Meet UbuntuBSD, UNIX For Human Beings

prisoninmate writes: What's ubuntuBSD? Well, it's not that hard to figure out yourself, but just in case you're not sure, we can tell you that ubuntuBSD promises to bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux. The best part of using the FreeBSD kernel is that you'll end up using the famous Z File System, or ZFS. Xfce is also included along with the popular Firefox, LibreOffice, and Ubuntu Software Center apps. ubuntuBSD is inspired by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project, it is hosted on SourceForge, and has been created by Jon Boden.

Comments

Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

You should have put that sentence first so I would not have wasted 5 minutes reading everything before it.

Re: Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask your parents to help with you're reading. It's obvious you can read well for a 3rd grader but you still read pretty slow to take 5 minutes to read a small paragraph. It took less than a minute for example to type this reply on my phone...

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[cfalcon]

There's nothing wrong with Sourceforge. That's a 2015-era complaint, get modern!

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Even the new slashdot owners admited sourceforge was shit.. COme on dude, nice try with the shilling, but how about open your eyes and let's snap out of denail and admit there's problems..

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[KGIII]

And what did they do about it?

Methinks your latter sentence could be directed towards you. But I suspect you'll refuse to acknowledge that.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nothing wrong with Sourceforge, other than the fact that the previous owners ran the brand name into the ground by bundling malware into installers.

Today the name Sourceforge is a warning: "Don't just walk away. RUN AWAY."

Re: Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask your parents to help with you're reading.

Maybe he will, if you ask your parents to help you with your writing.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[goranb]

get modern

oh, sorry... thought I read "get modem"... *blush*

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[m.alessandrini]

But I think it was to the users to opt for putting malware into their installers, not Sourceforge inserting it behind one's back, isn't it?

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[DrXym]

There's nothing wrong with Sourceforge except for the fact that they hijacked "abandoned" open source projects in order to bundle crapware into the installer, tried to persuade popular projects to bundle crapware, placed fake download links on project download pages, created fear distrust in their community, and failed to keep up with rival hosting services.

So nothing wrong at all. Even if they're trying to make amends or correct these things, it's too late. The trust is gone. Most active projects have decamped to the likes of Github.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

They also did it with abandoned projects. Which could have been easily avoided by the project maintainers if they choose to keep their project pages up to date. Source Forge would afaik hand control over a project back to its original owners if they wanted it.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not *that* old ;)

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Classic shilling! "Oh, that was just a small, one-off event. It's in the past. Never going to happen again in the future. Trust us."

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Look again. The GIMP for Windows had one heck of a time trying to re-establish control, because they wanted it _deleted_.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Did they place fake download links on download pages, or did they just outsource ad and banner placement to the wrong people?
I owned an "abandoned" project (after a few years of inactivity lost my SSH key and password in a PC migration).
Heard about the bundled crapware and downloaded my own project again to see if it was true, never saw the crapware. I don't mean it isn't true, by maybe not in all projects?

FWIW, my opinion of what killed SF: "git is more difficult and more complicated, so SVN has to be inferior, let's all relocate to github".
I still believe SVN would be the better choice for 8 or 9 out of every 10 projects (i.e. the smaller ones).

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

"The trust is gone" should really not matter that much; nobody should ever trust a third party host with his or her own data. This is why cloud services are bad(TM), and encryption is good(TM)

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a chicken-and-egg scenario here as well. Every IDE out there supports git. Combine that with the implementations of Git servers, (GitHub, GitLab, BitBucket, etc.), and it has become nearly the de facto standard for handling code. Nothing wrong with SVN, but because Git is pretty much everywhere... heck, even Microsoft has Git as an integral part of Team Foundation Server.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Not unlike how Windows 10 was flooded with travel and other affiliate links in the start menu. That on top of the usual crapware like symantec preinstalled on laptops at Dell and the big box stores.

Sounds like Microsoft should buy sourceforge to corner the market on garbage software installs (which would make everyone's head asplode!).

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[kuzb]

When sourceforge stops injecting adware in to the binaries you can say there's nothing wrong with sourceforge.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[DrXym]

Let's go through your points. a) They placed the ads and they are responsible for what ads they let through. They could have told their customers to knock it off or moved the ads somewhere less confusing. They did none of these things so they are at fault. b) They assumed ownership of abandoned projects (even projects which had actually just moved elsewhere) and bundled crapware. This is not hard to confirm. c) They also approached popular projects and begged them to bundle crapware d) so this was all part of an intentional push to raise revenues.

As for subversion, it's a perfectly acceptable source control system and certainly better than CVS. And in a lot of respects it is easier to comprehend than git, especially for people who are used to centralized source control systems. But it still sucks compared to git particularly on distributed projects, or projects where branching and merging are used extensively.

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[secretsquirel]

Well at least if you buy PC's directly from the Microsoft store they only come bundled with the Microsoft crapware, so I'll give them half credit.

Re: Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, last month?

Re:Hosted On SourceForce?

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh come on. Sourceforge has never been good. Slow as hell service (CVS et al) and cluttered UI in project pages were the main complaints in the 2000s. They've made the service fast now though. The UI has had a facelift once or twice during the time but the clutter remains. Projects' bug trackers are littered bugs that have doubly-escaped HTML entities, from some conversion in 2007 or so.

Here, have this snapshot of SF UI circa 2003: http://web.archive.org/web/20031008091422/http://sourceforge.net/projects/gaim/

'Tolerable' is what I'd currently rate them as. There are way better project hosting services around. I'd think there were way better project hosting services around in the early 2000s too.

Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried to run FreeBSD in the past. Hardware was poorly supported with frequent system crashes. Software was poorly supported; many packages and ports simply wouldn't install or build. The ports collection, often touted as a great benefit of BSD, often failed to properly build software. Because ports are built as root so they can be installed, I once had a port try to build and install a rootkit in the process. There are far fewer BSD users, so bugs are infrequently reported and the lack of developers means that bugs often go unfixed. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but why would anyone want to bring this experience to Linux?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's funny. I'm an OpenBSD user and I'm saying this seriously -- you've just summarized my experience with Linux. I tried using a Linux distro and after lots of pain came back to OpenBSD which has been so much easier to use (once you get past the bare bones installation. I'll admit).

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[0100010001010011]

Hardware was poorly supported with frequent system crashes.

This is the trick I've figured out with FreeBSD: They don't support crap hardware. The best hardware support comes from companies that pay developers to make FreeBSD drivers. (See RealTek vs Intel ethernet drivers). If you look at who the core users of FreeBSD are and look at who sponsors development it's mostly servers.

For most of my desktops I've returned to server hardware anyway. Whitebox builds were fun when I was poor and my time was free. But after the N'th time of dicking around with figuring out why my Motherboard and RAM won't play nice or the monster heat sink I added scrubbed off traces I'd rather just buy a machine that's supported.

Buy good hardware. Get good results.

so bugs are infrequently reported and the lack of developers means that bugs often go unfixed.

I've had the opposite experience. Bugs are so infrequent that if it's not a PEBKAC error then the FreeBSD guys can usually drill down to the bottom of it quick. If it's a problem someone else has experienced then the fix is most likely out there already anyway. Google will return results with the error I'm having instead of threads of noise from the Ubuntu forums.

often failed to properly build software

[Pics or it didn't happen].

Even if you somehow screwed the system up so bad that ports wouldn't build, there's always pkg.

I once had a port try to build and install a rootkit in the process.

[Citation Needed]

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I run FreeBSD and I can attest that nothing you say is remotely true.

In other words you full of shit, but you already knew that.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[convolvatron]

Why would anyone want this?

FreeBSD is hardly a perfect system. But why would I want to cripple it further by making it look like Ubuntu?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

They are not bringing any of that 'experience' over. It's another GNU/BSD. You'll be using extensive trusted repositories to install most software. You can compile your own software if you like but there won't be a ports system.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

> often failed to properly build software

Port fucks up software builds all the time, which is something you learn from actual experience with it. You seem to be awfully ignorant.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bruce Perens]

They don't support crap hardware.

:-)

It would help me believe this if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap, and show that BSD developers decided not to support it because it was crap, with reference to mailing list messages.

