Slashdot Mirror
Why FreeBSD
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
He didn't even flag it for the BSD section on the site. I guess this is a step up from that RAID article, though.
Simple, choice is good. As muck as I like Linux, I'm glad to see that there are viable, open alternative OS's.
I think I think, therefore I think I am.
If this were "Windows" or "Solaris" in the title, it would result in an all out bashing session by the Linux faithful.
This is news?
Don't ask why, ask why not.
For webhosting and file servers, I use FreeBSD. But I use OpenBSD for filewalls and I have a winning combo! BSD never seems to get the mainstream headlines like Linux does - anyone know why?
Website Just Down For Me? Find out
Jesus Christ, is this post a bloody propaganda speech or something? Slashdot - keeping the Nuremburg spirit alive!
Gamers Europe - Gaming News. Reviews.
"FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been."
Can it get anymore flaimbaitish than this. Ironicaly enought it comes from I.B.M developer works.
P.S: Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
Who cares what you use, as long as it's a free Unix system. No point in flamewars over your OS.
I usually hate complaints about bad posts more than I do the offending post, but not this time. Flame away.
Linux and BSD based operating systems provide many of the same services, and pretty much work the same way. I think that you can't go wrong with either of them. I see no need to pit them against each other, as they both provide freedom and excellence to the user.
Exactly how is this news?
;)
I've know that FreeBSD was much better than Linux for ages
Joking aside, FreeBSD is a bit hard to install and get working if you're using it as a workstation OS...
I've been using it for 4 years now and it still took most of my free time in a period of 2 weeks to get it installed properly on my newly bought laptop (with all the details and little stuff, that is)
Of course when I was done, it was very much worth it. I don't think any system is as robust and stable as FreeBSD.
A huge "Thank You" to the developers!
Who writes this crap?
People make more and more software for the unix like. Nicer looking with more eyecandy, it also helps to keep up with Windows looking more and more like a toy then an operating system.
The point is, people should install more appropriate software for their older hardware. Software that is less demanding. Because some idiot complains that kde 3.4.1 doesn't look nice on his 386 is not a fault on the pingiuns behalf.
More appropiate software and components make more specialized Operating System.
"It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
goatse.cx?
Are there any versions still available for 386?
It is unusual to mention operating system documentation that comes with UNIX systems because such documentation tends to be as unreadable as it is intrinsically interesting and useful.
...
...
NAME
xine - a free video player
SYNOPSIS
xine [options] [MRL]
DESCRIPTION
This manual page documents briefly the xine audio/video player.
-f, --fullscreen
Switch xine to fullscreen mode on start (just like pressing "F")
-g, --hide-gui
Hide all GUI windows (except the video window) on start. This is the same as pressing "G" within xine.
...
I guess if you want a fluffy story to cuddle up with at night, FreeBSD is for you. If you want to get a man-page that tells you what you want to know without complicated characters and a twisting plot...(L)Unix is the way to go. I can't imagine what I would want option parameters listed in the documentation for?
Skippy is the unknown giant among peanut butters. Starting out from George Washington Carver's project, it is an extremely creamy spreadable peanut product mostly for the "& Jelly" sandwich and its clones. In many ways, Skippy has always been the peanut butter that Peter Pan should have been. It spreads on Wonder Bread and artisan sourdough loafs fresh from the oven, and it serves terabites of children a day on some of the largest daycare centers on earth.
This is a good reason for which we really need hardware with open specifics, and not just closed source linux drivers...
Wondering why i am doing so strange posts? I am trying to get a "+5,Flamebait" or "-1,Insightful" rating.
Let me make an analogy to a newspaper. Not everything you get in a newspaper is "news". For instance, there's the "Life" section of USA Today or the "Living" or "Features" section of a typical local daily newspaper, which typically runs plenty of articles other than news. Even the "Business" section (called "Money" in USA Today) usually has some articles other than news.
Unknown Giant huh...
FreeBSD is the the guts of Apple's Mac OS X. Which incidentally outnumbers all other forms of Unix/Linux by about five to one.
And although OS X on Intel is coming, it is still 99.999% PowerPC.
OpenBSD is another Free Open Sourced BSD OS, one of its bigest points is its security, it has only had 1 remote exploit in 8 years. its very fast to install, very easy to use, super secure, perfect for a router box or a server.
portfolio
But all the new and fun stuff comes out for Linux. If you're looking for something close to the style of FreeBSD, but with the new and freshness of Linux, try Gentoo.
Isn't it dead?
freebsd is dying as is macos x and windows. The future is Linux. The future is Free.
FreeBSD is free'er than Linux, or more accurately the BSD license is free'er than the GPL. That said, the less free GPL's restrictions are meant to be benevolent for certain users.
Mac OS X's share is growing wildly. For some it is replacing Linux as their general purpose unix. Now some people have more specialized needs and Linux may be a better choice but many folks using Linux just need a general purpose unix box and are not into the politics and Mac OS X combines unix, a consumer GUI, FOS software, and off-the-shelf retail software very nicely.
In general, it is rock solid; I've seen a FreeBSD server with a load of 80-something (process went nuts), and still been able to login and take corrective action without rebooting. I remember being quite shocked to find a console reporting that / was inaccessible due to a drive error - but server processes on other partitions continued to run just fine anyway. We've had a few hiccups with 5.x (although 5.4 fixed most of them), but our testing of 6-beta is going really well. FreeBSD is the masochist of operating systems: you hit it, and it just keeps asking for more!
There are other reasons to love it. The ports system is very solid, and it's been years since we had problems applying an upgrade due to dependency issues. The documentation is marvelous - man pages are useful, and the handbook covers most things. The community support mailing lists are very useful, too. Jails provide a convenient way to partition processes on a single server, although they are far from perfect at this point (they keep improving, though).
I really can't say enough good things about FreeBSD. It has been running most of our hosting setup, and many of our client's networks for years, and the only time we ever seem to run into problems is when hardware dies.
(For the record, I also use Debian - and it is good, but I prefer FreeBSD for servers that have to be trusted)
Lead developer, http://wisptools.net
But BSD is dying! I thought everyone knew that. I guess someone forgot to tell CmdrTaco.
One could also argue that Linux is what FreeBSD should have been, and cite the huge number of supercomputers using Linux, or the success of Linux on the mainframe. However, it would be nice if the poster realized that it's a pissing contest and both operating systems are impressive and have their uses, benefits, and drawbacks. Neither is what one "should have been". They both have their own, very different methodologies, so let's leave it at that.
