Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 5.2 Released
James writes "Freebsd 5.2 is released. FTP mirrors. Release notes
This is another step towards 5-STABLE. Many improvements in this release, including ATA and networking enhancements." Patrick Jensen also points out that this is the first stable release with AMD64 support. You can also see the official announcement if you so desire.
Really.
finaly there
Gentoo, Mandrake and RedHat crashed. Couldn't test SuSE because you can't download their 64-bit Linux.
Although they advise against using the FreeBSD 5 line in production servers, our company went ahead & did it anyway because we needed a gigabit ethernet driver that was only in FreeBSD 5 not 4.
Our site gets a million hits a day on a completely db-driven website. Both the Apache webserver and the two replicated MySQL servers on the backend are all running FreeBSD 5, and have been for months now.
No problems at all. Rock-solid. Good ol' FreeBSD.
Nobody gives a fucking shit to be honest.
I'm running 4.9-R on my Thinkpad X40. I tried 5.2-RC2 about 2 months ago, and it was an utter nightmare. Wouldn't boot correctly, or if it did, it froze within a few minutes. Loads of errors, too.
Looks like I'll give it another try--5.x supports OpenBSD's pf and the Thinkpad wifi card (supposedly.)
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
too bad it still has perl 5.6 while almost every other operating system (including the other two BSDs) have switched to 5.8
Of course we can all agree that BSD is a failure, but why did BSD fail ? Once you get past the fact that BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know BSD keeps losing market share but why ? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players ? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities ? 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'm happy with my Linux system right now. It supports all my hardware and gives me a nice desktop. Why, beyond standard geek curiosity, should I switch to *BSD? I've used OpenBSD a bit and the ports system seemed kinda cool, though not as simple or powerful as my distribution's package manager. Where's the big advantage for me? Performance? Philosophy? In my very limited and anecdotal experience, Linux has seemed much faster than OpenBSD. I'd ideally like to try one of the free BSDs, but I'm having trouble convincing myself that there's really a point. (This is not intended as a troll. Really, I just want to know.)
Gates' Law: Every 18 months, the speed of software halves.
This news hasn't even hit the freebsd site or bsdforums yet. I checked this morning.
I'm overdue for an upgrade, I've got 5.0 running on my main desktop machine. I just love how easy it is to administer and how well documented everything is compared to Linux.
I haven't tried the Linux 2.6 kernel yet, mostly because there's no reason for me to not use FreeBSD. X, Fvwm, and Gnome apps run flawlessly, and the ports system is fantastic.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Everywhere else: It's dead, Jim.
Farewell *BSD, we hardly knew ye.
As of 8:53 AM EST, the annoucement page does not have it listed and the
freebsd-announce mailing list has not mentioned it.
This means that it is not yet released.
Dinivin
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_ _ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __ __
g_______________________________________________g
o_/_____\_____________\____________/____\_______o
a|_______|_____________\__________|______|______a
t|_______`._____________|_________|_______:_____t
s`________|_____________|________\|_______|_____s
e_\_______|_/_______/__\\\___--___\\_______:____e
x__\______\/____--~~__________~--__|_\_____|____x
*___\______\_-~____________________~-_\____|____*
g____\______\_________.--------.______\|___|____g
o______\_____\______//_________(_(__>__\___|____o
a_______\___.__C____)_________(_(____>__|__/____a
t_______/\_|___C_____)/BSDers\_(_____>__|_/_____t
s______/_/\|___C_____)__LOVE_|__(___>___/__\____s
e_____|___(____C_____)\_ANAL_/__//__/_/_____\___e
x_____|____\__|_____\\_________//_(__/_______|__x
*____|_\____\____)___`----___--'_____________|__*
g____|__\______________\_______/____________/_|_g
o___|______________/____|_____|__\____________|_o
a___|_____________|____/_______\__\___________|_a
t___|__________/_/____|_________|__\___________|t
s___|_________/_/______\__/\___/____|__________|s
e__|_________/_/________|____|_______|_________|e
x__|__________|_________|____|_______|_________|x
*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*_g_o_a_t_s_e_x_*
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Important Stuff: Please try to keep posts on topic. Try to reply to other people's comments instead of starting new threads. Read other people's messages before posting your own to avoid simply duplicating what has already been said. Use a clear subject that describes what your message is about. Offtopic, Inflammatory, Inappropriate, Illegal, or Offensive comments might be moderated. (You can read everything, even moderated posts, by adjusting your threshold on the User Preferences Page) If you want replies to your comments sent to you, consider logging in or creating an account.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
All *BSD and Linux people should join forces to create an even better Linux. The world doesn't need two sets of free *nix clones. The world needs ONE great *nix clone.
Capice?
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
My company uses FreeBSD 5 on half of our desktop machines in the office. All the PCs for customer service and general-purpose use are all running:
The fonts are anti-aliased and beautiful. I find it easier on the eyes than Windows or OS X.
