It's a strange thing. I think part of their philosophy is to colonize other OSen with the GPL.
Look at the strange GNU/Darwin project that has just taken a sharp right turn towards abject failure.
To be fair, GNU/Darwin was *not* either a Debian or actual GNU project, so their bizzare spin into death via license-fanatacism shouldn't be taken as symtomatic of Debian's approach - though the Debian folks do indeed tend to be too political for my taste.
I can't think of any other reason to replace a perfectly good userland with an almost identical, in function, userland.
Agreed. GNU's utilities are largely a superset of BSD Unix, so the result is largely a somewhat more bloated userland with basically the same command structure. Also using a third-party userland means you no longer get the advantage of an frequently updated/usr/src tree. (That includes some GNU utilities BTW, which will probably get updated in -STABLE and -CURRENT faster than Debian updates theirs!)
If I had a seperate machine just to do useless experiments with, I had thought of just for kicks installing Debian/NetBSD on it; just to see "Debian GNU/NetBSD" on the login screen.;-)
wonder if they worked out the 1024 cylinder limit. it's a big show stopper for me
I'm using NetBSD 1.6 and have used FreeBSD 4.6 on an 80 gig HD. I am booting above the 8 gig barrier of OpenBSD. (OpenBSD supports large HDs fine but you have to boot on the first 8 gigs - a show stopper for me.) Earlier versions of FreeBSD worked too I assume.
It looks like nothing is stopping you from trying it then, so almost-download, and almost-install the almost-released FreeBSD 5.0 already!;-) (Actually if you want stability try running FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE first. Upgrading is simple under *BSD, no Linux compares in this respect except perhaps Gentoo or Debian.)
I would be the happiest man alive if debian would use the FreeBSD kernel.
Well, as has been pointed out, a very non-release-quality version of Debian has been made for FreeBSD. A somewhat more mature Debian is available for NetBSD. (My guess for their motivation for porting Debian to NetBSD first is that part of their philosophy is to be available on a lot of architectures, like NetBSD.)
Personally I prefer to run *BSD without debianising it, pkgsrc/ports rock, and I consider the NetBSD and FreeBSD package and source tree upgrade utilities slightly superior to apt-get and friends. To each his own I guess.:-)
FreeBSD and NetBSD, and maybe Darwin too have support for Mozilla 1.1. The mozilla-devel port in FreeBSD, and I think NetBSD, has offered Mozilla 1.2 beta. The 1.2 release will probably be in FreeBSD ports in a couple of weeks, and NetBSD a tad later. On the other hand, OpenBSD still doesn't quite support Mozilla in a stable fashion, perhaps that is what you were thinking of.
Actually, I managed to get DOS to multitask using Desqview-386 on an old 386sx-16. I managed to run a networked (Fido) BBS (bullitin-board-system) in the background and keep my machine too. It wasn't nearly as powerful as Linux of course, which I downloaded from a BBS at version 0.95 and installed on aforementioned 386-16:-), but it did its job and did it OK as long as you were careful to use programs that were multi-tasking friendly under DV-386. (Windows 3.x's multitasking by comparison was next to worthless.)
Andrew tried a live CD but his disk was all NTFS so he was a bit stuck.
Partition Magic can resize NTFS partitions. PM 7.0 even supports Windows XP's NTFS partitions. Unfortunately, the product is closed source. It worked well on my system resizing an NTFS partition however.
there are a lot of people who choose/like microkernels (apple, *BSD).
BSD (which is an OS that I've run and respect) is *NOT* a microkernel, in fact it's been implemented as a bit more monolithic than the Linux kernel. BSD is usually pointed to as an example of a monolithic kernel... Maybe the fact that Apple uses BSD userland has confused you a bit, no offense.
The BSD community should take a hint and start gearing toward usability rather than "superior" security.