Otherwise, it might be better to say "the developers support what they had at a point in time and now only buy what is supported.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[invictusvoyd]

Imagine Funity . Unity for FreeBSD .. But thats just for joke sake . No one's gonna see the kernel anyways .. except that odd webcam you bought which just isn't running ..

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Masked Coward]

I'm typing this message from FreeBSD right now, on a Thinkpad laptop with Intel graphics & wireless.

It really depends on your hardware. With the right laptop it's a great system, and in my opinion much clearer than Linux.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[epyT-R]

For most of my desktops I've returned to server hardware anyway. Whitebox builds were fun when I was poor and my time was free. But after the N'th time of dicking around with figuring out why my Motherboard and RAM won't play nice or the monster heat sink I added scrubbed off traces I'd rather just buy a machine that's supported.

Sounds more like pebkac issues than anything else. I'd agree with this for building a server farm or datacenter, but for personal machines it's overkill and ludicrously expensive unless you're willing to live with 10 year old technology from ebay.

Buy good hardware. Get good results.

This applies anywhere regardless of method of acquisition.

Otherwise, I agree with your experience of freebsd. It's a solid system that has drivers for good hardware.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[KGIII]

I keep going back to a VM with GhostBSD. Man, I really wish I could get past a few things and run it on bare metal. I really like my browser and I really like VMWare. If I can get past that, I can use GhostBSD. I just can't do it. I really, really don't like Firefox. I really don't like VirtualBox. I understand there's a shim to get Linux software running but I've no idea how to make it work properly and get Opera and VMWare working. I'd *love* to switch to GhostBSD.

I've HAMMERED on it via VM. I've thrown gobs of data at it for fun. I've stripped away its resources and beat the hell of it. It slows down, boy does it slow down, but it takes it. It has yet to freeze, it has yet to fail, it has yet to do anything it wasn't meant to do. I've pushed, pulled, injected, ejected, poked, prodded, compressed, twisted, and pressed like I was having my way with a fat woman in the back of a bar in Juarez. And, like a fat chick, it's taken it all and asked for but a box of Ho-hos in return.

I'd love to put it in bare metal and have my way with it - again, like a fat woman in the back of a bar in Juarez. But, it just can't keep me satisfied yet - and the future isn't looking too bright either. Hmm... GhostBSD is a fat woman in the back of a Juarez bar. That does have some positive attributes, I guess. And, like her, I can keep going back for more.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Infidel! Wash your mouth out with soap immediately! Didn't you know that BSD is perfect and not to be criticized?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Darinbob]

It's how gamers think too. If it works for him then the fault must lie with the other person's system. No one wants to admit that it worked for them because they were lucky.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The same is true for Linux. It only gets support for hardware that the developers had at a point in time, which is why it has such shit support.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how gamers think too.

It really isn't.

If it works for him then the fault must lie with the other person's system. No one wants to admit that it worked for them because they were lucky.

This sounds like some sort of weird cross between retarded Linux zealot and Occupy Wall Street moron.

No one who is a gamer isn't going to believe that your aren't having problems. Is it your shit hardware? They'll just take a mild bit of piss out of you for trying to play on a potato, then happily recommend what you can do according to your budget. Is it your shit configuration? They'll make even more fun of you, then tell you what SSAO is and whether or not you should have clicked on the nice little button.

Unless, of course, you go full autist retard and start whining about how the game is trash because you're clueless when it comes to hardware and software. Then, yeah, you gonna git rekt in the court of public opinion.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's how gamers think too. If it works for him then the fault must lie with the other person's system.

That's because it usually is.

No one wants to admit that it worked for them because they were lucky.

Yes, a game working as intended must be luck.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[DNS-and-BIND]

Ah, I know this one. We had the same problem when Solaris came out with an x86 version back in the early 2000s. These drive-by linux users downloaded the ISO as if it were the distro-of-the-week, attempted to install it on whatever random crap hardware they had, and then loudly declared that Solaris sucked because they couldn't get something or other to work properly. The problem isn't the OS, the problem is between the keyboard and chair.

When you install a serious OS, you first must do something very unfamiliar and disconcerting. First, you must look at the list of supported hardware. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. If your hardware is not on the list, then the OS will not support it. Most linux fans come from Windows, which supports just about every bit of random junk Taiwanese hardware in the world. Other OS's aren't like that.

After you look at the hardware list, you then must do another thing that is totally counter-intuitive and out of most people's experience - go and buy supported hardware. They won't do this, they install the OS anyway, and surprise surprise when something doesn't work because the documentation clearly states it's not supported, guess what happens? They get frustrated, feel insulted, and begin screaming loudly online that the OS sucks ass. They wonder why they heard so many great things about the software. If it's so fucking great, why doesn't their wireless trackball and webcam from 1997 work seamlessly like under Windows? This happened so often back in the day with Solaris x86 that we had a slang term for the people who did it, though I forget what it was.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I had PC-BSD running on a tiny little Lenovo netbook for years. It worked fine.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[AmiMoJo]

The example that the GP used and which I've seen before is Realtek. Now, it's true that Realtek hardware is kinda crap... I seem to recall a comment in the driver about "redefining the low end". It's certainly not high performance, high reliability stuff, but it also gets the job done perfectly adequately most of the time and it's only people in need of high performance who care.

So in this case "crap" is defined as "wasn't good enough to attract any developers, and the manufacturer isn't interested in BSD either".

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would anyone want to run Linux? It has poor hardware support and frequently crashes.

Linux is often a mess of program dependencies, where as BSD can be built without having to seek out any binary packages OR use only binary packages.

I have never had a BSD server fail, where as I've had every Linux server fail, this is because Linux does not come "out of the box" in a server configuration, it comes out configured as a desktop with no video hardware support. FreeBSD on the other hand is out of the box a Server OS and many things that crash Linux (Linux loves to swap-thrash), FreeBSD doesn't even sweat.

But ultimately you can't say BSD or Linux is better, because they are more samey than they are different.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Crap hardware" is
- Intel onboard video
- Intel Chips that are not Xeon's
- AMD chips that are not Opteron's
- non-ECC memory
- 5400 RPM hard drives (especially "green")
- Seagate hard drives
- Samsung TLC SSD's

Every part you see on a Dell or SuperMicro server is supported.

And every part I listed above are parts I wouldn't trust in a server to begin with.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would have agreed with you if I hadn't made the minor version update from 10.0 to 10.1 and was left without a bootable system because of their inability to test their fucking shit.

I haven't had that happened since I stopped using Red Hat.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[undefinedreference]

His position is completely accurate. Linux hackers will work tirelessly to reverse engineer some pile of shit and write something comparable to support it, while *BSD people simply ignore it for being closed crap. All decent hardware from reasonable vendors is well supported in the BSDs.

Beyond that, they don't really target desktops much beyond the FreeBSD distro (even then, it's not as good as a Linux experience on most hardware). If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[armanox]

I actually like Unity - it is one of the big reasons I moved to Ubuntu from Fedora (that, and LTS versions rather then the short life cycle of Fedora). It is like having a modern WindowMaker or AfterStep.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

When you live in a world of software and don't poke around in device driver code it's easy to think that hardware is somehow perfect and not prone to bugs like software... They only get to make it once right? intel and amd with all their recourses can't make a bug free processor... every single one has bugs, they just turn off the buggy bits. There are plenty of other buggy hardware out their but in the form of peripherals, this doesn't mean it wont work at all, just like software, sometimes the bug is in the form of a race condition so it's not always present, or sometimes it's more obvious and needs hacky driver code to work at all.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[armanox]

Yup. I remember how surprised I was when I installed Solaris 10 on my Inspiron 8100 (P3 1GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2) and everything worked out of the box - GPU acceleration, Flash Player, MP3 codecs, sound - you name it, it worked perfect. I picked the system after checking the HCL and deciding to give it a shot despite all the stories I was hearing about Solaris sucking. Worked just as well as Ubuntu (6.06) did on the box, and all the proprietary stuff worked without a hitch! It was beautiful. I've run Solaris 11 as a desktop, and almost bought a Toshiba laptop when they were shipping with OpenSolaris as an option just to have everything work (Solaris 11 almost works on my laptops, just a few issues with power management that forced me off of it. I was amazed when it saw my battery and WiFi)

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah kernels make no difference at all...

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[ZeRu]

It's how gamers think too. If it works for him then the fault must lie with the other person's system. No one wants to admit that it worked for them because they were lucky.

