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Busy BSD: New FreeBSD Status Report

Posted by michael on from the worker-bees dept.

edhall cut-and-pastes "After a six-month hiatus, a new FreeBSD Status Report has just been issued, along with a promise to resume its bi-monthly publication. As the report itself makes obvious, a lot has happened over the last six months. Progress has been happening along many fronts; those groups making reports include: [snip] These are, of course, just the projects that remembered to send in a report -- there are many more ongoing efforts than listed here; see this page for a fuller but not necessarily complete list (you'll note that there are status reports for projects not listed there, such as the AMD64 port)."

1 of 49 comments (clear)

  1. Re:what I know about *BSD by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Informative

    1. You can not play games on it.

    You can play just about all the games that can be played on Linux.

    2. It cannot be used by my grandma.

    If your grandma knows how to use Linux, she can figure out FreeBSD. Most grandmas don't use computers at all.

    3. It lacks a GUI of any note.

    If X (which has been around longer than windows and has been fully functional from the start, quite unlike Windows) is not a GUI of any note, then Unix is "dying".

    4. There is no support available for it.

    There is support available for it, if you look.

    5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.

    Linux is nothing more than a kernel. Linux distros are nothing more than an assortment of fragmented open source projects with a similar GNU license + bits that have been ripped from the BSD's. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, and Darwin all have a team of people who regularly maintain and improve each project.

    6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.

    You are a total moron if you really believe that.

    7. You have to compile everything and know C.

    If you want to compile everything, you can. If you don't, you can download everything in binary form off the appropriate site or just buy an installation CD. If you want to build Linux and the accompanying userland, your only choice is Gentoo, which depends on Python and takes one hell of a lot longer to build than any of the BSDs. You do not have to know C to use any Unix-like OS.
    Just like Linux, the BSD's offer Perl, Python, Fortran, BASIC, Haskell, Lisp, PHP, assembly, Java, C#, Forth, Tcl/Tk, Ruby, Bison/yacc, awk, Postscript, Scheme, Octave, Eiffel, Rexx, Cobol, you name it. Not a programmer? That's your problem.

    8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.

    Support for crumby hardware is not forthcoming. Support for good hardware is often better than Linux (NetBSD was first to introduce USB) and a some notable commercial Unices available for the Intel platform. Linux probably gets a lot of driver code from the BSD's to start with.

    9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.

    FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD all offer Linux emulation that often allows Linux apps to perform better than they would running natively.

    10. It is dying.

    Only if you're a Slashdot retard.