute.
This should suprise no one familiar with the history of Unix. The earliest version was an unlicensed ripoff of the proprietary Multics operating system, and was partly responsible for destroying the market for this pioneering operating system. The Berkeley Shareware Distribution (BSD) was sued by AT&T in the early 1990s, for openly distributing copyrighted code in its public-domain source releases. As if this wasn't enough, it turned out that AT&T had also broken the license on code they had taken from BSD, leaving both sides forced to essentially accept the other's illegal behavior in order to avoid stiffer penalties.
Reputable software companies such as Microsoft, though initially interested in Unix, have learned to steer clear of the mess of standards, licenses, and conflicting intellectual property rights that Unix forms. Microsoft Windows XP is the latest release of Microsoft's flagship version of Windows, built from the ground up in the early 1990s based on the most modern concepts in operating systems, without any legacy baggage from the 1970s. And it is available essentially for free, preloaded on hardware from all major manufacturers. There is really no reason to use anything else, unless you need a truly high-performance computing system such as IBM's proprietary OS/390 or HP's OpenVMS.
Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when
recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of
1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft
survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this
news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing
in complete disarray, as further exemplified by
failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive
networking test.
You don't need to be a
Kreskin to
predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces
a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD
because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many
of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows
like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all,
having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo
states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are
there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is
roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD
users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD
posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article
put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are
(7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the
number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek,
abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was
taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All
major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD
is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is
to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to
decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For
all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
Enhanced "jail" management, allowing one server to provide many different "virtual machines" with reduced administrator workload.
...whenever they announce the release of free software distributions (or large applications).
That would be a nice value added service.
BlackNova Traders
Does anyone know if they managed to nail the BunDirty problems with UFS 1.0? I have a FreeBSD 5.0 machine I'd like to upgrade, but every time I installed a 5.1 kernel and world via CVSup, it would crash with a "BunDirty" error on boot.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
I just finished downloading my copy, seconds before this story posted.
HERE
And if they didn't, I suspect that they will have one mailed to them today... ;)
"Time is long and life is short, so begin to live while you still can." -EV
Keep the Linux dorks away from the BSDs!
w00t! I'm sure it will take ages since I'm on dialup, but I'm still excited!
:(]
Wish me luck! [booting FreeBSD floppies on vmware has been flaky last few times I've tried it.
We all know BSD dead--the only people who are using it are around 250 long-haired hippies refusing to accept a real man's OS--Loonux.
You can read wscons documentation, then edit the config file, reboot and you have more virtual terminals. You obviously didn't read the docs, or you're just trolling.
but my hardware probably is to 3l337 to run it. It is only four years old :-)
Because I can build a headless FreeBSD box for a few hundred dollars.
I run a Mac desktop and laptop, but I don't have the bread to buy myself an XServe. FreeBSD on a cheap x86 handles all my server needs. Life is good.
--
the strongest word is still the word "free"
If you are interested in the respective merits of FreeBSD 5.1 over 4.x and are unsure which one to install, you might want to see the Early Adopter's Guide for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE
Then someone should tell netcraft. . .
l
they're running it.
The site www.netcraft.com is running Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_perl/1.27 on FreeBSD.
and take a look at the uptime list.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.htm
there's one linux box and 49 *bsd boxes.
...what???? AAAaaaaauuugggghhhhhhh .... !!
*runs screaming from slashdot*
At one point the *BSD crowd looked down on the immature Linux featureset (in particular the VM). I think that situtation has reversed.
Note the new features of FreeBSD 5.1 that have been in Linux quite awhile:
* PAE (36bit memory addressing)
* DevFS
* Name Service Switch
* USB 2.0 support
* Basic HTT (HyperThreading) Support
* ata driver flushes at shutdown
* >2TB block devices
* Filesystem volume labels
* O_DIRECT support
My fucking god. The mind boggles.
Yes, it does. How could anyone could be so stupid as to not get the "5.1" joke?
Meanwhile proper sound support, proper SMP support, proper thread support, etc. ad nauseum, has been available in Linux for fucking YEARS.
Why do you fucking poseurs continue thinking you're lee7 running FreeBSD on your Pentium 3? Someday hopefully you'll find yourself in the real world.
In the "real world", you will find many ISPs like UUNet, Compuserve, and Mindspring, running their servers on BSD variants. Yahoo! uses BSD. Hotmail used(uses?) BSD. Why? It outperforms Linux and has greater stability. In the "real world", you will find BSD variants in many embedded applications because it is not saddled with the hobbyist-oriented GPL license that forces companies to part with their intellectual property. If Linksys had built their routers around BSD, they wouldn't be facing a legal mess that might force them to give away their source code.
So? and?
What is your point?
You have forever changed the BSD troll. Good job.
--Anonymous Coward
Who can take an anus
And stretch it open wide?
Put it on a website with a penis bird inside?
The GOATSEMAN can
The GOATSEMAN can
This seems to make it harder to install/use the system. I understand there's a bunch of politics involved in making the main distrubution, but whouldn't FBSD have a better chance of wide adoption if there was at least one other distro that was based on efficiency rather than politics?
FRA: STFU GTFO
It's too bad, but I won't be able to use this release for the projects I've had on the go (closed source - sorry) that run off of FreeBSD.
For some reason, the bktr driver used for TV tuner card and some other hardware hangs seconds after activiation on FreeBSD 5.x. I'll likely have to rewrite the driver anyway at some stage to fix some issues I have with it, but this is preventing me from upgrading past FreeBSD 4.8.
The efforts required to get Darwin running for at least one of these projects is starting to look like less and less of a pain. Time will tell...
