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DragonFly BSD: Daily Snapshots Available
Dan writes "Simon Schubert has offered to provide Daily Snapshots of DragonFly. The snapshots are available on FTP and HTTP. Simon says this is for users who want to give DragonFlyBSD a try and don't want to go through the FreeBSD4/cvsup/buildworld steps., and as a world tinderbox (logs are available for each run). DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. These operating systems belong in the same class as Linux in that they are based on UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."
"... entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."
What is so entirely differnet? No , not a flame i just dnot know...
Yeah heard about this. Can somebody explain what it's all about? Did somebody not like the name of a makefile variable or something and decide to fork a mostly-the-same distro of BSD?
I'm quite happy with FreeBSD and occasionally OpenBSD, can someone sell me Dragonfly BSD?
The Year of Our Lord 2003 has been a particularly bad year for the "B"s,
- Bob Hope
- Buddy Ebsen
- Buddy Hackett
- Barry White
- BSD
This honored list of dead is but a small token of adieu from the many fans of the deceased.These dead were truly some American Icons. They will be missed.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents [theos.com] on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying, that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is extremely sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
The daily snapshots would be far more usefull if they installed correctly. Sysinstall can't install any of the dists, and attempting to do so from the shell also proved ineffective. Sad really, as I think that DragonFly has great potential, and I love to try it. Building it from source has never worked for me either.
To be fair, until they get all the messaging stuff done, it still primarilly "developers only", but as they hope to do all of this in small, "bite sized chunks", it's inexcusable that the installer doesn't work.
I so look forward to seeing it in action...
Hello. Your friendly neighborhood slasdotter here to let you know that BSD IS DEAD. Dead dead dead dead dead. You hear me? Dead. Very dead. Deadder than a doornail. Dead as Richard Nixon. That's how dead it is.
Now can we PLEASE move along and start talking about important tapiocas? Things like: "What color does Linus Torvalds paint his toenails?" This is Slashdot, right?
1. You can not play games on it.
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
4. There is no support available for it.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
10.It is dying.
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
All these BSD trolls are proof that your average Slashdot Linux user (i.e. not very skilled, listens to random comments as fact, probably spells Microsoft as Micro$oft because they think its clever [note: it isn't], etc.) feels threatened by any OS that is not Linux. Especially a rock solid line of OSes like *BSD.
I wish the DragonFly team luck on their project, as *BSD is only dead when everyone gives up.
snapdragons?
badda bing!
Fuck you open sores hippe and all of you Lunix/BSD hippies.
*BSD is fucking dead and you know it.
I read the description posted on the MirBSD page but I still don't understand what niche MirBSD is supposed to cater to.
Is it optimized for pentium class processors and therefore offers a comparable speed increase than the other BSDs ? Why would a person need to use MirBSD ?
I found a Development Plan, but that's more like a todo list, and doesn't list the goals of the project.
Please fill me in.
11. I'm a 'tard.
Yes, one of the things he knows about *BSD is that "I am a tard", in the words of *BSD itself.
I'm no psychologist, but I'd say that these trolls are not just beign rude and obnioxious. Their defensive prose and use of profanity shows a genuine emotional reaction to the fact that BSD is still around. Like the adolescent who's not in the popular social circle, they become overley defiant in any and all ways possible. I want to take a moment to thank Linux for introducing me to the world of great open source software, but i must admit that i have moved on to grow and love the BSD's for most applications.
The Year of Our Lord 2003 has been a particularly bad year for the "B"s,
- Bob Hope
- Buddy Ebsen
- Buddy Hackett
- Barry White
- BSD
This honored list of dead is but a small token of adieu from the many fans of the deceased.These dead were truly some American Icons. They will be missed.
Its just openbsd he fucked up.
It's another approach to get ahead starting from 4.x-stable.
:)
That's all. They disgree about sopme/most of 5.X design decisions.
I say let 'em roll and we'll see if it rocks later
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
You're an idiot. I am all for DragonFly. I am disapointed that I can't currently use it.
BTW, you're still a fucking idiot. Not that I care.
Please add Bobby Bonds to your list. He died recently and he certainly will be remembered for his achievements on the baseball field. Thank you.
You only validate the points I have made.
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Generated by TrollBot 0.12
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Thanks to this*BSD troll website
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1. You can not play games on it. /usr/ports/games/ | wc -l
The ports collection begs to differ...
sh-2.05a$ ls
526
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
Your one almost good point. Although if you set your grandma up with a system preinstalled w/ BSD that booted into a GUI she could handle it as easily as she can handle windows.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note. /usr/ports/x11-wm/ |wc -l
So KDE and GNOME are of no note? Plus:
sh-2.05a$ ls
103
Now realistically there are not 103 window managers as a lot of the things in the directory contain themes and development stuff but I'd say there are at least 20 unique things in there.
4. There is no support available for it.
www.freebsd.org/handbook and #freebsd on irc.freenode.net will answer any question you ever have.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
Ermmmm, no?
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
This is where the clueless / obvious troll part comes in.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
pkg_add -r some_package_here
look at that, no compiling and I just installed some new software, yay!
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
While not as good as windows at supporting hardware right away it's no worse then any other *nix OS out there.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux. /etc/rc.conf |grep linux
sh-2.05a$ cat
linux_enable="YES"
10.It is dying.
Ermm, no? I would love to see some real proof of this. Seriously.
Check out my life
DragonFly will be doing things that the other BSDs simply cannot, primarily due to having to support a large existing user bases. For example, right now I am in the midst of completely rewriting the VFS file path lookup code (namei, lookup, vfs_cache_lookup, VOP_LOOKUP, VOP_CACHEDLOOKUP). This is not something the other BSDs would be able to easily do though it might just be possible to port it to FreeBSD-5 once it is done. But the results are going to be phenominal... an almost complete removal of the vnode locking requirements for path lookups, and at least a 3x improvement in path lookup performance. We are also converting all system calls and both the file descriptor and DEV interfaces to messaging interfaces and asynchronizing the path all the way through using Amiga-style semi-synchronous I/O messaging (and it would be a serious mistake to compare the methodology to, say, Mach messaging), so it will be possible to support userland threads without eating a kerneland stack context for each running operation. There are many goals and this is going to be a multi-year project.
It is quite possible that DragonFly will be an alternative upgrade path for FreeBSD-4.x users rather then going to FreeBSD-5. FreeBSD-4 is nearing its end-of-life and DragonFly is really going to give FreeBSD-5 (and linux for that matter) a run for its money. We are taking an entirely different approach to SMP, one that involves asynchronous inter-cpu messaging to resolve conflicts and requires far fewer mutex operations in the critical path. Those interested in understanding the new approach should read DragonFly's light weight kernel threading code (kern/lwkt_thread.c and friends).
The first user release will probably not happen for a year. In the mean time, only serious developers and knowledgeable programmers should really be using DragonFly.
OK, IHBT. Still...I'm taken hook line and sinker
1. You can not play games on it. If the BSD has Linux binary compatibility, you can indeed.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note. Is there no XFree86 for BSD?
4. There is no support available for it. Again, depends on your BSD.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform. Sefsckinwat?! I have been using PicoBSD for years - ON A 386DX!!!
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux. Not necessarily. FreeBSD at least has a Linux binary compatibility module.
10.It is dying. Wishful thinking! The mere existence of Dragonfly BSD and MacOS X show that BSD is alive and well.
-uso.
Dreams, dreams, don't doubt dreams, dreaming children's dreaming dreams. Sailor Moon SS
Another BSD...tsk, tsk, tsk...that's all we need. ugh.