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Looking at FreeBSD 6 and Beyond
Provataki writes "OSNews published an interview with core FreeBSD developers John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long. They discuss about the upcoming FreeBSD 6 and its new features, the competition, TrustedBSD, Darwin and much more."
From the article:
The TrustedBSD Audit support originated in large part from Mac OS X, and we really appreciate Apple's work with us to develop audit support, and their support in getting it out into open source. One of the outcomes of this will be our (TrustedBSD's) continuing maintainership of OpenBSM, a bundling of the libraries, documentation, and command line tools, which will be portable across a host of operating systems including FreeBSD, Darwin, and Linux. This sort of arrangement can be a strong motivator for companies like Apple to release software under open source -- we're already preparing bundles of documentation and feature enhancements that we hope they will be able to adopt back into Mac OS X.
I'm glad Apple is helping out, but I was hoping they would go more into the BSD kernel api that's appearing in Tiger.
"Scientists don't change their minds, they just die." -- Max Planck
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the Linux community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: Linux is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. This led to Mandrakesoft, makers of another troubled distro, to purchase Connectiva and become Mandriva. However, industry anaylists say that this will not help since Mandriva is already a shell of its former self.
Fact: Linux has balkanized yet again. There are now no less than 140 separate, competing Linux distros, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other distros, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project (except for Redhat and Novell/Suse): fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: The trivial issue os what to call Linux continues to hound Linux. At a recent Linux conference in San Francisco, a fight broke out between RMS (Richard M. Stallman) who says Linux should be called GNU/Linux and Linus Torvalds who created Linux and says that Linux should be called Linux. This led to a massive barroom style brawl involving at least 150 Linux geeks. The SFPD was called out to break up the melee, and arrested 150 people. It was estimated that at least 2 to 3 times that many were involved in the brawl, but there wasn't enough police on hand to arrest or count all of them. Sixty one people were hospitalized as a result of this brawl, and one person is still in a coma. Another three people had to get their jaws wired shut.
Fact: Linux is plagued by a lack of professionalism. The stereotype of Linux users being fat unwashed dateless geeks who still live in their parents' basements and refuse to shower more than once a month is all too true. The best example of this is RMS who claims to have a "water phobia" and thus rarely bathes. RMS also looks like he has been living in a cave for the last 5 years. In fact, RMS has been arrested twice because he has been mistaken for Osama Bin Laden. While RMS has always been found to not be Osama Bin Laden, it has created a perception of that Linux is the "terrorist operating system". Linus Torvalds has been forced to spend a great deal of time correcting this perception instead of working on the Linux kernel. Alan Cox quit Linux kernel development since he got tired of everyone saying that he was a terrorist.
Fact: There are almost no Connectiva developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support for Redhat's Fedora project. The newly formed group believes that Fedora has strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with other Linux distros and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: Ubuntu Linux, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered Debian "distro", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing. It also doesn't help that most people think the word, "Ubuntu", is an obscure term for a homosexual orgy." Netcraft reports that Ubuntu Linux is run on exactly 0% of internet servers. An attempt to save Ubuntu by creating a derivative distro called Kubuntu has also failed.
Fact: Debian Linux, which claims to focus on "being free" (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for Linux use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our Debian boxes ou
There should be a special FreeBSD 6.6.6 release with the demon/daemon emphasized.
FreeBSD 5 was the first FreeBSD major version that actually worked properly on my laptop. I'm really excited about FreeBSD 6. Possibly the best feature will be the inclusion of WPA for 802.11. Everything seemed to work on my Thinkpad when I was hardwired, but wireless support was TERRIBLE in FreeBSD 5. Having native drivers for wireless adapters, as well as WPA support will make a transition to FreeBSD full-time on my laptop possible. The only other thing I could really ask for would be an easy-to-use DVD transcoder. I've used most of the packages out there for *nix, but they're still in their infancy. It won't be too long before they're ready for prime-time.
I enjoy FreeBSD a lot, it is a great OS and it's fun to use, and I'd like to thank everyone involved.
