Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 3.4 released
On the networking front, the 'netgraph' code has been integrated, giving a much more modular networking framework, allowing arbitrary protocols and transports to be connected together. Amongst other things, this means that PPP over ISDN and PPP over ethernet now work. Many ISPs want to support PPP over ethernet now, and FreeBSD is ideal for this environment. The netgraph code was written and donated to the FreeBSD project by Whistle, and interested hackers can read more information about netgraph.
ISDN support has been improved, with an updated i4b(4) driver. Amongst other things, this adds support for more ISDN cards, including Asuscom ISDNlink 128K, AVM Fritz!Card PCI and PNP, and the Siemens I-Surf 2.0.
There have been security improvements across the board, including a new FreeBSD auditing project, to inspect the source code for potential problems, and fix them as necessary. ICMP redirects, outgoing RSTs, and incoming SYN|FIN frames can all be blocked, to negate certain DoS attacks, and the packet forwarding system can be configured to do so without decreasing the TTL, making gateways and firewalls much less visible, to list a few of the security related enhancements.
The Linux ABI has been improved, thanks to the efforts of Marcel Moolenaar. Linux versions of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament work flawlessly (and often faster) on FreeBSD, as do many other apps for which only Linux binaries are available.
As well as these, there have been the general plethora of fixes, updates, improvements to the documentation, and additions to the ports tree. There are currently more than 2,800 software ports available, from Apache, to Zope, which makes software installation that bit simpler for everyone.
FreeBSD 3.4 is available now.
ink.
;)
;)
"Those will come with the 4.0 release, later next year."
Not really "late" next year.. Q1 or Q2, depending.
Sysinstall is finally being replaced with something a little more modular. Expect to see X-based installs, just like Caldera and RedHat, as an option for users who don't care about the OS but are instead writing a magazine review
The second biggest change with sysinstall is that if one of the packages is interactive and prompts the user for a question about their mail relays or something else, when the progress meter on the first tty stops, the dialog will come up (For the weenies you don't realize you have to do Alt-F2, i watch _entire_ installs on that screen. Progress bars are for weenies)
Enough of that. I'm going to give sysinstall source a whirl.. dcs and jkh have been fighting over who does what next
-bugg
Does anyone know how the installation of FreeBSD is compared to Linux? Compared to lets say...hmm....RH6.1 (GUI) or RH6.0...also, does it support most of the same hardware?
Why should I change? (not a flame, just a serious question)
-Davidu
# Hack the planet, it's important.
Here's a few things you might be interested in:
Why Yahoo uses FreeBSD written by David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo
Booting Linux and FreeBSD using BootEasy
Booting Linux and FreeBSD using LILO
Linux+FreeBSD mini-HOWTO Excellent resource for installing and using FreeBSD and Linux on the same system
After Linux was announced officially supported the Linux RFE was obsoleted and now support for FreeBSD is the number one Request For Enhancement on Sun's Java Developer Connection!
Check out the Top 25 RFE's. (Free JDC membership requiered)
Markus
--
4.0-current is starting to look real cool. For the inside scoop, you should check out the -current mailing list archives at FreeBSD.org, but here are a few things:
The new sysinstall will have the CAPABILITY to support X installs. The talk on -current is all for having a fancy dancy configurator, but they don't want to leave the possiblity out. (The sysinstall that exists now is utterly horrible for changing, but it does a whole lot of stuff)
The ata driver is nearing completion and will replace the old wd driver. This means UDMA-66 support and other goodies.
Sound is being wrapped up into a new pcm driver, with support for most PCI sound cards, and work on the mmap support is improving.
A lot of drivers are being turned into KLDs, I'm able to load and unload nfs, msdos, vesa, various ethernet cards, USB (doesn't work too well yet), netgraph, cd9660, yadda yadda yadda.
I also here talk of after 4.0 FreeBSD will get a new ports/packages system. The ports tree is the best part of FreeBSD: cd /usr/ports/type/port && make install clean makes installing software hassle free. I don't know how it could get BETTER but that's what they're saying.
marotti.com
Hello,
;-)
.sample files, you have to manually choose what you want to start upon boot, and enable it yourself. Personally, I like this - especially for a home system. I don't necessarily want Apache running all the time, just when I need to test a website I've created.
