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BSDForums Interviews Scott Long

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the but-everyone-knows-linux-is-better dept.

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.

2 of 121 comments (clear)

  1. Moving forward quickly by Sv-Manowar · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

    --
    Business Voyeur
    1. Re:Moving forward quickly by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
      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!