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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.

4 of 219 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Why would anyone want this? by Bruce+Perens · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  2. Re:Why would anyone want this? by DNS-and-BIND · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    --
    Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
  3. Re:Why would anyone want this? by drinkypoo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

    --
    "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
  4. Re: Hosted On SourceForce? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    So, last month?