New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD

tearmeapart writes "The teams at FreeBSD have reached another great achievement with FreeBSD 9.1, with improvements to the already fantastic zfs features, more VM improvements (helping bringing FreeBSD to the next generation of VMs), and improvements in speed to many parts of the network system. Support FreeBSD via the FreeBSD mall or download/upgrade FreeBSD from a mirror. Unfortunately, the torrent server is still down due to the previous security incident." And new submitter northar writes "The other day the NetBSD project released their first update to the 6.x series, 6.0.1. They also (rather discreetly) announced a fund drive targeting 60.000 USD before the end of 2012 in the release notes. They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."

Comments

60 dollars?

[Osgeld]

Now that is cost efficiency!

Re:60 dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

What is it with programmers and measuring money to more than two decimal places?

Re:60 dollars?

[reboot246]

I think I may be able to donate the whole amount!

Re:60 dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

$60 dollars is a lot of money in netbsd land!

Re:60 dollars?

[davester666]

It's a hardware drive. They want to buy an Arduino [high-end model] to port FreeBSD to it.

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

Submitter could be from any of these countries.... Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use elsewhere), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kirgistan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Portuguese text), Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa (officially[15]), Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

Re:60 dollars?

[reboot246]

We understand that, but the amount was given in USD - United States Dollars.

Re:60 dollars?

[Guy Harris]

Copper wire was invented by two Checkpoint* developers fighting over a penny.

The CEO of a company at which I worked, who had a Dutch last name (I don't know how many generations back his Dutch ancestors arrived in the US) told the same joke, but it was "two Dutchmen..." Googling also finds "Scotsmen" and "lawyers" used.

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

Yes, USD was specified - doesn't mean it has to actually follow the format. I could say "60,000 Euro" and it might seem unusually formatted to a German. Basically, just get over it - it was either a typo, or the submitter was from a country that has different formats - we're all intelligent (might be a bit of an optimistic assumption I suppose) people here....

Re:60 dollars?

[Sulphur]

What is it with programmers and measuring money to more than two decimal places?

FWIW there used to be a plastic coin called a mill worth 0.1 cent. You still see millage in taxes.

Re:60 dollars?

[smash]

Euro thousands seperator.

Re:60 dollars?

[smash]

newsflash: the site may be hosted in the US, but the internet is international. it is visible globally and used by a global audience.

Re:60 dollars?

[Razgorov Prikazka]

>> Countries where a dot "." is used to mark the radix point (called "decimal point" when dealing with base-10) include: [...] India [...]
Just to make sure I got it right, it is 0.6 Lakh right? Not 0,6 Lakh?

More on-topic, great work from the *BSD guy's! And on a less serious note; I hope that 2013 will finally be the year of the *BSD desktop! :-)
Happy 2013 for all of you /.ers!

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

My assumption was clearly too optimistic....

Re:60 dollars?

[TheRaven64]

This list is a lot smaller if you limit it to countries where English is the native language. I would expect the same sorts of complaints if I translated something into French, but left the number separators in my own locale. Given that almost all of the English-speaking world uses the same thousands and decimal separators, it seems fairly simple to assume that, if you are writing for an English-speaking audience, you should use those.

Re:60 dollars?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sixty thousand may be written as 60,000 or 60.000 depending on your locale. Some countries use ',' as a decimal seperator instead of the '.' you are no doubt used to.

You don't have to tell me it's stupid and confusing and the world should standardize. I totally agree.

Re:60 dollars?

[petermgreen]

Is it too much to ask that when writing english people follow the conventions used in english rather than borrowing stuff from their own language that has a different meaning in english leaving us to guess whether they meant the meaning from their own language or the meaning from english? (yes in this case it was easy to guess)
Is it too much to ask that when someone is too clueless/lazy to do that the editors fix it?

I guess the answer here at /. is yes :(

Re:60 dollars?

[shaitand]

First the value was given in dollars. Second, he posted to a US website and should use the conventions of the host country, not those of his locale.

Re:60 dollars?