Not that it's news anyways...
Systemd: the PulseAudio of init systems
It's because of Beastie!
:-)
That's my story and I'm sticking with it.
The differences between Linux and BSD are minor; anybody who thinks they matter needs to have their head examined, and the kind of (implicit) Linux bashing represented by the article is pointless.
R.
I've admin'd most every flavor of Unix at some point in my life and I really really like how FreeBSD is managed, from development to the ports tree.
Now that there is a push to support binary updates, my last major complaint has been addressed.
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the perl dependancy hell will absolutely love the ports tree - I really don't understand why there hasn't been more adoption of that concept in Linux.
Also, I am suprised that Linux is the platform of choice for all of these appliances that companies are pumping out, like wireless routers, security devices, etc, when the BSD license is so much more attractive to business.
The major stumbling block that FreeBSD has left is their development team. It seems like the way things are organized really creates a lot of opportunity for personality clashes.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/
"Tell a joke; speak humorously; 'He often jokes even when he appears serious'"
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones.
This sounds like FreeBSD performs vastly better than any OS in the world. And how much faster is exteremly compared to Linux or Windows? Twice the speed? Four times?
This many comments into a BSD thread, and no one has inserted the "Netcraft confirms BSD is dying" troll? Is it now confirmed that BSD is actually growing, and that troll is nonsense?
That's Bigboo TAY! TAY!
The first time I installed FreeBSD, I looked at the screen and kind of went "What do I do now?". After a bit of digging, my impression was that of a system that had all the kinks worked out of it. After trying many Linux distros, FreeBSD made more sense.
/usr/local, if I upgrade the system, cvsup is simple, the ports tree makes keeping software up to date a breeze, I'm not going to have to hunt for a distro specific rpm or a wierd library just to get something to work. The amount of software available for FreeBSD is astounding, chances are, if a project is in development, it's already in the ports tree.
If I install software, it's going to be in
I've used FreeBSD for about 6 years and I really don't see myself using Linux anymore. The community is very supportive, intelligent and open minded, I always seem to get things done with FreeBSD, I haven't found a problem I couldn't solve within a few hours, it just works, and works well. Try it, you might find that it works as well for you.
I think those days are over...
The PC-BSD project makes it a snap to install a functioning FreeBSD system. DistroWatch mentions a very nice step-by-step guide to installation process but really, you don't even need that if you are already handy at installing various GNU/Linux distros. (Although the guide does go into some custom configuration things that are useful/interesting.)
The torrent for PC-BSD is ready to roll, give it a try. Now there are no more excuses ;-)
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
I still don't really understand how FreeBSD is fundamentaly different then Linux. I'm not much of an OS hacker... I have a Linux machine, darwin on the Mac, and I've poked around BSD boxes without noticing major differences.
Can someone explain why I should use one over the other, or if I should care?
I used to run FreeBSD on my server for Apache/PHP, but after I upgraded my server's hardware (was a 300 MHz PII) to a 1.1 GHz Celeron (which came from my Compaq after the 3.0 GHz P4 upgrade,) I decided go with NetBSD for my server. NetBSD seems to meet my needs for a server *BSD, and is nice because it will run on a Motorola 68030-based machine (with FPU,) along with of course many other architectures. My only gripe with FreeBSD was that it didn't support hardware like my PPC Mac Mini. I realize that supporting many platforms is difficult and alot of times it is better just to target something common and support it well, I guess I am strange. :)
Powered by caffeine and sugar; BSD
Seems like an informative and unbiased article, but I couldn't help but laugh at the author's email address. Especially given the "FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been" jab that the story submitter felt compelled to include.
Why FreeBSD
A quick tour of the BSD alternative
Level: Introductory
Frank Pohlmann (frank@linuxuser.co.uk), U.K. Technical Editor, Linuxuser and Developer
19 Jul 2005
OtakuBooty.com: Smart, funny, sexy nerds.
Why FreeBSD instead of OpenBSD, NetBSD, OSX, etc.?
The article was really sketchy on this point.
Hurray for people getting jokes! *sigh*
Nobody's gay for Mole-Man.
For real, yo. NetBSD works far better and smoother than anything in the FreeBSD 5.x series. Of course, for those scared of the command line there's always mac, windows and linux; but if you're going to run a unix, why settle for FreeBSD when you can have something far better?
You're an idiot. The BSDL is no less free for the little guy than is the GPL, and I contend that it is *more* free.
I work at a large internet organization that runs thousands of FreeBSD systems. When we need 64-bit though, we switch to Linux because it has a stable 64-bit distribution and FreeBSD does not. I've gone through all the kudo's about FreeBSD being stable, but are you using release 5? and are you using 64-bit? (and don't even get me started about threading support.)
Despite all the good things that have beein brought about by the most recent Linux 2.6.XX series kernels and boxed up by Redhat and Suse and CentOS people, there are still areas where the two differ a lot and will continue to do so.
FreeBSD's motto has always been rock solid stability, robustness and serving capability.
Thus, for the ones who mentioned their discomfort in installing FreeBSD for workstation - hey it's just another market demand driven issue; when there's enough pressure, the things will start getting cleaner.
For robustness one just can't beat FreeBSD, despite Linux's latest achievements. Remember the time when Linux had almost screwed itsef out of the server platform due to the incredible VM issues plaguing it's early 2.4.X series? Well, even today the VM is still not as stable as it should be. FreeBSD has the best VM out there, and it can take any types of loads.
Linux tends to be "quite fast" when people throw small tiny workloads at it like a few disk requests, or a few HTTP requests to a webserver, say Apache. If you throw any reasonable amount of workload, you gotta sit down and tune it. I mean literally re-write the code, coz it's not going to be able to handle thousands and thousands of requests. So it ends up being a very fast, low latency platform for a lot of non-serious non-server oriented uses. But it quickly looses the latency advantage when any serious load is thrown at it. I have had to re-write sizeable portions of the Linux kernel to make it handle better loads.
OTOH, FreeBSD seems to be slower and more sluggish when one throws non-server type one-off requests at it; however this latency can be multipled over thousands of requests. If you throw one request at FreeBSD or you throw thousands of thousands of requests, the latency is nearly the same - that is the DEFINITION of robustness.