If usability is what you're looking for, try FreeBSD instead. One of OpenBSD's goals is to be Secure by Default. Whereas other BSD variants and most Linux distros take an approach of 'turn everything on and let the admin turn off what he doesn't need'
NetBSD, at least as of 1.6, has most of its services turned off by default as well, has an extremely lean install, and runs on even more architectures than OpenBSD. It tends to be optimized towards stability more than security though. Actually, Debian doesn't turn on much by default among the Linuxes I've tried, but it probably isn't as secure as *BSD. (It doesn't have the group "wheel" to protect against root access for a well-known simple difference between BSD and SySV clones.)
thats the main reason why i didn't like the BSD/ports... having to compile a whole batch of file (like when you dist-upgrade) would use the power of your slow machines until the next upgrade:-)
You can always use pkg_add (on FreeBSD the syntax is pkg_add -r) instead and download binary packages with auto-resolved dependencies like apt-get. You can even install Debian's tools on BSD yourself if that's what floats your boat, there's such a thing as Debian GNU/NetBSD No, I am not making the name up.;-)
Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?
on
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE
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· Score: 2
This means, for example, that while a driver written under RedHat Linux will probably work with any other Linux, a driver written under FreeBSD will probably not work with the other BSDs
They would port easily though, many of FreeBSD's drivers are from NetBSD and vice versa.
Yes, their native JDK is still 1.3. You can run Linux 1.4 in emulation though if there's something in 1.4 you must have... I assume that there will eventually be a JDK 1.4 for FreeBSD.
Is there a site you know of (or used book store) that would have these CHEAP?
Unfortunately, good computer books are very expensive; as they are either priced according to textbook or professional book prices. Try getting them from an online used bookstore or an auction or discount site like half.com
I don't know of any OpenBSD books. (Though I do know of a couple of FreeBSD books.) My advice would be to get generic Unix books. Books such as "UNIX Power Tools" and "the purple book", "Unix System Administration" (which includes FreeBSD information) (you'll know the latter from the immitators with the same name because of it being a purple $70 paperback:-) ), would help lots even if some of the advice might need modification for OpenBSD.
I run NetBSD myself and am a former FreeBSD and Linux user. A lot of the knowledge I had from the others and books on the other Unices directly translates to what I run now, which is the operating system most akin to OpenBSD.
Israel does not count because of their denying the vote to people in the territories they occupy
I too disagree with that disenfranchisement - but since the people who live there don't want to vote in Israeli elections like Israeli Arabs anyway, they want their own state, a two state solution is what both sides should agree on. At present, the only two state solution the PLO wants is two Palestinian states.
forbidding candidates standing on an anti-zionist platform.
Yes, they forbid parties that are in favor of the destruction of Israel; which you call "opposing zionism". Actually, several of the religious parties are non-zionist and several of the Arab parties are non-zionist by any definition; so this restriction, which is not one that's enough to make a country not a democracy since the US and other countries have laws against advocating the violent overthrow of the government, has no teeth. Though they are working on putting on trial one MK for attending a pro-terrorism conference in Syria. Of course, you probably think that Syria and other terrorist sponsors, including the PLO itself, are in the right. Unfortunately, I don't have the sense of moral equivalency neccesary to consider Israel on the same level as the PLO who throw a man in a wheelchair overboard from a ship because he has a Jewish-sounding name.
BitMover is just doing what we would do if the shoe was on the other foot.[...]
Just like Windows is not the developer enviroment for the kernel, BitKeeper will not be the revision control software used for Subversion.
I have moderator points today, but I guess I'll give them up for this article because I don't see anyone else bringing up the most common useage in the legal field of this particular form of license agreement.Of course, IANAL.:-)
I'd agree with your perspective concerning Bitkeepers IP rights if this was the only way this clause is used in a shrink-wrap license. However, it is more often used in court in a semi-fraudulent manner. More often than not, Bitkeeper could claim that a developer was "contaminated", and unless it was *very carefully* documented otherwise, with the sort of documentation rarely available in an open-source project, it can shut down the competitition. I'd hate to think that Bitkeeper's lawyers would do something so cynical, but its a common practice with this sort of contract. About the only remedy is to start the entire project over from scratch and work in "double-clean" rooms, but that's practically impossible in an open source project.
