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:Obligatory statement

[Cro Magnon]

OMG, the BSD trolls are dying!

Better 'out of the box' support

[fak3r]

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.

Re:What debate?

[molnarcs]

Parent post is not offtopic - in fact, it is right on target: there is no linux vs. bsd debate, except here on slashdot (and that's the point Scott Long makes, except for the slashdot part). That is my experience as well. I came to bsd from a linux background (mandrake), and I only met friendly people at bsdforums.org. Friendly as in not trying to convince you to use bsd instead of linux at all cost. In fact, I read good reviews of various linux distroes on bsdforums. Generally speaking, bsd users (and I think bsdforums is a good representation of the userbase) are basically friendly towards linux - so don't let ./ trolls convince you otherwise (or journalists, who like this kind of x vs. y stuff because, like all controversies, they make better headlines).

BSD .vs. Linux

[Medievalist]

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.

Re:Why Darwin?

[TheRaven64]

Darwin sure looks like a BSD to me. It uses a BSD-style hierarchy, the system calls and commands are all BSD-style. The userland is mostly from FreeBSD (so du, thankfully, has a short option for depth, and ftp supports tab-completion).

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?