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FreeBSD 5.2 Review
JigSaw writes "OSNews published a review of FreeBSD 5.2. They found the OS very solid as a server but pretty lacking as a desktop. The author finds FreeBSD very fast overall, easy to configure and that it feels integrated and mature. On the other hand, it has limited modern hardware support, small annoyances at places and that not many binary packages are available and so compilations from ports may take long time."
That's a pretty stupid question. Of course he hasn't. BSD-ers are zealots.
If you want to get modded up around here, you need to get your opinions in line: GPL is not free, GNU write "GNU/" before everything and don't deserve any credit for writing an OS, Linux is a crap kernel, BSD is for "real" Unix people, four legs good, and two legs bad.
That's it, the BSD "+5 informative" formula. And since no one really cares about BSD, if you post *anything* that's not a troll, and is in line with these opinions, BSD forum readers will be so pleased that they'll mod you up, no matter how senseless your comment is.
BSD might be nice, but it's advocates are idiots.
hint to modders, this comment: "-1 True".
Oh right. Well how about this:
FreeBSD is much more stable and secure than Linux and it has a consistent and "engineered" design rather than Linux's ad hoc non-design.
FreeBSD also has a faster networking stack and runs better under heavy loads. Any time that Linux beats FreeBSD on a benchmark it is because Linux stole some code from FreeBSD, and actually in real world performance FreeBSD would be better anyway because it is better under "heavy loads" which you can't simulate with benchmarks for some reason.
Oh and FreeBSD is more scalable and we'll kindly ignore those Linux machines with hundreds of CPUs, but anyway FreeBSD 5 will be able to somehow beat them anyway if they did per chance exist. Even though FreeBSD 5 is a slow piece of crap, just wait 'till all the debugging code is removed... Boy that will instantly alleviate all its serialisation problems and SGI will just be able to switch their 512 CPU machines right on over to the more scalable and faster and more robust and better network stack and better under heavy loads and better designed FreeBSD, right?
How was that? Looks like a typical FreeBSD zealot's objective, complete with facts and figures.
Nice work champ.
Now, just create an account and post that comment every time a BSD story hits the front page, and you'll have excellent karma in no time. This could probably be automated.
There's just one missing thing though, you forgot to say "I use FreeBSD every day". For some reason, modders are really impressed when they hear this. Any BSD will do, but NetBSD does have a slight "weirdo" stigma attached to it. And if you hear the word "GNU", don't forget to say that GNU is just a non-free toolchain.
You have the power.
Other suggestions: Include some made up Linux horror stories that you or someone you know have been through, or pretend that you really like Linux but after having tried BSD you find it much better.
For some reason more outlandish lies and "facts" like this helps prove that BSD is superior to Linux, and you will be moderated accordingly.
They found the OS very solid as a server but pretty lacking as a desktop.
So, are they going to refer people to Windows as something with a "good desktop".
Operating systems, to me, are a lot like buildings. The kernel is the foundations, and everything that sits on top of it are floors in the building. Where would you prefer the weak link to be? Near the bottom of the building, where tapping on a support column on the first floor makes everything come crashing down (read, BSOD)? Or would it be better to have parts of the building that are higher up be weak, in which case part of the building is still left in tact?
I realize that this analogy isn't entirely true, as with the WTC the weight of the top part of the building entirely decimated the bottom part. But supposing that the bottom underlying part of an operating system is bulletproof, all the abstracting layers on top of it that come crashing down won't kill the whole thing.
I see this as BSD. They're making sure their foundations are rock solid before building on top of them. It's good practice. The rest of the infrastructure will come with time.
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
Please see my journal for some issues I've been having with DHCP and USB.
I have been pwned because my
Packages are auto-generated on the FreeBSD build cluster and posted periodically; most FTP mirrors carry them.
So I don't know what this crap about "not many binary packages are available" is coming from.
They found the OS very solid as a server but pretty lacking as a desktop.
They must not have liked the default sysinstall color scheme.
OSNews -- because we CAN evaluate an OS in thirty minutes or less!
--saint
Plus it's not as cool as PayYouFiveBucksBSD.
At least its accurate, but only because they are stating the obvious.
----
Go canucks, habs, and sens!
Please, for the love of god, do NOT deploy FreeBSD 5.2 in your corporate enterprise!! From grepping the source tree, it has come to our attention that FreeBSD contains hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lines of SCO's Intellectual Property (IP). For those who do decide to deploy it, expect our lawyers to be in touch.
Darl.
OK, so not exactly a dupe because it's a different review from the one last week, but do we really need another front page article?
NetCraft confirms that all versions of *BSD are under control of our Indian overlords. Domestic fans of the OS can expect a revised curry flavored kernal and Vishnu style dependencies ...
