BSDForums Interviews Scott Long

Dan writes that BSDForums is featuring and interview with FreeBSD's Scott Long. Scott fills us in on some of the new things in FreeBSD 6.0 including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64, and wireless compatibility. In addition to specifics Scott also abstracts on the overall snapshot of BSD development with respect to OpenBSD, NetBSD and the ongoing debate between BSD vs. Linux.

Comments

Moving forward quickly

[Sv-Manowar]

FreeBSD seemed to have some issues around the 5.0 release because of the major features that release brought (and the ensuing nervousness about upgrading). Hopefully 6.0 won't be plagued by these kinds of issues and should be taken up rapidly. I've had nothing but good experiences of FreeBSD in server environments, and the fact that increasing out of the box hardware support is being included for desktop platforms is great.

Re:Moving forward quickly

[molnarcs]

I agree - with one addition: I had nothing but good experience with FreeBSD (the 5.x line) on the desktop. Everything works as expected, packages/ports are up to date, kde performace is great, what else needs to be said?

The day to day tasks I use FreeBSD for include text editing, watching tv, encoding video, browsing the net, and occasionally playing some games (wesnoth!), in other words, the usual stuff. Let's take these one by one:

• Text editing: OpenOffice.org support is excellent. We had always the latest builds not only in ports, but as packages from goodday-net. What's more, not only english builds, but all language packs. Of course, I like to build these oo.o myself, so I switched from latest snapshots (all of which built fine) to beta and I'm now building rc1 (with KDE support and all).
• multimedia: mplayer of course. H.264 being the next standard (for future dvds) and all, I began to use it instead of mpeg-4 (ffmpeg or xvid). Downside is that it is painfully slow to encode, but still, it's the future. In the case of rapidly developing encoders like h.264 (and its opensource implentation, x264) it is important to have the latest and greatest. Right now, I have x264-0.0.20051004 (yesterday's snapshot) installed :)
• games: the number of games available in ports is impressive, but as usual with opensource games, few of them are impressive. Luckily, the important ones (for me at least) are also always up to date, like wesnoth.

So I'm eagerly waiting for 6.0 - by all accounts it's gonna be great!

Re:Why Darwin?

[Arandir]

Scott's FreeBSD code is *in* Darwin. This isn't deception, it's pride that he helped write a code base with such high quality that Apple decided to use it.

You don't always have to brag about your kids, sometimes you can brag about your nephews and nieces.

Re:Pathetic Fallacy

[shlong]

Sorry, wrong. I challenge you to find any posting that said that 6.0 would be released in June. It was widely publicized that the release process would START in June and hopefully conclude by August. It was also widely publicized that it would be released when it was ready, and not before.

Re:FreeBSD vs Linux

[david duncan scott]

if FreeBSD is so great, why don't they still use it?

Well, running FreeBSD was sort of an embarassment to Microsoft after they acquired HotMail, what with "eating your own dogfood" and all of that.

It took them at least two cuts at it, as I recall. The first time went rather badly, with delays and even brief outages. The second time they made it.

There was an interesting white paper, originally meant for internal consumption but later leaked (I have a vague recollection that it ended up in a public ftp directory by mistake) that described some of the issues involved. I read it back then and found it a pretty balanced work (perhaps why it had to be leaked.) Their offical public paper is also available.

It's worth noting that Hotmail worked just fine with a FreeBSD front end (the back end was a combination of NT SQL boxes and various Sun systems providing files services and handling incoming mail.) I'm not entirely clear just how much of the site is Windows even now -- they explicitily describe switching over the web servers, but don't really get into the back-end machines -- but I'm sure they're working on it if it isn't. It's a good showcase for them, after all.

Re:BSD .vs. Linux

[Nethead]

CPU architectures. i.e.: 6800 vs 8080 to 68030 vs 80386. An early form was SWTPC vs Altair or C64 vs TRS-80. The end of the era was Macintosh vs IBM-PC. Also see Harvard vs. von Neumann Architecture (obe.ibme.utoronto.ca/presentations/Microcontrolle r/sld007.htm)

Re:Will FreeBSD 6.0 become the STABLE branch?

[shlong]

There will be a 5.5 release once 6.0 is done. It will likely be the last 5.x release, and it will also be the seventh 5.x release. Not too shabby. 6.0 is the start of the 6-STABLE branch. There will be a 6.1 release a few months after 5.5. After that, there will only be 6.x releases until it's time for 7.0. That will be in approximately 2 years.