Slashdot Mirror
The Case for FreeBSD
essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the
accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."
second post! -1 overrated, -1 lame
I mean, FreeBSD already has a much larger userbase than NetBSD, so of what consequence are NetBSD's criticisms? I would say not much.
Of course, <troll>since BSD is dying anyway, I'm sure none of it matters either way.</troll>
I just installed FreeBSD this morning... I must say, straight off the iso, a quick install had me up and running pretty darn fast... much quicker than any linux distro I've tried in the recent past... Now if only I could figure out how to get visual studio to run under it, I could ditch windows... stupid work... stupid requiring development on Windows...
;)
One serious thing about FreeBSD over linux distro's... It feels like it has more of a structure, especially when installing utilities and apps... I find with linux distros, the stuff included feels like it's all over the place, hard to find where things end up installing... but I'm really a vxworks fan... so take what I say with a grain of salt...
---
Programming is like sex... Make one mistake and support it the rest of your life.
I don't see why people are so worried about advocacy. If you're not making money, what is the difference? Continue to refine the thing and get what you want out of it, and if other people don't get it, who loses? Personally I have a use for only a couple of operating systems now, and they are Linux and netbsd. netbsd because it runs on just about everything, and Linux because it's most supported. It's nothing against FreeBSD, which I simply don't need. The point is, I use whatever fits the job and if that was FreeBSD then I'd use that. The best fit is determined partially by functionality and partially by familiarity...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
...FreeBSD is getting a new logo (well, 0 submissions to date, but still !
In fact, for those who haven't tried it, it's quite an excellent full-featured Unix, with everything you'd find under Linux. In fact, it's fully binary compatible with Linux.
The only difference is that it does things the old way -- vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash. It doesn't have anyone pushing for "ease of use," though it's about at the level of slackware, except with ports, the greatest package management system known to man. Gentoo's portage doesn't even come close to the flexibility and reliability of ports.
Internally, it runs great, because it's not doing things the kernel shouldn't do to boost benchmarks. It's not deeply involved in corporate America, but remains strong due to good management.
Plus it's far more secure. With how much Linux websites are hacked these days -- see http://zone-h.org/ and check out the statistics section, at least 70-80% of website hacks are Linux based -- I wouldn't run it on Linux. FreeBSD is the obvious choice, as it runs its services flawlessly.
- - - - - Fear not the reaper, but my shiny white teeth.
I also heard that Windows used or at least used some BSD work in it's internet capability push years ago. One question will always dog me: Why aren't the BSD's as popular with their very good license at least in the eyes of the IBMs and HPs?
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
I've been using linux for couple of years, several times i thought about trying one of bsd systems, but didn't have enough courage to reccucitate it. If i see something that i like about them, then i might give it a try though.
An anonymous "BSD is dying" troll modded at +1 Interesting? Is this some kind of joke? I never have mod points, how come some fucking clueless moron gave 1 point to this shit?
Is it just me or do BSD people dole out more insults to each other than the Linux community does to them?
Not only that, but most of the jokes I hear from Linux people are often in jest, and not serious in any manner.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
Also, the development is getting very political, this also scares off people.
Gnome? KDE? Neither of those qualifies as "incredible", no matter how much crack you smoke...
prehistoric, Windows 3.1-level would be more accurate.
Why FreeBSD? Why go half-way? Why not switch to Mac OS X? It has everything that FreeBSD has, plus the best GUI there is or ever will be!
FreeBSD sounds great - until you realize you're dependent on X-Windows for graphics. X is garbage - Linux and the BSDs need to chuck that dinosaur in the rubbish bin and create something new and efficient from scratch.
What really sets FreeBSD apart is its robust death cycle. No other BSD at any price dies so reliably and consistently, with painless migration between deaths. It's clear that the FreeBSD development team has death as its highest priority and the result is easy to see in the product.
Scott has several good points. FreeBSD still has the same level of polish, the same amount of "professional" feel as it always has and it's just as consistent as before. The documentation is fabulous, Netgraph can do a lot of neat tricks, GEOM handles storage pretty well, vendor support is improving, etc. However, I think the most important one is discovered if you read between the lines: "don't focus on microbenchmarks."
There isn't nearly as much of a case for FreeBSD as there was a few years ago. The primary benefit it had over other operating systems in the 4.X days were a huge crew of folks keeping the ports up to date and terrific stability. The ports maintainers are the reason NetBSD didn't get the push.
