Well, you might be right in some respects, but gentoo became a gremlin for me during that time. In other words, I'm biased;)
He displayed a genuine interest in linux, and I encouraged him to try gentoo (myself already using a ports based "distro"). And later seeing his frustrations, I realized my mistake. I think one of the most important things if you want to get someone on the linux/unix train is documentation. Which is almost there in gentoo, but not quite. The other is: a clear system layout. Debian comes close to it (I might try sarge when it comes out, just to keep my linux skills honed - not long ago I couldn't make usb flash drive work in SuSE, and I felt really embarrassed), but I still didn't know what mplayer.conf does in/etc (or.operarc for that matter).
So my recent method of getting people trying out linux (or freebsd) is to give them a book. I would say: don't touch anything on your computer. Read this or that, and if you are still interested, and enjoyed your reading (because you'll have to do a lot of reading later as well), than you can go on following installation instruction. One important note: never give docs in electronic format. It is easier to grasp the basic concepts if in book form, and (strange as it may sound) without sitting in the front of a puter. And then I would recommend a kind of distro you mentioned: it might be gentoo or debian or slackware, it doesn't really matter (as long as it's not rh or mandrake)
Anyway, for nostalgia's sake, I dug up some of my friend's posts on gentooforums. Note the growing use-flag paranoia (and I refer back to the above post in a post below, just for recursivity's sake.:)
Well, I don't think so. I had the opportunity to play with gentoo for two months (see this post and this was my experience with it:
To get a usable system, we had to hunt for the description of various use-flags, and some of those descriptions were not exactly helpful: MOTIF= this will install motif on your sytem - well, thank you very much. Had to recompile kdebase to get plugin support for konqi. I was frustrated, while others on gentooforums, after learning that they have to recompile just as we did, began to praise the power of use-flags (I still don't understand how?).
Anyway, seeing that there were 300+ use-flags, and you have to remember at least a few dozen of them and their relationship and effect on your installed packages, I realized that gentoo was not (this was in april-may last year) that different from slackware without swaret. In slack, you had to remember package dependencies, but since repos grouped packages logically, this wasn't that difficult or daunting (nor was it in gentoo), but I still felt that what was referred as dependency-hell is simply exhanged in gentoo with what we may call a use-flag hell. Basically this was the result of portage (or ebuild) maintainers' unwillingness to come up with defaults (read: configure portage for you to the best of their abilities) that would suit 90% of the users (most users want a combination of most functionality + leanest packages). Don't tell me its not possible, because it is, they just don't do it. Moreover (and this bothers me a bit) they advertise this (forcing the user to memorize and spend days configuring use-flags) as a feature.
In a binary distribution, I'd end up with a couple hundred megs worth of QT and KDE anyway, but with Gentoo I can USE="-qt -kde" and eliminate it entirely.
Explain. I don't really understand how the first part of your sentence relates to the second. (I think that if I want debian, or ubuntu or [insert distro here] to be kde-free, I can do it, without use-flags. Hell, I can do it in freebsd, which doesn't have useflags - thankfully, progs present you with an ncurses based options screen if there are multiple build-knobs, so there is no need to learn a list of use-flags or tweak configuration files for days just to get package management working)
Gentoo is perfect for ignorant people. It may even make them feel they're learning something, although they don't.
Haha, that was funny. And true. A friend of mine who used mandrake for a few days went on to install gentoo, for rumour had it that if you can install it, you'll learn a lot about the system.
Spent hours and hours installing it, (which doesn't make too much sense - why not have a functioning system in 5 minutes and then rebuild everything?), installation documentation in his lap, and after a while he managed to install it. Took another day to get alsa working (couldn't help him, I myself was confused by it). Anyway, in a few days, he had a working system with X (and without working kpdf, for he missed a use-flag apparently). And I spent the next few weeks explaining the most trivial things I could learned reading the Introduction to Linux guide on my two-hour trip home on a train. Apparently, my friend didn't buy into the "I'm now a geek cause I installed gentoo" myth, and was very very frustrated. Finally, I dug up the excellent Machtelt Garrels guide (still the best in linuxland for newbies I think) and I lent it to him.
(Then later he switched back to Win2000, and just upgraded to XP recently).
