Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 5.3 on the Horizon
underpar writes "ZDNet UK is reporting that FreeBSD is nearing a code freeze. August 15th is the deadline which will be followed by the usual beta testing and a final release hoped for by October 1st. ZDNet interviewed the software engineer leading the release work, Scott Long, for the article. He says: 'The 5.3 release will be the first one where we see the real benefits of that. The multithreaded network stack will outperform everything we've done before, for running applications such as Apache or MySQL.' Status reports can be found on the FreeBSD website." I've been using the last technology release of FreeBSD for some time now, and am really looking forward to the 5.3 release, as well as the 5-STABLE branch that's rumored to follow soon after.
Can someone please explain how FreeBSD goodies like updated 5.3 code would make it's way into Mac OS X? How long might it take, what bits, etc, have moved in past releases?
Are you sure you didn't mean "BOLLOCKS!"? I mean, unless "Miss Congeniality" was even worse than I've heard, "BULLOCKS" isn't really a known expletive.
A patch I wrote for the CVS versions of Apache/APR to Add KQueue support has been added to the FreeBSD Port version of Apache.
Just make the port with "WITH_EXPERIMENTAL_PATCHES=1" and you can get a 10-25% boost in performance. (depends on your traffic patterns..)
Its a quick way to get more performance out of Apache on FreeBSD, without waiting for the 5-STABLE branch.
-Paul Querna
A "bullock" is a masculine cowlick...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
I got into FreeBSD about 6 months ago and have not looked back. I was frustrated with RedHat and heard good things about the BSDs.
I have been tempted to check out OpenBSD, because of the networking. This FreeBSD 5.3 status announcement mentions work being done integrating PF (updates?) and ALTQ (new to FreeBSD?)
I'm working towards a site-to-site VPN deployment (hubs and spokes, of course) and am debating FreeBSD vs. OpenBSD. IPSec, queueing and redundancy (dynamic routing, perhaps DBU, and something like CARP) are requirements. Managability is important. "Room for growth" (transparent proxies, accounting, file/print services) would be icing on the cake.
I figure it all could be made to work either way. Is FreeBSD's IPSec and firewall (IPFW/PF) as solid os OpenBSD? How about queueing? I'm a "seasoned newbee" on BSD... My experience is with the FreeBSD 5.x branch, but I'm not sure what all is changing with 5.3. I figure on diving into OpenBSD someday, it's just that time can be hard to come by.
Any advice out there? Am I giving anything up if I commit to Free vs. Open BSD?
FreeBSD is nearing a code freeze.
Wow, it's been in the coroner's office for that long?
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Did you consider switching to Slackware from Red Hat?
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
Using samba, if you share Fat32 and write to it from the network, you end up with corrupted files.
I hope it has been fixed, but I somehow doubt it since it's been around for at least 2 years (earliest bug report was on 4.6RC) so it exists in -stable as well.
A native port is already there! /usr/ports/java/jdk-1.4.2
p.s. If you want a prebuilt binary of jdk-1.4.2, then complain to Sun. They're the ones that prohibit the distribution of Java packages for BSD.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
are we finally get 'em? :)
Check out:
http://www.freebsd.org/java/install.html
Short Version:
It has been available for quite some time. I don't know what you are thinking, but its very easy to get a native Java on FreeBSD...(Read Subject)
"The JDK(TM) it produces is de facto compliant, but use in a production environment is still at your own risk."
But thanks for your words of encouragement. That "We don't want you" crack must make you feel really good.
Ok, first of all, linux compatability isn't any slower than running native binaries. Its just syscall translation, simple mapping of what linux syscalls the app is using corespond to what freebsd syscalls to do the same thing.
And you really can't blame FreeBSD for Sun having horrible license restrictions on java. If java were free it would already be ready for you. But because its not, there is a serious lack of people who are willing to sign away their life and ability to ever sue sun so that they can do the work of porting something they don't want anyways just for you.
Anyone know if vinum_geom will be stable in time for 5.3-RELEASE? Or if there's a native GEOM raid solution? I'm personally looking forward to having a large GDBE encrypted RAID array.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
Sorry man, I'm an American. We don't use that one too often.
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Anyone who commits gets "iced"...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The following has been brought to you by IANAT (I Am Not a Troll).
