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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.
Observing that coders had found it difficult to distinguish in their software a rising sun from a setting sun, Benjamin Franklin once said: "I have often ... in the course of reading Slashdot ... looked at that sun behind FreeBSD without being able to tell whether it was rising or setting. But now at length I have the sadness to know it is a setting and not a rising sun. FreeBSD is dying."
That's right; Ben Franklin confirms FreeBSD is dying.
You mean it's not dead? Are you telling me that my fellow Slashdotters lied to me?
BULLOCKS!
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Guess I was too early.
My hyperlinks aren't worth the paper they're printed on.
Nothing starts a weekend right quite the way a wake does!
GNAA Announces Interview with Real Troll Talk
Osaka, Japan - In a worldwide first, GNAA founder and president timecop agreed to conduct an interview with Real Troll Talk, a Slashdot member documenting the ways and means of internet trolls worldwide.
Although meant to be a one on one interview, several GNAA members were present in the audience, and many "contributed" to the interview by shouting out points that timecop forgot and by calling him an asshole. "The interview went well," timecop said afterward, "I was very pleased with the interest in GNAA and the exposure we'll be getting through this. Real Troll Talk seemed to have an unhealthy obsession with the sexual aspects of GNAA, though."
GNAA member godspeed noted that "The interview was really good, and I have a strong feeling that Real Troll Talk may be a homosexual black man himself. You could say my gaynigdar was set off by that dude." Opened to other GNAA members for comment, vSKIZZILE was quick to add "HAHA FGTS! You are all gay, LOL @ WTC LOL @ JEWS!!!! FRIST POSTAGE FOR GNAA!"
A transcript of the interview is available in Real Troll Talk #6, available at Real Troll Talk's Slashdot journal
About Real Troll Talk:
Real Troll Talk is Slashdot member number 793436, and has been running a series of journal articles on internet trolling, seeming to take a particular interest in Slashdot and Kuro5hin. You can find back issues of "Real Troll Talk" at Real Troll Talk's Journal
About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
Talk to one of the ops or any of the other members in the channel to sign up today! Upon submitting your application, you will be required to submit links to your successful First Post, and you will be tested on your knowledge of GAYNIGGERS FROM OUTER SPACE.
If you are having trouble locating #GNAA, the official GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA irc channel, you might be on a wrong irc network. The correct network is NiggerNET, and you can connect to irc.gnaa.us as our official server. Follow this link
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?
Lamar Latrell
The well known civil rights group Gay Nigger Association of America(GNAA) is considering legal action against alleged trolling group Slashdot. GNAA claims that Slashdot has been constantly trolling the GNAA website with racist comments, anti-gay sentiment, and other despicable behavior
Our call to the District Attorney's office revealed that GNAA isn't the only organization with a beef against Slashdot. District Attorney Tallbird had this to say, "Slashdot is actually a borderline terrorist organization and after the GNAA is done gutting it financially in civil court the government's case in a criminal court will probably be going ahead. We believe that Slashdot has been secretly divulging sensitive information to Axis of Evil countries through its mindless mass of utterly useless forums."
Among recent allegations against Slashdot is the enormous crapflood of GNAA.US throughout the month of June. Included in this crapflood were papparazzi photos of Will Wheaton in various homoerotic situations. Many gayniggers were enormously offended by the incredibly small size of Wheaton's Dong.
The self proclaimed Slashdot commander and extreme geek, CmdrTaco, responded from Camp Shane, where he is spending this summer saying, "This is just another example of the Nigger's ongoing campaign to control the internet."He went on to say that our question had rudely interrupted his nice whale orgy with his gigantic wife who is also at the camp this summer. GNAA Chief Engineer, MrSchwul, had this to say about the impending lawsuit, "Hugely fat, white gayfags like CmdrTaco are relics of the past when things like slave pwnership was common practice. Everyone out there must recognize the huge battle we face when ridding the internet of garbage such as slashdot." Well known activist PenisBird had this to say, "ruin that rectum", possibly referring to the recent street riots involving huge groups of white-hooded slashdot users fighting masses of gayniggers, who are known for their special finishing move, rectum ruination.