Confirming. I once complained that a certain game isn't compatibile with my graphics card on Steam forums and most replies consisted of rude and immature trolling.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a big difference in learning Unix/BSD skills vs leraning GNU/Linux. Finally it does not mater whether you are doing apt-get dist-upgrade or make kernel && make world. If something goes wrong recovering from GNU/Linux is much easier, simple query in search engine a you have tons of concepts. Maybe UNIX is difficult to learn, but offers a wide array of features to master after the user has figured out how to work it.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Antique Geekmeister]

Except for graphics tablets, many mice and game controllers, laptop video and audio chipsets, laptop power control systems, and bleeding edge graphics cards. It's why FreeBSD was a good choice for the Apple kernel: they had control of the hardware and could judiciously invest driver development in only those components they actually used.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Antique Geekmeister]

To avoid systemd, I suspect. Since systemd only works with the Linux kernel, and so far has produced a great deal of difficulty in return for its very aggressive re-engineering of the entire Linux back end infrastructure, it seems very very reasonable to try simply replacing the kernel to get a clean divorce from the systemd infrastructure.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[drinkypoo]

I wanted to use OpenBSD on my netbook for secure mobile computing, but they denied the patch that someone submitted for my wifi hardware on specious grounds so that they wouldn't have accept his patch — they claimed that getting some values from a Linux driver was a copyright issue when it has been conclusively proven that it hasn't. So I can't use it without buying additional hardware, so I installed Linux.

No joke, someone actually submitted a working patch, and they denied it on bullshit grounds. They don't want decent hardware support.

Last time I built a box just for OpenBSD it choked hard on "supported" NICs and failed to route my packets, almost costing me a job. Admittedly, that was over ten years ago. Still not going down that road again.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you just apply the patch?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[damaki]

I had issues with a dedicated 3Com pci board on FreeBSD, had to switch to OpenBSD for the damn thing to work. Never had issues with this card on any other OS. I could not even think how a network card driver could be so f*cked up on an OS. I mean, if the damn driver does not work, as automated tests should show (did they even have automated non-regression tests by then, around 2004?), why was it in the kernel? It should have been disabled and documented.
So I do not think the issue is about crap hardware. It's about spotty support of specific pieces of hardware.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you fucking serious? You're suggesting he basically maintain his own spin of the kernel because some idiots without any sense of how people actually want to use computers don't think the patch is useful enough to integrate upstream? Fuck me, people here really do live in their own bubble.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[jellomizer]

"They don't support crap hardware."
I find that to be a lame excuse for things not working. It is excusing the problem that BSD doesn't have the markets interest that Linux and Windows has in order for a diverse set of drivers to be made for a wide range of Systems.

Most system with "Crap Hardware" will work perfectly well on other os for years and last well beyond the useful life of the device. Unless you want to build your PC by yourself (something much more difficult if you want a Laptop) you normally need to deal with what the vendor gives you in terms of hardware. Being that most vendors really don't care about making a FreeBSD based Desktop solution you will not find too many that meet this requirement fully, and will undoubtedly cheap out on some particular part so you will feel good at getting such a device below $1,000 vs above. Where on Windows and Linux you wouldn't really notice as it will be detected and works, at least partially. While BSD it will just fail to recognize the device.

I am not basing BSD Systems, I actually love working on them when the hardware works with them. However for Personal Computing they suck, because they have this elitist attitude towards hardware.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny that, I've gone from 10 to 10.1 to 10.2 on various machines including laptops, desktops and servers and there were no issues.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Great post except your totally lame and immature "fat chick" commentary. So close Brah. Good luck.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm also typing this on a laptop with FreeBSD (HP with intel graphics and wireless). I also have a more beefer laptop that runs FreeBSD that includes the propriety nvidia drivers that allows me to play a few games in native BSD as well as Linux compatibility and Wine. I've installed FreeBSD on various laptops, desktops and servers and I've never had issues with hardware that wasn't supported. I'm wonder if I've just been lucky.

FreeBSD is not Linux and it does take some patience to learn the ropes and build a system the way you want it. But once you have done it, I find it's plain sailing.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rubbish.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[0100010001010011]

if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap,

If the vendor doesn't think it is worth their time to develop drivers for it then it must not be good enough to develop drivers for.

I already gave the RealTek vs Intel Ethernet drivers.

Another is Nvidia vs AMD/ATI. I hand Nvidia money. Nvidia hands me a working video driver. No reverse engineering needed. No "here's a bunch of specs, write your own driver".

Yet another is Supermicro and Intel motherboards vs consumer boards. Turns out Intel and Supermicro designs and develops motherboards with full driver support. Most consumer boards I've seen will toss in Realtek drivers and a bunch of other cheap chips to save a penny or so with the end result being no driver support in Linux or FreeBSD. Windows drivers are still hit or miss.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[0100010001010011]

While BSD it will just fail to recognize the device.

It may not recognize the device as "something" but it will always recognize the device. Any time I have a problem with a USB device on Windows I'll plug it into a FreeBSD machine and it'll tell me exactly what it is, no obfuscation

However for Personal Computing they suck,

My wife's laptop aside, in which she's happy with Windows 8 everything in my house is FreeBSD of some sort. Down to my HTPC which is FreeBSD running Kodi. All of the sound devices, including SPDIF out, are recognized. It was easier to setup than Kodi on Windows.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

s/Linux/WindowsNT/g
s/[a-zA-Z]4BSD/Linux/g

set date=today()-20y

That seems more familiar...

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX doesn't use the FreeBSD kernel, It uses the MACH kernel on top of the FreeBSD Operating System to make Darwin/OS. the rest of your statement is accurate though. amazing how stable a product is when you directly control all aspects of what it is.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[AmiMoJo]

I've tried both (I run a FreeBSD server now, Linux is relegated to a VM for now) and I'd say you are both kinda right.

Hardware - On Linux people expect things like their GPU to be fully accelerated and capable of running games and a fancy desktop. On BSD you just expect desktop support at resolutions you monitor supports with some reasonable 2D acceleration, but your network card damn well better benchmark close to line speed.

Software - It's pot luck, popular stuff is well supported on both platforms but anything else is down to how well someone cares to maintain it. Much like Windows really, where it depends how much of an asshat the developer is and if they provided a nice .zip or a badly coded installer.

One thing I'd say about Ubuntu is that it's kinda bloated. Much worse than Windows. You get a massive amount of crap installed by default, and unless you uninstall it all manually it's gonna want updates too. Uninstalling is a bit of a minefield as there seem to be some dependency tracking issues and I've heard (but not tested personally) that upgrading the OS can fail if you install certain things.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, the LEAST fucky part about Ubuntu is the kernel!

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[MeNeXT]

I seriously do not understand your post. I've ran (and still run) FreeBSD on 1000's of systems for over 10 years. On supported hardware I have yet to have a crash without hardware failure. Rock solid. Now on the latest and greatest newest hardware which was not yet supported I had the same success as Windows, Linux and Mac (which means luck was involved). I have one system on 6.3 which the client is too cheap to upgrade which is still running. Gets rebooted when there is a power failure. I have old systems, New systems. Used systems.

In most cases it's simpler to fix problems on FreeBSD than any other.

Linux has a great deal of noise in the forums.

On windows it sometimes requires a reinstall but this has mainly been resolved. There is very little pertinent documentation to fix problems. When equipment ages support just drops. Very hard to find drivers for older equipment.

Mac works well until Apple decides to change something then the support dies. If you invest time doing it Apples way you may need to invest time finding a new solution when Apple changes it's mind.

For me Linux and the BSD's are interchangeable some solutions work better with Linux others with FreeBSD. But one thing I can definitely say is the FreeBSD is rock solid.

My intention is not to start a flame war with this comment. I just find less politics/special agenda with FreeBSD than any other OS. It's like Debian you can always find a solution that works for you.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[clonehappy]

I agree that is complete bullshit, but your experience mirrors every Linux experience I've had in the last decade. I try and try to get basic things to work, and they just never do. Actually, Linux worked *better* for me 10 years ago than it has in the last few, so I just stick to BSD. I don't dislike Linux by any means, it just doesn't work for me.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[squiggleslash]

but why would anyone want to bring this experience to Linux?

