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."

Comments

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[Mad Marlin]

This is a rather amusing e-mail signature I saw recently:

Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
FreeBSD: Are you guys coming or what?

Re:~/.signature

[Tyler Eaves]

But that's really the point. FreeBSD is about getting it done and getting on with your life, not pie-in-the-sky stuff that's of no use to 99.9% of the users.

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[LnxAddct]

Ok, I don't agree with the first reply to this parent, however BSD isn't for hobbyists and it is commercial, ever here of this little company called Apple? Anyway I cant really say much more then that cause I use linux and I don't use a mac so anything I say is pretty much void from here on out. -Steve

Re:Link to files

[arcanumas]

Thank you. Google was tough to use, The FreeBSD site keeps them secret and the Internet is too difficult for me.
I would have never been able to find this if not for you....

Re:Screenshots

[Bingo Foo]

Here you go:

login:

A very defensive article

[Merk]

The first thing I noticed was that when they describe the license, they talk about how Free it is, but don't mention the crucial difference between the GPL and BSD licenses: your option to not release the source when you include the code in another programs.

The next comment that caught my eye was "The installer is fairly intuitive and informative, and everything works perfectly as far as I can tell -- I've installed FreeBSD about a dozen times." If you've installed FreeBSD that many times, of course it will seem intuitive and informative. I've heard the install process is much more Debian-like than say RedHat like. More information on that would really have been helpful.

When he talked about the boot process he said: "The FreeBSD bootloader, while simple and unable to be manually configured, is one of the best I've seen." He makes a good point that this means that no reconfiguration is needed when a new bootable partition is added... but "unable to be manually configured"? Does this mean you can't set a default OS to load? You can't set a default timeout? Seems odd to me, and needs more explanation for that comment.

The potshots at Debian, Gentoo and RedHat's respective package management systems are not backed up at all, and don't match my experience in the slightest.

Finally, at the end, there's the bit about 'ee' beint better than 'vi', but no discussion about what 'ee' is or why it is better than a very standard editor that's on every Unix in the world. (I'm an emacs guy myself but I happily fall back to vi when appropriate). He also says a lot of other FreeBSD tools are better than their Linux equivalents, but without so much as a single reason why.

I'd love to hear an article on a BSD saying what the differences really are, why the author prefers one version to another, etc. This one seems, at times, to be a review, but it isn't a review from someone who seems to have given both Linux and FreeBSD a chance.

At least it was enough for me to decide that FreeBSD isn't for me. I'm lazy, I admit it. I do certain things often enough that I want them to be simple. I prefer 'make xconfig' over manually editing a file to customize my kernel. I prefer a one-step package management command to a multi-step one. Sure, I'm familliar with CVS, and it's nice to know that's what you're doing with the BSDs, but I install and remove packages often enough that if I can save a few keystrokes every time, that will add up. FreeBSD sounds like it might make a better choice for an ultra-stable server which only ever has to be upgraded. If you're doing the maintenance over SSH anyway, configuring by editing files rather than a GUI is the way to go. But for a desktop system, Linux seems to be the better choice for me.

Re:Java?

[__past__]

I agree that the situation sucks (or at least sucked until very recently), but it's hardly an oversight of the FreeBSD people. In fact, there has been a Java-on-FreeBSD project for some time. They have managed to port the Sun VM to FreeBSD a long time ago, but weren't permitted to distribute it - i.e. you as a mere user could use it, but you'd have to install the linux version first, then get the source of the linux version under NDA from Sun, then get a patchset, then compile it; distributing binary packages would have been illegal.

The good news is that now there is an official, redistributable, native Sun Java VM port, at least for FreeBSD 4 (of course, you have to download it from the FreeBSD site, not Sun's, FreeBSD isn't part of the "A" in "WORA"). It has finally passed Sun's test suite, which it didn't earlier mostly because nobody could pay Sun enough money to run it. It was too late for 5.1, and there was still a minor issue IIRC, but I'd expect it to be in 5.2.

Bottom line:

• Java has worked fine on FreeBSD for ages
• Installing it has been a pain, isn't anymore
• Using proprietary technology tightly controlled by company with stupid, but influencial marketing department to develop free software is not a good idea.