[shaitand]

You use the conventions of a host site. A US site might be exposed to an international audience but they remain guests. It is no different than coming to the US and opening a restaurant and not following US conventions on the menu pricing.

Nobody is stopping you from doing it. But if you do it, bitching about it is fair game.

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

Third, get over yourself... My point was, who gives a fuck...?

Re:netbsd=hobby

[reboot246]

Don't you mean 30.000 employees?

No need to hurry

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."

Well, since the date on the image is Dec 30, 2009, I don't think you need to be in any sort of hurry.

Lots of good fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be an easy upgrade for anyone running 9.0, and it does add some neat stuff. These dot releases are usually logical improvements and fixes, but important new features do get introduced with regularity when they've been tested extensively in the the development branches.

9.1 is adding KMS for intel (Unless that was already MFC'd back to 9), I think the new code for LSI cards including IBM M1015, support for newer Ralink wireless cards, lots of bug fixes and improvements.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/relnotes.html

FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[AddisonW]

I've got FreeBSD 9.1 running on my machine now and it is absolute Unix heaven.

The NVidia drivers work perfectly with my 580 card. The rest of my hardware was recognized and works properly.

All my gaming is done on my PS3 and Wii and a little bit on my Android devices. So my FreeBSD is primarily used for development and some webbrowsing. Working on a system that is stable and free from the crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros is wonderful. The only negative I've found so far is the desktop's ports aren't as fully setup as you get as with something like Ubunut or Mint since the major focus of most of the FreeBSD devs is on server use.

I would like to thank all the lame people who have so diligently been posting their lame 'is dying' posts. I would never have checked out BSD if it wasn't for them. And it looks like the latest attempt at BSD FUD about funding massively backfired and led to a huge surge in project donations.

I usually hate these type of cute little sayings but after having switched from Linux to FreeBSD it really rings true:

Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
BSD is for people who love Unix

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[KiloByte]

FreeBSD kernel: perhaps. It's userland, though... What I remember about IRIX was nicer to use than current BSD, and that was aeons ago. I have no need for BSD at the moment, but if I did, it'd be a toss-up between Debian/kFreeBSD and unstable hacks.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Lord_Naikon]

Yes, that is exactly the way to enjoy FreeBSD - use it for what it's good at. FreeBSD + nVidia is awesome. State of the art compilers, every port installs its development headers, knowing that _you_ are in complete control of the system instead of the other way around. Outstanding development platform. I love it!

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

"crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros"

Speaking of FUD..

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is for people who love Unix.
FreeBSD is for people who love Unix but too cheap to get a Mac.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[chuckymonkey]

Oh man, IRIX. You know, that's still probably the fastest and most responsive DE that I've ever used. At least it was on good hardware, I think overall the user interface blew, but it was fast.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[LizardKing]

Dear God. I used IRIX on an SGI Indy, and it was the perfect disaster of buggy, unstable software on top opf painfully slow hardware. In comparison, the OpenWindows desktop on my Sun workstation was a thing of reliable elegance.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never used FreeBSD or a traditional UNIX. I get it.

OS X is neat, but entirely 100% different. Please don't bring up the UNIX trademark.

I used OS X before FreeBSD (FreeBSD was not evening running on PowerPC at the time) and MacBSD before there was an OS X.

OS X is much more similar to NeXT/OpenStep than it is to FreeBSD.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[AddisonW]

Why would I pay effectively double for a Mac that:

1. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive with

2. Apple's crap OpenGL drivers

Having had a tablet now for the past year and finding I spend most of my casual computing done with it and all my development work on my FreeBSD system.

Buying a Mac would be a waste of money. The only reason I would ever get a Mac desktop would be if for some reason I needed to work on a Mac desktop application. That is highly unlikely to ever happen.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[chuckymonkey]

INDY were garbage, it was great on the Onyx3 or Tezro(basically the same thing) systems.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Gothmolly]

Honest question from a long time Linux user - what does FreeBSD give me that CentOS wont?

