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UbuntuBSD Is Looking To Become An Official Ubuntu Flavor (softpedia.com)

prisoninmate quotes a report from Softpedia: UbuntuBSD maintainer and lead developer Jon Boden is now looking for a way for his operating system to contribute to the Ubuntu community and, eventually, become an official Ubuntu flavor. Just two weeks ago, [Softpedia] introduced the ubuntuBSD project, whose main design goal is to bring users an operating system powered by the FreeBSD kernel while offering them the familiarity of the Ubuntu Linux OS. Right now, ubuntuBSD is in heavy development, with a fourth Beta build out the door, and it looks like the developer already seeks official status and wants to contribute all of his work to the main Ubuntu channels. [Canonical has yet to respond.]

5 of 117 comments (clear)

  1. BSD is NOT LINUX! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Informative

    Please get it through your head wannabe Linux distro-devs , BSD is not Linux! Please stop attempting to fracture the BSD community with hundreds of distros!

    If you want a easy desktop system, put your development efforts into improving PCBSD not UbuntuBSD.
    If you want Arch pacman or Gentoo ports (don't know the name), it's mostly already covered by FreeBSD pkg and ports respectively. If you don't like them, just write new package managers for FreeBSD, there is no need for ArchBSD or GentooBSD.
    If you want an outdated GPL userland, just install outdated GPL userland stuff on your system, there is no need for DebianBSD.

    In the past the BSD community generally only split when it had good reason. If you're not rolling your own kernel or there isn't a commercial implementation of your new "distro" then you probably shouldn't do it. Go play with Linux.

    What are these "good reasons?"
    FreeBSD forked off of 386BSD when it died.
    NetBSD forked off of 386BSD focused on multi-architecture support.
    DragonFlyBSD forked off FreeBSD due to threading implementation.
    OpenBSD forked off NetBSD to focus on heavy security.

    These "Big 4" are completely different OS's, they all have their own kernel, they all have their own userland. They do share a lot, but they're not the same OS's.

    Then you have Open Source Commercial OS. All of these are based off FreeBSD.
    PC-BSD - iXsystems desktop OS.
    FreeNAS - iXsystems NAS OS.
    PFSense - Electric Sheep Fencing firewall OS.

    And there are probably more that would go into that category.

    If you don't fit into either slot. (New OS or Commerical) you probably should contribute to existing platform than searching for your pointless personal glory of being a distro maintainer.

  2. Re: Debugging a proprietary plug-in by Billly+Gates · · Score: 1, Informative

    An ABI like every other OS on the planet has. rMS hates them for theological reasons as they encourage closed hardware.

    My argument is patent agreements and contracts forbid this! A company cannot.

    If Linux did this it would be more successful

  3. Re:ROTFL @ server OS == Windows by Xabraxas · · Score: 5, Informative

    Windows IS a desktop OS, not a network OS. Notice it's not usable except by clicking desktop icons?

    Not true. Sure Powershell sucks but it is available.

    A server OS doesn't require rebooting every week or every month

    Seriously? This isn't 1999. I have Windows Servers up for much longer than that.

    A server OS can handle hotswap hardware. I swap drives regularly, and we've even hotswapped a CPU

    The only thing most people need to hotswap in a server are disks and that is easily done in Windows

    A server OS has mandatory access control.

    Windows has this.

    the bottom line is that Windows is a very successful desktop operating system. One originally developed as a user-friendly shell for Disk Operating System

    You really are working off of pre-2000 Windows knowledge. Current Windows implementations are not at all based on DOS despite their similarity to earlier Windows systems. What bothers me the most is that I'm a Linux guy and you're making me defend Windows because you can't just say things that are not true.

    --
    Time makes more converts than reason
  4. Re:You ever tasted Ubunti? by darthsilun · · Score: 4, Informative

    FreeBSD, which is more of a server OS

    Servers like Sony's PS3 (Vita OS) and PS4 (Orbis OS), both of which are based on FreeBSD?

    Most who install Ubuntu expect to have their devices ans [sic] peripherals running after install.

    Citation Needed!

    You know what? Linux isn't all rainbows and unicorns. A recent update to the Fedora kernel broke my dual monitor setup. Yes, the kernel. Reverting to an earlier kernel with no other changes restored my dual monitors. Gnome 3 Desktop has routine breakage. Yeah, don't tell me that Fedora isn't Ubuntu, I already know that.

    Part of the difference might be that there are actual companies selling Linux. Companies with lawyers, who can approve NDAs, that allow kernel developers to get early access to new devices, so Linux tends to get support for new stuff earlier. *BSD's kernel developers may not always have that kind of luxury.

    I've used FreeBSD since the beginning, and 386BSD before that. I've never had bleeding edge hardware and I've never had a problem with FreeBSD supporting my hardware.

  5. Re:ROTFL @ server OS == Windows by raymorris · · Score: 1, Informative

    >I have Windows Servers up for much longer than that.

    Two words: patch Tuesday. Server systems aren't systems designed to need rebooting two or three times just because it's Tuesday.

    >> server OS can handle hotswap hardware. I swap drives regularly, and we've even hotswapped a CPU

    > The only thing most people need to hotswap in a server are disks

    As long as nothing ever goes wrong, no hardware ever fails, the system won't crash. That's typical desktop. Systems built for server use stay up as you hotswap failed parts or parts throwing warnings.

    >> A server OS has mandatory access control.

    > Windows has this.

    No, Windows is based on discretionary access control, DAC, not MAC. DAC is the 1960s approach. Nobody uses it ,but Windows also has a silly little system they call MIC. It's an even more limited version of DAC in that it's based on levels. Any program run by any higher-level user can do anything to any file.

    With mandatory access control, access is predefined saying which program has which kind of access to which objects, in which contexts. Linux has a couple of options for MAC; SELinux is the default for most distributions.