Kudos to Bitkeeper's lawyers for proving that fascism is alive and well in the commercial software industry when it comes to competing with open source projects. Until they drop this clause open-source developers should boycott their tools, because doing otherwise is too great a risk. Maybe they'll get the message, if not, Bitkeeper will go the way of gopher, another product which got a license like this and was dropped like a hot potato by developers in favor of www, and of course the competition ended up being better.:-)
At the same time giving lots of money to another country in the same region which ignores more UN resolutions,
Three guesses as to which country is the only country not allowed to sit on the UN Security Council. Also recall that one of the UN resolutions that it ignores is the one that unequivacally equates Zionism with racisim. Then contemplate why they tend to ignore the UN.
has more weapons of mass destruction,
Their weapons of mass destruction are being used responsibly (i.e. never used, only a deterent to hostile neighbors) Do we have the same guarantee for Iraq, who already has launched missles at neighbors not at war with it?
has invaded all of its neighbours,
When your neighbors attack you in wars of anihilation three times, it's natural to go a bit into their territory in order to fight them back, and like in any defensive war of this sort boundries get changed; this is a principle of international law. Germany's and Italy's boundries changed after WWII, so can other agressors; it is a principle of war from time immemorial. Besides, Israel is willing to give almost all of it back, but the PLO decided they wanted two Palestinian states rather than one so they broke off negotiations in favor of terrorism.
treats ethnic groups in their territories badly
Which Middle Eastern country has the right to vote in *fair* elections (Egypt's don't count, they killed more opposition demonstrators in a few days during their phoney elections than Israel did in the first six months of armed riots.) for Arabs? Three guesses. (Yes, it's presently only some of its Arabs; but those get to vote for Arafat and the previously unknown Elementary school teacher who was his token opposition candidate of what the world calls a fair Palestinian election.)
and is lead by a nasty man.
If the PLO doesn't like Sharon, they have only themselves to blame. They decided they prefer war to peace during Camp David, so Israel elected in turn someone who didn't want peace at any price. As little as I like Sharon I admit that the peace process became a disaster for Israel so maybe for now he's the right man.
I have no idea how this got moderated as "insightful".:-)
While it is always good to see new features available on free OSes, I'm concerned that NetBSD's SMP might affect Linux adversely. Linux's advantage over the *BSDs has always been that it has more cutting-edge features like SMP, preemptive kernel threads, strong math emulation, and journaling filesystems. These features are required in enterprise applications, so many sysadmins choose Linux, despite it's cobbled-together nature and lack of good support.
SMP is already in FreeBSD, soon to be improved further. NetBSD is developing theres, and like all NetBSD features is likely to be implemented mature the first time. (Rather than "if it works it's good" NetBSD's philosophy is "if it's good it works") The "strong math emulation" of Linux is already avalilable in FreeBSD, and maybe the other BSDs, I haven't checked their kernel option files lately (another advantage of *BSD, kernel configuration and recompiling is easier), allows you to optionally taint the kernel with GPL code to use the GNU math emulation Linux uses rather than the weaker BSD version. (Linux, of course, is already tainted with GPL code; of course, rather than a bug, this is considered a feature.;-) ) I dunno why you consider this to be a "cutting edge feature" though, if I recall correctly, this is for 386 and 486sx processors only.:-)
As for journaling filesystems, NetBSD, alone among the BSDs, already offers one; though I'm not sure how mature it is. (The 1.6 release notes say that it's more stable now.) However, soft updates offer many of the advantages of the additional stability journaling filesystems bring.
The main reason why journaling filesystems are sutch a big deal on Linux is because ext2 is such an unstable file system, especially with asyncronous metadata, compared to the Berkeley Unix FFS BSD uses. If you don't have asyncronous metadata, yet have the rest asynronous, the whole advantage of redundant metadata storage disappears as I understand it. Of course, you don't have to fsck most of the time with a journaled filesystem; this is the only advantage remaining. In my mind though it is, in practice rather than as a brag, for important 24/7 servers to recover more fast after a power outage; but if you need that kind of availability you should have a power genererator or at least a UPS to deal with the power outage in the first place.
Sadly, we may see a flash flood of business customers moving to NetBSD. I would recommend selling any Debian stock you stil have lying around
I assume you're joking, since Debian is non-profit. NetBSD is owned by the NetBSD foundation, it's also non-profit, though Wasabi and others do manage to run businesses based on it. (After all, it has the Abbie Hoffman of software licenses - the BSD license, "Steal This Code".:-) )
Finally OpenBSD will ahve some straight up competition. For a long time it has been the most secure, and the only BSD with SMP support.