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[siDDis]

There are many reasons!

Jails
ZFS
GEOM Framework
Ports
PF
Carp
Hast
The FreeBSD Handbook / Documentation with consistency

However FreeBSD doesn't excell for everything, for example Java support is far away from production ready. And another thing I ran into recently was that monitoring a lot of files for changes was slow/not scalable at all because kqueue uses file descriptors for monitoring changes in your filesystem. Linux, OS X or even Windows have scalable and working solutions for this.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

You can (and, on a long-enough timeline, will) unwittingly destroy a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint system, leaving it unbootable, simply by selecting a wrong package in Synaptic. Package installer also enables and launches daemons without asking you, which is a huge security problem. That's never the case on any BSD's. The base system is kept separate, and screwing up with packages never screws up your whole system.

Linux distros also tend to be desktop-oriented and bloated. (For example, can you name one Linux distro that doesn't absolutely require perl? FreeBSD doesn't - in that aspect it is even more flexible than Gentoo!) For me sound always "just works" in FreeBSD, while all popular Linux distros require a huge bloated stack of needlessly-complex crap (ALSA, PulseAudio, etc) in order to make it work. I run `top` on my FreeBSD desktop, and I know what everything is, with no process being redundant; I run `top` on Linux, and I feel like I'm trapped in Mumbai during rush hour! As the result of this Linux bloat, FreeBSD actually runs faster than Linux without even trying!

--libman

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[rs79]

"Java is dead" - FreeBSD

Rightly so too. Utter rubbish.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[laffer1]

Java support is decent in FreeBSD provided OpenJDK will work for you. The only thing I can think of that doesn't work right is the Netbeans profiler and that's mostly their fault.

As for the file descriptor issue, that's quite true. In fact, I started to write an article for BSD magazine on the subject in relation to making decent file system search tools. I never got around to finishing it. The interface is cleaner for the programmer in BSD, but it's not scalable. It's quite common to have search index tools crash in FreeBSD from Gnome or KDE for instance. Someone was working on inotify support for the linuxolator awhile back. Not sure if that was ever finished, but if so it should be made usable natively too.

I would also argue there is one small flaw in GEOM. It's metadata storage conflicts with GPT disk layouts. The backup of the GPT table cannot be stored in the standard location due to GEOM storing it's data at the end of the disk.

It should also be pointed out that PF comes from OpenBSD.

FreeBSD also has poor power management for laptop use. Decent sleep functionality is missing and there isn't a user friendly way to check battery life built in. I added a command line tool, batt(1) to MidnightBSD that can read the sysctl's for battery life and report them easily to work around that issue. I wish they'd do something like that in FreeBSD.

In particular, I find FreeBSD to be an amazing web server and a decent database server. As a file server, it's a little slow with samba without tuning. NFS performance is reasonable, but there are some client compatibility issues with some versions of linux on NFSv4.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Bearhouse]

You're already at 5, so I can't mod you up, so will just say "well said Sir!"

(Yeah, i know, I'm well known here as a BSD fanboy...but there's a reason for it!)

And yes everyone, I have tried the others - latest attempt being to get Mint to run on an old Eee PC last night...

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, this is why Linux users does not like BSD users, since you are purposefully lying about your "facts":
http://wiki.linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Nfsv4_configuration#Common_NFS4_misunderstandings

I'm not going to bother responding to your other points, but if the BSD people cannot fathom why they are pushing large amounts of people from the FLOSS community away from them, then fuck'em. They're getting pushed further and further into the server room, and they seem pretty happy to gobble down on Apple cock.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[1s44c]

Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
BSD is for people who love Unix

I hate Microsoft and love Unix. I use both.

But if linux had stable ZFS I'd likely not run FreeBSD.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[1s44c]

ZFS is very, very nice if you have lots of disks. PF and carp are nice but you will get later versions and better security on OpenBSD.

The documentation does seem more consistent than any I've seen with any linux distribution.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[1s44c]

>Linux is for people who hate Microsoft

People like you are what's wrong with open source.

