GNOME 2.5.0 Available For FreeBSD

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke announces that GNOME 2.5.0 desktop, the "Obviously you're not a golfer" release, is now available for FreeBSD. You can check out this release from the MarcusCom CVS repository. Be sure to get the latest copy of the "marcusmerge" script while you're there to help with the upgrade. Thanks to FreeBSD GNOME users, there is also a man page to go with this script. NOTE: this is a developers release, and bugs will exist. If you're not into bug-hunting, you should probably steer clear until 2.6.0 is released."

Comments

Are you guys coming or what?

[grilo]

I'm extremely happy in watching Marcus and the whole FreeBSD-Gnome team doing such a good job in bringing a full-blown, easy to build (can't beat the ports collection) gnome desktop into the OS.

I wonder if they have any plans to bring Ximian Desktop or Dropline or something like that into the ports collection... I think it could be interesting.

Nevertheless, I'm still considering the gnome 2.5 changes, but I'll probably leap towards testing it and do some reporting from my side, since I'm not much of a coder! :)

P.S.- Do these people think they're funny or something? This whole "BSD is dying" crap from linsux/winblows fanboys, is getting on my nerve...

fuckin wankers

We might aswell take off the BSD section, with this kind of feeback all the time, it's plain useless.

Re:Are you guys coming or what?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well I switched to BSD from Linux and found a system that has better package management, boots up heaps faster and is easier to manage than any Linux distro.

The only thing that comes close to BSD's package system is Debian's apt-get, and its still not there.

Re:Are you guys coming or what?

[naelurec]

I like FreeBSD as well. Perhaps it was simply due to the fact I moved to it from Red Hat and fell in love with the ports/packages system.

As far as the "BSD is dying" crap .. yah, it is really annoying. I use other sources for BSD news that are a bit more umm.. grown-up.

Needless to say, it seems like FreeBSD if anything is growing, not dying. With the very logical and well laid out file system, ports system, ipfw firewall and relatively easy upgrade process (make buildworld, make installworld, portupgrade) there is a lot to like about FreeBSD. Oh did I mention the kernel level security levels, jails and other tightly integrated security related tools? And to top it off, all of it is truly free -- no GPL limiting your distribution. What is there not to like again? :)

Re:Are you guys coming or what?

[tarius8105]

Unless you intentionally left 'build' out of that sentence before 'server' this is a stupid statement. Since when is it a good idea to have a compiler on your server? Even if you did specifically mean build server, in most cases that just means running remote shells to do the compiling (like rsh or ssh) and not some spiffy server app that receives build requests from a build client (yes I know there are distributed build systems like Rational's clearmake, but that's not the norm). Besides all that it can handle multiple compiles. I have a build host which runs at least 9 builds at the same time every day, works just fine. The applications being built are used by major oil companies for geophysical mapping and surveying, so they're not exactly trivial, either.

You would have a point if we're talking about a production webserver. Infact its proven that Linux isnt good for multitasking between applications. In the 2.4 kernel watch a DVD while doing compiles, in 2.6 (which isnt even released yet) will have a proper scheduler.

Some people do need the latest nVidia cards to be supported, so if FreeBSD doesn't support it, it's not a viable solution. People doing graphical modeling software in the oil industry need good 3d hardware support. I work for such a company (subsidiary of Haliburton), and we are getting pressure from Shell to support Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3.0 (we already wupport 2.1, but they want to upgrade).

Workstation, desktop, samething in my mind. The only difference is a desktop is in my mind a home user, and workstation is a corporate user. If you read my original paragraph, FreeBSD is meant to be a work horse, not a graphics workstation.

To say that either system is always faster or more stable or more secure is pure nonsense. anyone can misconfigure a system and make it perform like shit. Anyone can tweak a system and make it scream. Developers of different projects have different goals, so they get different results.

You're absolutely right about system security. The question is which one is more secure out of the box? Red Hat Linux? If you think so, then you're dead wrong. FreeBSD asks you if you want to enable a higher kernel security mode after setup. If you go with extreme, only way on the box is through the console. Linux allows users to su to root without being in the wheel group, which is also a security risk. I'm not going to point out the security hazzards with Linux and FreeBSD, I just wanted to give a point of view. Ultimately the only way to make a computer truely secure is to not plug in the power.

