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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."
As a user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I must say that I have been quite satisfied with both, especially FreeBSD. While it could use some help in the ports and upgrading department, it is all around a wonderful piece of software, and it is quite interesting to watch the development of all the BSDs. Way to go!
BSD is slashdotted :)
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.
--
Each of the four major BSD projects are pushing forward with development and experiencing growth, diversifying the Open Source playing field's offerings Let's take a look at what each project is up to these days.
FreeBSD
FreeBSD is in a precarious state. While it has almost hit critical mass in the corporate world, their latest growing pains have left potential adopters confused. The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting technology, generally regarded as comparable with or superior to what is offered in Linux. The FreeBSD foundation is still upgrading its FreeBSD 4.x line and suggesting its use for production environments over FreeBSD 5. The reasons for this are very simple -- FreeBSD 5 won't be ready for prime time until FreeBSD 5.4 or 5.5 -- but users are left confused and timid.
FreeBSD's last major release, which now sits highly optimized at version 4.10, works just as well as always. For systems already running with FreeBSD 4.x that see no need to adopt the new technology in FreeBSD 5 or jump to Linux, this operating system is a godsend in stability and continued support. FreeBSD 4.11 is scheduled for a February '05 release, while plans for FreeBSD 4.12 are on the backburner should FreeBSD 5 not achieve -STABLE status by the fourth quarter of 2005. But what if you need the technology available in FreeBSD 5 and don't want to jump to Linux?
FreeBSD 5, currently available at FreeBSD 5.2.1 with FreeBSD 5.3 in late beta, tantalizes the BSD world with the culmination of several year's hard work and narrow escapes. Back in the late Nineties, when WindRiver bought BSD/OS (a closed-source BSD operating system owned by the now-defunct BSDI), FreeBSD users were promised a next-generation BSD made possible by crossing the ultra-robust corporate OS with its Open Source counterpart. While WindRiver let go of its plans leaving the future of FreeBSD in peril, the realization of its goal is almost here thanks to the FreeBSD community and Apple Computer, Inc.'s contribution of FreeBSD code.
That almost is a killer, though, in that it now causes potential users to look elsewhere for modern operating system features elsewhere until FreeBSD 5 is blessed as stable. Given FreeBSD's track record and the corporate sponsors now behind its operating system, however, it has a bright future ahead of it despite these stumbling blocks. Sadly, the same can't be said for its two little brothers, NetBSD and OpenBSD.
NetBSD
NetBSD's claims to fame aren't its optimization or secure code -- it's instead known for running on a wider variety of platforms than any other operating system out there, including Linux. NetBSD's binary releases include support for an amazing 40 platforms and an additional 12 platforms in the source code. In other words, it runs on everything but the kitchen sink. NetBSD forked from the 386BSD/4.4 BSD merger in 1993 and continued on its own in parallel to FreeBSD since then, albeit at a slower pace. It's currently at version 2.6.1, with aggressive testing on the new NetBSD 2.0 promising fruition by the first half of 2005.
Those familiar with NetBSD swear by it, though its use in serious environments is limited. It is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best. NetBSD's true usefulness comes in providing developers of other operating systems -- such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux -- with hardware support to base their own new ports off of. For instance, much of the code for the PowerPC FreeBSD port comes from NetBSD. OpenBSD implemented support for A
... you insensitive clod!
There are a few mistakes in that article.
as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years.
Actually the claim is "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"
OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode
If you're using an i386 system then SMP has been available for a while and is shipping in 3.6 (I have my CDs already.
OpenBSD isn't acceptable as a desktop system
I've used it as a desktop for years and the ports system works very well.
Trolling is a art,
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!
Wow, what a crappy article. The guy couldn't even be bothered to read the websites for each project so as not to fill his article with incorrect information.
As an OpenBSD user, I quickly saw tons wrong in the OpenBSD section, I am sure its the same for Free and Net. OpenBSD's security claim is right there at the front of the main page, and he manages to get it wrong? And he says it runs on "few" platforms, and to avoid alpha and PPC, which is rediculous. The supported platforms page seems to list 12 supported platforms, and 3 more being actively worked on. And alpha and PPC are both fine, in fact some devs have only PPC machines themselves. And he also claims its single CPU only, even though it has SMP support on i386 and amd64, with PPC in the works.
Wrong : OpenBSD has sticked to its schedule of a release every 6 months (November 1 and May 1) since years, and the OpenBSD 3.6 release won't be any different (CD already started to ship to those who pre-ordered by the way).
Please be so good and enter the address http://www.freebsd.org/features.html into your web browser. Thank you very much for your effort..
I have tried most common flavors of Linux. Some are nice, but something keeps me coming back to BSD.
