FreeBSD 8.0 Released

An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights: Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."

Comments

Awesome!

[ground.zero.612]

I was going to put Win7 on my HP dv7, but now this!

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD 8.0 Released

I won't believe it until Netcraft confirms it.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes! 8 > 7, thus FreeBSD 8 must be better than Windows 7!

Re:Awesome!

[hairyfeet]

Seriously though, is there even enough BSD desktop users to even worry about? That must be a truly itty bitty number, like 0.0001% or something. Not trying to cut down BSD, it is just from what I understand BSD is THE distro to go to to make routers, firewalls, all kinds of uber hardened network appliances for corporate and enterprise usage. I have never really heard of anybody doing large BSD desktop deployments like you do with RHEL or SUSE.

So is there really enough users out there to make all this hard work worth it? I know if they want to do it "just because" that of course is fine too, but I would think that since BSD is so widely used in the network appliance role that someone would build a Redhat style corporation around BSD and most of the funding would be that way. Is there any major corps funding BSD?

Re:Awesome!

[cboscari]

I was going to make a joke like "You mean other than Apple?" but that's too easy.

BSD's desktop users fill the same nitch as Slackware. Advanced users that want to do it themselves. That said, most Linux distro's were put together because, as we all know, Linux is a kernel, and not a complete OS. BSD's, are a more complete distro, and the ports system alleviates the need for a lot of stuff that Linux distros take care of (like a package manager.) Still, they both are "worth it" to develop for for their developers and users, and that's a good thing.

Re:Awesome!

[Nefarious Wheel]

Yes, but does it run... oh, wait ;P

I'm getting a surplus Dell Latitude from work. Was going to load Ubuntu but FreeBSD 8 plus KDE 4.3.0 (or later) looks like a fairly crisp choice for me. Anybody have any experience with this combination?

Re:Awesome!

[Hurricane78]

Gentoo fills the same niche with the Linux kernel. And since when is Slackware not a complete distro? Perhaps you meant “Linux From Scratch”...

P.S.: Please get your spelling right. It’s “niche”, “distros”, “BSDs” (second one only), and “develop for their developers”. Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^

Re:Awesome!

[turbidostato]

"Seriously though, is there even enough BSD desktop users to even worry about? That must be a truly itty bitty number, like 0.0001% or something."

Seriously though, does it matter a damn? If it's good for the purpouse, then it's good for the purpouse no matter how many (or how little) people use it. If number of users were a quality indicator, Windows would be the best system by an order of magnitude (hint: no, it's not).

And then again, for the casual desktop user, there's no difference between KDE on FreeBSD, KDE on Debian or KDE on Ubuntu. For the expert user differences between FreeBSD and, say, Debian or Red Hat are quite within the same league (and certainly they are much more akin between them than the three compared to any Microsoft offer).

"it is just from what I understand BSD is THE distro to go to to make routers, firewalls, all kinds of uber hardened network appliances for corporate and enterprise usage."

It is just that your understandment fails. That maybe can be the 'vox populi' about OpenBSD, not BSD as a whole.

"I have never really heard of anybody doing large BSD desktop deployments like you do with RHEL or SUSE."

Do you know that exactly your very flipplant rant can be used for unix-like systems as a whole, do you? ("I have never really heard of anybody doing large unix-like desktop deployments like you do with Windows"). Now, so what?

"So is there really enough users out there to make all this hard work worth it?"

Of course yes. Proof: the ones doing the hard work consider themselves enough of a user pool to push for it -and in fact do it.

"I would think that since BSD is so widely used in the network appliance role that someone would build a Redhat style corporation around BSD and most of the funding would be that way."

Again you miserably misundestand what BSD is but, anyway, there *is* in fact a "Redhat style corporation around BSD" and it's even bigger than Red Hat. You may recognize its name: Apple.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Which explains why Win2000 was the best version of windows ever made.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I have never really heard of anybody doing large BSD desktop deployments like you do with RHEL or SUSE.

(Nelson)Ha ha!(/Nelson)

And Happy Thanksgiving to *you*, re@!

And you over at Nvidia too!

Re:Awesome!

[hairyfeet]

First of all, there is no reason to act like a douche when someone asks a question. it is THAT kind of attitude that has non Windows/OSX platforms labeled as Operating Systems for the maladjusted. Nobody likes THAT guy, and I'm sure you don't want to be THAT guy, and since my post was quite civil it wouldn't be too much to ask to have the same in kind.

Now is Apple actually supporting BSD with serious funding, or are they just building off the work? Because it is pretty common knowledge the MSFT networking stack is in fact the BSD networking stack, but I don't see a "MSFT BSD corporation" anywhere. My question is very simple- is there a large corporation putting the kind of funds into BSD in the network appliance arena that Redhat puts into Linux on the enterprise server arena? Is there any corporations putting millions directly into one of the BSDs?

And I'm sorry that nobody can know everything about every OS. My expertise is Windows on the desktop and Windows/Linux on the server, I've never really had the time or inclination to learn yet another OS, and since Slashdot is the home of the ubergeeks I thought what better place to ask about BSD than an article on BSD here? As for as Windows goes, Win7 is REALLY nice, I mean really. No hassle, everything just works, no driver issues here, it just went out and found them all and set it up pretty as you please. So while I'm glad you have the time to tear into the nitty gritty of a non mainstream OS like BSD, here the economy is kinda in the shitter and after fixing PCs for 9 hours+ the last thing I want to do when I get home is have to work on my own PC. So for me and my customers the new Win7 "just works".

Re:Awesome!

[ScrewMaster]

Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^

Yes, well, you'll do until he shows up.

Re:Awesome!

[necrostopheles]

There are derivative desktop distros based on *bsd, like pc-bsd (see here http://www.pcbsd.org/ and here, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC-BSD). There's also a corporation based around providing enterprise support for pc-bsd, http://www.ixsystems.com/.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Some of the network utilities in windows did originate with BSD but the stack in Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server and beyond was written by Microsoft.

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

If i'm running a free unix desktop, its usually freebsd. Give it a shot if you're a linux person, and give your head a little while to get around to the unix way of doing things (rather than the bastardised linux way) and you may like it.

I used to use Linux, but found FreeBSD to be easier to configure from the command line, more consistent in its filesystem layout, more responsive under load, and generally "smoother" in terms of process scheduling. I gave up linux desktop use (for FreeBSD, and later, OS X) after having been a linux desktop user for about 5 years.

The fact that the userland tools are shared with MacOS X is a bonus.

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

A number of apple employees are FreeBSD committers. I believe a number of FreeBSD guys were hired by apple, and still work on the FreeBSD core. If you don't know about FreeBSD give it a shot. Its different from Linux, so it will take a little while to get your head around, but its good. I left linux for it after 5 years of linux. The learning curve going from Linux to BSD is nowhere near the curve as say, going from Windows to Linux. Most of the ideas are the same, they're just implemented slightly differently (and imho, in a better way - but i guess that is personal preference).

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

I ran FreeBSD 6.0 on a latitude D520 or D510 without any issues. Pretty sure power management even worked.

Re:Awesome!

[laffer1]

That depends on your definition of BSD. Some people look at the userland and the large amount of BSD code in Mac OS X and call that BSD. I'd say there are more than 0.01% of users that are on mac os.

I started a project to make a desktop friendly BSD operating system called MidnightBSD. There's also PC-BSD and the now defunct DesktopBSD. The new problem is that Linux folks have grown inpatient with the linux on the desktop idea. They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing linux down. A few projects have really done some serious changes to their software to make it function poorly (or not at all) on other OSes including *BSDs. Sometimes it's a lack of people to make reasonable updates to the kernels for various things like "new" video interfaces. Even things like X.org have done shifts that make hardware acceleration a real pain in the butt on BSD platforms. I've been shunned many times for trying to provide patches both for MidnightBSD and previously FreeBSD to other projects.

The FreeBSD project has had trouble getting patches upstreamed for things like GCC and binutils in the past. In general, I think many GNU projects are starting to get grumpy with respect to *BSD patches. There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive. Also, you get into situations like Apple buying cups and switching to LLVM because of fear of the GPLv3. Perhaps fear is not the right word.

The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.

Re:Awesome!

[Galactic Dominator]

It's what I run at work, runs well but have to know what you intend on using it for. Also IME KDE 4 is easier to install and has less quirks than on linux.

Virtualbox runs vista quite well for me so it takes care of that problem to.

If you run 64 bit, use the nouveau driver, it's far better than nv.

Re:Awesome!

[turbidostato]

"First of all, there is no reason to act like a douche when someone asks a question."

Any kind of question? Yours was obviously a "flamebait" one. And your answer to mine is too, so I betted my opinion on the first answer and I'm sure of it on this second.

"it is THAT kind of attitude that has non Windows/OSX platforms labeled as Operating Systems for the maladjusted. Nobody likes THAT guy"

You seem not to understand -again. All your rant basically begs for this answer: so what?

"My question is very simple- is there a large corporation putting the kind of funds into BSD in the network appliance arena that Redhat puts into Linux on the enterprise server arena? Is there any corporations putting millions directly into one of the BSDs?"

Your question might be very simple but:
a) It has a very simple answer. So simple indeed that anybody with genuine interest, not acting on pure facade can get to it in about five seconds: www.freebsd.org->support->vendors; right there, on high visibility on the top menu of the front page and...
b) It shows -again, your lack of understandment. Of course there are companies that push money on BSD in exactly the same way as Red Hat does on Linux: for their own profit (a different issue is if or to what extent do affect *BSD and Linux development and corporations' involvement their different "basic license" choice).

And of course I don't think Apple pushes any money "in the network appliance arena" since I don't know about Apple having much to do "in the network appliance arena" to start with.

And of course I don't know what has to do talking about "the network appliance arena" when talking in this thread about FreeBSD in the desktop.

And of course I don't know what has so much to do focusing "seriously" about FreeBSD on the desktop when the news is about a general anouncement of a new FreeBSD release for whoever may take benefit of it, be it on the server, on the desktop or on the network appliance.

And of course I don't know where your fixance about FreeBSD for network or security appliances when both NetBSD and OpenBSD are more popular choices on that niche comes from.

"And I'm sorry that nobody can know everything about every OS. My expertise is Windows on the desktop and Windows/Linux on the server, I've never really had the time or inclination to learn yet another OS"

Still you find yourself authorised to talk about what the OS you declare to ignore can and can't do and to question the validity of those that both know the system and believe on its abilities yet I am the douche.

"So for me and my customers the new Win7 "just works"."

And finally everything comes clear (as if it were not from the very beginning).

Re:Awesome!

[hairyfeet]

How is asking a couple of questions flamebait? I'm really getting sick of every post that doesn't read like a fucking press release getting modded flamebait or troll by fanboy douchebags. It has gotten to the point you have to turn off all the filters and have to put up with the nigger and faggot posts just to read anything on Slashdot that isn't "boy, isn't product x wonderful! Gee, it sure is!"

If you can show me a large BSD deployment at a major company (And NO Apple is NOT BSD! It is a proprietary locked down OS that uses some BSD underpinnings. You might as well call Windows BSD by that definition) then I will be happy to take back what I said, but frankly I've never heard of it. The only time I HAVE heard of BSD being deployed is EXACTLY like I wrote-routers,pbx systems, etc. Nice large locked down network appliances.

So mark flamebait ALL you want, fanboys, that don't make 2+2 = 5. Compared to even Linux BSD adoption for desktops has to be pretty damned tiny. So all of my questions were legitimate-can they keep up development pace, can they keep people motivated with such a tiny userbase, is support in the form of $$$ rolling in in enough quantities to keep them from having to quit to get day jobs, is there any major corporations bankrolling them like Redhat is doing as far as R&D? So I'm sorry if it hurt your wittle feelings that I dared to point out the inherent problems that comes with having a tiny niche. Just remember there are still those out there trying to build on the Amiga, that don't make it any less of a corpse.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows Server 2008 was slightly better.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

No, no, WinNT is better. It says "NEW".

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

What you are looking for is this: http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I disagree.

*BSD is so much behind the current state, that it's almost useless as a modern desktop system. No inotify support in the kernel, etc.

I think *BSD doesn't have any developers left which can rewrite the kernel to support a modern desktop environment. Bugs like http://www.mail-archive.com/freebsd-net@freebsd.org/msg28806.html don't get fixed for more than three years, even though this ack delay can be fixed easily (see John Nagle's comment here on slashdot: http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=174457&cid=14515105).

The BSD licence is the root of this problem. Look at how much code RedHat, Oracle, etc *must* contribute to linux and compare that with the code contributed to *BSD (by Apple for example)

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

So you've found one algorithm bug that affects some tiny number of users (in 10 years of using BSD, both in an ISP and a 13 site international company, i've never encountered or heard of it).

There are plenty of bugs in linux that don't get fixed because the patch was "not invented here".

As far as BSD being useless as a modern desktop system, apple don't seem to think so, and neither do i or plenty of other users. There's certainly less visible brain damage in it than plenty of other "modern" operating systems (including linux, imho).

Re:Awesome!

[drinkypoo]

Some of the network utilities in windows did originate with BSD but the stack in Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server and beyond was written by Microsoft.

False. Windows XP has the same stack as Windows 2000, which was lifted from BSD. We know because of fingerprinting and the attacks that it was once susceptible to. The new stack is in Server 2003 as you suggest, but it doesn't appear in desktop Windows until Vista. The same stack is also used in Windows 7. You can tell the change doesn't happen in XP due to the lack of integration of IPv6, which still demands the use of all the same management tools as on Windows 2000.

Re:Awesome!

[Undead NDR]

I'm getting a surplus Dell Latitude from work. Was going to load Ubuntu but FreeBSD 8 plus KDE 4.3.0 (or later) looks like a fairly crisp choice for me. Anybody have any experience with this combination?

Not with that particular make and model, but a while back I've been running FreeBSD (6.2 and 7) on my laptop for some months.

Sadly, I've had to give up on it because it didn't provide decent ACPI (suspend/resume) support and hardware graphics acceleration.

Re:Awesome!

[hotfireball]

Now is Apple actually supporting BSD with serious funding

Absolutely: http://maryniuk.blogspot.com/2008/03/asiabsdcon-2008.html

Re:Awesome!

[BOFHelsinki]

FWIW, I'm a long-time FreeBSD user (and can't wait to install and try out 8 even if I don't desperately need anything over 7) and I think you had good and interesting questions there. I'm a bit ashamed for the community (or rather the Slashdot faction) that you got so readily misunderstood and attacked.

To my knowledge there is no such corporate backing for BSD. It would be very interesting if there was, and in several ways it is just perfect for it. (Architecture, uniformity, licensing, etc.)

I totally agree that Apple doesn't count. It's a model example of BSD Licensing. The completely separate kernel and hugely moreso the interface give OS X a life completely divorced from FreeBSD. Doesn't matter if (the BSDL idea works and) Apple gives back to the BSD project. And... no problem.

OK, off to tinker with 8.0 now...

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

You see, you need to learn how to ask questions. What you did was come in with bits and pieces and of things you heard over the years and stated them as facts.

And now that the person you are replying to got you rolling, you keep doing the same things after an amount of research that probably didn't take longer then reading the first paragraph in the Wikipedia entry for osx.

You shouldn't be quoting "facts" unless you are an expert in the field.

Re:Awesome!

[isama]

I'm not sure about the learning curve from windows to linux being harder then linux-bsd, I've just installed my first bsd firewall about 1-2 weeks ago, and I personally think bsd is harder just becouse it is alot like linux, but the little diferences are the things that make it alot harder..

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing Linux down.

Debian has been working to incorporate BSD kernels. Considering that Debian packages a larger number of applications than almost any other distro (who packages more?), I'd say odds are good that we will see extensive support for BSD kernels across a wide spectrum of applications.

There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive.

That depends on whether you consider BSD as software, or as a license. If you're talking about the license, then of course, by definition. But if you're talking about software, it sounds like you're just whining that not everyone want to use the same license you do.

The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.

"Freedom", by definition, means different people want different things, and that's OK. It's always ironic when free software proponents start insisting "do it my way".

Re:Awesome!

[TheRaven64]

It's not quite true to say that there is no corporate backing for FreeBSD. There are no major companies that heavily back the project, but Yahoo! used to employ six developers full time to work on the kernel (not sure if they employ anyone now - do they have any money left?), Apple's Darwin team often contributes code, Juniper sends patches back, and a few other companies contribute financially. You may remember a couple of years ago that the FreeBSD foundation was in danger of losing its non-profit status because too high a proportion of the donations came from corporate entities, rather than individuals.

OpenBSD, on the other hand, gets very little corporate support, in spite of the fact that everyone ships OpenSSH.

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

I do use FreeBSD on my own desktops at home and work. I can't install it to users for the same reasons I could not give the MacOSX or any Linux(same corporate reasons, depending on win only apps, users used to the windows interface and no chance to train them to anything else and tso on).

Anyway what is it not worth? Most of the new features of 8.0 are mostly server adn router oriented(some I do use: ZFS, jail, virtualized network interfaced for jails, improved BPF, Virtaulbox porting, so FreeBSD can host virtual machines...).

Some are broader. A better usb stack is useful both on server adn desktop. this was sponsorized by some commercial entity*don't remember which).

mesh support for wifi was sponsorized by wifi AP and portals companies I hear, they do sell embedded boxes based on FreeBSD(m0n0w4ll for example).

As the press release states, juniper networks contributed a port to the MIPS architecture, since they're building MIPS based routers shipping with FreeBSD in them.

Google, juniper networks, and many other companies are giving money to the foundation to develop FreeBSD:

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/sponsors.shtml

(yes my name's in there too, but I'm a minor private donor)

Judge for yourself if the effort is worth it.

Re:Awesome!

[bill_mcgonigle]

With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds.

'Numbers' would be the better word choice. 'Amount' is more appropriate for indeterminate quantities.

Re:Awesome!

[williewang]

I don't know how much or how little companies contribute to FreeBSD, but it doesn't look like they throw much in. They are trying to raise $300,000 for the *year* (http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/). A company like Apple or Yahoo or Juniper or others that rely on it probably spend many times more than that on coffee. I hope that there is a lot I don't know about to help fund it (along with the other BSDs, Linux, and open source projects in general, for that matter), and there probably is, but being more public about it would be a nice change if that is the case. Quite a few companies have built themselves on top of BSD development--seems like they would want to see it continue to prosper.

I'm neither a developer or a rich guy, but FreeBSD and OpenBSD have saved my ass so many times I make sure to throw a few bucks their way every year. I do like Linux (particularly Gentoo and Ubuntu), and for bleeding edge things especially, Linux is awesome. But BSD is (for me) so simple, extremely stable, uber-easy to maintain, and crazy fast. For an average chump like me who needs a Unix platform to work and work well, BSD is very hard to beat. And PC-BSD has been very impressive to a lot of my Linux-user friends.

Insofar as BSD desktop deployments, no, I haven't really seen them and I doubt there are that many (besides the obvious of Apple ;-). But I would very much encourage looking into them. PC-BSD makes it very easy. I did three thin client deployments for schools in the area as a favor to my mother (she's a teacher) and it's been a godsend for them. We often used ancient hardware that was about to be thrown away and stood them up in one or two weekends (biggest one was 42 thin clients). No AV software required, centrally managed, lickety-splickety fast, and all the kids needed was a browser (Firefox), a video player (VLC) and basic documents (OpenOffice), so it was a perfect fit.

