Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
symbol versioning, TLS, non-sucky threading support, RTLD_NEXT, dlinfo() etc etc
NetBSD supports symbol versioning, which is a feature of the linker rather than the C library. If by TLS, you mean Transport Layer Security, then that's also supported by NetBSD and is again not a feature of the C library. Non sucky threading support? How about POSIX threads based on NetBSD's highly efficient scheduler activations implementation? Support for RTLD_NEXT and friends was added almost a year ago, which leaves dlinfo.
glibc also does a lot more than the BSDs libcs, which are generally rather poor in terms of features, portability and so on.
Could you point me in the direction of the "lot more" that glibc does over NetBSD's libc? The only things I can find are a couple of esoteric functions that aren't part of the ANSI C library or POSIX standards. Given that most open source software is written for Linux, then I would expect considerable portability problems when attempting to compile that code on NetBSD if, as you claim, glibc offered so many more features. The fact is that complex applications like OpenOffice and Mozilla compile with few changes, motsly related to grey areas in POSIX threads implementations.
As for glibc being more portable than NetBSD's libc, that's completely untrue. Glibc is used by Linux and the imcomplete GNU Hurd. The libc in use on the BSD's has been ported to more platforms than Linux, and is widely used in academia because of its legibility and emphasis on correctness over over engineered, buggy optimisations.
I have a 1.2Ghz, 256Mb laptop running NetBSD and GNOME 2.6 which is blazingly fast. Looking at top, it's using around 150Mb to run a GNOME login, Firebird, Rxvt and the NEdit editor.
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
Linux used to be great on lower spec hardware than Windows, but since 2.4 it has become bloated and slow. Glibc is also an incredibly bloated implementation of a C library if compared to those that ship with BSD's. The kernel bloat could be a result of the extra complexity ti run on mid-range, multi processor machines. Glibc's excuse is somewhat less easy to pin down.
AFAIK Saddams poison gas ("insecticide") factories were built by French and German companies.
Large quantities of industrial plant were also supplied by Italy, I don't have a reference to hand but I recall it was related to atomic research. Iraqi front companies also approached ICI in the UK, but despite approval from the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), ICI pulled out of a deal to provide chemical plant because of concerns over what its real use would be.
The important point is that the US intelligence must have known about such highly visible sales of equipment to Iraq, but did not press the German and French authorities to stop the sales going ahead. This is despite the fact that much of the plant was unsuitable for making fertiliser, which was the official Iraqi purpose it was to be used for. This unsuitablity was what got senior people at ICI concerned. The chemicals that the Iraqis were proposing to manufacture were either inappropriate or banned for use as fertiliser.
However, the chemicals were key ingredients in weapons that were used in the Iran - Iraq war, as well as against the Kurds within Iraq itself. Additional chemical precursors were supplied by the United States, and this leaves a lingering suspicion that all this was sanctioned at a high level in US intelligence at least.
I recently finished CCNA training and asked the instructor what OS CiscoIOS was based on and I was told it's based on BSD OS. He didn't tell me which BSD though....
It's descended from the Unix related work done at Berkeley in the early 1980's. I can't find a suitable link at the moment, but from what I remember there was some controversy about the commercialisation of the code. Much of the work was while the future Cisco founders were still employed at the university. This meant it should have belonged to the Regents, and released under a BSD license. If so, then it's ironic that the code is in the public domain, albeit under dubious circumstances.
It's OK, the code will probably be covered by the BSDi settlement. After all, Cisco's software is descended from code written at Berkeley and then commercialised by ex-university staff.
PDF was designed as an essentially "write once" format. The Word format isn't wonderful, but its main problem is the lack of a complete description of it (outside of MicroSoft at any rate). RTF was a good attempt at a more open format, but how many typical users know it exists let laone use it?
I suspect that most didn't receive an education beyond what we consider 6th grade.
You'd most likely be wrong. My girlfriend is Sicilian, and nearly all her classmates from school went onto University. Education is pretty good in Italy, with much less emphasis on learning by rote than in the UK. Surprising when you consider how strong the Catholic church still is in Southern Italy, a church that's noted for its teaching via catechism.