I remember when I had installed FreeBSD 4.2 a few years ago, and the httpd could handle only about 1000 simultaneous requests. I just had to change a few kernel sysctls, and it smoothly managed to increase that to about 100000 simultaneous requests; all chuggnig along at the same latency. That is what I want in a server platform.
I have never seen that kind of capability in Linux. When it comes to internet serving, one can still not beat FreeBSD.
Of late it's been plagued a bit by the big change in architecture for SMP scalability in the 5.X series; and it always seems to have an issue with driver availability - but that is just due to the fact that it is a small enthusiast community compared to Linux. Hence the lesser number of hands working on it.
Linux does have some advantages though, and their driver availabilty is very very good. It addresses almost every bit of desktop hardware money can buy, and is the only one that can compete with microsoft in the driver availability market.
Good luck to both!
Why not?
Quote Via QDB.us
Smells like an advertisement.
Follow the money,
the path ain't long.
Oh, great, only support for ancient filesystems.
How many hours does it take to fsck a 9 terabyte filesystem?
I'll stick with something that supports a journaling fs thanks.
"2 weeks to get installed" can you tell me specifically what advantages you have in a laptop that justify 2 weeks of work ?
even assuming zero maintenance for bsd (ha !) and 30 mins every 2 week for windows (windows update + norton) it is hard to see the advantage, particularly given the wealth of windows apps and ease of communicating with others
The reason you'll see just as many BSD fanatics as Linux nuts is for just the same reason: the license.
*BSD is a stable, secure OS with a proprietary-friendly, open source license. Linux is a stable, secure OS with a proprietary-hostile, open source license.
90% of the actual software that runs on the two is exactly the same. However, each has its own kernel and basic libraries.
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
Tune in next week for another episode of "Why (.*)", featuring GNU HURD!
Mach, not FreeBSD, is the "guts" of Mac OS X. The code borrowed from FreeBSD is mostly userspace code.
Cyric Zndovzny at your service.
I challenge all the BSD skeptics to objectively compare the BSD's and the linux's. I think you will find some interesting facts. If not, then I guess you all are not much different from windows zealots who scoff at linux.
I see BSD compared linux the way linux was compared to windows in recent years.
If you like what you see, it would be a snap to jump the linux ship and get on board with BSD.
After all is said and done does it really matter? Maybe there are a lot of people content with whatever system they are using and are also comfortable with their system. Some patch, some reload, some monitor and some do almost nothing.
Decide for yourself where your level is at.
I've run my own mail/web server in house with a static IP for 4 years. Up until 6 months ago it was always Linux (Slackware, Debian and then Gentoo) but I've now switched it to FreeBSD. The main motivation was choice; althought I was fine and comfy with Linux (and it did all I needed) I choose to switch. Now I've learned a new way to do (most) things, and learned how *BSD works. I've recently updated to 6.0 (SNAP004) - and am now helping with OSS that run on FreeBSD (HULA) as most dev work is done on Linux. Linux is backing up the server just in case, but I'm having fun again.
bad_outlook
--
Is this vague enough for you?
So what makes it stable? Is it more stable than 2.4 series Linux kernels today? And if it is, why? Are you saying that in situations where Linux kernel just dies or starts to stall seriously in performance, FreeBSD kernel just keeps on going? How do you prove this? Or is it just more stable because it has less hardware support, meaning it has less buggy drivers? Most crashes or problems I've had with Linux Desktops are related to Xorg / XFree86 graphics drivers and not to Linux itself.
Sorry all I have is big iron boxes that require clustered file systems, so yes I do wonder "Why?".
Got Code?
as he can close the software without having to worry about the lawyers coming round complaining about your code violating some obscure GPL snippet.
Sorry, but when you said "use" there I guess you really meant "close". Which is really more like "prevent others from using". Which is exactly what I was saying to begin with.
The GPL gives you freedom as long as you respect the freedom of others, ie. "the little guy".
it forces you to release software which doesn't even contain GPL code
This, of course, is complete bullshit. I can't even imagine how you could concoct such an idiocy. If you're not just trolling, why don't you tell us?
"I assumed blithely that there were no elves out there in the darkness"
That there is two systems competing for the same market is a good thing, even a friendly competition will improve both.
On the other hand, one could have a monopoly like MS does, and well we all know the effect that has on innovation.
With Linux and BSDen, when one comes up with a really good idea, the other adopts it, and both are better in the long run.
Threading is (or maybe was) a bit fsked, but still cool.
Seriously, computers and the software that runs them is all cool to me. Anyone that thinks otherwise needs to get laid.
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
OBSD's installation procedure is shit, starting right from the beginning:
3.3 - Does OpenBSD provide an ISO image for download?
Some other open source operating systems are commonly distributed as CD-ROM ISO images. This is not how OpenBSD is distributed.
+++ATH0
No VMware, that's why not.
Otherwise a fine OS.
So he installed FreeBSD and saw the blindling light of... Eliteness(?).
Don't judge a man by his email address.
-HyperChicken
hyperchicken@goatse.cx
Free of Flash! Free of Flash!
You need to track security updates for kernel, base and ports and apply them in different manners
Security updates come in source only form, this is a good thing or a bad thing depending on how you look at it. You apply the patches in order, i.e. if a Sendmail vulnerability comes out first and then an openssl vulnerability next, you have to do sendmail first. This is to ensure a consistant system that won't break when you load the new kernel/userland. If you track -STABLE you won't have to worry about applying them in any different manner. Just make world and walk away.
Package management is a decade behind what rpm and dpkg have to offer
pkg_add -r. Also see the manpages for pkg_* which set the trend and since 1994 has been doing what rpm and dpkg currently do. If anything FreeBSD is ahead in package management. I think you may be complaining at the fact that most open source software today completely ignores any other OS other than linux. Just going around to different sites, I see rpm or debian's package format. Nothing for *BSD,Solaris,etc.
It's essentially a DIY kit to build an OS. I just want an OS.
And what is an OS? Its fully functional out of the box. If I'm installing FreeBSD on a server I don't need X. If i'm installing FreeBSD on my desktop, I don't need apache. Pick and choose. If you hate installing packages everytime you reinstall, use FreeBSD from scratch.
Building ports takes ages, time I don't have
Building ports takes resources. Resources I want to use for the server's core buisiness. Which is not compiling ports
Who said to build from ports (granted there are some packages which require you to build from source SSH, java, et. al), again pkg_add -r is your friend. If you require the latest then put freebsd on a second machine and build there.