:)
Having said that, there are a few areas where FreeBSD sadly lacks behind Linux. For example, support for USB 2.0 is flakey, devices often don't work or behave oddly, and if you have atapicam compiled into the kernel, good luck with your iPod (firewire works flawlessly, though).
Another thing is WPA, there's no support for it in the stable branches, only in -CURRENT. I find support for USB 2.0 and WPA to be very important for an OS 2005, and frankly, support for both should be taken for granted, I think.
Other than that, it's a great OS and I am looking forward to 6.0. And I encourage everyone who is unfamiliar with FreeBSD to try it out - you might love it.
This reminds me: I recently got a shiny new hard drive and am going to put a bunch of partitions at the end. I was recently reminded of FreeBSD, and I'm gonna include that alongside Mandrake and Ubuntu (and whatever BeOS is left these days).
Are there any other major BSD distros, or is it just these guys? And what non-linux, non-BSD OSes are around now? (I hear OS X is due to be leaked for x86 any day now).
Are Linux and Free/OpenBSD the only real options now?
xkcd.com - a webcomic of mathematics, love, and language.
what ever happend to that contest to change the logo/image? I havent seen anything in a while about that.
Offtopic a bit, but it'll be sad to see Eugenia leaving OS News..
Anyone with a little experience in Life, would recognize Linux state-of-affairs as par for the course on Evolutionary terms. Chicken Little's would like to have corporate structure, command, control, dress code, etiquette and predictability of a market based product cycles to salve their insecurities.
Linux has contributed an enormous amount of good code that has driven the debate on software development. Dead would not describe Apache, *nix, open source and vertical applications that are disrupting the way American corps adopt new standards.
Why should I use FreeBSD over Solaris 10?
Linux and the associated cloud of distros are like an English garden - mad experiments in all corners, and a mostly clear middle.
FreeBSD is like the lawn of the commanding officer at Camp Pendleton. Each blade the same distance from the blades around it, all the same height, and if one should slip out of place someone comes and corrects this quickly.
I love the flow of cool GPL stuff ending up in
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
Maybe now that Sun has opened up Solaris, maybe its worthwhile. The *BSD was spurred by Bell Labs deciding to charge for licensing of Unix. BTW have you heard that old-timer claims require a lower ID #?
Neither does "Linux" describe Apache, *nix, open source, or vertical applications.
Why do people write poetry or write stories? You do it for the love of it. It is your passion and your hard work that you want to show the world. To me it is a form of artistic expression. That's why there are some many flavors of Linux and BSD.
Why should Apple care? They've got a kernel and now have bigger fish to fry: challenging Microsoft for desktop supremacy.
Apple may mouth platitudes about "free software", but mostly take and give back little.
im pretty disapointed tha USB2 is basically spot and go for device support.
iPod Minis dont work at all and the problem was reported by a couple of people and not even acknowledged
. . . but isn't FreeBSD dead?
Linux is like a operating system that is based around somewhat losely associated software compiled and created using tools from a specific RMS-related orginization that boots and operates off of a free software kernel that is developed by a group of originally non-paid volenteer guys who ended up being fairly wealthy from it.
*BSD is like a operating system that is based on a old operating system that took it's original ideas and code from a phone company. Eventually that old OS was mostly destroyed thru a series of malicious lawsuites and became largely irrelevent for a substantial length of time. Eventually this OS-that-is-like BSD turned around became decently well known and splintered into various ego-driven factions that duplicated each other's work in a effort to create a OS modeled more accurately after their own image of a perfect OS. These people generally use software originally written for the previously mentioned OS-that-is-like-linux-distros and use tools originally written for that other OS and spend their time occasionally rewriting bits and peices of it, then they begin telling each other and everybody else how superior they are because of it.
Hey, I think that that is a pretty decent analogy.
The SMPVFS work is a task to add fine-grained locking to the VFS layer of the kernel as well as the UFS and nullfs filesystems.