Probably the coolest part was showing the High School dorks how to maintain it and install apps (when I showed them how to update and compile a kernel, they acted like they were looking at The Matrix :-). So give it a try. Like I say to women: 'It won't take that long and, who knows? You just might like it.'

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

> (in 10 years of using BSD, both in an ISP and a 13 site international company, i've never encountered or heard of it).

Most ISPs have migrated to Linux anyway. Even *BSD-friendly companies move away from it because features which most users expect simply don't work right.

Example: Zend, the PHP company doesn't support FreeBSD anymore. The reason is simple, instead of fixing the bugs in the FreeBSD kernel, the FreeBSD maintainers forced the Zend engeneers to invent workarounds for kernel bugs in FreeBSD.

In PHP you can't switch off the Nagle Algorithm "NDELAY", so fragmented packets are *VERY* slow if you use the streams API.

Response from the FreeBSD maintainers: "Use unix domain sockets." -- Bleh! unix domain sockets are not available on Windows. Instead of dropping windows support, they have removed FreeBSD builds and moved to Solaris.

> As far as BSD being useless as a modern desktop system, apple don't seem to think so

BS! Apple uses Mach with a tiny BSD personality layer and a mixture of BSD and GNU userland. The GUI is proprietary anyway.

OSX is neither BSD nor based on it.

Re:Awesome!

[welsh git]

The main problem here, is that you don't know what you're talking about. - probably because you are blindly ignorant due to your view that the GPL way must be the only way to go.

Apart from Apple, 2 off the top of my head:

Yahoo contributed accept_filters and currently house servers on behalf of the freebsd project.

Blue Coat has contributed network routing architecture done by their senior network architect, Qing Li.

That's just 2 off the top of my head - google for the many others

Re:Awesome!

[kamochan]

'Number'. Not 'Numbers'.

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

PHP is crap anyway.

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

True, you can get caught out if you make assumptions. However if you read the docs before assuming, its easier than being totally foreign. Also, once you get the "BSD way" for a few applications, the rest of the OS is configured and operates much more consistently than the mish-mash of ways linux apps seem to do things.

Stick with it... might take a little while for the thought process behind BSD to "click" but once it does for you, linux is full of glaring inconsistencies and just feels "dirty" by comparison (for lack of a better description - BSD just "feels" clean... as much as an OS can inspire "feel"...)

Re:Awesome!

[smash]

OpenBSD, on the other hand, gets very little corporate support, in spite of the fact that everyone ships OpenSSH.

I wonder if it's Theo's charming personality :D Sometimes I agree with him, sometimes I don't but god damn he can spew some bile if you get on the wrong side of his argument.

Re:Awesome!

[hairyfeet]

How was I "quoting facts"? I said that compared to Linux desktops the adoption rate of BSD desktops must be tiny. You can buy Linux based desktops from Dell, HP, pretty much all the major OEMs have at least SOME kind of Linux desktop that you can buy. Do these major OEMs sell BSD desktops? No, they do not. Since OEMs do not sell machines that they know nobody will buy one can reasonably assume there is a market for those.

And how is any of the problems associated with having a tiny niche not a basic fact? One does not need a peer reviewed journal to have some basic common sense. Less popular = less exposure, Less Exposure = fewer people contributing code, Fewer people working on a project when faced with competition means more likely to fall behind said competition. How is ANY of that not the most basic of common sense?

Look, I have nothing at all against BSD. I wish them all the luck and fortune in the world. But perhaps more so than at any point in computer history the technology is exploding all around us. In just the past few years we have gone from single to dual to quad cores becoming cheap and affordable to the masses (I have a new 925 quad AMD being delivered on Monday. Cost a whole $140), The GPU has frankly become so powerful it is scary, with stream processing, GPGPU capabilities, and now from the AMD/ATI roadmap it looks like multiple GPUs will soon be the norm, We have gone from ATA to SATA to SATA II to SSD, frankly it is an incredible time to be alive.

But one would have to be frankly insane to not realize that trying to support this exploding technological landscape will be difficult even for companies with billions in R&D. Just read this on Linuxinsider of all places where developers of Windows 7 admit that many of the problems they had with Vista was due to their not being prepared for the rapid adoption of multiple cores and the problems with scaling. Now add to that the fact that nearly all *BSD adoption I have ever seen, or as ever been written about here on Slashdot has NOT been desktops but in devices such as PBXs, routers, etc, and it doesn't take a genius to figure that most companies that are contributing to BSD are most likely doing so in very niche areas.

So I stand by my questions. Does BSD have enough resources coming in to adapt to the changing landscape? Can they build enough buzz with their much smaller marketshare to keep developers interested in the platform? With the incredible advances in hardware do they have enough manpower to keep up, or are they falling behind the tech curve? These are legitimate questions that I would like to see asked to the heads of the various BSDs. And since Slashdot has many of those same people that come here to lurk, why not ask these questions here?

Re:Awesome!

[Anonymous Coward]

thanks for this comment
http://yap.ir

Re:Awesome!

[cyphercell]

I don't think your question is wrong so much as it is just annoying. Frankly the answer is yes, there's enough resources to support the users that have FreeBSD on the desktop, otherwise, they wouldn't be doing it.

Funny how similar the free Unices are

[amorsen]

Most of this could be from a Linux distribution list of new features... Slightly ahead in some ways, slightly behind in others.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is way ahead for serious users. I'm talking about people running high-availability and high-traffic servers, and workstation users who need a stable and reliable operating system.

Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer. FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes, but it's there when you need it, and it doesn't disappoint.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[NoYob]

Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer.

Wow - your impeccable logic has convinced me! Where do I sign up?

Right here!

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ls671]

Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.

Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))

P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is way ahead for serious users.

Yes, like the NYSE, the London Stock exchange, etc. They all run FreeBSD exclusively.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[1s44c]

Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.

Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))

P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)

FreeBSD has ported pf from OpenBSD.

Pf is nice.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ls671]

Yep, I know this.

So would you say that if my primary goal is to run Pf, it will make no difference if I install either freebsd or openbsd ?

I am thinking ease of installation, patches, etc. where there could be a delay before updates for freebsd. Also, does the freebsd port support 100% of the features implemented on openbsd and can it be considered as a totally equivalent alternative ?

Thanks for your reply.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[MrHanky]

What utter drivel.

I'm sure FreeBSD some times performs better or with greater stability than Linux, and I'm just as sure that some times it's the other way around. Some times Windows beats them both. And who knows, perhaps even Solaris. It depends on a lot of things, though, and to say that FreeBSD is simly 'better' for 'serious' tasks just makes me convinced that you've never used a computer for serious tasks.

As for your other claims, that "FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes": that's also wrong. FreeBSD can use all the X desktops and all the themes that Linux can use. Nvidia makes drivers for FreeBSD, too.

You know you're on Slashdot when a jar full of fanboy wank is called 'insightful'.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

You know you're on Slashdot when a jar full of fanboy wank is called 'insightful'.

I wish! My FreeDOS drivel never got that much attention despite it being a full featured, state of the art, operating system with a mature code base.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[turbidostato]

"FreeBSD is way ahead for serious users."

Comparing to what?

"I'm talking about people running high-availability and high-traffic servers, and workstation users who need a stable and reliable operating system."

Oh, you mean like there are high-availability and high-traffic servers and stable workstation perfectly running Linux?

"Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer."

Which is a great tribute at both the versatility and diversity of the Linux ecosystem. There are Linux distributions almost for everything. There's no problem if "most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer" even if that were true. It's enough that *some* Linux distributions can do it. And you can bet they are up to the task just as FreeBSD is.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[BrookHarty]

FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes, ...

Hey, Neither does Windows 7!

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ScrewMaster]

a jar full of fanboy wank

Thanks for the image.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

BTW, Nvidia only makes the 32-bit drivers for BSD, nothing 64-bit. I'm using BSD-current at home for the (brief) time being, and I'm still deciding what to install instead. I used Slamd64 before this, and I'm unhappy with Slackware 13's lack of a 32-bit toolchain (Yes, I know that one could build one's own, but I simply haven't the time for that at the moment). I do like BSD, and it's a pity there are no 64-bit Nvidia (or anything current from ATI for that matter) drivers for it.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

That's just ignorance speaking. After extensive experience with both operating systems in both corporate and home environments, I can assure you that BSD is the clear winner for consistency of quality and use as a serious server. Linux has better hardware support for a handful of devices that are absolutely irrelevant to server usage but important for a desktop user. Linux distributions tend to have quite a bit of incomplete/buggy/poorly written contributed code. Anyway my only point is that BSD has pf and rocks the free world. Go back to playing Quake on your penguin box. Nobody wants to hear about your gay rainbow diversity hypothesis.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ld a,b]

If your question is, implements as many security features for exploit mitigation as OpenBSD? The answer is no. pf and openssh should work all the same but given a vulnerability, OpenBSD has a better chance of surviving it unharmed until it is fixed.

Still, FreeBSD, like Linux, is faster and scales better than OpenBSD. So you have to factor that in if you plan on running something that needs it.

Finally, in my opinion, and always from the command line, OpenBSD ~= FreeBSD > ? > Linux as far as ease of use is concerned.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Galactic Dominator]

The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[turbidostato]

"That's just ignorance speaking. After extensive experience with both operating systems in both corporate and home environments, I can assure you that BSD is the clear winner for consistency of quality and use as a serious server. "

Well, I always say that it's very easy to say "this is that way" when you know the answer but it is always very dangerous to say "that's impossible" or "that's not the case" because you don't know everything.