Today, FreeBSD has chucked off the benefits of 4.X and is moving in a direction that will leave them with an unmaintainable codebase that only a handful of (fickle) people can work in. The performance won't be there when they get done, either. Without any benefits, all those ports maintainers are going to jump ship. FreeBSD doesn't have any compatibility benefits over the other BSDs where things like KDE or GNOME are concerned. This could happen at any time. NetBSD is already as good as or better than FreeBSD, and DragonFly is going to be better than all of them. The ports maintainers will leave and FreeBSD will be left as a hobby OS with no benefits over other operating systems.
I think that I shall never see
A tree as dead as BSD
Thanks but you're just one of those "copy-paste" trolls trying to win a few mod points and you look ridiculous.
Mod me down if you like, but if an old rant from an ex developer is considered "interesting", whis should be as well. ;)
Facts are facts.
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
NetBSD 2.0 is a higher-quality release than FreeBSD 5.3 on the IA32 platform. There's just no other way to put it.
My experience with FreeBSD is that the 4.x branch is rock-solid stable, fast, and everything works as it's supposed to.
NetBSD has basically reached that level of quality, with better performance.
FreeBSD 5.x has been unstable for me at best. While the userland programs are pretty much the same, the kernel-level changes have killed reliability. Furthermore, some of the much-touted new features simply do not work yet. I'm sure the SMP performance is much better, but I don't have many SMP machines. I've had problems with hard lockups, just doing things like trying to combine vlan and pf. The bridge interface, afaik, also, still doesn't work with pf.
As far as packages go, ports has more packages, true. Still, rarely has there been something not in pkgsrc that I absolutely needed. Pkgsrc is also much easier to work with, and far more friendly when it comes time to upgrade things. Portupgrade is an abortion, especially compared to even *gack* portage from ricerloonix.
There are reasons there's a buzz around NetBSD these days -- and reasons FreeBSD isn't getting the love it used to. I don't know whether the FreeBSD developers bit off more than they can chew, or if they just are rushing things out the door. But until they get their act together and put out a 5.x-RELEASE that truly is release-quality (by which I mean, all the features *work*, and the drivers are supported the same way), I'm going to be using NetBSD and advising my friends to do the same.
Surely one of us can send in a logo that looks like a coffin :-)
" Netcraft confirms - BSD is dead."
Anyone know where I can get root on FreeBSD for ~$20/month? Right now I'm using a Linux hoster and I'm happy with it but I'd be happier with FreeBSD for something on the Internet.
A decent number of them are marked BROKEN.
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
[nt].
The one here pretty much says it all.
This is BSD. Sod avocacy if it means in-fighting, mud-slinging, politics and such. We're not Linux or Microsoft so just STFU, code and enjoy. Don't make me come over there... ;-)
Resistance is futile. Reactance buggers it up.
..are here and here.
--
Requiem for the FUD
The NetBSD team were not criticising FreeBSD: basically, NetBSD stepped up their advocacy as part of NetBSD 2.0 release, including some whitepapers on performance comparision between NetBSD and FreeBSD. If anything, the BSD camps all have decent respect for each other, and honestly, Scott suggested that there was more animosity from the NetBSD camp that I think is the case in reality. All of the BSD camps could do with better advocacy, and Scott's post is more an indication that none of them are doing very good marketing, and as soon as NetBSD stepped up the marketing, the other camps (i.e. FreeBSD) felt they weren't getting a good rap: but really, the issue is, that FreeBSD guys just haven't been out there pushing their case as hard as they should really be.
...due to the heavy trolling I got last week regarding my comment that OS security and usability are 50% admin skill and 50% OS distributor integrity.
I'm learning more and more that OpenBSD definitely needs an admin that is more highly skilled admin than most Windows or Linux admins. I've definitely made progress in my implementing of OpenBSD, but I still say that my axiom holds true (see my SIG): With most OSes, if you have a competent admin, then you can have a secure system. OpenBSD might up the ante with oddball features to ensure security, but until those are implemented in other mainstream systems, they don't apply. Additionally, you really need to have very strong Unix skill to use OpenBSD, so it flies right in the face of my theory. Where most OSes would have the admin skills required at 50% competency, OpenBSD requires something more on the order of 80% competency in order to get a usable box.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
Same old GNU/Linux FUD, that has been disproved countless times...
In short: the MIT research is *11 years old*, and that Rice study on the TCP/IP stack uses FreeBSD *2.2.6*.
this is a really nice case for BSD!
Here's an idea, I think X-OS is better than Y-OS because I said so and if you don't like it then my dad will beat up your dad.
/.'rs can do) then you realise that the OS is only as good as it's ability to do the job you want it to.
Why does it matter what OS is used in a given situation? Surely that's down to the systems architect deciding upon what is best suited for the functionality they want at the price they can afford?
I stopped having the windows/linux/unix/*bsd debate a long time ago because once you learn more than how to install it (something I don't think a lot of
Thanks.