Well if you like security holes, malware, downtime, and getting your data leaked you will no doubt love Microsoft.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

Yes because perl is such hardcore bloat. I mean it's like 6mb on disk and about the same in ram but only if you use it... which you will be since perl is fast, easy to develop on, powerful, and used by everything and it's dog. FreeBSD may not require perl but you are going to need perl for something if you actually USE FreeBSD. Also, what does perl have to do with being desktop oriented? You use more perl in serverland where it is worth spending the time to craft up perl solutions.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.

I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.

The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[unixisc]

I've used NEXT in the past, and seen OS X, and I don't see how the 2 are even remotely similar. It's only when one gets into the underpinnings of the OS - XNU, BSD userland, et al that the similarity may be apparent.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

Done right in the sense that it is stable but quite frankly a Linux system is pretty rock solid as well. Systems suffer no bitrot, don't crash, don't need rebooted and are easily secured. I generally find that the increased development effort on Linux has resulted in serious speed improvements relative to BSD as well. The "features" missing in BSD land are now old tested technology. CLI utilities are missing basic functionality. Old vi vs vim? What possible justification can there be for this? It saves a few bytes on disk? You can't even get a thumb drive smaller than 2GB now.

The difference is the BSD experience is closer to what I found with Linux is the 90's and hasn't really evolved. The community surrounding it seems to be the kind who hate polish for the sake of hating polish and justify it by claiming it makes them more secure or stable. There certainly were no shortage of Linux users from the 90's with that mentality who jumped ship as Linux became more polished. Polish isn't about being pretty, it doesn't always carry a performance hit, and most importantly it is about reducing administrative overhead. Having to fiddle and tweak to get a configuration that is clearly optimal is educational, but it isn't constructive. In the 90's I had to configure almost everything by hand to get a config that was optimal for almost all users. In BSD I still do.

And yes, do things the way windows does it. Not under the hood but in the user experience. This has nothing to do with being second class or the windows way being optimal. At the end of the day the extra time spent by users re-learning the system is far more serious defect than any particular behavior of an interface. If a user who is fluent in graphics manipulation on the leading platform for that task has to spend hours learning your interface to do work then your interface is NOT better. Any platform I have to spend hours tinkering with is a hobby platform because people with work to do just don't have time to do this.

That said, there are some nasty things happening in user interfaces all over the place and some of them have come to Linux land. I don't really credit BSD for not doing something nasty like Unity though. It wasn't because BSD has something better or made a choice. It was because BSD didn't do anything at all and by chance this time the old stuff is better.

If you NEED pfsense, ZFS, or you are an old UNIX admin who is nostalgic about the archaic way UNIX used to be then BSD is the way to go. Otherwise, you are better off with Linux. Even if you don't need the additional capabilities, the top programming talent in the world, whether they are focused on the server space, distributed computing, embedded computing, they have all been spending their efforts building Linux and not BSD for the past decade so it is going to outperform BSD.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

pfsense is nicer to work with than iptables. This is why many enterprise firewall solutions use BSD as the base. That won't impact you much because if you have a firewall that needs many adjustments you will likely be using one of those enterprise solutions with it's dedicated ASIC chips for performance reasons and which underlying system is present won't impact you much.

The other thing is ZFS. ZFS is a pretty nice filesystem if you need a distributed FS. Most people using it, don't need it, but it is quite nice if you actually do. If you DON'T need a distributed FS then the Linux solutions are as if not more stable and faster performing.

BSDs do have better solutions for you if are the sort who likes to compile all your own packages as well. It is a religious debate over whether those are better than arch or gentoo but you said CentOS. In a work environment this probably isn't relevant as you won't have time to do this and there is provably little benefit vs using binary packages. At home you might like the flexibility and on older hardware you might squeeze more performance out. Personally, I'd probably go with Arch or gentoo here since in my experience the modern linux kernel is just as stable and secure and generally quite a bit faster than what I see in BSD.

