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Happy 20th Birthday, FreeBSD
mbadolato writes "FreeBSD celebrates its 20th birthday this week. On 19 June 1993, David Greenman, Jordan Hubbard and Rod Grimes announced the creation of their new fork of the BSD 4.3 operating system, and its new name: FreeBSD." And in the time since then, FreeBSD hasn't exactly stood still; it's spawned numerous other projects (like DragonFly BSD and PC-BSD), as well as served as the basis for much of Mac OS X; there's even a Raspberry Pi build.
Given enough time, Netcraft will confirm...
Trolling is a art,
I've been using it since about 1998 to serve web pages. Solid product, thanks for all the hard work people.
'I don't know what it's called. I just know the sound it makes, when it takes a man's life.' ~ Four Leaf Tayback
Well has it !!
your sega cd is malfunctioning..
OpenBSD was a fork made by the founder of FreeBSD and it's arguably better than FreeBSD in several major ways.
FreeBSD is a great example of open source working. Not only has it been successful, but it has spawned a lot of other open source projects such as GhostBSD, PC-BSD, DesktopBSD, DragonFly, pfsense, freenas, nanobsd, and my own MidnightBSD.
There are a lot of people who have donated a lot of time to FreeBSD. This wouldn't have happened without all the committers and folks offering patches to the project. FreeBSD and all the other projects I mentioned wouldn't be here without the. Thanks!
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
There is an organization that is supposed to be enforcing the FreeBSD trademark: http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/guidelines Supposedly. Except there is a project, http://www.debian.org/ports/kfreebsd-gnu/ that is only using parts of FreeBSD, that is nonetheless calling itself FreeBSD. Actually, for something like grub 2, FreeBSD no longer exists, it's kFreeBSD. Either you own the trademark or you don't. Which is it? And since when is it such a big deal to require someone to rename their project?
We might be talking about FreeBSD as we do Linux these days.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
Here's to the other kind of free, and another 20 years for both!
ID: the nose did not occur naturally, how would we wear glasses otherwise? (apologies to Voltaire)
Let's explode that myth. Here's what actually happened. Linux distributions such as Slackware back then supported booting from a floppy into the OS so that one could run the rest of the userland from a hard drive. That meant one could preserve Microsoft Windows booting yet run Linux at the same time with no risk. I cannot stress how important a feature that was back then to someone like me, back when PCs were very expensive and had to be shared among family members. The FreeBSD developers took a different tack. Their OS was for grown-ups, for servers. They openly mocked on their mailing lists the feature of being able to boot into the OS from a floppy drive. (Note this is different from being able to INSTALL from floppy, everyone back then could do that.) The FreeBSD developers CHOSE to not be popular.
Found memories back in the day. My favorite release was 4.12 right when 4.x was getting a little long in the tooth. Nothing seemed to work right on non server hardware after that.
http://saveie6.com/
There's new infrastructure that has been developed from FreeBSD, pkgng. It holds the promise of much better binary package management. There's just one problem: https://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng "As a consequence of the security incident on 11th November 2012, for the time being pre-compiled packages for pkgng are not available from any official FreeBSD repository." The security incident happened in NOVEMBER 2012. Yet as of at least June 5, 2013, "Target dates for when service may be resumed have not been released."
I'm not trolling here, but as a Linux user I never took interest in BSD, I hardly know what it is. The impression I have is that it is solid but somewhat backwards compared to Linux. It's just strange to me that there are two similar OSes coming out the same year and they are still both here. So what are the differences besides the licensing scheme ?
Non-Linux Penguins ?
Is not a major part of the diffrence in success due to the license: In BSD you just take the code and use it, In most of the Linux-software it was GPL where you had to give back your development to the community?
I remember downloading 386BSD via ftpmail one floppy image at a time. And writing those images to soooo many floppies and again when some of them were corrupted. It took days to download and install 386BSD for the first time but eventually I got it up and running on an 386DX machine. The sense of awe and wonder I had when it finally booted was indescribable. Those were the days.
Aaaaaaaaaaaa!
I'm still waiting to see the BSD userland / toolchain environment spliced together with the Linux kernel. My headache with BSD was always hardware driver support. Linux, the kernel, has won that race, and rather then duplicate efforts I would like to see the best parts of *BSD merged on top of a Linux kernel. Instead of just GNU/Linux (SysV Style Linux), you could have an alternative BSD/Linux (BSD Style Linux) distribution. If you include Mac OS X, BSD style unix far an away out numbers SysV style machines.
Android is mostly Apache license, which is very similar to BSD in nature. The kernel is more or less the only thing they ship that is GPL.