As one who is not particularly up to date on these matters, I wonder why so much development must occur? It sounds like Bill Gates argument for bundling IE with Windows: If we don't add more features to the core operating system, we'll die.
But hey, I still use ksh and vi, so what do I know?
fault-tolerant
if BSD is dying /dead , then its one hell of a zombie. .
I use three OSs, debian GNU/linux , freeBSD and Mac OS X.. and i think all three are as healthy as ever
im not sure on the whole of apples market share I think about 5% , but considering that OS X has its roots firmly in BSD from its NeXT heritage not to mention the programs it has from the FreeBSD project, then its safe to say that BSD is more alive than ever
The only things certain in war are Propaganda and Death. You can never be sure which is which though
Visual Studio under FreeBSD?
.NET
You might be interested in this article
from the MSDN magazine (July 2002)
about a FreeBSD implementation of
as well as the corresponding bits.
BTW, this runs on Mac OS X too.
I've been using Linux since around '96 something, first Redhat, then Slackware and recently Gentoo when I got my AMD64. I tried FreeBSD for the first time a few months ago when I had an old 200mhz machine that I just wanted to use for something, and since that seemed to work ok (a very basic install, no X or anything like that) I decided to give FreeBSD/AMD64 a try when I had to do a reinstallation due to hardware changes.
I downloaded a minimal boot CD, burned in, booted installed the base system over FTP and then X, KDE etc via ports...
After only a few hours I was totally confused. Everything just worked!! Well, almost everything. I had some problems with the soundcard, that was solved thanks to great documentation pointing me to a very logical solution.
I'm still a bit lightheaded. An operating system just can't be this good, I'm probably going to wake up soon.
- A decent number of them are marked BROKEN.
It only takes one to make someone's life miserableIf by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
I don't really think there's one system that has the best availability of all software. Some stuff's broken on Debian. Some stuff's broken on FreeBSD. I'm sure some stuff's broken on Gentoo as well. (Dunno first-hand, because my attempt at installing Gentoo failed.) It's just a question of whether you can get the stuff running that you personally really really need.
One thing I am not happy with about the FreeBSD ports system is that updating one port tends to break lots of other ports in complicated ways that are hard to fix. Portupgrade is the solution that everyone seems to push for solving this type of problem, but in my experience, portupgrade is a good way to hopelessly mung your system. To be fair, I don't think this is entirely the fault of the FreeBSD project; the stuff that gets really difficult to deal with is the Gnome libraries, and I think it's because Gnome just isn't careful enough about QA and maintaining backwards-compatibility (or they value rapid development more than stability).
Find free books.
In all seriousness there's only one word that can describe 5.x FreeBSD: CRAP. While I'm sure that some fanbox is going to pipe up about "I got it to run" all that I can say is that I have tried to install and run it on no less than four i386-based PCs and it crashed on ALL of them. In my experience, it's not unusual for it to have a kernel panic in the middle of the install process itself.
I'm sorry, I truly love BSD, and I have used it since 4.0-RELEASE, but the 5 branch of FreeBSD is a total, complete steaming pile.
For the moment, if you want a stable BSD for the i386 family, your best choice is NetBSD (which has NEVER given me problems.), and possibly OpenBSD.
FreeBSD may not be dead, but god DAMN does it smell like a corpse what sat out in the new orleans sun for a month.
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
That lie, mostly being, that FreeBSD is dying, or is some arcane system only to hack around on, similar to Plan9.
Subtle anti-Plan9 troll worked nicely into an ostensibly anti-trolling message. I'd give this a 7.
To say that A is better than B does not demand that anything B can do, A can to better. One might in that case say that A "owns" or "dominates" B. As you observe there is no single "dominant" package system. There are still grounds to ask whether or not A is better than B.
Your argument becomes more interesting when one considers that "B" doesn't even exist. Does B refer to Woody, Woody plus random backports, or Debian testing? What is Debian testing if not a crap shoot in motion. Debian package system, on a good day, if ever released again, could be compared on rough equal terms to the FreeBSD ports collection. But please, let's not pretend that three year intervals between stable releases a package system makes.
Linux appears to be way more popular than BSD these days, and there appear to be more apps and hardware drivers available for Linux than BSD.
So why would anyone consider BSD over Linux?
.. it's a *logo contest*. Kinda difficult to submit a new logo 2 days after the official announcement, I think.. :)
Anyway, for NetBSD's logo contest over 400 logos were submitted. Given FreeBSD's much wider user base, the numbers will probably be higher - and making a choice will be even harder.
--
Requiem for the FUD
I've been nothing but disappointed with FreeBSD's inability to get a binary ditribution of Java for the platform. I have used, and continue to use, FreeBSD for my main server, but next round will be OSX.