Just my experiences. YMMV.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

I'm sure this was tongue in cheek but Java is rubbish. Unfortunately it is very popular rubbish.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

"A base system should not have somebody's favorite scripting language just because they couldn't write their components in C, like real system programmers should."

This is just an old school mentality and I say that as someone who hates the quick adoption of bloat used by today's programmers in their 40 layers of abstraction, object oriented code that by nature reduces your familiarity with the function of underlying components, and adoption of not reinvent to the wheel to the point where everyone assumes that every piece of already written code is more efficient and better tested than their own or worse that efficiency doesn't matter at all.

Perl is implemented in C so Perl implemented correctly, and for tasks well suited to Perl, you get C performance out of it. In fact, used properly you will probably get better performance because few are up to the interpreter coders skill level and even if they are don't have time to dedicate to turning their implementations like those guys do. Properly structured and written Perl is far easier to maintain and less prone to vulnerabilities than C code. And, the 'base system' we are talking about isn't the low level code that qualifies as 'systems' programming. Remember the base system we are talking about isn't actual systems programming it includes daemons, userland, and plenty of shell scripting.

Like I said. These ideas come from the 90's when they were valid. Perl was an upstart back then, it was slow, it was bloated relative to the other tools out there and slower besides. Hardware and Perl have progressed to the point where Perl is one of the most trim things on your system and any 'bloat' potential is on the level of statistical noise, it is as fast or faster than most of the text mangling builtins, and it far far more powerful than even the combined array of pipeline processing utilities found in your traditional userland. Make no mistake, just because the first digit in the release has stayed the same does not mean Perl isn't advancing. Perl is advancing rapidly. If anything keeping that major release the same means the Perl team is doing the right thing and fixing bugs, optimizing, and tuning to a level you wouldn't believe.

There is nothing wrong with including Perl or even Python (not my cup of tea but w/e) or building processes around Perl. Besides, like I said before. It is so tiny that bloat doesn't even enter the equation. I guarantee that there are dozens of utilities included in your BSD environment that you won't ever use and may not even know are there with a bigger footprint than Perl.

A base script interpreter gains a big portion of its value from being runnable everywhere. This is minimized if you don't have at least the most popular ones in the system to run and since their footprints are extremely small there is no reason not to. I have no use personally for Python (in almost every case where you'd use it Perl is a technically superior and more stable solution imho) or even java but I don't object to others using those tools. Mono I do object to.

As for copyleft. My opinion is that it is a feature and not a bug. But that is a religious debate or a fiscal one depending on what aspect of things you take.

P.S. Why post AC when your sig gives your name?

BSD loses support from Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just reading an article on LWN.net

http://lwn.net/Articles/524606/

Where it's claimed that BSD is losing a lot of support due to Linux related tools and development processes only cares for Linux and not BSD.

So basicly because of GNOME adopting things like PulseAudio, systemd and so on makes this desktop to disappear from BSD one day because these underlaying technologies doesn't exist on their systems.

The BSD developers are certainly concerned about this issue.

Please read above article for further informations.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[rmstar]

[...]Where it's claimed that BSD is losing a lot of support due to Linux related tools and development processes only cares for Linux and not BSD.[...]

You know, part of the problem is that they have a crappy package management infrastructure, something I really find puzzling. Ports just does not scale, and things like a WM environment (kde, or xfce) are just hard to get working.

For example, if you start from a bare install, and build & install xfce (which will take a while) you will be surprised to find that X isn't a dependency. If you compile X, well, startx has to be compiled separately, which sort of makes sense if you are seriously autistic. Gdm? It builds, no problem. Installs in a broken and unusable state by default. Xfce plugins? Please build each one separately. And it goes on and on and on like this.

The net result is that freebsd is frustrating to install and use. More so than slackware was a decade ago, and this should really tell you how bad the situation is.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[ottdmk]

I have to respectfully disagree. While it takes some getting used to, the FreeBSD ports system is, imo, absolutely awesome. Running into conflicts is extremely rare. I ran into a software conflict two months ago. It was the first time in probably five years. (I've been using FreeBSD as my main home system since 2002.)

Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.

I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.

If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[Alex Zepeda]

The ports system is an absolute nightmare. Sure you've got things like portmaster and portupgrade (the latter is currently broken with no fix in sight). I spend far more time mangling ports than I do dealing with package management on any Debian based system. It took over forty seconds(!!) on an otherwise idle system (Ivy Bridge i5 w/ SSD) to list all the installed ports and their versions (pkg_version). Using the ports system is akin to pulling teeth as far as I can tell.

The problems with X, for me, have mainly been lack of driver support (Ivy Bridge support is pants). But that's a whole 'nother ball of wax.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[Ankle]

There is always the new package manager if you don't need any special options and are fine with binaries:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng
https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/pkgng-first-look-at-freebsds-new-package-manager.html

It easily rivals apt-get but I still stick with the regular ports system because I need to compile several packages (other than the dependancies) myself for the different options not available with binaries and I've never found compiling from source anywhere near as simple on linux distributions as it is on FreeBSD.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[TheRaven64]

pkg-ng does probably address all of the grandparent's complaints. Unfortunately, the security incident means that we don't currently have any binary package sets available (hopefully they'll appear very soon). It's also worth noting that a PackageKit back end for pkg-ng is underway, which should make it easy to use your favourite desktop environment's package management tool on FreeBSD. As most of the pkgng logic is in a shared library, with the pkg tool being a thin wrapper around it, it's very easy to integrate into GUI tools.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

Ironically, PulseAudio works better on BSD Unix systems than on Linux-based systems, generally. PulseAudio is a complete disaster area on the platform for which it was designed (Linux).

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

It took over forty seconds(!!) on an otherwise idle system (Ivy Bridge i5 w/ SSD) to list all the installed ports and their versions (pkg_version).

Regarding your only specific problem mention . . .

Do people still use pkg_version? Are you aware portversion is faster, and has been for a long time -- and pkg_* tools are reaching EOL?

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

Oh, and . . . portmaster has built-in facilities for the same stuff that work even better than portversion.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

- a *lot* of times a software gets a new version and the ports skip it. So you install mediawiki 1.18.1 and then update to 1.18.4. (just an example).

That's not the fault of the ports system. That's the fault of the maintainer of that specific port.

- patch backport: I really hate backporting of patches. so sometimes you have version 1.1 of a software and then you get version 1.1_1 which is actually almost 1.2. never liked it, I prefer the vanilla software.

That's kind of a strange gripe. Are you really complaining about how version numbers are represented?

- there *are* software conflicts. Try to install a couple of things that requires icu and keep them up to date. most likely you will not be able to update une of the packages 'cause it doesn't work with the old/new version of icu. Avahi still requires icu 3.8, guess what, it's not in the ports anymore.

It was stated that software conflicts are rare -- not that they never happen. They happen for every software management system, including those used by popular Linux distributions and what we might, with a laugh, call a software management system on MS Windows. Such is life.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

I'll use pkgng on the rare occasion that I need something huge and ugly like OpenOffice.org, in part because that won't pull in a bunch of asinine build dependencies and in part because I don't want to wait three days for something almost as big as MS Windows that I don't want anyway except for the fact some knucklehead sent me an Excel spreadsheet. Otherwise, I like the ports system (with portmaster as the front end, these days) just fine.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

Have you never learned to use one of the optional front ends to the ports system? I guess so.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[Alex Zepeda]

I am aware that portversion (part of the portupgrade suite) is much faster. I was using it until portupgrade broke. I did just check and it appears as if portupgrade is suddenly working again. Definitely not predictable enough for me to want to keep using.