I've always wondered why embedded device makers choose Linux over FreeBSD. Does anyone know why?
I'm curious because using Linux (which is GPL'd) seems a bit risky. It seems every other week some poor embedded device company is being tarred and feathered for allegedly breaking the terms of the GPL.
Why do companies run the risk of Linux/GPL license problems when FreeBSD is available? This is not a troll, I am genuinely curious.
-Teckla
Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is dying.
Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when
recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of
1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft
survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this
news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing
in complete disarray, as further exemplified by
failing dead last [samag.org] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive
networking test.
You don't need to be a
Kreskin [amdest.com] to
predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces
a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD
because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many
of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows
like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all,
having lost 93% of its core developers.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo
states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are
there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is
roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD
users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD
posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article
put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are
(7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the
number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek,
abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was
taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All
major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD
is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is
to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to
decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For
all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dead
How does someone who cheated on his wife and lied to a grand jury keep his job, as President of the United States, leader of the free world.
Could it have anything to do with the fact that his sex life has nothing to do with being the President? I know that it must be shocking to you to discover that a married man lied about an affair he had. That's never happened before in the history of man.
And I don't care that he lied to Ken Starr about it. Getting a blowjob from Monica Lewinsky had nothing to do with Starr's investigation into a 20 year old land deal in which Clinton lost money. The question shouldn't have been asked and I don't care that Clinton lied about it. Not all people can be pillers of virtue like many of Clinton's Republican critics.
Most of us would rather have a competent President who occasionally gets a blowjob than have the idiot we have in office now. When Clinton left office, we had a budget surplus. Since Bush's idiotic tax cuts for the rich, his war on Iraq, and wasteful government spending, we now have the largest deficit this country has ever seen. I'd rather have a President that fucks an intern rather than one who fucks the entire country.
Man, does anyone who criticizes FreeBSD ever use it? Because I use it and like it quite a bit, and everyone I know who uses it likes it.
/usr/bin to /usr/local/bin (they even put symlinks for you in /usr/bin) So as far as I can tell, FreeBSD 5.1 comes with perl 5.6.1 in the "default install." The only ramification is simply this. If you for some reason want to upgrade perl, you use ports and you don't have to wait for the FreeBSD team to update it, because rightly so, they see no reason to do it. Also note that why would you want perl scripts in an OS? Shell is perfectly adequate for the scripting needs of the base system, perl is something users use.
On Perl: Perl is not in the base install, it's a port installed by default, So What! It was moved to ports because people want to have a lot of flexibility when it comes to what version of perl they run. The FreeBSD team was doing just what the users wanted. And I would like to know how to install FreeBSD without that Perl port installed. You would have to go out of your way in every install method to take it out. Big deal it moved from
On Java: Sun is being an idiot with regards to Sun on anything but Solaris, Windows and Linux. They make it very hard to include the JVM in binary form in a "default install." They have a ridiculous license on they source code that makes it hard for FreeBSD to do much of anything about this. By they way, if you use ports the JVM 1.4 builds nicely and works rather well. I have personally written to Sun complaining about this - as have others, but they aren't willing to focus on FreeBSD. BTW, FreeBSD runs linux binaries and the Linux JVM works on that compatibility layer.
NVIDIA: Nvidia builds binary drivers for FreeBSD. Hardly 'niche.'
SMP, scheduler: SMP is vastly improved, scheduler and VM is very very good. This OS is very competitive with Linux, and despite what you may have heard, it is capable of outperforming it without sacrificing quality.
Matched c-library, GCC, userland and kernel: One must appreciate that the FreeBSD team is a very thorough. They are obsessively concerned with coherency and quality. This is not some slapped together random miasma in every incarnation, this is a well thought out combination of the vital system components. It works. Trust me, it works. If you want military grade, use 4.8+, if you want rock solid, use 5.1. Frankly, where FreeBSD-current is, is where most linuxes start in terms stability/coherency/usability. It is quite useable in its "unstable" form.
Polling Support: One of FreeBSD's best features is polling on networking devices to prevent interrupt driven livelock.
Proof in Pudding: Think of heavy iron appliances with various free operating systems in it. I can think of two for FreeBSD. The godly Juniper routers and the F5 BigIP. These are serious pieces of networking equipment and they chose FreeBSD for a reason - its far more pleasant to deal with commercially, its fast stable and coherent and the license permits modifications without divulging them to the world.
One project, one c compiler, one c library, one coherent userland, 5 different architectures, great portability, stability and commercial viability.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
The reason Perl was taken out was because of logistics: it's 54MB of source that's a moving target. Very hard to keep backward compatibility.
/usr/ports/lang/perl{5,5.8} && make install. You're done. (Or install a pre-compiled package.)
And backward compatibility is very important to FBSD: you can still run 2.x and 3.x binaries on a 5.x box. You can still run a.out binaries on a 5.x box.
If you want Perl, you can easily install it yourself by doing a: cd
I fail to see the issue here.
I was thinking of putting up a torrent for this, but figured i'd look around and see if anyone else did first. Besides the one on this thread, i found this useful site which creates torrents for slashdot linked files in general (and already has the FreeBSD 5.1 discs up), worth noting: http://f.scarywater.net/
"Easy to install
FreeBSD can be installed from a variety of media including CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, floppy disk, magnetic tape, a MS-DOS partition, or if you have a network connection, you can install it directly over anonymous FTP or NFS. All you need is a pair of blank, 1.44MB floppies and these directions."
Oh, well. I have a ultra-modern portable that doesn't ship with a floppy drive. Easy? Not for me.
You know I think this has more to do with the frequency of updates being made available for the linux kernel as compared with actual stability issues. I've NEVER had any linux servers crash on me or otherwise require a reboot due to something becoming irrecoverable.
