DesktopBSD 1.0 Final Released

Don Church writes "DesktopBSD is reporting that the 1.0 Final of DesktopBSD was released today for both 32-bit and 64-bit x86 architectures. This cutting edge FreeBSD derivative now includes KDE 3.5.1 and a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices. The DVD release even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software ready to go. They are offering downloads via several mirrors or the official torrent."

Comments

so?

[Anonymous Coward]

"even includes Amarok, Firefox and other popular software"

Yeah, well so does my FreeBSD discs and every linux distro in existance. what's so special about that?

Re:so?

[tornsaq]

Quit comparing Linux and FreeBSD.

Linux is a kernel, FreeBSD is an operating system.

Re:so?

[Anonymous Coward]

Learn to read, douchebag. OP said Linux distro.

Re:so?

[Anonymous Coward]

LINUX DISTRO! Stop, you're making me hard.....

fp?

[Anonymous Coward]

fp?

Who cares? BSD is Dead

[Anonymous Coward]

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BubuntuSD?

[irimi_00]

BubuntuSD?

Re:BubuntuSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

RIS?

Re:BubuntuSD?

[ilikejam]

RIS?
I don't get it.

Re:BubuntuSD?

[irimi_00]

Overrated by who? Myself?

Final?

[Anonymous Coward]

As in "final resting place"?

Netcraft confirms

[miscz]

BSD is dead

1 comment & already /.'d

[tinkerghost]

Sigh, guess I'll wait

Re:1 comment & already /.'d

[psykl0n3]

heh... I guess this flavour of BSD can't quite take a slashdotting... ;)

Re:1 comment & already /.'d

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot confirms it: BSD is dead!

Re:1 comment & already /.'d

[arvid]

If this is running on DesktopBSD I don't want it.

But, BSD, bytheway, is not dead at all. It just smells funny. ;)

Oh, and even FreeBSD 4.11-STABLE has the actual Firefox available through ports, so I don't get what might be so special about it. And KDE is no reason.

My first post

[Anonymous Coward]

...is a first post?

Me too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yawn.

Obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

Are they running this server on DesktopBSD? :)

Re:Obligatory

[xiao_haozi]

I was trying to get to the wiki link to read about the server features they might have included (packages, etc.)...guess the slashdotting may have answered my questions.... however, on a serious note....i have been playing with the initial release on an old PII with 64mb of ram and was extremely impressed with the stability and responsiveness. Nothing too ground breaking but is definitely a great version for new users of non windows OSes and is relatively nice to run on old hardware at the standard installation level (haven't needed to do much tweaking). However, being a "desktop" distrobution there isn't really much in terms of natively installed server tools, but is quite understandable....just would have been nice for a newer user to not have to try to hunt down the packages or decide which to use.

Ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

From here...

Hardware requirements and support

DesktopBSD is running on any decent i386, AMD64 or EM64T computer. We recommend at least 4 GB of disk space and 256 MB memory for installation, maybe less is possible.

If you want to know if a specific hardware component is supported, please see the FreeBSD Hardware Notes for i386 or AMD64/EM64T.

Most people have a hard time remembering if their CPU is made by Pentium or made by Intel. They won't have a clue whether it's i386 or AMD64.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Chrismith]

The sort of people who don't know the difference between Pentium and Intel probably aren't going to be installing this anyway, made for novices or not.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Lxy]

Most people have a hard time remembering if their CPU is made by Pentium or made by Intel. They won't have a clue whether it's i386 or AMD64

This is true, however:

If you want to know if a specific hardware component is supported..

If you're concerned about a particular piece of hardware, then you probably know what CPU you're running. Your point is moot.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

My Guess is they won't be using FreeBSD anything in that case.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[squiggleslash]

You think this is bad? Microsoft says Vista will need a "modern" CPU. That means it should run on a Power Macintosh G5 right? Well, if you click on that link you get to this, which in turn gives you links to Intel, AMD, and VIA CPU thingies. And what are these CPUs that, say, Intel (I think it says "Intel inside" on my Dell, but doesn't that mean I have a Dell CPU?) has? Well, on "Desktop" platforms (another link) it says I need a "Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 600 sequence with HT Technology and Intel® Extended Memory 64 Technology."

I don't know about you but all this stuff about HT Technology and stuff is very confusing. Do I have that?

This just proves that Vista is unready for the desktop. I guess that's why they cancelled it. Har har! Har har. Har, har. *sigh*

Seriously, what exactly is DesktopBSD's website supposed to say? The thing you quote seems reasonable to me, anyone who doesn't understand it is unlikely to find any way of wording it useful anyway, unless it was worded in such a way that'd make it useless to an actual computer professional.

It's not like they'll be installing it. They'll be asking us to do it, as usual.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[bombadillo]

Most people have a hard time remembering if their CPU is made by Pentium or made by Intel.

Even worse the average slashdot poster has trouble sorting out AMD/Intel as well.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, my dad thinks his computer has 160GB of RAM...

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Most people have a hard time remembering if their CPU is made by Pentium or made by Intel. They won't have a clue whether it's i386 or AMD64.

Sheesh, in order to determine whether a piece of software can run on a piece of hardwre, you need to: A) know the hardware requirements, and B) know what hardware you have. This is true for every software.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[GT_Onizuka]

*Wooosh*

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[X0563511]

Well, some customer at work thought the little green USB-to-PS/2 adapter was an ethernet card.

Go figure.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[ne0n]

The G5 is obsolete. Apple won't even ship the G5 when Vista comes round, so why even bother mentioning it.
The real issue isn't Vista anyways, it's DesktopBSD. Fortunately DesktopBSD supports almost all of the desktop systems available today.

Re:Ready for the desktop?

[Antique Geekmeister]

That's no problem. The first installation CD could be a Knoppix CD to boot with, go Google hunting, and print out a report on the hardware so you can see if it can hope to boot the target OS.

Don't laugh too hard. I regularly do this with Windows hardware to find and pre-download drivers for it that are not part of the basic OS install, especially the network drivers for newer chipsets, and to run tests for hardware trouble.

choice is good, but ...

[bcrowell]

Choice is good. The OSS ecosystem is healthier with two viable desktop systems to choose from, rather than just Linux. However, my experience has been that FreeBSD is a lot more appropriate for a server than for a desktop machine. Maybe DesktopBSD will help to change that, but I'm doubtful. The big problem I ran into with using FreeBSD as a desktop system was that the ports system wasn't robust enough. The software you need on a typical server is actually a lot smaller and simpler than the software you need on a desktop machine. At any given time, I was never able to run more than about 75% of the desktop apps that I wanted to run. I tried portupgrade, but that often did more harm than good. I'm still thrilled with FreeBSD as a server system, but I've switched my desktops to Ubuntu, and everything Just Works(tm).

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Necrotica]

You're comparing apples to oranges. FreeBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. DesktopBSD is a single, cohesive operating system. They are two distinctly different operating systems.

That would be like saying, "I installed Debian stable on my computer and I found that all of the software was out of date. Therefore Genoo must be out of date as well." We both know that's not accurate.

Having not installed DesktopBSD before, maybe they have some new tools for ports for "everyday" users. I have never had problems with ports on my FreeBSD servers, btw - but I also read /usr/ports/UPGRADING before I use portupgrade.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[bcrowell]

Having not installed DesktopBSD before, maybe they have some new tools for ports for "everyday" users. I have never had problems with ports on my FreeBSD servers, btw - but I also read /usr/ports/UPGRADING before I use portupgrade.
I've never had any problems with ports on my FreeBSD server, either. The problems I had were all desktop-related, e.g., the latest version of some Gnome library is required in order to run app A, but breaks app B. These are the kinds of rough edges that you don't see as a Linux user, because the developers themselves are all running Linux, and if something breaks, they know right away. Also, I think the level of testing and effort that goes into packaging desktop software on, say Ubuntu and Debian, is an order of magnitude greater than the effort that goes into the same stuff for FreeBSD -- simply because the size of the Linux desktop community is an order of magnitude greater. Of course I'd love to be proved wrong about DesktopBSD, and I admit to not even having RTFA, since it's slashdotted :-)

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

BAD MODS!

This is just a baseless troll, without any real information.

At any given time, I was never able to run more than about 75% of the desktop apps that I wanted to run. I tried portupgrade, but that often did more harm than good.

WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package. They ALL compile and install perfectly every time. Hell, I've UPGRADED my system from FreeBSD version to version, never bothered uninstalling the old ports, and everything continues to work fine. I've never seen ANY other OS handle upgrades remotely as gracefully.

Besides, even if you did have a problem with compiling from ports (which I have a very hard time believing), why didn't you just install from the binary packages, instead?

I can't believe this is anything other than another anti-BSD troll.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[SpinJaunt]

Ahem. That isn't a very constructive criticism. Yes, people that use FreeBSD know that is more appropriate for a server, although that hasn't stopped me amongst others from successfully using FreeBSD on a desktop/workstation.