About GNAA:
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the first organization which gathers GAY NIGGERS from all over America and abroad for one common goal - being GAY NIGGERS.
Are you GAY ?
Are you a NIGGER ?
Are you a GAY NIGGER ?
If you answered "Yes" to all of the above questions, then GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) might be exactly what you've been looking for!
Join GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) today, and enjoy all the benefits of being a full-time GNAA member.
GNAA (GAY NIGGER ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA) is the fastest-growing GAY NIGGER community with THOUSANDS of members all over United States of America and the World! You, too, can be a part of GNAA if you join today!
Why not? It's quick and easy - only 3 simple steps!
I demand satisfaction!
Meat locker? Liquid Nitrogen? chmod -r 444 *?
If Apple can provide a 1.4.2 JDK, certainly FreeBSD can as well. Please don't make me stick with Red Hat 9 of all things.
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
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
Zeikfried - Reuters, Saudi Arabia
The brutal slayings of Paul Johnson, the young Jew Nick Berg, and local Starcraft champion Kim Sun-il, only serve to exemplify that while so-called moderates preach Islam as a religion of peace, normal god-fearing citizens are not blind to the brutal truth, Islam wants to lop off your shit liberally.
"But these poor bastards were working abroad!" you cry, your several chins flailing wildly as a mixture of spittle and congealed fat sprays from your blackened lips like a gaijin Tubgirl. But you couldn't be more wrong, Gay Nigger studies indicate the muslims are, in fact, stealing your land, woman, and anal virginity before your very eyes. The situation is indeed dire, as indicated by a recent #GNAA straw poll showing that your average Joe Negro is a mere 58 metres away from a filthy sand nigger, ready willing and able to decapitate you and encode your fate into a shitty
How may we counter this? How can we protect our terrified brothers, sisters, and lovers from this reprehensible neck decimating towelhead menace? The answer is simple you wretched cretins, as of the 19th of June, award winning self-help group the Gay Nigger Association of America begins the sale of Decapitation Insurance to all American, Korean, and British citizens and expatriates not willing to contribute to Wil Wheatons latest marathon masturbation session.
But rather than provide this service to the select few, the GNAA understands that your menial jobs are now being performed for one tenth of the cost by an equally skilled Indian, so we have provided a range of contracts scaled to suit your needs.
But don't just take our word for it, GNAA sponsored clairvoyant Madame Jank DuTouche has contacted Paul Johnsons head from beyond the ethereal veil of death to bring you this recommendation:
"The moons axis over Jupiter brings it into allignment with the constellation Orion and the Planet Anus. After inhaling several ounces of crack, I followed this up with my tarot reading of 'The Jester', 'Death', 'Captain B Dick', '4 swords' and a 'double headed anal dildo'. This told me but one thing, Paul Johnson endorses the Gay Nigger Association of Americas drive for a gay and Decapitation free universe."
Not to be outdone, Kim Sun-il's head released the following statement:
"kekeke"
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.
are we finally get 'em? :)
(Read Subject)
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!
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)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
The statistics sample was a cheap attempt to minimize Matt's contribution to the project. The reason why he has been mostly silent is probably one of the most prominent signs of his superior maturity. The fact that the official defense (mostly fronted by Greg, atm) he wasn't such a substantial committer is crap, for the most part. If one wanted to go by the stats, Jeff Robertson (sorry if I munged the spelling) would be one of the key committers, and his UMA system isn't even entirely ripe yet, it's just been committed within the sample timeframe. That suddenly phk is at the top of the list, is simple a result of his newest attempt to add another large chunk of bit rot to the project that he can later claim not to have time to maintain "unless someone is willing to pay for my time" (like the atm bits, the half-finished devd monster, et.al.) One can hardly get him to look at his malloc bits, that put his name in lights at some point in the long past.