Bad documentation. The official freebsd manual often explains the most time consuming, error prone way of doing things. Later you'll find out there are many convienient ports to perform common tasks.
Excuse me?
No journalled filesystems. Yeah, it's really scary to remotely kill the power of a crashed machine.
First of all, even back in the early days of UFS/FFS, a power outage wouldn't trash the filesystem. You must be thinking of ext2. Now softupdates is part of the default kernel which gives journaling-like attributes to the UFS filesystem. IIRC, full journaling should be implemented somewhere in the 6.x release.
I would also be interested to hear why you think userland is amateurish. Especially since most of everything in there has been around since 1.0 or 386BSD
And to confirm i'm not a script i had to type 'supreme'.
...if you can have both: FreeBSD's obscure userland tools AND Gentoo's compile time:b sd.html
http://dev.gentoo.org/~citizen428/doc/gentoo-free
I mean to say, on Debian I can do 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' and that updates everything on my system to the latest version and/or fully security patched version (depending on which branch of Debian I'm in).
I used to run a FreeBSD desktop and I was impressed at the speed and reliability over what I'd been using before (Red Hat Linux), but the package systems on Red Hat and Debian are (or seem) far superior.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
...not so fast there sparky, a common misconception.
You are right in thinking that the true "guts" of the kernel is mach, however, it's only really used for the very very low level stuff and message passing, the rest of the system is provided by a BSD server for mach that takes care of 90% of the system duties. What apple have created is a bit of a bastard child of a microkernel and a monolithic kernel.
I am NaN
"Sorry, but when you said "use" there I guess you really meant "close". Which is really more like "prevent others from using". Which is exactly what I was saying to begin with."
This is the major deceptive argument made by some GPL fans. Software licensed under BSD remains free forever and ever. The fact that people are allowed to modify it without distributing the modifications in no way makes the orginal code "closed".
We can debate the merits of GPL vs. BSD, but let's keep it honest.
I don't like it either, "cute" or not, and I know quite a few people who wouldn't even think of running it based on that alone. It's just plain wrong to try and glorify the symbol of evil. I'm glad there are alternatives in the BSD world for people to choose from. They should have ditched that thing a long time ago. And yes, I have heard the arguments that it doesn't matter, etc, that's not the point at all. Hey, why not RapistOS, it's possible to draw a cute rapist?
They're working especially hard on driver support too. For what it's worth, Solaris 10 has never detected a sound card on any system I put it on (mostly Creative SoundBlaster stuff, or generic cards). PC-BSD based on Freesbie detected it automatically. It runs KDE 3.4.0 out of the box - no X setup necessary.
It's a bit sluggish when compared to some optimized Linux distros, but the new KDE is a bit of a load to put on out-dated hardware. For new users, with hardware that's say, faster than 400 MHz with 128 MB RAM, they could live with the performance.
It's a single CD for installation, and it's quite verbose, with a nice graphical system taking you through partitioning.
It ships quite light compared to the big Linux distros like SuSE, or probably Debian, Fedora (I've never used them). But it's no stripped down Gentoo either.
No OpenOffice.org, don't recall a Firefox. The GIMP was there, but pretty much everything that wasn't essential, or expected for a base install of the GUI was left out - but was easily available for FreeBSD from their site.
Also, it includes a nice version of KAsteroids by default :)
Some problems I found were that the bootloader doesn't play well with existing systems. I put it on the second half of a HDD with SuSE 9.3 Pro and couldn't access SuSE any more. Had to nuke both of them (mostly because I was getting unsure of what I was doing and they were both 'fresh' without documents that needed to be salvaged).
I'd flag PC-BSD as a great intro to OSS UNIX (I'm an Apple fanboi, so the OSS is important there). Very easy to get a stable install off the ground. For perforamance it seemed steady for what I used it for, but riced up - pretty KDE, but could have been more optimized.
There is something unsettling about a system that hides the Konsole in a KMenu item, rather than putting the 'Quick Launch' icon on the KBar all the time (apologies for MS terminology, don't know the Linux equivalent of 'quick launch').
I have a FreeBSD box with a current uptime of 900+ days. It would have been longer, but we had to move it from one location to another.
I wrote this a while ago but it seems applicable here.
Linux vs. FreeBSD
In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. I
We use FreeBSD and windows at my company. I hate it. I'd much rather use Linux, simply because I'm more familiar with it.
And while FreeBSD can run on "old" Intel hardware so can Linux, and Linux can run on Itanium, PPC, and just about every thing out there. I'm sure it can scale higher then FreeBSD at this point.
FBSD is, I guess, convenient for companies that don't want to have to give back their enhancements, but beyond that I really don't get the point. I certainly don't see why exactly Linux "should" be like free BSD.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
Your nick is so white they could use it in an Orbitz commercial.
Your nick is so white your Grams uses it to bleach her coffee cups.
Your nick is so white it flips 0xFFF to 0x000.
Your nick is so white the KKK is suing for diluting their trademark.
And last but not least. Your nick is so white it makes a 40-something, suburban white dude spontaneously bust out in snaps.
Again, sorry. Slow day. Dead story. And I was inspired by your post.
I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
Wow I gotta stop believing all that Linux FUD I've been reading. So Linux can't, hasn't or done any of that? Talk about tooting your own horn at the expense of something else.
My karma is not a Chameleon.
"In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been."
Can you say flame bait?
I personally love FreeBSD and several Linux distributions, but you can't really say that one is better than the other since most of them have quite different purposes in mind. I use Gentoo on my AMD64 desktop because in my experience FreeBSD is lacking in the GUI world and I also wanted a source distribution to make sure everything was optimized for my 64bit processor. I'm planning to learn how to take advantage of it in my own programming as well. I have one server that runs Debian and one that runs FreeBSD and both run great and I believe they are equally secure. Security depends more so on the administrator than the flavor of the OS. Uptime on both of the machines is practically flawless other than general hardware maintainence and kernel upgrades. Just be glad that you have the freedom to choose which OS or OS's you use but don't assume that your choice is the best for everyone.
So, uh, would BSD be like smooth peanut butter and GNU/Linux crunchy peanut butter? They both offer very similar things, but the two are different enough that you can have a preference. And both go good with jelly/jam (which could also be applied to this comparison). Some people are allergic to peanuts; I guess these people would be compared to those who cannot use Free software due to licensing restrictions?
