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FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE Reviewed
ValourX writes "Here's a full review of FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE complete with screen shots, a short comparison with GNU/Linux, and some notes on migrating to FreeBSD from Windows and GNU/Linux."
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To Whom It May Concern (other than myself):
Hi. I have been a huge fan of cereals of all kinds for my whole life. Sometimes I eat it for all three meals of the day, or live on it exclusively for weeks, or put it in my underpants to keep me feeling fresh (and also as an emergency back-up snack). I cereasly love it.
I am especially fond of a lot of your cereals like Boo Berry and Trix and Chex and Lucky Charms and Cookie Crisp. My absolute favorite is Fruity Pebbles though, which I believe is a Post cereal. Maybe you guys should make something that tastes like Fruity Pebbles except manages not to have Fred Flintstone's ugly mug all over the box. Yabba Dabba Eww. Anyway, my point is that I like a lot of your cereals and so I am personally concerned with their condition. And, quite frankly, lately I've been a bit worried.
Let's start with my favorite cereal of yours - Boo Berry. I love Boo Berry... at least I think I do... actually, I know it used to be my favorite cereal but I haven't had any in years so I've kind of forgotten what it tastes like - because it's not in any stores! No stores in my area carry it. I checked on your website and apparently you still make it; you even offer it for sale. Unfortunately I can't justify buying it for the $6.74 for a twelve ounce box price. You do offer buying it in a case instead of a four pack, which would drop the price to $4.71 a box, but that is still unreasonable and would also require me to spend an entire week's pay on a large shipment of haunted cereal. My girlfriend would kill me (if I didn't overdose on blue food coloring first).
I think I have a solution to this dilemma. I know you can't force any businesses to carry your cereals and I know that you can't afford to sell them direct for less than $4.71 and still have money left over to pay for upkeep on Count Chocula's castle, hiring someone to build 400 mind-numbing advertisements disguised as crappy kids games for youruleschool.com, and keep your CEOs rolling in golden Kix. So here's what you should do - open up your own stores all across the country. You've already got one in Mall-of-America, now put one in every mall in America. Even if you don't sell much cereal (and you'd sell a lot, trust me) it would be great advertising. You can sell t-shirts with nifty slogans like "Frosted Wheaties: When You're Too Damn Lazy To Put Sugar On Your Own Wheaties!" or "Honey Nut Chex: It Rhymes With 'Funny Butt Sex' For A Reason!" and other stuff which is even more great advertising plus it makes money up front. I can see it now, picture a young child in the mall with its mother...
YOUNG CHILD: Mommy! Mommy! Look at all the pretty colored cereal!
MOTHER: Oh Honey, you know cereals like that are just a result of the global dentist/cereal/porn conspiracy, we've been through this a million times...
YOUNG CHILD: Awww...
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT comes out of the store.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT: You know Ms. Averagemother, all of our cereals are fortified with titanium plating and deflector shi... er, essential vitamins and minerals; and they are a part of this complete breakfast.
MAN IN TRIX RABBIT SUIT whips out a complete breakfast on a tray.
MOTHER: Well... I guess a few minutes couldn't hurt...
YOUNG CHILD: Gee, thanks mom!
YOUNG CHILD runs in followed slowly by MOTHER. Group of scantily clad dentists appears and drags MOTHER into back room. YOUNG CHILD transforms into a cartoon and spends eternity trying to steal Lucky's Charms and torturing the Trix Rabbit by hogging the cereal.
Now, on to my next suggestion. You need to do something about Cheerios. Really, they're awful. Yes they are good for my heart, but this is overshadowed by the fact that they taste like my butt.
On the other hand, a cereal that already tastes great is Lu
Gay-o!
