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FreeBSD, Stealthy Open Source Project
zam4ever writes "Sean Michael Kerner has written an article on how FreeBSD has become a Stealth-Growth Open Source Project with various reasons outlined for FreeBSD's growth over the last years."
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Quandt also contends that FreeBSD is not currently on the same level as Linux when it comes to supporting heavy enterprise workloads...
:)
I was almost certain this paragraph was going to end praising FreeBSD over Linux, and I was slightly suprised to see this was not the case. FreeBSD's ability to cope with extremely high workloads is often cited as one of the reasons to use it over Linux in such environments.
However, I don't remember ever seeing any evidence of this, except that FreeBSD has proven itself time and time again on some of the largest, busiest internet sites. It'd be interesting to see how the two compared side-by-side in a real production environment. Perhaps someone can convince Yahoo to switch to Linux for a day
</ BSD advocacy >
I know for damn sure I'm one of those who's gonna seriously love having a 5-STABLE branch. :)
Damn tho, they need to stop talking to Linux people for these articles. I'm sick of hearing the GPL partyline.
FreeBSD is used on over 95 of the top 100 servers (greatest average uptime). FreeBSD is tested and true on the server-side in a way few linux distrobutions can claim. The closest any distro has come to actually matching reliability with FreeBSD is Debian. But even then, FreeBSD is still light-years ahead. I'm not really sure what inspired this article, but a simple google search reveals that BSD is the route most major corporations are taking with servers. So while I do appreciate GNU/GPL support, try to be less blatant. ;)
Woah, 3 devils on the main page (for me at least), all posted within a few minutes. Is BSD dying faster today or are they simply on Speed?
Bitten Apples are still better than dirty Windows...
Uh oh. I read the sentence "Linux actually inherits a lot of BSD code" and immdiately thought of Ken Brown. Ken, if you're reading this (or having it translated into a version using only monosyllabic words) be advised that the preceding quote refers to GNU/Linux, not the Linux kernel that Linux wrote in a year.
Actually, I was trying to be Insightful, not Funny.
Though he acknowledged that a FreeBSD license can be simple to deal with, he thinks the GPL (define) license, under which the Linux kernel is licensed, fosters a better sense of community.
Right.
It is now official. FreeBSD is Undead.
It has long been argued that FreeBSD is dead, but now new evidence is coming to light that it has been resurrected, and like a zombie process is lurching across the Unix landscape once again.
Recent growth in FreeBSD's market share, as reported by Slashdot, is evidence that a Faustian pact with the daemons has been made. Stay tuned for more on this recent development...
Eh, let the Linux fanboys talk all they want, as long as my mailserver keeps chugging away. ;)
over one million new domains were hosted on FreeBSD over the last year
Since OS X (Darwin) is based on FreeBSD, does this mean that the Netcraft figures counted OS X Server hosts as FreeBSD?
But why hasn't FreeBSD become as widespread as Linux? The answers may lie in its history.
That's roughly like asking: why do people eat less chocolate than they eat potatoes?
The answer is not history, it's that they are different kinds of "products" with different strengths and weaknesses.
I admin a web server at my university. I have to say *knock on wood* that it has stayed up and not been cracked into (yet). Unlike the previous web server running slowlaris 8, which has been broken into several times. We also have a linux server for the computer science majors, that also has been broken into. freebsd seems to be pretty solid in my experience. anyone have diffrent or same experinces as this?
The thing that sells me for FreeBSD in corporate environments is that FreeBSD is an operating system. The same group of people do the kernel *and* the OS. I've put a lot of FreeBSD boxes in production corporate environments, and I've never been bitten by the choice of OS, so I've become a pretty loyal punter. On the other hand, I just can't bring myself to put any OS that uses the linux *kernel* (there isn't an OS called 'linux' as best as I can tell) on a production enviroment - I've always had the impression that the Linuxes are all terribly fragmented, incoherent, and you never know what you're getting.
(by about now, all the script kids with mod points have cluelessly clicked the 'flamebait' button already... should I bother going on?!!! :-) )
In other news, I've become a really big fan of Gentoo Linux... it's just brilliant. I'm using it all kinds of non-production environments, and loving every minute of it. Bottom line though, it's too hard to sell something that is just a kernel as stable, reliable, and suitable for business.
I find your ideas intriguing and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.
I think we have seen some corruption problems over the net. Somehow SOLARIS was switched out with the word 'FreeBSD'. So the real statement is 'SOLARIS is dead'.
Sun seems to have realized this, so they say that SOLARIS will be open sourced. Why not? Then we'll see where they (Sun) took the code.. or, oh wait..
FreeBSD is a "stealthy" open source project in the same way the Brooklyn Bridge is a "stealthy" public works project:
It's been there forever, doing its job, fully appreciated only by an informed minority.
PS: Neither are for sale. :-)
org.slashdot.post.SignatureNotFoundException: ewg
I have several corporate systems consisting of Sun E10k hosts, Linux, and FreeBSD systems. In my experience, FreeBSD performs very well under heavy load, on par with Solaris and slightly better than Linux. Not that I'm downing Linux; Each OS has strengths and weaknesses, but the author seemed to indicate that FreeBSD was not suitable for corporate use and I believe that it is.