I've been using FreeBSD for a few years now, along with most other OS's I can get my hands on.
Currently I have RedHat Linux 6.1 installed on one box, and FreeBSD 3.4-Stable on my gateway machine.
The simple answer is, very similar in most ways, but that really doesn't tell you much. I'll instead mention some of the most obvious differences.
First of all, unlike RedHat, FreeBSD doesn't install and enable everything under the sun. With FreeBSD, if you choose to install "everything", you still have to configure and then enable most added-value type daemons. This is both good & bad, depending upon the user and what they can handle. If you're used to having some sort of defaults set and Samba, Apache, AnonFTP, etc. all startup on your first boot - you may be frustrated that these aren't running the first boot into FreeBSD. Although base defaults are places in
The second difference, and most important to me, is FreeBSD's install lets you choose the base "distribution" you want (Developer, X-Developer, X-User, Minimal, Everything, etc.) BEFORE it fetches anything. This is really important to me since I install via FTP from the Internet. I just replaced RedHat 6.1 with FreeBSD 3.4 on my laptop. Since I have the full 3.4-Stable sources on my gateway machine, I only need a minimal install on the laptop. I can then NFS mount the gateway's fs and compile/install the complete system from there. This cuts down drastically the amount of transfers over my modem. When I installed the minimal RedHat distributing on my laptop it took quite a few hours to complete. FreeBSD was done with the minimal base in about 20 minutes. Then, since I had already compiled the updated source on my gateway, I just had to mount the NFS exports and do a "make installworld" - BAM! Complete install on my laptop within about an hour.
As for technical differences, Linux uses one entire "DOS" extended partition for it's further slicing into swap and fs points. With FreeBSD, this "DOS" partition is created as a primary, not extended. This makes it easier to delete if you're just playing with OS's, since a DOS diskette with fdisk on it can remove the FreeBSD partition. With Linux, you can't remove the extended partition because extended drives exist, but DOS can't read the extended drive, so you're SOL.
The init scripts are also completely different. Many folks may argue that System V scripts are better than BSD scripts, or vis versa. I don't particularly think either is better, they're simply different.
hmmm... Think that's the major things you'll notice right off the bat. The hardware support is pretty much the same, I rarely find a device that one can use and the other can't. Usually, it's either supported by both FreeBSD and Linux, or neither of them at all.
Good luck! Remember, new experiences are opportunities to learn and grow! I have used/still use about 15 different OS's. Most of them Unix or Unix-like variants. They all have strengths, they all have weaknesses, and they all are different in many ways. But then again, they are all mostly the same.
Michael.
I AM, therefore I THINK!
Efnet:
ùíù Topic (#freebsd): The 3.4-RELEASE ISO IS READ ONLY BECAUSE ITS FUCKED -- OK?
Currently ethernet supports *NO* kind of user authentication, never was designed to authenticate. This is bad, especially for cable modem users, because cable companies rely on ethernet to network their subscribers with. I dont have a cable modem (sigh), but I have heard that you can access any system on a cable network (if the system is not secure). Point Im trying to make here is that when you send a packet out across an ethernet network, its broadcast to EVERYBODY, and frankly I wouldn't want some script kiddie watch my activities online with a packet sniffer.
Now with PPP, not only do you have authentication, but IIRC it has the ability to route (not sure if thats the best word to describe it) data to specific IP addresses. Once your system is authenticated, the ISPs routers can send data to you and not everybody else, and data you send out is only sent to the router.
-- Word of the day: Percussive maintenance is the fine art of whacking the crap out of an electronic device to get it wo
Note that they said ISP's really want this. That leads me to believe that they really mean making servers running pppd answer connections over ethernet instead of serial lines, so maybe they can hook up modem pools/terminal servers to their LAN infrastructure, instead of directly connecting them to a whole bunch of serial ports. This especially makes sense when talking about DSL and cable modem services - I'm sure that Cisco, Lucent et al. are soon/now shipping what amount to gateways between Fast/Gigabit Ethernet and DSL/Cable. Disclaimer - I don't work at an ISP so maybe I don't know what the hell I'm talking about ;-). But I do work at TI which churns out a lot of the DSL & cable modem chips (see e.g. www.ti.com), so maybe I do....