That's because Sun supports Java on Solaris and Linux themselves. Java on FreeBSD is a volunteer effort: if you want it, help out with time or cash.
I see you've been listening to the libs at nbc....
y b2 0030609.asp#5
NBC Again Distorts Topic by Saying People
âoeLeft Outâ of Tax Cut
NBC Nightly News refuses to simply inform its viewers that those making between about $10,000 and $27,000 who do not get a hike in the child credit in the tax cut bill which passed, do not pay income taxes, at least not any net income tax after deductions, credits and EITC paybacks.
On Thursday's NBC Nightly News, as reported in Friday's CyberAlert, NBC played off sympathy for low-paid military members, as Norah O'Donnell delivered a particularly distorted look at a military wife who âoelearned her family was not included in the child tax credit because they don't make enough money.â O'Donnell cited a report from the liberal Children's Defense Fund as her authority in claiming that âoeabout one million children in military families will not benefit from the new child tax credit.â She ludicrously insisted that âoemany military familiesâ are âoefacing a summer without tax relief.â But, CBS's Sharyl Attkisson pointed out what O'Donnell suppressed: Those in question âoepay no federal income taxesâ from which to get âoerelief.â For details: www.mediaresearch.org
Fast forward to Friday night, and Tom Brokaw raised the subject of how âoesome low-income groups were left outâ of âoethe President's tax cut,â but Brokaw again failed to point out the basic fact that they were âoeleft outâ of something they put nothing into.
Brokaw opened the June 6 NBC Nightly News: âoeWelcome back, President Bush. He returned to the White House today to disquieting news. The nation's unemployment rate continued to climb. And even though some analyzing the numbers think they see light at the end of the tunnel, the economy remains a tunnel with an uncertain destination. And the President's tax cut bill still is getting roughed up by Democrats, especially since it was discovered that some low-income groups were left out. NBC's David Gregory reporting tonight from the White House.â
Gregory stuck mostly to the unemployment number, but did eventually get to the tax cut's supposed shortcoming: âoeThe President's recent compromise victory on the tax cut is being undermined by new criticism that it left out a huge chunk of the working poor who wouldn't benefit from the tax plan's expanded child credit. The White House may be forced to compromise again on a more generous credit for lower-income families. It's now quickly moving through Congress.â
While NBC characterized people as being âoeleft out,â on PBS's Washington Week on Friday night, Washington Post reporter Juliet Eilperin ludicrously asserted those in question are âoehurtâ by not getting the higher tax credit when their situation would not change, so they would neither benefit or be hurt.
Eilperin echoed the liberal spin as she recalled how âoea huge number of liberal groups started mobilizing, pointing out who was hurt by this, we're talking about, you know 12 million children who, you know, are not getting the same kind of tax credit that people thought.â
http://www.mediaresearch.org/cyberalerts/2003/c
One of the Linux distros (cough, Mandrake) would cop the subscription system. FreeBSD is right on with this method, the price is reasonable, its a great cause and satisfying as hell to receive the disks as your reading about the new release.
Paying $60/$120/$600 up front is a little steep (at least for some of us) but paying $25 per release (or something similar) is a very nice approach.
Quack, quack.
The release notes mention that an experimental amd64 release is available, but don't mention that it can be downloaded from here, including ISO images.
Most of the credit for its rapid development goes to Peter Wemm, who nearly single-handedly took the X86-64 architecture from "it can't even mount the root filesystem or exec init" to a nearly-polished release in little more than a month. (And, no, it wasn't just a matter of copying what NetBSD did; the processor-specific parts of FreeBSD and NetBSD are quite different.)
Dear Free Software Zealot,
WE the undersigned have reason to believe that the software referred to as *BSD contains source code ("Code") that is the Intellectual Property ("Stuff") of the SCO Group, Inc. Or maybe the SCO Group Stuff contains Code that is the property of *BSD, we're not really sure. But we want your money, either way.
Please stop using *BSD until our lawyers are able to send you an invoice for the Code you are using. If it is easier for you, you can just mail us a check in advance and we'll subtract it from your balance.
Best regards,
D. Boies
Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe
Attorneys for the SCO Group, Inc
Humpty Dumpty was pushed.
How this could be modded up as insightful is indicative of how uninformed some people with moderator priveleges are with respect to SCO, Linux, FreeBSD, free software in general, and the US legal system.
1) SCO isn't going to win. They are dying, and doing so loudly, flailing about and spreading as much FUD as they can in the meantime, and the very people who ran the company into the ground are being paid off handsomely by Microsoft for the fit they are throwing but, in the end, they are a dead company. There lawsuit has no legal merit whatsoever, as demonstrated repeatedly by their reticence in backing up any of their wild and absurd claims with a single shred of evidence.
2) If SCO's tactics of unsubstantiated accusations and/or stealing code from one project and then accusing their victims of their own crimes and/or poisoning the well by releasing their own code, then disavowing the action and claiming copyright violation, and/or any number of other unpleasant extrapolations based upon their ever morphing and ever more shrill accusations, then there is nothing to prevent them from doing the same the FreeBSD, or any other project (free or proprietary). This isn't about Ye Olde AT&T code, which the BSD lawsuit cleared up years ago and which the FreeBSD license makes transferable to Linux[1], this is about unsubstantiated claims and FUD which IBM has the money to defend against, but which many other software projects, both free and small-time proprietary, do not.
If this were to ever be successful (something I find to be laughable even with the current, extreme dysfunction of the American legal system) it would represent a clear and present threat not just to Linux, but to FreeBSD, to free software in general, indeed, to proprietary software, to all software developed under any paradigm which isn't defended by a multimillion dollar company (and even those that are, for if absurdity were to ever be successful against the likes of IBM, it would pretty much spell the end of software development in the United States by anyone other than Microsoft or the US Government, and I'm not even sure how well the US Government would fare).