As ValiantSoul said, rh8 has been there for a long time, but the default was rh7.x - which has changed to 8 now. The reason is that a few linux-apps didn't work with rh7 (a few!). All current linux-apps in FreeBSD ports works well with rh8, (most of them work well with rh7 as well), so I guess for at least a year 8 will be sufficient. Since FreeBSD is all about stability (even cutting edge ports), it makes sense that they switched to a well tested default. I, for instance, changed the default linux base to linux_base8 right when I began using FreeBSD (in 2003 september) with 5.1 release, and no ports gave me trouble. For your interest: rh-9 is already in ports btw, along with a few others:
FreeBSD 5.x enjoyed an excellent head start in the fully 64-bit AMD64 operating system arena, but now trails the pack, with only Windows XP 64-bit behind it in speed and completeness.
The bold parts are hyperlins to articles that supposed to show how "slow" AMD64 under FreeBSD 5.3 is supposed to be does in no way even mention FreeBSD and in fact only tests SuSE and Fedora Core along with Windows XP SP1. Same with 'completeness'. On the other hand, I remember his amd64 review of FreeBSD 5.2.1 - which was an excellent and well detailed review. I guess he didn't even try FreeBSD on amd64 since then.
And don't even start me on his 'new feature list'. Forgets to mention important things like backports of many features of ULE to SCHED_4BSD, inclusion of pf and altq framwork in the base system (for sysadmins, this is perhaps one of the most important features), multithreaded network stack (although he mentions it elsewhere, but not under new features!), etc. He is even wrong in his pathetic attempt at humour (if it was that) about the naming of ULE:
The ULE (which is not an acronym; its full name is SCHED_ULE as opposed to the older SCHED_4BSD) scheduler continues to have stability and performance problems and was totally disabled instead of being made the default process scheduler in 5.3 as planned.
Well, yes, ULE might not be an acronym, and no, its name is not SCHED_ULE... name is ULE, SCHED_ULE is the configuration option you put in your kernel file.
I would take this guy's comments with a grain of salt, except for his older work, which I think was excellent (I don't have problems with criticism, and his old amd64 review was quite critical. I have problems with FUD and unsubstantiated claims and badly written articles). What happened to this guy?
Not just GPL I would say. It is the spirit of Open Source. Take the BSD's for example. They not only think that code sharing between projects is fine, they also pay extra attention to portability - to make code sharing easier (and that's not just NetBSD, I've seen changelogs of commits in FreeBSD that's main purpose was to make the code more portable across BSD's).
I good example is ehci (usb 2.0 support) that was written by FreeBSD devs, and then maintainer abandoned it. It was picked up by NetBSD devs, who enchanched it, and went trough OpenBSD as well - now FreeBSD folks are reintegrating the code (it's still work in progress). Note that the BSD licence wouldn't even force anyone to give back... it just makes a lot of sense, and I say: forget the whino. If he wan't to spend time on obsfucating changelogs instead of developing, there won't be too much his fork could offer you after a while.
I believe it is, because once you have network running and cvsup installed, it is all about synchronizing your ports and src tree.
In other words, you can have an 5.3-STABLE (warning, that is still a development branch, but as the name suggests, it's pretty stable) system or 5.3-RELEASE, or even 6-CURRENT if you want - depending how you set your standard-supfile.In short, you'll have a fully functional FreeBSD system, you can even decide which version you want.
Cvsup, ports/src tree... these might sound alien if you never used FreeBSD, but the concepts are really easy to pick up (me came to FreeBSD from a mandrake background, and their documentation is so excellent, that I picked up the basics in a few days). In fact, I believe that FreeBSD is the easiest unix system a non-techie person can learn! Also, the community is very newbie friendly and helpful (on bsdforums.org). You can read the Handbook on their homepage.
This is a metoo post. Like others said above, its good for system diagnosis. Many times I'm called to 'repair' a windows machine for "there is no internet" (lol). An easy way to see whether its hardware or software issue (if it isn't immediately obvious) is to pop in the cd, boot, put proper ip address + gw in/etc/rc.conf, do an "/etc/rc.d/netif restart" and lynx somewhere.
Also, FreeSBIE made a very nice fluxbox desktop (I learned about torsmo and idesk through it) and now I use it as a template for creating a light-weight, yet nice looking fluxdesktop for lower end machines. Also, another nice thing was that TVcard worked out of the box (just had to give the proper chanlist in motv, and in a minute after boot up I could watch TV on the machine of my roommate (winxp box).
"Number two, Apple is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's DRM, period."
MSN is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's browser... Sounds familiar? Of course it doesn't have any obligation to support (support implies actively working on it), but I think working on disabling rival formats is very uncool.
"Apple can do whatever it wishes with its own products, and consumers may decide whether or not they would like to purchase them."