(*** Why yes im been drinking Vodka)
I was a first time Linux user who had been running Gentoo for around 3 months now.
I found user support to be fantastic, and had lots to go from using Google and accessing varying forums, but there was just stuff that I could never get to work.
Then I tried to upgrade to the 2.6 kernel.... and I gave up.
Popped in FreeBSD, installed, popped on my favorite graphic environment and apps that went with it. Using FreeBSD I had duplicated, in 2 hours, everything that took me a struggling 3 months to build with my linux distro. Going through the handbook was so easy I was shocked, and countless other sites (like freebsd diary) filled any gaps.
I know there are various Linux distros and what not, but I thought FreeBSD was supposed to be the more "advanced" OS of the two? And by advanced I mean "pain in the ass to install for an idiot long time Windows user with no *nix experience."
Now to completely discredit my experience above, why is every damn OSNews review getting posted these days? Why don't we save the reviews for the Gods of Arstechnica who understand it's not all about posting GNOME screenshots and throwing around the phrase "not ready for the desktop!!!" every other article.
-j
P.S. Might I suggest one of our fine SCO-based offerings? They may be a little dated, but despite the occasional necessary reboot, they'll handle your enterprise computing needs with flying colors. (Just don't enable SMP or threading. Those issues will be fixed by the next release ;-) )
Darl.
Pros: excellent speed, memory management very mature, kernel options much more tunable and meaningful than the 4.x branch. Hardware support usually better but sometimes a little worse on exotic SCSI hardware.
Cons: it's dying.
We still have a couple print servers around here that are running Pentium Pro's with FreeBSD 3.4 from five years ago. Yeah its probably time we replaced them, but they've been reliable.
I mean for desktop, we use Mac OS X because that what its designed for, at the end of the day its the right tool for the right job.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
Not usable as a desktop? Over 10,000 apps available now. Not usable as a desktop? Gnome2, Openoffice, Mozilla, Gaim, Linux binary compatability, DVD-R support, over 100 different email apps. Not usable as a desktop?
Because DHCP and USB don't work? Here's an idea: GET A FUCKING CLUE. I just installed 5.2 on a Toshiba Laptop. EVERYTHING WORKS. USB, DHCP, CDRW, NIC, EVERYTHING. if the OP is too much of a moron to figure out FreeBSD 5.2, he'd better stick to Windows.
*shakes head*
FreeBSD is ugly to install...but once done it's a damned fine OS for the money.
This review was typical of the kind of simpleton garbage seen from OSNews. A slashdot-wannabe in a field of 1000s.
*spit*
I hope 2004 is the year Eugenia will stop posting stupid OS reviews.
The WTC was built on bedrock. Can you seriously compare stone that rests on continental tectonic plates in the same category as software that is based on the x86? You might as well build your house on shifting sands, if those two things were analogous!
The x86 platform is cheap, fast enough, and good enough for everyday usage. However it is nowhere near ideal for mission-critical tasks. There is a reason why NASA chose to go with a Motorola chip on the Spirit and Opportunity Mars rovers. That reason is because when billions of dollars are on the line you simply can't trust Intel's architecture to deliver efficiently and reliably.
Personally, I think IBM is making a big mistake in pushing their x86 low-end servers as the Next Big Thing. It will hurt their reputation when these servers with their cheap controllers and peripherals start failing massively.
Big Iron exists and succeeds for a reason, and that reason is exactly the opposite of the reasons why the x86 platform is not a good choice.
I have been pwned because my
I use FreeBSD every day as a desktop, and it works great for me. At least the reviewer appreciated the integrated feel that come from a real Unix, that was planned rather than hobbled together. It's also good that they noticed how solid FreeBSD is as a server. *BSD performance under heavy loads is something that can't always be proved by benchmarks. It has to be seen to be believed.
My main dissagreement though, is his complaint about the ports system. Debians apt-get system is the only thing that comes close, but with ports I find it much easier to maintain my own changes to the source tree.
I moved to FreeBSD after bad experiences on Linux, with licensing, the ad-hoc design, and spagetti code. Now I stay with FreeBSD because of it's engineered design, and because it's nice to have a truly free system.
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
I believe that the lack of a large, centralized resource for FreeBSD binary packages is one of the biggest things holding back BSD acceptance in the open source community at the moment. I worked a few months ago as a contract system administrator in a university computer science department, and they were evenly split between FreeBSD and Linux usage for their day-to-day work. However, the Linux users (they were running Debian 2.2 mostly...they were fairly conservative and were waiting for the 'stable' branch to reach 'stable-stable' before upgrading...or even the 'stable-stable-stable' stage where not even the /etc files are able to be edited any more...faculty meetings often sounded like discussions between horse trainers with all the talk of 'stable this', 'stable that'. But I digress.) had a big advantage over the FreeBSD users when it came to installing packages. There was an on-campus apt mirror which I'd set up, and it was a simple matter for the Linux users to issue a quick 'apt-get install' command to grab the latest binaries or Justin Timberlake MP3s without compilation holdups
This brings me to my next question. Instead of going down the hard route which has been suggested on a number of FreeBSD discussion forums and trying to write binary translation layers for BSD/Mac OS X .dmg packages to get access to a rich source of binary software (the PowerPC-x86 translator is only in alpha at the moment and it runs quite slowly, although AltiVec acceleration is on the to-do list), what about bundling apt-get with FreeBSD? That way BSD users could switch from the ports system to the tried and true apt-get when binary packages are desired. Only minimal tweaking would be required if my investigations are correct.
The largest problem then would possibly be one of naming. If FreeBSD was bundled with apt-get as a supplementary package system, would the viral nature of the GPL require that the whole system be named GNU/FreeBSD? Or would an exemption be granted in a case like this?
I look forward to hearing the community's feedback.
If you consider 10,000 "not many", then yeah. Not many packages are available.
BSD is only used by MS to "improve" (read: copy and paste) their OS. Of course they get that wrong too.
So what does pkg_add -r packagename do then? I thought it downloaded the pre-compiled binary
Rus
CPanel + Root from $35/mo - 10% off with discount code SLASHDOT
I had to use nt5 (win2k for those that read the propaganda) for a day to port a library I'd written to ActiveX for some ungrateful VB yuppies. A few reasons keep it from being even a tolerable desktop; I'm ignoring why it sucks as a development platform and server platform.
1. A busy window cannot be moved.
2. Viruses abound, and they are a bitch for an unexperienced user to remove.
3. Spyware apps abound, and they are a bitch for an unexperienced user to remove.
4. Problems are left unfixed. MSIE exploits are unpatchable even after months of MS being informed of them.
I know about spybot, antivirus software, and not trusting the a-holes at MS, but the average desktop user shouldn't have to deal with that crap.
The best desktop OS is Mac OS X. It's easy to use, comes with all needed hardware support, and is easy to configure. (I prefer Solaris and Linux to OSX. I'm not saying OSX is the best operating system, just that it's best for desktop use.)
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
The Windows base is hardly rock solid, unless you understand "Rock Solid" to mean "Full of Holes". Consider the RPC worms that came out last year (remember MSBlast?). These problems are win32 API level (something I would consider part of the base). And, this is not an isolated case; all the time, there are new holes being found in code written in the early days of NT that have propagated through today; many of them don't even get publicized because they aren't all neccessarily appropriate for spreading worms, but there are tons.
Even Linux in this department takes a back seat to FreeBSD; FreeBSD release versions have always been truly rock solid.
I love the install. I've been using FreeBSD for several years now, and I decided to throw RedHat on a machine to check it out. Suffice it to say, I won't be making that mistake again.
In 6+ years as a systems developer, very little approaches the way FreeBSD balances all considerations such as centralized development process, ported software, stability, and feature set.
.. but when it comes to running a server, its hard to argue with an OS that took well over 80 software platform upgrades (our own) without nary an OS crash.
;)
I like FreeBSD. Its never leading edge, its never trailing edge, it never supports the most hardware, it never does desktop best
Uptimes were 2+ years, 40 hits per second avg, and every freakin C bug I could throw at it.
FreeBSD is rock solid. ROCK solid. Oh, plus its dying.
"Old man yells at systemd"
Works For Me (tm)
;-)
Desktop performance is a lot better on 5.x. Things like flash and other (binary linux) plugins actually work. Do use SCHED_ULE. It helps. Mplayer does it all, media plugins largely work. many of these issues are really external from FreeBSD but its nice to see things come together. Yes, you may have to fiddle a bit.
But it can be used on the desktop and it can work very well there. Like I said, things are starting to come together. Sometimes it looks like merely cosmetics from the Linux side I guess but as desktop apps get more mature so does their portability. Or at least easier to fix in ports. More hands and brains also help. There's clearly an influx into the BSD users realm.
So yes, there is a viable *BSD desktop other than Apple's (perhaps even 3 or 4). A true *NIX head or someone willing to read some docs can have a pretty complete desktop on top of a *BSD. I get GL animated snapshots from camera/tv card snapshots in my xscreensaver. Does windows have that?
...They found the OS very solid as a server but pretty lacking as a desktop. The author finds Linux very fast overall, easy to configure and that it feels integrated and mature. On the other hand, it has limited modern hardware support, small annoyances at places...
public final transient String president = DUBYA;
FreeBSD is nice, but it has a substantially bigger learning curve than your average GNU/Linux distro. Gentoo, however, probably has an even bigger learning curve than FreeBSD. I tried Gentoo for a while, and had the same experience that you had. There were just some things that I never got working (including some severe corruption in the portage repository). I use Debian on all my machines now and I find it to be incredibly easy to use (and Debian is also misrepresented as being one of the more difficult studies), and a very nice desktop OS (take that OSNews).