Dismiss the SCO issues as absurd if you wish (they certainly are), but do not dismiss the tactic being used. Were it to stand in any way, shape, or form it would be profoundly dangerous to all software development in the United States of every kind, with the possible exception of that done by monopolists with deep pockets such as Microsoft and entities with lots of guns, such as the US government. Do not be so foolish as to assume FreeBSD would fare any better against such baseless accusations as Linux or anyone else.
[1]The FreeBSD license is compatible for inclusion into GPLed software, so any AT&T code in FreeBSD can be legally used in the Linux kernel as is, SCO's ranting notwithstanding. The inappropriate use of trade secrets by a code contributer, or the use of copyrighted code in violation of copyright law that postdates the BSD v. AT&T trial, could as easily be done by FreeBSD, Microsoft Windows, or Joe Blog's NewOS as it could be by Linux, as could any number of "poison well" scenerios.
So, in short, the allegations are absurd, the method of attack disingenuous and despicable in the finest FUD tradition, and the immunity of FreeBSD against similiar forms of attack exactly the same as that of Linux.
The openness of free software provides an interesting opportunity for pre-emtive defense against this sort of nonsense, and we should be brainstorming effective means for doing so in the future. Some (by no means exhaustive) ideas include:
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy
www.google.com, slashdot.org, www.amazon.com, www.redhat.com, www.cnn.com and any other major Linux host I can think of have no uptime charts whatsoever while www.freebsd.org does.
The only Linux uptime host I could find was www.debian.org with about a year uptime.
Besides that, their FAQ says that Linux boxes will cycle whatever number they measure after 497 days, so it is impossible for Linux to be in the top 50 since all of the hosts on there have been up greater than 497 days.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
You will know when BSD will start kicking ass when RMS will start advising people to call it GNU/FreeBSD.Afterall,it uses all the same components as GNU/LiNUX,except the kernel itself.So RMS is the success meter for an OS.If RMS cares to put GNU infront of the name,the project kicks ass.Netcraft surveys come after that.
Unfortunately, once the system has been installed, I can't boot it. The kernel always crashes during the bootup phase on my ASUS A7V8X motherboard :(
Maybe it has something to do with USB2 and my CD burner (Plextor S88TU). I had similar crashes with NetBSD and old Linux kernels.
{{.sig}}
and that linux box used to run BSD but for some reason they now use GNU/Linux. Looks like they had a good run with BSD, ohh well
Very subtle troll. Too bad it's wrong. FreeBSD has a complete userland as part of the distro. Very little of the core userland is GNU, but instead the "real deal" unix utilities that were *originally* released as the Berkley Software Distribution. That's right, BSD was a collection of software utilities. It evolved later into a complete Unix port for systems such as VMS.
Oh, and do you know why Linux has many of the same userland utilities as BSD? Because they were swiped from BSD in the early days of Linux development. Granted, most have been replaced by GNU software. None the less, you people could at least pay a little homage instead of biting the hand that feeds you.
... is always fun to whatch when a new big release comes out.
grisha.org
I currently use FreeBSD 4.8 on my old laptop, a 133 MHz Pentium Classic with 40 MB RAM. It's mainly a typewriter and ScummVM box, and FreeBSD 4.x is very nice, fast, and lightweight for the hardware (compared to Debian and Slack). But I love features as much as the next geek, so I'd like to know how 5.x compares to 4.x with regards to consumption of my precious RAM and disk space.
:-)
And I'd also like to know if there are any special features to drool for. Come on, just convince me to upgrade. I know I want to.
I know this was a joke, but some people may think this is true. FreeBSD (and Net and OpenBSD) are indemnified against UNIX claims from SCO or anyone else. They've already gone through their hell (daemon mascot pun intended) and came out legally unscathed, though pushed back in mindshare that they still haven't recovered from.
D. Boies
Dewey, Cheatham, and Howe
No Mr. Howard, Mr. Fine, Mr. Howard?
NBC Nightly News refuses to simply inform its viewers that those making between about $10,000 and $27,000 who do not get a hike in the child credit in the tax cut bill which passed, do not pay income taxes, at least not any net income tax after deductions, credits and EITC paybacks.
I said that the tax cuts are for the rich, which they are. Look at the tax cut on stock dividends. The poor are not big stock investors, so that does nothing for them. Very few middle class investors directly hold dividend paying stocks and those who do usually realize very little income from that stock. The majority of middle-class investors who hold dividend-paying stock do so through retirement plans which are invested in mutual funds. Since the funds reinvest the dividend income and since the taxes are deferred, individuals see no tax break from the dividend tax cut. But, when they retire and start drawing income from those retirement plans, they will pay more in taxes on those dividends than the directly-invested rich will pay today.
How about the cut in capital gains taxes. Sure, it helps some guy who sells his $750,000 home. How does it help a person of lesser means who lives in a rented apartment? It doesn't.
Tell that to RMS.I know many of the programs of linux distributions are from the BSD land.How about X11? How about mozilla, TeX, apache, etc? Does the "BSD collection of software utilities" include mozilla, lynx, open office, tex and apache? Or are they BSD software?
When you say complete userland, you mean "ls, cp, mv, cd, uptime, ps". Because if that's the userland there are 13 year-old kiddies who can make these programs in a month.
Good troll tho.
... ate my Troll rating. I stand by it none the less!