They're not. There isn't any Linux in this. This is about bringing the Ubuntu experience to FreeBSD. EVERY single thing you've talked about is something this project is trying to solve. Absolutely every thing.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[drinkypoo]

Why didn't you just apply the patch?

I tried, but alas, the sources had changed too much between when it was contributed and working and when I tried it a few years later for the patch to apply, or to be simple to adapt to the new code. If the patch had applied cleanly, or not taken too much bashing, I would have given it a go. If they had simply accepted the patch in the first place, then it would likely still be working when I wanted it, since it was only changes to an existing driver.

I'm not much of a programmer, and can admit that readily enough, but I shouldn't have to be in order to use a common NIC. And with Linux, I don't.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's FUnity. Emphasis on the FU.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use Gentoo?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

The only dedicated 3Com board that would have still been in use by 2004 was the 3c905 series NIC. I built routers around that era running FreeBSD, and many of those were out of spare parts I had, and given to friends and family. The spare NICs I usually had were 3Coms. Not to say that I didn't use others, I had some old 10Mbps ISA 3Com cards that I used for the WAN interface on some of those builds (remember, if it was being built for grandma's 768k DSL line in 2004 that was more than enough!), and never once did I have any issues with any of the cards not working.

Except for one, after a lightning strike took out the DSL modem, half the phones in the building, and the card running the WAN interface at a customer's site.

Aside, I wonder what model card it was and why it didn't work. If it was using the xl0 driver, I'm wondering if there wasn't some quirk with the hardware because that driver is still rock solid even TODAY on FreeBSD.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds like an admin error. I moved all my servers over to FreeBSD years ago, and haven't had a single problem with them. They're smoother, with a much smaller footprint than most modern Linux distros, and I've been taking advantage of ZFS in all that time while Linux has been kicking the can, dumping one user's data after another with its buggy port.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, it's funny that you're full of shit.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Eunuchswear]

Brilliant, jump out of the SystemD frying pan into the Upstart fire.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu is bloated simply because they want to be a one stop shop for any newcomers. More experienced people are picking things like Arch, etc. that allow more customization and trimming.

As for BSD vs. Linux, I use both and like both for different reasons. Both can be fantastic for certain purposes.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bruce Perens]

You haven't given any technical explanation of why RealTek hardware isn't worth the effort, and on this page it shows support in BSD for half a dozen model numbers from RealTek. You must be talking about a different model? There could be many reasons the developers haven't spent time on it other than the quality of the design. For example, a simple lack of people.

You could explain, for example, how the DMA engine in the card is broken or that it drops interrupts (if either of those is the case). Just saying it's crap isn't very credible without technical background.

My impression was that nVidia provided a proprietary driver, thus not long-term supportable once they lose interest.

I have a number of Supermicro boards. Actually their driver and firmware support is not great, and I have complained about their boards to them, only to get the answer that they work correctly on Windows. I buy them because they have remote management, but have given up on their remote management implementations and will go with an external solution next time. My latest Supermicro board is a C7X99-OCE-F and as you can see here, they don't claim BSD support at all. On Linux they have some IOMMU issues at the moment.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Bruce Perens]

As I replied to him, BSD claims support for half a dozen RealTek models, so I can't say he's even accurate about RealTek vs. Intel Ethernet. Now, you at least gave a reason that they might be crap. They're closed. Except that some of them weren't closed enough for a driver to appear on BSD. Did someone get documents, or did they just copy the Linux driver?

If you want uptime, don't have a graphics card in the box. Memory mapping hardware devices into user space is always going to make your box unstable. Both BSD and Linux are really good at staying up without a graphics card in the box.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Ol Olsoc]

Ubuntu isn't perfect, but why would anyone want to bring this experience to Linux?

Want to know why? Because some Linux users are so frothing at the mouth about systemd, that they go right to their happy place when BSD is mentioned.

I've also looked at BSD, and all your issues are spot-on. To put up with the crap you have to put up with in BSD is not worth whatever advantage there is to losing systemd.

side note - I was having an issue compiling a critical program in Linux Mint 17.3, so I tried out Ubuntu Mate. Worked nicely, and quite configurable, with a nice GUI. I'm not so certain that the original build problem wasn't my fault, but I was happy enough with UMate that I kept it.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Ol Olsoc]

That's funny. I'm an OpenBSD user and I'm saying this seriously -- you've just summarized my experience with Linux. I tried using a Linux distro and after lots of pain came back to OpenBSD which has been so much easier to use (once you get past the bare bones installation. I'll admit).

Imposing BSD upon Linux? This isn't trying to be a smartass (I'm an ass, but not smart) I don't have so much experience with BSD, but I've noticed that Windows users trying to use Linux often have issues when they try to use the knowledge they've acquired in Windowsworld and try to force it on Linux.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Ol Olsoc]

I agree that is complete bullshit, but your experience mirrors every Linux experience I've had in the last decade. I try and try to get basic things to work, and they just never do. Actually, Linux worked *better* for me 10 years ago than it has in the last few, so I just stick to BSD. I don't dislike Linux by any means, it just doesn't work for me.

What on earth happened? In a build problem program I was having recently in Mint, I installed and compiled a program I needed badly on several computers, after Installing Linux Mint 17.3, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu Mate.

The machines were a dual core Dell Optiplex, a eePC netbook, a Toshiba Satellite, and one of those damned Vista basic computers. Install was from a USB thumbdrive for the Dell, and DVDs for the others.

All of them worked perfectly in that Rogues gallery of computers and distros. Were you trying to install without internet access? That can be a big issue with drivers.

I've been trying to figure this one out for quite a while now.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Gamers are the lowest form of life in the universe. They create nothing, contribute nothing, have the social skills of a shit-flinging ape, and think they know something about computers.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Ol Olsoc]

They don't support crap hardware.

:-)

It would help me believe this if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap, and show that BSD developers decided not to support it because it was crap, with reference to mailing list messages.

Good hardware = Whatever works with BSD

Crap hardware = Whatever doesn't work with BSD

As long as it doesn't have systemd, some users will love it, warts and all.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bruce Perens]

You mean 3c509. I remember a driver developer who would pay you $1 to throw your 3com card away and send him the BNC T-connector. This was in the thin-net days. He contended that this was the only part worth anything.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[KGIII]

That's the *least* strange thing I yell out. Often it involves a cowboy hat, a lawn gnome, and a five gallon tub of mustard. What I say is the least of anyone's concerns. And no, she sticks around because I pay well.

You trundle up to any Juarez bar with a hijacked truck full of Ho-Hos, leave the keys in the ignition and back door unlocked, go to the bar, order a margarita - no salt - with cherries and not a lime, and then ask for Julia. She'll be out for you when she's ready.

You'll thank me someday. Arrrrrrriba!

(I'm going to hell, aren't I?)

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is hardly a perfect system. But why would I want to cripple it further by making it look like Ubuntu?

Because you're dying to run FreeBSD with systemd?

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Type44Q]

Ignorant? I suppose it depends how you define the term; I know enough about BSD to know that you don't bother messing with it unless you know what the hell you're doing (which of course begins with making sure you've got the right hardware; think designing a Hackintosh).

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS? Due to licensing issues, it is understandable that ZFS isn't in Linux by default, but it would be nice for more distros to have some sort of two phase process (boot the core Linux OS, load in ZFS from a separate repo, even if the repo is on the same OS medium), so one can have "/" on on down, all ZFS. Yes, one can do this now, but it takes some tap dancing.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's strange.

I just tested a bunch of old laptops

32 bit, with only 512 MB or 1 GB ram.

The only thing I could even install were the BSD's

Recent Linux distro's simply don't install on these older machines.

Obviously, I'm not talking about DSL or other mini distro's, as the goal was to make a useable machine without license restrictions. Some of the users were pleasantly surprised to use their old hardware again, when Windows got stuck again...

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yea my openbsd firewall has been up for 7 months now(built it 7 1/2 months ago). Straight command line baby. No X. A GUI is for the weak.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

I call bull. I have have built Linux, BSD, Mac, Solaris x86 and Sparc servers. I have also built Windows ones as well.