According to Open Source Development Labs (OSDL), which bills itself as a "center of gravity" for Linux development, Free BSD is on a separate path compared to Linux. Then why aren't they called the Linux Development Labs?
Let me say that I'm a happy Linux user, with 3 systems, each working fairly well (only one is in constant use; the others I use for fun). In my experience Linux is a very robust system (I've tried Gentoo and Red Hat, with Gentoo being my favorite), but I also tried OpenBSD. It gave me the feeling that if I got to know it better, then it would be great. But I wasn't into running a big server, so I left it alone. At some point, I would like to try FreeBSD, because it has a great reputation. I don't have the hardware right now, but I heard about a FreeBSD LiveCD that I would like to know more about. Why do open-source projects bicker among each other so much? Think "Life of Brian": Brian: "People, people, we should be fighting the common enemy." Fighters: "The Judean People's Front!" Brian: "No! The Romans!" Until Windows is brought down to an equal level, there is no reason to compete among Open OSs. After all, the *NIX (or *BSD) motto is: do one thing, do it well.
As far as stability and consistancey goes, only Debian-Stable approaches BSD, because Debian enforces a strict development and testing process (as opposed to adding in just any random unstable bleeding edge package because it is "new").
Where Linux does badly is in "out of memory" situations. I doubt a load average of 7 will, by itself, kill any system, but I've seen Linux boxes become unusable because of memory leaks -- hard reboot required, or equally bad, eventually some random processes get killed that bring the machine back up but all those processes have to be restarted by hand. Ditto if all those processes contributing to the load average of 7 required a huge chunk of memory. FreeBSD shines in this situation. If you configure enough swap space, it will usually get through somehow, if not, it will kill the offending process but not butcher the system.
FreeBSD isn't transitively "stealthy" (the onus is on the mainstream media), it just isn't widely regarded as having the potential to challenge Microsoft on the desktop, and there has never been a FreeBSD IPO announcement. From the mass media's perspective, what layperson wants to read about FreeBSD's growth in the server market (or overall greatness) unless they can take advantage of it?
I've always found the lack of Java very annoying too. To be fair, I think it's more like Sun/Java lacking support for FreeBSD rather than the other way around? Anyway, it is possible to get past this, though it involves downloading the source from Sun, enabling Linux compatability, getting a Linux JDK installed then compiling your own FreeBSD JDK... no fun, but can be done and I found it worth the hassle.
it uses a much more monolithic kernel than Linux, making it lose some flexibility
Wrong. FreeBSD uses KLD modules just as extensively as Linux.
You wouldn't really want to use FreeBSD for an embedded system
I'm using FreeBSD on Soekris net4801 boxes as router/postfix/imap/http/... low-power ADSL appliance.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
A few hundred words of copy from a Linux advocate with a few choice quotes from a BSD advocate for balance. Other than the once-a-month "there is more than linux in open-source operating systems" there is not really that much in this article that is NEWS or worth reading.
I don't believe (although I could well be wrong. Please correct me if I am) that it uses the new KSE in the 5.x branch, so it's still slower than on other platforms for multithreaded things.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
How small does the FreeBSD kernel get? Last time I tried it with Linux (2.4.19; 2.6 is supposed to get smaller), I got a kernel with some essential drivers and network support compiled in at about 600KB (on disk), just small enough to make myself a usablo boot diskette.
:-(
Can you match or beat that with FreeBSD? My hard drive is dead, so I can't really test this right now.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Did anyone else pick up from the article that BSD was gaining vs Linux because it did not have the GPL legal baggage?
Exactly. I really don't care if no one else is using FreeBSD. I have yet to find a better server and workstation environment (although OS X beats it on the desktop). It's stable and fast (especially the 5.x series). It also handles sound in a sensible way. When I was running it on a workstation I was able to listen to sound from a GNOME music player, beeps from a KDE Jabber client and occasionally play BZFlag (which uses /dev/dsp directly) at the same time (for those who have not used FreeBSD, it creates a numbe of virtual dsp devices and mixes the result in the kernel, even if the sound card does not support hardware mixing).
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Ultimately, it comes down to a matter of preference and a lot of the "my operating system is better than your operating system" just resolves to a pissing match. I cut my teeth on solaris and irix back before I tried Linux and I found Linux (granted with an early version of Red Hat) to be a bit scattered in comparison. I've not found the same problems to be true of FreeBSD.
It's not about how small the kernel image gets, but how much RAM it typically uses. The net4801 is a rather powerful box with 128 MB RAM. You can easily fit a FreeBSD base system on a 512 MB CF card and operate without the need for swap. A stripped down kernel would take approx. 2.5 MB diskspace, but you can tune it down to nearly 800k if you really must. BTW, you can put a small Linux system on that box just the same. It just happens hat I used 5.2.1 because it supports PXE booting and network install out of the box.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
``How about a under 500 word license VS over 2,500 word license?''