/etc, the fact that YaST didn't like me seeing the cluttered /etc, and this nagging feeling that it was a system of patched together parts, rather than a well-tested, stable "distribution" (note: I'm knocking the distro, not the kernel, and only slightly).
I've been using FreeBSD since long before it was apparently dying, since maybe the 2.x branch. I never tried Linux until this past year, because I live under a rock on the dark side of the moon.
I tried SuSE, and it was great and all -- the setup was really nice -- but it's not there yet. In fact, I backed over it with 5.2 immediately afterwards. Why? Well, for day-to-day use, I didn't see any difference between Linux and BSD -- except the cluttered
When it came down to it, FreeBSD and a daily-updated ports tree seemed to "click together" better than Linux. For most other day-to-day use, there wasn't a huge difference, though I will say BSD was a tad 'snappier'.
I urge those who haven't tried FreeBSD before to give it a chance. It's not that hard, and it is not, contrary to popular opinion, "better for servers". I play UT2004 and America's Army daily on my BSD box with no problems (thank you native nvidia drivers). What causes most people to gawk after seeing Linux is the text-mode installation -- which is just text menus, but still menus. (I've seen some installation programs that can make you wonder.. OpenBSD, I'm talking to you.)
Last month I introduced FreeBSD to someone who had never, ever used *nix in any form before. After about an hour explaining different concepts (slices, ports and packages, rc.conf), she was off and running and actually, almost sadly, hasn't asked for my help once since then. She had X and KDE up and running within the day.
So give it a try. We have no evil plan. (Except that, yanno, our mascot is related to Satan)
See also: http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/14.html
It's Sun compliant, just like 1.3. What do you want? An insurance policy? It's fscking open source software for chrissake.
For the record, we use native 1.4 on 15 fbsd 4.10 boxen (using tomcat/freemarker) for production enterprise systems with 4K+ users slammin' the boxes each day. No problems so far.
But I suggest you keep waiting. We'll be sure to send you a certificate or 'notice of native compliance' or something. Juuuust keep waiting...
Native binaries, blessed by Sun, available on FreeBSD. Yes I know I should complain to Sun. Yes I know it isn't FreeBSD's fault. But would it kill the FreeBSD developers to try to work up a relationship with Sun?
The JDK(TM)
You have violated the use of my trademark sign, TM(TM). Please cease and desist.
Sincerely,
TM(TM)
Ha ha.
Now he's back pedaling, and wants some
kinds of super-guarantee about Java,
instead of just working native build
that he didn't know about.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but all of FreeBSD is like that. Take a look for yourself.
In fact, I have yet to see any software package that says it is guaranteed to work without problems, all the time, under all circumstances, without first paying *huge* support contracts and getting a guarantee from the software company.
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Use of most software in a production environment is generally always at your own risk anyway, unless you're paying lots and lots of money.
FreeBSD's JDK works, works well, and has for some time. Whether it meets your standards or not is up for debate, but you can certainly test it with the applications you need to run and see for yourself.
Not that I'm defending the tone of the grandparent post (though I did laugh a little). I'm a BSD user, and I don't care if you use it or not, but I'm not going to be a dick to actively dissuade you.
Game... blouses.
Dude. Don't even try to dignify the guy's
crap by imagining it was about licensing or
a guarantee. He totally fucking didn't search
the ports tree.
out of curiosity ... do you have an opteron you can try that on? =)
vodka, straight up, thank you!
YES!
I want to be able to deploy a server on more than just faith. Five nines uptime is not something you can shoot for with a JDK that is deployable "at your own risk".
"For the record, [...] 4K+ users [...] each day [...]"
Let me know when your usage grows by three orders of magnitude. When you have problems at that point, then I will listen to you. Until then I'm forced to decide between a multitude of shitty Linux distributions, the godawful expensive Solaris, or Apple (?!). Like I said, I really want to go back to FreeBSD.
It's an open secret Netcraft just copies all their statistics out of the Farmer's Almanac.
While obviously flamebait, this is probably true. The original poster took care to distinguish the linux compat version of JDK 1.4, and cautioned readers not to remind him of its availability. One would suppose that he would also mention the native port, if he were aware of it at all. But mention of the native build is curiously absent from his original post.