None of my *Unix* servers ever failed unless the hardware died, I did have one Solaris/Sparc system that would run out of memory once a year couldn't figure that one out so we scheduled twice yearly reboots after hours and never saw an issue again ( that was one out of a dozen Sparcs we were running at the time ). Even Windows boxes if properly built and maintained will almost never crash and I say almost because memory leaks in Windows software happens more often but if you schedule patching and reboots once a month solves that issue 99% of the time. Anyone not buying good hardware for a server should be fired. It takes more than a title to be a server admin it takes knowledge of the different components and how they interact. A well built server regardless of the OS will run for years with proper maintenance.

Desktops/laptops are another thing entirely sometimes ( unless you build from scratch not really doable with laptops ) you end up with a piece of hardware that is not compatible usually wireless and I USB low profile card will fix this for you. I recently bought a Lenovo 11.6" 700 ISK laptop. I figured it would be a good buy based on hardware I was somewhat correct the only distro I can find that supports it 100% is Ubuntu 16.04 beta but suspend doesn't work. I could have said forget it but instead i downloaded a 4.5 kernel and now I am 100%. I fully understand that someone with less skill would have just said forget it and said the hardware sucked and returned it. I now have a great ultra portable laptop with decent battery life and a true HD screen.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone's feelings get hurt?

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

"I recently bought a Lenovo 11.6" 700 ISK laptop"

I didn't know you could buy laptops with eve/dust514 money. I have a shit ton of ISK on my dust account, time to start spending. :P

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, because properly assembling non-shit hardware and properly configuring the software running on it can only be done through luck.

It's not 1997 anymore. It's really not hard to do. Before you buy something, make sure that they didn't go cheap on garbage off-brand components. Cheap shit hardware begets stupid problems that shouldn't ever be a problem.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this an informative post? It's one anecdotal posting of a person who couldn't figure out how to run an OS which has a proven track record of running the backbone of a number of organizations. And the last sentence is highly biased without supporting evidence. ::sigh::

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Many RealTek "design wins" aren't performance based at all. They are based on "cheapest component that still checks the box" for OEMs and motherboard manufacturers out there. RealTek exists because Dell, HP, and Lenovo are in a race to the bottom, and cutting decent subsystems in favor of cheap shit that is barely good enough is a prime target for cost cutting.

Motherboard manufacturers do it too. This is the reason why they have cheap motherboards that are universally shit for anything but commonplace email and web browsing, and motherboards that are twice as expensive - the boards that are twice as expensive don't have that garbage on there, and the up-front cost for better hardware will pay off over time not spent fucking around with something that decided not to work properly all of a sudden, or a sound processor that takes a meat axe to the frequency spectrum and adds in a nice hiss from not having proper shielding.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

ISK is the model Lenovo unfortunately sell about a dozen or so models all labeled 700 including 11 and 14 inch models. I added that in case someone wanted to buy a laptop they could match the model and get one that works. The others may work or may not I can't vouch for them.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[fisted]

- Intel Chips that are not Xeon's
- AMD chips that are not Opteron's

Tough shit, where can I find Xeon and Opteron, and why do they have all the good hardware?

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually XNU uses FreeBSD code on top of the Mach kernel.

The low-level memory and process management is done by the Mach portion, and the syscall/userspace/permissions are handled by the FreeBSD portion.

Also, the question of drivers is irrelevant WRT FreeBSD since OS X uses I/OKit for drivers.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I'd say about Ubuntu is that it's kinda bloated. Much worse than Windows. You get a massive amount of crap installed by default, and unless you uninstall it all manually it's gonna want updates too. Uninstalling is a bit of a minefield as there seem to be some dependency tracking issues and I've heard (but not tested personally) that upgrading the OS can fail if you install certain things.

Eh, some of the "bloat" is a selling feature, as in "Look at all this stuff you get with Ubuntu" and so forth.

Which borders on the nice feature to HP/Packard Bell levels of crapware. I remember a neighbor who bought a Packard Bell just because it had this little program that looked like a room with icons on a shelf for the software they included.

Amazing what people want sometimes.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[almitydave]

I remember a neighbor who bought a Packard Bell just because it had this little program that looked like a room with icons on a shelf for the software they included.

Wait wait wait... You knew someone who actually bought a computer specifically because it had Microsoft Bob????????

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[mrchaotica]

If the vendor doesn't think [BSD] is worth their time to develop drivers for it then [BSD] must not be good enough to develop drivers for.

You sure that's the point you meant to make?

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[invictusvoyd]

That was a first !

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[gustygolf]

I never got the point of Debian/kFreeBSD (which UbuntuBSD seems to be about). Surely you want more than just the kernel of FreeBSD? They have nice userlands. They have a decent libc. They have good manual pages.

Getting away from coreutils and glibc is why I'd choose to run BSD. I don't care one bit about whether the kernel can provide me with ZFS or not.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Would you mind posting the exact complaint that you posted there? I'd like to see if you deserved your treatment or not.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Nvidia can't publish an open source driver due to licensing issues. Besides, even if they could, who would provide updates to it when they lose interest? You? Graphics drivers aren't like they used to be. They are extremely complex and I don't place any faith in the open source community to be able to handle the job.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bengie]

They suspected that the person submitting the patch had already seen the Linux code, which means he has been contaminated. You can't use his code. Welcome to copyright and the GPL.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bengie]

If you use the same type of hardware the devs use, you'll have a mostly good time. If you use some obscure integrated hardware that you got with your $40 motherboard or some crazy exotic hardware with your $200 motherboard, it probably won't be supported. Most of FreeBSD devs are running Intel servers and similarly speced desktops.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Bengie]

That issue only applied if you installed the RC, not release. Interestingly enough, it was caused by a race condition during the build process and not the code.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Zontar The Mindless]

If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.

Guess that depends on what expectations you have for uptime. 200+ days for a desktop suits me pretty well.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

If signing up for a /. account allowed blocking users, I'd have done it years ago.

Re: Why would anyone want this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because everyone should always drop thousands of dollars to TRY something new.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[Tower]

The 3c509 was a great ISA 10Mb NIC and had the BNC and AUI connectors. By 2004, I think the 905 probably would have been it - that one was PCI and 10/100. I had plenty of each over time.

Re:Why would anyone want this?

[laffer1]

It wasn't Microsoft BOB. It was Packard Bell Navigator. it's a totally different thing and unlike Microsoft BOB, Packard Bell released a patch for Windows 95.

My first PC was a Packard Bell Pentium 100mhz and it had that software on it. The novelty wears off pretty quick, but it made for cool demos at the store back then.

2016, the year of...

[Anonymous Coward]

...BSD on the desktop.

What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[0100010001010011]

It has everything 'pretty' that Ubuntu could have, minus the weirdness of a kFreeBSD/GNU userland. It sets everything up from install. You can even select what window manager you want to use during install.

Personally bare FreeBSD itself is just fine if the command line doesn't scare you. It takes less time to install FreeBSD and the 5-10 packages needed to get to a 'normal' desktop than it does to install any version Windows. I'm just kicking myself for not making the switch earlier.

Additionally. Describing projects as "For Humans" must stop. FreeBSD is already for humans. I could teach a middle schooler to install it and get to Facebook. It's honestly not that hard.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me it's the lack of Plex and CrashPlan support. I would LOVE to go straight BSD as I'm very comfortable in Solaris with my career, I realize both have Plex and CrashPlan have supported BSD but their support has been an afterthought. I believe CrashPlan recently officially (last year?) stopped supporting FreeBSD but left their headless config docs up as an unsupported config. I just want ZFS, a slick GUI (not a tablet one -- since its not headless and I use it with Synergy every day), Plex, Samba, and CrashPlan on my home file server! It used to be windows(7) and its amazing how much issues I stopped having by switching to Mint Cinnamon. My early blunders was when I was running my own personal (not public) Usenet crawler and I relied on too many PPA packages which caused conflicts.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does your laptop's wifi, sound, LCD panel (in native resolution), and sleep mode work after the install, without further faffing?

If not, it's not 'for humans' yet.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Masked Coward]

Does your laptop's wifi, sound, LCD panel (in native resolution), and sleep mode work after the install, without further faffing?

If not, it's not 'for humans' yet.

Wifi and sound work out-the-box. Suspend required me to add one line in a config file. I also had to do a few things to make my touchpad work the way I specifically wanted it to.... but I think that's probably true with any system.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried PC-BSD and OpenBSD a while ago on a Lenovo laptop - both worked fine. Apple OSX is also BSD based and my MacBook Pro works fine too.

