FreeBSD 4.10 Released

lorand writes "After some delay (initially scheduled to be released on May 5th) the long awaited 4.10 version of FreeBSD was released today. It features a large merge of the USB code from the -CURRENT development branch, some conservative updates to a number of programs in the base system and many bugfixes. The detailed release notes can be found here. Use one of the many mirrors if you need to get the ISOs." feargal adds "There are no sweeping changes from 4.9, mostly a consolidation of security and bug fixes. Looking forward, it is also the first in a new 'Errata Branch' which increases the scope of fixes applied. In the past only critical security fixes were applied to the release branch. The Errata branch will include local DoS fixes and well-tested non-security fixes."

Comments

Bsd is dying :P

[MrRuslan]

But the 4.X branch just won't die. Can't wait till 5.x gets ironed out.On a serious note it is good that they maintain the 4.x, It is good stuff.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[molnarcs]

It appaers that there will be a 4.11 release as well...

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[alexatrit]

I haven't had issues 5.x, really. The only nagging thing is that some of the ports don't always compile correctly. I do believe that's a known/disclosed issue. That's why I've stuck with the 4.x branch.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[cperciva]

The 5.x branch is mostly ready (indeed, I know many people running 5.2.1 without any problems); when 5.3 is released in a few months, it will be the recommended option.

The continued maintainance of the 4.x branch is largely for the benefit of those users who -- for good reasons -- are incredibly paranoid about moving to anything new. Users like large banks, for example. :-)

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[puzzled]

4.x and 5.x are different products. People who know are going to be running 4.x on servers for the next several years, no matter what happens with the 5.x train. All of my servers are 4.9 right now, I have 5.2.1 on a lappie just to get familiar with it.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Hel Toupee]

I've had 5.2 running smooth for quite awhile now. Don't get me wrong, I loved the 4.X branch just as much as the next guy...

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Jon Proesel]

All I can say is, great! I'm glad to see the FreeBSD guys providing support for 4.x, while 5.x is their main focus. Unlike some software companies, they believe in supporting all releases of their software that's being used.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

can someone please explain to me why /.-ers say bsd is dying (i realize the parent is joking)? is it just fud or does someone actually have evidence of declining bsd use or development?

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[gazbo]

You're praising the FreeBSD developers for continuing to support the current stable release series? You're pretty easy to please.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[diggem]

Been running 5.1 since it first came out.

--
meyerdg@swr999:~/bin/xterms
$ uname -a
FreeBSD swr999 5.1-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE #2: Mon Nov 24 08
root@swr999:/usr/src/sys/i386/compile/SPECIFIC i386
--

It's been rock solid in many respects, but there have been some (not so) small details which make me want to switch back to Linux.

- Sound card doesn't work, but that may very well be my own shortfall.
- Vesa mode console is not supported on my video card, but works like a charm under linux. (this relates to a problem switching between X and console mode causing lockups in both BSD and Linux)

There are some packages which don't work for whatever reason which I find extremely useful, xxdiff for one..

I've started migrating back to Linux, but not too far away.. Debian testing is my choice these days. A bit less stable but everything works.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

Why don't you switch to a recent version instead? You're more likely to find working code in 5.2.1.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[confused one]

ever thought of updating your system? They're at release 5.2.1 now...

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

can someone please explain to me why /.-ers say bsd is dying (i realize the parent is joking)? is it just fud or does someone actually have evidence of declining bsd use or development?

The 'bsd is dying' is FUD. I would imagine that the myth is being perpetuated by a few who for some reason couldn't get it installed. It very well could be due to their lack of ability or desire to read the documentation.

There is a big difference in the attitude of FreeBSD in that most FreeBSD users really don't care what operating system you use. If its linux that works for you best, then by all means use that. There's room for plenty of choices and everyone need not be alike and all do the same things. If we did, then that just a mono-culture of a different color.

It only takes a glance to see that the number of applications that have been ported to FreeBSD continue to grow:

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/growth/status.png

Its approaching 11,000 ported applications with new ones being added every day. If it were dying, wouldn't it stand to reason that there'd be a lack of development?

Many people choose FreeBSD because of its maturity (its been around longer than linux) and the professionalism that the project demonstrates. The solid stability and conservative nature of FreeBSD often makes it the choice for many users.

Open source is all about choice and embracing the diversity that is out there. Some of the linux (and other) zealots need to come to grips with the fact that people are all different and have different needs and goals than they do. I'm sure they could better spend their time doing bug fixes, writing documentation or new applications.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[molnarcs]

about your sound card: you might want to try putting device pcm in your kernel config file.

building your own kernel in freebsd is a breeze in freebsd. you don't give much info, so if you already know this I'm sorry..

your kernel config file is /usr/src/sys/i386/conf/GENERIC. make a copy of it and edit it putting in:

device pcm

than in /usr/src:

make buildkernel KERNCONF=yourconfigfile
make installkernel
reboot

Than see if it works.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[rawg]

It's the other way around for me. I'm Migrating from Debian to FreeBSD. Mostly because Debian is so unstable/outdated. I have found that everything in FreeBSD just works. I'm running FreeBSD stable with the latest server packages. I can't do that in Debian, unless I want to configure and compile everything manually. The Ports system makes it so easy that I don't think I'll every switch back.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[jandrese]

If you want to try to get your soundcard working, try "insmod snd_driver". To see if the system found anything run "cat /dev/sndstat". If there is anything in /dev/sndstat, then you should have working sound.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[molnarcs]

eermm... not insmod (and no modprobe).FreeBSD-Linux dictionary:)))

insmod = kldload - in his case, that would be kldload pcm or kldload snd_hissoundchipset - try ls /boot/kernel to see what's available
lsmod = kldstat
rmmod = kldunload

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

They don't believe in supporting all still-used releases. Each FreeBSD release, eg 4.n, 5.n etc., is only supported by the security team for 12 months.

That's right, 12 months. Once that time is up, you have to updgrade to a new release, which has new features, new Ports and new bugs -- so you have to re-test anything.

It's one of the biggest hinderances to greater FreeBSD adoption. Debian's 2+ years is good, RHEL's 5 years is excellent, and even Microsoft supports its OSes for several years.

You can hardly praise the FreeBSDers for doing a less than ideal job.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[SillyNickName4me]

I use both 4.x and 5.x

Interestingly, I currently run 5.x on my main server and 4.9 on my workstation.

I'm not running 4.9 out of conservatism or anything like that, but simply for the reason that I don't have time to bother with the current issues regarding the nvidia drivers and multi-threading.

My server runs 5.x because its rock solid and does a good job taking advantage of the smp hardware.

Once I don't have to bother with the linux-threads port to get a working form of kernel scheduling for threads with the nvidia driver or have to stick to libc_r, I'll switch back to 5.x on my workstation. (and yes, I know I'm stuck with libc_r now when using 4.9, but at least I don't have to bother keeping it that way while recompiling updates and such)

(oh, and why not use the xfree nvidia driver? because I want opengl for playing enemy territory and the like... not very important really, but good opengl support itself is important for other desktop uses)

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[twigles]

I'm running 4.9 on a laptop and my home router tracking the security branch. Runs great. I built a little Shuttle PC running 5.2.1 and to get my Audigy Platinum 1 sound card working I had to use an unofficial patch. And to get my Radeon 9200 video card to run I had to manually upgrade to XFree86 4.4. Don't get me wrong, both these steps were pretty easy and well documented (upgrading X consists of downloading the .tgzs and running a script while making tea), but you have to be ready to do more work than a Fedora install or something.

Other than that I'm really happy. I think the 5.x line is ready for deployment in home offices and places like that already, and the reason I wanted to start getting used to it is because development is not a binary switch - I don't see a lot of energy going into the 4.x line anymore.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[evil_one666]

In a real sense BSD is very much alive and kicking, as BSD is the codebase for Sun Solaris, AIX and MacOS, as well as the *BSDs (netBSD, freeBSD and openBSD)

The main reason that slashdotters say that BSD is dying is that open source BSD projects have not traditionally had the cooperative success that linux has. Although BSD's can be functionally superior to linux in many ways, the manner in which they are maintained has tended to create rifts, branches, and partings of ways among their respective development teams and codebases.

In other words *BSDers tend to be somewhat flamebaitable- thats why linux based slashdotters try to wind them up by shouting BSD IS DEAD at every available opportunity (Windows based slashdotters just sit on the sidelines scratching their heads and saying "whats bsd?")

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[MrRuslan]

Dude I was joking.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[essdodson]

You can run the snapshot available in the ports tree. It's the latest 4.3.xxx prior to 4.4 release. It works with my 9600 and is patched properly for freebsd.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[wirelessbuzzers]

Yes. The 5.x branch is slower, though, at least on some machines (dunno about SMP ones). GEOM slows down disk accesses slightly, and the extra locks they added to get rid of Giant can seriously slow down firewalling and some other activities. So don't use it to firewall a gigabit connection.

NB this is not my experience, it comes from the -current mailing list. My -current build is slow, but it has WITNESS and other debug options and these machines don't.

It would also be nice if they could get mounted snapshots to be stable, instead of hanging the machine on shutdown and risking random deadlocks as well.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Openstandards.net]

Or any user with a live server. To upgrade, you'd have to take the server down, and hope you can get it back up and fully operational in time.

Does anyone have recommendations for the best way to upgrade from 4.9 to 4.10? I'm guessing that 4.10 will expedite 4.9's EOL. That's about the only reason I'd consider it.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[EvilAlien]

Are you trying to get BSDers to attack you buy calling them flamebaitable? ;)

BTW, the Windows crowd might not be as clueless about BSD as some think: Windows Services for UNIX (SFU) 3.5. Apparently it is based on BSD (OpenBSD according to this OSNews.com thread). Its free now, and in some ways I like it a bit better than Cygwin. When I need to be on a Windows box, I tend to install either SFU or Cygwin. SFU is very handy once you get some of the stuff from the Interop UNIX tools warehouse installed.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm running current, not just 5.2.1, and there are some annoyances (probably many more of those in 5.2.1), but it's quite stable and I don't think I would ever go back to 4.x even though it had a glorious run.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[feargal]

1. Install cvsup from the ports collection.
2. Upgrade your sources.
3. Read /usr/src/Makefile and follow the instructions for upgrade.
4. Before you install the kernel, read up on mergemaster; it upgrades your /etc to the new distribution. Be aware of what you've changed in there in case there's a new version. The obvious ones are /etc/passwd, /etc/group, /etc/hosts, and files in /etc/ssh
5. Install your kernel and reboot - your downtime will be how long you can run through mergemaster and do an installworld. Typically, it takes me about ten-fifteen minutes.

It can be daunting first time, just be prepared, like the good boy scout you never were.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[SphericalCrusher]

Yeah, everytime I decide that I'm going to download a new version of it to have (until I can finish creating my BSD box to install it to), a new version comes out. I have three different versions of FreeBSD right now -- I guess I'm going to wait until I can get this box operational before I actually get a version to install.

The main reason I want this box is to learn FreeBSD -- one operating system that I have never really messed with. I've toyed around with the BSD shell in Mac OS X a pretty good bit, but I've never actually ran FreeBSD... I'm just much more of a Linux guy. I hear FreeBSD can be pretty amazing though.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Shanep]

Many people choose FreeBSD because of its maturity (its been around longer than linux)

That is arguable. 'FreeBSD' (1993) has not been around as long as Linux (1991), however the codebase that FreeBSD is built on is much older than Linux.

Linux is cool, but I love the BSD's, especially OpenBSD. The BSD's are maintained as complete systems and the consistency which that brings really shows. This is not to say that any given Linux distribution does not try to maintain their complete system (thinking Debian).

