Slashdot Mirror
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.
Reminds me of one point (.) upgrade in Linux where it switched from one library to another and half my applications suddenly malfunctioned. I'm sure it was all for the good in the long run, but I was certainly in a panic while trying to decide if I should just go back.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The main thing I've noticed is just better 'out of the box' support for hardware in 6.0. I don't have massive requirements, as I'm running FreeBSD 6.0 for my primary server (mail, web, chat, database, file) at home. I didn't need to rebuilt the kernel as I did with 5.2 - but that was to support an older NIC. Basically it 'just works' and I've stuck with GENERIC for the kernel with no issues. I use Ports like they're going out of style, and I haven't had anything break (that I couldn't fix ;))
Anyway, better 'out of the box' support, which would manifest mostly for folks installing 6.0 for a desktop, or someone who has some new(er) RAID or 1G NIC to support. I couldn't be happier, not using Linux for a server anymore, but it's still my Desktop of choice.
fak3r.com
From a TI-99/4A to years of wintel boxes, then Linux, I've now made the move to AMD 64 and freeBSD. I've moved onto freeBSD because somewhere I saw a quip that went...Linux is for people who hate windows; *BSD is for people who love Unix. I see Unix is an OS written by scientist for scientist and, as much as possible, I'd to discover that idea.
From the interview:
4. Some critics claim that FreeBSD has not been as popular among corporations as Linux, not even close. Microsoft acknowledges Linux as a viable threat but FreeBSD is not even on their radar screen.
Wasn't FreeBSD the only other operating system Microsoft ported C# to? Didn't Hotmail run for a LONG time on FreeBSD? Doesn't Microsoft use BSD code in their operating system?
There's your debate.
People will wonder why this is great. Darwin is not FreeBSD... there are too many things going on with the Mach Kernel. Yes, Fink or DarwinPorts solves some problems but still. I'm a happy fella.
I had used FreeBSD excusively in the 4.x's on both my desktop and servers up until about a year ago. I really liked ports and found that everything just seemed like it fit together like one seamless product instead of the hodge-podge that my previous experiences with RedHat and Slackware had been. Subjectively I also found that it felt faster than the Linux at the time of my switch. I stuck with FreeBSD but also with the 4.x tree because I was a bit put off by the whole stable vs development nature they kept putting forward for 5.
That changed when Novell bought SUSE and started offering their certifications. I was asked to evauluate it by some people at work who had fond memories of Novell and wanted to see what they did with Linux and I was given the opportunity to sit for the Novell CLP (Certified Linux Professional) practicum exam if I wanted as a carrot for doing it. I decided that the only way to get comfortable enough with it for the test was to dive in and install it on my primary desktop OS and force myself to use it.
What I found was surprising. There, obviously, were some growing pains when it came to various BSD vs SYSV things and directory layout and ports vs RPM etc. What I was surprised by was that everything worked out of the box. I am used to, and almost looked forward to, having to roll up my sleeves and figure out the config files and recompile the kernel and go through newsgroups and mailing lists for fixes. This has been especially true since my primary machine is a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600). What also surprised me was that Yast configures, with either a console or X-Win GUI, just about eveything that I wanted to configure and every setting that I wanted to change. I kept waiting to run into a gotcha so I could swear it off and convince myself I had to do it all by hand but it hasn't come yet. The whole magic-black-box aspect of it scares me a little but I am amazed how little I have had to get my hands dirty. It almost feels like Windows Server 2003 -- in a good way. Also, while I was put off by the 6 CD thing at first (I have always had a pretty streamlined and small FreeBSD install for my desktop) I find that having pretty much any piece of software that you might want in RPMs you can trust (and don't suffer from the dependency hell I remember) right on the CDs is actually pretty nice.
After I take my practicum in the next few weeks I am going to try Novell's desktop offering. If it is as slick as SLES then Novell, especially when you figure in NDS and ZenWorks, is going to make huge inroads versus the other distros and FreeBSD. And, strange as it sounds to me who missed the Novell hayday, there are alot of people in the industry who seem to remember their interaction with Novell fondly for whom their name and support seems to be a big plus.
NetBSD: Nice OS. However, it just "feels strange" to me in ways that I can't really quantify. For example, according to everything I've read, you rebuild the system by crosscompiling it to your own platform (and if I'm wrong, please enlighten me). It always gave me the subconscious impression that it tries really, really hard to prove how cross-platform it is by never really feeling completely at home on any of them. Justified? I don't know. That's just how it seemed to this outsider.
Largly you are cross compiling to your own platform. It really just builds the toolchain first then builds the rest of the system. The interesting consequence of this setup is that it's possible to build other versions of the OS without any contamination from the installed version. I've build a whole release snapshot of -current from 2.0.2, without installing it myself. This is difficult on the others, for instance when OpenBSD made the switch to ELF on i386, it was more or less a reinstall situation, whereas NetBSD would have just let you build it.
God save our Queen, and Heaven bless The Maple Leaf Forever!
Mach itself is a direct descendent of BSD - the original Mach implementation ran a BSD kernel as a service on top of the Mach microkernel, and userland was all BSD. The NeXTStep kernel put the BSD portion in kernel space for performance reasons, making it a BSD system running on a Mach hardware abstraction layer. The Rhapsody kernel threw away some of the old BSD code and replaced it with more modern code from NetBSD. More recent versions of Darwin have done the same with FreeBSD.
I moved to OS X from FreeBSD, and found the system very familiar. I also play with a NeXT machine on occasion, and that machine is also clearly a BSD family member.
FreeBSD is not out to take over the world. The point of the BSD license is to allow people to take your code and do whatever they want with it. Apple took a lot of BSD (and, specifically, FreeBSD) code, and made the second most popular OS on the planet. This means that the second most popular OS on the planet contains FreeBSD code. NetBSD and OpenBSD also periodically take code from FreeBSD, as does Linux. FreeBSD, in turn, gets code from Net and OpenBSD, along with contributions from Apple. Examining FreeBSD makes no sense out of the context of the BSD ecosystem.
To put this in a Linux context, imagine if someone from Red Hat had been asked to talk about their OS and about, say, OS X. Would you expect them to just talk about Red Had Enterprise Linux, or would you expect them to talk about the entire Linux ecosystem?
I am TheRaven on Soylent News