So I also tend to think that if PC-BSD doesn't work for you, then you are using weird hardware - simple as that.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Xtifr]

The "weirdness" of the *nix userland that most people in the *nix world have standardized on these days. Yeah, can't think why they'd possibly want that.

Regular FreeBSD is indeed just fine, but it has dozens of minor incompatibilities with both GNU and SysV that will trip you up if you're used to those others.

GNU/kFreeBSD is a really nice compromise if you're used to either GNU/Linux or SysV. GNU is designed to be as compatible as possible with both BSD and SysV. (So it's also a nice option if you're a BSD guy forced to work on a SysV system. Which is actually how I got started with it.)

If you're a BSD guy using BSD, then yeah, there's little point in putting GNU on it. But for everyone else, it makes a lot of sense.

Frankly, I try to stick GNU on everything. I've run it on BSD, HPUX, Solaris, SunOS, Windows, and, of course, Linux.

Right now, I'm running GNU/kFreeBSD in a vm to port some software to BSD. When I get it running, on that, I'll install regular BSD to make sure everything still works, but I'm interested in the porting effort, not in mucking around learning all of BSD's quirks, so GNU/kFreeBSD is a godsend. I'm not scared of the command line. I just don't want to waste my time remembering all the little incompatibilities of the BSD userland while I'm trying to get some work done. In recent years, every single time I've tried to use straight BSD, I end up getting frustrated at some little thing that just won't work the way I want it to. The way I'm used to.

Now, for someone who's new to *nix, I agree that BSD is a very fine option. Heck, I started with the BSD-based version of SunOS, and still have fond memories of it. But at this point in time, I am so used to the GNU userland that I just don't want to deal with something that doesn't have it. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who prefers GNU—after all, not only has the Debian GNU/BSD survived for many years, but now there's a second one! :)

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[drinkypoo]

It has everything 'pretty' that Ubuntu could have, minus the weirdness of a kFreeBSD/GNU userland. It sets everything up from install. You can even select what window manager you want to use during install.

It's completely insensible since the good part of Linux is the kernel, not the userland. It's not that Linux's userland is bad, but BSD's is fine. But when you give up the Linux kernel, you give up compatibility. You give up drivers for high performance graphics hardware, you give up being able to use vmware... If you're not going to do that stuff (because you have crap integrated graphics for example) then you don't seem to be giving up anything.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[0100010001010011]

Dell M6800.

wifi

Yes. It's even detected during FreeBSD's install and I can finish the installation on Wifi.

sound

Yes. And it's hands down better than the spaghetti mess that is sound on Linux.

LCD Panel

Yes. Nvidia even takes some of the money I give them and pays someone to develop drivers for the graphics card.

sleep mode work after the install,

I don't know, but I never used sleep on Windows or Linux so it's not a use case that I've tested.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

For me it's the lack of Plex and CrashPlan support.

I don't know about Plex, but there is a port for CrashPlan in FreeBSD. It uses the Linux client, which basically requires the Linux JVM. But there is a port for that too.

I've been using CrashPlan on FreeBSD for almost a year now, with no issues so far (crosses fingers).

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[0100010001010011]

I just tested it. Sleep works fine as well. The documentation on it is straight forward and easy to read: https://www.freebsd.org/doc/ha...

Tested it and it works fine.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Deagol]

Plex is there. My home PC runs FreeBSD, and it serves Plex to my Rokus.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

I was unable to install Plex on Debian 7, so I used FreeBSD. Plex installed easily, and runs flawlessly.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[thegarbz]

I could teach a middle schooler to install it and get to Facebook.

Pffft. That doesn't impress me. You can teach a middle schooler to hack in the NSA, unless of course they are teaching you to do it.

You want to impress me then teach my mother.

Re:What's wrong with PC-BSD?

[0100010001010011]

Why not FreeNAS if it's a home server? CrashPlan and Plex have plugins.

Thanks summary

[orledrat]

Thanks for answering the question "What's UbuntuBSD?" seeing as this is Slashdot it would have been more useful to explain "What's a human being?". You insensitive clod.

Re:Thanks summary

[Required Snark]

Wish I had points to mod you up.

Slashdot, where being human puts you in the minority.

Re:Thanks summary

[Anne Thwacks]

Presumably, if an "advert" turns you towards something, an "avert" turns you away.

Or did you not do Latin in school? Or even English?

The advantage is well known to everyone here: No systemd!

Re:Thanks summary

[Kjella]

Thanks for answering the question "What's UbuntuBSD?" seeing as this is Slashdot it would have been more useful to explain "What's a human being?". You insensitive clod.

It would, but all we got is an undocumented blob written in quad-bits (ACGT) and the original developer can't be reached. Not that it'd do much good, the code is constantly morphing through forking off new child processes while old ones come to a halt so there's probably little of the original left. There was an instruction manual too, but it's equally cryptic like "Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground". Source control seems completely absent so there's billions of versions in production. While we're making some progress on reverse engineering to fix the most critical bugs it's mostly a black box project full of unexplained and absurd behaviors. Like making dry jokes on a nerd website.

Re:Thanks summary

[thegarbz]

It's Poettering's answer to people moving to BSD to escape systemd.

What?

[Anonymous Coward]

"[...] bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux."

WTF?

lol here come the github users

[Anonymous Coward]

with their community nazi plans

Inspired?

[deniable]

"ubuntuBSD is inspired by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project"

Is that in the same way as Ubuntu is inspired by the Debian project?

Re:Inspired?

[Anonymous Coward]

Inspired: To take an existing project and market it as your own.

Just use FreeBSD or PC-BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want to use BSD, then use BSD period.

As opposed to?

[rebelwarlock]

What's the target demographic for other distros, rabbits?

Re:As opposed to?

[cfalcon]

OS X is for dolphins, Windows is for monkeys, standard BSDs are for superior alien beings, and Linux is for robot overlords with laser eyes.

Re: As opposed to?

[david4164]

So long and thanks for all the FreeBSD.

What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I've heard this talked about before, on bsdnow.tv - about people wanting the stability and reliability of the FreeBSD kernel, but with a GNU userland. We use Ubuntu Server at my work extensively, and I use FreeBSD at home, and to be honest, I really don't think it's hard to pick up one if you know the other. Moreover, Linux does have a kernel module now for ZFS, so what's the point? You're almost certainly better off using stock Ubuntu, if you're a Linux guy - it's got actual dollars going into maintaining it. If you're into FreeBSD, you're also better off going with stock FreeBSD.

I don't even know why people use PC-BSD, to be honest, and I've tried it several times. FreeBSD with an XFCE desktop is easy and as quick as sin to set up, and I'm not just a FreeBSD fanboy. People should just go ahead and check it out. Even GhostBSD and DesktopBSD don't get that much traction these days - it's because FreeBSD is pretty straightforward, if you're willing to put an evening or two into finding your way around.

Re:What's the point?

[dbIII]

Moreover, Linux does have a kernel module now for ZFS, so what's the point?

Because ZFS on linux is not yet ready for serious use. It is catching up and is fine for the home PC I'm using now but it still lags a long way behind other systems with ZFS on a lot of points, especially performance.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

I have found PC-BSD to be slower, and less supported than FreeBSD.

And, you are right "FreeBSD with an XFCE desktop is easy and as quick as sin to set up" although I used MATE with my FreeBSD setup.

Re:What's the point?

[Wolfrider]

> Because ZFS on linux is not yet ready for serious use

--That is not my experience. Killer-app for Linux is ZFS+Samba, and I have had that going with decent performance (for home / small business use, at least) for the last 2-3 years.

--This is with an older quad-core 2.4GHz COTS PC box with 6GB DDR2 RAM running Xubuntu 14.04--64--LTS and standard SATA-2 hard drives connected to (2) inexpensive 4-port PCIe cards. With standard 1500-byte Ethernet frames, I can almost saturate the link (~100-120MB/sec) running an FTP transfer from a RAIDz10 with noatime (2x2 disk pool.)

--The limiting issue is usually the write speed on the receiving side, unless it's going to SSD. (Writes to the pool are admittedly a bit slower IIRC, but zfs *is* doing auto-checking for every write.) But in general, **you don't run ZFS for max speed**, you run it for Reliability -- and features like "copies=2" + snapshots + filesystem-level compression. As well as the occasional quick RAID rebuild.

http://open-zfs.org/wiki/Featu...