'Yes, firefox is indeed greater than women. Can women block pops up for you? No. Can Firefox show you naked women? Yes.'
Aparently so,
The fact is FreeBSD is just a K E R N E L.
Linux is just a K E R N E L.
They both use G N U tools to do the majority of their user related tasks.
Let's talk about something really interesting, specifically inovation with respect to speed.
I'm seriously tired of the old processors. Every year a new legacy based Processsor.
nig nig nig.
You said it, not me!
The Internet's nature is peer to peer - 20050301_cs_profs.pdf
"The OpenBSD project does not make the ISO images used to master the official CDs available for download. The reason is simply that we would like you to buy the CD sets, helping fund ongoing OpenBSD development. The official OpenBSD CD-ROM layout is copyright Theo de Raadt. Theo does not permit people to redistribute images of the official OpenBSD CDs. As an incentive for people to buy the CD set, some extras are included in the package as well (artwork, stickers etc).
Note that only the CD layout is copyrighted, OpenBSD itself is free. Nothing precludes someone else from downloading OpenBSD and making their own CD. If for some reason you want to download a CD image, try searching the mailing list archives for possible sources. Of course, any OpenBSD ISO images available on the Internet either violate Theo de Raadt's copyright or are not official images. The source of an unofficial image may or may not be trustworthy; it is up to you to determine this for yourself.
We suggest that people who want to download OpenBSD for free use the FTP install option. For those that need a bootable CD for their system, bootdisk ISO images (named cd36.iso) are available for a number of platforms which will then permit the rest of the system to be installed via FTP. These ISO images are only a few megabytes in size, and contain just the installation tools, not the actual file sets."
So they do not provide isos for free, they prefer to have you buy a set of boxed cds to fund their effots. Yeah, I can see it... Bad, evil people trying to make some sort of money for a project.
They then say you can download from unofficial sources as you will. Gosh. They must be mad as well as evil...
They even propose to build a full system from an ftp using just a floppy or a cdrom . My head start spinning. This people REFUSE to give you an iso, but helps you 3 ways to get their sofware.(3.4 - Downloading via FTP, HTTP or AFS...)
So, I agree, BSD is made by Bad, Evil, Mind Spinning people that actually help you get their software. In multiple forms... but they won't provide you poor soul with an ISO, you'll have to use your bleeding fingers into 20 seconds of googling to get it...
Madmen, all...
It takes 40+ muscles to frown, but only four to extend your arm and bitchslap the motherfucker
And if you want a portable BSD, don't overlook NetBSD, arguably the most portable and ported modern high-performance operating system in existence.
you had me at #!
I installed 5.4 on my laptop. For years, before Gentoo, I was a FreeBSD person. In fact, only Gentoo could have made me switch. I wanted to see what was going on with FreeBSD, so I put it on a spare partition. After installing, I plugged in my USB key. After a flurry of error messages, with the activity light blinking, my key was unreadable. Disappointing.
I agree with you on most of that, and vastly prefer FreeBSD over any version of Linux. I love that the remotely exploitable security problems are few and far between, and they tend to only release pretty stable kernels. Back when I used Linux for everything the "kernel of the week" problem was eating up tons of my time.
I hate the way that the linux world feels compelled to constantly add useless (to me) features that only add to the bloat and breakage. If you want a linux desktop; fine; but PLEASE don't screw up the server functionality for the rest of us.
It's so bad that we have to depend on big commercial vendors to put together reliable Linux configurations for us. But it's an evil cycle; corporate vendors are always looking for a way to "value add" and "differentiate", which means more useless features and bugs.
But I've had horrible problems with ports -- on 4.9 and 4.10, large numbers of ports won't compile, and on both 4.x and 5.2.1, I'll try to compile a port and it will simply stop with a makefile error.
Also, they don't maintain separate ports trees for 4.x and 5.x, leading to inevitable incompatibilities (i.e port X depends on some v5.x feature or lib; many things depend on port X...)
portupgrade, and indeed the entire ports framework, is poorly documented with too many different ways of doing things.
The article just gets to making a point, and then never makes it. Over and over again.
The net result is just a lame advocacy attempt.
Again the lame point about linux being merely a kernel is made. What decade is this author living in? Has anyone ever decided to deploy linux in the enterprise by simply downloading the latest kernel for the install? Hell no, linux is installed as a distribution, always. This tedious harping on semantics and unix purity is nonsense.
In the replies the lamo 'RPM doesn't handle dependencies' rears its ugly head yet again. What modern distro now doesn't have a package management wrapper? If you violate dependencies with RPM's or whatever your package of choice may be, it's because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to manage your system of choice. I haven't had dependency issues *ever* using RPM's created for the installed base I was running. Sure if I chose to install rogue, poorly built RPM's from a source that doesn't use a consistent build environment, they will have issues...but that makes it my fault, not the fault of the system I'm running. The system, at least for now, isn't smart enough to keep me from using my free will and breaking it.
What happened to informative journalism? It's dead. Everyone from mainstream media to bloggers lives in a three sentence, paragraph header mentality. 90% of anything 'published' online now consists of a 'story' that is merely a collection of paragraph headers with no meat.
Just read all the 'security' articles weighing linux vs windows and it's evident. People with an obvious misunderstanding of both platforms, spouting off daily as though they are experts. The unfortunate part of all of this is that the average reader of any of these topics won't even realize the inherent flaws in the 'articles'.
Most FreeBSD releases 5.2, 5.3, 6.0 are forkbomb resistent. Linux 2.6 is forkbomb friendly also, but runs much slower than FreeBSD 6 when forkbombed.
If you want to seriously compare two open-source Unix-like systems, the only instrinsic difference is the kernel. Arguing that one system is better because of the default configuration of network services, the package system, the organization of the rc scripts, and so on, is a red herring, because there is no reason you can't take all of the userspace from one system and run it on top of the kernel from the other -- and there are projects which do this.
In that light, these benchmarks are the most enlightening comparison I have seen to date. Some BSD users have attacked the methodology, but none of them has gone on to do alternative tests of their own, and the author has been very conscientious about addressing some of the criticism. The bottom line is that FreeBSD is, whichever version you choose, at best equal to Linux in low-level kernel performance, and usually slower.
When you also take into account the greater ease of use of most common Linux distributions, broader hardware support, greater availability of commercial software (yes, you may be able to run it under FreeBSD's Linux emulation layer, but the vendor is unlikely to officially support that, which matters to large corporations), and better scalability, it really isn't suprising that most people considering a free Unix-like operating system choose some distribution of Linux.