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

comment out

options SMP
device apic

in your kernel config, recompile, and your nvidia driver will load

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[TheGratefulNet]

5.2.1 on laptops suck! the pcmcia support is either broken or not there.

I need 5.x for the 802.11g card - yet I need 4.x for the WORKING pcmcia code. can't get card to work with either system ;(

that said, I just completed 100 days of uptime on my 4.9 system that is a dual xeon with HTT (4 cpus - sort of) and its my main vnc server. it 'holds' my desktop so I can remotely attach and de-attach from it. its my SOP for how I work now. and even with heavy use and dual-head vnc (huh? well, it does work!) the server has been problem free. just wish the fans on my system would last as long as the base o/s stays up (really - I have to take the system down at least once or twice a year to replace noisy fans caked full of dust and bunnies). but can't blame the o/s for that.

4.x - good. 5.x - broken on laptops. sigh.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[R.Caley]

Does anyone have recommendations for the best way to upgrade from 4.9 to 4.10?

Cvsup and build from source. The actual time you need to have it out of use can be very small, Eg you can build a custom kernel before starting to do any of the instalation, and it's easy to upgrade multiple machines this way.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Openstandards.net]

Will I have to rebuild Java? I can say that it takes awhile on this server. Rebuilding for Gnome 2.6 took a long time as well.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[R.Caley]

Will I have to rebuild Java [and gnome]?

No, just the core OS and kernel. Basicly what was there when the machine was a clean install, except X.

Obviously, if something in the upgrade were to change something in the OS which Java or Gnome relied upon, but that would be true for any method of upgrading. In any case 9 -> 10 is fairly small from a functionality POV I think.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[SillyNickName4me]

It already loads, but it crashes at random during opengl use.

Thanks for the suggestion tho, will give it a trey to see if it fixes the crashes.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[SillyNickName4me]

Hate to reply to my own posts, but wanted to add the results..

First of all, I noticed that I had already tried this (the kernel config I used for testing the nvidia module had them disabled)

Second, it doesn't solve the instability issues. THe 2 ways I found to prevent them are the 2 I mentioned in my earlier post, either use the linux-threads port or revert to libc_r.

Too bad since 5.2.x does a much better job supporting the rest of my hardware (ata-133 and s-ata controllers, bc gigabit ethernet controller etc)

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Openstandards.net]

So, if I understand this correctly, the ports for 4.9 are already upgrade to 4.10? If I upgrade the ports, does this mean that the OS will then report that I'm on 4.10? And heck, where does it say whether you are on 4.9 or 4.10?

Thanks for your help!

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[R.Caley]

So, if I understand this correctly, the ports for 4.9 are already upgrade to 4.10?

No, the OS and the ports are separate. The OS is all maintained as one chunk, and is what you would upgrade with cvsup (or a binary upgrade from CD). The ports just get new versions when someone somewhere updates something.

Usually most installed ports will continue to work when you upgrade the OS. The FBSD peopel are reasonably conservative about that kind of thing. And the 4.X branch isn't chaging fast at this stage in its life anyway.

where does it say whether you are on 4.9 or 4.10?

$ uname -a
FreeBSD pele.r.caley.org.uk 4.8-STABLE FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE #11: Tue Dec 2 18:34:40 GMT 2003 rjc@bast.r.caley.org.uk:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/Pele i386

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Anonymous Coward]

Try:

"kldload snd_driver"

then check dmesg for a line that starts:

"pcm0:". There is a "snd_driver" in FBSD (at least in 5.2.1). The snd_* drivers will autoload the pcm module. If you can figure out which card is, you can only load the one module you need (for my built-in AC97 audio on a Intel mobo, it's snd_ich). Once you have this, you can put the following lines in /boot/loader.conf:

snd_cardname_load="YES"
or to just load all the drivers
snd_driver_load='YES"

Most common cards are supported.

To see which modules are loaded, use:

kldstat

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[Doctor O]

Actually I have more than one co-worker who'd say "ah yes, BSD, that's Blue Screen of Death, I know that".

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[jandrese]

Doh! You're right. This is what I get for running FreeBSD at home, but Redhat at work.

However, if you kldload snd_driver in FreeBSD, it will load _all_ of the sound drivers and figure out which one you actually need. After that, you can just load the one you need for your card.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[the real darkskye]

Heh, its friday so i'm going to state the bleeding obvious
From the output of his uname -a you can see that he already has a custom kernel, so he knows how to make one :)

Is it just me

[MrRuslan]

or did all of slashdot run off to download this because its already been more that 5 minutes and no posts....scarry stuff.

Re:Is it just me

[Anonymous Coward]

New around here, eh?

*BSD comments tend to be rather scarce, well, unless you count the *BSD is dying posts, which make up about 99% of all *BSD dicussion.

The trolls are still sleeping, that's all.

I like it

[molnarcs]

I like the way they package things - one cd full of goodies (KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6) and one rescue (live) cd for all releases (since 4.8 at least).

BTW - FreeBSD seems to be included on distrowatch now (good thing!) and there is even a nice review there of the 5.x branch. There are even some nice tips included in the review :)

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

I find this review highly questionable. The writer seems to use loaded language about "surprises during install". This language seems to imply that FreeBSD is somehow difficult or less than perfect.

The author also went through the trouble of writing about and taking a screenshot of a rare bug during install that I have never actually seen in all the time I have been using and installing FreeBSD.

I found the text install for FreeBSD to be a relief when compared to the many varied GUI Linux installs out there. It is like a mac: it tells you exactly what you need to know, and clearly defines your options. No it isn't easy for a complete novice! I don't want an OS that is made for a novice. By the same token, Linux is far from easy to install, and don't even get me started on a Windows install.

Macs on the other hand are a different story...

In any case, I learned nothing new in the above article except that distrowatch is obviously Linux biased. They seem to review FreeBSD as a novelty instead of a serious hardcore OS.

I am glad 4.10 is on RELEASE. I don't care if anyone likes or things BSD is easy. It is my little secret, and I think that is cool.

It just works.

Re:I like it

[molnarcs]

yeah, you are right in some respects - there wouldn't have been any 'surprises' if he bothered to read the handbook. Everything about slices and partitioning scheme is described in details. On the other hand, I don't think it is an unfavorable or biased review.

He does have some very positive things about FreeBSD, like its being the fastest distro he has ever tried. Like it or not, this is my personal experience too - it just seems faster compared to my earlier linux distroes (on the desktop - my primary use of FreeBSD) on the same machine. This isn't exactly a popular opinion around here - well around anywhere, now I expect tons of quotes of synthetic benchmarks - yeah, I know about fefe, and no I DON'T HAVE ANY PROOF! - but this is how it feels, can't help it :P

Re:I like it

[n0dez]

make world
Oops, wrong window!

Re:I like it

[archen]

The author also went through the trouble of writing about and taking a screenshot of a rare bug during install that I have never actually seen in all the time I have been using and installing FreeBSD.

If your talking about the disk geometry thing, I've seen that many times, although never on a drive less than 40Gb. The advice it (the installer) gives you is probably a good thing to note anyway - Look what the geometry is supposed to be on the hard drive, and look at what the bios says it is (use the bios settings). I've had other obscure problems with FreeBSD as well, such as the system not booting if I had two 80Gb hard drives connected at the same time - I seriously don't know what that problem was, but 5.x handled it fine.
Simply put, if you know what you are doing, it's about as hard to install as anything else.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

Very true about the article not being too bad. I may have been a little too eager to call bias, but it did seem a little unprofessional. I would expect a professional to just explain the facts. I don't care if he was surprised by something FreeBSD did or if he is confused by the differences between BSD and Linux. I just want to read a review of FreeBSD as an OS. If I want to read a comparision of Linux v. FreeBSD I will seek a more comprehensive source, or at least an article whose scope claims to be a comparision of the two.

FreeBSD does seem very speedy. As for anecdotal evidence: It is absurd how easy it is to take old equipment that can barely run win98 anymore and load it up with FreeBSD. I have a Pentium Pro 200 and K6 233 with 64 MB of RAM in my basement. They can run all the latest versions of Apache, MySQL, Sendmail, and some other daemons and still be reasonably responsive. The CPU load averages are extremely low too. These machines were dead to the Windows world, but have found new life as frankenstein FreeBSD machines. So far they have functioned flawlessly running FreeBSD 5.2 despite being 8 years old! Now that is a return on investment.

Re:I like it

[Openstandards.net]

I didn't read the article, but based on what you said, if he had partitioning issues, I understand what he went through. Of course, I read the handbook, but had a hard time understanding the full long-term implications of some of the partitioning decisions I had to make. Since it was an old computer, I didn't have 120GB that I could easily waste a few gig on a safe schema. I had to do a lot of trial and error to get it to both work, and where I felt it was save, particularly with regard to the size of /var. I believe I made /opt its own partition as well. On my development box, that fills up fast as some commercial development tools install in it.

The bottom line is the one of the fundamental differences between partitioning in BSD vs Linux is the philosophy of using more physical partitions to protect certain critical data from /usr file system corruption. This is wise, but just a bit of a surprise for someone used to installing Linux.

Re:I like it

[molnarcs]

I think one of the few things to look out for is the size of /usr/ports. If one uses ports extensively, some builds can take a lot of space (openoffice ~4Gb). Also, you can't put it on a separate partition (unless you have GBs to waste) for the ports tree is only ~300 Mb. - and buildspace is temporary. There is no good solution to this problem - you end up with a big /usr anyway, so having your home dir there as well (the freebsd default) also makes sense, for it isn't very often than one build openoffice (or java), and usually data in the home dir (music for instance) can be backed up easier than most anything else. So, although I have different needs and uses of freebsd (I think) - I know what you're talking about (defaults worked for me pretty well though: 256Mb for / /tmp /var respectively, rest for /usr - but I had to change default config later for progs liking var by default, like mysql).

Re:I like it

[Hatta]

FreeBSD does seem very speedy. As for anecdotal evidence: It is absurd how easy it is to take old equipment that can barely run win98 anymore and load it up with FreeBSD. I have a Pentium Pro 200 and K6 233 with 64 MB of RAM in my basement. They can run all the latest versions of Apache, MySQL, Sendmail, and some other daemons and still be reasonably responsive.

You can do the same thing with linux. If you have the ram, a 233 is plenty to even run mozilla and open office concurrently without much slowdown. That's without a bloaty wm though.

Re:I like it

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't really understand why the port for MySQL, for example, would default to the /var partition. Since the default partition for /var is relatively small in comparison to /usr it seems like it would make more sense to make the port install to a larger partition (or at least recommend one if /var is going to be obviously too small).

I am not an expert, so if anyone has the inclination or time to explain this, it would be greatly appreciated.

Re:I like it

[feargal]

My one gripe with the ports tree is the way the 'make clean' process recurses through everything, without remembering earlier iterations. If, like me, you tend to forget to clean up after yourself, it can take an age to clean up your tree, where what you really want to do is "rm -r `du -ad3 /usr/ports|grep '/work$'`".
Thankfully portupgrade does it properly, so I can get away with laziness.

Re:I like it

[Openstandards.net]

That's a good question. Thanks for asking it because I just looked, and apparantly I forgot to enable InnoDB on the server and never even noticed, LOL. With InnoDB, I have to specify the location, and the files it creates off the bat can be huge, because they are basically tablespaces. I often allocate 500 MB just for the first one.

Re:I like it

[welsh git]

errr, add this to /etc/make.conf :

WRKDIRPREFIX= /any/directory/that/exists/on/any/partition

All ports will build in there then instead of under /usr/ports/....