I agree with your sentiments, just don't discount GNU/Linux because of Gentoo.
The reviewer does hit a nail on the head, "If you are after an easy-to-use desktop system that doesn't require you to learn anything new, then you better look elsewhere."
This is the arrogance/beauty of FreeBSD, it is designed/engineered/distributed as an O/S to get the job done like no other. The Bauhaus school of software design. It is an SOB to get a new user going on, but once they see the light, good luck prying it from their hands. Good things are rarely easy.
The best thing ever to happen to FreeBSD was Linux, the best thing ever to happen to Linux was FreeBSD. A good, clean, honest competition which leaves both sides stronger.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
I remember a few years ago, I read that FreeBSD was far superior to the Linux kernel for a heavily-loaded server. Supposedly you could run a server at about 100% CPU load, for days, without any problem if you used FreeBSD, while a Linux kernel would have problems.
Now that Linux 2.6 is released, has Linux caught up with FreeBSD, or is FreeBSD still better?
(And play nice, folks, please. I'm not trying to start a flame war here.)
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
Somebody should tell this gal that 5.2 is NOT a stable release. Maybe I missed it, but she fails to mention that 5.2 is a "New Technology Release" and is not yet intended for production use.
Many of the problems that the author experienced will probably (hopefully) be resolved by the time that 5-STABLE is released.
I don't argue that there are problems in the 5-series (I still stick with 4-STABLE), but if you're going to review it, at least make it obvious that it is not a finished product.
The hardware support available in modern Linux distributions make it a very good candidate for desktop workstations. But the ability to tweak certain kernel settings to suit it to a desktop workstation (like the CK release of patches) make it an even BETTER choice for a desktop.
That said I would rather have a cohesive, well thought out OS for a server. I don't want the server to change ever. I want to have easy to read documentation when I need it in a pinch and actually have documentation that relates to the OS environment I'm in!
BSDs are far more cohesive than any Linux distro I have ever used and don't feel like a bunch of utilities slapped on top of a kernel. Man pages make sense, documentation is everywhere, and the bastard runs really freaking fast too.
On the other hand, my few adventures with *BSD on the desktop always had me banging my head in frustration.
The choice is obvious: If it supports your hardware, *BSD for the server. Linux is still the best choice for the desktop.
I had 5.1 installed and running perfectly fine on my box, tried to format and do a fresh install of 5.2 and it won't write to the HD.
did drive scans, installed various other OSes, all fine. but freeBSD hates me now.
so i installed 5.1 again and all is good.
that's my 5.2 experience. while googling for a solution I ran across a bunch of other people with the same problem and no resolution.
Drive geometry on Seagate barracuda drives doesn't seem to play nice with the 5.2 installer.
"You worthless post!"
-Shakespeare, 2 Gentlemen of Verona, 1. 1. 147
My experience has been simular in terms of the setup. I wihs the FreeBSD boys would work on that. However, I am happy user. I am using FreeBSD as both a desktop and as a small-scale server, and I have been very happy. It took a lttle playing to get CUPs up, but other than compiing a lot, things went great. The speed asolutely rocks. I am amazed at how fast things run -- even faster when you compile in the ULE scheduler; X was noticably faster.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
I use a FreeBSD-based CD firewall (netboz) and have it set up as a VMWare guest OS.
I like the OS, and find the syntax of its firewall rules a little easier to write from the CL than Linux iptables. The tuned kernel, memory and disk utilization were the seller for me on the firewall. Fast and stable.
As far as not being a good desktop OS, I'm not sure what the reviewer expects of a desktop. It lacks the 3D games and fluff, but for a business developer's or power user's destop, it's pretty solid and fast.
you should be glad this is'nt soviet russia, you would all be dead for speaking of this.
Neutra-You
Take a look at this exchange between a poster and the reviewer:
Poster: "AVIdeMux - A kind of weird-looking app" just doesn't cut it as a description of a program's strengths and shortcomings, especially in a piece that claims to be about the "state" of a field. Have you actually tried it? Or did you just rate based on the screen shots?"
Eugenia: "I did not try AVideMux yet, but based on these shots and feature description I don't want to use it either. It really does not feel as welcome like iMovie or even Moviemaker do."
I think it would be a good idea, so Linux folks could at least try it. Googled for it but didn't succed.
Help fight continental drift.
you would be dead for saying that, in soviet russia.