"Proprietary drivers are nothing but a PITA. They are totally unsupportable, and you have no idea how they will affect your system."
I have a fairly good idea how nvidia's binary drivers will affect my system. It makes neverwinter nights playable on linux/freebsd. It makes those fancy screensavers work. It provides 3d accelaration. etc.
This is sooo old, I don't even think where to begin. I know that _my_ ideas of what the binary drivers do are the layman's ideas. But do you have an idea of how [insert random opensource driver here] will affect your system? Do you read the source code of every opensource driver you happen to have on your install? And even if you do, how many of us does that regurarly?
Unsupportable... by whom? Ah, I know, opensource developers, cause they are proprietary. But is that really so important, or is that really a problem? This can only be perceived as a problem if you automatically assume that opensource devs could provide better support... because... well, why? Because they are opensource devs, and therefore are better? Because of the many-eyes argument (which was never really proved, because we tend to automatically assume that someone is looking at the code, but this someone often proves to be hypothetical). Nvidia drivers are not unsupportable... they are just supportable and supported by its developers - just like most opensource software is (even though there is the possibility for Joe Random to begin supporting software X, it rarely happens). And they do an excellent job at providing regular updates, bugfixes, improvements... they even do a better job of supporting their software than some open source projects.
The 'vendor goes AWOL' kinda argument in the close vs. open debate is getting really boring. Problem is, that it is true - but in this case: what do you think is the chance that nvidia will just screw its linux userbase?
None. The reason: they have excellent and commited developers. They use a unified code-base for all their drivers. Occasionally, they go out of their way to provide support even for less hyped operating systems (FreeBSD, for instance). This is an old thread, and FreeBSD with 5.3 has proper (proper for Nvidia's needs) tls implementation, but still, it is a good example of nvidia's commitment to work with open source developers on issues with their drivers.
So yes, the 'what if company X choses to no longer support opensource' has a ring of truth to it (and opensource advocates can always have it open in kwrite for copy & paste job for every newsbit about closed source drivers), but you always have to think about the specific case. Does nvidia have good support for their chipsets for linux/freebsd? Yes, it does, and these drivers are quite up to date with their windows counterparts. Are they willing to address various issues with their drivers? Yes they are. Are they willing to opensource their drivers? No. And that seems to bring out the worst of zealotry in opensource land. I'm not addressing this to parent post specifically btw, but to all who beat the 'company X suxorz cause they're proprietary' drum.
Would you stop spreading FUD please? greg made a mistake when stated that it doesn't work, and he apologized for it. This:
gvinum on 5.3-RELEASE seems to work fine as a LVM (LogicalVolumeManager) and for striping (RAID-0) and mirroring (RAID-1).
It does *not* work for *writing* on RAID5-volumes in UP (SingleProcessor) environments due to a bug which was fixed too late for 5.3-RELEASE.
I'm not aware of any statistics about the use of (g)vinum - but for users of (g)vinum RAID5-Volumes in UP-environments 5.3-RELEASE *is* problematic. Greg remains right here IMHO. RAID5 under 5.3-RELEASE (UP) only works with 'classic' vinum if loaded *after* the system has come up.
So you have to work around a bug (already fixed in current) if you want RAID5 on an UP system - and the work around isn't terribly hard. This is very far from your statement of FreeBSD not having software raid.
If you like slack you will love FreeBSD (and this is true vice versa - most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware to any other distro). To me, it is easier to configure/maintain (thanks to its excellent documentation: the man pages - better than gnu man pages usually,/usr/share/examples, the handbook of course, the faq, and the very friendly community at bsdforums.org).
Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into/usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook:)
I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS:o)) soon.
Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse)... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:
Add performance and reliability to that and you get one of the best systems there is. FreeBSD is never missing from the top 10 most reliable sites on netcraft, usually taking more places than any other OS.
In october, the 3 topmost reliable sites were all FreeBSD (4th was either Net~ or Open~ and 8th was again FreeBSD).Read More
Yeah, you might be right, I haven't thought of that from this perspective. Still, a bit more resources (necessary hardware for testing/writing drivers, at least a handful of developers working full time on FreeBSD wouldn't hurt:)).