Matt didn't contribute because he was convinced that that the smp development direction that was chosen (my impression at least from the archives and my fading memory) was overly complex, too complex for the number and talent level of the contributers involved, and that it would delay a release from the -current branch significantly. So he was right. I'll almost bet that that was a constant sore for John, who still hasn't gotten his long-promised, but little delivered re-entrant work done, but he always had time enough to object to any other commits that might help along the way. Strangely Julian and Matt could work together. One might attribute certain commits to both Matt and Julian (if that would matter anyway, since -core is interested in proving the opposite statistically).
If the issue here had anything to do with IPFW, then you all better get out your C-coder hats and take a little more time to fix that rotting pile of muck that has been the standard broken packet filter interface for FreeBSD long past its possible usefulness. A packet filter with no central maintainer which is subject to once yearly random feature bloat through some wild university project from Luigi. The brokenness that Luigi introduced (and the repository bloat through backing out and recommitting, ad absurdum) was probably no less a threat to security than anything Matt did. If the security officer was to be blatantly honest with himself, ipfw would be marked broken for either a full audit or full removal (just port obsd's pf or something that someone actually actively _cares_ about).
You've alienated Jordan, Mike, Bill Paul (for all I can see), Greenman, you constantly rag on Terry, even though he's seen and done more with FreeBSD than most of you, O'Brien is on the verge of quitting (since he, like I, am not convinced that GEOM is anything more than an ego trip that will never be completely maintained or usefully documented). There are certainly others, too, that have attempted to make technically correct contributions, but didn't fit into the sort of paranoid "glee club" that core would like to have around them. You guys lack the talent to steer the positive from Matt into the project and let the crap fall by the wayside. I'm not saying Matt's rants are the most intelligent thing he's done, but he's sat by the wayside and watch the superstars beat up the code to a point where it's less stable, slower, and more bloated than it ever was. I, for one, can understand his frustration (as I can with Mike's, Jordan's, and a few others), although I find his metho
FreeBSD is dead.
It is perhaps anybody's guess as to which *BSD is the worst off of an admittedly suffering *BSD community. The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting the most. Look at the numbers. The erosion of user base for FreeBSD continues in a head spinning downward spiral.
Consider that because of the many troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
Every major marketing survey has shown that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are infinitesimally dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among hobbyist dilettante dabblers. In truth, for all practical purposes *BSD is already dead. It is a dead man walking.
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
Complete with multiple cds (cd 1, livecd/commercial, packages 1, packages 2) and everything; or are they still in beta?
FreeBSD vs Linux - The Definitive Comparison
Flamewars between FreeBSD and Linux advocates occur all the time, so it's often hard to make a judgement. Our 500-employee company recently decided to convert fully to Open Source software and OSes; I was put in charge of making the decisions. It boiled down to FreeBSD and Linux, and without letting any bias or emotions get in the way, I established the following criteria.
Performance
This is a complicated issue, so let's consider these three types of machine (in use at our company):
Single CPU server: FreeBSD just edged ahead of Linux on this one. The differences weren't drastic, but large enough - consequently, score 1 for FreeBSD here.
Multi CPU server: With kernel 2.6, Linux performed considerably better than both FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.2.1. The updated SMP code and revised scheduler have worked wonders here, so 1 for Linux.
Desktop: Linux 2.6 is much faster than either FreeBSD, particularly when the system is heavily loaded. Application start times are slightly better, while responsiveness is remarkably superior to FreeBSD. Another 1 for Linux.
Result: FreeBSD 1, Linux 2
Stability
Linux distributions vary greatly in terms of stability, with Mandrake Linux and Fedora Core aiming for bleeding-edge desktop features, while Slackware and Debian put great emphasis on stability. FreeBSD is indeed a reliable OS, but the smaller development and testing community puts it behind Linux - additionally, there are more full-time Linux developers working with commercial companies on hardware support and core component testing.