I don't hate FreeBSD, but this is one proof of how bad has been the 5.x release. 5.x was suposed to be the SMP-friendly version, but a piece of code so important as the VFS is, is still under a single-lock kind of locking. I mean, I can imagine how BAD freebsd 5.x must be in filesystem-intesive workloads in SMP systems
I mean, what have they been doing all those years? Freebsd 5.x took a lot of time, this kind of optimization should have been done already.
This has nothing to do with, "corporate structure, command, control, dress code, etiquette and predictability of a market based product cycles". If people working on Linux can't come up with a distro that lasts longer than a few days or can't even bother to shower, then Linux is dead. If people working on Linux can't decide on its name and have massive barroom brawls as a result, then Linux is DEAD.
There is a PC operating system revolution in the making. In the next few years we will see a display of software battlery like never before. Mac OS X will be available on x86-based PCs, and FreeBSD 6.0 will be released. Solaris 11 promises to be perhaps the greatest true UNIX workstaton release ever. The new offerings from Mandriva, based on Debian rather than RedHat, will surely be amongst the top of their class. And of course there will (maybe) be the release of Longhorn.
With the advent of multicored CPUs, the level of concurrent performance will explode. OSes like Linux, FreeBSD 6.0, Solaris 10 and 11, and Mac OS X will be prepared for that change. They will be able to effectively take advantage of the first generation of multicore PC CPUs. There are questions as to whether Longhorn will be able to cut it in the New Computing Order that will soon be upon us.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
won't be missed. maybe start a new website without ridiculous and arbitrary moderation
I was quite an OSNews fan until I saw that David Adams, the publisher of OSNews, posted a fake resignation here at Slashdot.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
For one thing, some people don't like the restrictions that other licenses (like the GPL) place on use of the source code. I can understand why some people like it, I am just not one of those people.
The mistreatment of such a respected and glorious veteran such as yourself is an utter mockery.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yes, mistakes were made and things have gone less than well. But have no fear! Ex-FreeBSD developer Matt Dillon to the rescue! For a fellow like yourself can use DragonflyBSD instead of FreeBSD 5.0. It offers the SMP capabilities you crave and need, without the Giant Lock syndrome of FreeBSD 5.0.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
Yes, it is utterly contemptuous. Nothing to see here anymore but the filthy hoi polloi. Why these young whippersnappers with the 6 digit id numbers, they simply have no fucking couth, they will not even suck my dick.
The only difference between GPL and BSD is that BSD lets people put a more restrictive license on their software and the GPL doesn't.
Whoopy. That is SOOO fucking evil and restrictive of GPL right?
wrong.
Why is it so important for BSD'rs to show off how 'restrictive' the GPL is all the time?
The 'rights' your talking about is literally 'the right to take away other people's rights'. Why is that so admirable? It's insane.
The GPL PROTECTS my rights as a end user to continuing to depend on and use Free software. BSD license doesn't. Any person can take BSD code and release it under any insanely restrictive license they choose and if, thru one way or another, I happen to be forced to use that software then I am the one being screwed over because my rights have evaporated.
With the GPL my rights as a end user are protected and respected. I want free software, and I want it to remain free.
Say it! GNU/Linux!
Looks like a nice alternative to crappy does-this-belong-hered operating systems. Let's switch! :P
The truly selfless give without expectations.
Regards,
Steve
This is Slashdot.... what does this have to do with Linux? :P
Yes, and the GPL *removes* my ability to use that software in a corporate environment. I literally CANNOT work on a GPL project and be a programmer-for-hire. It's the same problem that Microsoft has with their programmers and open-source: they might contaminate corporate IP. The GPL is VIRAL. It's intended that way. Of course, so is Microsoft's license. I won't look at code from either one (unless it's MY code).
The BSD license means that as a corporate programmer, if I know that there's a function out there that does what I need, I can use it. The BSD license means that ANYONE can do just about ANYTHING with the code (I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advise). GPL means that I must avert my eyes and not fix bugs that I find because I can't look at the stupid code! Boy, that irks me.
. Define sqrt(x) as something really evil like (x / rand()), and bury it deep. Watch your coworkers go nuts.