There are plenty of reasons why it hasn't happened, and plenty of workarounds - but I don't care (welcome to the customer).
It is sad to note that the former FreeBSD developers didn't leave without giving warning. Each and every one predicted what was happening to FreeBSD. These guys were on the bridge and saw the iceberg with which FreeBSD was about to collide. But the politicians and petty gauleiters at the FreeBSD helm said caution be damned, and instead steamed full speed ahead into 5.x disaster.
you are wrong!!!
FreeBSD is more popular as a server OS than the #1 Linux distro, Red Hat Linux. Did you know that?
Gentoo uses more bleeding edge packages than FreeBSD. Even in using the stable branch, I've downloaded borked packaged more than once. While the ports in FreeBSD are order, they are tested MUCH more & the broken packages are actually labeled broken!
Portage does have some advantages over ports. Package stability is not one of them.
Relative to the size of the ports/portage tree, yes, it does.
"A team of FreeBSD developers works closely with engineers at Intel to provide the best ACPI power management support available in an open source operating system."
Is this true? I would really like S3 suspend/resume to work. I can't make it happen cleanly with linux 2.6.10. Does FreeBSD do a better job? From reading section 11.16.3.2 Suspend/Resume in the FreeBSD manual, it doesn't sound like driver support is much better than Linux. Anyone have good ACPI experiences?
Everyone says apples hardware is overpriced. Prove it.
Maybe their hardware is actually worth more for longer.
Both chrysler and BMW make cars, but BMW's cost more generally...why?
It would be nice if people would be more rational about hardware and quit parroting lame statements that don't make sense.
'nuff said.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
What bridge do you live under when you're not posting to Slashdot?
http://www.freshports.org/
12,397 ports available
192 broken
600 others impaired in some sense
So that makes 11,600 of 12,400 or 93.5% ready to roll right out of the box. OK, maybe the stuff on the install CD isn't the most current - use the cvsup app provided on the CD, sync to one of the master sites, and *then* you've got 93.5%. Its a simple process that takes less than five minutes on a high speed connection.
Contrast this with the miserable mess that even the best Linux distros display and you'll see why FreeBSD is the choice for mature operators. Its all there, it all works, and you just don't have to mess with it.
Moving from Windows to Linux reduces perceived OS chaos by a certain amount. I got the same sort of relief when I converted from Redhat 6.2 to FreeBSD 4.0 some years ago.
I am very easy to get along with, but I don't have time to waste being nice to people who are being stupid. -Theo
Where are all the geom HOWTOs?
The linked man page is "tasty" n'all, but details on implementing such magical wonders, until recently, have been rather scarce.
This man page is better than the one linked to in the original post. There's also some information from committer (read: major contributor to ggate ) Pawel Jakub Dawidek in Poland.
Not that the info isn't there now, right under man, but for a while it was all very vague.
When searching about all that is BSD, don't forget Google's special google.com/bsd section.
You can also search the freebsd-geom mail list archives to learn more.
geom-gate sure looks nifty! It's akin to block-level NFS (though that's most likely an extremely oversimplified view). All the fun things you can do with geom you can do over your network. Need worldwide distributed, encrypted, multi-level RAID? Go right ahead!
Pretty slick. We'll be hearing more about this.....
It's a shame no one uses a BSD-style license that's time-limited. That way, companies could do their proprietary thing, make their money, and only release their source after they've already milked their products for what they're worth.
The Zesiger License is the only license I know about that seems to achieve the goals of both the GPL and BSD licenses.
I'd hit it. Sober.
I think Dragonfly BSD attempts to address this. I hope they do well.
I'm happy that the FreeBSD people like their OS. Call me when they fix SMP.
[o]_O
How hard can it be?
Mods, he was being funny, not flaming/trolling.
Seriously now. Stop buying from that punk. He keeps selling you bad shit.
NetBSD has shown facts that prove FreeBSD 5 is significantly slower than netbsd. FreeBSD 5 was a huge amount of overhaul, and ended up being slower than FreeBSD 4. In the mean time, the rest of the world has advanced, and FreeBSD has nothing to show for all the time they spent on their new threading/smp model. NetBSD is simply the better choice, and there is really no reason to use FreeBSD at all. OpenBSD if security is more important than performance, NetBSD if performance is more important than security. Linux if you need some linux only proprietary app. FreeBSD... um, nowhere?
Since the introduction of the FreeBSD-5 branch, FreeBSD enthusiasts have been eagerly awaiting the day when the new codebase would stabilize. After much development and four previous releases, FreeBSD-5 has finally gone stable with version 5.3. But don't mistake a stable codebase with stable software. While the development team will no longer accept major changes to the base system, FreeBSD 5.3 still has bugs and problems.