And if you had such problems, what was wrong with the mailing lists? irc? forums? etc.

The ports system like anything else; yum, rpm, emerge, pkgsrc, etc. all have there gripes, and how are such things supposed to get better for you --and others-- when you do not tell anyone at the time with the required information; that is like going to the doctor and saying I feel ill and not giving any symptoms that are needed for diagnosis.

You get what you pay for in the Open Source Software and/or Free Software world, a lot of what you use is done with peoples unpaid spare time. People like you make us wonder why we bother.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Lots of ports break on AMD64 (all the free Lisps, for example). In all cases I've seen it's been because the package didn't (yet) work on AMD64, so the ports tree can't be blamed, but still they don't _always_ work.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Fweeky]

Knowing a bit about what you're doing is fairly important with ports, especially when dealing with complex upgrades like Gnome; dependency tracking's a lot less anal than apt/dpkg. This is good when you've got something installed from outside ports, and works nicely when you just want to pick and choose a few things to update (say, after running portaudit or tracking an interesting update on FreshPorts/commit logs).

Geeky FreeBSD users need a desktop too, and now we have three variants to choose from; FreeBSD, PC BSD and DesktopBSD. YMMV; just because it's aimed at desktops doesn't mean it's aimed at yours or your mother's.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[ps3udonym]

Sorry, that is just wrong. Free is a not bad system, but I have seen more than a few broken ports problems. One of the big issues is binary drivers and programs in the ports tree that require signing licence agreements. Installing OpenOffice I had to stop and download three different licences before it finally puked and just wouldn't install. Realplayer doesn't run nativly and has to use Linux Binary compatiblity mode, Flash is a program that just doesn't work. The alternatives cause Firefox to crash randomly. These are problems in ADDITION to the installer. It has been a while since I installed Free but we stopped using it a while ago due to one of the worst installers I have EVER seen. It wouldn't resolve DNS correctly and if you made a mistake, you are starting ALL over again. After 6 people (all OBSD people, so we are not talking n00bs) tried and failed to make the installer work correctly we took all our FreeBSD disks and threw them out the 18th floor of my friend's appartment building. Lastly, when I tried to boot up the computer behind my firewall without passing defining a local domain suffex it would hang on the sendmail script for 10 to 15 min before continueing on with the boot. While these issues may have been fixed, what I saw was a dev team more instrested in programing SMP into the kernel then fixing the existing problems with their installer or their OS. Until that attitude changes, I will not be using FreeBSD again anytime soon. Just my 2 cents, sorry about the spelling =P Peace

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Neil Hodges]

Actually, I tend to prefer FreeBSD, but have never gotten gst-ffmpeg (for GNOME) or mplayer in ports to compile; and since I'm on a source-built machine, it won't let me fetch a package.

Other than this one instance, FreeBSD has been great as well as fast with the proper optimizations in make.conf.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Billly Gates]

I haven't used FreeBSD for awhile but occasionally I have had to search for packages because some ports would not compile or would sig11. It was not often but I used FreeBSD as a desktop and installed a ton of software on it.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

fucking n00b

Re:choice is good, but ...

[killjoe]

"WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package."

Ah come on now. I have run freebsd servers for years and I can tell you from direct experience that there have been numerous times I could not get one port or another to build. The one I remember being pissed off the most was net-snmp for a while. I waited for months and emailed the author but it still didn't get fixed so I had to compile from source (something I do not like to do as a matter of course).

With all those ports there are bound to be defects at some time or another. I also remember I had problems with sablotron for a while too.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

Actually, I tend to prefer FreeBSD, but have never gotten gst-ffmpeg (for GNOME) or mplayer in ports to compile;

That's insane. I've never seen anything like that, and I've certainly compiled MPlayer dozens of times. If I did see that, I'd fix it.

How about posting the log of this MPlayer error?

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

Installing OpenOffice I had to stop and download three different licences

That much is true, only because it has Java as a dependency. I can't see how that would cause it to fail to compile. Anyhow, you can always disable Java (hence the license agreements) with "-DWITHOUT_JAVA".

Realplayer doesn't run nativly and has to use Linux Binary compatiblity mode,

Yes it does, but it still works just fine (just takes a while to install all the Linux base libs). If you don't want to do that, you can always install MPlayer/Xine, which will run natively, and use the Win32 DLLs.

Flash is a program that just doesn't work.

It had it working just fine back when I needed it. Then I got annoyed with all the ads and animations and uninstalled it all-together.

The alternatives cause Firefox to crash randomly.

Yes, that much is true. The open source flash libraries are terribly unstable, but that has NOTHING to do with FreeBSD, as they exhibit the same behavior on Linux.

It has been a while since I installed Free but we stopped using it a while ago due to one of the worst installers I have EVER seen. It wouldn't resolve DNS correctly and if you made a mistake, you are starting ALL over again.

What the hell? The FreeBSD installer is basically a step-up from the Slackware installer, and a hell of a lot better than the limited and bare-bones OpenBSD installer. You can always abort whatever step you're on, go back to the main screen, and start that step again. I have no idea where you're getting the idea from that you are somehow stuck with your mistakes.

Lastly, when I tried to boot up the computer behind my firewall without passing defining a local domain suffex it would hang on the sendmail script for 10 to 15 min before continueing on with the boot.

First legitimate complaint I've heard so far... Yes, that minor issue is very easily worked-around.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[4D6963]

Well I'm quite new to FreeBSD, but I already can tell you that if you got a problem with the ports, pkg_add -r! Personally I always download the packages anyways, mainly because I run it on a Pentium 133, and cuz it's simpler.

And as inexperimented to various unixes as I am, I've had such a though time with various Linuxes to get to install the software I wanted (eh, I'm a n00b!), as I never had any software resisting me yet in FreeBSD

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Bing Tsher E]

The OSS ecosystem is healthier with two viable desktop systems to choose from, rather than just Linux.

There are more than two. Considerably more than two.

I use NetBSD, for instance.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[ps3udonym]

Yes it does, but it still works just fine (just takes a while to install all the Linux base libs). If you don't want to do that, you can always install MPlayer/Xine, which will run natively, and use the Win32 DLLs.

MPlayer: when you configure the args at compile time to compile the Realplayer codecs it pukes when it reaches them. I belive the problem I was having was that there was no codec avalible for it to download. It also won't compile them by default so you have to set the flag at compile time. Never did get it to work correctly, ditched it. As for Xine, not an app I am familiar with so I didn't install it.

That much is true, only because it has Java as a dependency. I can't see how that would cause it to fail to compile. Anyhow, you can always disable Java (hence the license agreements) with "-DWITHOUT_JAVA".

Tried this and it still borked. It was a problem with the compile script. (this was a good 8 or 9 months ago so I don't remember the exact error). I certainly don't feel like spending hours fixing their script so I just used Abbi Word. Which BTW compiled beautifully.

You strike me as someone who has never acctually installed Free yourself. Esspecially if you aren't aware of the installer problems. Even the FreeBSD diciples among my friends freely admit that the installer is a huge dog and a major downfall of the system. Esspecially it not resolving DNS correctly. Unless you only install off of CD media, a method I almost never use. FTP and HTTP installs are seriously borked in Free. At least the older versions. I heard rumors of a new installer being created but I have yet to see it. As for the slackware installer.. haven't used it since almost certainly before you knew what a computer was. When I last used slackware it came with a little red book with very small text and step by step instructions much like the current Gentoo CD FAQ. Back when 8 megs of ram cost $900. weee! I imagine it has changed a bit in the mean time. As for the OBSD installer... it works, everytime. Enough said.

Lastly, when I tried to boot up the computer behind my firewall without passing defining a local domain suffex it would hang on the sendmail script for 10 to 15 min before continueing on with the boot.

First legitimate complaint I've heard so far... Yes, that minor issue is very easily worked-around.

Okay, THAT was an issue that I had almost a year ago. That the developers are all high on their new bells and whistles and STILL haven't fixed OBVIOUS bugs.. that says alot about how I can expect future bugs to be treated.. if at all.

Sorry, but there is NO way that you will get me to agree that working on new features is more important then developing stable and bug free code. Once you have THAT dragon slayed, you can start looking at new bells and whistles. If you don't... well then free will end up being the spagetti nightmare that the windows code base now is.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[jdog1016]

Oh please. I have used FreeBSD for about 6 years now, and I can recall numerous times where ports broke after a portupgrade. It happens--you just have to know to contact the port's maintainer.