I am/was using portmaster because portupgrade is broken on my system (it chokes on the pciids package). Portmaster is fast(er), but is unbelievably verbose, and its default settings are frustrating. Portupgrade defaults to saving old libraries, saving the need to recompile EVERYTHING. Portmaster does not. Portupgrade will keep distfiles around. Portmaster will sporadically prompt you to delete all of the associated distfiles. Portupgrade will show you the progress of the files it's downloading. Portmaster will show you that it's blocked, waiting for something to download (it will keep spamming your console with this rather useless message until the file has finished downloading... given how unreliable some of the default mirrors are this can add quite a bit of time to installs/upgrades unless you're paying attention to bandwidth usage elsewhere).

Yes, I'm sure portng is going to be a step up. I'm sure that I could learn how to use portmaster. But in the end, the Debian tools are far, far more intuitive and expedient for me. Maybe it's time to test out Debian/FreeBSD.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[apotheon]

I find the situation somewhat the opposite, and have some wedged updates on a Debian system right now to prove it. I guess your mileage differs.

Re:amazing.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

License, GNU userland by default, testing various crazy ideas...? Anyway, to me, this question sounds more like "why would anyone eat more than one kind of soup?".

BSD is for people who hate Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

Judging by your comments I would say that BSD is for people who hate Linux. :(

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[Bengie]

More like any time some troll comes in to the FreeBSD forums and smack talks about how great Linux is and how bad BSD is, it turns into a "Linux is teh awesomeest!!!!!1!" and "FreeBSD works well for us"

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[Bearhouse]

Not true. See quotes by BSD fans like me. We're not trashing Linux at all - BSD has its good and bad points, so do the various flavours of Linux. This used to be a place where people could come for objective discussion and advice, (sometimes still is) as well as a good chuckle now and then.

Only by admitting that issues exist can we fix them. This is supposed to open software, remember?

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[apotheon]

Anytime Linux comes up on the FreeBSD forums it turns into a huge flame fest.

Maybe that wouldn't happen if you didn't keep trolling there with hostile claims about how awful FreeBSD is, and how unpleasant its users are.

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[shaitand]

Has it ever occurred to you that despite having done some things wrong the Linux world has developed some very solid technology and BSD might, just might, benefit from pulling it's head out of the sand adopting some of them.

You can't have rational conversations with people who think the word "bloat" belongs in a discussion where the difference is like a meg. Those conversations made sense back in the 90's. People in BSD land still seem to think that the question of whether EMACS is bloated relative to VI is a legitimate discussion rather than a tongue in cheek reference to the old days. Hell last I checked BSD's still come with vi and not vim out of the box.

Is there any legitimate justification for the fact I have a more capable tar out of the box on a Linux system than BSD? Surely nobody can say bloat with a straight face. I would hope nobody is saying security we aren't all plagued with tar worms. And as for stability, I've never had an issue with a lack of stability in any version of tar. I've never known anyone who has. I've never HEARD of anyone who has. Not even a legend of a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

The Linux world has it's problems and if you use the cutting edge stuff you will have some glitches here and there. But at least it is doing SOMETHING. Those glitches will be worked out. Some things will be discarded in time others will stabilize into solid technology. BSDland is doing a whole lot of nothing and calling it a feature and most of the software running on BSD is developed in projects that are cross platform because it is easy to be but those projects exist and thrive because they run on Linux not because of BSD.

BSD has some nice technology but the only reason it continues to exist and talented people waste effort developing that technology there instead of on Linux (where more people will benefit from it) is because some people who felt l33t running a hard to use Linux in the 90's hated Linux going mainstream and because nostalgic old UNIX admins still perpetrate the myth that it is more stable/secure/somehow betterer because much of it originates from the old UNIX(TM) code base. Of course, thanks to SCO we all know that any of that code that was worth having migrated into Linux a long long time ago.

It's a shame. If there wasn't so much resentment and hate there could be more collaboration between two communities that really should be staunch allies.

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[shaitand]

"But keeping Linux up to date and still functional for the two media PCs at home was becoming a pain. With FreeBSD it's still a pain, but with one exception the stupidity has been my own (not making sure that xbmc 12rc1 actually compiled in poudriere is theirs. But with ports in subversion and a directory specific log... that's been reverted)."

If you are compiling all your packages keeping anything up-to-date is going to be a PITA.