Because some US firms would love the European Union to adopt US patent policy to cover the EU states. This is what MicroSoft are trying to encourage as a workaround to the recent EU anti-monopoly ruling. The ill-informed EU representatives in Brussels have already voted through some appalling legislation in relation to patents and the like, so MicroSoft are possibly going to get their way.
It's strange that using DHCP doesn't update your/etc/resolv.conf file. The default configuration does just that on my i386, Sparc, Vax and NeXT machines. Do you have a custom/etc/dhclient.conf? If so, then something in there may be inhibiting the DHCP client from updating your resolver file.
As for DHCP "just working" during the install, have you tried enabling the network from the utility menu of the installer? If you do a network install, then you are automatically prompted to setup the network. If you do a CD install, then you have to go into the utility menu and do it yourself prior to installing. Then when you finish the install you will be prompted whether you want to save the network configuration.
I update my laptop once a month by downloading the tar files from the i386/binary/sets directory, and then using the install floppies from the i386/installation/floppy directory. Alternatively, making a bootable CD from the releng snapshots is very easy as this page explains.
Not sure what your getting at. I assume you're talking about comparisons between Scheduler Activations and the plethora of scheduler algorithms available for Linux. NetBSD's SA is not a conventional scheduler in the "new, expermental one every week" Linux sense. They are a sophisticated system that allows layering of higher level abstractions like POSIX threads.
The mailing lists for NetBSD and FreeBSD are excellent. The OpenBSD ones tend to get cluttered up with spam, as the list admins (if they exist) seem to be a bit lax.
If only there were a native pkg for OpenOffice (recent - the earlier port did not work at all under -current for me).
The Linux binary package of OpenOffice runs perfectly on my laptop, as does the Linux version of Sun's JDK 1.4.2_04. If you've not tried running stuff under Linux emulation before, then give it a whirl. I run Java and the NetBeans IDE on a 256Mb NetBSD laptop where it is totally usable. On my desktop machine (same RAM, similar CPU), it crawls under Linux.
In short, Linux emulation under NetBSD seems to be far more resource friendly than running native under Linux. Performance isn't noticably different, and anecdotal evidence suggests it's actually faster.
There's a good chance it does work with your USB wifi adapter. I don't own any myself, but I've noticed plenty of discussions about them on the NetBSD mailing lists (mostly people adding quirks for more esoteric devices from what I recall).
There should be a list of supported devices on the NetBSD website, although stuff that's only in -current may not be listed yet. If so, then you could either take a look at the GENERIC kernel config file, or ask on one of the excellent mailing lists.
I've been running NetBSD -current (a bit like running Debian unstable for all you Linux types) since a little before the scheduler activations were merged in last year. I'd stuck with stable releases before that, but switched as -current got around some quirks in my oddball laptop that stable didn't.
My intial experiences with scheduler activations (which has a pthread compatible library layered on top of it), were a bit disappointing. Complex applications like Mozilla and some other desktop applications broke, as they relied on less than POSIX compliant features in certain other OS'es. Once those wrinkles were ironed out, -current became as rock solid as the stable releases.
The only thing NetBSD lacks once 2.0 is released is an ALSA compatability layer. Having read the scant, poorly written documentation on the ALSA website I'm at a loss to see what it really has that OSS doesn't, but that seems to be what Linux based MIDI and audio apps are migrating to.
I'm currently tinkering with a 1040 STe running TOS. It's a great machine for learning the fundamentals of computers - 68000 assembler, good documentation on the raw hardware and copious amounts of software on the net.
What let the ST down somewhat, was the poor quality mouse and keyboard. Despite this, it still compared favourably to the Amiga A500, which was a technically superior machine - but horrendously unstable.
Customs can insist on seeing a receipt for anything you bring back into the country. The easiest way to piss them off and encourage them to use this rule to the full is to play difficult with them.