In example, all you are really saying is that after extensive experience *you* were unable to achieve good enough results using Linux as a "serious server" (whatever that exactly means). Provided facts like those offered by Netcraft, top500 or my own extensive experience that says more about *your* limitations than about those of Linux.

"Anyway my only point is that BSD has pf and rocks the free world."

Anyway that was *not* your "only point" or else I would do nothing but agree.

"Go back to playing Quake on your penguin box. Nobody wants to hear about your gay rainbow diversity hypothesis."

Again, that says much more about you than anything else.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ls671]

Thanks a lot ! ;-))

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Ded Bob]

The FreeBSD Nvidia 64-bit driver should be coming soon (a few weeks minimum): http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2129411&postcount=445

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[ls671]

> always from the command line

Of course !

Thanks for your reply ! ;-)

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

"I can assure you that BSD is the clear winner for consistency of quality and use as a serious server"

So how many companies out there are successfully running Oracle, DB2, Siebel, and SAP on FreeBSD? I assure you, there are many running these "serious" applications on Linux based servers.

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[Anonymous Coward]

The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.

Uh, sorry dude, but that's massively incorrect. There have been major infrastructure changes in OpenBSD's networking stack and FreeBSD has not picked them up. I also know for a fact that Henning does not run FreeBSD, let alone commit to them.

Here's an example, can you run this line in any version of FreeBSD:

'match in on egress from !(egress) to any nat-to (egress:0)'

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[funky womble]

If you run FreeBSD, having PF ported gives you a more sane choice of firewall there, but if you're setting out specifically to run PF, OpenBSD gives some major benefits. The code is several years ahead of FreeBSD's port. Watch some of the recent presentations to see what's changed - see links to a couple of related videos at http://spacehopper.org/pfvids/

Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are

[kamochan]

MrHanky, ScrewMaster... ROFL

Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?

What? You can emulate Linux binaries?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

By the looks of it, ZFS.

BTRFS is coming, but it's not really here yet.

Ok, ZFS isn't *necessary* for the desktop user you suggest, but it's awfully nice.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Ian Alexander]

Since when have BSD's been known as primarily "desktop" operating systems?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[ceeam]

s/Linux/Windows/g
s/FreeBSD/Linux/g

There will be your answer.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Pope Reinhardt I]

Personally I was rather disappointed to find out the installer doesn't support ZFS. For a ZFS-only system, you need to do some manual partitioning. I found it a bit hard-ish, even with their instructions.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[clang_jangle]

Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?

FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software. But to each her own. :)

What? You can emulate Linux binaries?

For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would a desktop user run Linux instead of FreeBSD, when it doesn't add a single feature available on FreeBSD?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

But to each her own.

Well, aren't you hip and and with it.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, she's just female.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Mad Merlin]

But to each her own. :)

Her? This is Slashdot you know.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Bert64]

If ZFS is what you want (and on a desktop that's unlikely), Solaris has more mature ZFS support than FreeBSD.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Bert64]

Support for more hardware, especially workstation oriented hardware?
Greater availability of applications? (Most desktop oriented apps are written for linux first and later possibly ported to bsd, many closed source apps cant be ported to bsd at all).

When i tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, it worked well on my desktop (which was self assembled and intentionally bought using well known hardware) but wouldn't boot on my laptop (an ibm thinkpad 600e) and wouldn't run vmware (which was very new at the time if i remember and had no other alternatives)...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to /dev/dsp (back then they needed to have /dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.

ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.

The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).

Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.

DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.

So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[doti]

No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[1s44c]

Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?

I'm not staying FreeBSD is better than Linux but FreeBSD is a more consistent system.

Linux, even with the best distributions, is a bunch of separate bits stuck together with 15 ways to do any given thing.

FreeBSD also does have some stuff Linux doesn't like PF, Jails, and better ZFS support.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why on earth would a desktop user run Linux instead of Windows, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Windows?

What? You can run notepad and solitaire in Wine?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[maztuhblastah]

Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:

So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?

Laptops. Power usage.

FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.

With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?

Wi-Fi.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[harry666t]

I'm almost convinced. I've been toying with FreeBSD 7 on a vm a while ago, and I liked it. There's a certain "feel" about the whole system, and I really like that feel. Now I'm considering putting it on my laptop. I'm just wondering about a few possible showstoppers. Tell me about...

  - Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like installing&testing new stuff, trying out various funny Python libraries, etc. I need the process of finding, installing, upgrading, removing packages to be quick and efficient.

  - Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.

  - Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)

  - NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.

  - 3D support on Intel graphics?

  - read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?

That'd be all for now...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The solaris implementation of DTrace is also significantly better than the one found in FreeBSD. If these are the features you are interested in, you really should be using OpenSolaris, not FreeBSD.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[toejam13]

I've been using FreeBSD as a secondary desktop environment for about two years now, having used some flavor of BSD since I ran NetBSD 1.0 on my Amiga 3000.

For the most part, the experience is not dissimilar to using Linux as a desktop. I use WINE to supplement a few programs that have poor equivalents in the POSIX/GTK/Qt world, just as I would under Linux. Otherwise, most of the programs I use would be the same ones I'd used under either Windows or Linux.

FreeBSD as a desktop environment shines over Linux in that the sound management is easier. I also find the package installation, at least under the i386 branch, to be easier as well. Whatever doesn't have a package, ports seems to do a superior job than under Linux.

However, in my opinion, FreeBSD will never beat Linux as a desktop replacement until Adobe Flash, hardware video and 3D acceleration and library management are better handled. Linux has FreeBSD beat in most of those respects. Most of the core FreeBSD team is aware of this, but the work required to fix it just seems to be above what people are willing to donate. So, FreeBSD goes without.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Hurricane78]

Because I could not stand a package manager worse than portage anymore. ^^
Yes, that means that all RPM-based distros can go to hell in my personal opinion. ;)
(I know that Gentoo got the idea from Ports. That is why I respect FreeBSD.)

But what you write sounds like it’s a pretty great system to make music on, right? I hope it has a real-time kernel...
Also ZFS is a giant plus for me, after I lost half my archive because of data corruption.

DTrace again, is not very useful for me, because the Haskell compiler (GHC) is freakin’ sweet. The debugger allows you to go backwards in execution, amongst other things.

But when I look at the features listed in TFS as being new to FreeBSD... I have those things in my kernel for a loong time now. I would be pretty worried to not have them until now.

Another thing I don’t get: What is the point of putting a version number to a whole distro? I mean it’s not as if it were in any way related to the version of anything in it. But I guess you get used to it, when using Portage...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Ziest]

What? You can emulate Linux binaries?

Yes, FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for years. A little effort on your part to do some research before you post could have saved you from looking like a fool. Oh, wait..

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Spinning down the drive has been supported since 7.x with atacontrol.

However, you may run into problems with things writing to the disk (I found 900seconds prevents spurious spin-downs; Read: never spins down).
  http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=1012

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just answering the ones I can... :)

  - Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like installing&testing new stuff, trying out various funny Python libraries, etc. I need the process of finding, installing, upgrading, removing packages to be quick and efficient.

I find ports to be very easy to use (as well as packages, which are precompiled binaries). But I've never used apt etc. so I can't give a comparison sorry.
To install something like apache2.2 though, you'd type pkg_add -r apache22. To uninstall you'd type pkg_delete /var/db/pkg/apache22

- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.

Webcam support isn't great (at least last time I checked). Check out http://info.iet.unipi.it/~luigi/FreeBSD/usb-cameras.html for more info.

- Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)

Not sure about suspend to disk, never used it. Full disk encryption is available though via GELI and GBDE (check them both out in the FreeBSD man pages or the handbook at http://freebsd.org/handbook)

  - NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.

NFI, sorry..
  - 3D support on Intel graphics?

Yep

- read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?

That'd be all for now...

NFI again sorry. It does support FUSE,and the FUSE NTFS module works a treat in my experience.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[OeLeWaPpErKe]

A more complete feature list :

-> ZFS
-> DTrace (if anyone tells you SystemTap is equivalent, take them out and shoot them in the head. Twice. Carefully make sure they're dead. Shoot a few more times to make sure)
-> jails (if anyone tells you chroot or even vserver is equivalent, see above)
-> pf, and even other options (anyone tells you iptables ... you know what to do)
-> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)
-> actual coherent system (ever worked on a busybox linux system ?)
-> drivers are not so plentiful, but they are better quality. Rare hardware simply doesn't work, instead of sort-of working and then crashing your system every now and then
-> binary compatibility, not just with linux, but SCO and System V
-> sensible network defaults
-> default filesystem supports snapshots. It's not impossible with linux, but still this is nice
-> netgraph : there is no such thing as a way to mangle packets that fbsd doesn't support. Plus : easy to add stuff to. Fast (if not perfect, but faster than doing stuff in linux user space), and ultimate flexibility
-> application-level firewall (meaning applications can push firewall rules into the kernel that only apply to that one application. Helpful for stability and ddos mitigation)
-> coherent, existing organisation, polite even (try getting something done via lkml. I hear it's been known to cause nervous breakdowns. (jokingly) Even murder)

So, personally, I'd agree with "better quality". Especially for network servers.

If you want to use it on a laptop ... better look elsewhere. It will run, though.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[theshowmecanuck]

Because it has a BSD license and not a GNU license.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[nurb432]

Sound works

So does package management. Video, networking, performance.... The FreeBSD was much more organized environment then the feathered alternative was at the time, which is why I also switched over back in the 4.x days.

Sure, everyone has advanced over the years, but i still haven't seen many reasons to leave the bsd camp.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Cyberax]

including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks

No, it doesn't. However, beating Linux was one of motivations for rewriting the old O(1) scheduler.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt?

