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NetBSD Quarterly Status Report
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD's Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most
important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided
to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports
on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the
activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is
now available online."
I'm glad that NetBSD seems to have a strong roadmap that is going somewhere soon. Since I've started fiddling with FreeBSD, I've thought that NetBSD didn't have the drive and commitment that FreeBSD did. Bully for them, putting out an optimistic showing for v 2.0. I wonder what the new logo will be.
If you're thinking of deploying Open Source solutions in your company, hopefully this unbiased and detailed guide will help!
Unbiased? So you say.
Detailed? You have got to be kidding me. That read like a review of the latest Duke Nukem, from some crappy gamer mag. I'm surprised you didn't give FreeBSD 2 Bullets and Linux 9 Bullets.
People say that this Unix should be used because it is most supported, etc. But in reality, what any Unix needs is good admin. Whether a Solaris, AIX, HPUX, Linux or BSD is being taken care of, chances are that there have been customizations that require a good local admin. He rarely needs this support you talk of. FreeBSD is very reliable on the hardware that you would want to run servers on.
I'll take FreeBSD with a good admin, over Fedora with a good admin, any day.
How far will you get with Fedora, when the problem arises from one of your in-house perl scripts? Local knowledge with a consistent system wins every time.
The "good admin" is your local knowledge, and FreeBSD is your consistent system.
PS, regarding OEM driver support, OEM support even in Linux, is proving to be poor quality. The OEM's might know their hardware and Windows very well, but how well do they know Linux for example? I'll continue to choose hardware based on how well it is documented. That is where the real support is in OSS.
Why is it that every time something happens in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, et al. communities (or, at least, when it gets on slashdot) some Linux zealot (AC) has to go touting the problems of FreeBSD (note only one)? ALL OSes have problems! IMHO, all of the BSD derivatives (NetBSD for me) suck less than any of the other 73(!) OSes I've ever tried. Also, this wasn't even about FreeBSD: I hate it when people like you treat the BSDs as if they're all the same, with FreeBSD being the ringleader and the only one with commercial support (ever hear of Wasabi Systems?). If you don't like the BSDs, why would you waste your time on BSD slashdot? Do you seriously think you're going to magically make us care?
Now, I, like most other hackers, am a libertarian in most ways: I believe you have the right to express an opinion. But seriously, what the hell are you trying to prove? Mod me flamebait if you will, but I for one am tired of all the supposedly-unbiased BSD-against-Linux crap. This is not meant to offent anyone (besides the parent AC), but really, why can't Linux and BSD users just stop pissing each other off?
*Storms away*
PS: I do use Linux (Debian and Slack at school, at home I run a multiboot system with 4 different Linuxes and 9 other systems) on occasion and find them nice for some things (like good binary packages).
PPS: Debian has many packages (and is a good all-around distro), but I'll need to see some lists *without* virtual packages, dummy packages, meta packages, stubs, and a zillion different libraries that are normally bundled with their respective reverse-dependancies before I will believe that FreeBSD's collection isn't larger. Also, Woody still has less than FreeBSD, and you really shouldn't (at least, I wouldn't) use Sid on a server
-Bruce
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|\|3+85D: f0r t3h r3a1 133+ h4x0r5!!!!!1 Those who know will attest! They will agree! They already use it! They will not use annoying hacker-esque stereotypes!
Regrettably, however, there is truth in a lot of what you say. There was a time when FreeBSD was clearly a superior solution to Linux in every department, but today Linux has better SMP support, far better hardware support, and better software support too. FreeBSD 5.x is still not really "stable", 4.x is very stable but has lagging hardware support and poor SMP and threading, and the linuxulator can handle most but not all Linux binaries.
As for NetBSD, some of the above applies to it too. Its hardware support is often a bit better than FreeBSD (or even Linux -- NetBSD was the first free OS to have USB support, for example). But the smallness of its userbase means it will always lag linux in some hardware support and some usability aspects at the very least.
Nevertheless, after a year or so with Linux, I switched back to BSD (specifically, to DragonFly, a FreeBSD fork). Why? For the learning experience. The BSDs take their documentation seriously: not just commands and function names, but entire kernel subsystems are carefully documented in the manpages. And the source code is much cleaner. These things didn't matter to me earlier but I'm doing more and more programming now and find BSD a much nicer environment. You also learn a lot lurking on the lists. The linux kernel list is just too chaotic for me, this is not my primary focus in life. FreeBSD has the sense to use separate lists for separate topics (-current, -stable, -hackers, -mobile, -arch, -hardware, and most crucially -chat for the "offtopic" stuff), and DragonFly is still small enough that its lists are quite clean.
My understanding that this _IS_ the guest OS port to the Xen architecture. Check it out at http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/#newportxen.
Now, who knows what operating systems can host the Xen virtual machine monitor.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca