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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."
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.
BSD is only used by MS to "improve" (read: copy and paste) their OS. Of course they get that wrong too.
10,000 apps, but I'll bet cash the majority are command-line utilities, not desktop applications.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.