I've attempted to use FreeBSD over the last 10 years and every single time I attempt to, I run into the exact same issue with hard drives. Simply the fact that my chipsets are never supported, IDE and Sata. I've been in the chatrooms on IRC, I've been on the forums and no one was ever able to answer me. So FreeBSD might be 20 years old but they still don't have hard drive support.
I don't know whether the decision to use a Linux kernel for Android was made at Android, Inc or later at Google, but it's pretty clear that Google wanted Linux.
I suppose at the time, the whole Linux mobile thing had already generated a sufficient amount of traction so that a lot of the necessary infrastructure was already there.
I was working for a mobile phone manufacturer at the time (that was later acquired and shut down by BenQ) and for us, the successor to Symbian would have been Linux, too, built along the Opie and Qtopia userlands on Texas Instruments OMAP hardware. Both Google and Trolltech had offices in the city (Munich). At that time, Google was still developing its products as J2ME software though.
Happy birthday! Your user will be celebrating in the atrium! I understand there is to be cake!
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
It did. Android's libc uses a lot of FreeBSD code. They've recently been talking to us about syncing some of their changes and treating us as they do other upstream projects that they pull code from, rather than maintaining a complete fork. They picked the Linux kernel for a very simple reason: Android was created by a small team, and they had experience with the Linux kernel.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Building current FreeBSD appears to have been broken since last night on amd64, as of the tinderbox build at 2013-06-22 13:32 UTC http://tinderbox.freebsd.org/ This frequent and lengthy build breakage appears to be both a technical and a social problem. It is a technical problem because FreeBSD appears to lack suitable incremental build tools so that developers can quickly test patches before committing them. It is a social problem because even using plain CVS, OpenBSD's developers seem to have almost zero problem keeping their current source at least buildable.
That's a good description. I would add that each develops with a different open source philosophy; Linux under GPL, the BSD's under the BSD license.
Proprietary software companies use CopyRight to preserve power for themselves.
The GPL answer to it is CopyLeft, (I'll share with you, but only if you agree to share with everyone else).
The BSD answer is CopyFree (I'll share with you. Period. I have faith that some good will come out of it).
Perhaps both approaches in parallel are needed to prevent CopyRight holders from gaining absolute control over how we use computers.
There's a few things where it's ahead and a few where it is not. ZFS is the biggest thing it leads with IMHO, since the linux implementation (which I'm using on the computer I'm typing this on) has a lot of catching up to do.
Another thing which really astonished me is it's performance on 32 bit hardware. To learn how to use freebsd I put it on a disused server full of IDE disks and it performed far better than the linux that had been on there previously. On more recent systems it behaves as well as linux does.
Others who've used it for more than six months will have more to say.
Having said that, I'm not really happy about the status of Xen on FreeBSD. Sure, Xen/DomU is working, no complaints about it. But we're waiting for Xen/Dom0 support for quite some time now, basically to host various VMs on FreeBSD/ZFS clusters. Sadly, Xen/Dom0 support is nowhere to be seen.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
I still dabble with BSD on the desktop but usually revert to openSUSE or Bodhi Linux. But on my servers I reach for FreeBSD first, every time. After learning Linux, I found it wasn't hard to grasp the nuances of the system, and there was lots more to like: I find it gives preference to security over desktop conveniences as a default, ships a well-locked down system out of the box you can then add the minimum to as you need (rather than having to strip down a Linux install). I love its documentation, and despite all the hoo-hah about the user community, I have had great experiences with the BSD crowd: they're friendly and knowledgable and supportive. I've got a personal server running FreeBSD 9 and serving up postgresql and mysql databases, usenet newsgroups, email, and four different websites. It's chugging along beautifully with lots of RAM to spare, and it was super-easy to write a few scripts to do things I do regularly. Yes, you can do all this on Linux too (and I do prefer Linux for the desktop) but on FreeBSD you're forced to be methodical and explicit and really think about which services you are going to offer, what resources you're going to make available, and how it all fits together. It's been a great OS for me and I wish it another 20 years of life.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
History lesson wanted here - anyone knows if there were any reasons other than political why Sun went from a BSD based SunOS to an SVR4 based Solaris - aside from their partnership w/ AT&T/USL and enmity w/ the OSF guys IBM/DEC/HP? Did SVR4 actually have anything (in terms of features) that Sun needed, but that SunOS/BSD didn't have?
Is this desktop OS similar to, or based on, PC-BSD? What would be the differences, if any? How good/widespread would be the device support, which I believe would be the major roadblock to trying out BSD on a lot of hardware?