Can't wait to see what FreeBSD does to top this!
According to the official OpenBSD FAQ, OpenBSD does not have SMP. Either in -CURRENT (development branch) or in release form, though apparantly there is a group working on it. FreeBSD on the other hand will have an improved fine-grain implementation of SMP, in their upcoming 5.0 release, and already have a more primative version in the 4.x releases. It's really the reverse, OpenBSD is the only free *BSD *without* SMP being tested. I have no idea why you thought otherwise.
You may have to download the nVidia driver from an nVidia ftp server, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done from within a fancy GUI upgrade utility. SuSE's YOU (YaST Online Update) has been offering this for a while quite transpantly, although it's usually after installation.
Re:an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbs
on
Overview of the BSDs
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· Score: 2
[NetBSD 1.6] now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0
It's already been copied; rc_ng is now the default for -CURRENT.
True, but FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT is not a release version yet by any stretch of the imagination, it's an open beta-quality and even alpha-quality branch and very much in flux and frequent instability; I was refering to 5.0-RELEASE which hopefully will be ready-for-prime-time. (Of course, there's nothing wrong with having a development branch, the other BSDs and Linux also have this, just pointing that out.)
The Linux community is larger. I'm guessing that this is because Linux was written for x86 origionally, and was therefore available for the platform just about everybody has before BSD was. Obviously this is not true now, but momentum is a hard thing to overcome. I'm not confident on my timeline here, so if someone could prove that BSD was available for x86 prior to 1991,
386BSD and it's commercial cousin BSD/386 (now BSD/OS) existed at around the same time as Linux kernel version 0.95 as I recall from Usenet posts. (A Linux user since 0.95 who has since migrated to Free and NetBSD.)
I'd happily concede the point.
Happily concede the point then.:-) At the most Linux was available on the 386 in a useful form a few months before BSD; if it weren't for the AT&T lawsuit during a crucial period you might have not made this statement:
Anyway, that's my take on it. For the record, I'm a Linux guy. To my knowledge I have never used a BSD.
Because you'd be running BSD. (Linus himself said that *he* would have run BSD if it weren't for the timing and the lawsuit.)
an OK article, but a bit biased in favor of fbsd
on
Overview of the BSDs
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· Score: 4, Interesting
This article seems to give the impression that FreeBSD is the only one that's not a niche product. Nothing could be further from the truth. NetBSD's attention to portability and "correctness" means that it often has the best-written drivers and is even more stable than FreeBSD, and as of 1.6 it now has a new init system that FreeBSD is going to copy for 5.0. (Not that there's anything wrong with that, lots of things get copied from NetBSD because in line with Berkeley Unix's past it's a research and development oriented operating system.)
OpenBSD's attention to code audits also bodes well for overall lack of bugs; and its ability to have security features such as encryption of even the swap space makes it useful for paranoid executives or the government; and it's, as the article admits, great for firewalls because of that.
This article was good for bringing *BSD onto the radar screen of people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but if you read it you give the impression that nobody runs the other BSDs; something that the infamous AC BSD
trolls try to accuse, albeit more crudely, all of the BSDs of being.
The Gates Foundation has given billions away. Literally. What have you done?
The Gates Foundation is a public relations ploy. I recall that Bill Gates before it's founding admitted in an interview that primarily gave money in the form of computers donated to public libaries. (I couldn't find the interview, I did find this pre-gates-foundation article however.) His chartitable giving then according to Salon in '97? "85 percent in donated Microsoft computer software."
I can certainly empathize with trying to install an rpm that isn't listed in YaST...because often times it breaks because of a missing dependancy...and it usually takes AGES to find what package it's in!
SuSE has for a while had a nice program called pin that searches for libraries in packages very well. That having been said, judging from the screenshots, SuSE 8.1's package manager looks neat.
Slashdot Mirror
If I had a seperate machine just to do useless experiments with, I had thought of just for kicks installing Debian/NetBSD on it; just to see "Debian GNU/NetBSD" on the login screen. ;-)
It looks like nothing is stopping you from trying it then, so almost-download, and almost-install the almost-released FreeBSD 5.0 already! ;-) (Actually if you want stability try running FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE first. Upgrading is simple under *BSD, no Linux compares in this respect except perhaps Gentoo or Debian.)