It only takes us about an hour to set up a whole new ready-to-go office desktop PC for the office, using FreeBSD ports. And we LOVE that all boxes' apps are kept automatically updated every night using the portupgrade scripts.
If you're thinking of dabbling with FreeBSD as a desktop I can highly recommend it.
In fact I'm typing this on my Gateway laptop with FreeBSD 4.9 right now. Here are some FreeBSD laptop compatibility lists if you want to see if yours will work.
I just had a sudden realisation that although I consider myself a free software enthusiast, I am ashamed to say that I know *nothing* about FreeBSD at all! Well, I remember reading about where the codebase came from, once upon a time, but that's about it. Perhaps someone could give me an executive summary to stem this clueless feeling...
:) Zealots, do your worst!
Who uses it? How exactly is it licensed? How is it maintained and managed? Are there different distros as for Linux? Do any companies provide FreeBSD-based solutions, or is it just for hobbyists? What can it run on? Should *I* consider running it, and why?
I appreciate that I *could* go looking for all this information and piece the story together myself, but hell, it's easier this way.
These sigs are more interesting tha
Agree.
Time is an important factor. I think the BSDs are great for internet servers, though I don't see how they're any more secure than a properly set up Mandrake system. Yes, I use Mandrake, not because I'm a n00b, but because Suse cost me at least a month of downtime over the past year. I need my systems, to get actual work done.
Though I'm glad the BSDs are there, for my purposes Linux just works.
Campaign finance reform is national security.
BSD fanboys will be outraged to have to deal with reality, but these facts prove with the shadow of a doubt that BSD is an overrated system that's not worth serious investment from big companies like Linux has been for years.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 dilettante 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 dying
Maybe *BSD is dead but just not decomposing all that fast, thanks to the cold weather.
One thing I really like about Mac OS X is the increasing number of Unix-derived packages that are available through projects such as fink. Fink uses the venerable apt-get system, derived from Debian, to manage the installation, maintenance and upgrading of traditional Unix packages into the MacOS environment. A neat tool, no doubt.
I'm no BSD expert, but I believed that the *BSD systems came with their own packaging system, namely the 'ports' system. But therein lies the question: if Mac OS X is derived from a FreeBSD kernel, why is the premier system for managing open source software packages derived from Debian's apt-get? Would any regular BSD users care to comment? apt-get sure is convenient, but can these 'ports' make things even easier? Should BSD user mount a campaign on Apple's discussion boards to get these 'ports' included with the Developer's Package of the next release of Mac OS X? Apple is quite the innovator in ports after all, being a pioneer of both USB and FireWire. BSD ports could be another feather in their technical cap.
I look forward to the responses of the BSD community. Mac OS X, powered by FreeBSD, is a really rockin' platform!!
Maybe this version will be the charm, the one that recognizes my network card and display card and monitor at the same time, so that I can use it to connect to my LAN and the Internet, and also see what I'm doing at the same time! Am I the only one who has tried FreeBSD and had terrible luck with it recognizing and configuring key pieces of hardware? I am surprised that anyone runs FreeBSD (or cares) considering how well the major Linux distributions handle the recognition of such a wide variety of hardware devices. Of course, I'm going to try FreeBSD, because I would really like to see it work on one of my machines. Will I be able to get GNOME compiled from the Ports collection this time? It's always interesting to see, but usually disappointing too!
Folks,
/. has once again jumped the gun.
/. has pre-announced the release and people got bad code.
The mirrors are still updating. While 5.X is imminent,
In the past, we of the FreeBSD Project have started distributing an image to our mirrors and then recalled it when a last-minute bug is discovered. IIRC, at least once
Please do not grab this image thinking that it's FreeBSD 5.2! It won't be out until Scott Long says that it ready and available, and he has the right to nix this image up until the time he makes that announcement.
mwlucas at the obvious domain name
I for one, welcome our new beowulf cluster of dying *BSD overlords
In soviet rusia *BSD releases you!
May the source be with you!
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimize doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
he quote on the bottom of this page is "Death is a spirit leaving a body, sort of like a shell leaving the nut behind. -- Erma Bombeck"
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.
anyone know how well PowerPC is supported?
CYNIC, n.
A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as they ought to be. Hence the custom among the Scythians of plucking out a cynic's eyes to improve his vision.
Hey, this is kinda funny... w00t!
"The only clear view is from atop the mountain of our dead selves." - Peter Carroll
It is common knowledge that *BSD is dying. Everyone knows that ever hapless *BSD is mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing 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 hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Click me.
Finks has no association with Apple. There is a ports in the works. Its called DarwinPorts.
Doesn't have nearly as many packages as Fink does however.
"My brother is innocent. We are behind him 1,000 per cent," Jermaine said, addressing charges that Jackson sexually abused 12-year-old Gavin Arvizo.
Apparently, he has spoken to his brother every day since Michael, who has been bailed for one million dollars, was arrested for oral sex, mutual masturbation and inappropriate sexual touching.
Look here to see what other work needs to be done.