May I recommend my own tutorial operating system? It has a kernel providing basic console services, and it's in the public domain. License: 0 words. Obviously, it smokes the BSDs, GNU/Linux, Windows, and all the rest!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
The current release of the JDK and JRE available via the FreeBSD Foundation is 1.3.1
1.3.1 is ~not~ current.
It probably is just Sun not supporting the platform but it still impacts usability.
Agile Artisans
I was a big RedHat/Linux user until about 5 or so years ago. I got sick of:
* The constantly changing startup environment and filesystem layout. I started typing "evolving", but that implies it was small changes for the better, not wholesale changes which weren't always for the worse.
* Kernel upgrades became a big nuisance, requiring me to track down a whole bunch of userland applications that needed updating for the kernel. to be usable (psutils, for one). Why the kernel and key kernel applications aren't packaged together is beyond me.
* The installer became more and more piggish, adding X11 elements even when I specifically told it not to. The portions were hard to remove, since they almost always were snared in RPM dependencies.
* RPM itself wasn't bad, but what DID drive me nuts about binary packages was the total absence of build documentation. So many UNIX applications have significant build-time options which are never documented in RPM. SRPM helped, but it was still an annoyance.
FreeBSD just seems how it *should* be. The filesystem and startup environment isn't static, but doesn't make wholesale changes. The entire system is rebuildable from source, applications are transparently and easily buildable from source thanks to ports.
FreeBSD's installer could be improved, though. sysinstall needs to be reinvented and perhaps have picobsd merged into it. I'd love to be able to install a variable-sized FreeBSD for firewall or appliance-type installs.
The article ignores the biggest obstacle that *BSD faced in its early days, which gave Linux a big head start: the AT&T lawsuit.
The FUD was flying and unlike today's situation with the SCO attacks, the open source model was not well known, and the idea of a free *BSD was not as established as Linux is today. The suit was eventually taken care of (AT&T had violated UCB's license terms, heh, heh) but the damage to *BSD's momentum was done, and Linux had taken a mindshare lead.
Recently I've actually been trying to determine which would be better for new low cost servers, FreeBSD or a hardened Gentoo style Linux system. I like BOTH OS's (imagine that), and just want to use what works best for the application. Unfortunately, the net is flooded with fanatical cult-like debates and arguments that seem to only prove ignorance on both sides. Does anyone have any compelling reasons to use FreeBSD over modern Linux? Sure, FreeBSD has proven itself as being the best in the past and certainly isn't a poor choice, but I want to know what's best NOW. The above mentioned benchmarks favour Linux.. are there others to confirm this?
With 128 megs of RAM you really don't have anything to worry about. I have made Linux 2.4.19 kernels for systems with under 4 MB of core. That is about as low as I managed to go, and I doubt 2.4 could go much lower (preserving hard drive access - it was for installation). I don't think FreeBSD can, either. The practical benefit is probably gone these days, but I just have an obsession with small and modular code.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
``After all, the *NIX (or *BSD) motto is: do one thing, do it well.''
I think the arguing goes really well.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Any size comparison here isn't going to be fair. Linux kernels are bzipped, FreeBSD kernels are not.
Therefore the actual end size says nothing about the kernel itself, and everything about the method used to package it.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Maybe somebody can correct me if I'm wrong (and I know they will), but I don't think I've ever seen binary incompatibility brought on by a minor version increment in FreeBSD. With glibc, it seems that moving from say 2.2 to 2.3 is guaranteed to break your binaries unless you install the compatibility patch or re-compile.
by this argument, linux should have been completely aborted many a year ago, out of lack of mindshare, hardware supprt, etc. my (limited) bsd experience finds openBSD lagging behind (simply because they thouroughly test everything for security far more than either of the other two big ones) and netBSD a little bit behind because of the vast number of architectures they support. also, i find freeBSD's installer easier to use than debians, and less likely to hate me and stab me in the face. but then my favorite installers are OS X (convinience), netBSD (funny), and mandrake linux (easy and explanatory)
Don't worry - its just stigmata. Pass me a napkin and don't you dare tell my mother.
bsdweb5$ java -version
java version "1.4.2-p6"
Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build
1.4.2-p6-root_31_mar_2004_13_50)
Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-p6-root_31_mar_2004_13_50, mixed mode)
Installation required the byzantine procedure of typing portinstall java/jdk14. What Java support is FreeBSD supposedly missing?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Those are the current *binary packages*. In other words, this is what IS directly supported by Sun, allowing for an easy binary install. Whereas, if you want 1.4.2, you can get that, but you have to follow a few more steps, as mentioned by "APurplePolarBear" above. (and you have to wait through an interminable compile time -- fortunately, FreeBSD compiles like a champ, still handling its other processes, even for the most demanding portions of a compile)
Anyone know if the lockup is solved with 1.4.2?
Agile Artisans
Heh heh... so thats it... Darl is a Daemon Worshipper too!!!! We're takin' the crown back, boys!