Undoubtedly for a long time, perhaps until the 2.4 kernel came out, FreeBSD probably was superior, and had a well-deserved reputation as a better choice for serious usage. For some purposes (there are some routing benchmarks that FreeBSD people always bring up, which I can't find right now) it may still be. But through some combination of the AT&T lawsuit, media coverage, and pure chance (licensing may also have played a part), the commercial support and developer mindshare swung decisively to the Linux kernel, and today it is clearly the best choice for most uses. We can wonder what would have happened if FreeBSD had won out instead -- the resulting kernel might very well be better than either Linux or FreeBSD is today -- but that doesn't change the facts about which is the better choice today.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
"Each problem that I solved became a rule, which served afterwards to solve other problems." -- Rene Descartes.
/etc/sysconfig from RedHat systems. The equivalent on Debian is /etc/defaults, which is mentioned nowhere in the manual page, or *any* manual page, and Debian takes more care with their manual pages than most distributions. Why should I have to figure this out? This is one trivial example, but these kind of glitches in integration multiplied many-fold engender a degree of inconfidence in the system. When I read something in a *BSD manual page, I can usually go to the bank with it. OpenBSD takes great pride in their manual pages. I liken this to confidence with a hammer. If you know you can trust your hands and the tool, you can swing hard and drive your nails in. If you think you've got a slightly bent nail, a slightly rotted board, or shakey hands, you have to tap the screw in. Linux always makes me tap nails, and *BSD lets me drive them in like a pro.
This, in my opinion, is what *BSD has over Linux. The *BSD's have more stable API's, better documentation, and well-established procedures for system management, etc. Some of the quirks have to do with not invalidating old-knowledge, not breaking things that work, not causing radical upheavals. Linux, of course, has no problem doing these things on a routine basis.
I have run Debian. The boot(7) web-page mentions that
A lot of the FreeBSD plusses you listed also apply to Gentoo Linux.
:)
Both are decent operating systems.
If Osama Bin Laden was an operating system, he would be *BSD. It is the enemy of free operating systems and must be stopped.
FreeBSD is not Unix-LIKE, it *is* Unix, in the same sense that Linux is NOT Unix and never will be. FreeBSD is in direct line of descent from the original Unix versions, with continuity of both code and contributors. Linix is a bad re-implementation by a bunch of clueless n00bs who have been re-capitulating all of real Unix's old bugs, twenty years later.
Or slashdot login. (in fairness, I did run the ircd.)
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
And I remember that the guy doing it has no clue what he is doing, and ran netbsd with only a single kernel thread. And didn't even figure out that with 2 CPUs it was the same as with 1 CPU, maybe I am doing something wrong. Yep, that must be because BSD sucks.
.001% of people are ever going to use a 64 CPU machine, I am very glad that the BSD developers have not wasted tons of time and money supporting such machines. And linux does not scale linearly to the last processor, nor does any OS, you are just talking out of your ass now, SMP always has overhead.
Considering that less than
Maybe some day you will stop being sick and tired, but it looks like you will always be ignorant and foolish.
I'd recommend you trying OpenBSD. Contrary to the misinformation that is passed by most Slashdotters, OpenBSD is not just "for firewalls". It's a great, fast-performing, stable, "correct" BSD that has many, many nifty features. Oh, and it's secure-by-default.
I've been very pleased with my 64-bit machines running OpenBSD. I'm slowly moving all of our production FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x machines over to OpenBSD.
Chris
Because NOONE has hurd of freeb&d and for those who have 'looked' at it, have decided it is a poorly developed OS except for a few odd exceptions.
I'm not the only nerd who has tried it SEVERAL times in the past..to much frustration and disappointment with even the BASICS of installing and setting up.
But when the maintainer(s) seem arrogant, ALONG with the fact that you need to be more than an 'Admin' to love the install/setup procedure..well..
However I'll keep trying it every-now-and-then becaue i like to keep an open mind.
But i'm sorry, when as recently as 'FreesBie' came out, and won't even recognize a system correctly which is barely a year old.. my opinion is the rest-of-the-implimentation will probably goes as 'lousy'.
I KNOW that alot of these maintainers do the work for free, or outa enjoyment... buhhht, they really should NOT expect everyone else to take them very seriously, let alone 'join' them, or give them money.
Linux at least has hundreds if not thousands of 'distros', which you can enjoy as much 'shopping' for on the net, as much as trying them out.. and put several on your pc, each one dedicated to a 'special' task that distro 'excells' in. :)
A product (including alot of linux stuff) is NOT free when you have to be agrivated nearly us much as you would with ms. crap!!
But at least with Linux you can make changes if you have the time and patience :)
-- The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste... arrest bill gates, and shut-down microsoft IMMEDIATELY!
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
http://www.sgi.com/products/servers/altix/
"The SGI Altix 3700 Bx2 supercomputer supports globally addressable memory across multiple nodes, scaling to hundreds of Intel Itanium 2 microprocessors. Each Altix 3700 node can combine up to 512 processors in a single Linux operating system image, and is ideal for the most complex HPC problems, enabling innovation without limits for technical users."
Until last year some on /. would call it...
The Hand Book for the Recently Deceased
I personally find it reads like stereo instructions...or the info pages for Emacs!
Most obvious distinction is that BSD (and I guess FreeBSD) is dead.
Linux has yet to add that feature... or perhaps Linus is simply rejecting the patch for now. My guess is that he didn't want to junk up the kernel with rotting and decaying matter. He's probably looking for a good user space implementation of death. We'll see.
FreeBSD is UNIX (legally and technically)! No UNIX-like about it, its the real thing.
Linux is relatively new (esp. to the desktop).
Bsd & Unix proper have been around for neary 50 years.
Why do you waste everyones time with such un-credible remarks.
Many major companies like Ibm and Hp have taken the Linux route-- for a reason!
Please don't say Apple has gone the way of Bsd, because EVERYONE knows that-- (you simplton)!!
Ahhhhhnd, EVERYONE KNOWS that they can't afford to install Macs, nor do they have the resources that Steve Jobs has to incorporate a 'working-harden-bsd' system on their kids computers!! :)
-- The InterNet is a terrible thing to waste.. arrest bill gates, and shut-down microsoft-- IMMEDIATELY.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in /etc and /usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
PC-BSD is a GUI-centric version of FreeBSD (KDE) with a program installation system similar to Mac OS X (application folders).