You may disagree, but to be blunt, you're wrong. -tgd
None of what you named has anything to do with Linix OR FreeBSD. Nor do they have anything to do with RMS. They are *user* programs written by third parties. The only thing that the GNU produces are standard "userland" utils. The primary exception is GCC which is used by all free projects.
It's amazing what people will attribute to RMS. (shakes head)
When you say complete userland, you mean "ls, cp, mv, cd, uptime, ps". Because if that's the userland there are 13 year-old kiddies who can make these programs in a month.
Heh. And they did. It's called GNU/Linux. What a fricking mess. Every program works any way it wants, may produce completely bizarre output, has no or completely useless documentation, etc. Just because someone *can* do something doesn't mean they can do it well.
Hehe.
Due to code size limitations, the i386 boot loader can only load kernels from root file systems that are 1.5TB or smaller in size.
Darn, I guess I'll have to stick with 4.8!
get:
k _io_initiation() at softdep_disk_io_initiation+0x80
Starting background file system checks.
Mon Jun 9 14:57:37 EDT 2003
panic: initiate_write_inodeblock_ufs1: already started
cpuid = 1;
Debugger("panic")
Stopped at Debugger+0x1c: ta %xcc, 1
db> t
panic() at panic+0x134
initiate_write_inodeblock_ufs1() at initiate_write_inodeblock_ufs1+0x32c
softdep_dis
spec_xstrategy() at spec_xstrategy+0x134
spec_specstrategy() at spec_specstrategy+0x8
spec_vnoperate() at spec_vnoperate+0x1c
bwrite() at bwrite+0x3b8
vfs_bio_awrite() at vfs_bio_awrite+0x1a0
vop_stdfsync() at vop_stdfsync+0x120
spec_fsync() at spec_fsync+0x20
spec_vnoperate() at spec_vnoperate+0x1c
ffs_sync() at ffs_sync+0x348
sync() at sync+0xcc
syscall() at syscall+0x2a8
-- syscall (36, FreeBSD ELF64, sync) %o7=0x105e44 --
userland() at 0x10e4c8
user trace: trap %o7=0x105e44
pc 0x10e4c8, sp 0x7fdfffff311
pc 0x1001f0, sp 0x7fdfffff3e1
pc 0, sp 0x7fdfffff4a1
done
db>
FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE-p7 works OK though.
This very sad news should remind us that many very good people have been hurt in the last few years by the IT implosion.
Sometimes nothing we do can make a difference. Sometimes the tiniest gesture can save a life.
Please remember to say "Hi, how are you?" to someone who might need it.
The poor vote for Demoncrats because they believe the Demoncraticly controled media. They have no incentive to believ anything else. Collage students vote Demoncrate because its the cool thing to do and their Political Science prof. is a Demoncrate. Students are also usualy poor. As soon as someone desires to become other then poor and starts working for a living, they normally become Republicans ( or Republicrats like me) unless the early scholastic brainwashing plus media hype is so strong as to drown out reason. The result is a desire by the Demoncrats, to keep everyone one poor. BTW the Demoncrating definition for rich, is anyone who is making more the the cost of living. The policies of the Clinton administration devistated the economy. The media was liing about the streangth of the economy. 2% growth, come on a bank acount is better then that. Also notice that befor Bush, the econmy was great, but the very day he took office, the economy was reported to be in trouble.
This is a feature I'm really looking forward to.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I
it's just resting.
Get to it boys.
[Ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
I wish more distro's would do it. I love the idea of supporting my favorite distro by automatically shelling out a very reasonable fee everytime they release. Wish I used Slack.
Quack, quack.
I know this was a joke, but some people may think this is true. FreeBSD (and Net and OpenBSD) are indemnified against UNIX claims from SCO or anyone else. They've already gone through their hell (daemon mascot pun intended) and came out legally unscathed, though pushed back in mindshare that they still haven't recovered from.
And this will stop SCO from sending cease & desist letters or filing lawsuits? You don't know much about the legal system, do you? They can send as many letters as they want, until someone files a restraining order against them. They can file any lawsuit they want, it doesn't matter if it has no merit if they're expecting it never to go to trial. That's exactly what the RIAA did with the RPI student. If you threaten enough you might just make some money in the process. As long as you don't let the case get to court and be thrown out...
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Nothing. Go back to sleep.
a brief document explaining in simple terms what the differences are between Linux and BSD and why anyone should care which one he uses. From the point of view of someone who is not doing systems hacking, all versions of Unix look pretty much the same, with mostly the same commands and system calls.
I work in the embedded industry and I can tell you why: people have heard of Linux. Almost all of the people calling me asking about running Linux on embedded hardware are doing it for the first time, and they've never heard of BSD.
Hrm, actually, the BigIP versions 4.0-4.5 run on BSDi. F5's 3DNS version 3.x ran on FreeBSD, but they migrated it to BSDi in version 4.0. ISMan might run on FreeBSD though - it comes as an ISO.
--Dox
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point all the more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Needs a BitTorrent for the Alpha release.
[N.B.: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It's w
parent is a very offensive post.
It is just not enough Unix for me.
FreeBSD does not even have weekly minutes, like Michael does.
I can not buy a cheap FreeBSD box from walmart.com
FreeBSD does not have a cool enough name, like say, Lindows. Lindows sounds like a Unix worth owning.
FreeBSD does not have Click 'n' Run Warehouse.
I am sorry, but for the power user, FreeBSD just does not offer anything compelling, and let's not even get into development environments.
FreeBSD is just not 31337 for the masses yet.
Even big important money making companies like SCO pay it no mind.
Should have been " ... and only helping the rich."
it's about time someone gave that FreeUser freak a good fisting. that freak must suck on RMS's cock every night, or maybe just his alter ego.
BSDI paid for the porting so I can't see why not.