-- The WIPO Avenger
-INSANE-PRIEST--INSANE-PRIEST--INSAN
I___________,.-------.,____________I Slashdot
N______,;~'_____________'~;,_______N fucking
S____,;____LINUX FUCKING____;,_____S sucks
A___;___SUCKS, YOU FUCKING____;____A
N__,'____SLASHDOT RETARDS.____',___N Rob Malda
E_,;___GET IT INTO YOUR HEAD___;,__E is a
-_;_;______._____l_____.______;_;__- cocksucker
P_l_;____________l____________;_l__P
R_l__`/~"_____~"_._"~_____"~\'__l__R Slashdot
I_l__~__,-~~~^~,_l_,~^~~~-,__~__l__I fucking
E__l___l________}:{__ (O) _l___l___E sucks
S__l___l_ (o) _/_l_\_______!___l___S
T__.~__(__,.--"_.^._"--.,__)__~.___T Rob Malda
-__l_____---;'_/_l_\_`;---_____l___- is a
-___\__._______V.^.V___((oo))./____- cocksucker
I__O_VI_\________________ll_IV___O_I
N_____I_lT~\___!___!___/~ll_I______N Fucking
S_____I_l`IIII_I_I_I_IIIIll_I__o___S lameness
A_O___I__\,III_I_I_I_III,ll_I______A filters,
N______\___`----------'__ll/____o__N will
E____O___\___._______.___ll________E this
-_________\..___^____../(_l___O____- ever
P_________/_^___^___^_/__ll\_______P fucking
R_O______/`'-l l_l l-';__ll_l___O__R WORK?!
I_______;_`'=l l_l l='__/ll_l______I
E_____O_l___\l l~l l__l/_ll_l______E Your mother
S_______l\___\ l_l l__;__ll_l__O___S was good
T__o____l_\___ll=l l==\__ll_l______T in bed, she
-____o__l_/\_/\l_l l__l`-ll_/______- grunts like
-_______'-l_`;'l_l l__l__ll_____O__- an ape.
I_O_______l__l l_l l__l__ll________I
N____O____l__l+l_l+l__l__ll___O____N Rob Malda
S_________l__"""_"""__l__ll________S is a
A__O______l____o_o____l__ll____O___A cocksucker
N_________l,;,;,;,;,;,l__ll________N
E_____O___`lIlIlIlIlIl`__ll________E
-__________llIlIlIlIll___ll_____O__- By Dessimat0r
P__________`"""""""""`___""________P (c)2003 Trollkore
-INSANE-PRIEST--INSANE-PRIEST--INSAN
The bishop, while living, was a follower of God.
Now dead, his rotting fingers are able to raise
an army of skeletons from the grave.
Trollkore
"I hate you, I hate your country, and I hate your face!"
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Here is a link to all of the BSD trolls. Please do not re-post them to this discussion. It just creates unnecessary clutter.
Finally, an original BSD is dying troll. My congratulations, sir!
I've never had the honour (pain?) of being directly slashdotted, but I seem to be getting an indirect slashdotting. From the link in the middle of the article (to a very handy utility in development for performing binary security updates) I'm seeing a couple visitors per second.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
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 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 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
What is it about this comment that gives me a tremendous urge to turn on the TV and watch a solid hour of M*A*S*H reruns?
If nothing else, remember that you have BSD to thank for tcp/ip and, hence, the Internet.
Weren't you complaining about Linux being too political before, but now you're claiming that FreeBSD was written by Al Gore?
I can't wait to try out this BullShit-DOS you are farting about..
No can do, cowboy. Sorry. We don't support shit hardware. Take the piece of crap back to Best Buy.
Gosh, as a courtesy, you should really give Yahoo, NetCraft and the rest of these folks this important advice.
If nothing else, remember that BSD is dying.
BSD commissars are always spouting some kind of socialist gobbledygook. The free market said "No! we don't want BSD!"
BSD people are losers who need to feel "different". It is much like self-proclaimed homosexuals. You have an empty spot in your psyche which requires you to always need to be associated with the peculiar and different. Your most important concern in life is hardly the operating system itself. It is the need to feel "special". Maybe your momma didn't cuddle you enough, who knows.
I use 5.1 - I am writing this in Opera 7.21 on the XFCE4 destop. Have Mozilla 1.4, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), KDE 3.1.4, etc. installed.