Install portupgrade and then installing from both source and binary works nicely. I've never had uninstalling fail, but if you like testing and uninstalling stuff then just create a cloned copy of the base system (with ZFS), set it as a jail, try it there, and then delete the whole jail later. It's fast and easy, and will definitely clean up anything that's left over (temporary configuration files and so on).

- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.

Depends on the machine. It's been a few years since I tried to run FreeBSD on anything that wasn't 100% supported out of the box, but your milage may vary.

- Full disk encryption. This is a must and I'm not going anywhere without it. I suppose it's there; but can I have swap on encrypted logical volume and still be able to do suspend to disk? (suspend to ram is also really handy)

OpenBSD was the first system to get encrypted swap and FreeBSD copied it quickly (5.3 was the first to support it, but 6.0 tweaked it to use GEOM). Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo if you're expecting true suspend to disk; it's not even theoretically possible to do it securely without something like a TPM, although that doesn't stop a few operating systems claiming it. Without encrypted swap, suspend to RAM and disk work fine on my ThinkPad R31.

Encrypted volumes were supported with Vinim years ago, and GEOM when it was introduced. I'm not sure if they are natively supported with ZFS, but you can always use a ZVOL as a GEOM provider and encrypt that.

- NetworkManager? Or something equivalent. I don't want to go to commandline unless a task that I'm performing demands by its very nature a command-oriented user interface.

No idea. Unlike Linux, the ifconfig tool on the command line doesn't suck, so I've never bothered looking at graphical alternatives. If you want a pointy-clicky system then I'd suggest that you look at PC-BSD, which is a more user-oriented FreeBSD distribution.

- 3D support on Intel graphics?

Given that the Intel drivers are developed by the FreeBSD DRI maintained, I'd be very surprised if they didn't.

- read&write support for ext3, ntfs, etc for Linux and Windows inter-op?

Ext3 uses the same layout as ext2, which is supported in-kernel. NTFS uses the same userspace driver as Linux.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the system is truly separated from the applications. I can have a stable system while using the newest applications. This is what made me switch from Debian desktop to FreeBSD desktop. (And I hate this Iceweasel shit.)

And I don't have to wait for fsck at boot.

And when I need help I actually find answers in the handbook.

And I get informed about security issues with applications automatically even before there is a patch (portaudit).

And because I don't need a sound server.

And there is hardly a reason not to, if your hardware is supported.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So in other words, it's not really supported.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

The hardware support can be a problem. It is hard to tell without knowing specifics. Wifi and ethernet could be problems, check that first. I've never operated a webcam, ever, so I can't say anything about that.

Concerning the package management, I'd suggest you try PCBSD. Most people running FreeBSD use the ports, which means compiling from source. There are binary packages, but they are not as up to date. And by default you only get the packages that were tagged for the FreeBSD release. I am not entirely sure how one can change to a more recent source of packages. But PCBSD has another way to install applications, the pbi. These are self-contained binary packages of the applications. So no problems with dependencies and they install cleanly side by side and can be removed without leaving a trace.

PCBSD is at least a quick and easy way to get hooked. You'll probably find yourself using the ports later anyway.

If your hardware is supported you should give it a try.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are instances where it happens:
http://www.pcbsd.org/

http://www.midnightbsd.org/

not to mention the now defunct project called desktopBSD ;)

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Galactic Dominator]

If you want to use it on a laptop ... better look elsewhere. It will run, though.

Runs great on my Inspiron M600.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

But to each her own.

Well, aren't you hip and and with it.

I bet you get a lot of pussy. Not!

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[ffflala]

So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?

The real time, low latencey kernel available to user accounts is pretty much the only reason I do. It's a must for multitrack sound recording.

The last time I was using FreeBSD regularly (late 4.x through 6.0), the real-time kernel access required for low-latency recording (a must for multitrack recording) was only available if you were running as root. At this time it was available via Igno Molnar's kernel patch and a rebuild.

  My understanding was that the structure blocking users from real time kernel access is an intentional security design and very unlikely to change in FreeBSD. Do you happen to know if it has?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[deek]

Have to disagree with you. I find Linux (well, Debian anyway) to be more consistent than FreeBSD. I manage a few FreeBSD boxes at my work, and I've found that configuration files and service startup scripts are better managed in Debian.

Linux has iptables instead of pf. From what I've used of pf, it doesn't have anything that cannot be done by iptables.

I do like Jails. While you can achieve the same thing with virtual machines, Jails is better with resources. Still, if we're talking about a desktop user here, it's a useless feature.

Speaking of desktop users, they will certainly like the better hardware support of Linux. For a regular user, they'll also prefer a distribution like Ubuntu. So the original commenter still has a good point.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

Dtrace, zfs, pf, jails, configuration files done the right way and a scheduler that has not crapped out under load of more than about 2-3 - for decades.

None of this is available on Linux. Yes there are half-assed work arounds to do the same thing, but they don't work as well.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

As above. However, i've run freebsd quite happily on a laptop before (back in the 6.0 days, even). You just need to make sure the hardware support is there. AS you do with any OS - even on Windows i'm particular with the hardware I buy as the shiniest/cheapest/best value hardware in the world is no good without stable driver support...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

wifi works with freebsd, you just need to RTFM.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

Flash problem will hopefully go away with HTML 5. 3d acceleration works fine once set up. What probs have you had with library management? Being able to build from ports to suit the version of library X you have on your sytem, rather than what the package depends on is a great strength, imho...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install,

"Fail filesystem"! The keys are right next to each other!

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

In my experience...

• ports: cd /usr/ports/[package class]/[package name] && make && make install - done. however, if there is a package available, i just use that - pkg_add -r packagename will install the package off the network, with any dependencies as well - in a single step
• can't comment on 1 year old laptop support, haven't run it on a laptop for a while
• not sure
• sysinstall will do this
• 3d support on intel = x.org - works as far as i know, the driver is open source
• ext3, nfs are read-write. ntfs is read fine, writing is a bit "Experimental", but AFAIK thats the case with linux too.

I'd install it and give it a shot. You're right about the "feel". I think its because the kernel and userland are put out by the same core team, with the same quality standards and policies. It feels much more like an integrated system, rather than slapped together components.

I can't wait until CLANG is the default compiler, keen to see the speed-up...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

...but unfortunately, the rest of Solaris is crap when compared to FreeBSD *ducks and covers*

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[filekutter]

Plain and simple... Unix is over 30 yrs old. A rugged, mature, operating system in comparison to the still teenaged Linux. Just the ports system makes BSD eclipse the nightmare of program installation on a Linux box. Yes, you do have lots of nice sand-boxed apps that can install nicely.. but BSD allows you an easy install everything in the Ports dir. I'll take a battle-scarred Unix any day over Linux.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?

KVM?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[smash]

parent is not a troll, the bullet points are accurate. gotta love the moderation system - any time anyone brings up anything in any way anti linux.... as someone who has used both (in a 2500 employee company) for a decade+ ... he speaks the truth.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[drinkypoo]

That's a pretty poor definition of 'works'. To me, it means that I just install the OS and it goes. Windows frequently fails this test, mind you, as do many Linux distributions (and Ubuntu often fails on older hardware, where some other distribution would succeed, so it's not like there's a one size fits all fix from the Penguin either.)

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[harry666t]

> Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo
> if you're expecting true suspend to disk;

My current setup is an encrypted volume, containing an LVM volume, containing root, swap and home. When I resume from s2d, it asks me for the passphrase just like during a normal boot, and only when the swap shows up it tries to resume from it. I guess that this is just as safe as a normal shutdown.

Big thanks to you (and everyone else) for all the replies.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Same reason I have not switched to FreeBSD either...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[drinkypoo]

Linux is Unix, it's just not UNIX. If you want to be a pedant, at least be correct.

I don't think there's ever been a point at which any of the *BSDs hasn't had a ton of broken stuff in ports.

You're a fanboy, and should stop, because you're not helping BSD.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's UNIX-like and licensed under the GNU's Not UNIX General Public License. It is not UNIX.

FreeBSD is directly descended from AT&T UNIX.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Descended? Whoopdedoo, so is Linux. But neither Linux nor FreeBSD are officially certified as UNIX.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[chrysalis]

> -> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)

    Yes, the good reason is the BSD license. They can use it for free and make money out of it without needing to opensource nor contribute back anything.

> -> actual coherent system

    Uh? Oh come I can't compile that software against OpenSSL? Ah, it's using OpenSSL from /usr/local/lib, not the one in /usr/lib . But how come OpenSSH is linked against the one in /usr/local/ ? Ah, because it's the one from ports that overwrote the one in /usr/bin thanks to the awesome OVERRIDE_BASE feature.

    Seriously, it's a real mess.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

Ooops, that should have been 'jail filesystem'. I think I press the j and f keys with the same finger, but on opposite hands, so there's probably some dodgy wiring in my spine. Or I'm just so used to typing fail on the Internet that my brain autocorrected jail...

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD at one point had a shared codebase with AT&T UNIX, so yes, descended.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD has jails, which let you run virtual FreeBSD instances with a lot less overhead than KVM, and VirtualBox if you need to run other operating systems in virtual machines. Oh, and KQEMU also works on FreeBSD if you prefer something closer to KVM.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

There's less of a gap with FreeBSD 8. As I recall, FreeBSD now ships the same (or a slightly newer) version of ZFS than Solaris, however OpenSolaris has a newer version with a couple of interesting features (deduplication, for example). Both FreeBSD 8 and Solaris have very nice sound subsystems and I think FreeBSD jails are now up to feature parity with Solaris Zones (possibly slightly ahead; I'm not sure if you can nest Zones in Solaris). DTrace on Solaris is newer than in FreeBSD, although I've not looked at what the differences are. FreeBSD generally has better hardware support, although Solaris scales a lot better on systems with more than 8 cores (I wouldn't want to run FreeBSD on a 64-processor SMP box, while Solaris would consider that a mid-range system). FreeBSD 8 includes fine grained locking in the network stack, but Solaris has now moved to a lockless message passing model for the network stack, so should scale a lot better if you have lots of cores and lots of 10GigE connections.