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
#include "disclaim.h"
"All the best people in life seem to like LINUX." - Steve Wozniak
From inetd.conf on my OpenBSD 2.6 laptop (recently installed, not yet tweaked):
#telnet stream tcp nowait root ...
Your other points, however, are well taken. Most open source OSen can be made as secure or as insecure as the admin is capable of. In the case of OpenBSD, it simply takes less effort since the emphasis is on security, whereas other OSen seem to be focused on ``gee whiz, look what I can do'' out of the box.
Think about all the fascinating socal factors involved. Who is drawn to irc? Who becomes a regular there? How is pecking order determined? How is it preserved? How does a community age? How does an established power or prestige structure react to new members in that community? How does the lack of face-to-face contact change interactions? Does communication suffer, or is it smoothed? Are we quicker to show kindness if the other person is a person, not lines of type? Are we quicker to do casual harm if all there is on the other side is a line of type? How do we perceive the "us" and "them"? Are strangers always "them", and if not, which ones are "us"? Does the speed of feedback change any of this? What behaviours produce positive reinforcement, what behaviours negative ones? How does the overall friendliness of the group change with time? Do members come and go randomly, or are their entrenched figures? How well do these group dynamics scale as membership increases? Are there regular patterns of behavior that occur only in specific sorts of groups but not in others? Is it long-term helpful to give individual attention to each newcomer's duplicate questions rather than creating a FAQ? What differences and similaries in communications can be found between mailing lists, newsgroups, IRC, and Slashdot? Are these different than the group dynamics you find in a real-time live club devoted to a common interest that meets regularly, or from what you'd find in an informal bunch of pals hanging out at there favorite pub? Is Slashdot really something of a time-delayed webchat?
There's a very interesting paper or three waiting for some budding sociologist to write about interactions in the hacker community's electronic forums.
Guess what? The similarities so far outweigh the differences as to render these latter wholly inconsequential. Quite obviously, here we are at most speaking variant dialects of the same common language called Unix, not completely different languages.
Right now you would have to compare two boxes with the same RIVA or 3dfx card each to test for OS specific differences.
Having worked for Yahoo! for several months, I have the following points to make about their usage of FreeBSD:
David Filo tried an early version of Linux (a Slackware distro I beleive), but didn't have much success in getting it installed. The legend at Yahoo! is that a copy of FreeBSD was passed onto him, and he only gave it a try because it installed first time. A slightly dubious reason for choosing one OS over another, but at the time FreeBSD was certainly more mature than Linux.
Yahoo! use large numbers of uniprocessor machines with each HTTP request marshalled out on a round-robin basis. When the load gets too great, it's simply a case of adding more machines and tweaking the boxes that assign requests. This approach was taken because multiprocessor setups are that much less reliable.
My experience of FreeBSD was that it makes a fantastic server OS, but version 2.2.* didn't cut it as a desktop platform. I have a copy of 3.3 sitting in my desk drawer and I'm keen to see what's changed from a workstation user's perspective, so don't flame me about using an old version.
My major gripe with FreeBSD is that upgrading can be a pain. The ports and packages collection is not the panacea that many FreeBSD users seem to believe. My hard drive soon became full of half-working applications, with little or no control over what was being installed and where.
This may have been an issue with running FreeBSD 2.2.8 when version 3.1 was already available, but the ports and packages I tried came from the 2.2.* branch. Now that I've left Yahoo! I'm back to using Linux on the desktop, and NetBSD on my Sun servers.