5.3 scheduled soon

[MancDiceman]

We're not a million miles away from seeing them put 5.3 out of the door, which will then become -STABLE I believe.

Lot of nice things being sorted out in the FreeBSD kernel. I can't wait until the conversation starts about what's going into 6.x

Re:5.3 scheduled soon

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope that day will come soon. I have these fears of a release 4.11 on the horizon. It would be much nicer for the focus to shift to 5.x as it becomes the stable branch. Hopefully, I'll resist the urge to follow 6-CURRENT.

For the *BSD nay sayers

[CompWerks]

Just take a look at "Sites with longest running systems by average uptime"

I swear that I'm no BSD zealot, but that's pretty impressive.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[grahamlee]

I swear that I'm no BSD zealot

Even in the face of evidence that it helps you keep it up for longer? Your server, that is. Although.. there is help for that other affliction....

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Himring]

Just take a look at "Sites with longest running systems by average uptime"

That site is biased. There's no windows servers there....

/duck
/dodge
/hide

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

That doesn't prove anything. My windows can stay up for years if I only run screensaver on it.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[secolactico]

I love FreeBSD, but could those uptimes be because some load balancer/front ends run a BSD variant? Maybe that's the uptime we are seeing, not the actual server's.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Ryan Huddleston]

I, too, was at first impressed when I saw that.

However, if you check out their FAQ here, you will see that the uptime cannot be measured that high for HP-UX, Linux or Solaris. Therefore, this really doesn't say much other than the fact that BSD's uptime counter is programmed better than other Unices.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

its even better, any linux box up for over 400 days shows as being rebooted due to some clock's roll over.

PS: can BSD load a new kernel without rebooting? if so great, if not, look a list of BSD machines to break into.

you can use netcraft to search for linux/windows boxs the same way, if it hasn't rebooted since a patch/kernel update that needs a reboot, then you have an open machine.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Lehk228]

unless of course the machine has been configured to lie about uptime >:) and yes my winME box HAS been up for 500 Days now...

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[koekepeer]

hehe, that's just because linux users are so eager to compile and install every new kernel release :P

seriously, i would be worried if a system was up so long. of course it means that the system is stable, but it also means that security patches to the kernel have not been applied for a *long* time...

i prefer a secure sytem with an uptime of 2 minutes over and insecure one with an uptime of 2 years. but hey, that's just me...

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[$criptah]

FreeBSD, and BSDs in general, are different from Linux in many aspects, including how releases are performed and what is included in a particular release.

BSD development is conservative. Before new additions to the base system are available as a part of STABLE (production release), they undergo severe testing; therefore, BSDs lack a great variety of flaky drivers and questionable stuff that is all arond the Linux kernel. That is pricesely why BSDs may lack some hardware support available on Linux.

BSDs are different from Linux in terms what they consider to be a base system. Linux is composed of the kernel, which is pretty useless on its own, and many extras on top of it. BSDs have a broader sense of the base system. In particular, BSD integrate kernel, libraries and some binaries together to make the base. Closer integration means more polishing; that leads to greater stability.

If you take a look at FreeBSDs kernel, you will see that it is pretty minimal even with the default configuration: it includes only the very basic stuff; the rest has to be added by users. If you go through the configuration file and comment out everything that you do not need, you will have a very tiny kernel. That can increase a chance of having longer uptimes. When I was introduced to FreeBSD I could not believe that kernel could be configured and compiled so painlessly. When Linux developers try to include an absolute enormous amount of hardware support provided by default kernels, BSD developers provide only what is needed for basic functionality; that is truly a big plus.

These are simply several exmaples of why I think FreeBSD can produce reasonably long uptimes. Some people may point you to the historical fact that, in sense, BSDs have been around much longer than Linux; there is a great deal of history and previous experiences there. Can it contribute to longer uptimes? That is something that you'll have to answer yourself.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[molnarcs]

I was surprised myself by the easyness of building & configuring freebsd. Although I built kernel in linux (only a few times) I reluctant to try it out first (what, no menu? editing config file by hand?). But I needed scsi support for k3b to work (freebsd can write to ata cds directly with burncd, I think it even had direct ata cdwriter support before linux, but there is no graphical frontend to it).

So I had the handbook open on one desktop, going through the text file on a terminal, following the book point by point, commenting out unnecessary stuff, putting in some lines - than after 5 minutes, I noticed that I can't scroll down any further. I said: what? First I thought I edited the wrong file. I checked the handbook ... and saw that the next page is a different chapter. Even then, I was a bit bewildered: that was it?? Yes.

Many folks would think that by using FreeBSD one can earn geek points, cause it sounds more 'difficult' - this is not the case. If you see someone feeling cool cause he uses freebsd, you can be sure he is bluffing. FreeBSD is easy! Of course, it caters to those who are not antagonistic towards the command line, but anyone who used slackware or debian would easily learn FreeBSD - if he or she is willing to read. Their handbook (see it on their homepage) is the best OS documentation I ever read, their man pages are superb, and configuration is much easier than any linux was for me. In other words: it is a great learning platform, thanks to the great documentation and the consistency and cleanness of the system. Forget about synthetic benchmarks and bsd vs. linux flamefests. FreeBSD is fun, and is an excellent desktop system, and ports just works (no freaking use-flags, its the job of port maintainers to provide lean and mean yet rich experience with the ports - now almost 11000!).

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

" this really doesn't say much other than the fact that BSD's uptime counter is programmed better than other Unices."

Uh, and the fact that the programmers working on the other OS's cant figure out how to get a simple uptime counter to keep working is supposed to give me the warm fuzzies about the quality of their code?

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you telling me that the development of the GNU C library and POSIX userland are not closely following the development of the Linux kernel?

Closely followed by:

The bonus that you get with loose coupling is a greater degree of reusability (hence, the GNU userland runs on just about every Unix-like kernel on the planet).

So is the GNU userland closely tied to Linux or not?

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course if you actually go to the top 5 sites in that list, you would notice that there is nothing running on any of them. Just the "There is nothing here" out-of-the-box page.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Especially GL Pipes! OMG, I freakin' LOVE that screen saver!!!!!111

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

I love it when a BSD fanboy doesn't read the link and proceeds to stick his whole leg into his mouth.

From the FAQ: "Additionally HP-UX, Linux, NetApp NetCache, Solaris and recent releases of FreeBSD cycle back to zero after 497 days, exactly as if the machine had been rebooted at that precise point."

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[$criptah]

Listen retard, first of all, it was my sole opinion on why FreeBSD boxes could show long uptimes. You have your opinion, I have my. I did not say "this is exactly why FreeBSD is better than Linux."

FYI, I am familiar with GNU/Linux. I've seen enough of Linux kernel shit; that is why I started looking for an alternative solution to begin with. Take a look at any distro and you'll see that it is nothing but a kernel patched with a bunch of libraries and utilities that may or may not vary from one distribution to another. FreeBSD's kernel and utilities are developed based on several of BSD's own libraries. Following a developmental process and developing tools to work together is a big difference.

I have no idea if an unused module can present an immediate danger; however, why the fuck would you want to have useless code to begin with?

Again, BSD development IS conservative. FreeBSD and OpenBSD (do not know about NetBSD) undergo massive audition projects. In fact, CERT has not released an advisory concerning a default FreeBSD installation for 2003. OpenBSD has been pretty stable (Yeah, I know about 'sendmail' one but that is not the default). Then there are kernel security levels in additional to system run levels. Can that add to enhanced security and longer uptimes? Probably :)

If anything, then staying uptodate is much easier with FreeBSD (and other BSDs, I assume) because there is a single CVS source where people can get the latest code for the whole OS. As far as I know, there are no public CVS servers avaiable for Linux users who wish to get the latest updates of their distros.

You wanted my reasons for "being on a high horse?" You got them. By the way, I enjoy having useful computers that have long uptimes. I do not feel warm and fuzzy about running beta drivers on my servers so I can notify the rest of the world about the bugs that I may find.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

simply check those sites, see how many of them are running real stuff?

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I don't want to get into a flamewar (i think they're silly) but this portion seems a bit misinformed:
Yeah. Remind me of one "flaky driver" or "questionable stuff" that was recently added to a stable Linux kernel release. The 2.4 maintainer is EXTREMELY hesitant to include anything new, to the point of frustrating people (see XFS).
Linux 2.4 changed its VM subsystem, and its scheduler in the middle of the 2.4 branch. They worked, but the "extremely hesitant to include anything new" label doesn't fit. The fact that these changes worked will little ill effect cause a lot of people not to remember these. Linux 2.4 also shipped with a corruption bug in it's default filesystem (ext3) in a common (though not default) journal mode.

These are not attacks against Linux, I use it at work, have used it for years. Just it does have a different development model. Kindly stop the "my freely developed x86 UNIX workalike is SO much better than your freely developed x86 UNIX workalike" arguments. Very silly, and we have better battles to fight.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you familiar with GNU/Linux? Are you telling me that the development of the GNU C library and POSIX userland are not closely following the development of the Linux kernel? If it weren't for Linux, what else would they bother with?

You are correct. And this is why it should not be called "GNU/Linux".

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[$criptah]

www.moveon.org has gotta be one of the best sites. You are totally right my friend.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[theArtificial]

Only hitch is getting ATI drivers working for 3D support (currently you're stuck with 2d and thats it) since the binary only drivers are written for linux only. You're pretty much stuck with NVIDIA if you want anything reasonable (which you should be running, right?) I'm not trying to nag, just my freebsd 4.9 box is lifesupport for my ati8500, however i was able to get tv in working just fine through GATOS, and i don't really game on that box, its just something to toy with. that aside freebsd's video support is lacking in some respects, however im sure somethign will eventually make it a reality.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

----Yeah. Remind me of one "flaky driver" or "questionable stuff" that was recently added to a stable Linux kernel release. The 2.4 maintainer is EXTREMELY hesitant to include anything new, to the point of frustrating people (see XFS).----

No problem, man! See the Adaptec (aacraid) driver in kernel 2.4 for the Dell Perc 3/Di. Yeah, it randomly froze my system. I can't find the Red Hat list quickly anymore, but Alan Cox was also on the list. Many people have had this problem.

Let's face it, no one's perfect. Not Linux, not FreeBSD, not Microsoft... nobody.

PS: I don't have a /. acct., but I'm not the parent poster. Oh, and over a year later, the bug still exists in kernel 2.4; it seems to be a mysterious bug. I didn't notice problems in 2.6 though.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Billly Gates]

I have used Linux since 98 and FreeBSD since 2002.

Yes, there is a certain feel and polish to the BSD's that are reminiscent of Unix. Linux in recent years has gone down the tubes in terms of beta and alpha level packages thrown in distros.

I am typing this from SuSE 9.1 right now because I dont have time to tinker with everything to set it up FreeBSD as a workstation.

But dont take make my word on it. Try it and use the FreeBSD handbook?

It feels certainly more stable and the /etc is a godsend under BSD.

No complicated psuedo files in /etc symlinked to god knows where that are written in Bash like in Linux. Just simple RC files that have things like #uncomment this line to enable this.

That makes my life 10x easier to administrate.

I also can tweak gcc by using /etc/defaults/make.conf.

If only it had the right fonts, universal menu's and codecs by default it would be awesome.

As a SuSE user there is no way in hell would I trust it to a server. I have crashed the distro many times and have seen 2 kernel panics in just the week since I owned it. Xine is very buggy too. All the characters sometime turn grey and only red shows when I play a video now?? wtf?

Also I can't play a certain mp3 with xmms without it crashing and its now impossible to run off the opengl spectrum analyzer without crashing xmms again. I just discovered during the course of writing this message.