FreeBSD is a complete Unix-like operating system entirely developed by a single large team of programmers. This is in stark contrast to GNU/Linux which, as a complete operating system, has no central, cohesive developer base and is packaged in myriad different ways by myriad different distribution projects and companies; and proprietary Unixes, which are closed-source, restrictively licensed, and work on a comparatively small number of usually proprietary hardware architectures. FreeBSD has historically been clean, fast, reliable, and scalable. It's easy to use, learn, set up, and navigate from the command line, has more than 10,000 software programs in the Ports system, runs on a wide variety of hardware, and can easily be used for either a desktop or a server.
The transition to 5.x
Until the release of 5.3, the most recent "production release" was the FreeBSD-4 series, which is presently at version 4.10 and has been deemed the "Legacy" release in the wake of the 5.x branch going to STABLE. FreeBSD-5 was supposed to be a grand introduction of new technology -- a revolutionary improvement to the tried and true 4.x branch -- but soon after it left the gate, it got caught up in developer politics and failed implementations of too-ambitious theories among other questionable design decisions, causing some developers to fork the FreeBSD-4 project into a separate and more focused operating system.
The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned. The mix of threading subsystems still yields problems with efficiency and stability. Also, the networking subsystem may now be multithreaded and therefore faster on SMP systems, but users with some implementations of the 3Com (SysKonnect/Yukon) gigabit LAN chip are now unable to access their network at all because of new bugs that have popped up in the driver; other SysKonnect/Yukon users have problems under heavy network traffic, along with those using Intel Pro/1000 chips. Unfortunately all of our test systems use these network chips for onboard LAN; coincidentally they are two of the most popular gigabit LAN chipsets used on modern motherboards from major manufacturers. We also experienced lockups during boot if a custom-compiled kernel did not have SMP enabled on a Hyper-Threaded computer. A list of these and other errata can be found right here.
Considering the long list of significant problems in FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, it would seem irrational to recommend that anyone switch a production server from 4.x or any previous known-working 5.x release to 5.3. Just the same, the FreeBSD project maintains a migration guide for this purpose.
A lost lead
This is a shining example to all trolls how it is to be done. Subtle, but still the complete opposite of reality. Note the correct use of the "I like _insert thing I am trolling_" before the wildly innacurate claims and juxtaposition of negative aspects from the trolled subjects bitter enemy onto itself. See how he uses vague wording like "matter of personal pride _and other things_" to create an illusion of knowledge. Sure, "other things" can be "perfectly valid technical reasons", but we wouldn't want to admit that!
For all your hard work Nelson, I am proud to present you slashdot's coveted, troll of the week award. I suggest all the AC trolls study your work carefully, we are truely witness to a master at his craft here.
Gentoo users make fun of mandrake users, and everyone else makes fun of gentoo users. This is much more of a technical argument than such linux flaming, so perhaps you should have a nice cup of stfu.
The 5.x branch is still full of bugs, broken and/or unimplimented features, and stability issues. This is not polish, and its not what I expect from a "stable" unix system. Just move to NetBSD. Seriously, it was very easy to make the switch, and its way less headache.
One thing that always turned me off about the BSD projects was the amount of ego and politics. The only thing the BSD crowds hated more than Linux was the other versions of BSD. Meanwhile Linux supporters where much more concerned with the real threat, Microsoft.
Brian: Excuse me. Are you the Judean People's Front?
Reg: Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea
I'm always struck by the similarity.
In fact, most of the "ports" are trivial 1980s mini applets and stuff culled from Usenets comp.sources.unix. Largely useless and irrelevant nowadays.
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, where he is still works to this day.
And the short version of the same thing, but using a recovery CD instead of a live system http://dannyman.toldme.com/2005/01/24/freebsd-howt o-gmirror-system/
Kind of a coincidence that this gets posted today on /., as I've spent most of the morning setting up geom on a new 5.3 box, had used Vinum in the past on 4.x, and have loved FreeBSD for servers since 2.2.5
My Linux Command of the Day site : LCOD
On the subject of QNX, I've been meaning to try it for a while. I keep hearing that there is a free (not as in speech) download for personal use - but I can't find it. I'm probably just being blind, but can anyone draw me a roadmap to it?
there has been only one remote hole in the *DEFAULT INSTALL* in eight years! that includes a chrooted bind and apache so no need to get yer gay panties in a tizzy about it. and ego? well it wouldn't be percieved as ego if everyone was as smart as most of us bsd users. but since your not, your going to to percieve what is normal mental abilities to us as "ego". stupid apeman.