NetBSD and OpenBSD fit the niche of embedded products, AP's, firewalls, home gateways, etc
Correct, but that doesn't mean that Net (haven't used Open since 2.6) can't be used as a good desktop OS. The machine I am typing this on dual boots NetBSD -current and Fedora Core 1. I do a mixture of C, C++ and Jva development on it, and one thing I immediately noticed was how NetBSD performs much more responsively than Linux. For instance, running NetBeans and the (Linux emulated) JDK on NetBSD requires 256Mb to be usable. Running Linux, it requires 512Mb.
Linux seems to be gaining high end server features and tuning at the expense of desktop usability. NetBSD may not be the optimal OS for a quad Xeon server box, but right now it is my preferred choice for a uniprocessor desktop machine (even mine, with a hyperthreading Pentium 4).
Add to that the fact that a BSD system will not automatically upgrade your/etc, then you have the best reasons that say, a Debian box is easier to maintain.
Your BSD is clearly not my BSD, or else you'd know about etcupdate. Having discovered first hand the "joy" of Debian's installer and lack of backwards compatability between releases, I think I'll steer clear of it.
I'm not sure with Open and Net haven't imported it [mergemaster] yet
NetBSD has etcupdate, although I've never used it myself, as upgrades rarely touch the files in/etc that I modify. That's the beauty of NetBSD upgrades, the developers are very careful about backwards compatability. I could even run 4.3BSD binaries if I wanted to (not that I would), by enabling the correct system call compatability in the kernel.
If the band folds, and you find yourself looking for another IT job, then just lie. Ensure that you have a couple of good references from former employers, and then adjust your CV to cover the period you were doing band stuff.
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Do any of the other BSDs lack SMP support in this day and age?
NetBSD has had SMP support for some time, and it is now working on a number of platforms (sparc, i386, etc). It's largely been the work of Bill Studenmund, and also formed the basis of OpenBSD's SMP support. This kind of sharing is quite common amongst the BSD's, especially Open and Net.
Chris
symbol versioning, TLS, non-sucky threading support, RTLD_NEXT, dlinfo() etc etc
NetBSD supports symbol versioning, which is a feature of the linker rather than the C library. If by TLS, you mean Transport Layer Security, then that's also supported by NetBSD and is again not a feature of the C library. Non sucky threading support? How about POSIX threads based on NetBSD's highly efficient scheduler activations implementation? Support for RTLD_NEXT and friends was added almost a year ago, which leaves dlinfo.
Chris
glibc also does a lot more than the BSDs libcs, which are generally rather poor in terms of features, portability and so on.
Could you point me in the direction of the "lot more" that glibc does over NetBSD's libc? The only things I can find are a couple of esoteric functions that aren't part of the ANSI C library or POSIX standards. Given that most open source software is written for Linux, then I would expect considerable portability problems when attempting to compile that code on NetBSD if, as you claim, glibc offered so many more features. The fact is that complex applications like OpenOffice and Mozilla compile with few changes, motsly related to grey areas in POSIX threads implementations.
As for glibc being more portable than NetBSD's libc, that's completely untrue. Glibc is used by Linux and the imcomplete GNU Hurd. The libc in use on the BSD's has been ported to more platforms than Linux, and is widely used in academia because of its legibility and emphasis on correctness over over engineered, buggy optimisations.
Chris
I have a 1.2Ghz, 256Mb laptop running NetBSD and GNOME 2.6 which is blazingly fast. Looking at top, it's using around 150Mb to run a GNOME login, Firebird, Rxvt and the NEdit editor.
In comparison, my 1.6Ghz, 512Mb desktop machine running Linux and GNOME 2.6 is noticably slower. The memory footprint with a similar list of apps running (Mozilla instead of Firebird) is around 400Mb.
Linux used to be great on lower spec hardware than Windows, but since 2.4 it has become bloated and slow. Glibc is also an incredibly bloated implementation of a C library if compared to those that ship with BSD's. The kernel bloat could be a result of the extra complexity ti run on mid-range, multi processor machines. Glibc's excuse is somewhat less easy to pin down.
Chris
AFAIK Saddams poison gas ("insecticide") factories were built by French and German companies.
Large quantities of industrial plant were also supplied by Italy, I don't have a reference to hand but I recall it was related to atomic research. Iraqi front companies also approached ICI in the UK, but despite approval from the DTI (Department of Trade and Industry), ICI pulled out of a deal to provide chemical plant because of concerns over what its real use would be.
