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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."
Some linux distributions are more fragmentary than others. Gentoo linux in particular tends to put things in the same place every time; /etc/conf.d for commandline and environment options, and /etc/ for that package's config files. On the other hand I've been mulling over the possibility of putting QNX on my laptop, which has only 128MB ram :)
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
... 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."
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
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."
Yes, but there is a very dedicated team that manages to produce a very high quality J2SDK implementation, even if the installation involves compiling Java from scratch. 1.4.2-p7 runs a production Tomcat site like a dream here. I am very happy with OS X as as desktop OS, but i would not rate Apple's SDK as highly as FreeBSD's one, YMMV, of course. BTW, nobody knows if Apple intends to ship a 64bit JVM with Tiger, au contraire, FreeBSD's Java team has an already working, if early one, for AMD64.
c) Make sure to have a relatively recent ports tree /usr/ports/java/jdk14
--------Quick recipe to get up and running with Java under FreeBSD ------
a) Make sure to be running a modular kernel OR a kernel with linux compatibility enabled (Compile phase only)
b) Read http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-java/
d) cd
e) make install
f) follow instructions.