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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."
Two minutes and no first post? Get on the ball today /.ers.
And that's an easy FP.
I think Netcraft would disagree with you.
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>
[ed. 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
It's not dead yet! Or is it?
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 !
The statistics sample from 2004 over a year 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), alt
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"
FFFT!!
RRWWOOOOWWWLLL!!
"[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."
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 the Amazing 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
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.
A decent number of them are marked BROKEN. The usefulness of ports is overrated. Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
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
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.
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 l
[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.
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.
...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.
Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all know *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personae?
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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 ever deeper into the mire of decay, their parting addresses will resound as fitting eulogies to BSD's demise.
"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.
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.
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*.
I'm happy that the FreeBSD people like their OS. Call me when they fix SMP.
[o]_O
How hard can it be?
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.
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.
..are here and here.
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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.
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.
If that's too much typing for you,(without any spaces put there by Slashdot) yields: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386/pack
Oh, and for you "Well just right-click on the text and click 'Follow Link'." people, tell me how to open a selected-text link containing extraneous Slashdot spaces in a new tab using Mozilla, or shut up.
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.
The guy asked: "So why would anyone consider BSD over Linux?"
Modding "redundant" my one line answer is just stupid - or dishonest.
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.
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.
You would save yourself alot of trouble by using a free language.
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.
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