In terms of userland, FreeBSD is a lot simpler. Solaris is backwards-compatible with every previous version of Solaris or SunOS ever made and contains SysV, BSD, and GNU userlands that you can switch between. FreeBSD just has a BSD userland. Solaris 10 (I think, maybe 9) replaced the SysV init system with SMF, which is conceptually quite similar to Apple's Launchd, but quite different in terms of implementation. FreeBSD uses RCng, which is a lot simpler and a bit less powerful. Solaris default installs include a lot of third-party software, providing a complete workstation or server environment, while FreeBSD installs a very lean system and expects you to add other things yourself. Which you prefer is a case of personal preference (I find Solaris too cluttered, other people find FreeBSD too sparse).

Oh, and I wouldn't say wanting ZFS on a desktop is unlikely. Snapshots and clones are both useful on a desktop and zfs send / zfs receive is incredibly useful for incremental backups (take a snapshot and then just stream the changes between two snapshots to a remote machine over the network or to DVD).

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[TheRaven64]

Installing Flash is a pain at the moment (you need to install the Linux version then run it via the plugin wrapper), but once it's installed it provides a better experience than the default Linux install because it runs in a separate process. Any time flash crashes, it just crashes the plugin without taking the browser down. Note that this is entirely possible on Linux too (and is used on some systems to run 32-bit flash in a 64-bit browser), and it's a shame that it isn't the default everywhere. Ideally, the flash plugin should also chroot itself somewhere so that the inevitable security hole in flash doesn't compromise anything important.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Brother!!!!!!!!! :)

I used NetBSD on an Amiga 4000, after having to dump AmigaOS(after the sad sad commodore failure), and user BSD since on PCs(and I use the word PC to describe modern server hardware too. They do get a rack enclosure, but they're damn PCs inside with the same crappy hardware of any desktop. they just cost more).

I'm quite happy with freebsd and am blocking ALL flash on widnows too(with exceptions) I usually avoid flash sites. flash is bad. silverlight too.

We do not need to get flash on freebsd, we do need to get it out of the world. That's the problem.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[sim303]

Encrypted swap is easy: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/swap-encrypting.html sim

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[drinkypoo]

It's UNIX-like and licensed under the GNU's Not UNIX General Public License. It is not UNIX.

And in that moment, the student was enlightened. Or at least, was given the opportunity. You can lead a whore to Vasser, but you can't make him think.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

I did, and my Wi-Fi wasn't supported, so I was shit outta luck.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[welsh git]

>> faster routing code (all juniper routers run a modified version of fbsd, for good reason)

> Yes, the good reason is the BSD license. They can use it for free and make money out of it without needing to opensource nor contribute back anything.

Way to go shooting yourself in the foot. Whilst what you say is actually correct, Juniper DO contribute back to Freebsd.

If you'd read the bloomin' article (yes, I know, this is slashdot) it even mentions some of the stuff they've contributed to the 8 release!

Your GPL-warped brain seems to think that the GPL is the only way to get stuff contributed.

Take your blinkers off

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[celle]

"No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows."

No, because Freebsd does add features not available on Linux.

Fixed that for you.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because some random opinion on some foreign web site means fuck all.

You're about as sharp as a pillowcase stuffed with Jell-O.

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ha, ha, ha... dude you're so right... my natural language parsing routine failed to understand the "her" bit!!!

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

solaris has much poorer hardware support

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sill Linux user. You didn't know BSD had women?

Re:Why would a desktop user would run it?

[Anonymous Coward]

So FreeBSD is for the very small niche of people who want ZFS and have hardware that's supported by BSD but not by Solaris?

FreeBSD hardware support is quite poor in it's own right compared to linux or windows...

And Sparc hardware turns your argument on its head...

Jumping the gun...

[cperciva]

Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[MrMr]

But in order for that to work we would have to rtfa.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[cperciva]

I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).

Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[cperciva]

We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[Razalhague]

Tell me about it. When I was new here I always used to read the articles before posting, but by then everyone had already commented and spent their mod points so I never got any karma! But then I learnt the proper way of doing things and now I've got karma to burn on offtopic posts about slashdot!

Re:Jumping the gun...

[Opyros]

I was wondering about that; I saw "FreeBSD 8.0 Final" a few days ago on FileForum, but the FreeBSD homepage said RC3 was the latest.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[krelian]

I was wondering about that; I saw "FreeBSD 8.0 Final" a few days ago on FileForum [betanews.com], but the FreeBSD homepage said RC3 was the latest.

Was it released by RAZOR1911?

Re:Jumping the gun...

[hedwards]

That's a sort of byproduct of the way the last stages of a release go. It isn't put up as a final release until the build is done and it's been distributed to the ftp sites and they've been given a bit of time to prepare.

Which means that the source as well as the ports tree for that release have been hanging out on one server or another for a bit.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[Stargoat]

The last time I jumped a gun was against a French 74 out of Marseilles. We were in the slaughter house on board HMS Bellipotent, hammering away furiously from Jack Catches It, our twenty-four pounder. Had her treble shotted. But the barrel got hot after twenty minutes, and she bucked so violently that she broke her right breaching tackle on the recoil and flipped over. It was just as well, since the third lieutenant was calling for border and we didn't need to bother securing our guns. It let us stop by the bucket first and get a quick drink.

Re:Jumping the gun...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think this would make more sense in Italian.

FreeBSD rocks :)

[clang_jangle]

I was intending to install RC3 on a new desktop machine a few days ago, but got the error message "this version not available on this server". So I went to the options screen and changed it to 8.0-RELEASE just on a hunch and happily it was there and installed without a hitch. Definitely several good performance improvements over 7.2, especially when copying large amounts of data from a USB disk. So far this seems like a nice, solid release and I look forward to migrating my servers to it (after a month or so, just to be sure).

I'll try it.

[palegray.net]

If only for the improvements to ZFS I'll give it a shot.

Using it now for my home "superserver"

[RT Alec]

PF + AltQ, a ZFS raidz array, and booting from a CF card. Excellent job, kudos to the FreeBSD team!

Great job!

[ceeam]

Congratulations to all involved!

FreeBSD is a great Free Unix system.

Nothing yet...

[Jazz-Masta]

Nothing yet on the website. Only 8 rc3 released on November 12th.

But on the FTP there is something on Nov. 22 labelled as 8.0

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/

wpa_supplicant replacement?

[FudRucker]

wpa_supplicant needs to either be dumped and replaced with something better or the people that work on wpa_supplicant need rework it to support a wider variety of wifi cards

Re:wpa_supplicant replacement?

[cperciva]

Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.

Re:wpa_supplicant replacement?

[Abcd1234]

I'm confused... how the hell is it wpa_supplicant's job to support specific wifi chipsets/cards? Isn't it the kernel's job to implement drivers for each card while exposing a general API that wpa_supplicant then uses?

How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously - some anonymous person makes vague claims about how it's "higher quality" - without defining "quality" or providing any citations, reasons, or examples, and it's modded "insightful"?!?! TWICE!??!!

What. The. Fuck!??!!

Here's my refutation of this post - containing just as much "insightful" commentary as yours:

Nuh-uh!

So, where are *my* "insightful" mods?

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[MrNaz]

Given that any sysadmin worth his salt knows that Linux and FreeBSD offer different tradeoffs between "completeness" and "rigorous quality", it's not unreasonable for him to point out that FreeBSD has a "higher quality", even if the actual words he uses are subjective. Everyone familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros would know what he's saying and agree.

Unfortunately, I can't say that your "nuh-uh" also resounds with common experience in this way, so I disagree with your contention that it is a valid response under these circumstances.

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that any sysadmin worth his salt knows that Linux and FreeBSD offer different tradeoffs between "completeness" and "rigorous quality"

Bullshit. I've been a unix admin for 15 years, and there is no such "tradeoff". In particular, you might be surprised to know that different distros have different emphasis - some favour "completeness" (eg. Fedora) while some (such as Slackware) favour "rigorous quality". Some (such as Debian) try for both, and end up a happy middle.

it's not unreasonable for him to point out that FreeBSD has a "higher quality"

It's completely unreasonable to "point out" something and then provide nothing substantive to back it up. You know, like you just did.

Everyone familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros would know what he's saying and agree.

I'm familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros, and I disagree, so it looks like you're completely wrong.

You want some ketchup to go with that foot?

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried rc3 and found out (didn't dig too deep) I could not access (write to) a NTFS-3g drive. Yeh-Haa

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not a foot, it's popcorn, and I'm eating it while watching the fanboy circus that you're the star of.

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[kamochan]

AFAIK, "Nuh-uh" means something naughty with a polar bear, in Eskimo. I suspect there is common experience involved, otherwise there wouldn't be an expression for it.

So, (provided that he's an Eskimo) the AC wins. QED.

PS. I also maintain both *nux and *bsd environments, and I fully agree with the original statement. All my mission critical stuff runs bsd.

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunately you were rewarded for your blindness.

Consider.

Solaris vs FreeBSD vs OpenBSD vs NetBSD vs DragonflyBSD vs Mac OSX

This is Combat between Jedi Masters you foolish mortal...