When I was on an "advocacy kick", I spent a year (well, a few minutes every day for a year) answering Linux questions on Usenet. A year after that, I took a good part time job offer from someone who remembered seeing my name and college in those newsgroups. A year or two later, when I was hunting for finite element software to help with a class project, I downloaded the most appropriate program I could find and was surprised to find my name on the acknowledgements page, because apparantly I'd helped fix the author's first Linux installation.
Of course, this could be "random good luck" as much as "bread on the water", and it probably helped that my "advocacy" was helping others rather than just preaching to them, but I think the lesson was clear: free software users don't give you money, but some can give you respect and some can give you more software. That wouldn't be worth it if the respect and software were all you were interested in, of course; it's just a bit of added reward for doing something like rooting for a baseball team that some people find fun to begin with.
>Mods, he was being funny :)
Maybe. But posting the link to what Netcraft actually says has been even funnier, IMHO.
..are here and here.
--
Requiem for the FUD
I use Gentoo on the desktop, and BSD on servers as well. I'm not sure what you mean by "using stable". The base install has nothing to do with ports, differences between 4x and 5x aside..
Most of the popular stuff is about the same as far as how up to date they are. Apache, Postgresql, Samba - they're pretty much the same. Some of the fringe stuff is pretty far out of date though, but as you say, I would rather have something tested well before release then someone throwing the source in the ports tree just to keep it up to date.
My biggest problem with Gentoo is that many things for me are broken, but not because of something broken in portage, but because portage itself is part of the problem and causing screw-ups. Seems like I can't go more than 2 weeks without some mysterious breakage of an application that I will have to dig up a fix. Some things (like torsmo right now for me) will just sit broken until the next update. No one else has problems, just me. I see a lot of Gentoo users report the same sorts of problems, and I hope they'll work on that area a bit more in the future.
I think the other messages in the thread on FreeBSD-current are also worth a glance, especially this one by Robert Watson, which stresses the strong cooperation and code sharing that is actually connecting the BSD projects.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
A quote from the 2005/2/22 review FreeBSD vs. NetBSD: ready for primetime?:
...
...
* FreeBSD's installer has always been, and still is, better than NetBSD's.
* FreeBSD 5.3 ships with x.org, which is **BROKEN**. Sorry, guys, but you don't earn any rating but broken when you can't even produce a usable TWM display on a Radeon 9200.
* XOrg on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE (or -STABLE, take your pick) still dies on this machine. This indicates that insufficient testing was done before the switch to xorg. Obviously they can't test everything, but a radeon 9200 isn't THAT old!* FreeBSD 5.3 ships with x.org, which is **BROKEN**. Sorry, guys, but you don't earn any rating but broken when you can't even produce a usable TWM display on a Radeon 9200.
In my experience, ports doesn't lag too far behind portage - it's somewhere between the portage stable branch and current. As the complexity of a package (and it's impact on other ports) grows, so does the time port maintainers spend testing them. Just to give a good idea of how much ports is up to date (or not):
If we take the GIMP for example, usually it is in ports the day it is announced. That speaks volumes of it's portability/cleanness of the code base. On the other hand, as important as it may be, it doesn't affect much other ports.
Then let's see KDE. KDE becomes part of ports (and the package repository) usually a few weeks after the announcment. If I remember correctly, one of the 3.2 releases was in ports some 3-4 days after release. On the other hand, 3.3.2 took 2 week to get there. That isn't much of a lag, now is it?
And finally: Xorg. Xorg affects many many ports, so there is usually a lot more time spent in testing then with the packages I just mentioned. We are still at 6.8.1, although 6.8.2 is coming as you can see from this mailing list post.
Generally, ports is quite up to date. There are weekly updates to OpenOffice.org 2.0 - probably because it is independent from other ports. Also, the most important package are updated pretty fast (I had PHP 5.0.3 running before the announcment of the security fix release hit slashdot). Others, however, lag behind somewhat. We don't have KDE 3.4beta in ports for example, while I guess it is already in portage.
As I said, I don't disagree with what you wrote, I just wanted to give a general impression about the freshness of ports for other readers (check out freshports to learn more.
I feel your pain Mike, but you haven't gone into specifics. It just looks right now like you've not gotten your way about certain directions the core is going, and you've taken your marbles home.
Good luck to ya, I hope you can take your expertise with BSD and make Apple's offering that much better. I just am saying that your post is lacking specifics.
X.org on FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE with a Radeon 9200 works just dandy for me. It's not broken, it works fine. Just because NetBSD is one of the lone holdouts for XFree86 doesn't mean that everything else is broken.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Go ahead, load up Sendmail, break out 3 or 4 equally fast machines to send at it, and time how long it takes for the machine to accept, say, 100,000 8K messages. Now install the other other system on the same hard drive and repeat. Score? FreeBSD. Every time. Repeat with squid, repeat with Apache, repeat with cyrus or imap-uw. FreeBSD every time. That's why hosting sites install FreeBSD over NetBSD about a thousand to one.