God Linux is a piece of crap. I may have to reboot to get it to work again. Hmmm now which os does that remind you of?

At least Windows2k and WindowsXP are now fairly stable. More then Linux as of today in my opinion. Boy, have times chages.

It pains me to say that.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Billly Gates]

Adeptes writes the drivers for FreeBSD first then ports them to Linux.... or did?

Try FreeBSD 4.10 on it. SCSI has always been better supported under BSD untill Linux 2.6.

I am starting to dislike Linux more and more. It use to be quite stable back in the 2.0 days and distro's were not in the rush to include the latest alpha and beta level packages in their products.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[feargal]

I think the best example for this is the fact that the default kernel has no support for sound cards.

It's similar to the differing firewall philosophies - do you block everything first, and then allow what you need, or do you allow everything first, and then block what you don't need?

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[$criptah]

We were talking about uptimes here and as far as I am concerned, sound cards have nothing to do with it. The guy who started this whole pile of shit regarding freebsd questioned its ability to be stable. Well, guess what, just becuase it lacks some support by default, it does not mean that the system is less stable.

I totally understand YOUR point of view. That is why I use Mac OS X for my desktop. I haven't found hardware that it did not support :) The rest of my servers run BSD or Debian.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Umm, Linux 2.4 didn't change its scheduler, and the corruption bug was actually in a very uncommon journal mode: the corruption was not detected by someone with a failed production system, but due to testing.

FreeBSD 4.9 shipped with bad SMP stability problems, and its default filesystem mode (softupdates) would crash with large files. It also included major rework in its VM subsystem to support PAE.

These are not attacks against FreeBSD. Just it is not immune to problems and mistakes either.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD development is conservative. Before new additions to the base system are available as a part of STABLE (production release), they undergo severe testing; therefore, BSDs lack a great variety of flaky drivers and questionable stuff that is all arond the Linux kernel. That is pricesely why BSDs may lack some hardware support available on Linux.

Unlike Linux, where, uh, before new additions to the base system are available as a part of a production release, they undergo severe testing?

If you consider an old but still maintained Linux (2.2, or 2.4 when more people migrate to 2.6) as the equivalent of FreeBSD STABLE, I really don't see that there's that much difference between the development models.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[$criptah]

Of course there is. It seems that most of the Linux distros have one goal in mind: beat Microsoft and provide as much hardware support as it is possible. FreeBSD development team seems to have a different target: provide a rocksolid operating system. FreeBSD STABLE branch is not an old version of the operating system, it is the production version of the operating system that may or may not have significant new functionality.

Have you ever wondered why some of the latest drivers for god knows what never make it to the latest distributions of Free or OpenBSDs? The reason is that unless developers are absolutely 100% sure about the functionality, they do not even think of including it with the OSes. OpenBSD crowd is very specific about what they want to see in the newest release because they are a banch of freaking paranoids; and no, being paranoid is not a bad thing :)

Look, I can go on and on and on. Unfortunately, I have better things to do. FYI, I run both Linux and BSD OSes. I have compared them so many times, it is not even funny. Is Linux better than BSD? I do not know. In the original reply, I specified my thoughts on why BSD servers had high uptime as it was referenced on the specified web site. If you want to have a Linux vs. BSD go somehwere, else. I just posted my personal thoughts because I thought that some things were appropriate.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey there!

Well, I ran linux 2.6 on the server for the remainder of the semester for my users.

I later upgraded to FBSD 5.2.1, after realizing that it was stable enough for us. I ran 5.X on a test server (still running it there) for 6 months without problems (doing semi-production stuff); I felt this warranted putting it on one more server.

Then, suddenly, I got asked to install FBSD on more servers.. Yay! My university is installing FreeBSD more often now (well, I am at least).

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[R.Caley]

As a SuSE user there is no way in hell would I trust it to a server.

I know this is common wisdom (linux for desktop, bds for servers and firewalls), but I want to suggest another POV.

Once you have it set up and working, linux seems to work. It's only when you try to change something that it comes apart at the seams (literally, where package meets package).

Since servers get less fiddling with than desktops (no one comes along wanting to plug in something bizzare, or install the latest gee-wizzo software), I have far less problem with linux on a server than I would if somene were to try and persuade me to use it as a desktop.

My servers can get rebooted every so often, that just interrupts work for a minute or so. My desktop should run for months, or I lose my emacs context and I HATE that.

I suspect this is my age showing again. I remember when the computer I typed at went down once a year for backups and anything beyond that was sign of a major screw up somewhere.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[trippinonbsd]

I was thinking the same thing. If I was the sysadmin on one of these boxes that had an uptime of over a thousand days then I would most certainly have a firewall in front of that box that only allowed port 80 tcp traffic for instance. If you put a OpenBSD box infront of one these old hulking boxes and wrote a good ruleset {scrubbing, syn proxy, etcerta} then the box would only need to be running the latest version of apache.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[runderwo]

Perhaps if you learned to read, you'd be able to comprehend the difference between "following the development of the Linux kernel" and "loose coupling". Let me help you.

"Following the development of the Linux kernel" means that the glibc and userland people continually track changes in the Linux kernel and fix bugs or implement new features as necessary.

"loose coupling" means that Linux-related development on these tools does not cause the functionality of these tools on non-Linux platforms to be affected. Another way to put that is that the functionality of said tools does not depend on Linux, even if Linux is the target that gets the most attention these days.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[runderwo]

Listen retard, first of all, it was my sole opinion on why FreeBSD boxes could show long uptimes. You have your opinion, I have my. I did not say "this is exactly why FreeBSD is better than Linux."

No problem. It's just that in these BSD stories, you get a lot of masturbating about how BSD is and has always been the best, and sneering at any mention of Linux or anything related to Linux. It's probably because there isn't enough traffic in this section for the angsty teenagers and elitists to vent regularly.

Take a look at any distro and you'll see that it is nothing but a kernel patched with a bunch of libraries and utilities that may or may not vary from one distribution to another.

So pick one good distribution and ignore the 100 shitty ones (including some commercial ones). If a FreeBSD fork showed up called CrapBSD and did everything wrong, could I then infer that BSD's suck because of my experience with CrapBSD?

I have no idea if an unused module can present an immediate danger; however, why the fuck would you want to have useless code to begin with?

Why the fuck would you want to maintain your own custom kernels on each machine and have to rebuild every time you have to change hardware to the vendor's chip-of-the-day?

I prefer kernel security updates in the form of nice binary packages without having to worry about a locally-maintained mess. Sure, there's a bunch of modules that I don't use and will probably never use. They take up disk space and filesystem entries. If you can think of anything else negative that their mere presence poses, I'm all ears. I happen to like being able to swap a network card with what is handed to me and not be bothered with which chip is on it.

FreeBSD and OpenBSD (do not know about NetBSD) undergo massive audition projects.

http://www.debian.org/security/audit/

Then there are kernel security levels in additional to system run levels.

I don't know what you're talking about here. Are you referring to capabilities?

As far as I know, there are no public CVS servers avaiable for Linux users who wish to get the latest updates of their distros.

For Debian and Gentoo users there are. But who cares about CVS? I thought we were talking about servers here? I have a nice tool called cron-apt running on all of my servers to grab binary security update packages every 12 hours. The only time any of my servers reboot is for a hardware failure or new kernel. I've never been rooted (yet).

I do not feel warm and fuzzy about running beta drivers on my servers so I can notify the rest of the world about the bugs that I may find.

Where did I recommend or even suggest running a beta driver on a deployed server? Where does any Linux kernel developer recommend doing such a thing? Beta drivers are for us to beat up in our test environments, not to roll out into production without any validation. So I still don't see why it hurts to have beta drivers available for testing and feedback when they are clearly marked as such.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[bovinewasteproduct]

Only hitch is getting ATI drivers working for 3D support (currently you're stuck with 2d and thats it)

Huh? Maybe some of the wild stuff, but my ATI card works just fine in 3D mode. Here are a couple of selected tidbits from my dmesg.boot,XFree86.0.log, and glxinfo.

drm0: ATI Radeon If R250 9000
Chipset: "ATI Radeon 9000/PRO If (AGP/PCI)"
direct rendering: Yes
OpenGL renderer string: Mesa DRI R200 20020827 AGP 1x x86/MMX/SSE TCL

It's not one of the top end cards, but for an average workstation (I do 95% programming so...)it works quite well. Here are a couple of specs...
glxgears = 1400 FPS
gloss = 375 fps
fire = 60 fps
geartrain = 200 fps
ray = 67 fps

Nothing to get excited about, but I do have hardware 3D...

BWP

One more FreeBSD 4.X release

[krut]

From 4.10-Release Announcement:
The current plans are for one more FreeBSD 4.X release which will be FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE. It is expected the upcoming FreeBSD 5.3 release will have reached the maturity level most users will be able to migrate to 5.X.

So probably no more new-feature-development in 4.X. Just keeping it stable.

It's just you

[gazbo]

I suggest reading up on "scalability" and "caching".

Here's looking to 4.11 !!

[green pizza]

Hopefully there'll be a 4.11 soon.... anything .10 looks so bizzare. FreeBSD 4.10 reminds me of IRIX 6.5.10. They almost look like typos!

Re:Here's looking to 4.11 !!

[Anonymous Coward]

4.10 is an upgrade of 4.9 ?

If i know anything about which number is bigger than the other number...

Re:Here's looking to 4.11 !!

[Dastard]

I make it a matter of policy to stay away from any softare release that ends in a .10. They used to call the "Errata Branch" -STABLE.

Re:Here's looking to 4.11 !!

[Fweeky]

It's not a number, it's a tuple of integers; [4, 10]. 10 is greater than 9, ergo it's an upgrade.

Versions are not floating point numbers! Well, they can be, but that's just confusing and silly ;)

Question

[kaoshin]

I'd like to get FreeBSD going on my laptop but I've had trouble with the cardbus ethernet adapters. Can anyone recommend a 16 Bit PCMCIA ethernet for use with FreeBSD? Too bad there are no sites like Linux-Laptop for BSD. As far as BSD dying, spend some time dealing with various non-responsive Linux package maintainers and then say who is dead.

Re:Question

[pknoll]

I have one that works perfectly; it's a U.S. Robotics card but I don't remember the part number. I'll post it when I get home.

You can't install using this particular card, but the mini-ISO is enough to get it going; then you can pkg_add to complete your install.

This card may be hard to find, but I don't need it anymore, so an eBay solution is a strong possibility. =)

Re:Question

[univeralifepadre]

Too bad there are no sites like Linux-Laptop for BSD

You mean like this?

As to your other question, I use a Netgear fa410tx.

Re:Question

[kaoshin]

Thanks for the info. I'll submit my laptop since it isn't listed.

Re:Question

[Asmodai]

You might want to try DragonFly BSD then. It is synched to a lot of what it is 5.x, but took 4.x as it starting point and is moving into a different, in my opinion better (but I am biased), direction. E.g. NEWCARD is present on DF as well as a lot of architecture changes...

Re:Question

[jglen490]

I downloaded FreeBSD about 6 weeks ago, burned a CD and attempted to load it on my laptop. It's not a great laptop (P120/3.2GB/72MB), but it works with Mandrake 9.2 just fine - and it's paid for ;>).

After a couple of false starts (my bad), I got it up and actually running, but it never would detect my PCMCIA NIC. Not only would it not detect, but there was no place that I could find to actually configure the NIC or the network connection to my router. So I gave up and went back to MDK. At least that was something I could use and also something that has useful documentation.

My point is, that I was very disappointed in what has been touted as a great OS. Maybe someday, but not for a while.