Note that the benchmark was initially done using NetBSD 1.6.1, and that is what the graphs etc. represent. However, at the suggestion of some users, the author reran the benchmark using NetBSD-CURRENT, and found it to have improved massively, and beat FreeBSD.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think you could say the same of any non-Windows/Mac OS. Unless, that is, this really is the year of Linux On The Desktop. ;-)
Fewer drivers are available (especially those available as binary modules for Linux).
This is somewhat true, but the counterargument is that most FreeBSD drivers support every bit of functionality that a piece of hardware can offer. For example, if your NIC has a built-in PRNG, then FreeBSD will probably use it as a hardware accelerator for rand(). Linux is pretty good about this, too, but generally speaking when FreeBSD says that they support something, they mean all of it.
Many applications developed for the GNU system won't work on a vanilla FreeBSD system. While this is the applications' fault, it still is a disadvantage for FreeBSD.
If by "many applications" you mean "some commercial programs", then I'd have to agree. If you meant that as a general statement, then I'd have to vehemently disagree. I ran FreeBSD with a KDE desktop as my personal workstation for a long time, and don't remember any specific apps that I could use under Linux that weren't available in FreeBSD.
It also has fewer binary packages available than Debian GNU/Linux.
According to apt-cache, my Debian/unstable system has 16725 installable packages. There are 11236 Makefiles in my /usr/ports on the FreeBSD server next to me. Debian wins, but I wouldn't call it a landslide. :)
The ports system really is the killer app for me. I love (and depend on) the ability to compile the options I need into an application. I like Debian a lot, but it's a pain in the neck to maintain your own version of a package with non-Debian-standard build options.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Not a complete apples-to-apples comparison (as you mention bzip), but you can gzip a FreeBSD /kernel file. The boot loader will recognize /kernel.gz, uncompress it, and load it like any other.
I myself did this on a Soekris Net4501 when squeezing FreeBSD into a 32M flash card. Kernel size (on disk) went from 2.1 MB to 970 kB.
Fully licensed blockchain psychiatrist
what java support do you need? I've had java working on freebsd. installed it from the ports tree
dave
I don't know for sure, but I think this was a problem in FreeBSD 4.9, which was solved for 4.10 and for 5.2.x. Also, it might relate to which version of the Linux base you install. Stable FreeBSD tends to install version 6.x of linux-base, while I usually upgrade to 8.x, which is roughly compatible with RedHat 8.x.
;)). You might want to spend some time on http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-java/
Remember, though: you are not forced to use Linux emulation to run Java. You use linux emulation to install Java 1.4.2, but then you can compile a FreeBSD-native version (although I have never gone as far as that
Look at my original post moderation....50% off topic and 50% troll....what a bunch of humorless asses
WTF? Over?
This is slowly changing.
Native FreeBSD java
A lot of "Daemon worshipper since ever" and "Tried Linux, didn't like it" in here. Some "Like both". A few trolls have been modded down.
But when looking at it, *BSD users are throwing praise at each others in here. It's not like anyone is arguing in here, because mostly people with the same opinion responded to the article.
But no one is really talking about why Linux has more market/mind share. Or why the kernel developers for Linux have created a technologically similar kernel without having a head start (i.e. a full UNIX kernel). Or why - if any *nix - is taught, nearly always Linux is taught at universities. What made Linux the platform of choice for so many people in so "little" time?
These are not flames. These are questions I'd really like answers for. And maybe the *BSD communities should have them, to take advantage of that knowledge!
Nothing gained from 20 somewhat posts of the style "I like the ports tree", "Me, too!".
Start asking: "Why isn't *BSD dominating the *nix world now?" Don't answer: "It doesn't want to." Because that's not true. Hear yourselves talk. You want to! But you don't.
So why? Don't give me the USL/Novell case. In the time from 1991-1993 Linux had not become a comparable kernel, it became after.
Is it the license? The more chaotic collaboration? Linus' personality? The anti-Windows stance? The urge for people to develop something new (that lured more developers)? Why is (almost virtually etc.) nobody talking of a FreeBSD desktop?
As long as a lot of people talk about history, or past successes, or think along "I always have done it that way / have used it" nothing is won for *BSD in terms of "innovation" (it hurts to write it). *BSD needs some new answers to the Linux question, not some self-content same ol', same ol'.
If *BSD asked these questions, found the answers for them, and used them, it actually again become the most-used *nix system.
This is true: "I got an email suggesting that I re-check NetBSD. The results are nothing short of astonishing. In two weeks time the NetBSD team made dramatic improvements." This is impressive and we should congratulate the NetBSD team for optimizing so quickly. However, let's not forget they did so in *reaction* to specific benchmarks, rather than having generally fast code which was proven by a few specific benchmarks, as FreeBSD 5.1 and Linux 2.6 did. Unless proven otherwise, I'd be forced to assume that generally, the code scalability in NetBSD is less than in FreeBSD 5.1/Linux 2.6, with these specific benchmarks being exceptions. Undoubtably, all of the OSes/distros could have been tweaked to improve these benchmarks, but NetBSD is the only one that was, or we were made aware of. Again, congratulations to them for showing they could fix the problems these benchmarks exposed, but it's not nearly as impressive as having good code the first time around. We know they can code to fix a flaw, but can they write code that scales well on arbitary code? -Dan
Ever see those movies Airplane and Airplane 2? You know how there's those scenes where everyone forms a line to bitch-slap a hysterical passenger? Well that's what's going on here with all the "No" replies I'm getting. I already got a satisfactory boolean answer with the first posted reply- enough already! I was just wondering if OS X Server was getting market share but appeared as FreeBSD online, the way Safari identifies itself as Mozilla to web servers. I was just curious. I got responses from people who know their stuff. The matter is closed. Move along.