:)
I imagine this was a learning experience for markv242. But that's ok; that's what this forum is for.
One factor that led me to switch back to Gentoo was the choppyness while working on the desktop environments. At that time I was using 5.1. So say if I was playing the audio/browsing/compiling etc, the computer would freeze for a moment.
Activists United
wow
2nd paragraph of the FreeBSD Java page
that was a tough one to find!
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Five nines uptime is not something you can shoot for with a JDK
Sure you can. I have averaged 91.9999% uptime with that very JDK.
Complete with multiple cds (cd 1, livecd/commercial, packages 1, packages 2) and everything; or are they still in beta?
Keep using linux, kiddie. There ain't no insurance policy with open source. Moron.
Jesus christ, what is this, some kind of soap opera?! :)
Switch back to Slashdot's D1 system.
I find it rather funny that most of the responses claim that I haven't looked at the ports tree. On the contrary, I have kept very close tabs on the advancement of Java under FreeBSD. Back when our app ran under 1.1.8, we happily deployed FreeBSD. I will be first in line to deploy it again when the 1.4 JDK is bumped up to production-ready.
My debian machine lost it's harddrive recently, coincidently about one hour before I had to head out of town for the weekend. So I needed to install something on some random harddrive and get my email server backup, quickly. Well, all I had laying around was the 5.1 install cds that I had downloaded when they were announced on /., with the intention of trying out FreeBSD sometime in the nebulous future. So I installed FreeBSD for the first time ever, and have all my accounts added back, along with the various services I needed (named, smtp, and ssh) on and configured, in about 45 minutes. That included going through the install with no documentation at all (my internet connection was also routed through the debian box). That was very impressive, to me at least. Now, granted, after I got back I spent every night for a week dinking around figuring out how things are different, switching from sendmail to postfix, upgrading from 5.1 to 5.2.1, adding ext2 support to copy over all my data, setting up X and sound, setting up support for my Zire 72, and playing around with ports until it became second nature.
/etc/rc.conf is nice (once you figure out what's supposed to be in there). It's a bit of a pain when trying to run various things (like nagios), where scripts and whatnot are written for Linux and break subtly (or completely) on FreeBSD. However, that's generally a one-line fix of some sort (change an argument passed to ps or nslookup, for instance), so it's not a huge deal. I've never liked Gentoo, and doing a 'portupgrade -a' makes me long for 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. I really like the kernel configuration, it works like a champ. I've recompiled my kernel probably six or seven times (chasing various hardware and software settings), and I've never had a single thing go wrong. I really wish it supported my APC usb-based UPS, but it doesn't.
:-)
So, my thoughts having been on FreeBSD for a couple months? Honestly, I dunno. I haven't noticed any speed difference at all, despite many a BSDer's claim to the contrary (this is a 750Mhz Duron with 1.25GB ram). I had to switch out my soundcard (Envy24-based Chaintech for an SB64 I had laying around) because it wasn't supported. The support for my Zire seems to be much nicer (I've always had problems in Linux with USB-based Palms, and tools like KPilot). I really like the init system, and
In summary, when I change hardware in the near future, I'll probably end up putting debian back on. The expanded hardware support, removal of all those little 'bumps' in making software work correctly, and ease and quickness of upgrading and installing software make debian win out. However, if it wasn't for Debian, FreeBSD would be my choice. I use (and administer) Redhat WS3 at work, and I'll take BSD over it any day of the week
Of course, my ideal setup would be a G5 with OSX as my desktop, and OpenBSD on my server. That would be kinda doable if I still had seperate computers for workstation and server (Linux as desktop, OpenBSD on server), but the ever decreasing pool of working hardware forced me down to one. And I'm not masochistic enough to run OpenBSD on the desktop...
I just know I'm going to get flamed for this or at the very least modded down, but it has to be said.
I've heard and read absolutely fantastic things about FreeBSD. It looks like a nice stable platform to learn and test UNIX. However, I have one major problem with FreeBSD - its mascot.
As a life-long practicing Christian, active in my local church, with many practicing Christian friends, I just can not in good conscience use an operating system that uses an image of Satan as its mascot. Not only does it represent the source of evil, but if my family and/or friends were to catch wind of my using anything that uses an image of the Devil to represent itself with, I'd be at the center of controversy, if not out-right ostracized.