Having said that, my first linux system was redhat 6.0. I didn't use linux for a number of years, and just started using gentoo a few months ago, so I don't know too much about it yet. But I do know this: FreeBSD doesn't buckle under load. During a port install, I/O is essentially unaffected. From what I have seen, this is nowhere near the case with Linux. The only reason that I switched to linux is that FreeBSD amd64 support has been lacking. If something has changed and this DesktopBSD thing is really nice, I might consider switching back.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[SillyNickName4me]

As a parttime job I currently 'play' administrator for a small company... They are running some remote terminal servers for a few Windows apps they really need still, rest of their desktop apps are all either native FreeBSD or some Linux binaries. Not a very large installation, only some 8 or so machines, all pxe booted diskless machines (tho they have a local flash disk), and easily maintained from a central server. They run about as many servers for hosting a bunch of web apps and some firewalls. (and an oddball linux and windows machine here and there)

Anyway, seems to work pretty well for them. Almost anything they use is built from source locally but by some centralized machines, and is distributed in a controlled way as binary packages.

Just got asterisk to realize we have isdn hardware, nice small scale voip project is next, kiax is already running.

And yeah, I did setup most of that environment, its interesting how esp. the developers and web people seem to be quite content with it.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[discogravy]

WTF? I can't remember the last time I saw FreeBSD ports break. Not even a SINGLE package.

OK, do me a favor and get yourself a FreeBSD box. as root, go into /usr/ports/misc/instant-workstation and run a "make install clean" and let me know if that works for you. Hasn't worked for me in ages. There's no way to get a quick desktop with FreeBSD without doing a bunch of work -- installing X, a desktop and then X apps so that you can actually use it (firefox, gaim, xmms/rhythmbox et al).

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

You strike me as someone who has never acctually installed Free yourself. Esspecially if you aren't aware of the installer problems.

Shows how much you know. I'm using a nicely updated FreeBSD 6.0 right now. Using Firefox 1.5 compiled from ports (with a minor modification to have it use GTK1 instead of 2). In fact, practically every program I'm using was compiled from ports, perhaps with the exception of MPlayer, since I wanted a CVS snapshot, not the last (1-year old) release.

Even the FreeBSD diciples among my friends freely admit that the installer is a huge dog and a major downfall of the system.

Yes, well, the "FreeBSD diciples" you know may quite possibly be idiots. I have no way of knowing.

I heard rumors of a new installer being created but I have yet to see it.

Nope, still the same-old installer. If it ain't broke...

As for the slackware installer.. haven't used it since almost certainly before you knew what a computer was.

Definately not. Linux has only been around about 15 years now, and I've got a much longer history with computers than that. In fact I still sometimes use a '81 QUME terminal I kept around.

When I last used slackware it came with a little red book with very small text and step by step instructions

Only if you paid for it... I'm sure plenty of us were loading up floppies at school/work instead of paying for it.

As for the OBSD installer... it works, everytime. Enough said.

If only that were true. I've run across lots of systems where OpenBSD didn't like the disk geometry, couldn't load a driver for the CD-ROM, didn't have appropriate network card drivers, would lock-up upon kernel boot-up, would start throwing out read-errors halfway through installation, etc. The most annoying, though, is one I went through repeatedly... The OpenBSD boot disk/CD isn't a big fan of my Alpha system, and if it sits idle (no keypresses) for more than about 2 minutes, you can't input anything. Now, to make this problem all the more horendous, it loads the de driver before the dc one (took quite a while for me to figure-out this problem) so these hundreds of megs of dist files were downloading at 1KB/s, meaning I'd have to sit there at the keyboard for a very long time to get the thing installed.

Sorry, but there is NO way that you will get me to agree that working on new features is more important then developing stable and bug free code.

This is beyond ridiculous. Nothing you have listed could even remotely be considered a bug in FreeBSD, at all. At most you can consider the above an inconvenience. Perhaps a lack of polish.

I'm just wasting my time. I'm done with this nonsense zealotry... Send a bugreport, post some details, etc. Otherwise, you're just blowing hot air.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Brandybuck]

I've had absolutely no problems building mplayer. None at all. The only thing I've ever had problems with was with a perl upgrade late last year. But that was only because I didn't read the UPDATING notice like I should have.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[wolf369T]

MPlayer: when you configure the args at compile time to compile the Realplayer codecs it pukes when it reaches them. I belive the problem I was having was that there was no codec avalible for it to download. It also won't compile them by default so you have to set the flag at compile time. Never did get it to work correctly, ditched it.

I always download the 12M all codec pack and put it in /usr/lib/codecs and then compile MPlayer without any special arguments. My .rm files works just fine.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[BrookHarty]

Anyone who says the ports never breaks isnt a true freebsd user.

Almost every distro of *nix that has needs other packages will break sometimes, thats the biggest fault of opensource software, almost everything has dependices.

I havent seen DLL hell in years, but I've had KDE/Gnome hell on every upgrade.

Re:choice is good, but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

unices

Re:choice is good, but ...

[the chao goes mu]

Have to disagree with you on one thing. If you upgraded and didn't see anything break, you haven't been doing it for long.
I am a BSD fan. Why, I am typing this from my FreeBSD desktop at work. But I admit that upgrades (at least once) broke quite a bit. When BSD went from a.out to ELF, a ton of libraries stopped working as advertised.
I have also had problems with ports, but very rarely. Most notably browser plug-ins and java related software have given me fits. But those are the exceptions, not the rules. To be honest, I have had more difficulty getting a CD player to work on Red Hat (at a previous job) than I have with anything on FreeBSD (Java excepted).

Re:choice is good, but ...

[evilviper]

If you upgraded and didn't see anything break, you haven't been doing it for long.

I think you misunderstood the point in that comment of mine... I haven't seen any other OS upgrade even from one version to the next, without serious breakage. That FreeBSD works smoothly even after just one upgrade is a significant achievment.

When BSD went from a.out to ELF, a ton of libraries stopped working as advertised.

Yes, that would be the time NOT to upgrade, but to install from scratch. There's no way that change could possibly be handled gracefully.

Review & screenshots

[MyNymWasTaken]

DesktopBSD review

DesktopBSD is a distribution that is geared towards being a friendly and easyDesktopBSD intro BSD operating system based on FreeBSD. BSD is some might say is a closer relative to Unix than Linux is. BSD is more geared towards servers and workstations but, not DesktopBSD. DesktopBSD is supposed to be aimed towards user friendliness that people might not even find in a user friendly Linux distribution such as Xandros or Linspire, but is quite powerful enough that you can adapt DesktopBSD to your liking.

Installation of DesktopBSD is quite easy with its graphical interface. It gives you the option of what you want to choose when installing, whether you have another operating system installed say, Windows or Linux and you don't want to overwrite it or ruin the way it boots from your computer.

[...]

RC3 screenshots

Re:Review & screenshots

[Architect_sasyr]

One thing to say...

About fucking time! Good on the team (can't see the site, /.'d still) but I know I'm a going to be moving away from my Linux installation GUI's, and finally to the BSD desktop (Can't convince users to install BSD as a desktop OS, and now I can :) )... Good work team!

Re:Review & screenshots

[DanielSeuffert]

Thank you for your kind comment. We wish you a lot of fun, please visit our forum after the slashdotting and give us feedback if you want. We apologize for the inconvenience, our server is under extreme high load. Best regards, Daniel Seuffert

me thinks...

[Anonymous Coward]

..the term desktop is in relation to the hardware that is running the site...any other pages with info on this?

torrent

[Graham_Hodgson]

Torrent here: http://linuxtracker.org/download.php?id=1734&name= DesktopBSD-1.0-x86-DVD.iso.torrent

No Site Mirrors

[tecker]

MirrorDot and Corel Casche are out as the page is giving a database error and they snapped that. Maybe it will be up later.

Nothing to see here (for now).

This looks promising for a Desktop BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

This looks very promising. Lately, FreeBSD as a desktop has been plagued by missing libs and lack of maintainers for certain applications requiring a lot of configuation, most of the time, using -current worked to fix a lot of these issues, but not always. I hope DesktopBSD addresses these issues. Without bsdforums, a lot of new users would have been helpless, heh.

Re:This looks promising for a Desktop BSD

[Just Some Guy]

Lately, FreeBSD as a desktop has been plagued by missing libs and lack of maintainers for certain applications requiring a lot of configuation, most of the time, using -current worked to fix a lot of these issues, but not always.

I typed "portinstall kde3" on a FreeBSD system last week, and it resulted in a fully installed, ready-to-use KDE 3.5.1 system. What exactly did you find it to be missing or broken?

Re:This looks promising for a Desktop BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I've had issues with mplayer all the time in FreeBSD, each time I install it on a new machine, the same issue quirks up. Missing libm.so.3, which is easy to fix, but that's not the point. Point is, anyone new using this is going to go insane over this for hours before they find a solution. This is not the only thing in ports that has been broken and I'd agree that there are things that work (as you said, doing portinstall KDE worked flawlessly for me), but not everything does. I'm not trying to attack freeBSD as I use it as a desktop all the time, I just wish this stuff with ports would be fixed. As you seem to be a BSD desktop user, I'm pretty damn sure you have runned into these problems, because there hasn't been a fresh install that I haven't ran into these problems.