Neutra-You
" After about 40 minutes of compiling it and its dependancies I had VidioLAN up and running, only to get a black output window (the video was playing fine and the sound was fine but it would render black and it would take an awful lot of cpu, error messages on the terminal would appear, Google didn't help). After hitting a few random buttons on its window to make it stop, FreeBSD would just crash and the machine would reboot."
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
"It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything." -Josef Stalin
HEH WHAT I MURRRHN ZZUUBUU!! BREASTFEEDING A LARGE TIGER OHH WHAT DOES THE WOEMEN LION SAY TO THE MALE LYON: " YOU ARE A LYIN' FOR BEING OUT SIWHT OUTHER WOMEN" ROFTOFL
Hehe. Beautiful!
*BSD is dying
Slightly OT, but what is the kernel version in Win2k3? WinXP was 5.1, would it be 5.2, 5.5 or 6.0?
Michel
Fedora Project Contribut
That's the one thing about BSD users that we Linux users will never be able to tolerate. The snobbish attitude.
"appreciated the integrated feel that come from a real Unix, that was planned rather than hobbled together.
" moved to FreeBSD after bad experiences on Linux, with licensing, the ad-hoc design, and spagetti code."
"because it's nice to have a truly free system."
So your basically saying you think Linux is a wannbe Unix, with the "wrong' license, and is poorly designed? BSD is a solid reliable OS. I was actually surprised when Eug said a gui app crash brought the whole system down. That doesn't usually happen. But if the only way you know how to pimp your OS is to take cheap shots at Linux then your just doing your part to continue the idea that BSD users are a bunch of elitist asses.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Am I to understand that proper planning of software and network infrastructure avoids problems? This is madness! I thought that if I avoided planning beyond picking any linux distro at random I should be fine. Maybe I should be more selective about what I choose to believe about what I read, even on Slashdot.
1. to pass from physical life
2. to pass out of existence
3. to disappear or subside gradually
4. to cease functioning
but now it is undead and will live forever sucking the will and lifeforce from all who touch it. What you thought the demon mascot was some sort of coincidence?
yes.. freebsd has more binary packages then MOST distro's have....
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
For me, the advantages of compiling everything from scratch justify the investment in compile time. If I can get a piece of software to build on the same machine that I intend to run it on, I've found that I have far fewer problems overall. Most potential problems get caught at compile time. This is what kept me using FreeBSD/OpenBSD for years.
Now that I've been using Gentoo for about a year, I've come to believe that this is 90% of what made the BSDs better than any linux distro I'd used back in 1999. If you want a program you build it... it's built for your architecture, with your optimization settings, exactly the way you want it. If the program you want isn't in ports/portage, you can usually add it yourself by changing a couple lines in an existing port. If the developer updates the source to a program without changing the build process too much, you can just rebuild. No need to hunt down rpms or debs.
Because you're building your own binaries, you're also afforded some small amount of protection from scripted security exploits that target known builds of programs... but that's another subject.
I've been using FreeBSD as a server since 1999, and as a desktop for only 6 months or so. I would have to agree that FreeBSD is not as good a desktop system as it is a server. But there are a couple reasons for that.
"Linux" Application - KDE, MPlayer, Mozilla, XMMS, etc etc are more geared towards running on Linux. The developers are on Linux as are most of the userbase. When one of the Linux geared projects is ported to FreeBSD, there are usually many patches that need to be applied to make it run better. However, Samba (last I tried it), Apache, MySQL, PHP... all compile without a hitch.
Driver support. I can't use either of my web cams with FreeBSD, because there are just no drivers available. The people developing FreeBSD don't have the time to keep up with the latest wacky devices. If something is standard compliant (like my Nikon 995), it will just WORK. My nVidia (mostly because I use nVidia's binary drivers) crashes once a week, and I can't get out of X without locking my system up. However, I can use just about any RAID card in my server.
I mostly use FreeBSD as a desktop because it's the same system that my servers run. I keep my CVS repository on this machine, and I keep FreeBSD's source tree on this box, NFS from the servers and update when they need it. It makes my life easier from an administrative point of view, but it's definitely not geared towards being a Windows 9?xp? killer.
What about MEEPT?!?!
Sadly, I took one glance at the screenshot in the upper-right hand corner, and knew I would be reading a Eugenia article.
/. posters. FreeBSD 5.2 is rock solid, as any Unix, Linux, box would be. Every port in the ports tree has a pkd_add to go along with it. That's 10,000 precompiles binary ready to download. They all install, deinstall, with near zero user interaction.
She continues to base a useable desktop by how many windows she can open at once. Skip the article, and read the reviews from the
In short, use FreeBSD.
I really hate Dan Patrick.
Classic... there should be a "yeah it's a troll, but it made me laugh" Mod.
I believe the OSNews review said that *exotic* hardware support, not *modern* hardware support, was a bit lacking.