"And then there is firewall maintenance and even Rusty Russell agrees that PF is less of a PITA than iptables."

I don't know who Rusty Russell (somebody in iptables land?) is but I too agree. OTOH how often do you need to do maintenance on your home firewall? Generally you open a port, close a port, it's pretty trivial do that stuff under either system. At work it is pretty much the same on servers. The firewalls that change often are the more central firewalls and the enterprise world generally doesn't run firewalls that would involve you making pf or iptables adjustments directly.

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[apotheon]

I've just noticed that whenever someone asks if FreeBSD has a feature that is already in Linux or if someone asks how they can do action ABC on FreeBSD that they do on Linux, the result is typically a flame fest. People in the FreeBSD community often use their hatred of Linux to defend their own lack of progress.

I haven't really seen that on the mailing lists and in IRC. Maybe what you observe is a problem with the forum, specifically.

Which you comment, appropriately enough, demonstrates.

I think this statement of yours demonstrates that you're just looking for reasons to hate FreeBSD users.

Re:netbsd=hobby

[Bengie]

I can access Youtube, Facebook, ./, etc from work, but only 1,000 employees.

hobby fox

[epine]

A fox joins the lion and donkey in hunting. When the donkey divides their catch into three equal portions, the angry lion kills the donkey and eats him. Then the fox put everything into one pile, leaving just a tiny bit for herself, and told the lion to choose. When the lion asked her how she learned to share things this way, the fox replied, "From the donkey(slashcode fuckup)s misfortune."

I'd rather have a foxhole hobby than be foxy humble.

Working Great

[Sadsfae]

I've been using 9.1-RELEASE since SVN was tagged 2012-12-04 on both my home and work desktop. ZFS root is awesome, and userland is pretty much the latest bleeding edge upstream, I've had absolutely no issues running a full-fledged XFCE-4.10, Firefox ESR 10.x with Flash, 3D accel, everything desktop.

I've used freebsd-update to go from both 9.1-RC3 and 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE also switching to pkgng.
I'd recommend folks to look at the following guides if they want to use ZFS root or create a nice, full-featured desktop OS.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 (ZFS ROOT)
https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to (good desktop guide)

Great job BSD devs, keep it up.

Re:Did I miss something?

[Andrewkov]

Zombie process?

Re:amazing.

[smash]

The license and GNU userland are both traps.

Re:Bent over, spread wide, take that black box!

[kthreadd]

FreeBSD works similar to Linux in that regard. Nvidia's driver is available if you want it, but you don't have to use it and the OS certainly doesn't include it by default.

The main difference is that when Nvidia came to FreeBSD the FreeBSD developers (unlike the Linux kernel counterpart) appreciated that a big hardware vendor wanted to support their OS.

Re:netbsd=hobby

[1s44c]

I work at a multinational corporation with 30,000 employees worldwide.

Accessing netbsd.org from our corporate network gives permission denied

The explaination for the site access ban is netbsd=hobby site by the ranking of the net filtering service my company uses

Your net filtering service is broken. I suggest you complain to them.

Do you really need a net filtering service anyway?

Re:Who needs BSD ? It's dead !

[apotheon]

After entering protected mode and going to _main with the far jump simply return EOL; or something similar. That's all there is for a new BSD release. Nothing else.

alternative interpretation:

Woohoo! FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE comes with support for new Intel HD graphics. Hot damn. I finally get to get rid of the non-deterministic, obese, constantly agonizing experience of dicking around with half-baked bullshit in the Linux world on this laptop.

I mean, really . . . who wouldn't want to get out from under the horrid experiences Lennart Poettering, the GNU Project, and Canonical have foisted onto the Linux world in recent years?

Re:netbsd=hobby

[shaitand]

Your company has 30,000 employees, does netfiltering, and doesn't use Bluecoat? Didn't even know there was a competing product worth noting that someone would consider on a large installation.

Re:tl;dr

[Airline_Sickness_Bag]

Most recent trends? A million new devices a day running Linux.