"Not surprising anonymous coward you are." - Coda

"Ahh, you fail to realize my Light sabre runs Linux, see this button here makes coffee..." - Gnu/Sith

gurgle gurgle - you hear coffee beginning to brew in the background.

"Embraced a narrow view of the source you have. Focused only on features you are." -Coda

Which, isn't really to say Linux sucks either. I think Linux really kicks ass in a lot of ways.

Re:How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?!

[Anonymous Coward]

episode II

Gnarth Stallman reminds all that Gnarth is a recursive acronym for Gnarth's Not A Robotic Turd Hole and dubs the young Gnu/Sith, "Gnarth Synthesis".

Hey, you're the guy!

[coryking]

Your blog has been a great resource for me for a very long time. Thanks for all the informative posts... you were the only set of instructions that made sense for doing a binary upgrade :-)

Thank you sir!!!

Re:Hey, you're the guy!

[cperciva]

Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update. :-)

Re:Hey, you're the guy!

[TheLink]

Unfortunately that's not always the case - the person who writes the software might find its usage obvious and not know how to explain it well to others.

And often the users who find it unobvious, and finally figure out by themselves how to use something, forget which parts were unobvious. They weren't taking down notes on the unobvious bits - typically too busy just trying to get things to work. So it might be useful to have some people taking notes on "questions" they have that aren't answered by the documentation, and other problems, while learning the stuff.

Sometimes in OSS the developers appear to have the opinion that the source code is good enough documentation. I've also seen the ridiculous case in Linux of a well documented method/API being deprecated in favour of a poorly documented new API/method (which may be technically better, but only a few in the world can figure out how to use it).

In general things in FreeBSD tend to be better documented than in a typical Linux distro. At least that's what I find from comparing the manpages (yes I've tried using the "info" docs on suse and ubuntu, and too often I get more useful help from "experts exchange" ;) ).

Re:Hey, you're the guy!

[TheRaven64]

Sorry if this comes across as a flame, but as the guy who wrote FreeBSD Update, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions:

Firstly, why is it so slow? I can cvsup and recompile the tree and install in less time that it takes freebsd-update upgrade to run; the two install steps then take even longer. If I run systat -iostat, I see it hitting the disk incredibly hard. Couldn't it just compare the last modification date of most of the files with the time of the last upgrade? Possibly this has been fixed, as updating from 8-RC3 to 8-RELEASE seems to be going a lot faster than going from RC-2 to RC-3 (and has actually finished while typing this post. Previous updates took a good 3-4 hours; longer than compiling all of LLVM + Clang on that machine).

Secondly, is it possible to make the merge marginally less stupid? Every time I run freebsd-update it prompts me to okay changes to files that I've never edited (and have no idea what it is even for), where the only change is the comment at the top telling me the FreeBSD version the file came from. I then have to say 'yes' a few dozen times, and at twice while doing that I've managed to type yes to okay one change which actually was important and left my system unbootable. One was a change to one of the init scripts in the bit that mounted the default filesystems; it tried to merge the two versions (even though the file was not one that I had modified, or that users ever should touch) and ended up with complete nonsense so the shell aborted the script while trying to mount filesystems. I only fixed that one by booting to single user mode, deleting the script and grabbing a copy from cvs.

To slightly paraphrase The Who

[MonsterTrimble]

Meet the new Boss, Same as the old Boss.

Maybe it's me, or are we starting to see BSD & Linux become the new Gnome vs KDE or new .deb vs .rpm? Debian & BSD they can now handle each other's packages (like KDE apps can run in Gnome and vice versa if the right libraries are installed) and I stand back and wonder if Google and others might be right where the apps are everything and the underlying OS means very little to the average consumer.

Irregardless, cheers to the OpenBSD crew on another release, even if I'm a Kubuntu user. When one of us does well, we all do.

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[Anonymous Coward]

can someone please mod this - dipshit?

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[Anonymous Coward]

are we starting to see BSD & Linux become the new Gnome vs KDE

No, because GNOME and KDE have comparable numbers of users. With Linux and FreeBSD it's not even close. What are you smoking?

Irregardless

That's not even a real word.

cheers to the OpenBSD crew on another release

The article is about FreeBSD, not OpenBSD. You are a moron.

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[Anonymous Coward]

Meet the new Boss, Same as the old Boss.

Maybe it's me, or are we starting to see BSD & Linux become the new Gnome vs KDE or new .deb vs .rpm? Debian & BSD they can now handle each other's packages (like KDE apps can run in Gnome and vice versa if the right libraries are installed) and I stand back and wonder if Google and others might be right where the apps are everything and the underlying OS means very little to the average consumer.

Irregardless, cheers to the OpenBSD crew on another release, even if I'm a Kubuntu user. When one of us does well, we all do.

Anyone using 'Irregardless' as a real word needs to step back.

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[hedwards]

Umm, I must be missing something. FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for well over a decade. And this was a FreeBSD release, some developers work on both, but it's a different set of priorities and interests.

Not to mention that unlike the second example where the obvious answer is that .deb is better, the other ones are more a matter of philosophy for most people than pragmatism. A sort of choice between having an actual OS or a Kernel plus whatever packages were available to cobble together an OS with. I'm sure there's a reason why people would want the latter, but it makes it a pain in the ass to make stable, fast and reliable. Or to figure out what's gone wrong when it's an application specific mess in the userland.

Linux of late has been becoming a bit too much like Windows in terms of installing components you may or may not ever want or need.

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[Anonymous Coward]

he's a canadian. that is about as intelligent as they come.

Re:To slightly paraphrase The Who

[TheRaven64]

Umm, I must be missing something. FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for well over a decade

The FreeBSD Linux ABI layer didn't support system calls introduced with 2.6 kernels until relatively recently. With FreeBSD 8, it should now support everything that Linux 2.6.16 supported. If your Linux programs need a newer kernel than that, they may not work, but anything that works on 2.6.16 and doesn't run under FreeBSD should be considered a bug and reported.

One thing not mentioned in the release (and not actually part of the release) is that there is now an up to date and working version of valgrind for FreeBSD. This eliminates the one reason I had for still occasionally sshing into a Linux machine.

freebsd-update via wlan?

[Conley Index]

I did not read your blog using freebsd-update this time, but as far as I see, it would not have saved me needing hands on assistance for the system that I tried to update remotely with the last connection being a wlan. I added the appropriate lines to rc.conf before the update, but after the first reboot with the new kernel and old userland, the wlan did not come up. Thinking about it, nothing else could be expected...

Re:freebsd-update via wlan?

[cperciva]

Good point... come to think of it, I'm not sure how it's possible to do that even with a source upgrade, since trying to run an 8.0 world on a 7.x kernel would break too.

Re:freebsd-update via wlan?

[Conley Index]

Remote updates via the wlan are probably not very common. And I guess I could have put a brave "freebsd-update install && reboot" somewhere in the startup scripts that would have been replaced if that really succeeded. (Probably something a little more intelligent would be better.)

Use the mirrors!

[Conley Index]

It appeared on the main ftp server on Monday and only an hour later on some of the mirrors. Now most of them got the bits. This is really not the time to stress the main ftp server more than necessary. The checksum files from the main server might be worse getting -- or better yet, wait for the official announcement that will contain them, too.

You are right.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's the apps, stupid.

People run apps. OSes are just a necessary evil. I personally would love to see the day when apps are coded like console games, with only the needed parts to boot and run and do the job.

Re:You are right.

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean you want computers to be like they were in the 80s. Enjoy booting and running your single tasking PC.

Re:You are right.

[sound vision]

If apps were "coded like console games"... *Every application would need to include device drivers for every piece of hardware on the system. For every system you want your app to run on. So that boils down to coding (or getting from the manufacturer) drivers for every computer device in existence. *There would be no multi-tasking. Let's say you are working on something in Microsoft Office. In order to look up something on Google real quick, you'd need to save your work, unload Office, load up Firefox, look up whatever you needed to, unload Firefox, re-load Office, and open your file back up. I could go on, but I don't feel like doing so in a reply to an AC. Simply put, there's a good reason that operating systems to exist. They act as an abstraction to the hardware, making development of applications *way* easier since you only have to code your program to interface with the APIs of an operating system, which in turn has drivers installed to work with whatever particular hardware is on a machine that you are trying to run your app on. I'm pretty sure all the game consoles developed in the past decade have their own pseudo-OS, to let Xbox Live etc. run concurrently with all the games. Or maybe they just have libraries for that stuff that they give to the developers to include in their games. Either way, it works because all PS2s/Xboxen/Wii are the same. That is not true of personal computers.

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because he is smarter than you are?

Re:Why?

[Stupendoussteve]

Yet cheers on the new OpenBSD release of FreeBSD?

Re:Why?

[MonsterTrimble]

Yeah, that was my bad. I blame a lack of coffee.

Roundabout

[hey]

Seems pretty roundabout... to make youtube work they needed Flash. To make Flash work they got Fedora 10 compatibly going.

Re:Roundabout

[RAMMS EIN]

``Seems pretty roundabout... to make youtube work they needed Flash. To make Flash work they got Fedora 10 compatibly going.''

The joys of proprietary software ...

Re:Roundabout

[Anonymous Coward]

This is the bad thing about the FreeBSD "community". Their system is nice but they insist on contaminating it with binary blobs and compatibility layers to emulate crappy Operating Systems (Windows, Fedora).
If you are going to use Windows drivers wrapped around a Linux wrapper to use Windows programs and play Windows games, you could as well use, you know, Windows 7!
Emulating them you are telling the vendors, hey! don't care about us just support Windows! instead of fuck you bitch which is what nVidia et al deserve.

No XFS support

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have loved to try and dual boot FreeBSD, but it doesn't support XFS at all. The partitions that hold my media files are all XFS filesystems. One of the best features of linux is its wide support of various filesystems, even long obsolete ones.