NetBSD for toasters, FreeBSD is for real computers. Linux needn't apply.
I'm sorry, but that article is just crap. It's not even an article, it's something someone would scribble in a notepad while trying FreeBSD and NetBSD for the first time.
And he's completely wrong too. Just because he couldn't get X.org to work on his Radeon 9200 in FreeBSD does *NOT* mean that it's broken. I know for a fact that it *WORKS* because I installed it on a machine with with a Radeon 9200 and a GeForce FX5200 and it worked perfectly, right out of the box. Both the initial FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE and the current patched release, not to mention -STABLE.
That "comparison" really is a poor choice to be used for making a point against FreeBSD
It's more a case of PEBCAK than anything else.
-CKS
P.S. PEBCAK == Problem Exists Between Chair And Keyboard, for those of you that don't know.
Tried FreeBSD recently and gave up on it due to the difficulty getting Java working. On a machine of limited capabilities trying to compile it is too much. It claimed to need 1.7GB of space for the compile! I didn't believe it until the system slowed to a crawl and I found the build directory eating all free space on the partition.
Too bad, seemed good otherwise. I'm falling back to good old Gentoo for now.
fuck off, idiot
/packages-stable/All/lynx-2.8.5.tgz' | tr -d ' '`
why would I link to a binary !
and, on top of it all, why bother linking for YOUR modus operandi ?
why not
wget -n `echo 'ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
The guy asked: "So why would anyone consider BSD over Linux?"
Modding "redundant" my one line answer is just stupid - or dishonest.
Gentoo plays dangerously with blockings and confusing dependencies, if you run 'tested' software only (and non-tested basically sets your machine on fire).
I have two examples. Firstly, when XFce 4.2.0 was just released, it was in Portage in a heartbeat. Some days later HALF of it was marked tested, and half was still untested (at least for x86). Since parts that were marked tested needed the untested ebuilds, they couldn't emerge; and since some other software (e.g. panel plugins) needed the older versions altogether, emerging them killed your newer versions (and hence your whole xfce4) and brought back older, incompatible ones.
While this is as much a failure of XFce for being such a disjointed piece of shit in the first place, Gentoo Portage falls way behind FreeBSD which Doesn't Care About Versions. Rightly so.
Second example, copy-n-paste:
[blocks B ] [ebuild U ] media-libs/freetype-2.1.9-r1 [2.1.5-r1] -bindist -debug -doc +zlib 969 kB
[ebuild U ] media-gfx/gimp-2.2.3 [2.0.4] -aalib (-altivec) -debug -doc +gimpprint +gtkhtml +jpeg +mmx -mng +png -python +sse -svg -tiff -wmf 13,486 kB
I can either have the new GIMP (2.2 was in the tree for one day buildable, then impossible to emerge without hacks for a month or so, now back as untested - even though every other package manager concedes that it is in fact very stable) and lose Firefox because a new freetype is needed, or keep the old GIMP and be able to use Firefox. Charming.
The worst example ever, is that even the tested ebuilds are often completely broken. libusb needs user intervention to work at all (try to emerge hpoj, for instance), and this is a known bug nobody has fixed in portage. It was marked tested in spite of this. The new openmotif (might have been fixed, but was still bad when first marked tested) couldn't be linked against at all - try emerging nedit. It was marked tested.
It just goes to show that, no matter how big a community you have testing your software, if they're complete f#%^ing morons it doesn't help your case. pkgsrc and FBSD Ports have recently shown a MUCH better stability record, even using bleeding-edge software, and without these mysterious breakages and blockings.
I like Gentoo Portage since it gracefully lists what it will do and has USE and all, but sometimes it makes me want to break down and cry.
Sam ty sig.
I don't mean to troll, but I think this post has to be made. For the record, I have nothing against the *BSD's (I'm actually considering moving to one of them now that I have a new hard drive to set up), and I have no problem with people advocating them. However, I like to see people advocating their favourite OS using *good* facts.
A lot of people are throwing around the fact that slashdot ran a story back in 2004 stating, correctly, that NetBSD 2.0 was used by some Swedish researchers to set a new Internet2 land-speed record. A lot of people point out that the researchers used NetBSD because they found its network stack to be superior to linux's.
Head on over to here to see the official history of the competition. It's true that NetBSD set the record in April 2004 and then again in September 2004. However, since then a CERN-Caltech and then a Japanese team have broken that record - using linux 2.6. So the linux kernel is indeed capable of the same high speed networking as NetBSD.