They claim 5.3 will be the stable version but I will not upgrade. I am sticking with 4.9 for now.
http://saveie6.com/
The ultimate proof that bsd is superior to linux.
m l
http://www.xs4all.nl/~marcone/bsdversuslinux.ht
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the generous goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
Does anyone know if they have fixed PCMCIA support during the install? It used to work fine in the 4.x series, then it got broken in the 5.x series. I have tried it a month ago, and it was still broken.
Basically, if you need PCMCIA support during the install, you're SOL. For instance if you want to do a network install over a PCMCIA NIC. Like I said, since 5.x the installer doesn't even try to detect PCMCIA devices anymore.
I hadn't known there were so many idiots in the world until I started using the Internet -Stanislaw Lem
http://daily.daemonnews.org/view_story.php3?story_ id=2872
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/178
here
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of BSD 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 marketing 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 dillatant dabblers. If truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking. Fact: *BSD is dying
If you're going to troll at least make your points half way realistic. Apart being partially correct on point 8 you're 100% wrong on everything else.
Wow, now I *know* its been a long time since I've been a FreeBSD user. The last time I downloaded the OS, it came in 230k chunks (nice for that 14.4 modem) and was version 2.5. Maybe i'll give the 5.2 version a go, I'm sure there has been a few improvements ;)
You create your own reality - Leave mine to me.
Adam stated he was told by three Mayan Elders, one of which was Carlos Barrios, that they "believe" Nostradamus was a student, and this is were he learned his technique of "water and a tripod". It is said using a bowl of water on a tripod is called "scrying". It is a technique used by those trained to "see/view" other places without being "seen" by those they are "viewing" (spying on), or to help them foretell the future.
Since last night's interview, I have been told this technique was used by many cultures long before Nostradamus discovered it and put it to his own use. Nothing about Nostradamus studying with the Mayans can be more erroneous or incorrect.
One must use common sense when dealing with any form of information. Nostradamus traveled all over Europe carrying his books and belongings on the back of a donkey. Cars, trains and planes were not yet available and a trip by sea to take a study to Guatemala with some Mayan elders would have been very expensive and time-consuming for the doctor who was very much in demand for his services against the plague affecting Europe during his existence. I know for a fact that Nostradamus spoke a few languages and I do not know about the Mayan dialect.
prior to 5.2, i was having weird make errors when running an SMP kernel on Hyperthreaded Xeons. basically, during any sort of heavy make, the make would error out with a segmentation fault. this was using a GENERIC kernel with only the two SMP options enabled. the same system running a non-SMP GENERIC kernel would work fine. in addition, while running full load (setiathome for example) the two processors would peak at 50% load. now with the new SMP code, they both top out at 100% and otherwise act like a true dual processor machine. one last bit is that SMP is now enabled in the GENERIC kernel right from the start, probably in anticipation of large amounts of HT p4's and Xeons.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
FreeBSD currently doesn't run on the PPC platform, which prevents me from using it on my iBook, but NetBSD, which (as far as I know) is simlar to FreeBSD has a working PPC port. So this is what I'm wondering, why not just use the NetBSD bootloader to load the FreeBSD kernel. It can easily be compiled for the ELF format, and OpenFirmware on macs know how to load that type of kernel. I'm not a expert when it comes to these things, so could someone please explain why no one has tryed using the FreeBSD kernel with the NetBSD bootloader (or loading it raw into OpenFirmware) ?
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In addition, during this file transfer, Netscape will not work. And everything else has ground to a halt. Even MicroEmacs is straining to keep up as I type this.
I won't bore you with the laundry list of other problems that I've encountered while working on various FreeBSD machines, but suffice it to say there have been many, not the least of which is I've never seen a FreeBSD box that has run faster than its Windows counterpart, despite the machine's faster chip architecture. My 486/66 with 8 megs of ram runs faster than this 800 mhz FreeBSD machine at times. From a productivity standpoint, I don't get how people can claim that FreeBSD is a "superior" machine.
FreeBSD addicts, flame me if you'd like, but I'd rather hear some intelligent reasons why anyone would choose to use a FreeBSD over other faster, cheaper, more stable systems.
1. You can not play games on it.
You can play Linux games on it (ok, no games)
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
If your grandma is able to use Gnome or KDE, she can use FreeBSD.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
see above.
4. There is no support available for it.
There are a lot of places on the net were you can get help from the community. And some companies provide commercial support for FreeBSD.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
FreeBSD is a complete OS by itself, it's an evolution of 4.4BSD.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Of course it runs on x86.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
Thanks to the ports collection, you just have to type "make" to get something compiled for you.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
Support for the latest hardware is sometimes poor indeed.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD has a complete Linux compatibility layer which allows to run Linux binaries.
10. It is dying.
Well, some people like to repeat that every month since 1993!
Stephane
------
Life isn't fair, but the root password helps.
Currently running slackware 9, would love to switch to FreeBSD. But I absolutely need vmware. I know version 3 has been ported, but vmware GSX has not and I'm not sure how well vmware version 3 runs.