There is undeniably an elitism amongst FreeBSD users that I neither liked nor could I understand. One of the regular complaints I heard was that Linux installation and configuration tools were uneccessary bloat. Well, I can hand edit a kernel config file on both Linux and FreeBSD as well as the next guru, but I'd much rather use 'make menuconfig'. This kind of carping was sheer elitism, and underlined that a sea change in FreeBSD users attitudes was required (if not in that of the developers). Otherwise, the OS would become nothing more than a *tiny* niche platform. With the alternative installation programs touted for version 4.0, it looks like this change is coming.
Chris Wareham
It's remarkable how much "technical competence" or "discerning professional judgment" gets branded as élitism. In fact, current usages of "élite", "élitist", and "élistism" are just part of the whole dumbing-down of America theme. Or, if you would, part of the supreme dominance of uninformed consumerism and the mass media's manipulations.
It is not "élitist" to prefer food that doesn't suck, or cars that don't break down, or software that doesn't crash. It is not "élitist" to want a clean, digital CD instead of a scratchy phonograph disc. It is not "élitist" to ask for a senior surgeon instead of an intern. It is not "élitist" to prefer BSD over CP/M.
In short, pay very careful every time you see someone using terms like "élite", "élitist", and "élistism". In almost every case, what you're seeing is a form of bigotry and prejudice that's bashing someone with a politically correct putdown that Joe Bubba can lend his cheerlead to. But it's still a disrespectful and facile insult.
This tred is subtly but seriously dangerous, and it's not just in our schools that it's happening. In recent years, the country as a whole as come to extoll the stupid, the dumb, the intellectually challenged if you would. There is no excellence, no pride, no "going the extra mile". To pretend that everyone is the same, that we are all no different in what we know or *can* know or what we do or *can* do, whether it be from training or education or intelligence or energy or motivation, is a damned lie.
So don't grab a nice little trendy buzzterm like "élitism" and bash down technical and professional competence, any individuality or drive or vision--any personal flare. By condesendingly scoffing at élitism, you're just furthering our current national hobby the Dumbing of America.
(And don't worry, you folks outside of America. Your time, too, is coming.)
Dare we ask for a bit of professional knowledge?
Yes, but the FreeBSD attitude I encountered was along the lines of ``Why make it easy'' or ``If it is easy it must be crap''. As I noted, I can configure my networking with route and friends. I can configure my kernel by editing a commented text file. But this shouldn't preclude the inclusion of simple to use tools, or make me any less of a `power user' if I use them. Your whole comment just reeks of elitism, and that isn't anything to be proud of. Most people are elitist because they're insecure, not particlularily good in their field. That's why I refrained from lumping FreeBSD's maintainers with the users.
I agree that a trend towards not teaching complex computer subjects is dangerous. I was taught assembler, but program in C or Objective C. My point is that knowing assembler makes my code in C slightly more optimal, but I'm not going to code in assembler if I can avoid it. Perl is often touted as a language that non computer-scientists can benefit from - it gets the job done without necessarily requiring knowledge of what's going on in the guts of the machine. Are you saying that all those people who aren't programmers by trade, yet use Perl for the odd hack should be sneered at? It certainly looks that way judging by your post.
Having most likely burnt my bridges I'll leave it at that.
Chris Wareham
As for Perl, I strongly resent its mention in every article that addresses me. I would also appreciate it if you would avoid putting words into my mouth I never said.
For a server OS I require a system I can remotely administer and depend on not to crash. FreeBSD suits this purpose very well. I have historically worked for companies with remote (think on the other side of the world, or next continent) server farms. Developing on those machines was either painfull, or out of the question because they were production machines. This meant I needed a desktop system that I could use for development. As I'm often the person evaluating new software (entire packages or simply upgrades), root access to a machine that no one else depended on was also essential.
...
For the desktop I require something that I can rapidly upgrade and has a wealth of niceties. The typical Linux distro comes with a massive amount of software, and something like RPM make upgrading a doddle.
I found FreeBSD performed poorly on low end hardware, something that Linux excels at. The libraries on FreeBSD 2.2.8 were odd - they deprecated BSD system calls that I had been used to on SunOS. I had much more success coding on the more SVR4 like Linux, and then compiling on FreeBSD for production purposes.