For the sake of myself and other good Christians and other religious believers, I hope that someday the FreeBSD Foundation chooses a new mascot, one that isn't offensive to hundreds of millions of potential users. However, until then, I suppose I'll have to stick with Microsoft Windows. Pity.
Care to rephrase that?
The same should be said of your original post, which failed to mention that you were somehow aware of the native build. You said you were not interested in the linux compat port, and failed to mentioned any problems with the existing, working native build. Now we are supposed to imagine that your original complaint was about licensing terms? Please, you expect us to be generous when reading your furtive, evasive messages, and then take someone else to task when they complain about your lack of research.
But thanks for your words of encouragement. That "We don't want you" crack must make you feel really good.
I think I see the real problem here. The AC post really got to you. He got into your head. He pushed your button, and you responded just like he wanted. Instead of absorbing the lesson, you decided to (a) return flamebait with flaimebait, and (b) evaded the issue by making a misleading (and frankly, I think, false ) statement that your original complaint was about licensing.
As you read these words, please don't let anger or judgment cloud your response. Think honestly and thoughtfully. You didn't know about the native port? That's fine. Some guy was an asshole in pointing it out? That's fine as well; there were a half dozen other polite posts that did the same. The lesson to learn is this: you need a thicker skin, and less of a tendency to resort to mendacious statements when you find that learning something new stings a little.
I have to disagree with the server level driver support for freeBSD being better that Linux.
.. tell me does Dell have PERC drivers for FREEBSD , does IBM have ServRAID drivers [updated ones] for Freebsd , how about qlogic fiber card support or 3ware , and the list goes on and on!!
WHAT ENTERPRISES X86 SERVER VENDOR CONSIDERS FREEBSD !!!
Come on
Now Last i tested FREEBSD 5.x and Linux 2.6 I got about the same performance on a single processor system so I will leave that one score alone , because other factors of your test are unknown to me.
But please no more about FreeBSD Server support being better.
Au contraire ... please see Netcraft's recent results, major companies, with some of the best uptimes on the planet, are not only using it, but more and more so all the time. What with Apple helping out, it is going no where but forward.
Please stay on topic. Thanks very much. Peace.
All software is _always_ use in a production environment at your own risk... you don't read EULA's do you?
I wish. ;-)
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
If you were keeping "very close tabs" you wouldn't be so caught up in word choice and would be able to say why (from a technical standpoint) the current Java version doesn't work for you.
Maybe you've been refreshing that page every few months, but I doubt you've been keeping close tabs on anything.
You're free to use whatever you want for whatever reason you want. No need to pull my leg.
Game... blouses.
That was on topic! You didn't think *BSD killed itself, did you?
From the article
FreeBSD 5.2[3] will also introduce a software layer that lets Windows network drivers work with FreeBSD. This layer, dubbed Project Evil, means that wired and wireless network cards should be able to work with FreeBSD even if the manufacturers have not written any drivers for the operating system.
This is totally awesome! FreeBSD network drivers are very reliable, but hard to come by for very new devices (eg. wifi). I would totally use this feature even with some reliability sacrifice.
In Soviet Russia, articles before post read *you*!
FreeBSD is *NOT* a very good platform for deploying Java. It can be done, but it is a poor choice. The main reason is that FreeBSD still lacks a robust thread implementation. This problems with threads causes Java to barf frequently. Unless you are into major pain, stay away from Java on FreeBSD.
I know where you are comming from, but there is always the funding issue. Why not help out the developers and donate to the java project if you are that interested?
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/
NetBSD.jpg
...and you require 5 nines reliability you are living in cloud cuckoo land if you think you can get what you are asking for gratis.
Stop being so cheap and shell out some dosh with Sun if you really need fanatical support and guaranteed operation. Although, if you're supporting that many people and it's as mission critical as you are saying then cost should be no problem, so I'm inclined to think you're just trolling on the whole Java issue.
I've stress tested my companies J2EE product on a FreeBSD box, pusing it to its limits and had zero problems, however, YMMV.
I am NaN
as always . . .