>I think the BSDs are great for internet servers, though I don't see how they're any more secure than a properly set up Mandrake system.
You couldn't be more right. The difference, at least to me, is that FreeBSD is much easier to configure properly because the documentation and ports system are so good.
With regard to OpenBSD however, there are many security enhancements that put its security far ahead of the rest. But it is rather paranoid for simple applications, and probably not worth the performance/ease of use hit.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
Looks like someone needs to turn on DMA.
I'd like to see pros and cons, also benchmarks of Linux 2.6.1 vs. FreeBSD 5.2. Also the best linux distribution using the 2.6.1 kernel (or a few of the most popular since this is different from person to person) vs. FreeBSD 5.2, from downloading to installation to general use as a server/workstation, configurint etc.
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
Since I haven't seen this mentioned yet...
What's the possibilty of having a FreeBSD LiveCD? As far as I can tell, there is no technical restriction, since if I remember correctly, a lot of floppy-based routers use netBSD.
FreeBSD gets lots of praise from it's users, but my only real experience with it is that a couple of my friends tried it (about 3 years ago) and found it impossible to install. However, it seems like an it would be worth a try, but I don't really want to sacrifice my Linux partition. Plus, I'm not all that interested in going through another lengthy install process since I'm pretty happy with Slackware.
Of course, since supporters mostly seem to admire the ports system, there maybe little difference for the end-user between Linux and FreeBSD LiveCD's.
And please, no jokes about a "dead" operating system being distributed on a live CD.
"To save the planet, I had to go to the worst spot on Earth, and that was Philadelphia." -- Sun Ra
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
I've been an avid follower of the developments in FreeBSD for around 5 years now, so my overview of the entire history of "glue that binds" FreeBSD together isn't complete. That said, I've come to be a bit disappointed at how events in the last 18 months or so seem to be pushing the project in a direction that has made things more difficult, instead of more successful, that has shown distain for experience and quality and made FreeBSD a platform for large ego's to push their personal projects down everyone's throat.
The statistics sample from 2001 over a year was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few o
seriously out of whack with the universe. Not a single *BSD is dying/dead post.
From excellent karma to terible karma with a single +5 funny post...
If you can't take the heat stay out of the kitchen. Mud is always thrown best from the side arm because they never know where it is going to hit.
Yeah, until you find an ircd daemon running with about 2k connections sharing mp3's, pr0n, and warez.
It's all fun and games till someobody
Look, I'm only familiar with RPM.
However, it would seem to me that what is needed is a packaging system that accomodates both binary distributions and source in a way that resolves dependencies.
There should be a hard line drawn between the source and binary environments.
The packaging system must encompass the entire Base Operating System (granted that most UNIX distributions transfer a "mini-system" at some point in the install). For example, patching the Base Operating System on OpenBSD is entirely different than applying updated packages. This inconsistency would be unacceptable for a major commercial user; the interface must be consistent.
Assuming that such a consistent packaging format could be developed, it should then be the goal to convert one of the old school UNIX players (HP and SGI might be the most receptive - there were rumors that Tru64 was going to RPM some time back; Solaris never changes anything in userland).
Until one of these packaging formats manages to win over a major UNIX player, the strife will continue.
The Perl you have on your system is whatever you installed from /usr/ports.
They removed Perl from the base system because it was too much of a hassle to keep up-to-date. Guranteeing backwards compatibility is also a major chore with Perl in some cases.
1. Unlike most of the Linux distros, you can upgrade the system from the source. You can get the latest source code via CVS and completely update the whole system to the latest version or use it in order to fix bug fixes. It works really well if you want to stay updated on crucial bugs.
2. Unlike most of the Linux distros, it has a good software management system, ports. You can update them via CVS as a part of your cron job, thus you can get the latest version of software anytime you want to install something.
3. Kernel configuration does not involve clicking on tons of buttons. Also, the default kernel configuration does not come with tons of stuff enabled. When I create a custom kernel, I have to add certain lines for my personal configuration and hardly disable anything beyond simple stuff.
4. So far, I have used Mandrake, RedHat, Slackware, Debian and FreeBSD. From my experience FreeBSD was the easiest system to install and manage for server/production environment. I do not care about a nice looking penguin or games, I want my computer to do work. If I wanted to play, I'd use Windows.
There is NO RELEASE until someone from Release Engineering Team will say this in freebsd-announce@freebsd.org list with PGP signed message.
FreeBSD 5.2 is NOT released!
I'll admit, I tried out FreeBSD 5 shortly after it's initial release, and was fairly impressed with it. Solid, Stable, Ports rock. I ended up leaving it though, because at the time I was all about WineX...
;), so I'm curious if anyone has any experience using it as a full-blown multimedia desktop OS.
;)
Anyway, my question is this: How is FreeBSD as a desktop system? I no longer care much for WineX, and am far more interested in how well things like TV Tuners, Digital Cameras, USB/Firewire/CoolNiftyGadgets are handled by it. I was always under the impression that the *BSDs tended to be more conservative than the various Linux distros (Woody excluded
I'll soon be building a Media Box w/ Tuner, DVD Burner, and USB gamepads for my TV, and a new Workstation with a Scanner, Digital Cam hook-up, etc.