Yes, I have said that about a man.
emt 377 emt 4
I'm not sure if this is even worth mentioning, but there is Apple's Darwin. I know nothing about it so I can't tell you more, but the site seems to be http://developer.apple.com/darwin/ and it does have install CDs.
Maybe someone else can tell us ups and downs of using Darwin?
The space unintentionally left unblank.
Oh man, maybe it was just the lighting but someone needs to get those guys out in the sun. Sheesh, I'm a hardcore geek programmer too but even I recognize the health benefits of some daylight each day (at least if you don't want to end up in a mental institute).
As for FreeBSD... It's cool but unless the latest VMware runs on it, it's useless to me. I was happy when nVidia added FreeBSD drivers though.
lol, retard.
I think it'd be cool if we moved to debian package management though. Even though I do think urpmi is sweet, sometimes it seems a bit cloodgy and slow.
Well, BSD has been along for a long time, since the late 1970s. In fact, here is the Berkeley copyright notice for FreeBSD:
Compare that history to Windows (first released in 1985, although to be fair, Windows development and the release of DOS was in 1981), and to GNU/Linux (GNU project started in 1984, Linux started in 1991). Now, BSD has been freely available for just about the same time as Linux, though. Read your history before you start flaming.
Secondly, the BSDs have a nice level of integration between the kernel and the userland, since the developers work on both parts. For example, the BSD developers work on the kernel, the userland, the C library, the manual pages, etc. The only parts that aren't developed by the BSDs are the C compiler (from GNU) and a handful of other GNU utilities. This is different from Linux, in which the kernel is developed by Linus and contributors, while the userland is developed mainly by the GNU project.
Finally, the BSDs have proven themselves over the last 25+ years that they are very stable and capable operating systems, with a lot of merit. BSD was the first operating system to implement TCP/IP. BSD was a major commercial player back in the days of 4.3BSD and the VAX, and it does behind the scenes work in many of the non-BSD operating systems that people use (e.g., the core of Mac OS X and many Windows networking tools). BSD was one of the first pieces of software that went from closed-source to open-source (but not without a fight from AT&T, which explains why Linux, and not BSD, seems to be more popular).
BSD is a very nice operating system, and developers like working on it because it is well engineered and is proven. Read some BSD history and try a BSD before you start flaming.
One of the nicest things about the BSDs is that they have good userlands, instead of the horrible mess of GNU crap that you get stuck with on linux. And the userland utilities all have real documentation, and in the same format even!
If you know that dragonflybsd is still under giant lock for lots of stuff, maybe you shouldn't be posting that people should use it instead of freebsd to get away from giant locks?
Until dragonflybsd actually has a stable release, quit pretending its an option.
Nothing in your post has anything to do with what I said, or the topic at hand. Maybe you should try reading this thread again?
That's what's called a joke son.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
http://www.zejn.si/~natan/666.html 'Bill Gates 666' in Google gives me 129,000 matches. Of course it's using Ascii, not Hebrew letters as it should be. Another great Gates/Anti-Christ page is (even has that old Excel '95 easter egg:
http://egomania.nu/gates.html
What Slashdotter doesn't know this by heart?
Get your Unix fortune now!
Does this mean that there IS an afterlife?
:)
Well we all knew the freebsd daemon would go to hell
I for one, welcome our new hot grits... PROFIT!
You can already download FreeBSD 7 Here.
Mac OS X will be available on x86-based PCs
No, Apple is a hardware company. Mac OS X is the hook to get you to buy the slighly more expensive (today) Apple hardware over commodity PC hardware. Apple's switch to x86 does not mean they will be selling Mac OS X for PCs. They will have a non-PC proprietary design that Mac OS X will require. Other OS' may be ported to that new hardware but Mac OS X will not be moving off of it. Do not be confused by current development systems that are pretty generic. Apple has a history of not supporting development systems in the retail product, even when the hardware was their own.
And that was the funniest damn troll I've read in a long time. Mad props to you!
1. Tell us more about SMPVFS and its significance.
Yeah, nice warm entry into this article...you want more? more than? I feel the sleep fairys pulling down my eyelids!