I love the BSDs, first played with them when Linux was a toy. When we were evaluating OSes for our Web Servers, we installed an OpenBSD machine and a Redhat machine and went to lunch. When I got back from lunch, before we could go to work, I was fielding calls that my new Redhat machines was launching attacks in Germany. We decided not to use Redhat at that point.
We recently started playing with FreeBSD 5 and RHEL 3 for comparisons... Quite frankly, I MUCH prefer the BSD ports to up2date, they are terrific. Both OSes are pretty good in the performance departments (OpenBSD while a rock, just couldn't perform).
Why did I switch to Redhat?
Redhat is simply moving in a direction that I like. Getting the machines to talk to our LDAP Server and Kerberos KDC (an OS X Server that does our central directory system) is a joke, as was straight LDAP before we started playing with Kerberos.
Adding software is a bit easier in BSD-land, because if I need to switch compile-time options, the ports are MUCH easier to work with than SRPMS. Granted that compiling source on Linux is easier, because most developers target Linux first, however, source tarballs are great for testing, not so great to roll out and keep track of across my networks.
Redhat support, while pretty mediocre at the low-end (RHEL 3.0 ES, $350/machine or so), I can put support requests in and get a response over time and get things escalated to engineering. With Apple Support, it's even worse, I can fill something out on Apple's bug report/feature request site, but I can't find out if they are doing anything on it.
It's a dilemma for a small company, you don't have the money to get the GOOD support from a top company, but dealing with a small company may get you personal service, but not the capabilities of the big boys.
FreeBSD is a GREAT system, and the ports/packages are a DREAM to work with.
The greatest thing about a BSD is how streamlined/stripped down the core is, then it is off to ports to configure.
The worst thing about a BSD is how streamlined/stripped down the core is, as making network configuration changes is just harder/more time-consuming, with multiple files to change.
FreeBSD, great OS, just not offering the easy-to-use Enterprise features that Redhat provides. Without the easy integration, it just isn't as easy for my little business to take advantage of everything that I can with Redhat.
If you really need tiny kernels, you'll have to abandon Linux and BSD altogether and switch to someting like the L4KA::Pistachio microkernel. Of course, you'll still need userland apps for almost anything, like memory servers, file system servers, device driver servers... That's an awful lot of stuff to cut out of BSD or Linux codebase.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
Breakfast served all day!
Microkernel, small, efficient. Wow, this looks like something I might fall in love with. Thanks!
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Also if you notice the The socket benchmark, FreeBSD was optimized for when a process allocates in excess of 3500 sockets. Also in Measuring HTTP request latency you can see that there is optimization for when there have been in excess of 4000 requests. These types of clever optimizations are what sets FreeBSD apart.
Also keep in mind that absolute magnitude is not what is really important in these test results. The idea is that if your software scales well, you just get enough hardware to handle what you expect as worst case. The nice thing is that FreeBSD has some optimizations that are directed for scaling even better under some particular high load cases.
I would not say from these tests that FreeBSD performed much worse than Linux. In fact mmap syscalls are not actually used much except for mapping in dynamic libraries on many server type loads.
That's OpenBSD. Damn, man, it's two articles down on the front page.
Marxist evolution is just N generations away!
????? You mean the installation procedure did NOT involve:
1)The portinstall failing
2)Cutting & pasting Sun's URL from the error message into a browser
3)Signing in to the Sun Download Center
4)Downloading the port
5)Restarting the portinstall
6)The portinstall failing
7)Cutting and pasting the EyesBeyond URL from the error message into a browser
8)Downloading the patchset
9)Restarting the portinstall
Adherence to the truth is a form of disloyalty.
If you asked me whether it was a good idea to use FreeBSD on a desktop, I'd say "no." Any Linux distribution would get the same answer as well. However, for the production environment I highly recommend either Free or Open BSDs. as somebody who works on Linux and BSD servers, I prefer BSD.
The weird thing about BSD is that it does not want to dominate the market. It does work well and for some reason there is no hype associate with it. Linux, on the other hand, is overhyped in my opinion. IBM and Novell have been running an avid ad compaign in order to push their Linux solutions, Linux has a somewhat odd *fellowship* among its users and it seems that there are several distros that receive a good amount of support. Still, I prefer FreeBSD.
From my point of view, it is really easy to manage BSDs. Ports collection makes it possible for me to tweak out installs for my system before they even happen. If I want to use binaries, I can do "pkg_add -r" as well. Generally, I find FreeBSD to be a more polished operating system. The installation process seems to be very straightforward and I simply love updating the source and the ports tree from CVS.
