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The State of the Demon Address
Kelly McNeill writes "It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going."
Too bad I can't mod the story flaim bait; the treatment of Net and Open is a bit heavy handed and the article seems to be written as a FreeBSD advert....
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
I was using BSD 4.2 in college over 15 years ago, and the litigation didn't happen for quite some time.
BSD's roots are in the early 80s when they were working closely with Bell Labs, and both versions of Unix were quasi-official.
Obviously, the big break for the modern BSD was 386BSD, which brought the OS to the personal computer a little over a decade ago.
Today, I think it is the rich set of userland capabilities that distinguish the BSDs to the point that occasionally Linux distributions pop up that emulate their functionality (e.g. Gentoo's use of a BSD-like ports system).
BSD is a rich OS with a long history, and I'm glad that it's still around and growing into niches that need it. Today, I'm mostly a Linux user, but I remember my roots and the joy that life was when BSD gained popularity over the proprietary OSes of the day back in the 80s.
I am a BSD user since 386BSD days, and a frustrated linux admin.
There is enough room in the world for both, and hopefully many more. Vote with what you run, be proud, but don't knock the other guy.
I get what I want out of my FreeBSD installations, I hope there are many Linux and any other flavor OS users out there just as happy with their installations.
Life is to short, enjoy it the best way you can with what you like!
I believe FreeBSD 5.0 has a new scheduler - which particularly caught my eye - but also noteworthy is that BSD 5.0 has better hardware support than 4.x - specifically, for example it supports my 802.11g card allowing me to roll my own secure wireless gateway.
The FreeBSD folks would benefit from a clear document describing the differences between 4 and 5 - I'm sure they have one but it isn't presented anywhere prominently...
Yep, the article is almost utterly devoid of useful content, and much of what it does have is simply plain wrong[1]. It reads very much like some of the Linux articles did a few years ago... "Oooh, I've just found this great new OS, so I'm going to pimp it everywhere I can, even though I don't know enough about it to do a decent advocacy job and avoid looking like a fool". Sigh. FWIW, I use both Linux and OpenBSD.
[1] The particular one that gets me is the oft quoted, but now inaccurate claim that NetBSD supports more platforms than Linux. That was indeed once true, but it hasn't been for a few years[2].
[2] Unless you use NetBSD's somewhat arbitrary definition of a platform. Either way, Linux runs on more CPU architectures than NetBSD does.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Personally, I LIKE the attitude on the mailing lists. It keeps people on topic (mostly) and scares off everyone too incompetent to RTFM and run a google search before posting.
The policy of the United States is worse than bad---it is insane. -- Ludwig von Mises, Economic Policy(1959)
You must be joking. It's not even true for the kernel (there are some forks, mostly for supporting more or less obscure platforms, but more so because some distribution patch the official kernel really heavily) but if you consider the complete Operating System then you must consider the distributions and not the kernel, and those everyone stopped to count long ago...
You also fail to take notice of the fact that even if the three major BSDs follow a different path there is still a very high level of blood mixing, a good thing appearing on one of them quickly make its way to the others, as well as countless bugfixes and small improvements.
Darwin -- only available for Mac hardware or specific Intel architectures. (aside: Buy a mac, has the best OS out there by a *long* shot).
Aside from the fact it has PPC as the primary platform, it has the advantage of having a good choice of software when you take into account the commercial, shareware, freeware and open source solutions - there is something for most everyone, if you are willing to buy the basic machine.
All I need now is a good CAD application for MacOS X/Darwin.
Note: I am a happy Mac user - so I am fairly biased.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
Well, having support for the CPU is nice but each platform needs its bootloader, often specific system utilities (NVRAM manipulation, disk-partitionning...) and more importantly support for everything around the CPU (also kernel init is often slightly different depending on the platform, CPU being equal. Starting up a Mac68k and a Sun3 is not exactly done the same way).
e.g. a kernel supporting SPARC without supporting SBus and the common SBus peripherals (framebuffers, NICs) would be at best useless.
I really think the NetBSD definition of a platform is the right one, because having a kernel supporting your CPU don't mean you'll be able to run it on your computer using that CPU, or if it runs that you'll be able to do anything useful with it, because you may lack platform support.
There is not one GNU/Linux, there are dozens of incompatable linux distros. There isn't even one Linux kernel, since most distros make local changes to their kernels.
And BSDs have not fragmented into extremes. Don't make such idiotic statements if you've never even tried the BSDs. I use OpenBSD for everything, my laptop, my firewalls, my servers. You could do it all with Free or Net or a linux distro. The difference is which one the person doing it prefers.
Posts like yours are why more and more BSD users think linux users are idiots. Please learn to keep your mouth shut if you don't know what you are talking about, instead of making the linux community look stupid.
There is exactly one GNU/Linux... which is ultimately designed by one team.
Bwahahaha! You've got one kernel (with half a dozen semi-official patch sets), one GNU metaproject (with dozens subprojects each with their own team), imports from several other projects, and an infrastructure that is unique to each distribution. Then you have some tiny distros that use busybox and dietlibc. Or realtime embedded variants.
Claiming that there's exactly one system/team in this mix is beyond absurd.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
The "computing world" consists of more than desktops and servers. Embedded, handheld, etc. Different OSes for different needs. Sort of like the UNIX philosophy.
Random is the New Order.
I've never read as much bullsh*t in so little text.
The person obviously never looked at NetBSD in detail, nor has any deep understanding of concepts like performance and security, else it would be obvious that they are not something that NetBSD has to brag about, but rather something that's considered normal.