... I don't want to remember ;-)
:)
Tried it first a couple of weeks ago. Before that I used Mandrake 9.0/9.1 for a year and before that
I was (well, still am) a computer noob - no formal computer education (I'm studying literature) - but after installing linux, I understood what distrowatch's "put fun back into computing" means. I even mostly forgot about the hot windows games - playing with linux (and now BSD) is more fun.
I just wanted to say: I admire the people making FreeBSD (just as I admire linux developers). This is a very decent review of FreeBSD, but it makes it sound more geekish than it really is (well, I know this can't be helped, and I see the effort to emphasize the fact that the FreeBSD documentation is so good, that it really makes things simple, more simple than in linux in fact.)
As to the dying trolls: I don't really get that. Can someone tell me when this started? It is as if someone had a personal vendetta against BSD - and I can't think of a reason for it. Is he/she (are they?) linux zealots (I _am_ a linux zealot - I like it as much as I do BSD, I just prefer the latter right now)? Disgruntled BSDi users? It doesn't make any sense. It is funny, however, that they point to netcraft to confirm their claims, whereas it was netcraft that reported a continuous and steady growth of the FreeBSD user base in the past years.
Anyway, its a fantastic OS - and I think the current kernel development is on par with linux (KSE, PAE, whatnot). I didn't have problems with hardware support either, in fact, my on-board via8233 is working flawlessly, while I had to download an updated driver for Mandrake 9.1 to get it working. I also believe that anyone who isn't unconfortable with the command line in linux, would really like and appreciate BSD (gentoo/slackware users: give it a try!)
*BSD is dead.
regards,
-- Skeets Gallagher
> *BSD is dying.
you're talking complete and utter crap.
if anything, it's growing quite significantly;
since everyone knows (all the intelligent people) it's FAR more stable and secure than a hack such as linux.
> *BSD is dying :).
since you put a smiley there, i'll forgive your uneducated ass.
I think it started when Walnut Creek CD Rom (who actually owned the FreeBSD trademark) went out of business. Then later, FreeBSD project leader Jordan Hubbard and his friend Mike Smith quit the core team in disgust. This left FreeBSD in a turmoil from which has never recovered. That's the short and long of it.
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.
I don't want to stray too far from topic, but the reviewer mentions Gentoo's Portage system having horrible breakage? This concerns me a bit as I'm a recent inductee into all that is Gentoo and have thusfar been quite happy with Portage as well as the system in general. Are there really serious issues that one should know about before trusting Gentoo and Portage, or is this mostly FUD?
Not really interested in "sucks/rules" responses, but if anyone has some concrete examples or information, I'd definitely be interested.
Thank you that post just brightened up my day to finally see that "BSD sux" post to be trounced into the ground.
Photoshop runs in Linux on Wine.
As to the dying trolls: I don't really get that. Can someone tell me when this started? It is as if someone had a personal vendetta against BSD - and I can't think of a reason for it. Is he/she (are they?) linux zealots (I _am_ a linux zealot - I like it as much as I do BSD, I just prefer the latter right now)? Disgruntled BSDi users? It doesn't make any sense.
/. of this came from Rubin Safir - a NYC Linux/GPL zealot. His message has been posted a few times. Another manifefistation of this is the 'call everything linux' mentality. By calling anything that runs on Linux Linux, the word Linux gets used more.
There is a couple of people who think it is a former BSDi staffer.
On occation, the people in tin-foil hats make claims that it is Microsoft trying to create division in Open Source.
Sometimes a post shows up that claims they are doing it just to be a troll. (but its more like crapflood)
But the most common idea is some people see the world as win-loose. For their idea to win, others must loose. Thus the 'BSD is dying' crap. An example posted on
You said it. I believe it. That settles it.
Maybe you are too busy worshiping your BSD devil to have a clue. But hey, no matter how often you bow down to the BSD devil, you can't get away from God's holy power.
BSD people, with His help you can be cured. Stop the devil idolatry. Stop the boy-man "love". And don't forget, that God created Adam and Eve, NOT Adam and Steve. If you don't like it, well that is too darn bad because it is His world not yours. He makes the rules, not you.