Arguably, you could consider Windows as a good desktop OS. It has lots of simple toys, and you can telnet to your development box. Run an X server and it's like you're on a Unix workstation. The flaw with this logic is if you're developing for a Unix OS, why not run one? This is why I always replace NT with Linux when I arrive at a new contract.
To conclude, I'm not knocking FreeBSD. It is a fine OS, and if you're from a BSD background (as opposed to a System V one) it makes the logical choice. My *personal* choice is Linux for the desktop, and my posts state my *personal* issues with FreeBSD in that environment. And with version 4.0 it looks like most of these will disappear.
As simple as that
Chris Wareham
The common intpretation of `elitism' is as a pejorative. This could be attributed to a fear of ones peers, but at the close of the twentieth century I link it to something else. Elitism - a belief that something is better than something else - has been one of the most destructive forces in this century. Look at Nazism, Social Darwinism or the Khmer Rouge. Elitism has been adopted as a term for paternal or downright oppressive ideas.
I'm impressed that you still associate it with it's original dictionary meaning, but that doesn't stop others interpreting it differently. The English language evolves, and todays slang will be part of tomorrows codified language. I'm particularily aware of this as a learnt Finnish at university. The codified language is overseen by a government body, and all loan words (foreign words adopted into Finnish) are closely scrutinised. This has lead to a dialect that reflects a certain section of Finnish at best. In fact, no one speaks the language as it is in the dictionary.
The same is true of English. In the UK we have societies that campaign for the `Queen's English', an illusory dialect that scoffs at slang or regional pronunciation. This is `elitist' as in the popular definition of the word, and tries to stop the spoken language evolving.
Some of this is evident in the way ``old school'' Unix people look at Linux and projects like GNOME/KDE. It simply masks their fear of the new, just as Nazism often masked the German middle classes fear of the future.
This is why many people suspect FreeBSD bigots are clinging onto an antiquated set of tools, API's and configuration methods. This attitude is clearly not evident in the FreeBSD developers - but then what incentive is there in maintaining the statis quo?
Chris Wareham
...and, presumably, gets, or can be told to get, them for you. (FreeBSD pkg_add does that, at least when run with the -r flag to fetch stuff over the Internet - I've not run it in any other mode; I don't know whether the packaging systems in the other BSDs do so, but they might.)
Which packaging systems, if any, keep track of which installed packages are needed by which other installed packages, so that, at minimum, they can tell you "careful, package XXX depends on that" if you try to un-install some package and, potentially, will automatically uninstall any package if it wasn't explicitly installed and if the last package that caused it to be installed as a dependency has been uninstalled?
Why has nearly every BSD story a "Linux link" at the top of the "Related Links" section?
How does Linux relate to this FreeBSD release?
I don't see any BSD links in Linux stories...
Please explain!
What graphics cards are they equipped with?
In case of Matrox G200/G400 you can try to build a recent glx version from openprojects.net yourself, as it is more advanced in respect to these cards than the version I based the FreeBSD port on. (Lack of a Matrox card and end-of-year-project-craze has prevented me from updating it yet).
Then there seems to be some sort of AGP support added to Linux in the meantime. Don't how know much impact it has there, however.
Something relevant to the Slashdot article? Well what could one say beyond ``nice new features and bugfixes''. Relevant to the Yahoo! FreeBSD advocacy? Well, I think I illuminate the reason why Yahoo! use it.
As for my general comments on FreeBSD, I gained all my experience of FreeBSD (as opposed to NetBSD and pre-Solaris SunOS) while at Yahoo!.
Do you see the relevancy there? The logical flow of commentary? Maybe not - in which case I'll just point out that this is Slashdot, and any reasoned comments are a godsend compared to the Natalie Portman or gritsboy posters.
Or maybe you're just bitter that I can see faults in FreeBSD. Well, rest assured I can see the flaws in all the operating systems I use, so unfortunately for you I can't be labeled a Linux/Solaris/whatever bigot.
But there's the rub, had this been an article on a new Linux distro that I use, I may have been posting critiques of Linux. There's your relevancy.
Chris Wareham