SELECT CLUE FROM $Slashdot_Comments WHERE (OS_Name IS NOT LIKE '%Linux%';)
Zero rows returned;
SCO.com uses Linux
Put that coffee down. Coffee is for hackers only.
but plz, keep shaking. ;-)
Solaris 2 combined with SunOS 5 gives us Solaris 7. Funny how Solaris 9 uses the SunOS 5.9 kernel. All of these major version jumps tend to result in a sort of revenge by the programmers, where a hidden version number still advances slowly.
You can't judge a book by the way it wears its hair.
All i know is it runs quake3, warcraft3 and xmms just fine.
Good thing I run BSD then.
cvsup your ports tree /usr/ports/emulators/linux_dase-debian
cd
make install
rehash (if not bash)
apt-get till you cream on yerself'.
It's weird because I had the opposite impression. I'm using FeeBSD 5.2 release on my laptop. It solid and has everything I need. Getting java will be a hassle because I don't have room to compile it but I think it makes a great desktop.
On the other hand, I couldn't get the 5.2 kernel to boot on my HP Pavilion that I'm re-purposing as a server. OpenBSD proved an excellent solution. Now I think of OpenBSD as my main server OS and FreeBSD as my desktop. Of course I still have a linux box for java and whatnot.
I think FreeBSD is very user friendly. Most stuff just works.
A dyslexic man walks into a bra.
How about they get a reviewer that understands the ports tree?
this Eugenia chick a sweet piece of pussy like Angelina Jolie?
It's called Mac OS X.
Rot-13 my address to e-mail me.
"So I hurry back to little earth / For another life another birth"
Disclaimer: I have only read the first page of the article. What he says about kuser is true, it probably should /not/ have been included if it was a known problem. But also bear in mind that 5.2 is Beta quality code, and is a testing release. Not a production release. All the same, I'm here to chip in my two cents.
/do/ have to take disagreement with the 'not ready for desktop' bit. FreeBSD seems to take this attitude that if you take the time to learn something, it will pay off. If you're going to use ports, check out sysutils/portupgrade. Once you learn how to use it, and how to use pkgtools.conf, you will save yourself *hours* of configuration and twiddling time. Just tonight, I spent two hours swapping versions of OpenSSL on a web server (hosting about 200 sites), and Apache was down for all of about 45 seconds. The ports tree is one of the best things about FreeBSD, and I don't see any binary distribution system even coming *close* to competing with it.
;)
First off, stability. It's true, FreeBSD is *rock* solid. I used Solaris and Linux (Debian/Slackware/Redhat) before coming to BSD. And I am astounded daily by the differences between the three. Our residential web server at work has been slashdotted three times in the past year, and the only reason we noticed was because someone saw the posting on Slashdot. And it's not fancy hardware -- P4, 1.6GHz, 512MB RAM. And while being slashdotted, we were still doing work on it, without really noticing the load increase.
But I
(And yes, I have used apt-get extensively. I have not, however, used Gentoo yet, but I have heard that its packaging system does indeed rival the ports tree.)
I use FreeBSD on my desktop (obviously). And to be quite honest, I could easily port my environment over to a Linux desktop, and not really notice a massive difference in functionality. If an app compiles on FreeBSD, chances are, it compiles on Linux (and vice-versa). I just use FBSD because I'm used to it, and because I know it a bit better -- it's more comfortable for me. Purely from a desktop usability viewpoint, I don't think it's much worse or better than any given Linux distribution, so long as I can keep my current setup. But again, it's that ports tree that sets it apart.
I, as well, moved to FreeBSD from Linux. That was shortly before 2.4 came out, and I still don't trust any kernels beyond 2.2, really. But I run 5.2-R and -CURRENT on my two desktops, and 5.2-R on one of our servers. Yes, it has its gotchas right now, but remember: this is considered Beta quality code right now. If you're looking for something slick, together, and perfect, wait for 5.3.
Not that FreeBSD isn't already that.
If you mount an ext2 partition ro or rw with 5.2-RELEASE the UFS filesystems aren't cleanly unmounted unless you manually unmount any ext2/ext3 before using reboot or shutdown.
Kerry
See http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-January/019212.html
I'm starting to get really sick of OSNews reviews. We know that no OS is perfect, but do we really need two full pages of a two page article to dwell on the imperfections? Even the dumbass comments are more insightful than the reviews!
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Ok, i've asked this before, and i could not get any responses. Is the new ULE scheduler prone to the same problems as Con Kolivas of the Linux Interactivity patches fame, claims?
There seems to be a bug in slashdot where the OSNews rdf feed keeps creeping into the front page. Someone should look into that.