It was love at /usr/ports/
It had me at pkg_get -r
No Red Hat, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Debian or Mandrake could give me that same feeling. Call it a personal preference, call it zealotry. But FreeBSD has won my heart.
BSD I love you...
To blog is sublime
Ports and packages work just fine together. Using a port is just compiling and creating a package on your machine, and then installing it for you. pkg_info will list the packages you've installed via ports. There is no conflict or problem at all. If you had a problem, it was likely because you used 4.4 packages on a 4.3 system or something like that, meaning the dependancies would be all wrong.
Hm. No mention of DragonflyBSD. I don't have time to give it a proper blurb really, but DragonflyBSD is probably the most promising of the BSDs.
It uses a message passing framework, like a microkernel, but still keeps most things in kernel space. This quite a divergence from the other BSDs and Linux and will hopefully enable some really cool features.
Check it out for yourself at http://www.dragonflybsd.org!
OpenBSD is tightly controlled by a madman, thus should be avoided.
Heck, the same could be said about Windows.
Anyway, I've installed OBSD on an old PC for an Internet gateway / firewall and have been nothing but happy. It's small (downloads quick), robust, secure. Power failures? Reboots automatically and continues w/ no problem, it has required 0 maintenance (other than, for example, checking authlog and changing ssh port for all the ssh scanners out there recently). It VPN's to a Linksys box, has dyndns client, and much, much more.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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!
A long time (well, relatively speaking- (6 years)) user of Linux i'm finding myself spending more and more time in my FreeBSD installation than anything else.
/. readers would have too). It's more elegant in that UNIX way. Things are less complicated through better design and implimentation.
This isn't a rant against linux- Debian and Slackware have both been very good, stable, and fun for me over the years. I have no regrets! But i must say that the grass is greener on the FreeBSD side of the fence, at least for my purposes.
Package management is concise and consistent. The whole OS and all its packages can be found in one place. No sifting through rpmfind.net (we have RH machines at work), sourceforge or freshmeat, or any other craziness. Documentation is well done and up to date. Software installation is almost mindless. Configuring the kernel is amazingly simple. The gripes about hardware support and detection seem to be a non-issue for the hardware i have (which is pretty typical of what 90% of
The BSD folks highlight how the BSD system is all made by one small team, vs. GNU/Linux being made by hundreds or thousands of folks on separate projects. I must attest that there truly *is* a difference in the end product. Everything in a BSD system "fits" and "gets along".
Once again- this isn't a criticism of linux either. The `fragmented' or `modular' method of assembling a GNU/Linux system gives it other strenghts in different areas that some BSD systems might otherwise not have. It's all about the right tool for the job.
A side benefit of the BSD side of the fence is the lack of Crusading To Subjugate The World type of mentality. It's all about the UNIXy goodness instead, which is why -I- got away from Windows in the first place. I find this a very refreshing change.
do() || do_not();
This is one man spewing invalid opinions and using outdated information. He hits hard on NetBSD and OpenBSD as though they were evil or the spawns of some demon's loins.
He says of NetBSD, "...its desktop and production applications are so limited as to be nonexistent...," yet this is a foolish and downright insulting thing to say. Desktop applications are not dependant on Linux or FreeBSD as much as they are on X. The issue of production applications are a problem with companies, not the system itself. And even then there are means to emulate other systems to allow most programs for Linux to run on NetBSD.
Of OpenBSD he says: "Sticking with Intel and compatible chips is a safe bet as its Alpha and PowerPC ports are still in their infancy." I find this once again rediculous. The macppc and alpha ports are better than what FreeBSD has to offer and are pretty much comparable to the NetBSD ones (what with the code sharing). He also takes a personal slam at Theo de Raadt himself, not at all something to make his opinion more valid or acceptable.
Of Darwin he speaks as though it were a complete system and not an incomplete husk of one. He even calls it a Unix, while it is not. His views seem tainted and hazed by his own prejudices.
He does not even touch on DragonFlyBSD, a system which I find to be far more a BSD than Darwin considering Darwin uses Mach and not BSD for a kernel.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
This article text was already smelling bad, and the strong points of next version of darwin are:
"support for Java 1.5, XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3.0"
Yeah. Sure.
> By keeping to just ports on your system, you only have to resolve the needs of one mechanism. And that pretty much works. Since I took that approach, my upgrades have been headache free.
/var/db/pkg
/var/db/pkg to see what packages/ports you have installed and in which version.
/usr/ports/UPDATING, the problem was KDE, I had to manually remove some components and install the new versions. This is very exceptional, and again, was well documented.
Now lets get something very clear here.
When you install a package, it gets registered in
The exact same thing happens when you install a port.