Paradox

[kensai]

BSD is dying, yet they keep on releasing new stuff. Does that mean that BSD is the zombie OS? :P

Re:Paradox

[Anonymous Coward]

ROFFLES OMG UR TEH FUNNAY LOLOL!~~!!!!~!!11one!!eleven`

ZOMBIE OS OMG WTF LOL CUZ ITS DEAD BUT ALIVE OMG LOL

Re:Paradox

[r7]

>BSD is dying, yet they keep on releasing new stuff.

And we keep on using it. There's no better platform for avoiding library skew (dll-hell, rpm dependencies, ...) Even apt-get doesn't compare with /usr/ports.

We do have fewer and fewer machines running FreeBSD though, because of poor support for Java/Tomcat, lack of iSCSI, and decrepit NFS. Ever try to setup an NFS-IMAP server with 100MB+ quotas and maildir? Can't do it in FreeBSD :-(

R7

Re:Paradox

[molnarcs]

They have a fine sense of humour too ... OpenBSD's deadly.org was renamed to undeadly.org :)))

Re:Paradox

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

... because of poor support for Java/Tomcat,..
Kind of pisses me off about Sun's poor Java support of BSD, especially since the original SunOS was a mild port of Berkely BSD. Lots of big people at sun (including Bill Joy) hacked the BSD kernel back in the day.

Re:Paradox

[archen]

Does that make the admin a necromancer?

There's a reason to use it all in itself!

Conservative updates?

[What'sInAName]

some conservative updates to a number of programs in the base system

But I'm a liberal, you insensitive clod!

Re:Conservative updates?

[Eraser_]

Then use Linux, you damn hippie!

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[bkaraff]

i was thinking the same thing.
im no mathmotologist, but 4.1 seems 8 steps BELOW 4.9 to me.

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[ttrafford]

Am I reading this right? They went from 4.9 to 4.10?

Seems like they should go from 4.9 to 4.91.

Only if that was a decimal point, there.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

IT'S NOT A TROLL you dope. The problem is, on Slashdot, someone who criticize *BSD (or Linux), even with valid arguments, is always modded down as a troll.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look here if you'd like a more detailed reason as to why someone might want to use BSD over Linux.

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, you're kidding, right?

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh? Learn how to count, then think about why your comment made no sence.

Re:4.10 ? uhhm ... maybe I am havent had enough sl

[kompzec]

nevermind

Re:Long awaited uh?

[alexatrit]

Obvious troll for "who uses" ... ftp.cdrom.com, anyone? Anyways, I've never have issues with device support, except in the VERY early releases of 5.x. I've loaded FreeBSD on hundreds of machines of various manufacture, without a hiccup. If anything, they support too much, to the point where I'd cut all of the excess from the kernel after installation. IDE access times? You're kidding, right? If you want extraordinarily fast access times and throughputs, why are you using IDE drives to begin with. Technical arguments aside, Beastie is so much cooler than Tux. And if you don't like that, I'll have him stab you with the trident.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a pile of crap! You should be ashamed
to post such obviously false statements
backed by the authority of well known name
in the community. Everybody who has used
FreeBSD knows that it is in par with Linux
performance wise (to be non polemical), and
in particular the filesystem and the ata driver
don't suffer in comparison. Basically all
current hardware is supported, the same as in Linux.
The ports system is indeed gentoo like, but you can also install precompiled softs.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it's free in the dictionary sense, free in the political sense, and *not* "free" in the RMS sense.

Seriously. The licencing matters to many people, especially in business environments.

As an added bonus, a single person with reasonable effort can still understand how the kernel works in some depth; contrast the 2.6 branch of the Linux kernel.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

- The FreeBSD ports system existed long before the first version of Gentoo was releases.
- Don't know about the IDE drivers, never had any performance issues.
- Did you know FreeBSD stable did have USB support before Linux stable did? I could use my USB keyboard, mouse and printer on FreeBSD 4.0 and at that time the were only unofficial patches for the 2.2.x kernel which would allow the same on Linux and Linux kernel 2.4.x didn't even exist yet.
- Most programs originally developed for Linux compile fine for FreeBSD. In that case the emulation layer isn't even needed. The emulation layer is only useful for closed-source binary applications which work most of the times just fine.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

*A LOT* of people use FreeBSD.

We've used FreeBSD in all of our production servers for many years. I've only ever had hardware problems with the absolute newest hardware out (linux didn't even support it yet). It always seems to be supported by the next -RELEASE. It's an extreemly easy OS to manage, upgrade, etc. I see no reason to use Linux on any of our production systems..

have they?

[Anonymous Coward]

made this OS any easier to install and configure?

Re:have they?

[$criptah]

Yeah, it has been that way since.. I dunno.... 3.2...?

Re:have they?

[Anonymous Coward]

you can use Lindows if you like.

Re:have they?

[scosol]

No, it's been the same install procedure for... damn... almost 10 years?

There's no need to change it- it's simple, straightforward, and once you've done it a few times you can almost do it blindfolded. :)

Re:have they?

[the real darkskye]

The install procedure hasn't changed all that much from 2.2.7, at least I don't think it has, its not often I re-install FBSD, and the last time I did it was over a serial terminal and that was to the 2.2.7 box which had been progressivly build world'ed to 5.2 which eventually got the cleaning it needed

What do you mean socks5d needs libc.3?

Re:Long awaited uh?

[latroM]

So why-oh-why would anybody chose FreeBSD, since it's basically GNU/Linux without the Linux portion, with the FreeBSD kernel instead, with some Linux compatibility bits, minus the performance and hardware support? and please don't tell me it's good for routers, NetBSD or OpenBSD are better for that.

The thing you are describing is of course Debian GNU/kFreeBSD: http://www.debian.org/ports/freebsd/gnu-libc-based :). FreeBSD has its own libc (GNU/Linux has GNU's glibc) and most of the userland is BSD although the C compiler and some programs are GNU. I guess that some people like the development method of FreeBSD and that it provides a complete OS which isn't the case in GNU/Linux land. Linux is only a kernel. FreeBSD is an OS.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[jazzer]

Also, most of the userland packages you can find for FreeBSD can also be found on Linux. In fact, most of these packages are originally Linux packages. Many programs need Linux-specific features, like /dev/rtc, so FreeBSD provides an emulation layer...that isn't complete and doesn't work well. Etc etc...

I haven't used FreeBSD in a couple of years, however the Linux compatibility ran perfectly then. I have a hard time picturing it got worse.

So why-oh-why would anybody chose FreeBSD, since it's basically GNU/Linux without the Linux portion, with the FreeBSD kernel instead, with some Linux compatibility bits, minus the performance and hardware support? and please don't tell me it's good for routers, NetBSD or OpenBSD are better for that.

Actually, I always found FreeBSD when I used along side Linux to be more stable and performance was at least as good. Remember, competition is a good thing. Yes, the hardware support isn't quite as good, but ask a Windows user is Linux's hardware support is good. Right now I'm using Linux, but it's comments like this that make me want to switch away. I'm sorry, but Linux is not the holy grail.

One Step Ahead Of Time

[$criptah]

No, I am not talking about FreeBSD. I am talking about me deciding to perform a 'cvsup' on RELENG_4 last night. Little did I know that I was getting the newest release.

Re:One Step Ahead Of Time

[cperciva]

You weren't getting the newest release. You were getting the release plus a couple months of development.

Releases get significant amounts of testing (and last minute bug fixing) after they are branched and before they are released. Meanwhile, development continues mostly as normal in the main branch.

Re:One Step Ahead Of Time

[$criptah]

Even better :)

Re:Long awaited uh?

[sremick]

I've been using FreeBSD off and on since 2.2.2 or so. I officially replaced my primary home desktop with it over a year and an half ago. But even before that, and to this day, I run it for several servers I maintain.

I have numerous friends who use FreeBSD, many because of me. More are coming. My webhost uses FreeBSD and the new one I'm switching to does as well. In fact, most of the sites with the longest uptime run FreeBSD or some *BSD.

The supported hardware is broader than the list suggests, because the list is mostly by chipsets. You'll find LOTS of different products that all use the same chipset. I've found that if you're unsure, just ask... people in the community will help you figure it out. I got a video-capture card for xmas that has worked like a charm. Watching TV in a box on my desktop is nice. I've watched DVDs, had no problems with my sound, get hardware-accel 3D on my video card, network card has always worked, as well as my wireless mouse. All the rest of my hardware besides the video-capture card is the same stuff I had when I ran Windows 2000 (which I bought without knowing I'd be ditching Windows for FreeBSD) and it all worked great when I switched. The ports system kicks ass. Upgrading is a cinch. The OS is very stable. I'm happy.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ho ho! Valid arguments? Now there's a joke.

1) I have never had a problem, speedwise, with the IDE drivers on FreeBSD. They come up equal, if not greater than those of other x86 OSes.

2) Supported hardware a joke? ALL my hardware works fine with FreeBSD, and most of it is pretty much generic el-cheapo stuff. Even my TV tuner card that I can never get working properly in GNU/Linux, and my USB ADSL modem that requires a firmware upload to run.

3) The Linux compatibility layer works extremely well, but is only really needed for Linux binaries where source code is not availble, which is rare. Native FreeBSD binaries are even available for some closed source software, such as Opera.

4) FreeBSD differs in many ways from GNU/Linux. It's not simply a different kernel, any more than Solaris is simply a different kernel. FreeBSD has it's own unique quirks and features, like any other operating system.

5) FreeBSD is probably (from what I've heard and from personal experience with multiple OSes) the fastest major OS on the x86 architecture.

About the only thing that had the slightest air of truth about it in the original post was the mention of the ports collection for building software from source (although binary packages are always available as an alternative).

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[noselasd]

Learn to read, and count ?
It says 4.10
10 comes after 9, atleast in base 10 math.

The next release will be ...

[yecrom2]

28 gauge, then 20 gauge, followed by 16 gauge, then 12 gauge, and finally 10 gauge. 8 gauge would be next, but anything larger than a 10 gauge is illegal in my state.

Matt

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[smcv]

Version "numbers" aren't conventionally decimal numbers, at least in the Unix world; instead, you split the version up at the dots and compare succesive components, so 4.10 comes between 4.9 and 4.11, 4.100 is the version after 4.99, and so on. As a number, 4.10 would usually denote "four point one zero", but as a version number it's "four point ten" (or even "four dot ten", I suppose).

It looks less strange in a version numbering scheme with three or more components (Linux 2.4.26, Perl 5.8.1, Apache 1.3.20) where it's obvious that you're not dealing with decimal numbers. It's also consistent with the way sections are numbered in many textbooks, RFCs, W3C standards, etc. (chapter 1 section 2 would be headed "1.2", its subsection 20 would be headed "1.2.20".)

Most projects' second (minor) version number never reaches 10, since there's a new major release at least once every 10 minor releases (e.g. Apache 1.3 followed by 2.0, or Debian 2.2 followed by 3.0).

(A few projects do use decimal numbers: Perl used to, so the version before Perl 5.6.0 was something like Perl 5.00503, which would be Perl 5.5.3 in the new system.)

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Tell the Linux folks that... 2.4.26 appears to be a much more recent version than 2.4.3.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Octorian]

Also, I find that if you like being able to manually configure your system (text files and all), FreeBSD is actually a lot easier to fully understand and use than most Linux distros.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Octorian]

True, the officially mentioned hardware support may not be as good. However, there are exceptions. I remember when all those Promise ATA cards (for ATA 66 and up) first came out. They were supported on FreeBSD before Linux actually.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, most userland packages/programs does NOT originate from Linux, but from 4.4 BSDLite.

Also note that for all the userland programs in the base install are in the same source tree. The programs are developed by FreeBSD users/developers for FreeBSD. The tools thereby evolves with the system.