This reminds me of the time the Microsoft lackey in my company were strying to get me to soften my anti Microsoft/Windows stance and prove that the T&M industry was going to Windows based instrumentation because that is what the customers wanted. They showed me a study from a company that has already been taken over by MS, and had no history of Unix support( i.e. all there customers were already 100% Windows). Further investigation showed that the study was done at MSs request.
If you want to convince me, youd better do better then bartcop!!!
I assumed FreeBSD 5.0 was stable because everyone here mentioned how ready it was. It ruined my whole system.
Just a reminder to take a look at FreeBSD 4.8 if you use a server or workstation with critical work on it.
http://saveie6.com/
After the problems that occurred when the last release was announced early, the FreeBSD release team created a new permissions scheme so that only mirror admins could access the 5.1 release directory before the official release. If anybody else tried to access the 5.1 release directory (even on a mirror site), they would get a 403 (access denied) error.
In this case, clearly it was of little use for Slashdot to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.1 early.
GPF right out of the gate. Of course, it could have something to do with this POS Vaio laptop... Anyway, make mine 4.8 for now =]
End of Line.
As the release notes state, FreeBSD 5.1 includes the latest stable releases of GNOME and KDE, 2.2.1 and 3.1.2 respectively.
Getting FreeBSD 5.1 would be a great way to easily get the latest stable versions of these desktop environments as they were intended to be (without all the distribution-specific customizations made by Red Hat, SuSE, and so on).
Granted, you could also use Gentoo current or Debian unstable, but FreeBSD 5.1 is likely to be more stable (in the sense of not frequently changing) and you can get it on CD.
Agreed, the only problem I have with FreeBSD is that it doesn't always restore reliably when I open my laptop lid. Besides that, I like it as much as the better linux distros (debian, gentoo, slack)
What the hell is a "human bing"? Is that a term used to describe animals that go on a rampage when their soccer team wins (or loses) a match?
As to "looser", here's what's on dictionary.com:
adj. loosÂer, loosÂest
1. Not fastened, restrained, or contained: loose bricks.
2. Not taut, fixed, or rigid: a loose anchor line; a loose chair leg.
3. Free from confinement or imprisonment; unfettered: criminals loose in the neighborhood; dogs that are loose on the streets.
4. Not tight-fitting or tightly fitted: loose shoes.
5. Not bound, bundled, stapled, or gathered together: loose papers.
6. Not compact or dense in arrangement or structure: loose gravel.
7. Lacking a sense of restraint or responsibility; idle: loose talk.
8. Not formal; relaxed: a loose atmosphere at the club.
9. Lacking conventional moral restraint in sexual behavior.
10. Not literal or exact: a loose translation.
11. Characterized by a free movement of fluids in the body: a loose cough; loose bowels.
Sounds like you're the one who can't speak English.
Enterprise computing is my profession. I administer a cluster wtih 400 nodes in the UK. So if you think you know what enterprise computing is, think again looser.
So you're a system administrator. I'm a software engineer. Comparing what you do to what I do is like comparing the job of an automobile service technician to an automobile engineer.
You have probably never touched anything with more power than a Speccy.
So you get your rocks off "touching" powerful computers designed by real engineers. I've worked on state-of-the-art systems for the past two decades. See, engineers are the ones who design the systems and software long before it ever gets down to your "computer janitor" hands.
Piss off wanker!
To use a U.S. colloquialism, go fuck yourself little man.
I was playing with the Beta 2 and the disklabel was gone with the partition info! What the F**
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE
XFree86 4.3.0
GNOME 2.2.1/KDE 3.1.2
....and still my favorite WM: WindowMaker 0.80.2 (who needs a dot.oh release anyway???)
Ummmm....actually, you needn't install 5.1-RELEASE to get the latest KDE/GNOME versions. 'Portupgrade' is your friend....;-)
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE
XFree86 4.3.0
GNOME 2.2.1/KDE 3.1.2
....and still my favorite WM: WindowMaker 0.80.2 (who needs a dot.oh release anyway???)
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Did you notice www.hs.sll.se, which claims to be running Microsoft-IIS/4.0 on FreeBSD? Is this even possible?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
It is official; UN Statistics now confirms: the USA is dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered USA when president Bush confirmed that their markets have dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction their value when he began his term. Coming on the heels of a recent UN survey which plainly states that America has lost its way, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. America is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by being the most hated nation in the world.
You don't need to be a foreigner to predict America's future. The hand writing is on the wall: America faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Americans because the USA is dying. Things are looking very bad for America. As many of us are already aware, as the American economy continues to collapse.
Red ink flows like a river of blood. For all practical purposes, all Americans are dead, or at least should be.
Sadly because software is being designed to run on Linux, not generic Unix or with a focus on POSIX compliance. The focus used to be on transmitting data as plain text, interoperability, and portability. Now it's just "does it compile on my Redhat box?"
It hurts and stuff.
Wanting to incarcerate everything that moves.
Pls die sn kthx!!!111!
You are correct about BSD/OS being the OS underneath; Check out the sources for BSDi BSD/OS, you are entitled to them as a binary license holder. You'll be surprised when you see a very striking similarity to FreeBSD. Walnut Creek and BSDi merged and a lot of the development is parallel. I sort of think of BSDi as commercial dress for FreeBSD these days. I have had the pleasure of using both, but for something I use personally, I would use FreeBSD. I can't think of anything unique to BSD/OS off the top of my head.
