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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.
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
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!
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.
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.)