Our Debian and Slackware systems have never crashed or suffered any other major glitches in five years of use, and we know of other individuals and companies that can say the same. With the correct distribution selection, Linux systems are extremely reliable. The far greater amount of testing by the community and companies gives Linux a boost here.
Result: FreeBSD 0, Linux 1
Support
Ease of updating: Although a third-party binary updaing system exists, it's not yet part of the official FreeBSD system (and consequently, problems with trust occur). Current FreeBSD releases rely on manual CVS updating, patch applying, compilation and installation. Debian GNU/Linux, conversely, only needs a single command to update; this is a major win for Linux, as it saves a huge amount of time on a large number of machines. 1 to Linux.
Length of support: Each FreeBSD point release is only supported for 12 months. The Debian Project supports each of its releases for over two years, and other distros such as Red Hat Enterprise Linux are supported for five years. Although upgrading FreeBSD is fairly simple, the changes in userland tools and Ports means that extensive re-testing of home-grown apps needs to be made. A major win for Linux here.
Commercial support: FreeBSD is significantly weaker on this front, with Linux vendors offering a much greater range and variety of support contracts than are available for FreeBSD. 1 to Linux.
Result: FreeBSD 0, Linux 3
Hardware
Server: FreeBSD's driver range for server-class machines is very good, and the drivers themselves are robust and well-tested. Linux is strong on this front too, but FreeBSD just pips it to the post. 1 to FreeBSD.
Desktop: Linux far surpasses FreeBSD in terms of desktop hardware support, with a gigantic range of drivers and subsystems from both kernel developers and third parties. 1 to Linux.
Other platforms: Debian supports more architectures than FreeBSD, although the gap is narrowing. NetBSD supports even more, but that involves throwing another BSD variant into the mix - this causes problems. 1 to Linux.
Result: FreeBSD 1, Linux 2
Get to Ft. Lauderdale airport early in the morning. Go up to Skycap and inform him that I'm declaring firearms in my checked baggage and tip him 5 bucks. He says to follow him inside since this has to be handled at the customer service counter. We proceed past about 40 people to the front of the line, saving me from at least a 1-hour wait!
Tell the agent behind the counter that I'm declaring firearms. She has me open the luggage and the locked firearms case to demonstrate they are unloaded. I clear my Glock 22, Glock 29 and Kel-Tec P32 for her. Ammo for said firearms is also inside in a hard plastic ammo case.
She fills out a tag and places it in the case. I close and lock the case, and zip up the luggage. She checks the baggage in. That's it.
The flight back from New Orleans was exactly the same. Tipped the Skycap 5 bucks and he marches me to the front of a very long line at customer service. Ran through the same drill. Same outcome. Extremely satisfied with SouthWest Airlines.
Moral of the story: The quickest way through an airport is to bring a gun!
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...
Shhhh. Don't tell anyone but FreeBSD is D E A D
Ponder that, big guy.
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.
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.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save *BSD at this point in time. For all practical purposes, FreeBSD is dead.
Fact: FreeBSD is dying
YHBT. YHL. HAND.
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*!
The analysis reveals that this moribund operating system, in the throes of a long, agonizing death since approximately 1990, is only weeks away from death.
Why? Because FreeBSD is stealing code from Linux and the FreeBSD project will soon be named as a defendant in a lawsuit filed by the Free Software Foundation.
It comes as a shock to the entire Open Source community that the FreeBSD developers would resort to such measures, but, faced with the imment demise and subsequent rigor mortis of their labor of love, they have been driven to outright theft.
At this point, it's only a matter of weeks. This embattled, dying OS will soon be only a memory kept alive by tinkering hackers--as well as in the annals of shameful history, to be studied as an example of "what not to do" by software engineers and law students alike.
To: Secretary of State Colin Powell
March 10, 2003
Dear Mr. Secretary:
I am joining my colleague AmigaOS in submitting my resignation from the list of living operating systems (effective immediately) because I cannot in good conscience compete with Linux.