I didn't want to use it at first because you didn't have control over partitioning in the first few versions.
Thankfully, they changed the installer so that you can partition and install over multiple partitions in the newest versions.
I'm going to install it soon as a server even though it's intended as a desktop. The reason is that, in my opinion, text-only administration of my server is way too much hassle, I've got better things to do than memorize dozens of text commands and their flags. On top of that, the installation of programs is easier and cleaner, even easier and cleaner than Windows.
I'm a visual person and handling my FreeBSD 5.3 install with text-only programs was not good enough, not enough feedback and not enough usability. I didn't have a good mental overview of my system with shell-only programs and everytime I wanted to do anything I had to consult the (excellent) FreeBSD manual. With Windows I could figure things out just by clicking around the GUI. GUIs can be seen as having built-in manuals in my opinion.
One thing that worries me is that I've been told that X is a big security vulnerability. Is KDE an X system? Is it open to attacks by default? It'd be great if someone can help answer. Thanks for helping out a newcomer.
- -- Truth addict for life.
I think the funniest thing about the summary is the classification of BSD as "unix like" when truthfully it's the only OS left that truly IS unix.
And it's on IBM page, maybe Big Blue eye is moving to another target.
Linux wars are sooooo expensive.
Pepicek
but indeed one of my all time favs.. /usr/ports was the most ideal packaging system.. the automatically downloaded dependency feature had to influence debian's idea for apt-get, and urpmi for rpm based distros.. i wish freebsd did have more practical uses.. its so damn stable.. and so amazing.. why not spend some time working on nice graphical front-end and get people interested in something other than a server??
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
I thought this was supposed to be a "news for nerds site". You don't have to that high up to know about FreeBSD. Why the hell is it news to re introduce the FreeBSD OS all of a sudden? This is really pathetic guys; i mean really if you haven't heard of FreeBSD and don't know the differences about it and it's license vs gnu/linux then you really shouldn't even be visiting this webpage. I've been reading about comments for years on how /. has been going down hill. Damn, well this clearly shows it.
His name's not Chuck.
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
It is not superior to RPM, nor DEB for that matter. Anyone who has built or managed a large number of servers with disperate services on them should be able to recognise why.
It checks for required dependancies and installs them as required, something even CPAN can do, and it can even (usually) uninstall them (with varing levels of success), that is more or less it.
What it does not do is check for conflicts between libraries or the dependancies of other applications (meaning it's possible to fuck up one application, by installing another because it may overwrite an existing, older, installed library).
Systems like 'ports' do not verify package integrity, nor do they it support using a previons minor revion of the same application (often a requirement when the 'latest' version of whatever application or library your using breaks a feature you've been relying on, or is simply not a release you've had time to test in your test environment).
An even bigger problem related to the reliance of ports system, one of the most time consuming, is the process of upgrades. Upgrading between newer versions of FreeBSD is a mine field, awash with the potential for screwups, because there is no system in place to handle this task elegantly. Upgrading between disperate versions of the same branch (e.g. 4.6 to 4.11) will often cause serious problems you'll have to sort out manually at the console, upgrading from systems that are not in the same release (from 3.x or 4.x to 5.x) will often take up a good chunk of an afternoon to sort out the resulting mess. Upgrading a DEB or RPM system which is fully packaged managed (kernel and all), even between quite disperate releases is far more straight forward (more along the lines of 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', or in the case of a Red Hat system, pop in the CD and click the 'Upgrade' button).
Another feature that makes more feature rich package management systems more desirable is the reduced risk. RPM is staggeringly powerful with regard to the sorts of operations it is able to carry out with packages (pretty much every feature you could ever want) and it is also trivial to build packages for - as is also true of DEB. This massively reduces the propensity for mistakes - sure you can write individual custom bash install scripts for packages in ports, but that is not a robust approach when you think about how many packages your likley to use.
There are two practical reasons why people typically dislike RPM:
1) It's refused to do what they wanted because a package was trying to be installed did not have it's appropriate dependancies also installed, or it conflicted in some way.
In these circumstances most users opt to 'force' it to install because they are frustrated at installing dependancies and sub-dependancies, and then they wonder why their system does not work as they expected, and so declare the RPM system to be at fault.
Arguably, it is at least partly at fault, but it was only being accurate by alerting them to problems that they would not otherwise have known about, which is pretty hard to critisize.
2) This is compounded by the fact that they are usually exposed to it in the form of 'Red Hat', or a similar distrobution, which does NOT feature something like 'apt-get'. 'apt-get' is in fact package management system agnostic, at least technically, and their have been RPM based commercial distrobutions which have shipped with it. It's absolutly more associated with Debian, and I think it's a mistake for Red Hat and other vendors not to include it in their RPM based distros because of the frequency of the scenario above, I suspect the cost of maintaining apt repositories (man hours, infrastructure and running costs such as bandwith) are key reasons.
Disclaimer:
I use ports on an almost daily basis, along with De
Indeed:) I am writing the BSD column for Linuxuser & Developer. Nothing elitist about it. Rather humdrum, if you ask me.
Frank Pohlmann
LUD Tech Ed.
Man if this isn't the biggest cripple fight Slashdot post I've seen in awhile. What's next, Blue Thunder vs Airwolf? Kirk vs Picard?
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
HP says itanic is the future too, it doesn't make it so. Scaling linearly would mean that adding a CPU would always increase performance the exact same amount, no matter how many CPUs there are. This is not the case with linux, nor is it the case with say, Solaris which has had very large SMP support for a very long time. Companies can lie and pretend they scale linearly by using silly and meaningless FLOPS benchmarks, and showing a straight line on their graph. However in the real world people run applications, and they tend to do more than just floating point math. Benchmarking an actual app will show a line that isn't linear at all.
Don't get me wrong, linux certainly handles SMP better than BSDs, and handles more CPUs. But spreading HP's bullshit doesn't help your case any.
And BSD users have no effect on anything, just like linux users have no effect on anything. Developers is what matters. BSD developers aren't here, they are developing, and on the whole don't give a rats ass about what linux does or does not do.
As for your list:
1. It sure does, and it leads to buggy unstable shit. Linux doesn't even have a "stable" release anymore, and that was never even stable to start with. There are 5 fucking filesystems and nobody can decide which one is right, but at least 2 of them corrupt and lose data.