Kernel security levels is the other thing that I like about FreeBSD. Also, I do like that it comes with its own compiler and that I can do a lot of stuff w/o installing tons of GNU libraries. But then again, this is just my opinion. Yours might be different. It seems to me that BSDs are better prepared for production environments by default. What do you think?
If you follow that procedure on every server you maintain, then I wonder how you found time to write. :)
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The names match. The code never did. Alan Cox once
asked Berkeley to use the BSD code under the GPL
and was turned down. Thus, the BSD code could not
be used.
It's obvious if you look at the old code. BSD has
a VAX heratage, where pages were 512 bytes and
memory was costly. Thus BSD used the mbuf, with a
linked list of little memory blocks. Linux used the
skbuf, which involved a nice linear chunk of memory
for better performance on a PC.
Boy, and I thought the Mac crowd was rabid!
Agile Artisans
Hmmm...Seems that using Java on FreeBSD is a "at your own risk" proposition right now.
This is made very clear here:
http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/14.html
And here:
http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/jdk14.ht ml
If this is no longer the case, then these pages need to get updated so that people won't get scared away from using FreeBSD+Java combination.
I'm sure someone will post about "it works fine, they're being overly caution/conservative" but it sure would be nice if there were more quantatative replies about this (such as FreeBSD+Java passing certain test suites, etc.)
BTW, I like FreeBSD. It never crashed on me (3.x and 4.x) while Linux had several times. But I use Linux because of better Java support.
Agile Artisans
If you mean consistency of user interfaces and package versions, I guess you are right. In terms of crash-proofness, you may not.
I tried to install FreeBSD 5.2.1 a few weeks ago and the installer had a kernel panic. Now you may say that's not the stable branch, but I've heard bad things about 4.8, too, stability-wise (sure, it may work for many, depending on their hardware configuration etc). I do know some options you can enable in Linux 2.6.6 which will make your system unstable (e.g., unfortunately, XFS, if mounted), but I never had an installer crash.
I love C++
I think I can answer this to some extend, or at least narrow it down a bit.
;-), but it was not at all known in the hobbyist/hacker/entrepeneur side of society, while Linux was. Grass roots and all that.
USL/Novel ended after 1993 IIRC and then the thing needed to be repaired and re-gather steam.
There was mailnly the lite and the net tapes to work with at this point from what I understand.
The dot com boom came much later (your reasoning has a time gap).
There was a split, actually NetBSD got established (from net) just before FreeBSD (from lite). Around 1995 ish the dot com boom started its rally. But the big linux boost was more like 98/99 along with the peak of the dot com dreams.
Meantime ISPs were starting up, many of which mom and pops. The interesting question is why the (new) techies went mostly for Linux (slack, debian, redhat).
Meantime the web started to roll. The first and perhaps last profitable web business is... porn. But they mostly went with FreeBSD, as did yahoo. So if power horses were needed they used BSD. Or if they weren't upstarts and had cash it was Solaris or something. A lot of this was already there when small upstart ISPs got around.
It cannot be argued that BSD was still completely in shambles at that point in time. So I have to agree with OP, although it can't be denied that the USL/UBC suit did a lot of harm and wasted a lot of time. It can't be the sole reason if it was good enough for Yahoo to use in, say, '96.
I think the real difference is in BSDs academic nature, which in the early 90s probably meant that it was only known at colleges (and at Sun, IBM and all of course, even at SCO at that time
If you're still with me, here's some things to muse about: did the GNU tools/userland and philosophy inspire a new (or older but "left out") generation enough to be a main factor? After all, "linux" is generally associated with "freedom" (which must have 42 definitions) and the C-64 generation (home computers), while BSD is associated with "unix", and by association "mainframes", and "70s". Anything but home computers.
And of course Linux was the antidote to "unix" before it became the proclaimed antidode to Microsoft. All things at its time folks... No doubt BSD will be humping along also.
So, wrapping it all up somewhat, after thinking this through, would the main difference have been that Linux and GNU became the haven of "the outcasts" (very generally speaking) versus the establishment (including universities and professional -- read unix -- IT in general) at a time when just that was needed? Compare with a goldrush or anything alike at any time and place when the jackpot just gets hit if you like, it's the practical opportunists that hit the jackpot, not the academics. So I'd say that it's a mixture of time and place, of ability (good enough), of availability and exposure (the Internet arrived, remember), and of attitude/character/social factors/counterculture and everything of the audience. I suppose also the desire to use this new Internet (and what was before, the phone hacking folks for example must have gotton onto the Net around the same time) to use the possibility to get in contact with likeminded people and if you initially have small circles they tend to find eachother and mingle.
I realize that this is much more grey in reality and nowadays in some ways the opposite seems to be going on in terms of Linux vs BSD relatively speaking, as perceptions and the whole situation concerning Linux versus the Status Quo has changed dramatically. And of course BSD can make good use of most software developed on/for Linux, especially on the desktop, and so while the Linux desktop matures, so does the BSD desktop. And that's good. We all win.