The important point is that the US intelligence must have known about such highly visible sales of equipment to Iraq, but did not press the German and French authorities to stop the sales going ahead. This is despite the fact that much of the plant was unsuitable for making fertiliser, which was the official Iraqi purpose it was to be used for. This unsuitablity was what got senior people at ICI concerned. The chemicals that the Iraqis were proposing to manufacture were either inappropriate or banned for use as fertiliser.
However, the chemicals were key ingredients in weapons that were used in the Iran - Iraq war, as well as against the Kurds within Iraq itself. Additional chemical precursors were supplied by the United States, and this leaves a lingering suspicion that all this was sanctioned at a high level in US intelligence at least.
Chris
Anyone can put together a bunch of seemingly well-written code
Many "professional" programmers can't, not at my company at least.
Chris
I recently finished CCNA training and asked the instructor what OS CiscoIOS was based on and I was told it's based on BSD OS. He didn't tell me which BSD though....
It's descended from the Unix related work done at Berkeley in the early 1980's. I can't find a suitable link at the moment, but from what I remember there was some controversy about the commercialisation of the code. Much of the work was while the future Cisco founders were still employed at the university. This meant it should have belonged to the Regents, and released under a BSD license. If so, then it's ironic that the code is in the public domain, albeit under dubious circumstances.
Chris
It's OK, the code will probably be covered by the BSDi settlement. After all, Cisco's software is descended from code written at Berkeley and then commercialised by ex-university staff.
Chris
Someone should target .pdf
PDF was designed as an essentially "write once" format. The Word format isn't wonderful, but its main problem is the lack of a complete description of it (outside of MicroSoft at any rate). RTF was a good attempt at a more open format, but how many typical users know it exists let laone use it?
Chris
I suspect that most didn't receive an education beyond what we consider 6th grade.
You'd most likely be wrong. My girlfriend is Sicilian, and nearly all her classmates from school went onto University. Education is pretty good in Italy, with much less emphasis on learning by rote than in the UK. Surprising when you consider how strong the Catholic church still is in Southern Italy, a church that's noted for its teaching via catechism.
Chris
Why would Europeans be concerned with US patents?
Because some US firms would love the European Union to adopt US patent policy to cover the EU states. This is what MicroSoft are trying to encourage as a workaround to the recent EU anti-monopoly ruling. The ill-informed EU representatives in Brussels have already voted through some appalling legislation in relation to patents and the like, so MicroSoft are possibly going to get their way.
Chris
It's strange that using DHCP doesn't update your /etc/resolv.conf file. The default configuration does just that on my i386, Sparc, Vax and NeXT machines. Do you have a custom /etc/dhclient.conf? If so, then something in there may be inhibiting the DHCP client from updating your resolver file.
As for DHCP "just working" during the install, have you tried enabling the network from the utility menu of the installer? If you do a network install, then you are automatically prompted to setup the network. If you do a CD install, then you have to go into the utility menu and do it yourself prior to installing. Then when you finish the install you will be prompted whether you want to save the network configuration.
Chris
You could always download daily snapshots from the release engineering server:
releng.netbsd.org
I update my laptop once a month by downloading the tar files from the i386/binary/sets directory, and then using the install floppies from the i386/installation/floppy directory. Alternatively, making a bootable CD from the releng snapshots is very easy as this page explains.
Chris
Not sure what your getting at. I assume you're talking about comparisons between Scheduler Activations and the plethora of scheduler algorithms available for Linux. NetBSD's SA is not a conventional scheduler in the "new, expermental one every week" Linux sense. They are a sophisticated system that allows layering of higher level abstractions like POSIX threads.
Chris
What other forums are available to BSD users?
The mailing lists for NetBSD and FreeBSD are excellent. The OpenBSD ones tend to get cluttered up with spam, as the list admins (if they exist) seem to be a bit lax.
Chris
If only there were a native pkg for OpenOffice (recent - the earlier port did not work at all under -current for me).