If you want proof, just simply visit bsdforums.org
There are plenty of cases where people run into broken ports which require some sort of tweaking in order to get it to work. So I was merely wondering if DesktopBSD addresses these issues with ports...

Re:This looks promising for a Desktop BSD

[Just Some Guy]

I've seen the occasional quirks and temporary brokenness, sure. I guess I'm mainly replying to the people who think that problems are the norm rather than the exception.

By the way, how did you get an mplayer linked against libm.so.3? libm.so.4 is the current version on my system that I'm typing this on, and that's what my mplayer is linked to.

Obligatory...

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD IS DEAD

It's dead, Jim...

[Anonymous Coward]

Mirrordot cache: http://mirrordot.org/stories/e7cd62fa4b24ca2788721 1c05d686136/index.html

And Coral Cache:
http://www.desktopbsd.net.nyud.net:8080/index.php? id=43&tx_ttnews%5Btt_news%5D=15&tx_ttnews%5BbackPi d%5D=55&cHash=cddb1e432f

When will slashcode be modified to automatically use the cached pages? Harumph! </SARCASM>

Muwahahaha

Re:It's dead, Jim...

[Anonymous Coward]

When will slashcode be modified to automatically use the cached pages? Harumph!

Because they would get sued into oblivion in no time at all for copyright violation?

Oops, I forgot, copyright law only applies to mere mortals.

If it is any consolation to you...

[irimi_00]

i found this hella insightful.

MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

I AM FISH!

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[Roj Blake]

Are you Faulkner's Mother?

Re:MOD PARENT UP!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, just a regular moose.

An Idea

[Anonymous Coward]

Hi there!

I'm a frequent reader of Slashdot and it seems like a lot of stories are run which are version change announcements of various Open Source projects.

Have you considered starting a separate website for nothing but software update announcements like this? That way people interested in such things can stay fresh on the latest in software announcements, and this site can concentrate on meatier topics.

Otherwise, great job!

Signed,

Anonymous Coward

Re:An Idea

[hatrisc]

it's called freshmeat

Re:An Idea

[ickoonite]

Are you incredibly stupid, or...?

Read the grandparent again. Then read it again. Read it maybe three or four times more. Pay particular attention to font weights.

Then make your comment again.

*sigh*

iqu :|

Re:An Idea

[sgbett]

My hat has trouble replying to my business. I find it soon passes.

Re:An Idea

[theArtificial]

What about freshports.org?

Re:An Idea

[hatrisc]

i *must* be incredibly stupid. after all, i am replying to you.

Re:An Idea

[hatrisc]

huh? i assume you're trying to make a pun, however, it's so weak i'm not seeing it.

BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[teslatug]

FreeBSD could still beat Linux to the desktop just because it's standardised on what comes with it, and you could release packages for it a lot more easily. What's lacking is hardware support (which is even more miserable than linux), and desktop performance. If they worked on desktop performance, I think they could easily get drivers by porting them from Linux. I wouldn't mind running FreeBSD on my laptop if only they'd get the performance right. I have actually dual booted FreeBSD and Linux on the same box, both running the same version of KDE, and FreeBSD is just dog slow compared to Linux, which isn't that fast to begin with. Sure KDE can be a hog, but it's either more of a hog on FreeBSD or FreeBSD just doesn't pay attention to a desktop user's needs.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Baki]

Maybe KDE is an exception here (I think there is this preloaded shared libraries which seems to help, is it disabled in the FreeBSD port?), but generally FreeBSD is not slower than Linux on the desktop.

Under some load and disk-I/O I think that FreeBSD remains much more responsive than Linux.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[SpinJaunt]

freebsd% top -Ctn
last pid: 98440; load averages: 0.13, 0.25, 0.21 up 19+03:57:19 23:10:45
91 processes: 91 sleeping
 
Mem: 236M Active, 107M Inact, 100M Wired, 46M Cache, 60M Buf, 2696K Free
Swap: 1025M Total, 1025M Free
 
  PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE C TIME CPU COMMAND
63699 spinjaunt 5 20 0 50048K 32604K kserel 1 77:43 6.74% knode
87187 spinjaunt 4 20 -76 34332K 10800K kserel 0 54:02 0.00% artsd
90628 spinjaunt 4 20 0 108M 81940K kserel 1 52:46 0.00% amarokapp
37428 spinjaunt 1 76 0 187M 69600K select 0 33:43 0.00% Xorg
62469 spinjaunt 1 76 0 28364K 15608K select 0 20:15 0.00% kdeinit
51299 spinjaunt 1 76 0 32352K 19248K select 0 9:11 0.00% kdeinit
59972 spinjaunt 1 76 0 33852K 19956K select 0 8:10 0.00% kdeinit
  6510 spinjaunt 4 20 0 61148K 40188K kserel 0 6:03 0.00% kopete
62946 spinjaunt 1 76 0 53684K 36752K select 0 1:38 0.00% akregator
51876 spinjaunt 1 76 0 3508K 1548K select 1 1:34 0.00% gam_server
58329 spinjaunt 1 76 0 28476K 16836K select 1 0:52 0.00% kdeinit
60522 spinjaunt 1 76 0 26056K 14496K select 1 0:49 0.00% kdeinit
64335 root 1 76 0 1336K 520K select 0 0:43 0.00% moused
59160 spinjaunt 1 76 0 29792K 17788K select 0 0:24 0.00% kdeinit
49588 spinjaunt 1 76 0 23840K 12040K select 1 0:10 0.00% kdeinit
56732 spinjaunt 1 76 0 25384K 13608K select 0 0:05 0.00% kdeinit
48887 spinjaunt 1 76 0 24844K 12872K select 1 0:03 0.00% kdeinit
57047 spinjaunt 1 8 0 1384K 620K nanslp 0 0:02 0.00% kwrapper

not that much of a hog really :)

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, 'cause its super simple to port device drivers from linux to freebsd (or any other os for that matter).

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Poppler]

I dual boot Linux and FreeBSD on my laptop. I use Gnome with both and don't notice any difference in performance. In fact, one of the things I like about FreeBSD is the faster boot time; it is my OS of choice for old laptops for that very reason.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Illbay]

FreeBSD could still beat Linux to the desktop...[but] what's lacking is hardware support (which is even more miserable than linux), and desktop performance...

Hm. Wanna run that by me again?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Just Some Guy]

Sure KDE can be a hog, but it's either more of a hog on FreeBSD or FreeBSD just doesn't pay attention to a desktop user's needs.

I recently switched my work desktop from FreeBSD to Gentoo because of a harddrive failure and the need to try something different. I think you're at least partially right: KDE "felt" much more responsive under Linux than FreeBSD, even under the same hardware, compiled with the same compiler version, and using similar CFLAGS.

However, I think that's partly because FreeBSD has traditionally been optimized for throughput instead of interactivity. On idle systems, Linux seems to respond more quickly to user input. However, the FreeBSD system seemed to stand up better to high loads than Linux ("how on earth did my load average get up to 10? It's been there for how long?") without becoming jerky or noticeably less responsive.

I have zero real evidence to support this idea, but personal observation makes me think I'm basically right. Maybe you were seeing the same low-load behavior but didn't notice the corresponding high-load advantage?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Billly Gates]

Are you sure that applies to FBSD 5.x and above?

I used to be a FBSD fanatic. 5.0 turned me off and 6.0 made me leave. Its I/O and threading is slower than 4.x and its much less stable not to mention my hardware worked fine with 4.x but has issued with 5.x and higher. Strange indeed?

Linux has improved with low latency timers in the kernel which make it alot faster than earlier versions. Version 2.4 and FBSD 4.x it was a no brainer on which was faster and that was FBSD. But times are changing.

I still have hope in the dragonflyBSD project.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Nimey]

I think they could easily get drivers by porting them from Linux

No. Linux drivers are typically licensed under the GPL, which is incompatible with BSD, so porting will be largely impossible.

Maybe you should understand what you're talking about before posting. Oh, wait, this is /.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[j79zlr]

Uh, there is plenty of GPL licensed software in FreeBSD. I don't know, maybe you've never head of Xorg or Samba for example.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[4D6963]

FreeBSD is just dog slow compared to Linux

Well I'd be curious to know the specs of the box you've testes FreeBSD on, because I run FreeBSD 6.0 on a Pentium I 133 MHz with 32 MB of RAM and it runs like a charm. No Gnome or KDE tho, just a lightweight window manager (blackbox). Maybe your performance issues have to do with that?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Just Some Guy]

You chose a GPL package (Samba) available through the third-party ports system, and another (X.org) released under the MIT license to demonstrate that FreeBSD is widely GPLed?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[j79zlr]

Samba is available during the install, xorg I guess is a bad example, but parts of it are licensed under the GPL. Besides, the OP made it sound like if it was GPL it was incompatible with BSD, which is not the case. Ok, since we are being pedantic, how about these from the base system: awk, bc, cpio, cvs, diff, gcc, gdb, groff, less, ncurses, patch, texinfo, tar I'm sure there are others.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[dadragon]

You might do well to take a look at NetBSD, it seems that its scheduler activations imnplementation is more complete, and it apparently scales better than FreeBSD 5.x. The problem is that X doesnt' seem to work as well, but that might just be my odd hardware.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Just Some Guy]

Samba is available during the install

...as a precompiled port ("package") from the third-party ports system.