I have failed:
--To support SMP
--To generate media attention
--To spawn a professionally managed distribution
--To innovate
--To be relevant.
Throughout the globe *BSD is becoming associated with in-fighting and sloppy coding. My disregard for views of other operating systems, borne out by my neglect of technical competence, is giving birth to an anti-BSD century.
I joined the operating system world because I love technology. Respectfully, Mr. Secretary, I am now bringing this calling to a close, with a heavy heart but for the same reason that I embraced it.
Sincerely,
*BSD
Dead Operating System
What is this 'FreeBSD' that you talk about ? Is it something like Linux ?
NetBSD.jpg
BSD IS DEAD Developers
5 more
Games
10 more
Interviews
IT
7 more
Linux
5 more
Science
4 more
YRO
...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?)
[eds. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I
- Laci Peterson
- Lori Hacking
- Nicole
Simpson
- FreeBSD
Submit your response along with a stamped self-addressed envelope.See contest rules for further details. Void where prohibited.
It's a FACT. If you want stability and dependability, you simply CANNOT use a "gratis" solution. Mod Parent +8 INSIGHTFUL!!!
It hurts 'n' stuff.
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.
What We Can Learn From BSD
By Chinese Karma Whore, Version 1.0
Everyone knows about BSD's failure and imminent demise. As we pore over the history of BSD, we'll uncover a story of fatal mistakes, poor priorities, and personal rivalry, and we'll learn what mistakes to avoid so as to save Linux from a similarly grisly fate.
Let's not be overly morbid and give BSD credit for its early successes. In the 1970s, Ken Thompson and Bill Joy both made significant contributions to the computing world on the BSD platform. In the 80s, DARPA saw BSD as the premiere open platform, and, after initial successes with the 4.1BSD product, gave the BSD company a 2 year contract.
These early triumphs would soon be forgotten in a series of internal conflicts that would mar BSD's progress. In 1992, AT&T filed suit against Berkeley Software, claiming that proprietary code agreements had been haphazardly violated. In the same year, BSD filed countersuit, reciprocating bad intentions and fueling internal rivalry. While AT&T and Berkeley Software lawyers battled in court, lead developers of various BSD distributions quarreled on Usenet. In 1995, Theo de Raadt, one of the founders of the NetBSD project, formed his own rival distribution, OpenBSD, as the result of a quarrel that he documents on his website. Mr. de Raadt's stubborn arrogance was later seen in his clash with Darren Reed, which resulted in the expulsion of IPF from the OpenBSD distribution.
As personal rivalries took precedence over a quality product, BSD's codebase became worse and worse. As we all know, incompatibilities between each BSD distribution make code sharing an arduous task. Research conducted at MIT found BSD's filesystem implementation to be "very poorly performing." Even BSD's acclaimed TCP/IP stack has lagged behind, according to this study.
Problems with BSD's codebase were compounded by fundamental flaws in the BSD design approach. As argued by Eric Raymond in his watershed essay, The Cathedral and the Bazaar, rapid, decentralized development models are inherently superior to slow, centralized ones in software development. BSD developers never heeded Mr. Raymond's lesson and insisted that centralized models lead to 'cleaner code.' Don't believe their hype - BSD's development model has significantly impaired its progress. Any achievements that BSD managed to make were nullified by the BSD license, which allows corporations and coders alike to reap profits without reciprocating the goodwill of open-source. Fortunately, Linux is not prone to this exploitation, as it is licensed under the GPL.
The failure of BSD culminated in the resignation of Jordan Hubbard and Michael Smith from the FreeBSD core team. They both believed that FreeBSD had long lost its earlier vitality. Like an empire in decline, BSD had become bureaucratic and stagnant. As Linux gains market share and as BSD sinks deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
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.
don't weep for me bsd fans...
the truth is I never lived.
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.
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..
BSD is dead... I burried a bunch of BSD CDs yesterday in my garden.
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).
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.