The Linux binary package of OpenOffice runs perfectly on my laptop, as does the Linux version of Sun's JDK 1.4.2_04. If you've not tried running stuff under Linux emulation before, then give it a whirl. I run Java and the NetBeans IDE on a 256Mb NetBSD laptop where it is totally usable. On my desktop machine (same RAM, similar CPU), it crawls under Linux.
In short, Linux emulation under NetBSD seems to be far more resource friendly than running native under Linux. Performance isn't noticably different, and anecdotal evidence suggests it's actually faster.
Chris
There's a good chance it does work with your USB wifi adapter. I don't own any myself, but I've noticed plenty of discussions about them on the NetBSD mailing lists (mostly people adding quirks for more esoteric devices from what I recall).
There should be a list of supported devices on the NetBSD website, although stuff that's only in -current may not be listed yet. If so, then you could either take a look at the GENERIC kernel config file, or ask on one of the excellent mailing lists.
Chris
I've been running NetBSD -current (a bit like running Debian unstable for all you Linux types) since a little before the scheduler activations were merged in last year. I'd stuck with stable releases before that, but switched as -current got around some quirks in my oddball laptop that stable didn't.
My intial experiences with scheduler activations (which has a pthread compatible library layered on top of it), were a bit disappointing. Complex applications like Mozilla and some other desktop applications broke, as they relied on less than POSIX compliant features in certain other OS'es. Once those wrinkles were ironed out, -current became as rock solid as the stable releases.
The only thing NetBSD lacks once 2.0 is released is an ALSA compatability layer. Having read the scant, poorly written documentation on the ALSA website I'm at a loss to see what it really has that OSS doesn't, but that seems to be what Linux based MIDI and audio apps are migrating to.
Chris
TOS was so kick ass... 15 years ago...
I'm currently tinkering with a 1040 STe running TOS. It's a great machine for learning the fundamentals of computers - 68000 assembler, good documentation on the raw hardware and copious amounts of software on the net.
What let the ST down somewhat, was the poor quality mouse and keyboard. Despite this, it still compared favourably to the Amiga A500, which was a technically superior machine - but horrendously unstable.
Chris
Customs can insist on seeing a receipt for anything you bring back into the country. The easiest way to piss them off and encourage them to use this rule to the full is to play difficult with them.
Chris
NetBSD and OpenBSD fit the niche of embedded products, AP's, firewalls, home gateways, etc
Correct, but that doesn't mean that Net (haven't used Open since 2.6) can't be used as a good desktop OS. The machine I am typing this on dual boots NetBSD -current and Fedora Core 1. I do a mixture of C, C++ and Jva development on it, and one thing I immediately noticed was how NetBSD performs much more responsively than Linux. For instance, running NetBeans and the (Linux emulated) JDK on NetBSD requires 256Mb to be usable. Running Linux, it requires 512Mb.
Linux seems to be gaining high end server features and tuning at the expense of desktop usability. NetBSD may not be the optimal OS for a quad Xeon server box, but right now it is my preferred choice for a uniprocessor desktop machine (even mine, with a hyperthreading Pentium 4).
Chris
Add to that the fact that a BSD system will not automatically upgrade your /etc, then you have the best reasons that say, a Debian box is easier to maintain.
Your BSD is clearly not my BSD, or else you'd know about etcupdate. Having discovered first hand the "joy" of Debian's installer and lack of backwards compatability between releases, I think I'll steer clear of it.
Chris
I'm not sure with Open and Net haven't imported it [mergemaster] yet
NetBSD has etcupdate, although I've never used it myself, as upgrades rarely touch the files in /etc that I modify. That's the beauty of NetBSD upgrades, the developers are very careful about backwards compatability. I could even run 4.3BSD binaries if I wanted to (not that I would), by enabling the correct system call compatability in the kernel.
Chris
If the band folds, and you find yourself looking for another IT job, then just lie. Ensure that you have a couple of good references from former employers, and then adjust your CV to cover the period you were doing band stuff.
Chris
Three phase power supply - it could run my Vax 11/780. Now lets see if I can rustle up 4 million dollars before someone else snaps it up.
Chris