FYI, I have personally (seriously) used Debian 1998 to late 2000 and then tried FreeBSD and stuck with it since.
And I won't go into licensing. I do think that the GPL (or rather it's loudspeakers) cleverly appeal to both socialist-
Look at my original post moderation....50% off topic and 50% troll....what a bunch of humorless asses You mispelled "Linux fanatics with mod points." ;)
Oops! :)
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
They most certainly are small-timers. By "major corporations", one typically means companies like BP, ExxonMobil, Microsoft, Dow, Boeing, McDonald's, GM, and so on.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
I agree that many people consider Linux from an anti-Windows stance. Most articles written about Linux in the "mainstream" press have one of two topics:
;)
"Will Linux replace Windows on the Desktop?"
"Will Linux make a dent in Bill Gates' earnings?"
But I think there is another thing about it:
The *BSD developer community - and I really don't know, whether rightly so or not - is often painted as being elitist. Maybe the open and friendly approach of Linus to kernel development was an inspiration for many people wanting to have their try at kernel development. (Like me - I'm currently porting a VME bus driver to PowerPC, and "porting" Linux to a single-board computer)
When most of your contributons are done for free by people committed to the idea of free/open software, a bad/eltitist reputation can be the worst thing to have.
Like with XFree86 - the project seems to be despised by nearly everyone who was denied the approval of the inner circle. You rarely read "good press" about XFree, depite all of its technological merits (I'd prefer a GUI without a client/server over network principle a lot, still).
Maybe this is all about outside perception and reputation. I don't pretend to know it.
Actually you are deluding yourself by mixing up the features of OpenBSD and FreeBSD. OpenBSD is not really very efficient. And FreeBSD is not nearly as secure as OpenBSD.
You can't mix both up just to make a point. It's more like this:
Guess why the penguin is popular. It seems to have the same priorities most people have, in the same order.
gzip, yes, that is what I meant to say, of course. I really could not explain whatever brain damage caused me to say bzip, but oh well.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Boy, and I thought the Mac crowd was rabid!
Rabid and clueless. I try to like the Mac folks, but the OS X IS THE BEST UNIX EVER BECAUSE STEVE JOBS IS GOD partyline is right up there with the worst linux zealotry. Regurgitated hype with no facts to back them up, just strawman arguments.
Oh well. Mod me down and i will become more powerful than you could ever imagine, but those that read at -1 will nod their heads in agreement.
do() || do_not();
Consider this: computers are getting more and more popular; they are being integrated into more aspects of our lives than they ever were before, and now it's standard for people to own them. Another interesting combination is that personal computers have gotten cheaper and more powerful at the same time.
Of course, none of this is a new development; people could have and were saying these sorts of things over a decade ago, but the good thing is that it's still true.
What's newer is the fact that open source seems to have escalated since then; every day it keeps becoming a bigger and bigger deal. More large companies are working with it than ever before, development has increased, and code maturity levels are always rising. A linux system installed today is something really different than what I started out using only three years ago.
Okay, so what does this all mean, and what does it have to do with BSD? Well, nobody will deny that linux is the big thing, and, while linux gets most of the press, BSD has always been around, and BSD is always being further developed and improved upon at a rate not at all unlike linux. What's good for one open source software product is good for another, and it seems that BSD is chugging right along with the rest of them.
I don't have data like Netcraft does, and it's a mistake to make hard conclusions based on pseronal experience, but I've spent a bit of time on the #freebsd channel on freenode, and from that alone I see FreeBSD adoption/development taking place. Any time I go in there (the channel is a little crowded), there is always somebody there who has questions about FreeBSD; some of them are curious about it, some are trying to install it for the first time, some are new to their systems and need help getting started with a particular task, and some are a little bit more experienced but are still pressing forward with something new. These people are always there. Talking to some of them, you'd find that most were people who had been using linux and started using FreeBSD after hearing good things about it or simply developing an interest in something new.
When people aren't talking about learning FreeBSD, they are talking about projected development, new features, etc. And this is all very apt because new developments in this modern operating system have proliferated (just look at all the changes in the FreeBSD new technology release).
I can imagine how people might consider BSD to be something traditionally "old-fashioned", but to me it's about as shiny and new as linux, and I regard both systems with equal fervor.
Just to block criticism I already see coming, all of those ported apps are built into packages, and all are available, out of the box, via pkg-add in freebsd. The project has a whole cluster dedicated to building packages, and it also acts as quality control for the ports system: if an app doesn't build, it smacks the ports people in the face.
Revisiting this thread, it's kind lame that you were moderated all the way down. You didn't sugarcoat your questions but they all seemed reasonable enough. I tried to answer you in kind; too bad the mods didn't do the same.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Thanks. :-) I personally think it's rather funny - first the score went way up, then it went way down. In the meantime, noone has really been able to answer me.