Please please please, gods, let this one show up on my meta-moderation. *signs in so ACs go bye-bye*
You can find it here: FreeBSD HandBook
Instead of doing this:
using the installer, I typed /bin/bash as the shell
I could edit the passwd files
It took me over an hour trying to find on Google clues
I had to create links for /dev/dvd and /dev/cdrw
I also had to edit rc.conf to enable Samba
Further remarks:
The ports system does come with preconfigured applications, this is what I really like about FreeBSD. I don't need long time to setup things.
Instead VLC (which is a really buggy thing), better use mplayer.
ext2fs has an evil license (GPL), that's why it is not default.
I am happy with my X11-speed on 5.2R, I have 2700fps using glxgears on my P3-500.
Ports is the best thing about FreeBSD. Talking differently is typical for Linux users.
I consider FreeBSD as the best desktop ever, but I don't use Gnome2 (does not mean, I don't like it), I rather use Xfce4, which looks good and is lightweight.
I actually think that you need less experience to install FreeBSD. I recently tried to install Debian, but it failed to find my Intel Ethernet Express Pro 100, because Debian is using ancient kernels. Such things and all networking (including PPPoE) works out-of-the-box on FreeBSD.
Once upon a time, I was a happy FreeBSD user who submitted a trivial port update to gnats. I waited three months. I waited six months. I waited nine months. When it was finally committed, a newer version of the software package then my update had since been released.
Shortly after, I switched to Gentoo, which is usually very prompt in getting the newest software into unstable portage. I can't say I've never looked back, but even hearing the bureaucracy has since improved, I don't feel like giving up my USE flags in favor of "WANT_KITCHEN_SINK=1" again.
I like the BSD design philosophies better and didn't really notice the lack of drivers everyone complains about, so if Gentoo/BSD matures to the point of usability soon, I'll be first in line to try it.
Would anyone suggest trying BSD before sticking to Linux? If so, why?
I am new to FreeBSD. I just recently installed Release 5.2. I find the system to be rock solid.
.deb, there are often issues with dependencies.
At a desktop level, it is quite decent for day to day use.
I find that installing new software goes fairly smoothly. The ports collection makes it easy to install new software, and not spend hours trying to install all the dependencies. Even with the package management in Linux, be it rpm or
I also find the support available to be excelent. I have always found an answer to my problems in the mailing lists.
All in all, I am enjoying my new FreeBSD install and plan to use FreeBSD as my primary OS for the forseeable future.
So, I guess it's a good solid server on a good old hardware, right?
I wonder, have they fixed SMP or it's still broken as it was last year when I've tried it on IBM Netfinity 5500 with 4 CPUs?
Less is more !
I can't say I agree. Windows may be more learnable (or perhaps that's the marketing speaking), but I wouldn't personally consider it anywhere near as usable as something like WindowMaker or MacOS. Among other things, Microsoft frequently doesn't even follow basic UI design guidelines that have been clearly established for decades, such as placing menu bars next to borders and important controls in the corners.
Nearly everyone I know who uses Windows hates a lot of things about it. Often it's just general problems, and often it's a result of how Windows tends to fall apart and fragment if you leave it long enough. Consider the neverending war between applications and businesses to steal space and attention from each other on your Windows desktop -- you pay for such a commercial product and you truly get all the worst parts of commercialism.
The vast majority of people don't use Windows because they like it or find it usable. They use it because they perceive a huge barrier to them ever being able to use anything else. It might be the barrier of zapping everything on their HDD and installing an alternative. It might be the barrier of finding non-Windows application support for everything they need. Whatever it is, I certainly think that it's incorrect to consider Windows "usable".
" After hitting a few random buttons on its window to make it stop, FreeBSD would just crash "
So much for their claims. Or is it only rock solid as long as you don't touch it or try and do anything with it? Yeah , this'll get modded down as
a troll , see if i care.
That the -STABLE branch is not the most stable distribution of FreeBSD available. As I say every time some idiot posts this. See http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/current-stable.htm l for more information.
www.sitetronics.com/wordpress
Am I wrong to expect that a journalist might possess a rudimentary grasp of English? A couple of examples:
"Regarding the USB2 card, I could not test it because I couldn't see any EHCI option ("device ehci") on the FreeBSD configuration kernel file except of OHCI and UHCI and so I didn't bother recompiling the kernel (especially now that the 5.x kernels come precompiled for sound there is little incentive to mess with it anymore)."
"Once upon a time this was a big bragging point for the Linux/Unix folks, but today is nothing that would make any new user or "switcher" awe."
Since when was 'awe' a verb? Have these been throught Babelfish and back again? Where did this guy learn to write? Or is it just another sorry case of the only editorial control being "does it get past the spellchecker on Word"?
Quite frankly, whatever he has to say about FreeBSD is severely tainted by the knowledge that he is clearly illiterate.
R Tape loading error, 0:1
My first experience with FreeBSD was tainted by the BSD Handbook.