Robert Watson John Baldwin: The SMPVFS work is a task to add fine-grained locking to the VFS layer of the kerne....
At this point I would simulate key presses synonymous with my head hittin the keyboard after falling asleep, however, I realised this may be too subtle for the slashdot crowd, and I fear I am verging on troll/redundant as it is.
On the other hand, Microsofts articles at least would allow the executive to stay awake long enough to scrawl the url to bring it up at the next meeting, or remember it...
I guess this is a techie case document, but BSD's should have business case documents around, as in companies where the IT guys have some real power, it is used substantially (like in our offices) but in larger corps, maybe it is overlooked?
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
And the Greek text says "Hde h sophia estin; ho echn noun psphisat ton arithmon tou thriou, arithmos gar anthrpou estin; kai ho arithmos autou hexakosioi hexkonta hex."
That means six hundred sixty-six.
I know, it's amazing to see people twist the facts when writing propaganda!
It's only a joke. No matter, us Jews don't buy that Revelations bullshit.
Get your Unix fortune now!
In the article I noticed this:
"The issue found with HT is that the two logical CPUs on a single core share the same caches "
Thats a seriously nasty hardware "bug"! Didn't anyone at intel even consider the security implications with this or were they just beaten over the head by the marketing guys who were desperate to get one over AMD??
Changing the subject here.
mkLinux doesn't use Linus's kernel so is it correct to even call it mkLinux?
I have a second hand Apple performa which I know can run mkLinux but at this late stage I can't find a working mirror to download it from. Any suggestions would be welcome.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
..the GPL *removes* my ability to use that software in a corporate environment.
Boo. Fucking. Hoo.
I literally CANNOT work on a GPL project and be a programmer-for-hire.
You're so dead wrong I can only conclude that you're lying. I not only manage a large GPL project, I've filled copyright assignments with the FSF. Yet my day job is to manage SCM repositories for some very proprietary enterprise telecoms software for a large corporation. Not only are my employers fully aware of my "other" job, they're supportive and have happilly signed a copyright waiver. I'm hardly unique in this situation.
Thousands of people manage to work on GPL and non-GPL codebases at the same time without any problems at all. Claiming that you can't even look at GPL'd code without somehow "infecting" yourself or your work is just so much horse shit I can smell it from here. No one but other BSDL zealots even agree with you there; not even the FSF. There is nothing at all wrong with reading a section of GPL licenced code and re-implementing it yourself. The only time this would be copyright infringment would be if you copied verbatim, and only then for non-trivial works. Just using the same variable name(s) or re-implementing a structure (for example) is not infringement.
However from the last paragraph of your post, it looks as though you're more interested in taking than you are in giving, so of course you like the BSDL. You employ other peoples work for your own benefit without having to do any real work yourself. What's not to like? Hell, if there are people out there generous enough and stupid enough to give you a free ride like that, then more power to them I guess.
This made my day. My favorite distro is finally important enough to be used in a "Linux is dead" post by a BSD troll. Go Ubuntu.
Open Source Sushi
My (grandparent) post is a sincere question. Many people have studied Linux and open source in general. The question is, why does it work. The answer is quite important because it undermines the basic principles that a lot of modern economic theory is based on. One of the usual answers is that the GPL gives developers a feeling that their work will be treated fairly and not be appropriated for someone else's profit. The continued existence of BSD makes one wonder about that assumption.
... (shrugs).
Bottom line: I do care about your answer: it is important. Perhaps I could express myself better but
... 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, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.
*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."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
If acceptance of BSD code is 100% based on merit as I've repeatedly heard claimed, then why are there multiple different distributions? Shouldn't they all be using the best code?
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
The reason BSD continues to exist is that, despite what capitalism assumes, not all people are assholes who feel the need to own and control everything. If I write software and release it under as BSD license, and then come company uses it, is my software any worse off? Of course not. However, people now do have one more avenue to take if for some reason I stop developing my version, or if the commercial version advances at a more rapid pace. The GPL on the other hand somehow assumes that a company using open code to benefit themselves, and hence making better software available to everyone, is a bad thing, because people are making money off of it. Any company with good intentions is going to give back to the community (see the first comment in this thread about Apple). Any company without an interest in helping out won't use GPL code anyway, so the argument that GPL is the only way to encourage contributions is silly. In fact, if not for the BSD license, FreeBSD wouldn't be benefiting from Apple's contributions at all!