Of course if you have nothing else to sell you can say "we're oh so secure" or "hey, we have all the cool GUI stuff, we can afford the bloat" - NetBSD won't, given it's constraints given through the portability. NetBSD has to offer state of the art operating system that OF COURSE is secure, and OF COURSE is performance optimized, and OF COURSE has about all the drivers available. But there's more to that other than the things that every operating system offers OF COURSE these days.
Blindly ignoring the facts and judging by some marketing slogan and hear-say proves that the author has no technical background for his writing at all, and obviously doesn't know any code of ethics for writing.
- Hubert (in bad mood)
I'm a FreeBSD advocate and all, but lets everyone bear in mind that this does not, I repeat NOT, come from any sort of official channel either in Berkeley or the FreeBSD project. It is a freaking OS Opinion editorial. Calling it a "State of the Daemon Address" is deliberately misleading and in extremely poor taste.
Aside from a few vocal "Linux is teh sux0r" zealots, the FreeBSD community doesn't really worry itself too much about what the other BSDs or Unix-alikes are doing and certainly don't typically engage in penis-length matches such as this editorial.
The wording is inflammatory, the facts are wrong, and a quick Google reveals with near certainty that the author isn't actually involved with the FreeBSD Project on any level.
I believe OpenBSD is a very good distro, but failing to warn /. linux wannabe BSD n00bs about Theo and his behavior would make the misc list run red for the next month. I think Paul has done a service to Theo, the misc list and n00bs all around by emphasizing that OpenBSD is not for those who fsck around...
sigs are for fools and trolls. no signature is *always* appropriate. you should turn them off in your preferences.
I don't know all of the of the Net/OpenBSD split, but in my view. As far I am concerned in 2004, it is ancient history. I use OpenBSD for my routers and DNS at the house, and have not had a lick of trouble with it. It just works, and it does its thing on extremely modest hardware (P/133, P/166, and P/200 boxen). In my view, there are not enough accolades available for PF.
Furthermore, with his all of his unsteadiness and unpredictability, Theo manages to heard the cats every six months for a solid, production quality release. No OS, commercial or open source, has been as consistently reliable for me in terms of operation, quality, or schedule. Let's not get into the patch responsiveness of the OpenBSD team.
If Theo is the loon this trolling article claims, we need a few more loons like'em. He leads a team that produces a great product. Cheers Theo -- keep up the great work.
The author fails to point out the direct relationship between a distribution that sets out to conquer hell and the requirement for the participants to invest in a few pairs of asbestos underwear.
He also fails to point out the leadership qualities that OpenBSD has brought to the BSD buffet: OpenSSH, Darren Reed's packet filter, and soon the Via C5J Esther processor with user-space crypto acceleration, whose design was influenced by activities within the OpenBSD camp.
The author also throws a lot of unnecessary FUD at the stabalization of the FreeBSD 5.x series. The kinds of people who choose to deploy OpenBSD for their firewalls and FreeBSD for their application servers don't sit around and quaver about a few drops of -stable holy water. If you aren't prepared to read the lists, use 4-latest. If you are prepared to read the lists, you can decide for yourself whether the remaining troublespots in 5.x are a problem or not for your intended application.
... if you go on Apple's site looking for Darwin binaries, they send you to OpenDarwin. It's like saying "Slackware is a project to complete what Linux couldn't or wouldn't". It's technically true, but not relevant. Darwin is the Core, OpenDarwin is the whole environment. Apple releases their own, and it's called MacOSX.
And yes, it uses a Mach microkernel (which was derived from BSD) and has a BSD kernel personality. That is to say, from an external API level, it looks like a daemon and quacks like a daemon... It's userland is all FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD userland tools. How much more BSD do you need. So it has a different, related kernel. So do the big three BSDs. It has more in common with these than most other OSs.
As for Theo, he has my abiding respect, even after an argument we had. He had some good points. I think I did too. The fact is that he doesn't suffer fools, and he is quick to resolve the evidence in front of him. He may have false positives. Frankly, though, you have to be a particular weenie to actually be flamed off the internet. That's hard-core victim mentality right there. "Ooooh, theo said a bad thing to me.... mommeeeeeeeeeee." No one likes to be disliked by anyone, especially whom they respect, but that's life. Deal with it.
i - This sig provided by
> Getting Debian -> mirrors -> network installation -> floppy disks.
Which is extremely useless seeing how: 1. many modern systems come without a floppy drive, and 2. most non x86 systems that are supported by Debian come without a floppy drive. Also, I found the installer, I was asking for clear information on the Debian site about where to find it. We were talking about documentation.
> apt-get is better at dependencies than FreeBSD, so I wouldn't pick on that point too hard.
Well, tell me where it is actually better at that, so far it has failed me way more often then the FBSD ports collection, and when going to google for it as well as listening to people around me, that experience seems to be common.
> But what do you mean "the dependency of a sparc smp kernel on initrd tools"? This seems like just a trivial omission in the sparc kernel package and nothing at all to do with apt-get.
The package mentions the dependency allright. apt-get fails to install it properly.
> Err... how about you come back when you learn to RTFM, eh? Troll.
You like screaming troll whenever you disagree eh?
does not make it true what you are saying however.
How can I tell apt-get to see if a new version is available in binary format, and if it isnt yet, build it automatically from source and in both cases create a package that I can distribute to other machines? (I know I can install source packages with apt-get, that is NOT what I am talking about here)
> It seems to me that you are fairly misinformed about the matter though, so you'd be likely to say anything.
Yeah, I guess I am... let me give you a small suggestion tho, I make my living with maintaining servers running both platforms. Not being well informed about the possibilities costs me a lot of money, so I guess that I have reason to be well informed.
It does however seem to me that you are quite badly informed yourself with regards to things outside the Linux world.