Of course, even if it wasn't, we have to question how much land-speed records mean for an OS - look further back into the history of the competition and you'll see a number of records set by, wait for it, Windows. Apparently it doesn't take a quality system to set a record afterall.
Again, I just want to emphasise, I'm not bashing on NetBSD. I'm not bashing any system (alright, except Windows). I just want to make it clear that the several people who instantly trot out the NetBSD record story as a reason to convert to NetBSD should probably stop doing so.
Grr @ HTML nature of Slashdot... the first line of that portage had "net-www/mozilla-firefox-1.0-r3 (from pkg media-libs/freetype-2.1.9-r1)" after a certain bracket I won't repeat.
Hint to Slashdot: Wake up, you can format things without needing HTML.
Sam ty sig.
Parent is indeed redundant: my apologies to readers (especially BSD users) for posting it. I did it because I thought that the other equivalent message wouldn't get modded up, but it did. :-)
I'll pay more attention in the future.
I'm sorry (oh so sorry) to say that you're full of sh*t. :)
;)
In the words of one of the Swedish researchers:
"Actually, we did tests with Linux (both 2.4 and 2.6) and FreeBSD also, but with not as good results. Linux IP stack eats much more CPU (and memory!) than it should. Basic problem is the network buffer implementation (or the lack of!). This is true for both 2.4 and 2.6. A redesign is needed of the IP stack to make it perform better. FreeBSD have a lot of linear searches in their IP stack left, fixing that would most likely give the same result as for NetBSD. I may port over some of the NetBSD changes if I get some spare time. NetBSD had already fixed (most of) those problems, some of them long ago, therefore it was simple to just use it."
That was May 2004.
Maybe in the following six months the Linux developers took a sneaky peek at the NetBSD code, in order to learn how things are when they're done properly.
Mind share is partly right. These companies (IBM, HP, etc.) make most of their money in hardware and services, and they have their software patents for software protection. These companies chose the GPL for bait. If there's a GPL replacement for GNU/Linux, they'd opt for it.
These giants need software for their hardware and service business model. With the GPL, they can leverage the GPL community to do most of the work, since the majority of GPL derivatives are Open. All they have to do is give away some bait. For a GNU/Linux loving company like IBM, they sure are selective about their Opening software instead of Opening everything, like their DB2 database or like other GNU/Linux companies (Red Hat...)
In other words, software development is a major expense, but the GPL grants these companies the collective derivative works of others; thus, the GPL benefits these giants greatly. If they need to take control of the software market in the future, they'll just use their software patents.
http://www.openssh.org/usage/ssh-stats.html
Like all OSes -- including Microsoft Windows and Apple's OS X as well as the various Linux distributions and other BSDs-- FreeBSD has it's pros and cons. Choosing which to use boils down to prioritizing what you need the system to do and what's less hassle for you. If you're a Windows admin primarily, it's going to be immeasureably easier for you to set up LDAP on an AD box; if you're primarily a unix admin, you can just as easily do the same thing on a *nix.
FreeBSD for the impatient.
His X problems are his own, not FreeBSDs. And as a long time freebsd user, I must say our installer sucks nuts. NetBSDs, a couple linux distros and especially OpenBSDs are much better. The FreeBSD installer requires you to get used to its quirks, where doing something logical like "commit changes" makes the installer stupidly re-download and re-extract everything its already installed for no reason. The other BSDs installers are much more logical.
FreeBSD doesn't need to do anything to support java, java needs to be released for FreeBSD. Tell Sun you aren't going to use java because they are too thick-headed to release it for freebsd. If enough of you whiners actually do something for a change, they will fix it.
I was reading your post and I figured some idiot would do that... I understood the reasoning behind it and I would have done the same.
FYI: on FreeBSD you'd use `fetch` rather than `wget`
oh *I* would, would *I* ?
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I think they search through for unlinked URI's just to flame
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Ha! That article is so misinformed. In fact, FreeBSD has the worst most buggy networking stack of all the BSDs due to the buggy "SACK" code which does not properly implement SACK, according to the authors of the SACK spec. FreeBSD 5.3 Release went out with a thoroughly buggy TCP stack. It's hilarious how FreeBSD is touting their SACK code when it's actually something to be ashamed of.
Ditto for the SMP locking they're touting as an achievement. They've been fumbling around for a year and it's still not right.
It is available on many platforms including BSD, Linux and Windows
The best way to predict the future is to invent it
I recommend this.
Use ISO 8601 dates [YYYY-MM-DD]
You sure you don't have a motherboard with one of those onboard ATI IXP chipsets?
READY.
PRINT ""+-0