I made the mistake of replacing the MBR that freebsd installs with that of grub from my gentoo install and realized after that it looks like grub 0.93 from gentoo cannot read or mount the UFS2 filesystem from my 5.1-RELEASE install. How can I fix this/boot back into freebsd now? And does anyone know if installing grub from freebsd's ports will support UFS2? Or am I just going to have to reinstall fbsd with UFS1. -Robert
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: *BSD is growing
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Windows community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has risen yet again, now up to more than 30 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has gained more market share , this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is sending other OSes into complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by topping the charts in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Daemon to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a long and prosperous future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Windows Server because *BSD is growing. Things are looking very good for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to gain market share. Red ink flows from Redmond like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most loved of them all, having gained 93% more core developers. The sudden and pleasant release of the long developed 5.0 only serves to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is growing.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
FreeBSD leaders state that there are innumerable users of FreeBSD. How many users of FreeBSD are there? Let's see. Every time FreeBSD a huge number of FreeBSD users cvsup their tree with the closest mirror. Notice there are hundreds of FreeBSD mirrors under constant stress. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts, of which there are many hundreds per day.
Due to the merger of Walnut Creek and BSDi, and Juniper JunOS, cool new technologies and so on, FreeBSD is expanding into more markets than ever. FreeBSD has become more than the sum of its parts.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily gained in market share. *BSD is very powerful and its long term survival prospects are very bright. If Windows is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to improve. The progress achieved is nothing short of a miracle. For all practical purposes, *BSD is alive and kicking.
Fact: *BSD will kick your ass
Mod this up as insightful. It might save lives.
It also helps if the FreeBSD Foudation doesn't piss off the main HotSpot VM lead in the FreeBSD. Much of 1.3.1 was mine from the days when I was at BSDi, J2SE 1.4 wouldn't have been possible without work on the threading system and the massive job of porting the HotSpot VM in J2SE 1.3 to FreeBSD. It's a major feat for the BSDs overall and is one of the main bug complains on Sun's site.
3 /freebsd- java/20030209.freebsd-java.html
e tch=42987 9+0+archive/2003/freebsd-java/20030209.freebsd-jav a9 387 9+0+archive/2003/freebsd-java/20030209.freebsd-jav a
Basically, the FreeBSD Foundation paid another lower level engineer to do work that was pretty much in my technical domain without consultation with me asking if this was ok or not, etc.. and other things that go with having the responsibilities of being a technical lead of a project. It undermines the nature of how volunteer organizations work. Pretty ridiculous, since I'm effectively the technical lead of the project until this event. By doing this, they undermined my status within the group, pissed me off and effectively took over the entire FreeBSD Java effort without crediting me for my work over the last 2 years that stemmed originally from my BSDi day as a JVM internals engineer.
I busted ass for these folks the first half of last year and they basically blew me off because of these "elists" actions. It's difficult to interpret it any other way from my point of view.
The flames are thick and I got really pissed off from how they treated me, "you're annoying and threaten my status within the FreeBSD Foundation. Dipshits.
Original archived thread:
http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/archive/200
Supporting emails:
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?f
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=3
Reading the CVS log in the patchset will reveal what I've done. An unfortunate set of circumstances.
I stil haven't gotten an apology from them yet, 4 months have past.
This is that same guy who comes into the #opendarwin channel on irc.freenode.net and pisses everyone off to the point where he got banned. I don't think it was elitism.... just the elimination of an asshole.
This link should answer your question
o ss ible
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/accuracy.html#imp
> SMP, scheduler: SMP is vastly improved, scheduler and VM is very very good. This OS is very competitive with Linux, and despite what you may have heard, it is capable of outperforming it without sacrificing quality.
Can you back this up with some figures? Or is it just your personal opinion?
The FreeBSD VM might have been far superior in the past, but it's not like Linux development stood still.
As for your stability issue.. that's just FUD.. I'm pretty sure that the commercial Linux distro's put ALOT of testing into a kernel release. With Apple using FreeBSD at it's core, it probably also gets a fare amount of testing (probably a lot more than in the past)
I'd apologize to you, but I have no standing.
I doubt that the slight was intentional. Remember
Hanlon's Razor.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
My bad, it's 'syscons'.
Will sendmail ever become a port?
Just tried out the new SCHED_ULE scheduler and so far it is awesome on my SMP machine. XFree86 uses half the CPU it used to and it was very smooth running other apps whilst rebuilding the kernel with -j6, eg. FXTV.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real g
What are you talking about? This is great stuff!!!
# ps -uax
Bad syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'?
while ps uax is OK. and then they push this GNU longopt shit on us. --with-my-head-up-my-ass
it's great fun in Linux elitist land.
Much of 1.3.1 was mine from the days when I was at BSDi,
Many thanks; every little bit helps.
Basically, the FreeBSD Foundation paid another lower level engineer to do work that was pretty much in my technical domain without consultation with me asking if this was ok or not, etc..
I'm not upto date on the particulars, but perhaps the fact that Java on FreeBSD was happening so slowly that it might as well not have been happening at all have something to do with it? Personally I love FreeBSD, but since most all my work switched from Perl based to Java based I could no longer advocate my beloved OS. Sure, Java kinda, sorta, maybe was available on FreeBSD...enough that I coded on a FreeBSD work station...but nothing close to something anyone could resonablly present to a client as a "good idea to run this project on FreeBSD". No way in hell, period, when Sparc hardware was/is so cheap and actually supported today.
By doing this, they undermined my status within the group, pissed me off and effectively took over the entire FreeBSD Java effort without crediting me for my work over the last 2 years that stemmed originally from my BSDi day as a JVM internals engineer.
Java on FreeBSD was going no where, fast. Maybe they, like myself and pretty much every FreeBSD user that longed for Java to be supported well enough on FreeBSD to use it for professional work, just got sick and tired of the snails pace that Java on FreeBSD was going. Maybe they thought FreeBSD, effectively having been a non-player in the Java world from the get-go, needed to try a different tactic, some freash blood, because obviously whatever had been happening wasn't good enough by miles.