I did a dual-install, and wanted to read files from my Linux partition.. but ext2fs drivers weren't included in the default FreeBSD kernel..
So I load up the FreeBSD handbook, and flip to the section on compiling a new kernel... what greeted me was the following logic:
"If you have version X or earlier, do YYY, if you have a later version than X, do ZZZ, otherwise, do AAA"
I asked several people to read it, and they couldn't make heads or tails of it.
Maybe this 'journalist' is the same guy who wrote that section of the FreeBSD handbook?
Everybody loves FreeBSD here but it would be good that somebody describes his experience of tweaking Freebsd as a desktop system.Let's that we want to install Openoffice, Mozilla, Gaim, Gftp, Grip,Mplayer,K3B.
I would love to see this review and the time needed to accomplish this things. If it happens in two hour i will switch to FreeBsd.
Sometimes their reviews are a bit fluffy, and its not as technical as kerneltrapl.org but they do cover quite obscure operating systems that otherwise I'd never hear about. Eugenia's reviews can be very UI-centric, but I continue to read them for the above-stated reasons. I also tend to agree with her UI views... :-)
I'm not sure what you are smoking, but NT 3.51 sucked eggs. Even with 80 megs of memory( hey it was released circa 94), it had major stability issues running any program. After our university replaced OS2 with NT 3.51, the tech support calls quadrupled. Like most operating systems (except win 9x which ended in the disaster known as ME) Nt has become more stable with each release.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
...maybe this article wasn't supposed to come out for a couple more months.
Gnats is just as up to date. If not you can do a cvsup to the stable branch.
This guy is a troll.
http://saveie6.com/
orbituary!!!
So, once again Microsoft is planning on obsoleting my two-years-old hardware the fast way, isn't it?
Well at least this'll be the first time I won't be blaming Windows. I knew that dot net thingy was evil...
Though not in the release notes (unless they have been changed since I read them).
If you use vinum on your drives (the reasons to do this are many but boil down to hard disks are unreliable pieces of crap.) You can no longer use a vinum volume as swap partition, and this is not on the immediate fix list. (this is new from 5.1) I am back at 5.1 because it is functional if not as stable.
This is part of a onstep back to go two steps forward. But it kind of sucks to lose functionality in a new point release, even though something better is comming along. But it really sucks that you don't get any warning.
Work bio at MMWD
Amen to that.
I am sick of her reviews. Sorry. I can't believe Slashdot links to them.
Seriously, what sort of "review" mentions that the user/reviewer forgot where bash was? Are you kidding me? There are several comments in this review that are ridiculous. If I recall, one of her last reviews contained a few complaints about how she had to edit a file in order to configure something (don't remember what it was). What a joke.
Well, anyway... I laughed hysterically when I read that someone else had the same feelings about Eugenia's incompetent reviews.
I may have to go back and read some of her other reviews and post some of my favorite Eugenia comments in her lame OS reviews.
It's a PITA to only build a few modules on FreeBSD, and you can't even only make 2 eth0 like 3Com and Realtek support, you have to build all. Crap.
Crap.
This article might help!
Wikileaks, no DNS
(actually, wheel)
/usr as mortal user using your favourite package system?
Btw, you can install packages into
Brr....
That's quality!
No, I can't, but I can use everything except make install as an user.
They are somewhat misinformed about the binary packages available for FreeBSD. Of course, not all the packages are on the distribution CDs. AFAIK, *all* the source ports are pre-compiled and available at the well-organized freebsd.org ftp mirrors. The environment variable PACKAGESITE comes set to load the latest packages for the distro you're on by just doing 'pkg_add -r packagename'. I have not used Debian or some of the Linux distros reputed to have great package systems, but I'll tell you what, I have amazed a few Windows/Linux users when I needed something like an editor and just did 'pkg_add -r jove' or whatever and had it up and running with a file loaded in less than 30 seconds. Works for me... The other nice thing is that you don't have to know what version goes with the distro you are running (PACKAGESITE again). The short names are linked on the ftp to the correct version, so you only have to ask for the short name like 'emacs', 'bash', or whatever. Off that subject, I have been running KDE on my Dell laptop through 4.3, thru 5.2 and I have had almost no problems with any desktop app. However, to be fair, I've never tried using the KDE config stuff to add users! Freebsd since 1994...
I can do all that with ports (as local user) by adding some vars.
I can postpone to the actual install as user too. (but have to store my zipfiles outside the common archive)
That's not what meta-moderation does.
what parts of 5.2 will make it into Darwin?
No, when I saw the parent post, it was modded "+1 Interesting". Whoever did that needs, IMNSHO, a kick in the head. By the time I was modded, I can only assume it had been modded down to hell, and the mod thought I was responding to the grandparent. Or they just don't like me. Who knows? ;)