BSD works because not everyone is an asshole. The fact that you're shocked it does work is a testament to the terrible state our world is in today. Modern economic theory is an idiotic, self-fulfulling prophesy.
Calling it FreeBSD 6 still doesn't remove the stink of FreeBSD 5. They can call it FreeBSD 7 for all it matters. The fact remains that FreeBSD continues to accumulate bloat and ugliness in its source code like its multiple redundant security systems. And it's still not as fast as DragonFlyBSD!
will FreeBSD be as easy to install as Mac OS X? Or am I the only one who cares?
This is the best troll i have read in a while. Something new. Wonder how often we are going to see it pop up.
cat
Or Glue Eunichs!
New glue sticks?
They use sh standard for user accounts, csh for root.
That's flamebait! See Csh Considered Harmful. Solaris uses Bourne shell for root and user accounts, by default. Bash is installed if you install the full (SUNWCXall) package cluster.
Solaris scales to more than 64 CPUs - certainly 96, presumably higher in principle (though the biggest Sun server, AFAIK, goes to 96 CPUs)
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Amazon.com does not run debian. The run redhat.
The cow goes "tink"
One thing we have to admit is that Jordan Hubbard was right about the problems with the 5.x series. He said that the project would never deliver on its unrealistic goals for 5.0. History proved him right. The question is, can Watson deliver the goods, or is it another exercise in futility?
way to miss the point
What is different?
:-)
All freebsd device names are in the form:
e.g. ad0, ad1... ed0, ed1... agp0, plip0...
All start at zero, all use the device driver's name, seems pretty straight forwards and standardized to me, or are you suggesting that everyone should just copy linux and somehow, being the youngest OS around, it is more correct?
http://www.inspircd.org - Modular C++ IRC Daemon
I'll bite, but just because it will be informative for those who don't know.
/dev/adX (X being an number). There are slices (partitions) on each drive, so you can have /dev/adXsY (Y being a number). Slices are like Microsoft-style (FAT/NTFS) partitions. In addition to the slices, you have a partitions within that slice, so /dev/adXsYZ (Z being a lowercase letter).
FreeBSD does have a system. Hard-Drives are
There is a convention to the letters:
a = root
b = swap
c = whole disk
d = obselete whole disk
e-h = everything else
So, ad0s1a is the root partition on disk 1, slice 1. It's not "unstandardized". Other devices have their own conventions too. It's not that hard. Anyone with a little bit of intelligence can make sense of it.
Vivin Suresh Paliath
http://vivin.net
I like
I like NetBSD's general level of quality, and have found its functionality a lifesaver more than once.
Having said that, I usually wind up using Debian Linux, because NetBSD often lacks hardware support for common (cheap) PC hardware that I have, e.g. my SMC1211TX 10/100 network card.
If I could use NetBSD - I would!
There are ancient, variant manuscripts that list 616 as the value instead, although most manuscripts agree with the 666 value. Astute readers have noticed that Nero Caesar = 616, whereas Neron Caesar = 666.
For those who don't know, other languages used to use letters as numbers just like roman numerals. Some believe this alternate spelling of Nero accounts for the variants.
Slashdot used to have techie articles like this all the time. I was actually glad to see that articles like this could still make it to the front page here and there. I don't think it's overlooked, but it doesn't have the media PR machine behind it that Linux has, not by a long shot. Yahoo! runs on FreeBSD. The big corps definitely use it. ISPs definitely use it. Webhosting companies definitely use it.
I'm not sure what you mean by business case documents. I'm guessing that's like brochures and PR materials for management. FreeBSD just started up a marketing team, you'll probably be seeing stuff like that more in the near future.