Regardless of how they are developed, both Linux & BSD have distros, and in fact, distro families. In BSD, they started off w/ FreeBSD & NetBSD, which in turn spawned off other derivative distros. On the NetBSD side, you have OpenBSD (which now has its own fork in Bitrig), while on the FreeBSD side, you have DragonFlyBSD, Ghost BSD, Midnight BSD and others. The FreeBSD side also has distros specific to certain functions, such as FreeNAS for SANs and pFsense and m0n0wall for routers/firewalls.
On the Linux side, the distro families are pretty much as varied as FBSD and NBSD are - you have Redhat/Fedora (Scientific Linux, OEL, Mandriva, et al), Debian (Mint, SolusOS, ZavenOS, et al), Gentoo (Sabayon, Calculate Linux), Slackware (Vector Linux, Salix, .Slackel) & Arch (Chakra, Manjaro). Of course, under Debian, you have Ubuntu and under that, Mint, Zorin, Trisquel, Hybryde, and so on.
In short, both have distributions - yeah, fewer in BSD than in Linux, but still, plenty of choice in BSD as well.
Does anyone know how the performance of ZFS compares on FreeBSD vs Solaris? Preferably on the same test beds - be it UltraSPARC or Xeon servers, so that the comparison is apples to apples
Does ZFS exist on Linux? The last I read about that was some loadable ZFS modules on Linux, since ZFS can't be a part of a GPLed kernel, since it's under an incompatible license called the CDDL
The biggest attractive thing about FBSD is IPv6 - FBSD has been ahead of the curve in supporting it. The only pity is that some of the other derivative projects, such as pFsense or m0n0wall are still not as good in their support of IPv6 as they are about IPv4.
I am particularly excited about PC-BSD, although I haven't had the chance to use it as yet.
With my FreeBSD Core Team hat on, I have fairly regular meetings with people at ARM (which, conveniently, is about half an hour's cycle ride away). It's coming, but it's coming more slowly than I'd like...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
I wonder whether Android could completely replace their Linux underpinnings w/ something like Minix (once it's ready for ARM) or FBSD? Then the footprint of the OS that runs everything in the phone or tablet would be even smaller, while at the same time, Google can make their thing shared source or closed source, as they like, and have the same advantages that iOS has by being closed source. The original team may have created it using Linux, but I don't see why Dalvik and all the userland technologies used by Google can't be ported to BSD, and avoid any GPL issues altogether.
To address one thing the GP said, iOS was derived from OS-X - the underlying OS - XNU and FBSD userland - is the same, and that dates back from the NEXTSTEP days. It wasn't something that Apple decided to go w/ due to any licensing issues.
Have you tried VirtualBSD?
We've ported Dalvik to FreeBSD. The Binder IPC stuff also needs porting, however having done this the isolation between applications could be much better enforced using Capsicum. For real-world usage, you'd also need to port the GPU drivers, because Android has its own graphics stack.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
but with that said, desktopbsd seems to be dead. =(
alive to the universe, dead to the world
I cannot understand why year after year we have to bring this topic up... Gentlemen! Why can't you do your research and believe that Darwin is not based / founded on FreeBSD. Most of the Darwin / Mac OS X source code is from 386-BSD and not from the FreeBSD. Darwin Is a fork from 4.4 BSD fork 386-BSD fork made for NextStep. It's true it was updated with some of the components from the FreeBSD userland, but that is pretty minor.
So the page right on Apple's site, where it states:
Darwin 1.4.1 is the UNIX-based, open-source foundation of Mac OS X. It is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies and provides...
is incorrect then?
NextStep consisted of the Mach microkernel, BSD (probably the 4.3 release, and updated to 4.4 and Net/2 when later available), and some other technologies outside the BSD arena. After Apple purchased it, it probably contained whatever the latest free BSD code was available...4.4 BSD-Lite, probably, since 386BSD was the original BSD port to Intel hardware (from which FreeBSD was derived)/ Darwin was Apple's open source release of their [then] current version of Mac OS X...Cheetah, I think? I played with a copy of OS X server when it was first released in 1998, and found the command-line remarkably similar to FreeBSD 2.x (though I was not an expert and the BSDs have kept many BSD-isms throughout the ages). Apple had probably integrated the latest BSD derivative available for that Mac OS X release. I remember reading about a switch to from FreeBSD 3.x to 5.x in the Panther release notes or somewhere similar, so they had long since switched to FreeBSD from whatever NextStep used by the time Darwin was released.
So, no. Darwin wasn't originally based on FreeBSD. Darwin was the source code based on released version Mac OS X, which was originally based on NextStep/OpenStep, which was based on Mach/BSD, which existed before FreeBSD.
The Apple Darwin kb page linked above is part of Apple's (now-defunct) attempt to drum up interest in Darwin as the core of Mac OS X, but wasn't a fork of 4.4BSD as the AC post above implied.