One thing they should do is to update the Foundations website. Advertise. Make donating easier and more compelling. An outdated website is not a good incentive to contribute. The best thing would be if they could achieve steady funding. I'm just a student, and my monthly budget is 76000HUF (~380$). Hungary is cheap, so that's OK, but it isn't much (it just covers my monthly expenses, it is not enough to save up), yet I think I could afford a monthly 5$ to help them. But I would only do that if I saw a very well organized 'campaign' to do that. A professional, easy to use website, specific goals (target amount for each month), way to track it, publicity, publicity, publicity. I think it would even be worth for the project to pay someone to organize this (let's say he or she would get x% of the income). I also think that income should be calculable.
In other words, this 'campaign' (I'm looking for a better expression, english is not my native language!) should focus on getting to those who are willing to contribute (even very small amounts, like 5$) for a set amount of time (6-12-x months) - thus to make the 'income' as a said, predictable.
I just want to express my deep respect for FreeBSD developers. All the hype is around linux these days, and rightly so: it is a wonderful system. But few know that there are now ~100 paid developers working on linux (which is 'just' a kernel) at any given time, while there are none in FreeBSD. Yes, yes, PHK now is payed to do FreeBSD-only development for 8-10 months. There are others who receive either support from their employers to work on FreeBSD part-time, or some grants or others, but all in all, the FreeBSD project has 1/100 of the resources linux has.
Of course, I realize that from a user/technical standpoint, this means nothing. But there are too many trolls out here who are bent on conducting a smear campaign against FreeBSD developers, going even as far as to question their programming skills. Now think about this: these developers have kept up with the pace linux development dictates with 1/100 of the resources linux development has. It is still one of the most reliable operating systems out there, no matter what disgruntled HawkinsOS guys will tell you about FreeBSD not being 'enterprise ready.' In fact, if you check netcraft's monthly reports about the most reliable sites, 4-5 sites from the top 10 is always running FreeBSD. In october, the top three sites having the fewest failed requests all ran FreeBSD (the 4th is Net~ or Open~).
So I just can't emphasize enough how impressed I am (as a desktop user btw) with the work of these guys. And now this announcment! Excellent ideas there! And I hope to see ULE allowed in -STABLE again soon:))) (did I say I was a desktop user?).
Yes!!! That is very good news! Thanks for the info:)
I'm primarily a desktop user of FreeBSD, and I miss ULE soo much (hiccups in mplayer - and even JUK sometimes - during compile with 4BSD, and general responsivity issues - on the desktop of course).
Just a minor correction (granpda) : ULE was not made the default scheduler in 5.2/5.2.1! In fact, I think that was the main problem (switching to ULE only in current later meant less exposure, and less chance to find the bugs as early as possible, less time to work on those bugs, etc...)
I agree with you. Also, besides the excellent network transparency, at least according to this guy, PDF support is also better in KDE. And the good thing about that review is that it is an honest comparison, from someone who actually used KDE for production (read: not just installed, didn't like the menu, removed it and came to./ to harp about OS X).
Note that he compares KDE 3.1.4 with OS X, and yes, there were things he liked, there were things he didn't, some of which has been addressed since then, and there were some things that (be very shocked!!!) he liked better in KDE.
You can see it everywhere with KDE...starting with their braindamaged way of not using separate tarballs for every app and instead bundling the apps to arbitary categories which can be quite frustrating for people not using KDE wanting to use only a single app.
So? What prevents vendors from putting various kdeapps into their own packages? In fact, that's exactly what kde@freebsd does. You don't have to install all the stuff in kdeaddons if you want only the kate plugins part. Look:
mcsaba@mcsaba$ pkg_info | grep kde hu-kde-i18n-3.3.0 Localized messages and documentation for KDE3 kde-icons-amaranth-althaea-0.5 KDE iconset like Crystal SVG, but simpler kde-icons-lime-rade8-1.01 KDE Mac OS X like iconset, most from rad-e8 kdeaddons-kate-plugins-3.3.0 Additonal plugins and features for kate kdeaddons-kfile-plugins-3.3.0 Plugins for Konqueror (in filemanager mode) kdeaddons-kicker-applets-3.3.0 Additional applets for Kicker kdeaddons-konq-plugins-3.3.0 Additonal plugins and features for Konqueror kdeadmin-3.3.0 KDE applications related to system administration kdeartwork-3.3.0 Additional themes, sounds, wallpapers and window styles kdebase-3.3.0_4 Basic applications for the KDE system kdebase-konqueror-nsplugins-3.3.0 Netscape plugin support for Konqueror kdegraphics-3.3.0 Graphics utilities for the KDE3 integrated X11 desktop kdegraphics-kamera-3.3.0 Digital camera support for KDE kdegraphics-kooka-3.3.0 Raster image scan program for KDE kdegraphics-kuickshow-3.3.0 KDE image viewer kdelibs-3.3.0_2 Base set of libraries needed by KDE programs kdemultimedia-3.3.0 Multimedia utilities for the KDE integrated X11 kdemultimedia-mpeglib_artsplug-3.3.0 Default KDE decoders for mp3/ogg kdenetwork-3.3.0_1 Network-related programs and modules for KDE kdenetwork-lanbrowsing-3.3.0 Lanbrowsing facility and backend for KDE kdepim-3.3.0 Personal Information Management tools for KDE kdetoys-3.3.0 Small applications for KDE kdeutils-3.3.0 Utilities for the KDE integrated X11 desktop kdewebdev-3.3.0,2 Comprehensive html/website development environment
Blame your particular distro for not providing separate packages for kuickshow (for example).