Should I give FreeBSD another shot?
The longer I'm a member of the Human Race, the more I believe Apocalypse is a valid solution.
It takes about 5 minutes to install.
You can instantly download a pre-compiled binary of the latest version of pretty much anything by issuing the following command:
pkg_add -r [NAME]
You can instantly upgrade any software to the very latest version by installing sysutils/portupgrade and then typing
portupgrade [NAME]
Its so stable Apple used it as the foundation for OS X.
IMHO, hardware support is dramatically better in release 5 compared to release 4.5
If you havn't tried it yet you don't know what your missing.
Check out the FreeBSD Forums
To blog is sublime
Wow, you're some kind of smart guy, huh? Humorless dipshit.
If you understand how there can be a difference between two different versions of linux, you should be able to understand that there can be a huge difference between two operating systems.
FreeBSD has a different code commit policy: code going into CVS typically gets looked at by more than one person. In Linux, someone generally takes the code, feeds it to someone else, who feeds it to Linus, and nobody is really responsible for 'reviewing' the code. They may glance at it, or they may just read comments, but there is no accountability, there is nobody who's tasked with looking for 'off-by-one' or stack issues, and there is nobody who says "well, this is a good idea, but it's not the best". That sort of discussion is the core (and, at times, the problem) of FreeBSD.
Cool now MAC can twist BSD's version of the GPL to come up with OS/11.
If I wanted easy I wouldnt be an engineer or a patriot.
I go back and forth on this. The linux one is better in some respects; make xconfig is good for allowing one to see the various options and configure things easily. But I like the very brutal simplicity of the BSD config; it's more manual, but I get more control, which I like.
The biggest complaint about the BSD kernel config is the sometimes inadequate documentation of available configuration parameters (this was made worse in the move between 4.x and 5.x, as the config file has changed somewhat and the new values haven't gotten commented quite yet).
As a UCB EECS graduate, I can truly appreciate FreeBSD.
As a hardware nerd, though, I was a little disappointed at the empirical results the OS turned in for my disk array (RAID5, 4x200GB, 16kB block size, 8:16:32:256K stripe size) - burst and sustained transfer is much faster under Windows. Have a look at the results: IDE Hardware Raid On FreeBSD
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org
sure would be nice if you could cancle a moderation typo without having to post into the forum that you mod-typoed in.
Is www.cdbaby.com still running OpenBSD?
I actually just recently tried out FreeBSD (5.1-RELEASE, to be exact), because I wanted to do something with my Sun ultrasparc 5 besides having it sit there and look sexy. OpenBSD was not an option, as I cannot boot the ultra5 from floppy (even says so in the README somewhere), and I was way too lazy to build a boot CD ala NetBSD's instructions, so FreeBSD it was - I wanted to use the box and see something new besides Linux and Win2k (and OS X in my dreams on the 12" PB).
:/ /usr/ports ; make distro clean takes about three days, but who is counting. :)
In hindsight, I have to say it's great, it simply *works*. I am running apache2 on it and soon will switch my internal IMAP server (just for home, two users, collecting from various accounts via fetchmail and providing the results to internal IMAP clients) to that box. Maybe nfs/samba file server will be next so I can retire the Mandrake 7.2 installation on my current file server.
Of course, the machine is slow, a cd
However, to finally get to the point (yes, I am bored today), installation was a bitch, to say the least, none of the terminal emulations the installer suggests is usable on the sun console. Usenet searches suggested a serial terminal (yeah, didn't have that under the kitchen sink), or a nullmodem to another box. I decided to do a "blind" install, took a couple of attemots, but somehow it worked and the rest is history - did everything through ssh from my desktop linux box.
I skimmed the release notes on 5.2, but could not find any mentioning of the sun console finally being a usuable install option, even though in my (previously mentioned) usenet archive search I came across mentionings of someone wanting to fix this. Does anyone know where it stands?
I've used and liked FreeBSD since back in the 2.1.5 days. (~1994 IIRC)
Of all the reasons listed, it is the simplicity and order and coherency of everything that works for me. It's very standardized, and things just seem to be done in a way that "makes sense".
So- why not use it?
There really is only one reason: bleeding-edge hardware support.
For server systems this is not an issue, but for desktops (particularly laptops) it raises its ugly head.
I will say that the 5.x series makes a lot of improvements in the "general laptop functionality" area, but even still- hardware support *does* lag behind Linux.
It is for that reason (and *only* that reason) that for my FOB P2040, FreeBSD (4.x at the time) just was not an option. Stuff like sound/tvout/suspend/spindown and IIRC even the particular USB controller wasn't supported. It's been a long time now but I remember installing it and just finding it unworkable at all on a machine that new at the time.
Anyway- food for thought.
I browse at +5 Flamebait- moderation for all or moderation for none.
