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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."
Calling Solaris a *BSD is a rather perverse rewriting of history.
:)
(Like all UNIXes it has BSD code, but the *BSD revival movement was primarily spurred by Sun/Bill Joy's decision switch to the more modern and performant and more complex System V.)
Solaris is also THE real option other than Linux/BSD, so learning it can't hurt. Unlike BSD, it might get you a job.
Whenever I hear the word 'Innovation', I reach for my pistol.
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.
You see, that's *why* it's not in stable. In BSD, something has to work properly before it moves from current to stable.
OTOH, Linux pushes things in as soon as possible, without extensive testing. That's not necessarily a bad thing, it's just a different attitude.
Why should Apple care?
Because mac os x shares code with freebsd, and helping freebsd will help themselves?
Well I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of Solaris 10, and I can give you reasons why you should use Linux instead of FreeBSD, but I can't really say very much when it comes to Solaris vs FreeBSD.
Both OS's are certainly making progress, Solaris 10 in particular represents major progress over the previous versions, but neither is quite there yet and the weaknesses of one tend to be shared by the other.
The things I'm thinking of are related to the UI for both systems. Neither uses bash (or even tcsh) as the default shell. Neither uses gnu coreutils for things like ls, cp, rm, etc. These things may not matter to some, but they do matter to me. I'm sure the core OS of each is a very strong and capable system, but the same can be said of Linux and I don't have to fight with it to beat the UI into something usable.
Lee
Muslim community leaders warn of backlash from tomorrow morning's terrorist attack.
Hello,
I wasn't complaining about the fact that it hasn't been MFC'ed yet, I was expressing my worries about the fact that overall support for things I consider essential (like USB 2.0, WPA, and even the possibility of a higher console resolution) has been started rather late compared to other OS's.
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.
You feeling okay? Last I checked (about a minute ago) I could run a whole BASh language script on BSD just as well as Linux. In fact, you can invoke sh and BASh alternately to run the same script on FreeBsd.
The 'default' shell can be reset to BASh or any other shell, if you prefer ( As I do ) the BASh shells, and the base install CD gives you the option before committing to an install.
My experience with sh shell commands is that the BSD versions run much better than the GNU versions anyway.
Seriously I hope you reply to this because, frankly, your above quoted statements made no sense to me at all.
Dawn of the Dead
Well, there's always Windows. You did say non-Linux, non-BSD, right?
Other than that, for the x86, there is Solaris, Plan 9, Hurd, MS-DOS, DR-DOS, FreeDOS, BeOS, Darwin x86, NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP, Apple Rhapsody (there's a beta floating around somewhere for the x86, closest thing we're going to get to Mac OS for Dells other than NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP), and Minix.
If you have access to emulation, you have even more choices. Mac OS 6/7/8 (under the Basilisk 68k emulator), Mac OS X (under PearPC), OpenVMS, Unix 32/V (if you want to get really old school), AmigaOS, and probably many more that I don't know/forgot.
And if you want to have some fun with Linux/BSD, try running Linux 0.01 or 386BSD (its available somewhere). You can even find really ancient versions of BSD (such as 2.11BSD and 4.3BSD) if you felt like some emulation and going back in time.
Documentation does seem to be one of the greatest strengths of the BSDs, noone involved in actual projects for Linux and GNU stuff bother to document - they need to start up seperate projects for it.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
The ascii value of "3" is 51.
Yawn.
The problem is that many system utilities are designed to use that default shell, so if one has to diagnose an oddly booting system, then you can run into some problems if you aren't familiar with the scripting language.
Marxism is the opiate of dumbasses
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.
The difference between Linux and the BSDs is that all bazillion Linux distros basically run the same kernel. Use the same drivers. Have the same memory manager. With the BSD systems, each one is distinct. They do share code, however the kernels are very different from each other. Unlike RMS, I feel an OS is defined by it's kernel, drivers, and memory manager, process scheduler, things like that (It's Linux not GNU/Linux!). For Linux, those are pretty much all the same on all Linux distros. That's not the case with BSDs. Each BSD really is a separate OS. It's why a merging of all the BSD into one OS is pretty much not possible. The only one I'm not sure of is OpenBSD. It's the only BSD that is a true folk from a previous project (FreeBSD and NetBSD were never on the same trunk, they were both created as separate OS's from the beginning). OpenBSD was a split from NetBSD, so I'm sure the kernel and what not are very similar to Net. However, the claim to fame for OpenBSD was that they do all sorts of fancy code auditing for security purposes. I believe they've changed much at the low levels of the OS. So much so that OpenBSD does not share the same broad platform support that Net does. I do feel Open probably could merge back with Net, however Theo's ego would get in the way. For that reason, I don't think it'll ever happen. I'm probably wrong when I think it, but I look at OpenBSD as being nothing but a tweaked NetBSD. In some ways it's good, but I prefer NetBSD. Compairing the security of both, I really don't see where OpenBSD stands that far above Net, Free, or even Linux.
will FreeBSD be as easy to install as Mac OS X? Or am I the only one who cares?
hawk
Why do you assume there is one best for all circumstances? Depending on what you are trying to do sometimes you need different underlying algorithms to get the same result.
NetBSD claims to be best because it runs on everything. That means that have to reject code that uses more memory than a VAX or sun3 system is likely to have. FreeBSD can get some extra speed because they can assume you have more memory.
Look closely at DragonFlyBSD. That project split from FreeBSD not long ago because there are two fundamentally different ways to do SMP. Nobody knows which will be best, and until both are implemented fully we cannot know. There is no choice here but to have two different BSDs, each doing their own things.
OpenBSD exists because the founder is a great programmer, but he cannot get along with anyone else.
I think he's complaining that "I don't understand the plain shell", which sounds, to me, on a Friday afternoon, pretty close to saying "I'm not capable of calling myself a sysadmin, so why am I even trying to go beyond my abilities?"
But maybe I'm being harsh,
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re