When you use portupgrade, it will look (using pkg_info!!!!! that should really ring a bell there) in
IT DOES NOT MATTER FOR THAT IF YOU USED A PORT OR A PACKAGE (sorry for shouting)
What does matter is using portupgrade correctly so it will resolve dependencies in both directions, ie, ALWAYS use -r -R
I just upgraded a 4.10 system that had everything installed using packages, and I used portupgrade and let it built the ports for them.
This resulted in one problem, which was extremely well documented in
You can ask portupgrade to use packages for installing as well as ports )see the -P flag) and you can also instruct portupgrade to create packages from compiled ports with the -p flag.
The later is an extremely usefull feature when you have multiple machines that need the same packages, compile once, install as often as you need.
Saying that ports and packages dont mix is not true in most cases. It is true in a few cases tho. For example, the firefox package will not include the development tools needed for compiling the mplayer plugin from a port, that will only work if you built firefox as a port. This again is an exception, and I consider it a problem of the firefox package.
That said, if you install both as package, and then use portupgrade to upgrade them (and use -r -R !!) the system will figure out that the plugin depends of firefox and build firefox first.
> If you don't agree, fine, suit yourself. Spend hours futzing with builds. I'd rather be USING the system or be off doing something more enjoyable with my time.
You could also spend a little more time reading the documentation. Most of what you suggest is simply not true. Ports and packages use the exact same system for registering themselves, and so can be mixed and still be upgraded with as much or little trouble as when you only used ports (or packages)
A very important commandline to remember:
portupgrade -r -R -p -a
Sorry if I sound annoyed here, but yes, it annoys me when people who claim to have used the system for a long time, still did miss the fact that portupgrade explicitly supports packages and ports for installing and upgrading, and then make wrong claims about it.
FreeBSD is worth advocating, but I bet the avergage BSD connoisseur can come up with better arguments. The article is full of stereotypes and garbage. I really wonder if the author really took an hour to visit the WEBSITES, let alone experimenting with the systems by himself:
The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting technology, generally regarded as comparable with or superior to what is offered in Linux...while plans for FreeBSD 4.12 are on the backburner should FreeBSD 5 not achieve -STABLE status by the fourth quarter of 2005.
What a fair comparison, let's benchmark STABLE technology available in Linux by the end of 2004 with technology that might be stable in FreeBSD by the end of 2005!
[NetBSD] it's currently at version 2.6.1, with aggressive testing on the new NetBSD 2.0 promising fruition by the first half of 2005...Those familiar with NetBSD swear by it, though its use in serious environments is limited.
OK, first of all, NetBSD is at version 1.6.2, not 2.6.1, and if you are looking for "serious environments", what if I tell you that the world's fastest computer is running NetBSD? Maybe NASA's Lewis Research Center, NEC Europe and Sony Japan do not count as "serious environments". http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html.
Forking from NetBSD in 1995 after a very heated -- and embarrassing -- personal argument, OpenBSD's one and only focus is to offer security. Every line of code is hand-audited and, as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years. Striking a balance in hardware support somewhere between FreeBSD and NetBSD, OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode.
I don't know who got embarrassed w/ that argument, but certainly not Theo since he keeps a record of it in his own personal website for visitors to see:http://zeus.theos.com/deraadt/coremail.html. There hasn't been a hole in the default install in over EIGHT years, not seven.
OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode
OpenBSD runs in more platforms than FreeBSD!!! http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html
OpenBSD isn't acceptable as a desktop system or 3D workstation, however...One factor that mars OpenBSD's fair weather is its primary developer, Theo de Raadt...developers may wish to remain wary of this platform and its creator.
What a bunch of nonsense! I've been using OpenBSD in my desktop for years, and had developers listened to you, OpenSSH wouldn't exist, nor have over 88 percent of the SSH server market!http://www.openssh.com/press.html
I could go on and on, but I got tired already. I wonder why you guys promote these articles.
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 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.
But, I couldn't let this slide (even giving up my mod points): counting security advisories is just not a good way to judge the relative security of an OS, especially one of the more uncommon ones. SecurityFocus has no vulnerabilities listed for either MS-DOS or EROS, but few people would conclude that both operating systems were equally secure, or that MS-DOS's unblemished security record means it's more secure than OpenBSD (which has many dozens of vulnerabilites listed, most of which are advisories for bundled programs like Apache which OpenBSD nevertheless takes responsibility for).
Even worse, the more that people are believed to be using vulnerability lists to compare OSes, the more pressure vendors feel to improve their scores by sweeping security problems under the rug. Microsoft is notorious in this regard -- years after promising to make security their #1 focus, whenever they think they can get away with it they continue to hide known security bugs from sysadmins (who would be able to deploy work-arounds if they were told about the problems) in favor of silently sneaking the fixes into the next service pack many months later.