Ok, since we are being pedantic, how about these from the base system: awk, bc, cpio, cvs, diff, gcc, gdb, groff, less, ncurses, patch, texinfo, tar I'm sure there are others.

I didn't say that they don't use any GPL/GNU stuff (although tar is actually their own), just that there's no more of it in the base system than necessary. OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of those are GPL, but some aren't.

awk - they use one-true-awk, from Lucent, and it isn't GPL'd
ncurses - based on the sources in the tree, that's under an MIT license
tar - they use bsdtar, which is a bsd-licensed reimplementation

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[theArtificial]

Brooktree ring a bell? While xorg 6.9 does have GATOS support Video IN/OUT isn't a strong point.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[MichaelSmith]

However, the FreeBSD system seemed to stand up better to high loads than Linux

Not sure about FreeBSD, but I have noticed that NetBSD performs better than Linux when resources are scarce. I tried redhat, and then NetBSD on a very old laptop which I got second hand. NetBSD was more responsive under heavy load.

I put this down to history. BSD had to function on very slow computers in the 80's before linux was written, so the kernel is written with different assumptions about resources.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

The gentoo-sources and development-sources kernels, which are the recommended defaults, have some low latency "desktop" patches which presumably contribute to the responsiveness. IIRC ck-sources is still more aggressive in this regard, making fundamental changes to the scheduler and so on.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Anonymous Coward]

Note that such parameters are heavily tweakable on linux via numerous sysctls. You can choose preemptible or nonpreemptible kernel and various CPU and I/O schedulers and swap policies. The average "desktop" user of course doesn't want to have to know about these things, so it tends to be set up for them e.g. a major difference between, say, RHEL4 and Mandriva desktop edition or whatever they're calling it now is that out-of-box, RHEL4 comes configured for server loads, even down to picking a different I/O scheduler (CFQ) and Mandriva for desktops (duh). I'd suspect most gentoo ricers are desktop hobbyists, so it's likely the gentoo defaults are similarly tuned for interactive use.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Illbay]

Brooktree ring a bell?

Uh, no. And that's a point, isn't it?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[drsmithy]

Uh, there is plenty of GPL licensed software in FreeBSD.

And it's all carefully sectioned off so it can't infect the BSD code.

You *do* understand what using GPLed code in the FreeBSD kernel would mean, right ?

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[ratatask]

>FreeBSD could still beat Linux to the desktop just because it's standardised on
>what comes with it, and you could release packages for it a lot more easily.
Right , until we start seeing more distributions of/based on FreeBSD. Like
say DesktopPC.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[the chao goes mu]

Regarding throughput, I know in terms of network this is true. BSD reaps closed sockets almost immediately while Linux (and Solaris, the other OS with which I am familiar enough to comment) tend to wait a long-ish time before cleaning up old sockets. This can lead to real problems in machines handling messaging and other, similar tasks, where there are huge number of rapid, small data packets coming from a large number of sources. Guess it isn't exaclty a "throughput" optimiziation after all, more that BSD is better as a server. Which means this is completely off-topic. Nevermind.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Billly Gates]

I need java and opengl. So NetBSD is not an option

Also my netgear nic is not supported.

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[Eivind Eklund]

Your assumption is correct - we've generally optimized for throughput on large loads. Traditionally, our #1 benchmark has been "How fast can this make world?", meaning a full build of the entire system. Benchmarking systems was able to measure this at an accuracy of better than +- 0.1%. That's pretty damn good: To get that kind of accuracy required GPS clocks (accurate to better than 1ppm), cache preloading, and extreme temperature control of the machine.

I can't say how things are going right at the moment (I've been mostly offline from the FreeBSD development process for a couple of years), but when I "left" there was a number of things going on that should improve this: Preemtable kernel, pluggable schedulers, etc.

I think the ULE scheduler would give you more of the same performance curve as Linux, and it might be more suitable for desktop work. In general, I've found FreeBSD's performance fine for my personal desktop needs - it's been snappy enough, and my only issues have been when web browsers or similar eat enormous amounts of RAM and I/O capacity. I've not tested Linux for desktops for a good many years, so I don't have direct experience to say how it compares in practice.

Eivind (FreeBSD developer "in exile").

Re:BSD could beat Linux to the desktop

[jZnat]

For Java, how about you just compile Mustang J2SE 1.6 from source? I don't see any problems in doing that (other than the fact that compiling Mustang is non-trivial in some cases for some reason).

Interesting

[360fusion]

Gosh, now 99.98% of the people who comment are MIA constantly clicking refresh!

Lets hope the distraction is large enough that we get less story dupes...

Multiple OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

Is there a fairly easy way to install this onto a PC already running Windows XP, keeping the XP installation the way it is? ie not reinstalling apps and backing up files.

I assume I would be able to select which OS to run at startup.

Thanks!

Re:Multiple OS's

[Anonymous Coward]

did you just fall off the turnip truck?

Re:Multiple OS's

[DanielSeuffert]

Option A: You have enough space on your disk(s) Option B: You use Partition Magc or something similar to free some space Yes, you can use the FreeBSD-bootloader, GAG, Grub etc. for multiboot. - Daniel

There are two major issues with BSD and the deskto

[Anonymous Coward]

There are two major issues with BSD and the desktop.

1. Technical which more competant people than I have commented on.

2. Business is war and this is part of the war of Free (as in speach) Open (as in can read the source code) Source Software fight with closed priperitory software. Linux comes under one license. Major distributions are scatter across the globe. Read many political and judical systems. The various desktop BSDs are another front. Difference license. Different history. Different source location for the distributions. No way can MS fight and win all these fights. Impossible. Too many different sets of circumstances.

PC-BSD

[Snowgen]

I wonder how this differs from PC-BSD.

They managed to ship earlier despite a later start. I'm not sure if that's good or bad.

Re:PC-BSD

[water-and-sewer]

My own rather inadequate trial and comparison story here: http://therandymon.com/content/view/87/79/. I had bad luck with Desktop BSD's hardware support, which gave me trouble with a network card more than one Linux distro has choked on too, for some reason. Overall I am impressed with the BSDs and intend to keep trying them out. It's impressive from a Linux user's point of view how everything fits so well together and is so well integrated. After years of Linux' organized chaos, it's a nice change. I remain on Linux for the moment, but it's only a matter of time ...

Re:PC-BSD

[KwKSilver]

Actually, DesktopBSD started somewhat earlier. I've tried both & both have their good and bad points. PC-BSD is currently using the FreeBSD 6.0 kernel, so they are "ahead" there, if that counts, DtBSD is now using FreeBSD kernel 5.5--however, it has support for AMD-64 and EMT-64 CPU's, which seems to be quite a way off for PC-BSD.

The most obvious difference to me is in the installation of added software beyond their base systems. Dt-BSD uses a graphic frontend to the ports. I've had mixed results with it. PC-BSD uses an installation system more reminiscent of --dare I say it? Yes-- Windows. Download and double-click something called a pbi, which kicks off the install routine. The app and all its dependencies are installed in a separate directory, something made more practical by the huge size of harddrives these days. I've had one or two pbis fail. However, there are not that many pbi's compared to what's available through FreeBSD's ports. In theory, pkg_add and ports routines at the CLI should work for either DtBSD or PC-BSD. Not always for me, but it could be my hardware-or me.

Both seem to be small operations with one main developer with some support from interested FreeBSD users some of whose posts on the forums suggest they are either very advanced users, or coders, or both.

All things considered, the accomplishments of both projects are fairly impressive to me. What they are aiming at is to make the installation of a FreeBSD desktop easy, one suitable for use by the casual users, one that installs as easy as Linux, one that is as easy to use as Windows. The only failed install I had with either was the first RC of DtBSD and the first release of the 6.0 kernel under PC-BSD. In every case the base install "just works" and I could install either one my mom's computer in 20 or 30 mins & teach her to use them in an hour, or so (she's 75).

Try it before you bash it...

[shrapnull]

Before we get into the usual banter about BSD, Netcraft, or whatever they've confirmed recently, I have to say that I use BSD more now then ever.

It would never have dawned on me to bother with trying BSD as a desktop until I had some extra cash in the account and setup a system for network monitoring and packet scanning. With the bulk of the load being network-based, I figured this might as well be my desktop system too to garner more bang for the buck. This, mind you, after having used GNU/Linux and Windows for years and relegating BSD to beige server boxen only.

That was a about a year ago. Today every PC I own runs FreeBSD as the primary desktop.