Re:No XFS support

[larry bagina]

FreeBSD has support for /dev/null which, in my experience, is faster than xfs and just as reliable.

Re:No XFS support

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to ZFS. You wont regret it.

Re:No XFS support

[Opyros]

From Wikipedia:

FreeBSD gained read-only support for XFS in December 2005 and in June 2006 experimental write support was introduced; however this is supposed to be used only as an aid in migration from Linux, not to be used as a "main" filesystem.

TECHNICALLY,

[Anonymous Coward]

YOU MOM HASN'T BEEN WET SINCE YOU BROKE HER TWOT.

WGUN is an Atlanta area AM broadcasting station (licensed to Atlanta, Georgia) that broadcasts Christian and brokered time programming. It broadcasts at a frequency of 1010 kHz with 50,000 Watts of power during the daytime and 78 Watts during nighttime hours using a non-directional antenna. WGUN is classified as a Class-D AM broadcast station according to the Federal Communications Commission.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm going to guess something got lost in translation in this summary. I have an amd64 machine that runs 64-bit nvidia glx without any problems.

Re:What?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, you don't.

Re:Moderators, please take your job seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree that can't possibly be taken seriously, unless there are some serious features missing in FreeBSD 7 that somehow Windows 7 addresses but FreeBSD 8 implements better?

firewall GUI?

[tirnacopu]

Is there some WaterRoof (OS X utility for IPFW) equivalent for FreeBSD?

Re:firewall GUI?

[broknstrngz]

http://www.fwbuilder.org/ http://sourceforge.net/projects/qtfw/

So, any VMware images of this release?

[RiffRafff]

Anyone post an image to run on VMware Player?

If only java was supported

[Billly Gates]

FreeBSD 4.x was hot back in the old days of 2003ish. After pulling my hair out with Gentoo FreeBSD was well integrated and stable.

I know there is experimental 5 year old patches for java 1.3x which I successfully compiled which looked like a bootstrap hack with an emulated jvm just to compile it. FreeBSD 5.x was just terrible and i kept using 4.x until 4.12 before switching back to Windows. I hope it got better as not even my simple usb keyboard that was supported with FBSD 3.,x and 4.x would not work with 5.x and 6.x

Re:If only java was supported

[Galactic Dominator]

Billy you'll be happy to learn USB received some long needed love in 8.0. A new well performing library has been integrated into base, chances are your cheap keyboard will now work under FreeBSD again.

native and ported jdk's and jre's have been available and usable in FreeBSD for quite some time. FreeBSD has a special licensing agreement with Sun which the reason you need to bootstrap a native build. However the linux-sun and diablo ports install quite fast and usable for most anything.

Re:If only java was supported

[ishobo]

It has been supported officially supported for years.

http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml

Re:Moderators, please take your job seriously

[Anonymous Coward]

"Funny" doesn't get a karma bump; "Insightful" does. So people acknowledge a joke with something, anything; just not "Funny".

Re:if only...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah that is really the problem. But comparing the numbers it is the more impressive how much they get done.

The other very big problem is the ignorance of the Linux developers. Like look at the hal disaster. It came from the freedesktop project, but they really don't give a damn about anything but Linux. It is just depressing to see them tinkering on that while you know FreeBSD has a better solution with devd. Then you have to put a lot of effort into porting it, because it was based on /proc, which is not UNIX but Linux. And you have to port it because lots of useful software depends on hal. And as soon as you get it to work they deprecate it.

What's the point in the screenshots?

[harmonise]

What's the point in the screenshots? It looks like every other GNOME desktop. (or KDE desktop for the KDE screenshots)

Re:What's the point in the screenshots?

[TheRaven64]

Possibly that is the point. Reminding people that the 'Linux desktop' actually has very little to do with Linux.

Re:What's the point in the screenshots?

[value_added]

LOL. I'd think people who spend their time evaluating screenshots aren't the folks who would grasp the inherent irony.

Re:if only...

[Galactic Dominator]

Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.

Works for me.

Live UFS dump is broken.

Works for me.

USB mass storage support is broken.

Wine is not supported;

And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64

ZFS in double parity mode is broken

Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.

MTRR for older ATI cards is broken

If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.

Re:if only...

[awehttam]

Sounds like FreeBSD 4.x and 5.x!

Girls make...

[Anonymous Coward]

you stutter: we understand.

Re:if only...

[hxnwix]

Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.

Works for me.

It doesn't work with l4d2 dedicated server (segfaults), it doesn't work with rosetta (signal 4). Reproducible failure > "works for me."

Live UFS dump is broken.

Works for me.

Bullshit. UFS snapshots have been broken for a long time; read the thread. Core developers acknowledge it. Dump -L relies on UFS snapshots, and is therefore broken.

USB mass storage support is broken.

Still broken.

Wine is not supported on AMD64

And this is FreeBSD's fault why?

It works on Gentoo AMD64. Why can't FreeBSD support it?

ZFS in double parity mode is broken

Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.

That's right, you are guessing. You clearly haven't tried any of the things I described. So far, you're 0/6.

MTRR for older ATI cards is broken

If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.

Feel free to actually reference a bug report. You're full of it. "works for me!" How informative... it doesn't, and if you'd tried it, you'd know. Come back when you've actually tried any of the things I mentioned, dipshit.

Re:if only...

[BOFHelsinki]

>> ZFS in double parity mode is broken

> Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.

How retarded can you be? Please stop embarrassing us who dig and use FreeBSD but don't need to see it through rose-tinted glasses (or the whole scene as a pissing contest).

Re:if only...

[chrysalis]

> > Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.

> Works for me.

Try to run the Neko VM, then.

Segfault, segfault, segfault. While it of course works like a charm on a real Linux system.

"ahah, you stupid, Neko is in the ports tree, just install it and enjoy the native version"

Yeah, but while it's in the ports tree, it obviously was never tested because it can't even start a thread without immediately crashing. Oh and a bug report is open for years, but apparently nobody knows how to make it work and nobody wants to remove broken ports from the ports tree either.

Does it run?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've found FreeBSD PC hardware support to be very disappointing in recent years.

Maybe I always buy the wrong machines, but my recent experiences were such that FreeBSD does not ever boot and install out of the box (always hangs/crashes), whereas NetBSD and Linux usually do. Sometimes those systems also do not recognize or support certain hardware components properly, but that does not prevent them from booting and running.

I'm not interested in messing with FreeBSD kernel compile options and maybe bootloader settings. In the past (more than 5 or so years ago) it just worked, nowadays I guess you are expected to check whether the PC you buy is supported or to fix stuff on your own.

Only once in the past 4 years have I seen a FreeBSD version that runs on one of my systems, and that was a custom compiled version with altered interrupt controller settings or something like that.

Will or has FreeBSD returned to a generally usable default?

Switching from Slackware?

[heri0n]

I use slackware for my home web server / ssh-ing and torrenting from work. I have always been interested in BSDs but never really bothered to try it out. From what I understand Slackware is pretty similar to BSDs (do it yourself/rc.* scripts). What would be the main advantages of switching to a BSD? The ports system?

Re:if only...

[Galactic Dominator]

It doesn't work with l4d2 dedicated server (segfaults), it doesn't work with rosetta (signal 4). Reproducible failure > "works for me."

Too bad. File a bug report.

Bullshit. [freebsd.org] UFS snapshots have been broken for a long time; read the thread. Core developers acknowledge it. Dump -L relies on UFS snapshots, and is therefore broken.

No dump is not broken, sorry you have crappy hardware. No "core developer" agreed with you.

Still broken.

Works good here. Works good according to mailing list feedback. I'm so sorry it doesn't work for you. Maybe file a bug report.

It works on Gentoo AMD64. Why can't FreeBSD support it?

Gentoo AMD64 has 64 bit wine? Really? Maybe you should switch to Gentoo then.

That's right, you are guessing. You clearly haven't tried any of the things I described. So far, you're 0/6.

I see you have Internet Tough Guy Syndrome, but I assure you I've done these things.

Feel free to actually reference a bug report. You're full of it.

Well works for me is actually pretty informative. You say it doesn't, I say it does which mean one of us is wrong. I'm betting it's not me since the public archive agrees with me.

Re:if only...

[welsh git]

Well said.

Linux people talk about freedom and following standards and keeping things open, and yet they come up with awful linux-only hacks and conventions.

Like, why come out with ALSA, when they should have fixed their version of OSS instead..

I was amazed logging into a linux box recently how un-unix it's becoming.

That old comment "FreeBSD is for people that like Unix - Linux is for people that hate windows" is truer now more than ever.

Re:if only...

[welsh git]

I have been backing up my servers using ufs snapshots since FreeBSD 7.2 and have no problems.

I also use snapshots for immediate access to historic versions of files, again no problems.

It works and works well.

ZFS on ARM!

[ivoras]

One interesting and yet unexplored scenario with FreeBSD is using it for the ZFS in small "appliance" devices, like ARM-based NAS servers. Give it enough RAM and there appears a very interesting opportunity.

Re:if only...

[awyeah]

I'll concur with Galactic Dominator - I used Linux emulation for almost a year as part of my backup strategy, before switching to duplicity. I still use dump (and yes, I'm doing dumps of live, mounted, read/write filesystems - all of them - nightly.

I also use ZFS on my system, and have never had corruption or a failure of any kind. As for double parity mode - I'm not sure what the status is, but as of version 8.0, ZFS is no longer considered experimental.

Scared!

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux holy ppl should be very scared now. Scared, they are. So many anti-BSD posts shows how scared they are.

New USB Stack?

[Tubal-Cain]

Some of the highlights:...a new USB stack

Does that include support for USB 3.0?