Ah, I see. I made the mistake of not asking if it had hit "-STABLE" yet. (Which, apparently, it hasn't. Wasn't it scheduled to do so at 5.2 or 5.3?)
damn
i'm about to start building a fbsd cluster to run java stuff. it guess it's p4/4.10 for now
amd64 is supposed to be supported in java 5 though
vodka, straight up, thank you!
Mod the parent up, please !
I don't get. I'm really not into flame wars of any kind. But it so happens more and more often - good technical comments are modded down for political reasons.
Java support is great. It's been there for a while. The problem (traditionally) has been that fbsd won't run an app container or ejb container (I was told with a shrug, that it "had to do with threading"). Has that been fixed yet?
Stability:
(a lot of words 'bout Linux, probably no hands-on experience with FreeBSD) - Result: FreeBSD 0, Linux 1.
Support:
Ease of updating (man portupgrade, man pkg_add was never seen, I suppose) - Result: FreeBSD 0, Linux 3.
Software:
(man linux - no, this is not a joke - also was never seen; although there are many apps that cannot be run this way - e.g. MuSE - it works great with many others) - Result: FreeBSD 0, Linux 1.
CONCLUSION
"Windows is far better than any Unix, 'cause I have Windows on my PC - and I haven't any Unix on it and I don't plan to." - some Johnny. You cannot compare known to unknown - this mean you can, but what for?
Just finding inspiration, well, that's my excuse
"Come on .. tell me does Dell have PERC drivers for FREEBSD"
FreeBSD has drivers that work with PERC. (It's just rebranded AMI, and older ones are Adaptec I'm pretty sure).
"does IBM have ServRAID drivers [updated ones] for Freebsd"
FreeBSD has drivers that support the ServRAID cards.
"how about qlogic fiber card support"
Yes.
"3ware"
Yes.
"the list goes on and on!!"
It sure does. Lots and lots of drivers for "enterprise" x86 cards.
Hey, remind me, can you Linux guys change and/or check the ethernet media status with ifconfig yet? Or do you still have to use the mii-tool hack? he he he.
How do you sleep at night, without assurances from your vendors that their software or hardware will never fail?
Perhaps you should reconsider wether or not to you wish to use slang (in public, at least) which you do not have a full understanding of.
It's a FACT. If you want stability and dependability, you simply CANNOT use a "gratis" solution. Mod Parent +8 INSIGHTFUL!!!
Here is my idea: First, we ascertain how many are willing to enlist. Then we let the Bush campaign know we are interested in helping. Who knows? We might wind up in designer outfits on national TV!
huh???
Except in this case, he's 100% wrong. The threading issue was a problem with early versions of the port. It's now been fixed. If you just read what google gives you, and don't bother to check the mailing lists, you'll end up with stale complaints that are no longer a problem.
> Did you consider switching to Slackware from Red
> Hat?
Or at least Gentoo with it's Portage?
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
So I was a Gentoo zealot for two years, it helped to teach me (more than I wanted to know) about Linux.
I got fed up with power-management issues on my employer-supplied laptop computer (a nice machine, but not Linux-friendly) and purchased a Macintosh PowerBook. Very nice, not as clean as Gentoo, but it got me interested in *BSD.
My server was running Gentoo SeLinux until last week. I've installed FreeBSD 5.2.1 and I am *very* happy with it as a stable, secure server platform.
Linux, Apache, etc. have lent legitimacy to Open Source, and BSD license is attractive to many who cannot otherwise use Open Source. So *BSD is helping spread Open Source, and to otherwise improve the quality of the aggregate code base.
Since Gentoo was developed by someone who liked BSD but wanted the device-driver support of Linux, I feel that most of my skills transfer very quickly. I feel that my learning curve on FreeBSD helps me better understand Mac OS X, which has an installed base of about 12 million computers (if Apple is to be believed).
BSD is dead? Hmm. I rather doubt it.
It hasn't been fixed unless hand waving "fixes" it. Java is broken on FreeBSD. Period.
Good News Everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
You can read more about FreeBSD here
If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!
The question I have is "what exactly is scripting" and "debugging" and how I am supposed to debug? Can someone with some techno experience explain what is scripting, coding, etc...Also, what is a "RunTime Error". The exact line that pops up says: "A runtime error has occurred. Do you wish to debug? Line:52 Error 'null' is null or not an object" What does this mean?