2. Vastly is a serious overstantment. Slightly would be more accurate. And no, this would not change regardless of what any "clueless BSD users" do. Binary only drivers for linux are a result of linux marketshare, and those are the only things linux supports and BSDs don't.
3. No it is not, NetBSD is far more portable than linux, and so is OpenBSD, although its driver subsystem isn't quite as nicely seperated as NetBSDs.
4. Again with "vastly". Linux can use vastly more CPUs effectively, yes. That's not the only measure of scalability though. Linux also falls over at 100,000pps as a router, and FreeBSD happily handles 10 times that. Scalability is not an absolute, and linux and the BSDs are all constantly being changed, so its hardly something to cry about.
5. No, you just like to whine about other people having opinions that don't match your own. Boo hoo, you poor baby. There's a whole lot more linux users bickering about distros or how much "M$ sUx" than there are BSD users bickering about anything. Quit critisizing everyone else and pretending you aren't standing in a glass house.
"I am having extensive problems using ReiserFS; it seems to have bugs all over the place. I'm not compiling with a buggy compiler. What is happening? How can this be stable? :-/..... Real bug reports are at the time of writing outnumbered 10 to 1 by hardware bugs that trigger error messages. We are working on making our error messages better at catching hardware bugs and identifying them as such. There is only so far we can go though in runtime consistency checking without serious speed reductions. We don't release software unless it goes through extensive testing; so if you don't think that our testing could have missed the bug, it is probably hardware."
You have hardware problems. Really, you do. Even if the bugs don't show up with ext2, you have hardware problems. (See FAQ question about ReiserFS running 3C hotter than ext2.) Most SuSE users use ReiserFS. Obscure bugs probably still exist; but if you find bugs as easily as using Windows, you have bad RAM, bad CPU, bad cable, bad cooling, VIA chipset with PCI quirks turned on, or other hardware or other software layer bugs. ReiserFS is stable. You can be sure that if the bugs are encountered easily and commonly with normal usage patterns, it is not us. This does not mean that the next release won't somehow break something though
Referenced in the FAQ.
How can they say it is unknown, I was running it on my computer at age 13, possibly 12 or earlier (i'm not really sure when i finally phased it out in favor of linux).
I'm using an amd64 FreeBSD-STABLE system at work and I've never experienced any problems with stability.
I cannot compare with 64 bit Linux, but it's about twice as fast doing encryption when I compare with a faster and more modern 32 bit Linux system (see openssl benchmarks).
All the sudden, it makes perfect sense why Apple and MS like the BSD license, and IBM, SGI, HP, and everyone else who competes with MS like the GPL.
... they could have used any kernel they wanted. They could have even used Linux without getting into trouble with the GPL, the way they used GCC, but they decided to continue with their existing BSD code base and FreeBSD... and then kept it open source.
Apple has released the source to every major and minor version of just about everything in Mac OS X below the Quartz layer, and a bunch of stuff above it. Even if BSD had been GPLed, they've gone far beyond the requirements of the GPL by not only releasing the source to the code that's linked with the kernel, but just about all the important utilities including applications like launchd that are part of their competitive advantage over other UNIX platforms. They have released not only their enhancements to KHTML but all the glue necessary to rebuild Webcore and virtually every important part of Safari, not only as tarballs but also through repository access. This is a HUGE amount of work from a company as small as Apple.
Apple didn't use BSD because they wanted to keep their source code private. The source code that they're keeping private is highly portable and was already running under Solaris and Windows, using standard APIs
IBM? HP? SGI? Where can I download OpenAIX, OpenHPUX, and OpenIrix? THAT's the kind of code release that would be comparable to what Apple's done.
Microsoft? I wish they'd use MORE BSD code in their kernel, not less. They don't like any flavor of open source all that much, it makes it too hard for them to do things like maintaining an incompatible sockets library.
http://www.pcbsd.org/ Is the desktop brand of FreeBSD, as they say on there page. I have nothing agenst *BSD, it's just Unix in my view and if has something that i need. I will use it in the end. Today i use Gentoo Linux without any problem.
> FreeBSD is free'er than Linux, or more accurately
:)
> the BSD license is free'er than the GPL. That
> said, the less free GPL's restrictions are meant
> to be benevolent for certain users
This is true as long as "free" beer is "free'er" than "free" speech.
BSD is free'er with respect to "speech". Wasn't that obvious, they have the same price? The GPL has strings, BSD is free from strings. "Free Speech" gives you the right to speak, it does not compel you to do so, you have the right to keep your thoughts to yourself should you choose to. BSD respects the individual's choice to share or not to share. You may disagree with someone's choice, but it is their call, just as it is the choice of an original author to choose BSD or GPL as suits their personal goals.
The BSD license gives more freedom to the developer - they can take other people's work and close it to the community (and even the original developer)
... you can also consider the GPL to be "free'er" in that it ensures that free software stays free.
Untrue, the original developer and the community have lost nothing. The original work is still there, still available. To borrow an idea from music pirates: nothing has been stolen, the owner (copright holder) has not lost access to their property.
What you are talking about is not really freedom, you are in fact describing an enforced benevolence.
> If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
.
Interestingly enough, just today the first draft of a new area on the website was committed to try to bring together various whitepapers and case studies with a business orientation: see http://www.freebsd.org/marketing
Mark Linimon
at a competitive disadvantage. FreeBSD and just about every Linux distro can be downloaded, used and stored as an ISO.
Why on Earth would I want to inconvenience myself? How is it that the FreeBSD project seems to do just fine while distributing ISOs but OpenBSD just can't do it?
It's obnoxious.
+++ATH0
You should read things before submitting replies to them.
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the perl dependancy hell will absolutely love the ports tree - I really don't understand why there hasn't been more adoption of that concept in Linux.
Huh? Perl what? Never had a problem with dpkg/apt myself...
Case of miscapitalization here, he [presumably] never had a problem with dependencies for perl (the interpreter, and for all intents and purposes, the associated libraries), rather for Perl, meaning that even using the CPAN module, getting new modules to work on an existing installation is a nightmare.
Also, I am suprised that Linux is the platform of choice for all of these appliances that companies are pumping out, like wireless routers, security devices, etc, when the BSD license is so much more attractive to business.
As usual the problem is drivers. Linux just has more.
Hmm...you've made a believer out of me, I'm switching to Linux, where apparently developers write drivers for the device that you yourself are developing before it's released.
--- What