--What some folks might want to do to speed things up is some research; I have some custom stuff going on in /etc/rc.local (sysctls to speedup I/O, blockdev --setra 8192 /dev/sd* , Gig ethernet speedup script, rmmod unused modules, stop all unneeded services, etc. Optimizations are available upon request.) Bog-standard Linux install is not optimized for speed, usually. Plus if you're running all your pool drives off motherboard SATA ports, it can limit your speed. On my rig, the "mirror" drives in the pool are connected to the 2nd SATA card.

--Also - if you want best speed from ZFS, most advice is to run mirrored pools - *not* RAIDZ. I switched out my original 500GBx6 RAIDZ2 to equivalent RAIDz10 (with 2x2 newer 2TB WD Red drives, which aren't even considered hi-speed drives) and the pool performance improved. If I expand the pool to 6 drives, it should pick up even a little more speed. If I wanted to spend more money, I could put a SAS card in and run that instead of SATA.

--An interesting feature of ZFS, BTW - I started out with 2x2TB drives, unmirrored, making a non-RAID writable space of ~4TB. After saving up for a couple of months and buying 2 more drives, I was able to add mirrors to both disks in the pool ON-THE-FLY and converted the pool in-situ to RAIDz10. I did a "burn-in" test (R/W all sectors) on the new drives 1st, and I consider WD to be pretty reliable to begin with, but still - I don't know any other filesystem that you could do that with.

Kindof pointless?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ubuntu already has ZFS, and any recent linux distro can boot from it as well.

The only BSD worth running

[Anonymous Coward]

is OS X.

Just get a Mac already. You know you want to.

Re:The only BSD worth running

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X isn't a BSD. OS X is XNU, X is Not UNIX.

Search your feelings, you know it to be true.

Re:The only BSD worth running

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X is as much a BSD as any other variant. They all have different kernels. Operating systems evolve.

Were you aware that Mach started as a drop-in replacement for the BSD kernel?

Or that NeXT paid AT&T for a UNIX license before BSD was unencumbered?

Z File System?

[xbytor]

It's just ZFS. It used to stand for "Zettabyte File System" but that was dropped years ago.

Re:Z File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

The makers of ZFS can decide that they like a cryptic meaningless name better, but for us mere mortals it's quite handy to know from the name that it is, you know, *a file system*.

So I support any editor who ignores the nitpicking and just writes Z File System.

Re:Z File System?

[Anonymous Coward]

Pro-tip: if a product has an acronym that ends "FS", it's a file system. To the extent that if a non-file-system has an acronym ending "FS" they change the acronym so people don't think it's a file system.

Re:Z File System?

[omnichad]

But why not go for the recursive bacronym and call it ZFS File System? So that you're using the correct name in the process, too?

Re:Z File System?

[deniable]

Feel free to google for NFS some time. :(

Yea, but systemd...

[Anonymous Coward]

I haven't read ANYWHERE about this new module for systemd called "UbuntuBSD", this must be early April fools, ha! you got me...

Seriously though, can we expect a good desktop environment like MATE to run on UbuntuBSD without the cancer that is systemd?

Re: Yea, but systemd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Spell it SystemD. That way it looks like a dick thats rammed hard into the user's asses.

Re:Yea, but systemd...

[KGIII]

Err... I'm going to assume you're not retarded and just don't know. If you want MATE and BSD, get GhostBSD.

http://www.ghostbsd.org/downlo...

Why would you say such stupid things? Seriously?

Re:Yea, but systemd...

[Eunuchswear]

SystemD trolls don't know their history.

Upstart, you idiot,

You know, an init system that runs everything under ptrace.

Re: Yea, but systemd...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or Lennart's awful bowlcut.

Re: Yea, but systemd...

[Anonymous Coward]

That user with multiple asses...I would like to subscribe to her newsletter. If you know what I mean, nudge, nudge.

UNIX for humans? Year of bsd on desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Um, OS X.

Ok, that's not free... I care about that, but I need to get stuff done too.

Then you're doing something wrong.

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Are you sure it was FreeBSD, not Net or Open? If so you were either on some oddball hardware where support was just coming into existence, or you were doing something wrong.

BSD forked three ways and the three branches are specialized for three purposes:
  - FreeBSD is about running on as many kinds of hardware and peripherals as possible. If it runs under BSD it runs under FreeBSD. Once the driving code is solid it might get imported into other branches, or ported to other things (like Linux). Meanwhile, maybe the code for your device is still new and still flaky.
  - NetBSD is about being a reference platform for developing, and pushing the envelope on, networking technology (at the expense of only bothering to be guaranteed to run on a limited number of platforms and configurations).
  - OpenBSD is about being reliable and secure - at the expense of being limited to devices and code that are open enough to be audited, and being developed and maintained outside the US and its "encryption is a weapon" export controls.

(Or at least that's how I understand it. I'm not following it closely right now because I'm not running it - though I'm considering switching from Linux to Open and may soon be giving it more attention.)

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not even close. NetBSD's focus has always been on portability and running on as many platforms as possible. FreeBSD is a general purpose operating system. DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD, originally for the purpose of improving performance for symmetric multiprocessing and threading. OpenBSD is focused on security and reliability.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

- OpenBSD is about being reliable and secure

OpenBSD is about Theo de Raadt being kicked off of CVS write access to NetBSD for being such a jerkwad. The result has been a lot of flat-out refusals by OpenBSD maintainers to fix even the most basic bugs or accept patches for the most basic features because they don't fit Theo's "architectural vision", which is why he lost CVS write access to NetBSD in the first place.

It's amazing how Theo can whinge about his mistreatment in the exact fashion that caused them to punt his wish-fullfullment-sized ego to the curb in exactly the content he uses to say how badly he was mistreated, at http://www.theos.com/deraadt/c...

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[drinkypoo]

NetBSD is about being a reference platform for developing, and pushing the envelope on, networking technology (at the expense of only bothering to be guaranteed to run on a limited number of platforms and configurations).

Before Linux, Netbsd was THE distribution for running on weird platforms. Since Linux, Netbsd has no particular reason to exist. Linux runs on dramatically more hardware than netbsd now. Several ports have withered and died since Linux took on all the weird architectures.

Re: Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Dell's Force10 switch OS uses the NetBSD kernel.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

BSD Forked 4 ways - There's DragonflyBSD that's aimed at maximizing performance of the kernel.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Where does that leave PC-BSD?

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Awesome. A score 5 informative post which has only 33% accurate content. If your'e going to post "facts", please check them first. No excuse not to. After all you had to be on the Internet to post in the first place.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Software availability is better on FreeBSD than on the other BSDs, but there is less of everything than there is in Linux. I use Debian at home and run a lot of BSD variants inside virtualbox. FreeBSD has working guest-extensions, whereas for example, Dragonfly BSD does not.

W!

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Bengie]

PC-BSD is just a thin layer on top of FreeBSD. You can upgrade and downgrade FreeBSD to/from PC-BSD.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[laffer1]

4 ways? MirBSD and MidnightBSD made 6 and there have been several other forks.

Re:Then you're doing something wrong.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but MirBSD is a fork of OpenBSD, which is a fork of NetBSD... MidnightBSD forked from FreeBSD.

The real forks of the original BSD (from 4BSD variants, that is) are Mach OS, SunOS, Ultrix, 386BSD and BSD/386.

Well that didn't take long,

[dsmatthews9379]

for this thread to turn into a Dick Jousting Tournament.

If anyone has the time to take a break from their boneless appendage waving I'd like to know if there is a BSD equivalent of Turnkey Linux?

Re:Well that didn't take long,

[0100010001010011]

PC-BSD

Re:Well that didn't take long,

[Zontar The Mindless]

Here.

Looks like someone had the same idea as me

[Kryptonut]

https://slashdot.org/comments....

I suggested a similar thing when the GPL purists were getting ansy about Ubuntu planning to include ZFS support.

Re:UNIX for humans? Year of bsd on desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

You need to get stuff done and you care about freedom ... so ... why on earth would you consider OS X?

name wont last

[Anonymous Coward]

canonical is anal about their trademarks.

Is it at least systemd free?