Some GNU tools, gcc, binutils and gdb are such examples are imported into the system, but most other things are clearly not.

If I would venture, I would say that FreeBSD nowadays import/share more developments/updates and programs in the base systems with the other BSDs (Net, Open, DragonFly) than Linux. Most Linux stuff is in the ports. /Joachim

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[mjm1231]

No. 4.9 is greater than 4.1, and 4.9 is also greater than 4.10, however you write it. In fact, mathematically, 4.1 and 4.10 are the same number (it's a different number of significant figures, but the value is the same). 4.10. with a trailing decimal doesn't even make sense mathematically. I haven't followed the version numbers of FreeBSD closely, but if there had been a patched version of 4.1 which became 4.11, and now you have a patch for version 4.10 which makes it version 4.11, there's pretty clearly a lot of potential for confusion.

FreeBSD-laptop

[n0dez]

Wrong!

This is the most popular FreeBSD-Laptop site. gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/

This is a great resource if your laptop is old. www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html

Here you can read an article about FreeBSD on laptops. www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/lapto p/article.html

If you need more FreeBSD resources, then visit www.n0dez.com/freebsd/

If you've got a 32-bit PCMCIA card on your laptop, use FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. The 5.x branch supports 32-bit PCMCIA cards. In fact, I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE on an old laptop without a hitch.

Re:FreeBSD-laptop

[kwench]

I had some troubles in getting my PCMCIA modem to work with FreeBSD 5. It worked just fine with FreeBSD 4, though.

Obviously, the shiny-new code broke some older drivers.

Re:FreeBSD-laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting site. I had thought about trying bsd on my laptop but after seeing that site I'm just not going to bother. Almost eveyone with an Inspiron says Broken/Not Working for ACPI, Cardbus etc. I'm just not willing to deal with an OS that doesn't support ACPI, my touchpad, Speedstep, Hibernate, and Fan Control. I hate being stuck with only Windows that can support my laptop. Buying a new one isn't and never will be an option.

When will someone make a *nix that fully supports Laptops out of the box? I'm not even talking about brand new laptops. My freaking Dell is like 3 years old and still nobody can get it working right. Everything is always half working out of the box and takes tons of recompling to get even basic things working. Sigh.

Re:FreeBSD-laptop

[Anonymous Coward]

> When will someone make a *nix that fully supports Laptops out of the box?

How about Apple laptops? The iBooks are priced fairly competitive.

Re:FreeBSD-laptop

[TheGratefulNet]

same here - 4.9 worked with my pc cards but 5.2.1 didn't. its a thinkpad 600 (older style) with cardbus. cb is broken and pcmcia is broken, too. I need the ath driver (.11g card) and 5.x is where that lies but their pc card support is VERY bad right now.

its not just you. its a known problem with the current release of 5.x.

A reason to use FreeBSD

[cronot]

I'm a[nother] Linux user, and I wanted a good reason to use FreeBSD. I've installed it twice, but after realizing that I didn't have a good reason to keep using it, as its maintenance was too time-consuming, I ended up removing it. But I still would like to use it, it feels very consistent, and the fact that it doesn't suffer from the "distributions" disease adds up to that.

Coming from a Debian background, my main complaint (and reason that I resist using it) is that, AFAIK, it doesn't have a large repository of binary packages for installation. I know about the wonders of Ports, but I feel like it is something for users with time and resources on their hands, which I do not have - I don't like the idea of having to wait sometimes hours for something to compile, so I can use it. This time could be better spent actually doing something useful with my computer, rather than it sitting there and compiling stuff.

I'm aware that Debian has two BSDs ports (NetBSD and FreeBSD), but they are far from maturity right now. For myself, I think that an automated system for installation/upgrading of software packages are a must for desktop installations, so FreeBSD is already out of the game here. For server installations, however, I could go without, although it would still be useful. So I'd like to know if there's a reliable and updated repository (i.e. packages website a la linuxpackages.net, for slackware) that FreeBSD users use to get binary packages.

Don't take this post as a troll, I'm really interested on FreeBSD and would like to have some solid reasons to use it.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[molnarcs]

Hey, you are wrong (sorry for being blunt). Every now and then the entire ports collection is built on their clusters, providing binary packages. In fact, you don't even have to install the ports collection, you can just go using packages :)))

In fact, package management in FreeBSD is very similar to apt-get (different commands, same result... a case in point: pkg_add -r kdebase = apt-get install kdebase)

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD has binary packages. Every port is built into a package (you can do this yourself with make package, but they are also on the main ftp site and some mirrors). The packages are often a day or two behind the source releases (since it takes time to build them all), but they are there. If you use the portupgrade utility then specifying the -P option will instruct it to install from packages if they exist, or ports if they don't. -PP will instruct it to only use packages. If you are not, then you can use pkg_add to install packages.

I assume that you are not using portupgrade, since you say that FreeBSD doesn't have an automatic update system. Give it a look, it's well worth it.

I haven't used FreeBSD on a workstation since I got a Mac, but it's a great server OS.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[killjoe]

Is there a file which knows the URLs to fetch the packages from? One of the things I like about apt is that it knows which versions you have installed and which versions exist "out there" and allows you to update your packages. I hear netbsd pkgsrc has the same thing.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[molnarcs]

I'm sure there is, though I didn't check it for I use ports. But yes, pkg_* knows which version you have installed, knows if there is an update - well, you can install portupgrade too for more automatic stuff. portupgrade -a would upgrade every port. If you want to use packages in combination with ports, portupgrade -P does the trick. Portupgrade -PP (or portinstall -PP in case of new stuff) will use packages only.

There are also free binary security updates for freebsd - one of the developers (and ./ user with the nick cpercive) provides them.

Also, you can specify a remote site when adding packages. The fruitsalad project provides fresh binary kde packages. I think you would install it with pkg_add -r url_to_their_ftp_repository. Someone (who was also a deb user) asked me for an incentive to try out freebsd. I told him this: if you are 100% satisfied and not curious about it, don't try it. Otherwise, I think its a great OS and it is very rewarding (and convenient) - so go ahead! Also, the community is very friendly and helpful (and before I switched, I came from mandrakeusers and pclinuxonline, so you might guess that I had high standards :)) - www.bsdforums.org is invaluable if you want help :)

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

pkg_version -v

Make sure to have an updated ports tree!

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[dokebi]

Someone else pointed out Packages so I'll try to enumerate things I like about FreeBSD:

1. Stability. The -stable branch (right now 4.x series) is ROCK SOLID. Even with a saturated CPU load, it is responsive and doesn't crash. It rivals commercial unix for stability in high-load environments. I think one can get linux to do this using a very stable kernel (ie, not the latest) or distributions (debian stable). The -current branch is less stable. I've had two kernel panics with it in the last year.

2. Saner release cycle. With RedHat and others constantly upping their version numbers, it is nice to see branches supported for long periods. 3.x got security updates for a long time, and I know 4.x will too after 5.x becomes stable

3. Saner Design. Unlike Linux, each release of FreeBSD dictate kernel+base system. Other packages are installed afterwards. Due to this, upgrades are a snap, as each cvsup, makeworld gives you a new release of FreeBSD but leaves your apps alone. Maybe to some people this is bad (KDE not being upgraded), but for servers this is ideal.

4. Part of No, 3, but oh well. Saner directory structure. Maybe I'm old school, but I *like* having all the base system (bin utils, etc) in /usr/bin and installed packages in /usr/local/bin. So when I do a system upgrade, only /usr/bin is updated. Linux's behavior of putting everything in /usr/bin drives me nuts.

5. Documentation. man will give everything you want, but there is also the Handbook, which in my opinion is only rivaled by Gentoo's. It is well written, clear, and easy to find.

So you can see where FreeBSD is geared towards--servers. As such, it is great to set-up, maintain, and run services on it, but it also has downsides, like lack of hardware support (can't have flaky hardware and drivers ruining uptimes). I suggest you try FreeBSD for your server needs, but stick to Linux for more general use, especially if there is no driver support for your favorite hardware.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

So why is it that the front page of www.bsdforums.org hitting my browser tells me the latest release is 4.8?

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you arn't a troll and just didn't RTFM (which still makes you a troll in a way...):

Every BSD flavor (Open, Net, and Free) has a packages framework that provides binary packages to install on the system; the ports framework is just a way to make the packages. In fact, building a port actually makes the package and then installs it!

So yes there are binary packages out there that mirror the stuff in the ports trees.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[raytracer]

I'm a[nother] Linux user, and I wanted a good reason to use FreeBSD. I've installed it twice, but after realizing that I didn't have a good reason to keep using it, as its maintenance was too time-consuming, I ended up removing it.

First of all, if you are happy running Debian or whatever, why bother seeking other alternatives? If your time is as precious as you say, then why are you considering other alternatives? Honestly, if you can't think of a reason to use FreeBSD, then you probably don't need to run FreeBSD.

You are right, FreeBSD relies on the ports system and building from source to a greater degree than your typical Linux system. I usually cvsup the kernel about once a month and rebuild the world and kernel. It virtually always works exactly as advertised, and maybe takes ten minutes of my attention. I'm have modest desktop requirements (I don't use Gnome or KDE, in large part because they have large numbers of requirements and are frequently updated with little effect on my overall productivity). I mostly keep up to date on Python, Apache and a few assorted Python modules. The rest, I simply don't worry about keeping up to date on.

Finallly, f you are really in the mood for binary packages, you should learn about "pkg_add -r".

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[platipusrc]

While there are easy ways to install packages (pkg_add -r, as mentioned in another post), I can't really see a reason not to upgrade from source. Take a look at /etc/defaults/make.conf, copy it to /etc/make.conf and make whatever changes you need. Then install the sysutils/portupgrade package. Add a couple lines like so to your new make.conf:

SUP_UPDATE="yes"
PORTSSUPFILE="/somewhere/ports -supfile"

then copy /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile to your "somewhere" dir and change the server listed in that file to one of the cvs mirrors.

Now, to update, all you need to do is something like:
cd /usr/ports && make update && portupgrade -ak

That will update all packages from source using your compiler options. Your system will still be usable while that's going on.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[platipusrc]

I forgot something. If you don't already have a cvsup client installed, you should install it first by using 'pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui'

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Billly Gates]

I just downgraded my workstation with FreeBSD to SuSE Linux.

Its already driving me crazy but I have nice fonts, codecs for xine, and a whole bunch of other stuff taken care of out of the box.

Already I have discoverd 6 bugs and xine on SuSE 9.1 does strange stuff and core dumps ALOT. That does not happen under FreeBSD.

Of course I dont have the codecs on FreeBSD either. :-)

So its a tug of war.

No way in hell would I trust this release of SuSE on a server. Sadly older redhats and kernels were quite stable. Remember redhat 5.2 with kernel 2.0? In those days I would trust Linux as a server.

Lets hope the situation improves. Debian I trust for a server but thats about it.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Patrick Dung]

FreeBSD is unique and special.
These features attracts me:

- Native IPSEC support. The IPSEC support has been tightly integrated into the kernel and the base utilities.

- Random IP ID. Make the increment of ID field in IP packets to be randomize instead of 1.

- Shadow Process. Users except root view their own process.

All the above featues are included in the source/cvs without downloading any patch, a big plus.

There are also many other features or pros of FreeBSD. To name a few:
BSD's secure level, sealth firewall, stable TCP/IP stack and VM, random ephemeral port allocation (ported from OpenBSD) and ......

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[R.Caley]

...rather than it sitting there and compiling stuff.

You are allowed to go and do something else while it compiles this is not Windows!