With regard to OpenBSD however, there are many security enhancements that put its security far ahead of the rest.
Yes, except for access control lists. There are no ACLs in OpenBSD! As a result, you have to run more programs as root, which is definitely a security problem.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
It was at 4:25am early on the morning of January 7th 2004 that, after many failed attempts to resuscitate the dying OS, *BSD finally passed away. While *BSD has been in it's death throes for many months now and it's death has been foreseen for many years, this is still a very sad moment; a great loss for OS dilettante dabblers and *BSD lovers the world over.
Though *BSD has passed away, it will surely be fondly remembered for years to come by users, developers, and trolls alike. Even if you didn't enjoy using *BSD, there's no denying it's contributions to popular OS culture. Truly a Berkeley icon. It will be missed :(
Thankfully the evil republic of Israel doesn't use FreeBSD.
Before SCO finds it first!
"If the FreeBSD team could get away with it, they would probably use warnings like "Contains live plague bacteria. Beware the Rabid Hippopotami. May cause nausea and vomiting."
-- Michael Lucas, re: FreeBSD-CURRENT
If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the precipitate.
...why would you *not* want to go to BSD (on the desktop, at least).
Well, if I got to sum it up in one line "Because it's far more fringe than Linux is". As a Linux desktop user, I'm sure you know the drawbacks of not being mainstream.
I don't mind being in a minority, but it basicly comes down to that. Linux is starting to get on the radar, BSD just isn't... It might not be dying, but it's hardly booming either. Linux is getting the hardware support, and if the point is to run Linux binaries, why not run the original?
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
we have to realize one simple fundamental fact:
Come to terms with these facts, and you're home free.
"FreeBSD also shines on older hardware compared to Linux (exempting Slackware or build your own.)"
I don't know about AlphaLinux, but I can tell you that installing FreeBSD on my Digital AlphaServer 1000 was almost suspiciously easy. It autopartitioned my drives, detected all my hardware, and in general just asked me how I wanted the network configured and what software packages I wanted, then took care of the entire thing itself. I really wasn't expecting that on such old, esoteric hardware.
+++ATH0
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.
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 long gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become ever more bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
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 infinitesimally 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
No, the problem with FreeBSD is fuckwits like you. I'll just add that you have no idea about how Linux development works so just close your mouth before all the shit flying out of it hurts someone.
It is practically universal knowledge that *BSD is dying. Indeed *BSD is hopelessly mired in an irrecoverable and mortifying tangle of fatal trouble. It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The loss of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
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 marketing 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 hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
Fact: *BSD is dying
While speaking of the software ports collection, Debian Troll's Best wrote...
... where did you steal this one from?
Apple is quite the innovator in ports after all, being a pioneer of both USB and FireWire.
The Debian Troll gets the mods (yet again!) by trolling about hardware ports such as USB and Firewire. Yet another good troll
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
1. SCO is suing FreeBSD.
2. IBM is helping Linux.
3. Nobody will help FreeBSD.
FreeBSD has more reason to be scared of SCO than Linux.
You must have nothing better to do then troll slashdot, which is fine. It's still more a waste of time then listening to a Captain and Tennille album.
/etc/sysctl (or you can use sysctl -w to add these):
Your link to the SysAdmin story is wonderfully entertaining, but you failed to realize those guys couldn't tune a FreeBSD, or any other *BSD box to save their life. FreeBSD ships with extremely small settings, and requires quite a bit of kernel tweaking via sysctl variables, and loader defaults (or recompile) for proper useage of memory, disk, and network performance on a high load, or high traffic system. (Such as SysAdmin is benchmarking in said test)
Quote from SysAdmin Magazine:
On FreeBSD: Append to
kern.maxfiles=65536
kern.maxfilesperproc=32768
The above are their "kernel tweaks", which I must say, is short of absolute hilarity. (All the fbsd admins are probably laughing with me too at these meager attempts to "tweak", by SysAdmin Magazine. This is just short of attempting to put a band-aid over a gash the size of your fist, and expecting the bleeding to stop.)
If you publish technical benchmarks, and state that your company is knowledgable and competent (Which I seriously question here.) atleast have the common courtesy to have someone experienced enough to tweak the server (as any large institution/corp/etc would, or like me, have a default sysctl.conf/loader.rc specifically for large load servers) Anyone who's ever admin'd a server with 15,000+ concurrent connections knows, a default FreeBSD box will "fall over and die" without tweaking. (More specifically, you'll fill up your mbufs, or exhaust your sockets, long before smashing the kernel to death.) After tweaking, it will easily do it with minimal load (dependant upon which services, obviously) as my servers are living proof of, along with Yahoo, and many, many others. FreeBSD's default kernel values are at very low, "safe" values, which in many areas will lead to much slower, degraded performance from what it is capable. (TCP Window Scaling is extremely low out of the box for just one small, yet very important example, and you'll see further ahead, this will easily lead to deathly slow socket connections, and such.)