Different licenses fill different needs. With the BSD license I am not free to ensure that people benefiting from my work return anything to the community.

You're wrong, with the BSD License you are free, with the exception of removing existing headers, to do whatever you want. You want to release code that is open source or close sourced? Well you have that option with the BSD License. That is the reason its more free then the GPL cause you can do whatever you want, with the exception of removing headers. GPL makes it law that you have to release your source code that uses any GPL licensed code. Thus you're not free to close source it.

I dont know maybe you're one of those people who caught into the "Linux" phase of life. I dont see how you can view the GPL as being free when it literally pushes you to do things. The only free part of the GPL is the cost ownership of it. You dont have to pay a dime to use it.

Re:Are you guys coming or what?

[tarius8105]

Erm, doesn't really answer the question. Still not as quick as one single "apt-get" command is it?

Depends on what you're trying to get. Prebuilt Kernel? Maybe good for that if you're happy with the default one. As for packages, FreeBSD has something similar to apt-get.

[root@revan /usr/ports/www/lynx] pkg_add -r lynx
Fetching ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packa ges-5.1-release/Latest/lynx.tbz... Done.

Thats all I have to do for a package that is listed in ports. The only benefit apt-get has over this is that you can do a dist-upgrade.

Again, nowhere near as quick as apt-get. Hey, I'm no Debian zealot by any means, but when there's a nasty exploit in the wild and I need to patch lots of boxes quickly, Debian's system is much quicker and far more elegant than FreeBSD's. And that matters to a helluva lot of people, evidently...

The pkg_add command is just as quick as apt-get in most ways. To update the kernel, when you have a custom configuration, you cant really rely on apt-get, atleast from personal use I cant. However, with cvsup, the best part of it is if there is only one file has been updated, thats all you download. Then you run two commands. The compile may take 10 minutes or so. Then after it finishes compiling, assuming all your servers in the server farm are the same, all you have to do is SCP the new kernel to each machine...which you could write a perl script to do it. First time writing the perl script may take a while, but if you plan it ahead before an update, and keep it modular so the server list is like a plain text file then the whole process can be as seemless. We've done something similar at where I work. When UNIX first went out. System Administrators needed to write their own shell scripts to automate stuff. I would consider updating all boxes a tedious task even if you had to run one command on each. If you need to update each box with a package, you could write a perl script that would go on each box and run apt-get to update the package. Have the perl script accept for a parameter the package name. The only issue is this, with ssh, the first time you connect you'll need to accept the host key, after that, it wont be any trouble.

Re:Are you guys coming or what?

[pyros]

Threading - Why would I watch a DVD on a dev machine or server? You said Linux was a bad server because it can't do multiple compiles. I said I have no trouble doing concurrent builds, so you tell me to watch a DVD and compile software. Now you're mixing desktop and server usage to say FreeBSD is a better server. I don't deny the latency issues you bring up, but I do take issue with the examples you use to illustrate your point.

Hardware support - You said, and I quote, "BSD isnt meant for desktop, its meant for doing work, I dont need my nVidia card to be supported to do email and crap." I gave an example of where some people need 3d hardware support for "doing work." You respond with FreeBSD is meant to be a work horse, not a graphics workstation. I'm sure you didn't mean to minimize egineers in the oil industry, but you kinda did. Is compiling software magically more computationally difficult than running geological simulations and plotting fault lines and stuff like that? People doing real work need 3d hardware support and FreeBSD doesn't offer it. The developers have different goals, and the users have different needs.

Security - different design goals, different needs, yadda yadda.

License - You totally missed my point. The GPL allows me different freedoms as a publisher than the BSD license. The BSD license offers me more freedoms as a consumer than the GPL. But who cares? That's why we have more than one OSS license to choose from.

In case I haven't made it clear yet, my impression of your statements is that you don't accept the fact that some people need things FreeBSD doesn't offer, just like some people need things that Linux doesn't offer. I'm not saying that Linux is better, I'm just trying to say that FreeBSD isn't better either.