Personally I prefer to run *BSD without debianising it, pkgsrc/ports rock, and I consider the NetBSD and FreeBSD package and source tree upgrade utilities slightly superior to apt-get and friends. To each his own I guess. :-)
FreeBSD and NetBSD, and maybe Darwin too have support for Mozilla 1.1. The mozilla-devel port in FreeBSD, and I think NetBSD, has offered Mozilla 1.2 beta. The 1.2 release will probably be in FreeBSD ports in a couple of weeks, and NetBSD a tad later. On the other hand, OpenBSD still doesn't quite support Mozilla in a stable fashion, perhaps that is what you were thinking of.
Actually, I managed to get DOS to multitask using Desqview-386 on an old 386sx-16. I managed to run a networked (Fido) BBS (bullitin-board-system) in the background and keep my machine too. It wasn't nearly as powerful as Linux of course, which I downloaded from a BBS at version 0.95 and installed on aforementioned 386-16 :-), but it did its job and did it OK as long as you were careful to use programs that were multi-tasking friendly under DV-386. (Windows 3.x's multitasking by comparison was next to worthless.)
I run NetBSD myself and am a former FreeBSD and Linux user. A lot of the knowledge I had from the others and books on the other Unices directly translates to what I run now, which is the operating system most akin to OpenBSD.
I'd agree with your perspective concerning Bitkeepers IP rights if this was the only way this clause is used in a shrink-wrap license. However, it is more often used in court in a semi-fraudulent manner. More often than not, Bitkeeper could claim that a developer was "contaminated", and unless it was *very carefully* documented otherwise, with the sort of documentation rarely available in an open-source project, it can shut down the competitition. I'd hate to think that Bitkeeper's lawyers would do something so cynical, but its a common practice with this sort of contract. About the only remedy is to start the entire project over from scratch and work in "double-clean" rooms, but that's practically impossible in an open source project.
Kudos to Bitkeeper's lawyers for proving that fascism is alive and well in the commercial software industry when it comes to competing with open source projects. Until they drop this clause open-source developers should boycott their tools, because doing otherwise is too great a risk. Maybe they'll get the message, if not, Bitkeeper will go the way of gopher, another product which got a license like this and was dropped like a hot potato by developers in favor of www, and of course the competition ended up being better. :-)
As for journaling filesystems, NetBSD, alone among the BSDs, already offers one; though I'm not sure how mature it is. (The 1.6 release notes say that it's more stable now.) However, soft updates offer many of the advantages of the additional stability journaling filesystems bring. The main reason why journaling filesystems are sutch a big deal on Linux is because ext2 is such an unstable file system, especially with asyncronous metadata, compared to the Berkeley Unix FFS BSD uses. If you don't have asyncronous metadata, yet have the rest asynronous, the whole advantage of redundant metadata storage disappears as I understand it. Of course, you don't have to fsck most of the time with a journaled filesystem; this is the only advantage remaining. In my mind though it is, in practice rather than as a brag, for important 24/7 servers to recover more fast after a power outage; but if you need that kind of availability you should have a power genererator or at least a UPS to deal with the power outage in the first place.
I assume you're joking, since Debian is non-profit. NetBSD is owned by the NetBSD foundation, it's also non-profit, though Wasabi and others do manage to run businesses based on it. (After all, it has the Abbie Hoffman of software licenses - the BSD license, "Steal This Code".You may have to download the nVidia driver from an nVidia ftp server, but that doesn't mean that it can't be done from within a fancy GUI upgrade utility. SuSE's YOU (YaST Online Update) has been offering this for a while quite transpantly, although it's usually after installation.
OpenBSD's attention to code audits also bodes well for overall lack of bugs; and its ability to have security features such as encryption of even the swap space makes it useful for paranoid executives or the government; and it's, as the article admits, great for firewalls because of that.
This article was good for bringing *BSD onto the radar screen of people who otherwise wouldn't have heard of it, but if you read it you give the impression that nobody runs the other BSDs; something that the infamous AC BSD trolls try to accuse, albeit more crudely, all of the BSDs of being.