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:Screenshots

[Bingo Foo]

Here you go:

login:

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.