It's not without it's issues when you install from the standard FreeBSD disks. I had to compile OOOrg from ports using flags (with cups, kde), and I had to install the linuxflashplayer-wrapper and tinker with it for a while to get it running...so yes, there are dozens of "little" things that keep this from desktop adoption.

If a distribution such as DesktopBSD can create prepackaged desktop installations with a preconfigured flash-player, OOOrg, etc...I don't see why many people wouldn't at least try it out. The package management from a desktop user perspective has been great (I prefer it over apt, yum or portage), I have no failed installations due to -cpio bad magic, checksig errors (when I know the keys are installed), etc...

Be prepared though, with this install you get a basic desktop. There is still much work to be done, but this is a nice start from a group of guys I can totally relate to.

Re:Try it before you bash it...

[Anonymous Coward]

I had to compile OOOrg from ports using flags (with cups, kde), and I had to install the linuxflashplayer-wrapper and tinker with it for a while to get it running...so yes, there are dozens of "little" things that keep this from desktop adoption.

Yeah right. I wouldn't call compiling OO.org from ports a "little" thing.

Re:Try it before you bash it...

[Ekarderif]

cd /usr/ports/editors/openoffice.org-2.0
make install && clean

Re:Try it before you bash it...

[SillyNickName4me]

While at it, do a make package clean instead.. might save some time for the next machine you want to install..

Re:Try it before you bash it...

[Brandybuck]

You can get precompiled packages of OO.org. Save yourself eight hours of compiling and download it from http://porting.openoffice.org/freebsd/

BSD is alive and well

[Anonymous Coward]

... and living in Miami.

Tools, eh?

[speed_of_light]

. . . a host of tools designed to make the BSD experience more palatable to novices

Like Jenna Jameson wallpaper?

wow

[stinky wizzleteats]

BSD now ships a more recent cut of KDE than Gentoo does. Wow. Never thought I'd see that.

Re:wow

[pnatural]

Huh? I read the summary and thought to my self, self, aren't you lucky, you just emerged KDE 3.5.2 last night. have yourself a little pat on the back just for being so bloody bleeding-edge. :)

Re:wow

[Anonymous Coward]

Shenanigans. 3.5.2 is not in stable.

Re:wow

[paulmer2003]

Gentoo does not 'ship' with practically anything (Besides basic libs and other necessities :)

Re:There are two major issues with BSD and the des

[Anonymous Coward]

Lol at your spelling!

Slashdot confirms: DesktopBSD site is dying

[From A Far Away Land]

Respected Slashdot users made a prediction today: DesktopBSD the desktop ready and user friendly port of FreeBSD is dying! The website, reportedly run on IIS, crashed at 3 minutes past being posted to Slashdot.org this afternoon.

Remember that Slashdot confirms DesktopBSD's site is DYING!

Which Free OS for novices?

[ScottCooperDotNet]

So do I go with Linux or Desktop BSD? I'm leaning toward Ubuntu simply because there is more support.

Don't troll this, you damn trolls!

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Just Some Guy]

So do I go with Linux or Desktop BSD?

What's your goal? An old saying is that "Linux is for people who hate Windows, but FreeBSD is for people who love Unix". From a novice perspective, there's some amount of truth to that. More browser plugins work out-of-the-box under Linux, and you'll get more video game ports. FreeBSD definitely has its own charms, though, and if you want to learn how to administer a Unix system, you could definitely do worse.

Both are good. I prefer FreeBSD, but that's just me.

I'm leaning toward Ubuntu simply because there is more support.

I kind of doubt that. I haven't had the need to use Ubuntu's support, but can definitely state that the FreeBSD mailing lists are packed with smart, helpful people. I'm not saying that Ubuntu's support is lacking, but that I can't imagine what more you could get from the FreeBSD crowd short of one of them driving to your house and fixing it for you (which is probably possible if you live in a populous area).

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[X3J11]

I suggest Slackware (http://www.slackware.com/). While its popularity has declined over the last decade, it's a wonderful distro with a reputation for being somewhat minimalistic (and behind the times, although I would beg to differ). If you're new it's better to get your hands as dirty as you can, in my most humble opinion.

I've used Slack off and on for about ten years now (since 3.0), and tried various other distros both on real hardware and virtual. I always come back to Slack [tm].

Incidently, I've not tried Ubuntu or any of its derivates, and I'm neither trolling nor attempting to incite a distro war. Just stating my opinion.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[RLiegh]

So do I go with Linux or Desktop BSD? I'm leaning toward Ubuntu simply because there is more support.

You should go with Linux From Scratch, not only is it easier than those two arcane OSes, it's fresher too (made from scratch with the freshes t ingredients)!
Don't troll this, you damn trolls!

Oh shit, I suppose I should have read that before posting.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Kadin2048]

I'll preface this by saying that I've never used a BSD as a desktop OS, although I've used it pretty extensively through a remote shell. What OS to go with really depends on what your goals are. If you want to ditch Windows as a desktop OS, but maintain most of the same stuff you're doing, particularly including games, you're probably going to want to go with Linux. If your ultimate aim is server administration ... pick whatever you want. I wouldn't even bother putting a GUI on it. In fact it'll be a more educational experience if you set the whole thing up headlessly anyway.

Personally I did the latter before I did the former; I set up some old machines as home fileservers and firewalls, stuck in closets and stuff, before I attempted to do an open-source desktop machine. Mostly I think this is because I was really cheap but always had a few old P100s or 133s lying around. I found the hardware support on esoteric old junk to be better with Linux, although there are some pretty impressive turnkey firewall systems based on BSD that you can just put in the CD-Rom drive and reboot, and viola -- instant firewall. (I can't remember the name of any of them at the moment, I played with them for a while and was pretty impressed though.)

I've only given what I thought was a fair shot to a Linux desktop fairly recently. I didn't take the jump completely, but bought a new machine and a KVM switch and go back and forth between it and my Mac. So far I've used Ubuntu, but disliked Gnome and installed the Kubuntu packages (KDE+dependencies). For all the complaints that I sometimes have of it, it's remarkably good. Definitely useable; however at least my personal installation has a lot of quirks, and to me that's not a good thing. I'd have to say though that it's not a bad way to get started, and so far I haven't found anything that's screamed to me that it would be a better option. (Although if anyone does know of a Debian+KDE distro that's stable, well documented, and polished, I'm in the market.)

I would just caution anyone to moderate your expectations, I think my key problem throughout all of my experiments with Kubuntu is that I'm basically A/Bing that system against my Mac, and the difference in maturity and general "spit and polish" shows.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[God_Retired]

This is a tough one. I ran FreeBSD for awhile.

Pros of *BSD:

• Much cleaner filesystem. I REALLY liked the way the system is laid out.
• It was very nice to have one system, not wonder how *.deb is different from *.rpm or *.tgz, or really how to get one to play CLEANLY with my systems packaging system.

Con of *BSD:

• Did not seem to have the same number of packages as GNU/Linux

OK, now I haven't run *BSD for about 4 years. On a purely gut level, I REALLY prefer the GNU license to frickin' BSD. But that was/is the only real reason I stick with GNU/Linux. I would much prefer to switch to some GNU/* which was as tight as FreeBSD was. But I do feel that strongly about the license.

If you don't have a lot of time, don't switch. If you want to play, pick one, install it. Buy a book on *nix. Learn the command line, get comfortable with vi, get comfortable editing config files and restarting/starting/stopping services. Once you are comfortable with one, you can switch to the other with little effort. The differences are more in the feel of the system. As you will probably hear from other posts.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Brandybuck]

Go with both. You don't have to dual boot, you can triple boot. It's not like you're spending money on them or anything.

p.s. Unlike Windows and Linux, BSD systems want their own primary partition to boot from. So when you're partitioning your drive, make sure you've got a primary, not extended, partition for DesktopBSD.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have used both Linux and BSD. I'm not crazy about Ubuntuu myself. As long as your hardware is supported I'd say possible FreeBSD. The major PITA is that linux emulation is handled a little better (or at least is documented better) in NetBSD. Slackware was my first Linux Distro it's not to bad in generall. the 10.x. series have had some odd bugs though and something I'd call showstoppers (like how 10.2 doesn't correctly install the 2.6 kernel ) On the other hand probably your best bet is to try say 3 different linux distros with their relative pro's and cons. Then try FreeBSD. Decide for yourself wich headaches you like least.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[jbolden]

Although if anyone does know of a Debian+KDE distro that's stable, well documented, and polished, I'm in the market.)

Ah you get the king of polished. Though you sound a little advanced for Xandros. Another alternative which may be a better fit Mandriva.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Antique Geekmeister]

"Made from scratch from the freshest ingredients" is a problem. It often implies the rash you get when various software components haven't been tested in combination. And you'd better believe that compiler changes affect kernels and components, and that subtle changes in the use of internationalization can break lots of shell scripts, etc. Ask anyone who had to deal with the OpenSSH "privsep" feature when it came to operating systems other than OpenBSD.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Just Some Guy]

Pros of *BSD:

• It was very nice to have one system, not wonder how *.deb is different from *.rpm or *.tgz, or really how to get one to play CLEANLY with my systems packaging system.