The theory for this is, it should lead to a much more stable overall machine, albeit I've never had any of my tweaked machines reboot.
Quote from SysAdmin article:
FreeBSD performance decreased somewhat when more than 1500 connections were added.
I don't doubt this, as default FreeBSD install will have very minimal settings for max connections, max allocated sockets, max files per process, low fd's, again, low tcp window scaling, and more which for brevity I'll exclude.
To say FreeBSD performs worse than Linux, and Solaris, AND, Win... Absolutely laughable. I'm sorry, I've been in the UNIX/Networking field (traversing more medias than I wish to list) for over 12 years, I've run the entire gambit, and still do, so I find that statement highly offensive, because it's plain wrong.
To Sys Admin Magazine: Learn how to tweak a FreeBSD kernel, then run the test. We as the readers have an obligation to expect absolute technical perfection from those publishing these types of articles. Apples to Oranges.
More NetCraft fodder:
Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.
Posted by mhp at 08:54 AM UTC on Jan 11, 2004
Had you ever contemplated the fact that FreeBSD, nor any other *BSD's success does NOT rely on how many people use it? We really couldn't care less. We'd love more userbase, and more contributors, who wouldn't? The fact that we have less users than Windows, or Linux, or OS X, is totally irrelevant to us.
A proj
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent 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 dilettante 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 dying
and here is my leg :-)
:-)
http://acme-tech.org/images/tux-tat.jpg
Your tattoo is much better done then mine, I want it redone. Stupid ass cheap tattoo parlor... I want hexley too tattooed somewhere.
Not being up to date on open source / free software politics, Im curious where, when and why this anti-bsd thing started?
This is not intended to start a flame war, I am genuinely interested.
I am Monkey, the Great Sage, equal of heaven!
If this discussion was reversed, with the FreeBSD people saying the things that are being said by GNU/Linux people in a Linux announcment people would be moderated down fast. I am a FreeBSD fan and as I speak I am installing 5.2. But I can say that I have tried several GNU/Linux installations. In fact I have used Redhat, SuSE, College, Mandrake, Gentoo, Lycoris, and Slackware; I have a dedicated machine to testing, deploying and toying with OpenSource OS'es. After having tried those distributions I was able to determine what I liked the best. Now, having said that my main beef with the GNU/Linux people is that some of them have not taken the time to check out the system. I have taken the time to check out even the different branches of the BSD's and I like FreeBSD the best and I have my reasons.
In fairness to the BSD world, before people open their mouths and start to rant and rave about how BSD sucks and Linux is the best, and vice-versa, people should take the time to test them. Obviously if FreeBSD is now to 5.2 and has active development then it is not dying. Both Linux and the *BSD's have strong points and a week point. But there is no sense making this a religious war. Use whatever OS is best for the job whether that is Mac, Linux, Windows, or a BSD.
Just because I am using FreeBSD and Windows today does not mean that I will stay FreeBSD and Windows. I may switch to FreeBSD and Linux or Linux and Windows.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
It seems that FreeBSD 5.2 does not work with vmware nor the crappy virtual pc. Vmware throws "NOT_SUPPORTED" error, while virtual PC just hangs. I really wished i could test FreeBSD 5.2.
nt
FB5.2 soon crashes during installation on the latest version of VMware Workstation under WinXP SP1, when the disc1 ISO is mounted for the CD drive.
Nice, I've been meaning to give FreeBSD a try. My spare box has a hacked up AMD T-Bird that I tried (unsuccessfully) overclocking. Damn, the OCing never goes as smoothly as indicated in those articles. :^)
Kinda weird acting although I did install Solaris 9 x86 on it. Maybe some of that weirdness is Solaris choking on this weirded out CPU and mobo that isn't on Sun's (short) HCL.
- deal with the inevitable.
- grieve for your loss.
- move on.
Never let your emotions get tangled up with something as silly as a computeroperating system. It isn't healthy. So BSD fails. Big whoop. Deal with it and move on.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered "Longhorn" community when IDC confirmed that "Longhorn" market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that "Longhorn" has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. "Longhorn" is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict Longhorn's future. The hand writing is on the wall: "Longhorn" faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for "Longhorn" because "Longhorn" is dying. Things are looking very bad for "Longhorn". As many of us are already aware, "Longhorn" continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
"Longhorn" is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time "Longhorn" developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: "Longhorn" is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
"Longhorn" leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of "Longhorn". How many users of "Longhorn" are there? Let's see. The number of "Longhorn" versus "Longhorn" posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 "Longhorn" users. "Longhorn" posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of "Longhorn" posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of "Longhorn". A recent article put "Longhorn" at about 80 percent of the "Longhorn" market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 "Longhorn" users. This is consistent with the number of "Longhorn" Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, "Longhorn" went out of business and was taken over by "Longhorn" who sell another troubled OS. Now "Longhorn" is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that "Longhorn" has steadily declined in market share. "Longhorn" is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If "Longhorn" is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. "Longhorn" continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, "Longhorn" is dead.