Good News Everyone!
Mike Smith now works for Apple, whose OS is based on BSD.
Check it out: www.lemis.com/~grog/msmr.html
and at: daemonnews, under "BSD at Apple"
He didn't like the direction that v5 was taking so he quit and starting writing BSD code for Apple.
Sad, but true. Mod parent up. We should pressure Sun to fix this.
I haven't tried Gentoo so I can't comment on it, but I suggested Slackware since it's supposed to be the most UNIX like Linux.
1f u c4n r34d th1s u r34lly n33d t0 g37 l41d
I'm not a Java developer, so I have no idea what you're talking about. All I know is that every Java app I've tried to run, has. A few applets don't, but that's par for the course on any platform.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Bad news for this troll!
Mike Smith's employment at Apple was terminated on May 19, 2004. Company spokespersons would not comment, citing only "irreconcilable differences" between Apple and Mr. Smith.
Industry rumors, too common and consistent not to be taken seriously, say that Mr. Smith
- acted in a remarkably unprofessional manner at Apple
- contributed little or nothing to the OS while at Apple
- challenged two or more Apple OS developers to fistfights
- tried to change the company's tab-based indents to space-based indents
Mike Smith apparently made that last point his mission while at Apple: conversion of all Apple OS code from using tabs to spaces. This is what he felt was most important, and ultimately led to his termination at Apple.
Bad news for *BSD goons: pretending *BSD isn't dead doesn't change anything.
Big difference between running some applet advert in Mozilla and running a high-perf Java server. Especially since nobody cares about Java except on the server.
Since BSD refuses to qualify the most important modern server applications, why should it be the user's problem? If they want to demonstrate that they aren't dying, they could be bothered to put it on a web page. Unless, it's it can't be denied.
There are a variety of Java engines for FreeBSD. All are compilable/downloadable from ports. FreeBSD has native engines and I'm using this Sun engine for FreeBSD for my projects:
java version "1.4.2-p6" Java(TM) 2 Runtime Environment, Standard Edition (build 1.4.2-p6-koinu_17_apr_2004_23_41) Java HotSpot(TM) Client VM (build 1.4.2-p6-koinu_17_apr_2004_23_41, mixed mode)Secondly, the linux emulation is fast. It's as fast as linux. I play various commercial 3D Linux-Games on FreeBSD and they run all fine. There is also no native acrobat reader for FreeBSD and I start it sometimes using linux emulation. There are no differences in speed, in my opinion.
Your "trolling" just helps to pass insignificant time, so I could care less.
by stability you mean a new way to get root on linux every month?
why do all these linux ducks take so much pleasure in repeately posting 'freebsd is dead' ? Get some facts, and perhaps visit netcraft for the list of uptimes, where do you see linux there? http://uptime.ptnix.com/ and here? Right. Then they wonder why 99% of other people think the linux community is rather immature..
Care to give one real example?
I didn't stumble across one java program that would barf on a recent CURRENT.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
If you believe that the Half-assed drivers offer valid PERC support. You obviously have never used an enterprise dell server. Use google to find all the shit people have had trying to get a PERC controller working properly under Freebsd 4.x and 5.x and these are not the lastest cards.
ServRAID controllers and MPT fusion [ips.o] drivers are NOT well supported under FreeBSD also.
I am willing to bet the level of support for 3ware drivers and qlogic drivers is very limited [the 3ware was beta last i checked]
When i say Enterprise support I refer to 2-4+ way servers ranging from 32-64 bit systems. I am not speaking about your simple single proc dell desktop --just made-- server in your dads basement.
Until FreeBSD has the support of Hardware and *software* vendors in the Enterprise space , It will remain a toy.
BSD offers nothing above Linux and until they have groups like http://www.osdl.org/ that assures scalibility and stability testing on "ENTERPRISE !!" hardware then it is never going to grow beyond simple SMP on basic x86 hardware.
Interesting, I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1 on a Dell 1650 with a Perc controller. FreeBSD recgonized the controller (and everything else on that box) right out of the gate.
I looked around before we purchased the server, and I don't recall a huge number of problems. (Posting AC so as not to undo my moderation to this topic).