In all fairness, Linux is just as consistent intra-platform as *BSD. FreeBSD has ports. NetBSD has pkgsrc. OpenBSD has (incompatible, I think) ports.

Con of *BSD:

• Did not seem to have the same number of packages as GNU/Linux

FreeBSD has something like 15,000 ports available for installation. Gentoo seems to have around 10,000 (based on the results of locate metadata.xml | wc, which I think is roughly accurate). I don't know where to look for the official count on either system, so feel free to correct me if my guesses are wrong.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[RLiegh]

"Made from scratch from the freshest ingredients" is a problem. It often implies the rash you get when various software components haven't been tested in combination.

Which illustrates perfectly why they call it "Open Sores Software". ;)

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[__aaxwdb6741]

http://www.freebsd.org/ports/
Currently 14271 ports available, although my own system reports that it has 14285.

Just finished the advanced task of updating my ports tree using the tediously long and unintuitive command of "portsnap fetch update", and now upgrading my installed ports with the equally unintuitive "portupgrade -a".

But honestly, why the hell would you need the system with "Most software available"? You only need the software that you need. No more, no less. No way anybody is going to install the 14271 ports and then say "omg FreeBSD sux linux has more software". The thing is, all the popular software is already ported. It's highly unlikely that you will find an application that you need which is not ported to FreeBSD. And even if you do, installing it's dependencies is easy with the ports system :)

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[Arandir]

But I do feel that strongly about the license.

Why? It isn't your code, it's BSD's code. From a user's perspective there are no differences between the BSD and GPL licenses. Since you are not the developer of the code, it shouldn't make any difference to you at all.

I myself don't particularly like the GPL, but it doesn't stop me from using GPL licensed software. I may not develop GPL software because of this, but it won't stop me from using it. I am not so bigoted as that.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[jawtheshark]

Yeah, and if you didn't partition correctly.... Donwload GParted and be done with it.

Re:Which Free OS for novices?

[God_Retired]

I am not so bigoted as that.

Them's fightin' words. :) I don't feel a religous passion about it, but I do feel somewhat strongly about it. Strong enough that it made me change back. Not a big deal. I'm not telling the BSD people to become GPL people or anything. I think that the GPL goes further in helping the world (a little grand, but you get the idea) than the BSD license does.

And you're right, it's not my code. I'm barely a coder. I do enjoy poking around other peoples code on rainy weekends. And yes, much of the software on my box is published under something other than the GPL. So be it.

Ports not robust????

[nurb432]

Then you wernt using them correctly..

FreeBSD on my desktop for 7 years

[Nick Barnes]

I've been running FreeBSD on my desktop for 7 or 8 years now. It's just fine. The main problem has been the usual thing on hacker desktops: managing the dependencies between the 100-200 miscellaneous third-party packages that you end up with (all the GUI stuff, docproj with LaTeX, Apache with some modules, perl plus a couple of dozen perl modules, ditto python, ditto ruby, ditto PHP, ditto SQL, etc). The ports collection (together with the port management tools such as portupgrade) has been very good at this, and it would probably have been fine if I'd been in the habit of keeping it all up-to-date (barring some rough edges such as the docproj meta-package). It's certainly been easier to manage than Windows. I haven't tried keeping a desktop Linux box current (why would I?), so I can't compare with that.

It's been 18 months or so since I cvsupped the core OS. I'll be looking at DesktopBSD as an option the next time I do that.

Re:FreeBSD on my desktop for 7 years

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running FreeBSD on my laptop for 6+ years, my window manager
is the fabulous ion.

Re:FreeBSD on my desktop for 7 years

[Brandybuck]

Do you use portupgrade? It's soooo much better than the plain vanilla pkg tools.

BSD is dead

[Anonymous Coward]

It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: NetBSD is dying

Alpha station

[Kancept]

Will they be releasing a version for the AlphaStation? I have this nice machine here and would like to run that on it...

Re:Alpha station

[DanielSeuffert]

Sorry, but there will be only releases for i386 and amd64 in the near future. Please stick with the upcoming FreeBSD 6.1. Best regards, Daniel Seuffert

The newbie's question

[Godji]

I guess I'll be the one who dares to ask it: What are the key differences between FreeBSD and Linux? (I'm mostly interested in the technical ones.)

To me, a full-time Linux user, FreeBSD remains as that alternative exotic Unix thingy, which (because of Linux's greateness) has no reason to exist whatsoever. Disclaimer: I know I'm extremely wrong here, but I just don't know why and I hope someone will enlighten me in a friendly tone.

To put it simply: Given the existence of Linux, a technically superb and free as in speech OS, why would anyone be interested in FreeBSD [I hope you forgive me ;)]?

Re:The newbie's question

[Anonymous Coward]

the differences are huge, from kernel archatecture, to implementation of command line tools... they're completly unrelated beasts. it's like comparing to high performance cars from competeing itialian designers to the edsel that is Microsoft windows. okay, bad analogy, it's more like comparing two different top quality diner to the pre-processed mcdonald's food. although the food quality is better at either diner, because mecdonald's is 'known by everyone' and 'avialable anywhere in the world' it's what everyone eats.

Re:The newbie's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the short answer: download an ISO, install in on a spare partition, run it for a few weeks/days and do interesting things with. Learning a new OS is like learning a new programming language: you can write the same trivial programs in any language, but if you want to know what makes them unique, you have to do a variety of non-trivial things with each in order to understand them.

Any attempt by anyone to "explain" it without you using it would really be insufficient.

Re:The newbie's question

[Brandybuck]

This democracy thing is so wonderful, I can't understand why anyone would be interested in more than one candidate. :-)

Re:The newbie's question

[ps3udonym]

While I am not going to go into the technical merits, never mind the security benifits of the BSD family of operating systems. Here is the biggest different between *BSD and the rest;

Copyright (c) ,
All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:

* Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer.
* Redistributions in binary form must reproduce the above copyright notice, this list of conditions and the following disclaimer in the documentation and/or other materials provided with the distribution.
* Neither the name of the nor the names of its contributors may be used to endorse or promote products derived from this software without specific prior written permission.

THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED BY THE COPYRIGHT HOLDERS AND CONTRIBUTORS "AS IS" AND ANY EXPRESS OR IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE ARE DISCLAIMED. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE COPYRIGHT OWNER OR CONTRIBUTORS BE LIABLE FOR ANY DIRECT, INDIRECT, INCIDENTAL, SPECIAL, EXEMPLARY, OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES (INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, PROCUREMENT OF SUBSTITUTE GOODS OR SERVICES; LOSS OF USE, DATA, OR PROFITS; OR BUSINESS INTERRUPTION) HOWEVER CAUSED AND ON ANY THEORY OF LIABILITY, WHETHER IN CONTRACT, STRICT LIABILITY, OR TORT (INCLUDING NEGLIGENCE OR OTHERWISE) ARISING IN ANY WAY OUT OF THE USE OF THIS SOFTWARE, EVEN IF ADVISED OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH DAMAGE.

Copyright © 2006 by the Open Source Initiative Technical questions about the website go to Steve M.: webmaster at opensource.org / Policy questions about open source go to the Board of Directors.

The contents of this website are licensed under the Open Software License 2.1 or Academic Free License 2.1

OSI is a registered non-profit with 501(c)(3) status. Donating to OSI is one way to show your support.

That is the licence. The whole bit. There are no chapters, certainly it does without a three page preamble! Here is the link to the GNU licence licence. As you can see, it is many pages in length. The strength of the BSD licence is that it still allows an avenue for developers to make money from their creations. In this way it is the only Open Source alternative that can realisticly challenge the Microsofts of the world. Apple certainly has seen the light.

Re:The newbie's question

[el_womble]

The problem with democracy is that nobody seems to want it, and that when asked if they want it, 40% of voters stay at home, and the rest vote with whoever the media tells them too. People don't understand politics and values they understand the market. In that respect they want short term, more for less at the expense of the future, because the future is uncertain at best. So is it any wonder that left to its own devices the market forms monopolies (autocracies) and not co-operatives (democracies)? The best way to guarentee that you have the best deal, is if its the only deal in town.

I would like nothing more than hetrogenous IT landscape. I already use OS X on my laptop, Linux on my home server, Win2K on work dev box and Solaris on our dev servers. I code, predominantly in Java, but also do a bit of PHP, P/Jython and Cocoa, and I love the concepts of democracy and choice, but even in IT my views are not the norm. The developers I work with fear change. They actively avoid having to telnet into the Solaris boxes, they think I'm mad for owning a Mac, and they still think Linux is just for geeks (a category they sign up to only in job description). If thats the IT workforce, whats happening in the real world?