I really think that FreeBSD is a great system. However, it seems that GNU/Linux has beaten it accross the board, except in the license and the documentation, where it really depends on your needs. I consider FreeBSD (and also NetBSD) to have better quality documentation, but on the other hand, GNU manpages mention the conformance and compatibility of functions with other systems, which is very valuable to me.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Ok, but how widespread are commercialized BSDs like BSD/OS, or whatever BSD commercializing attempts there are? (I really want to know)
And you can surely find BSD the same way in the Enterprise as you can find Debian: under a vendor name. Debian itself isn't used, but "enhanced versions" can be bought like from Xandros.
Shouldn't be too different for BSD, should it?
I tried to answer you; did I miss the important stuff?
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Well, what I meant is that nobody has really pointed out how FreeBSD is superior to GNU/Linux. Even in your message, you don't get further than showing that FreeBSD is not that much worse.
I was hoping that someone could point out strengths of FreeBSD that no other operating system has. Basically, I was inviting people to prove me wrong and convince me that FreeBSD is really beats the lot.
FreeBSD has been used on many servers, and I have heard only good things about it. However, that proves just that FreeBSD is good, not that it's the best. Indeed, it seems that Linux seems to be taking the lead in terms of performance and available applications (does Oracle run under FreeBSD?) lately.
FreeBSD's documentation is very high quality. However, Debian documentation is also very good, and what I have seen from Gentoo and NetBSD is also very good. GNU documentation mentions compatibility issues, which FreeBSD docs didn't, last I checked.
Your point that FreeBSD tends to support hardware completely when it supports it is a step in the right direction, but doesn't really convince me either. I have never had problems with partially supported hardware under Linux, and it supports a lot more hardware that FreeBSD.
Really, I cannot come up with any area in which FreeBSD is clearly superior. I wouldn't expect it to, given all the attention that Linux gets and FreeBSD doesn't, but people seem to think FreeBSD is better. I want to know what it is they know and I don't.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
There are a lot of chances to improve FreeBSD advocacy (and BSD in general). Simplest example, Ports/pkgsrc and Gentoo. Suddenly, Gentoo comes out, everyone start to use it, I hear a lot about it, wonderful. {Free,Net,Open}BSD had such facilities for around a *decade*, I belive. BSDs need marketing!
When deciding on a new server platform, we set up two machines, a Linux machine and a Redhat machine. I was the BSD advocate, my partner was pushing RedHat.
/etc /usr/local/etc system was brilliantly simple. All told, to roll out my machines it would have been installing the 10 or 11 packages that I built out of the ports, plus my notes on the dozen of files to edit...
I absolutely GOT everything to work on FreeBSD. The
I 100% agree that FreeBSD's BSD based file system is MUCH nicer to work with than RedHat's SysV/BSD/RedHat-specific attrocity. Setting up multiple IPs is MUCH better under FreeBSD, because the BSD file format is straight-forward, and RedHat's system is EXTREMELY complex, however RedHat's tools do the job. While the purist in me agrees with you about X11, the realist in me realizes that that simply involves checking the box at install that says X11. When I need to remotely update a machine, I fire up X11 on my Mac, ssh -X, and away we go.
Where RedHat rocks is: authconfig
For my network, where we use LDAP + Kerberos (or LDAP w/ StartTLS if I haven't setup the Kerberos yet), authconfig which will do LDAP, Kerberos, Hesiod, or even SMB and set everything up.
With BSD, I am stuck doing everything "manually."
My biggest gripe in Unix (being an old NT guy) is Directory Services. On an NT network, everything uses the NT Directory by default... whether that be the local users, the domain users, or Active Directory (that I'm admittedly not familiar with). With Unix, every application seems to want its own users/groups by default.
A Directory Abstraction layer (like PAM is/tries to be... pam doesn't really support Kerberos or other slick stuff properly) is the first step, but applications should USE that. Then the Unix "simple tool" model would work, I could use flat files, a local database, a PostgreSQL database, a *shudder* MySQL "database," or LDAP, and all my applications would work. Instead I need to teach each service separately how to reach my LDAP server, that's insane.
Realistically, RedHat builds most things with MIT Kerberos built in, which is nice. With FreeBSD, I had to build everything myself from Ports, which isn't really a big deal. However, on each machine, I'd need to go in and remember/write down all the configuration stuff. With RedHat, authconfig does the hard stuff.
I'm in agreement that BSD is cleaner, no question. The difference is that my observation is that FreeBSD is used/developed by/for ISPs, Yahoo, and other "big players" on the Internet where BSD is King. RedHat is pushing their Linux-based system into corporate America. As a result, I get to get an Enterprise-friendly Unix for my small business, and free-ride of all the stuff RedHat implements solely so they can go for those big accounts.
I doubt that my experience is normal by any stretch. I run an OS X Network (because we all have local PostgreSQL Databases with Apache/PHP) with some Unix servers, and my Unix Servers need to play nicely with my OS X Server. However, it is typical in that even if you evaluate FreeBSD because it's "better," the fact is it doesn't function like any NOS that IT people are familiar with. RedHat, for all its Windows-like weirdness, fuctions like a NOS. Moving between NetWare, NT, and RedHat is pretty straight-forward. You use the new tools, but it is the same principles of setting up a network operating system. With FreeBSD, it is down to the metal and learning what each application does.
Alex