Solaris (SunOS) 4.x was actually a BSD variant. When they went to SunOS 5.x (confusingly also called Solaris 2), they changed to a more classical SvsV version of Unix, and that's been the basis of Solaris since that time.
I'm going to regret this... but:
"In Soviet Russia, Slashdotters are dying imagining a beowulf cluster as their new overlord owning you, Netcraft confirms..."
He who has no
The definition that these are not Linux simply ignores the historical Linux importance to their existence.
Without Linux there would not be an Apache community, *nixen distros, open source development efforts and vertical applications that have proven to be both as effective and successful in the marketplace as they've been.
In Linux absence, you would have Gnu-like alternatives that run on top of proprietary OSes. Linux personal experiment changed the World of Software, contrary to opposing definitions notwithstanding.
So do the truly broke...
Reality doesn't really support that assertion. Free, open source web servers predate Linux. Free unixes predate linux. Open source predates linux by decades. There's absolutely no reason to presume that open source would not have survived with or without Linux.
I agree wholeheartedly, it belongs on slashdot without question.
freeBSD was used in a small company I worked at as a router/fileserver/hey we need a xyz server.
In my present larger job, its use is far more crucial, running webservers et al.
But I think the article was a little weird, it didn't look like a techie-lets-get-our-hands-dirty article, and the focus group was scattered.
I expected a jargon free talk about benefits etc. Maybe techie sites just got more sexy looking.
#hostfile 0.0.0.0 primidi.com 0.0.0.0 www.primidi.com 0.0.0.0 radio.weblogs.com
He is talking about linux, the kernel. USB2.0 support has nothing to do with distros, its drivers in the kernel, that get stuck in there when they compile, and lead to lockups and crashes. You don't even get stable and unstable kernels with linux anymore, its just all unstable.
It's still a distro issue. Distro makers select a kernel, test it, and alter it to their own specifications and tolerances before shipping it in their OS. The kernel hackers' audience is the distributer, not the end-user.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
OpenBSD strives for security and freedom, much more so than the other BSDs. And if Theo couldn't get along with anyone, he'd be the only developer wouldn't he?
I fail to see why speaking the truth gets moderated as "flamebait". FreeBSD 5.x is a open sore which has yet to heal. It is a disaster, start to finish. Everyone knows it. Why aren't you allowed to mention this fact on Slashdot?
I use openbsd on my laptop, and everything I use works fine, and without having to do anything to get it working. The only things that don't work are the winmodem obviously, and firewire which openbsd doesn't support. But laptops that require ACPI and don't have APM, or have hardware with no docs can be a problem.
For what its worth, I always thought it would be worth putting a BSD userland on top of a linux kernel. The fact that debian does the opposite has always seemed really bizzare to me.
Just because the distributors get to suffer from linux's "we don't offer stable software anymore" attitude, doesn't mean its ok. And believe it or not, you sometimes have to upgrade kernels to get new features, or drivers, so even ordinary users do in fact get screwed by this. Regardless of who their audience is, they should have some basic standards to produce stable software.
My point is don't slam the guy for calling linux an OS and then try to dismiss his point because you "don't know what OS he means", when you are the one that's confused. He was right, he was referring to linux correctly, as a kernel, with no standards of quality or stability.
d actually represented the whole FreeBSD slice, not the disk.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
Sure 5.0 and 5.1 did not install on any hardware I own, but then, Windows2k won't install on this machine, and no-one knows why. (It did run Win2kServer, but one day it stopped, and I have not managed a successful reinstall!).
This is a perfectly normal P4 with a standard mobo. It runs FBSD5.4, and its been running it since the day RC2 came out. The only problem I know about is Xine crashes a lot. If I cared, I'd do something about it. I am more interested in PGSQL than Xine (Sad, I know)
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
I like FreeBSD a lot.
It is a great OS.
I am looking forward to this next release.
For all those g00bers who think it is dead, why dont you work on the security holes in Linux before Linux gets in real 'patch hell' trouble.
> For all those g00bers who think it is dead,
??
I have to ask. *Who* thinks that?
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."
> why dont you work on the security holes in Linux before Linux gets in real 'patch hell' trouble.
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.