The basic choice is between waiting for it to download, and getting a generic package which may or may not work with the libraries you have to hand etc (consider RedHat RPM hell) and waiting for it to compile and getting something which should use what you have or get what it needs.

I think that an automated system for installation/upgrading of software packages are a must for desktop installations

# portupgrade -r -R -F mozilla

Then close that window and get on with some work.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[R.Caley]

- Shadow Process. Users except root view their own process.

Redhat, at least, does this, I know because one of our client's machines got this behaviour when it was upgraded.

It is also evil beyond belief and whoever thought of it should be lynched, but that is a religious issue.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, if you are happy running Debian or whatever, why bother seeking other alternatives? If your time is as precious as you say, then why are you considering other alternatives? Honestly, if you can't think of a reason to use FreeBSD, then you probably don't need to run FreeBSD.

He asked a question, and you basically told him that the question was meaningless if he didn't already know the answer. Allow me to respond with a big WTF?!

You're seriously saying that it's better to stick with what you've got than to ask whether a better alternative might exist? If everyone used that logic we'd still be sitting round in caves.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Patrick Dung]

That's Redhat. It is a third party patch? (specific to RedHat)
I doubt if it is the default in other Linux distributions.

For FreeBSD, Shadow Process comes with the OS. No patch is needed because FreeBSD is highly integrated.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

To use a specific ftp for getting your packages,
set the PACKAGESITE environment variable (it's explained in the pkg_add manpage).

I usually have PACKAGESITE setup like this:

setenv PACKAGESITE ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/packa ges-4-stable/All/

Notice that it's a complete path to a directory with all the packages in it, and you NEED the trailing slash.

Now you can do a:

pkg_add -r kde-3.2.2

and everything will work. (you must install XFree86 too, since the kde metapackage will only install the X11 libraries, (just do a pkg_add -r XFree86-4.3.0,1) and then configure XFree86 by running XFree86 -configure .. etc .. it's in the handbook)

Anyway, if you're wondering what the hell the package names are for using with the pkg_add -r command, just ftp to the site and directory that's in the PACKAGESITE variable and do an ls.

You should see a list of a whole bunch of .tgz files. For pkg_add -r to install a package, you just specify it the name of the file without the .tgz ... it's that easy.

The fact that FreeBSD has such a HUGE selection of precompiled packages available for easy install gives the user great power. You can go from Minimal FreeBSD to Desktop Workstation FreeBSD in 30 minutes !!!

Enjoy the freebsd package system :P (i know i am ;)

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[evilviper]

I've installed it twice, but after realizing that I didn't have a good reason to keep using it, as its maintenance was too time-consuming, I ended up removing it.

What is it about FreeBSD maintenance that is time-consuming exactly? Installing ports/packages isn't maintenance, so I'm stuck.

I really have no idea what you could have found difficult, as I've found all BSD OSes to be far simpler than any of the dozens of Linux distros, including some that don't even resemble distros per-se (eg. gentoo).

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[mabu]

I'm aware that Debian has two BSDs ports (NetBSD and FreeBSD), but they are far from maturity right now.

I'm not sure how you qualify a mature release. I have servers running FreeBSD getting millions of hits a day with uptime measured in YEARS. Yahoo has been running FreeBSD for years, as have many other promiment networks. I have 2.x and 5.x branches running and they both fly like the wind and are ultra stable.

However, it doesn't bother me when people question FreeBSD. It's kind of like visiting Seattle from California and asking a local about their city: "Oh, it's ok here, but you'd hate the rain - don't move up here... please, don't move here! You won't like it. Stay in L.A."

Along those lines, stick with Linux. This OS isn't for you. "These aren't the droids you're looking for." Leave us FreeBSD people alone and in peace and harmony. We like our sucky little OS and don't need for it to become the industry standard. It sucks anyway.. remember: "FreeBSD is DEAD."

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, cool down boy. The guy was talking about the Debian ports of BSD , which are immature. Their project page says this right on top, but I'll leave that as an exercise for you to find them, so maybe this cools you down and teach you to read better the line yourself had quoted, and stop scaring away new users.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[mabu]

FreeBSD is dead. It's all dead. These aren't the droids you're looking for.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[Just Some Guy]

Every port is built into a package

No. Most ports are available as packages, but there are quite a few distribution-restricted programs in there. If you want Java2, for example, be prepared to build it yourself.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD stable did have USB support before Linux stable did

Linux has a stable branch now?

(Sorry, couldn't resist. Feel free to mod troll.)

hostAP

[rawg]

Does anyone know if hostap is fixed? I don't see anything about it in the change log. The 4.9 is driving me nuts with it's constant hostap crashing. It's simple to bring the interface down then back up, but it's like twice a day. (See "Power Save Mode" Bug).

Re:Long awaited uh?

[molnarcs]

Nice explanation, I just wanted to add something: it is so very convenient that the OS and ports are clearly separated. My roommate didn't update his gentoo box for two months, and after a massive update a week or two ago, now nothing compiles (I think it was glibc...). Anyway, that can happen in FreeBSD too (well, not glibc exactly, but something can go wrong, like in any OS - so this is not a linux vs freebsd thing). But thanks to a separate src tree, there is a one command solution for every serious problem!

I ruined my system by deleting stuff from /usr/lib - and nothing would compile. I could reinstall stuff from the CD but that would be a forced downgrade and its just too unconvenient. But thanks to the fact that the entire OS (the 'world' - which is different from gentoo's world: world is the OS in freebsd land, and ports are programs installed on top of the os) build is self contained in /usr/obj, even though I didn't even have a working gcc, I could repair the system with one command: make installworld and a reboot. Oh yes, its a good idea to keep /usr/obj - because you have an OS reinstall one command away, and you don't have to fumble with config files, reinstalling ports, etc...

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

however you write it

Well we're writing it as a version number where 4.10 is larger than 4.9, and we don't give a flying fuck wether or not you think that's correct.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll upgrade my old trusty k6-2 300. FreeBSD 4.x runs just fine on that one.

Only trouble I've ever had with FreeBSD was when I tried to put it on my main desktop. 4.9 flatly refused to mount the disc and 5.2.1 had trouble with acpi and a lot of broken ports. I even had trouble with vim, wich someone suggested was because I wanted to use ctags. However, when I was told that I had already turned back to Crux, wich I must say is the most BSD-like dist I have encountered.

But as said; Old Trusty is getting an upgrade.

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[Anonymous Coward]

Following the Apple lead, shouldn't that be "FreeBSD 4.X ?"

BSD 4.1?

[twenex]

Personally I can't wait until the 4.1 NET release to get TCP/IP networking, although I understand that BSD 4.2 will be the real killer release.

Re:BSD 4.1?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

I wonder when the first person who doesn't know BSD history to mark this as a troll. I still remember all the dorks modding down IBM PS/2 jokes when the Sony PS2 came out.

Re:BSD 4.1?

[Brandybuck]

BSD is going to die a long slow death if it doesn't stop requiring users to buy an AT&T license!

</humour>

Re:BSD 4.1?

[Billly Gates]

You know BSD 4.2 will also include this cool new technology called "virtually memory". Bill Joy even wanted to call it VMBSD. lol

Wow its going to kick butt. With something called a swapfile where you can use your hard drive when the ram is full. Yes its many times slower but at least you wont get panics when it gets full. Wow.

With this and my brand new VCR tape of Tron and Star TrekII we can finally live like high tech geeks.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Earth to BSD Advocate ... ftp.cdrom.com might have been a big site back in 1996, but nobody's gone there this decade. If you want to impress people you might want to think up an example that non-senior-citizens have heard of. (eg. Yahoo, and ... um ... uh ....)

Also, CDROM.com owners also owned FreeBSD for a while (before going bankrupt). So this is sort like saying Windows is great because it's used at Microsoft.com.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[molnarcs]

funny ... bsd terminology is so pervasive. I have hard time speaking in terms of extended and logical partitions, for slices make more sense now. I also found myself referring to linux 2.4.x as their stable branch (without any intention to suggest that 2.6.x is not stable). OTOH it wasn't very easy at first to see how all those branches and releases work - now it is linux that confuses me (Is there a 2.7.x 'branch' yet? - I can't wait for their console driver to be fixed :P).

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[mjm1231]

If the only rating a post recieves is "Overrated", is that meant recursively? I wasn't trying to say that using 4.10 to mean 4.ten is wrong or stupid. Just pointing out that to most peoples experience of numbers, 4.1 and 4.10 are the same, and also asking an honest question about how you tell the difference between 4.11 (4.one one) and 4.11 (4.ten one) under such a system.

Re:just you

[MrRuslan]

Ohh pretty graphics...that dosent make an OS "REAL" Besides OSX is BSD with a VERY nice UI.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[merdark]

Except that the grandparents arguments were not valid.

There are a lot of FreeBSD users out there, if you want to estimate try looking at the traffice www.freebsd.org gets, or the number of mirrors.

The rest of the grandparent's post is equally as crufty. Hardware support on FreeBSD is quite good, many times things have worked in FreeBSD that haven't worked in Linux (yes, Linux may have support, but I don't have 3 years to figure out how to make that support actually *work*). Performance wise FreeBSD has long been better than Linux, and this only changed with the release of 2.6. Even so, FreeBSD 5.3 is competitive with Linux 2.6.

I could go on, but it's a waste of my time.

Four dot one oh or four dot... oh, ten!

[Punk Walrus]

Did anyone else first get confused by this? I thought "WTF, 4.1.0? Wasn't 4.9 the last... OH! 4.*ten*... that makes sense..."

/needs coffee

Re:Four dot one oh or four dot... oh, ten!

[Anonymous Coward]

problem is, with proper decimals, it would be 4."one zero", not "ten"

and that isn't correct, since trailing decimals are dropped. you do end up with 4.1.

but all that is for mathematics, not a version count. it just sounds weird.

Re:Why bother with this junk when Mac OS X is here

[pvera]

I am a Mac OS X user too, but my servers run on freeBSD.

Why? Because freeBSD runs on very inexpensive hardware. I don't have the budget to get Xserves here, and all the Powermac G4s are tied up as workstations. Yet I have a nice PIII rackmount that was doing nothing and now is happily running our mail services with absolutely zero hassles.

My personal server is a freeBSD jail, something I cannot get for OS X at the price that I got it.

For the record, one of the things that sold me into switching from XP Pro to OS X was that freeBSD legacy, since I had been using freeBSD for years before I even saw OS X working. freeBSD is anything but primitive.

FreeBSD jails

[bigberk]

IMHO, BSD's jail() is one of the more interesting developments in recent versions -- at least for an internet service provider.

For those of you unfamiliar, check it out. It's very much like User Mode Linux and allows running virtual servers within a larger server. Many colocation/virtual server providers (e.g. take, your, pick) use FreeBSD jails to provide low-cost root-access hosts for customers. This really has revolutionized cost effectiveness of large scale hosting!

There have been various limitations with FreeBSD jails when they first appeared. There were glitches with information leaking across jails. There's a limit to a single IP address, inability to do raw socket operations or even ping/traceroute, and some glitches with a couple system calls used by major applications like Postfix.

But my understanding is that 5.x seriously improves jail support, especially from a resource efficiency perspective. One of my BSD developer buddies also tells me that he's fixing raw socket support. Keep an eye on the jail feature...

bzip2 vs gzip

[theapodan]

What I like about the 4.x releases is pretty minor, but the package management on the install cd's is still gzip, whereas in the 5.x release its bzip2. Some of us choose to run FreeBSD on older computers with little ram, like 32M, and gzip decompresses almost infinately faster than bzip2. Long live the 4.x tree.

5.2.1 was a big dissapointment for me.

[Anonymous Coward]

Darned thing locks up the computer all the time...... much more than Win98.