> You're absolutely right. However there's a difference between the developer claiming "usable for most tasks. However [...]" and a developer claiming a version is a "Production" version.
And in all my experiences (I know, anecdotal evidence, but still, obne that is confirmed by many others who tried) 'usable for most tasks' in the FreeBSD world is a lot more usable then 'production ready' in the Windows world, and even in the Linux world.
> I find it rather funny that most of the responses claim that I haven't looked at the ports tree. On the contrary, I have kept very close tabs on the advancement of Java under FreeBSD. Back when our app ran under 1.1.8, we happily deployed FreeBSD. I will be first in line to deploy it again when the 1.4 JDK is bumped up to production-ready.
Have you actually tried it?
I have been running the FreeBSD native port for a long time, both server and client side, and it simply works, period.
There is an issue, that issue is Sun's source code licensing. That is however not a technical issue, and if you can build it, it is very usable for a production environment also.
I'm currently playing with the 1.5 jdk.
Could you point us at such a page about Linux? or should we conclude it is dying?
> Java support is great. It's been there for a while. The problem (traditionally) has been that fbsd won't run an app container or ejb container (I was told with a shrug, that it "had to do with threading"). Has that been fixed yet?
First of all, the issue you talk about is with the prebuilt jdk 1.3 as sanctioned by SUN.
The issue is that it supports green threads only, not native threads.
My experience with a jdk 1.4.2 built from the source is that it does support this, and that anything I tried (and that is not just some applets, but also tomcat + servlets and jboss + servlets) work perfectly well.
> Native binaries, blessed by Sun, available on FreeBSD. Yes I know I should complain to Sun. Yes I know it isn't FreeBSD's fault.
What is more, this is not only a problem for FreeBSD, but for each and every OS that SUN doesn't feel like 'blessing'. Many Linux distributions suffer from related licensing problems and cannot distribvute JAVA binaries either.
> But would it kill the FreeBSD developers to try to work up a relationship with Sun?
It is why there is a jdk 1.3 binary for FreeBSD. The relationship between FreeBSD developers and SUN isn't really the issue, SUN's attitude, resources and unusable source code license are the issue.
It is a major annoyance for anyone who wants to do anythign with JAVA whatsoever and who cannot pay SUN for the resources (when SUN doesn't feel like it has a reason to do it itself ofcourse)
When I clicked on "Read More..." there was no posting viewable for this article, just a message which read " Nothing for you to see here. Please move along."
Does this happen often?
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
> I haven't tried Gentoo so I can't comment on it,
:)
> but I suggested Slackware since it's supposed to
> be the most UNIX like Linux.
Yep. I cut my teeth on Slack.
Codifex Maximus ~ In search of... a shorter sig.
Why do you want to upgrade all of your ports simulatneously in the first place? If it's not broken, don't fix it! You really should only upgrade individual packages if the newer version fixes a bug that affects you, or provides some feature that will benefit you. Otherwise, there's no reason not to leave everything as-is.
In fact, this is the whole reason i switched over to BSD from Debian-- because with Debian stable I can't easily upgrade a package I want to a newer version (because the damn thing is only released every 2.5 years or so), and with testing or unstable I can't help but upgrade nearly everything just to get a point release of a small package (because of massive dependency chains).
He's 110% wrong! Obviously, he doesn't know what he's talking about.
Running freebsd on 1650's just fine. Remind me why we are replying to this troll?
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You forgot to jump into the ditch yourself.
I used Linux since Kernel 2.0.12 (Ago-Sept'96), and my first installs were Slackware, so the text based install looks familiar to me. A graphical install in my case brings nothing. The only FreeBSD I tried was release-4.7, and the install didn't want to install X together with the other packages, I hope that changed ;-). Getting X and KDE to install was a bit hard, the packages had to be installed one by one... no idea why.
On the other hand, for mc, text terminal without color and "dumb" mode was something I didn't like (specially dumb mode), as a programmer, Ctrl-O simplifies my life a bit :-). (Mey be a config or termcap problem... no idea, hint!).
I'm looking forward to a new release... Hope next time I'll have more luck.
There are new ways of getting root on Linux every month? If so, why? Can't people just log in like they always have, or am I missing something?