Fact: "Longhorn" is dying
When Linux started making headway some time ago, *BSD users couldn't handle the competition into their area so they started spending all their free time bashing Linux.
Then Linux users started doing the same in response and now they cry foul like the hypocrites they are when someone does it to them.
you fell for a copy and paste troll
looks like someone fell for an old troll
mod down parent
This I am aware of, as I've seen this identical posting atleast 4 times in other threads. I just had to go on record and disprove his mindless dribble, if not merely for my own satisfaction.
-mpf
Current Uptimes
I see lots of trolls posting NetCraft stats, so here's yet some more to entertain their lonely lives.
Dead you say? It must be so, look how long these machines have been up, it certainly time for something new.
Gander at which OS's dominate the list. This certainly doesn't mean anything, now does it?
For a dead guy, BSD sure has a lot of kick left in them. For those of you that're behind, plans are already being made for the 6.x branch of FreeBSD. That sure sounds like a dying OS, now doesn't it?
I've got no beef with Linux. I run Linux, and multiple BSDs, and have for over a decade. I've got a beef with trolls making false statements and any moderators that bump their post to informative.
*chuckle*
We're far from through.
-mpf
Please cite a case where SCO has sued either a FreeBSD user, or the FreeBSD Foundation itself. I have seen no such mention anywhere. There has been some FUD from SCO but no legal action.
It is likely that SCO is enjoined from taking any such action as a result of the BSDI/AT&T settlement. Unless you cite some kind of source for your "information", it's just going to be clear that you are intentionally spreading lies.
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
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
The various problems with FreeBSD can be summarized by attempting to retrieve the release notes. The release notes are stored on an FTP server (instead of a web server), and when you retreive them, you get the "too many connections" error message from the FTP server which prevents you from retrieving the file. This is pathetic. These types of design decisions are the reason no one uses freebsd and no one takes freebsd seriously.
I'll add mine here
;)
The biggest advantage to the FreeBSD ports vs. FreeBSD packages I've seen (and most activly use) is that whenever you compile any port from source it uses your global make.conf settings, as such all my ports are compiled with -O2 -mcpu=athlon-xp for those few less bytes and picosecond execution time.
Just my 2c while I buildworld to 5.2 and then portupgrade -aRrF
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
What is... FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Release Notes Alex?
Release Notes are obtainable via many methods, not just FTP. Neither FTP nor HTTP are inheriently superior to the other for the transfer of files, so your premise is rather skewed. For you to say HTTP is better fitted to serve that specific file is a moot point.
The main FreeBSD repository server is very busy, especially during release time. That's why there's more mirrors for FreeBSD than Michael Jackson has in "neverneverland ranch". So you can download from a mirror that's geographically closest to you, thus you don't go through fubar'd routing and such.
-mpf
This I am aware of, as I've seen this identical posting atleast 4 times in other threads. I just had to go on record and disprove his mindless dribble, if not merely for my own satisfaction.
Actually you only make yourself look stupid when you spend time trying to correct a troll. The troll knows what he posting is wrong. He just wants to see people like you make buffoons of yourselves trying to defend *BSD.
FTP imposes a lower threshold connection limit than HTTP. FTP requires lots of chatter on the wire to be able to just receive a file. So, to say that one is not superior to the other is just wrong. HTTP is better suited for the transfer of files *inherently* because of its low overhead.
FTP imposes a lower threshold connection limit than HTTP.
This is solely based upon individual's configurations.
The excess "overhead" of the FTP protocol introduces trivial amounts of added traffic, especially in today's high bandwidth internet. This is a moot point, and one that should be discussed elsewhere, however I'll atleast respond.
If you don't live under a rock, you know mark-up language adds tags obviously. In turn which adds to the size of the file. The following are the i386 Release notes for 5.2-RELEASE:
58K RELNOTES.HTM
30K RELNOTES.TXT
As you can see, the HTML file is much larger - nearly DOUBLE, which will surely result in MORE traffic. I'm sure there's not 28k of extra over the wire traffic due grabbing this file via FTP as opposed to HTTP. Even if there were say ~30k overhead due to the ftp session, (Which I *know* grabbing this 1 file, would not generate that kind of traffic) then they balance out as equal in the end. (Obviously interpreting hypertext will cause "more" cpu load than opening a plain text file)
I agree with you on a whole that serving content is usually better left to the tender loving care of an HTTP server. That's for many reasons, which aren't all specifically protocol based.
End result, I don't know what you were smoking that lead you to beleive you could only get FreeBSD's release notes via FTP, nor how that would tie into FreeBSD's viability as an Operating System.
-mpf
According to you.
Stating facts and correcting dimwits never makes someone look stupid, and quite a few of these people *seriously* beleive what they're saying. While others are blatent trolls. It's a waste of time responding to copy and paste trolls. Yet lots of these people truly beleive every word of their posting, especially zealots. If you honestly beleive disproving their incorrect statements takes much time or effort, perhaps you're the stupid one.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I
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 teh end time for *BSD.