Seriously... For a modern IT setting Java is very often a primary focus for new development of server apps. FreeBSD will simply get left in the dust as a "Serious Server OS" if it doesn't have rock solid Java support upto and including the latest versions available for Linux/Solaris/Windows.
You can't just be getting 1.3 to laughably be called "production ready" when 1.4 is production ready everywhere else... Hell, I'm not even sure what's available for Java on FreeBSD these days because I gave up watching the grass not grow. I know a great many that are pretty much in the same boat.
You couldn't hack it for whatever reasons, so they went looking for someone who maybe could. Boo-who they didn't coddle you more before looking.
My
A little lost. Where is Sparc64 Disc1? I have downloaded Disc2, but Disc1 is nowhere to be found. I am assuming (yea I know) that there is a Disc 1 as ver 5.0 had a Disc 1 and in 5.1 i386 has a Disc 1 and 2....
The README says look in the distro/floppies directory for a README.TXT with more information. Doesn't exist and can't find anything on the site...
hints?
You mean BSOD!
Alexey Zelkin is doing a good job, but needs help since this stuff is way beyond any single person. If the project was more organized and politically clear, there might have been a better effort for corporate out reach, which would have set a a positive example in the BSD for this kind of organization. Currently, you just have old school advocates that don't really understand why these issues are significant (political and technical) and why they need to change, be more politically inclusive and step out of the way of folks when then need to. Linux, on the other hand, is too decentralized to have any politics really effect it. It's definitely more of a meritocracy.
:\ /me wishes the *BSD Java project luck
IMO, the open sources BSDs might collapse if this does get corrected. The money being shoved into Linux is enormous.
My time with this project has past. It was kind of a painful experience overall, but I've moved to the Linux community doing RTOS work instead and have found it to be much more reasonable and accepting community. There's really no reason for me to go back to FreeBSD.
bill
I been using NetBSD on my laptop and on some servers lately and its so fat satisfied all my expectations except a few exception.
/proc filesystem the OpenOffice crashed without explanation. There was only one way to determine what caused the crash and that is to do trace of the program. Why would i not have /proc filesystem because i like the simple philosopy of BSD that if its not needed dont put it there.
The port/package system is great and it works perfectly 99% of the time. The 1% of the time it does not work is because the package is not up to date or the build fails for some reason or the package conflicts with another package. When this happens there is no automatic fix you have to usualy modify the Makefile yourself or email the maintener and wait for fixes to be made.
What i also love and cant live without in package system is that it installs things in expected places and sets up and postinstallation steps specific to the OS that need to be done that otherwise would have to be done in a time consuming maner by hand.
What i dont like about the ports/package system is that its not intuative when custom modification need to be made. Its pretty much automatic as far as installing what is offered by the package but if one needs special config options or special needs then there is no uniform config file to modify and you never know where in the Makefile the change you need can be baried.
I cant speak for FreeBSD since i have not used it but i am sure alot of the general things apply to them also.
Let me give an expample in Netbsd where packages dont live up to their expectation and that is when dealing with packages with intall systems that dont fit the standard open source build system. NetBSD is not to blame here but the companies who release this software.
Example 1. OpenOffice.
First there is only Linux Binaries because the source can not realy be build for the new version of OpenOffice. Ok this is not a huge problem since Linux emulation is pretty easy to set up. What realy upset me is that since i didnt have the
Example 2.
Sun Java SDK
This is another broken and annoying thing to install. First you need to download binaries yourself. Then you have to also enable Linux Emulation. Then you can install but it will be unstable for some reason. Version 1.3 runs stables but Version 1.4 causes strange lockups. Again this is Sun to blame for not making it easy to adopt their software to BSD.
Overall the install systems is clean. It seems that Gentoo linux has developed a install system similar to this and i hope to explore it.
Next thing that i love about Netbsd is its clean rc.d system. Basicaly not runlevel nonesence and very uniform implementation of all the start scrips. The package software also provides an start scrip.
Last thing i love about NetBSD is that its inovative. Yes maybe not at a frantic pace like Linux or a faced pace FreeBSD but its not sitting around idly either. New exciting features to come in next version like scheduler activations.
Ok i had enough to say for now.
Has NVIDIA released 5.x drivers yet?
This is a test. This is a test of the emergency sig system. This has been only a test.
See subject, it says it all...
http://www.FreeBSD.org/cgi/url.cgi?ports/mail/send mail/pkg-descr
If you meant to ask if sendmail will ever be removed from the base install, then I doubt it. There are things in the base that assume there is a working MDA, even if only for local delivery. For better or worse, I think sendmail will be left in this role.
From the Solaris 8 perspective (never have used Linux), I found run levels to be useful.
Admittedly, for many people, FreeBSD's two run levels (single user, multi-user) are good enough. However additional run levels give you more flexibility.
We use level 4 to start all our custom processes, and is the normal boot level. 3 is standard Solaris+Sybase. 2 and 1/S are the stock configuration and are useful in certain trouble shooting scenarios. It's nice to be able to shift up and down for installs and troubleshooting.
Coming from a SunOS 4.x and FreeBSD background it took me a little bit to get used to run levels, but now I find them useful. Obviously, run levels aren't "essential" Unix, but they are hardly nonsens
One could argue that frequent kernel updates are a sign of instability.
someone tell this newbie, why does /. have a "BSD section" but not a "Linux section"? is Linux so fucking huge there's only room for the small interest groups here?
seems odd to me...
Apple doesn't use FreeBSD as its core, you stupid fucking shit. It uses another open-source BSD called Darwin, so shut the fuck up.