The noobs right to ask the question, why do we need more than one OS? The answer is, we don't. I'm not that suprised, that even within the OSS aware IT crowd that people are still asking that question, and will be asking it again when Hurd finally rears its horns. The reason we have OS X, Linux and BSD is not because we need them, but because we can, because it's there. That's the realm of mountain climbers, pioneers and artic explorers, not the 95% of people that are happy with Windows.

Re:The newbie's question

[welsh git]

> To me, a full-time Linux user, FreeBSD remains as that alternative exotic Unix
> thingy, which (because of Linux's greateness) has no reason to exist whatsoever.
> Disclaimer: I know I'm extremely wrong here, but I just don't know why and I hope
> someone will enlighten me in a friendly tone.
>
> To put it simply: Given the existence of Linux, a technically superb and free as in
> speech OS, why would anyone be interested in FreeBSD [I hope you forgive me ;)]?

To me, a full-time FreeBSD user, Linux remains as that alternative exotic Unix
thingy, which (because of FreeBSD's greateness) has no reason to exist whatsoever.
Disclaimer: I know I'm extremely wrong here, but I just don't know why and I hope
someone will enlighten me in a friendly tone.

To put it simply: Given the existence of FreeBSD, a technically superb and free as in
speech OS, why would anyone be interested in Linux [I hope you forgive me ;)]?

Re:The newbie's question

[Anonymous Coward]

Historically I would have said the great advantage of freebsd (etc.) was the ports collection.

You basically have the ability to install new software over the internet. If A needs B and B needs C and D, and D needs E and F, the ports system does all the dependencies first.

One command.

Compare this with RPM, which can be annoying as heck to satisfy dependencies.

The ports tree was biggest on freebsd, but you had netbsd and openbsd ports trees as well. Less stuff generally.

Of course I now know all about debian and dpkg. I'm using Ubuntu now, but I actually got introduced to these concepts by the excellent Mac OSX "fink" tools.

Re:The newbie's question

[wolf369T]

One command.

One command... to rule them all.

torrents

[Anonymous Coward]

ftp://ftp.desktopbsd.net/torrents/

FreeBSD vs. DesktopBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

OK So I am a long time user of FreeBSD, and don't see any reason to switch to this DesktopBSD, but yet I wonder, what exactly is DesktopBSD. Is it a fork? Is it pre-confiured FreeBSD with flashy installation wizard?

Anyone?

Slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah, the magic of being slashdotted...

Database Error The current username, password or host was not accepted when the connection to the database was attempted to be established!

Whoops!

[Lost Found]

They forgot to include the performance!

Wasting time...

[Lost Found]

OpenBSD is actively replacing GPL code with BSD to excise the last parts (although I seriously doubt we'll see another BSD-licensed C compiler).

Perhaps if they weren't so intent on wasting time, they could be exciting enough to get funding!

Seriously, I think the BSD community's devotion to its license is notable, but they're never going to make any progress at all if they're so fanatically opposed to the GPL. Since the GPL doesn't affect normal users at all (rather, just the people that want to take and not give back), it seems like a dramatic waste of time. They're not about to win anyone over that is going to do anything for their cause -- unless their cause is to be a free programmer for the proprietary software industry.

Sorry BSD guys -- the GPL is huge! You'll never escape it! David Wheeler surveyed license penetration in 2003 by looking at Freshmeat and SourceForge. GPL-licensed code came in around 70%, BSD licensed code around 4-7%. LGPL - the FSF's answer to BSD - came in at 5-10%!

Re:Wasting time...

[drsmithy]

Since the GPL doesn't affect normal users at all (rather, just the people that want to take and not give back) [...]

Linking to a library is a pretty weird definition of "taking without giving back".

If you ever worked retail

[Propaganda13]

you would know that
Modem refers to the actual computer
Computer refers to the monitor

Insider Reveals : What Killed FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The End of FreeBSD

[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]

When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.

Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.

FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.

It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.

So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.

Discussion

I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.

From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.

There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.

Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.

Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?

Shouts

To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.

To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. I

Re:Insider Reveals : What Killed FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Thank you for your candor. I have been using FreeBSD since v3.2 and have loved it. I haven't always stuck with it, and I admit that I am a huge SuSE fan having a couple of servers that use linux, but my desktop has been, and will always be some form of BSD, whether OpenBSD (which I love), or FreeBSD. I am saddened to hear that there is a departure from what you believe the core mission/attitude has been for FreeBSD as that may mean that I lose a beloved friend in the future. I was also distressed by the revelation that OpenBSD needs more funding.

I could care less about the BSD vs. Linux debate as I think their target audiences are very different. I like linux as a desktop (even though I use it for servers) and I ABSLOLUTELY LOVE BSD AS A SERVER (even though I use it as a desktop). All of that is to say that politics plays a huge role in what I am able to do at my job. At least I can use some form of OSS rather than paying money in sacrifice to the M$ gods.....

Java Support

[xornor]

How is Java Support? Can I run eclipse?

Awesome

[ranga_the_don]

This is really a great news for BSD lovers... FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and a now wow a DesktopBSD! cool1

Ignore all those other people!

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're asking, you should use Ubuntu.
The other distros (and BSDs) are for people who don't mind surfing around, finding the pros and cons, reading about them till you understand them and what they'll mean for you, and making a decision like that. i.e. they're hard work. Ubuntu is easy and novice friendly.

I'm very sorry to add this qualifier (trust me, it's the only one): only use Ubuntu if you have at least 256 megabytes of RAM. If you don't, you should probably stick with whatever you have working for you now, because nothing new will work that well for you.

oops link

[ps3udonym]

my, don't I feel foolish =P http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl.html

WHERE ARE PRO-AUDIO TOOLS?

[Anonymous Coward]

Forget BSD desktop! Until you can deliver PRO-AUDIO layer/apps like Linux then it's waste of my time.

Where is ALSA for BSD? Where is JACK audio connection kit? Where is Ardour, Rosegarden?

Re:WHERE ARE PRO-AUDIO TOOLS?

[Anonymous Coward]

In the ports, but there is no ALSA for BSD, because that is not necessary.
But this tools are no pro if you compare them to the windows tools.
So linux has neither support for pro-audio tools.

Re:WHERE ARE PRO-AUDIO TOOLS?

[DrunkenPenguin]

But this tools are no pro if you compare them to the windows tools. So linux has neither support for pro-audio tools.
 
Oh really? That's pretty weird. Please tell me what we are lacking? In what sense Ardour is not capable for pro-audio? Please tell me, I'm truly interested to hear that.
 
Maybe you didn't know that, but Linux ALSA supports high end audio cards like RME Hammerfall 100%. It is also possible to use VST plugins with JACK audio connection kit. Also, JACK is the most advanced way to share audio between different audio apps on _ANY_ platform.
 
Hey, it's funny! You know what I heard? Highend mixing console designer Harrison (one of the leading manufacturers in business) supports Ardour and actually promotes it to it's customers! What the hell? How can this be? Oh no, they favor Ardour over Pro-Tools! No! This must not be true! It's Linux software, it's not Windows software so it can not be pro-audio tool! Yeah right. Are you familiar with Ardour? Did you know that it outperforms ProTools on similar hardware? Perhaps you should actually learn about Linux audio before you open your mouth.

Translation

[Anonymous Coward]

"I want to do all the fun bits and basically what the hell I want
  but some mean nasty manager is trying to make me do some real
  boring stuff because its important. I don't like this so I'm
  going to whinge and bitch , throw all my toys out the pram and
  generally be a prima donna , then let the whole world know about
  how bad everything is in the team and if only they did it my
  way it would all work so much better because I'm a genius and
  grade A know-it-all"

Badly Squeeezing for Dollars!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

!!!

I have posted that in another thread but, here you are:

BSD

Bad Sofware Developpers

Badly Squeeezing for Dollars :)

Sorry, I could not help it!

or

Beware! Some Despicable

BaStarDs sons of UNIX

Begging for Some Dollars!

--

This one was bad at all neither !

---

Yep.. its true.. No exuse.

Only perhaps these:

- Montepulziano d'Abruzzio " Denominazione d'Origine Contallata", La Rinalda 2004 - 1 Bottle

- Vitoria "Gran Reserva" 1997, Valdepenas, denominacion de Origen, Tempranillo - 2 Bottles

- Cotes du Rhone 2004, Denomination d'origine - 2 Bottles

- some still to come...

that we are finishing here !!!

It is being a great night here! We have also been trying the DesktopBSD 1.0 distro. Pretty good actually... Not all the good stuff is Linux...

!!!

Firefox ..

[Blu-Ray]

"my only issues have been when web browsers or similar eat enormous amounts of RAM and I/O capacity"

yep, Firefox.
and it ain't crash proof either!
(compare that to opera 8.5, mozilla got some work to do)

the themes are nice though..