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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.
There's a debate between Linux and BSD? Hmm, I must have missed it.
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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.
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OMG, the BSD trolls are dying!
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
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.
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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.
Of course I can't say this is true for everyone, because I don't know everyone. I'm just saying this out of experience with my personal real life friends and coworkers. There's definitely exceptions to this - it can't be said that every Linux user uses it out of hatred for Microsoft and that every BSD user uses it for love of Unix. This would be simply untrue. This is just my observation.
I also know that I'll probably get modded troll or flamebait for this, even though I'm simply stating something that I've noticed throughout the years.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo!
It has generally been my experience that the people who argue "BSD versus linux" fall into one of two categories.
1) BSD people who have no in-depth knowledge of linux, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
2) Linux people who know very little about any particular BSD, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance
The people with truly deep knowledge of both systems always say "use the right tool for the right task" and typically have no time for OS religious wars.
There are BSD fans like to "rile" Linux users with [friendly] jibes of "weenie" and "get a proper operating system". But it really goes without saying what some of them think of Microsoft products. Not so much hatred, as sheer, unbridled contempt: they barely acknowledge Windows as software. And for the record, I use Linux because I like Linux.
(I also read Playboy for the articles, and BoingBoing for the SuicideGirls adverts.)
Why is there no "-1 Retarded" ?
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.
Wasn't FreeBSD the only other operating system Microsoft ported C# to?
No the plans are not still alive because no one really cared. Mono on the other hand is pretty well supported.they planned to are those plans still alive?
Didn't Hotmail run for a LONG time on FreeBSD?
Yes hotmail before Microsoft was heavilly FreeBSD + Qmail. I'd expect Microft to use Win2k3 over any OS as would most normal ppl.they no longer do. if FreeBSD is so great, why don't they still use it?
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.
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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.
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Scott Long is dying!!!
No I'm not!!!
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
1. Partitioning. Why in the fucking hell do you have to partition TWICE? Why do you need a standard partition that can be seen by other OSes and then those weird ass partitions within that partition that only BSD can see? How is that useful?
How useful is the partitioning scheme of Linux and Windows? First you have primary partitions, then extended partitions, and then logical partitions. Huh?
Here's the scoop, numbnut: way back in the beginning of harddisks on the PC, the idea was that every OS got its own primary partition. Then the OS could slice up its own partition however it wanted to. Microsoft decided to use extended/logical partitions, while 386BSD decided to use the traditional BSD slices. Then Linux came along and said "let's do it the Microsoft way!" The truth is that neither method is better or worse than the other. In the absence of any standard, each OS is free to subdivide their primary partition however they want.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
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?
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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.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
Are you the Scott Long that is overdue on his credit card payments? If so then I have a crapload of mail and phone messages for you =-D
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
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.
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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.
Cat, the other, tastier white meat.