[bobeil]

I would consider it if it does not have systemd.

Maybe ten years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Seriously, what's the purpose of this?

The "power" of BSD kernel? Is that the power of bad hardware support compared to Linux kernel? Is that the security which is lacking many things Linux had for years, like, oh say.... ASRL? (yea there's Hardened BSD but that ain't coming upstream for many years to come, not before FreeBSD 12)....

And ZFS? ZFS on Linux works just fine, in fact Ubuntu is making ZFS a first class citizen .... so why on earth would anyone want this?

Re: Maybe ten years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe, except CDDL is not compatible with GPL. So what do you mean by first class citizen?

Re: Maybe ten years ago

[Anonymous Coward]

I mean you can install it with apt without having to include third party PPA-s. It is also supported to boot from through initramfs. That kind of first class citizen, the one you don't have to script or fiddle with to get it working manually.

Re:UNIX for humans? Year of bsd on desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you wanted to get things done, you wouldn't use OS X, you'd use Windows. LOL!

Re:UNIX for humans? Year of bsd on desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

OS X isn't for humans, shitlord. It's for otherkin and those with multiple headmates (more than 2).

Just use PC-BSD instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Bah, although I’m for competition this has already been done (and quite well I might add) by PC-BSD. PC-BSD is FreeBSD for desktop use and it’s been around since 2006.

Re:Just use PC-BSD instead.

[Anonymous Coward]

Quite true. PCBSD has been known as the Ubuntu of BSD world. Complete with reinventing the Lumina wheel (like Unity was) and the package management wheel (like snappy will be).

BSD/Linux All subject to hardware

[tomxor]

The problem with any open source OS is that your experience with it can be highly subjective depending on the hardware. Many including myself have had the opposite experience to you and also mixed - all depending on hardware... The important thing is to not be an absolutist jerk based on purely your own anecdotal evidence like yourself and realise that the world is not that black and white.

I use both various Linux distros and FreeBSD, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, and they all work with mixed results on different hardware, one thing many people like about FreeBSD is the concept of a base system that's not excessively minimal, not bloated and builds easily... but for FreeBSD like any system that's not in the popular desktop spotlight - will have poor device support on systems like laptops, this only gets better with popularity, which is why Linux is usually a far easier experience once the basic system can run... For anyone who intends to use FreeBSD on a laptop and has bothered to visit the forums and device support page, they will know to choose hardware very carefully... or if sticking with existing and unideal hardware to be prepared to get stuck into messing around with drivers, just like Linux pre2000. My most recent experience with FreeBSD is on a 8 year old macbook pro, this machine has pretty terrible hardware and various linux distros i've tried on it are very unstable - oddly FreeBSD seems quite happy on it, but like I said device support sucks, so I have to mess with kernel modules and recompile to get little details like backlight control to work, luckily this process is actually quite a pleasant experience on FreeBSD... where as this would probably already be done for you on ubuntu.

ZFS on Ubuntu works fine

[akindo]

I ran Debian/kFreeBSD for a couple of years as it was the only/best way I could get ZFS support. But there were several packages I needed which weren't available, others outdated, and Ubuntu got native ZFS support (https://launchpad.net/~zfs-native/+archive/ubuntu/stable), so I switched to Ubuntu, and have been happier with that. However, standby mode on my Intel Atom MB hasn't worked with either distro. :(

Because FreeBSD is great for networking/storage

[Anonymous Coward]

As a desktop it is crap, yes, but FreeBSD is really good when used as a software router, or NAS. It often does better than Linux (network throughput as a router), or has better "shrink-wrap" packages (pfsense, freenas, etc).

You need to know what you are buying to run it on, though.

OpenBSD or noBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD is a half measure in my opinion. Linux fulfills the role of FreeBSD. If I'm going to suffer having to use BSD, I might as well get something for the trouble. At this time, the only attraction of any BSD is OpenBSD which has the best security and stability (think codebase).

Host on MSFT sirvers if ppl don't like Sorce Forge

[Anonymous Coward]

Ask Microsotf to host it on there sirvers if people don't like Sorce Forged site, cause they like open sauce now.

Why not just run FreeBSD?

[Anonymous Coward]

What does Ubuntu bring to it? Just a GUI?

Supermicro?

[Bruce Perens]

My Supermicro C7x99-oce-f doesn't support ECC, does support non-Xeon CPUs, the sound interface is from RealTek, and the Aspeed IPMI integrates a low-end display chip and its firmware doesn't handle having another display card in the system well.

It's sort of everything people in this thread say Supermicro isn't.

Re:Supermicro?

[MachineShedFred]

Every manufacturer makes their Ford Pinto eventually.

Look! A car analogy!

looking for information

[Anonymous Coward]

One thing I couldn't find is, that based on the article this is based on 15.10 which only gets support for 6 months. What happens after that does it upgrade to 16.04 base or is it unsupported at that point?

Who was the previous BSD designed for?

[kuzb]

If it wasn't for humans, was I using the version for robots all this?

Re:Who was the previous BSD designed for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Geeks. I guess humans are a broader class.

Re:Who was the previous BSD designed for?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, because we're simply not human, right?

BSD. Yawn. ZFS. Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

ZFS. What a yawn. Everyone thinks they need it, when obviously nearly nobody does. If you want to run BSD fine. But it's going nowhere, because there's only room for one *nix in the market, and the market made their choice 15 years ago.

Re:BSD. Yawn. ZFS. Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

...there's only room for one *nix in the market, and the market made their choice 15 years ago.

Yep. Linux & OS X!

Installing the Beta ISO in Vmware now

[Wolfrider]

--Setting up root on ZFS isn't exactly intuitive, not sure if I could duplicate what I ended up doing...

REF: http://www.tumfatig.net/201205...

--Basically I gave (sda is 15GB) sda1 300MB UFS /boot, sda2 700MB swap, and sda3 ZFS. When I hit "Configure ZFS", I named the default pool "zroot" and configured the Logical volume to have 100MB less than the default displayed size (IIRC.)

--When Selecting and Installing Software, I was able to use my local Squid proxy but the step kept bombing out. I ended up selecting the 1st option + OpenSSH + Minimal Xubuntu install to get it to work. (Had to skip Samba + Print server + Xubuntu desktop.)

--And now installing Grub has failed at "update-grub".

--Don't think this is ready for general release yet. And the distro REALLY needs a Forum where people can login and post.

--Unfortunately, having given kfreebsd a real shot for about 2 years a while back (installing it in a VM and contributing bug reports), I'm not really surprised by my results so far. I continue to hope for the best though, maybe eventually kfreebsd will get to be as stable as everything else but it needs a really dedicated development team (and maybe a paying sponsor.)

Re:Installing the Beta ISO in Vmware now

[Wolfrider]

--UPDATE: I rebooted the VM and ran the install again, deleted the ZFS config and redid it, proxy went OK (so I didn't waste a lot of bandwidth re-downloading packages) and did the same software selection (1st option, +SSH, +Minimal Xubuntu install) and this time Grub installed OK and I booted into the UbuntuBSD display manager.

Re:Installing the Beta ISO in Vmware now

[Wolfrider]

--1st impressions: Buggy desktop - hangs when I do Edit \ Prefences in the xfce4 Terminal or the XFCE Panel window, **no text virtual consoles** on screens 1-4... Only 1 virtual desktop by default?? Strange choice for X-windows...

+ installed pkgs joe mc screen netcat == OK

PROTIP: + Installing " lxde " display manager and running " lxrandr " to set the screen resolution seems to get around most of the bugginess so far. Also using LXTERMINAL instead of xfce's terminal.

+ Apt-get update/upgrade works with my proxy settings remembered from the install, which is nice. I was able to install Firefox web browser, but ' apt-file update ' doesn't do anything useful.

--If anyone wants a working Vmware VM of UbuntuBSD, feel free to email me.

Re:Installing the Beta ISO in Vmware now

[Wolfrider]

--UPDATE: The VM shit itself and wouldn't reboot after converting the disk from Flat to Growable. Reinstalled, this time with a UFS instead of ZFS root, and the 'zpool' command ISN'T EVEN AVAILABLE.

--Judgement: This is Alpha-level software, not suitable for general distribution yet. No real homepage for the distro except for Sourceforge and no support forum. AVOID unless you like frustration.