I really wanted the 5.2 series because of the superior hardware support... guess I'm going to have to wait a while.

(BTW, it's not a hardware problem because the system is stable with Linux)

Re:5.2.1 was a big dissapointment for me.

[bsd_usr]

Is that 75 uers including Yahoo!, UUnet, Microsoft, Juniper and others or not? I guess it doesn't matter how many boxes they have, they each only count at a single entity right? So I guess that's 3 of the 75 users. Oh yeah, then there's me. So that makes 4 of the 75 users. Oh wait, I guess I should include the original poster. So that would make 5 users. I wonder who are the other 70 users.

Don't you want...

[n0dez]

...a PowerBook?

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Brandybuck]

Same thing with SATA. It's one reason my home desktop never got Linux on it, because at the time I built it (only a year ago), no shipping Linux distro would install on it due to the SATA drives.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Brandybuck]

Slices are also used by nearly every other Unix and Unix-like operating system out there.

Re:just you

[MrRuslan]

Look I like GUI stuff but I also like the terminal emulator.Get with the time? I use gnome 2.6 on my home box and it's my favorite GUI piriod.How are you going to tell me whats better for me? I don't like flashy GUI's, some people do but i don't. I got my Mozilla, my OO.org , a bunch of apps that im very comfortable with and most importantly my CLI.And im not even some old UNIX person.I got my first computer in 1999 with windows 98 and i had no expereance before that. I was very repulesed by windows and ordered Redhat 6.2 from cheapbytes, Best thing I ever did, I still remember using gnome 1.1 something and enrightenment as the windows maneger.I will never forget how good that stuff was and how much better it was :).some people like flashy stuff but I don't and im not a minimalist and gnome is far from minimalistic.I also don't like most common propertery software cuz it usually thinks it is smarter than the user and that pises me off.I don't think of myself as a zelot because thise stuff jst works for me and even if someone gave me a box with OSX for free I would not be comfortable working with it.

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[DashEvil]

So what is Linux 2.4.20 to you?

Re:just you

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey don't fret. That's cool. Not everyone is cut out to be an OS X user. The day will come when you hit the wall of what FreeBSD can do, and the OS X community will be here to welcome you with open arms.

Pizza?

[sp0rk173]

I don't know why...but this post made me want pizza.

Not really like UML

[don.g]

FreeBSD jails can be used for virtual hosting; UML can be used for it too. But for various types of kernel debugging, experimentation with network setups and the like, the ability to run a kernel as a user process is really useful. It's just a pity that (last I checked) the UML ports to operating systems other than Linux hadn't got very far :-(

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Atmchicago]

"Technical arguments aside, Beastie is so much cooler than Tux. And if you don't like that, I'll have him stab you with the trident."

You do realize that the Linux penguin just ate a fish, right? And fish come from the sea.

And who was the first guy to use tridents? It was Neptune, the god of the sea. (or Poseidon for your greek people). So Tux just ate a fish and kicked Beastie in the ass because fish are part of Beatie's world.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Billly Gates]

I can back that up!

I am having trouble getting my pny flashdrive to work on Linux. Oddly it works fine under FreeBSD 5.2.1

four-dot-ten naming schemes

[scosol]

Does this irk anyone else as much as it does me?

I know that there's a lot of projects now doing it- but damn.
Maybe I'm just old school, but reading 4.10 as different from 4.1, and also as *greater* than 4.7 just fucks with my logical mind.

It also breaks automated comparison tools- it's kinda non-trivial to make a program that understands that 4.100 is greater than 4.1, and that 4.100 is greater than 4.70, but that 4.100 is less than 4.7000
Why bother with this nonsense when it flys in the face of the earliest of floating-point mathematics?

What are the positive arguments towards this scheme?
Are there any?
Please enlighten me... I'll take 4.95 anyday...

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[MavEtJu]

Maybe I'm just old school, but reading 4.10 as different from 4.1, and also as *greater* than 4.7 just fucks with my logical mind.

Why bother with this nonsense when it flys in the face of the earliest of floating-point mathematics?

The dot in the version number has nothing to do with the mathematical dot, just like the dot at the end of this line doesn't.

Also, following your reasoning you will have great difficulties with the concept for minor revision numbers like 2.2.7 and 5.2.1...

For what it is worth, if you're doing version comparisons and are treating the numbers as mathematical values, your algorithm is broken by design. The right way is to split the version number by the dots (so you get a 4 and a 10) and compare them with the other splitted versions.

Edwin

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[JamesKPolk]

You don't get it. Plenty of sensible developers DO use real numbers for software versions. Not everyone uses the Apple(?) double-dot numbering.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[TiggsPanther]

Does this irk anyone else as much as it does me?

I wouldn't advise looking at the latest Linux Kernel releases, then. Both the 2.2 and 2.4 branches are at 2.x.26 at the moment.
Not only using two-digit numbers after the dot, but actually having 2 dots.

I guess it just requires adjusting to the fact that software-versioning although looking like a decimal number, often isn't a decimal number and therefore can't really be parsed as same.

Tiggs

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[scosol]

Right- I guess it just looks really weird and non-intuitive when it's not in x.x.x format-
(the algorithmic parsing of version numbers is admittedly not something I actually do, but I'm sure there are *some* who do this)

I'd have to go dig up my old OLD FreeBSD CDs, but I would swear that way back, they had releases such as 2.0.5 and 2.2.2 etc.

Since there's no consistency in the "software world" as a whole, perhaps 4.9.0 and 4.10.0 would be more appropriate release names.
(just on a visual basis)

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[0racle]

Sort of got over that with Novell 4.11. Becides its not like your going to take FreeBSD 4.9 and 4.10, add them together to get FreeBSD 9. Its a numbering scheme to show progression, its very easy to see 10 is the release after 9.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny ... cuz i'm using Apple's OS X version 10.2.8 right now.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[JamesKPolk]

Yes, I know Apple uses it. What I'm unsure of is whether Apple invented it.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[evilviper]

What are the positive arguments towards this scheme?

Well, that's simple. They need to put something after 4.9, and 5.0 is not an option. What alternative do you have as a suggestion? 4.91 would get pretty ugly, moreso when there gets to be 10+ revisions after 4.9 (eg. 4.993).

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[innosent]

Don't forget, the latest 5.x release was 5.2.1, which followed 5.2[.0], so the lower values do exist, they just aren't used often.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[the real darkskye]

Yep, this has been mentioned before, either here or at bsd forums
The FreeBSD team dropped the tripple dot format when they branched to 3.0 (and switched from AOUT to ELF binaries).
They still use them from time to time but only for, in my experience, quick bug splatterage. 5.2.1 was released because alot of people found 5.2 increadibly unstable, and the fixes didn't really warrent the label 5.3, the same I beleive is true of 3.5.1.

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[utlemming]

Also M$...the machine I'm using is Windows 2000 is version 5.00.2195. Also the version of Corel Word Perfect on this machine is 9.0.883. (It's an Academic Machine, not my Home Machines)

Re:four-dot-ten naming schemes

[funwithBSD]

Ah, so is 192.168.1.1 greater than 192.168.1.100?
Definetely not so if your netmask is 255.255.255.192

Think of it like that, IP numbers.

Oh, that brings up the trend of things like 1.888.555.1212 for phone number notations.

See? the geeks will inherit the world.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[feargal]

From the other perspective, somebody mentioned the addition of the BSDs to distrowatch. There was a lengthy discussion on the site as they tried to figure out the correct terminology for refering to a BSD distribution^Wrelease^Wproject^Wcycle^Wbranch. Can't find it on the site now, but I think some of them were getting quite confused about the whole -RELEASE/-CURRENT thing.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not on IBM-compatible PCs.

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Brandybuck]

You mean like on Solaris for x86? Go check again...

Re:just you

[MrRuslan]

I don't think so

Which one?

[RKBA]

I was going to replace RH9 with FreeBSD, but now I'm not sure whether to install 4.10 or 5.2.1 over the Linux partition. I seem to recall seeing a discussion about the 4.9 fork, but don't recall the details. Wasn't it about post v4.9 FreeBSD including some proprietary software or something?

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

A few projects do use decimal numbers: Perl used to, so the version before Perl 5.6.0 was something like Perl 5.00503, which would be Perl 5.5.3 in the new system.
As an aside, the reason for the weird perl version is the older perls cound't handle a version x.y.z, so they used the x.yyyzz scheme. I'm not so sure if I'm either relieved that he had the forthought for 3 digits in a minor version number, or weirded out that he might make it to version x.100.zz without fixing this. =)

How about a BSD- Linux Crosswalk in Ports?

[HighOrbit]

I wonder if it would be worthwhile to make a "port" which would just run a script to create a bunch of soft links and manpage additons of linuxisms linked to the BSD commands. That might help people transition (although some of the options might be profoundly different).

Re:just you

[Too Much Noise]

Why, I'd loooove it if someone give me a free Mac with OSX. Nothing like the warm fuzzy feeling of ... huh? what's that, a security patch ... hmm ... what? incomplete? wtf? I thought macs didn't run Windows. (joking aside, a PowerBook can sure be nice and convenient, especially in the winter ... oh, nevermind, OSX is cool for what fits its purpose; it's just that not everything does)

Anyway, Mr. Ruslan, I see you already met an OSX troll. They're a fairly persistent bunch - in an (Apple-style) twisted way, some of them are the new generation of the "*BSD is dying" trolls (I thought they were a dying breed, but apparently not). Funny that there aren't any *BSD trolls ... I wonder why :-)

i'm searching possible traps or jokes.

[Anonymous Coward]

vm_map.c

static int old_msync;
SYSCTL_INT(_vm, OID_AUTO, old_msync, CTLFLAG_RW, &old_msync, 0,
"Use old (insecure) msync behavior");

kern_proc.c

if (!PRISON_CHECK(curproc, p))
return (0);
if (!ps_argsopen && p_trespass(curproc, p))
return (0);

sysv_sem.c (what is good morning for a Operating System?)

printf("semop: good morning!\n");

open4free ©

Biased!

[Laebshade]

heh... it's probably biased since Netcraft is running FreeBSD too.

Best let them all believe BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

So much the better for herding the malcontents and trolls over to Linux. Once there, they can proclaim BSD is dying all they like at least until Longhorn comes out... then they can go back to annoying Windows users.

Re:Why bother with this junk when Mac OS X is here

[Anonymous Coward]

A better question would be Why buy hundreds or thousands of dollars worth of hardware from Apple just to run OS X when you could get FreeBSD and run it on it low cost machine, have real Unix OS, have more control over the OS then you get with OS X (albeit minus some pretty buttons and a dock thought that too can be remedied), not be subject to someone's EULA, etc.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Switched to FreeBSD

[bigberk]

I've been a fan of Linux, and have been using it on my desktop and home server but for my business server I have switched to FreeBSD. I just got too nervous looking at all the times I had to upgrade my Linux kernel because of a root vulnerability. From my own uptime.log on my Linux system

2003-05-24 glibc security update
up 25 days
2003-06-18 new kernel (root exploits)
up 25 days
2003-07-14 power outage
up 13 days
2003-07-28 power outage
up 151 days
2003-12-27 added RAM
2003-12-28 new kernel (local root exploit)
2003-12-29 added disk volume
2004-01-10 new kernel (local root exploit)
up 40 days
2004-02-20 new kernel (local root exploit)
up 94 days
2004-05-24 new kernel (local root exploit)

FreeBSD Book?

[gchan]

Does anyone know of any good FreeBSD books for n00bs?

Re:FreeBSD Book?

[Anonymous Coward]

Amazon sells a good BSD intro book.