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He displayed a genuine interest in linux, and I encouraged him to try gentoo (myself already using a ports based "distro"). And later seeing his frustrations, I realized my mistake. I think one of the most important things if you want to get someone on the linux/unix train is documentation. Which is almost there in gentoo, but not quite. The other is: a clear system layout. Debian comes close to it (I might try sarge when it comes out, just to keep my linux skills honed - not long ago I couldn't make usb flash drive work in SuSE, and I felt really embarrassed), but I still didn't know what mplayer.conf does in /etc (or .operarc for that matter).
So my recent method of getting people trying out linux (or freebsd) is to give them a book. I would say: don't touch anything on your computer. Read this or that, and if you are still interested, and enjoyed your reading (because you'll have to do a lot of reading later as well), than you can go on following installation instruction. One important note: never give docs in electronic format. It is easier to grasp the basic concepts if in book form, and (strange as it may sound) without sitting in the front of a puter. And then I would recommend a kind of distro you mentioned: it might be gentoo or debian or slackware, it doesn't really matter (as long as it's not rh or mandrake)
Anyway, for nostalgia's sake, I dug up some of my friend's posts on gentooforums. Note the growing use-flag paranoia (and I refer back to the above post in a post below, just for recursivity's sake. :)
Of course, you are right, thanks.
To get a usable system, we had to hunt for the description of various use-flags, and some of those descriptions were not exactly helpful: MOTIF= this will install motif on your sytem - well, thank you very much. Had to recompile kdebase to get plugin support for konqi. I was frustrated, while others on gentooforums, after learning that they have to recompile just as we did, began to praise the power of use-flags (I still don't understand how?).
Anyway, seeing that there were 300+ use-flags, and you have to remember at least a few dozen of them and their relationship and effect on your installed packages, I realized that gentoo was not (this was in april-may last year) that different from slackware without swaret. In slack, you had to remember package dependencies, but since repos grouped packages logically, this wasn't that difficult or daunting (nor was it in gentoo), but I still felt that what was referred as dependency-hell is simply exhanged in gentoo with what we may call a use-flag hell. Basically this was the result of portage (or ebuild) maintainers' unwillingness to come up with defaults (read: configure portage for you to the best of their abilities) that would suit 90% of the users (most users want a combination of most functionality + leanest packages). Don't tell me its not possible, because it is, they just don't do it. Moreover (and this bothers me a bit) they advertise this (forcing the user to memorize and spend days configuring use-flags) as a feature.
In a binary distribution, I'd end up with a couple hundred megs worth of QT and KDE anyway, but with Gentoo I can USE="-qt -kde" and eliminate it entirely.
Explain. I don't really understand how the first part of your sentence relates to the second. (I think that if I want debian, or ubuntu or [insert distro here] to be kde-free, I can do it, without use-flags. Hell, I can do it in freebsd, which doesn't have useflags - thankfully, progs present you with an ncurses based options screen if there are multiple build-knobs, so there is no need to learn a list of use-flags or tweak configuration files for days just to get package management working)
Haha, that was funny. And true. A friend of mine who used mandrake for a few days went on to install gentoo, for rumour had it that if you can install it, you'll learn a lot about the system.
Spent hours and hours installing it, (which doesn't make too much sense - why not have a functioning system in 5 minutes and then rebuild everything?), installation documentation in his lap, and after a while he managed to install it. Took another day to get alsa working (couldn't help him, I myself was confused by it). Anyway, in a few days, he had a working system with X (and without working kpdf, for he missed a use-flag apparently). And I spent the next few weeks explaining the most trivial things I could learned reading the Introduction to Linux guide on my two-hour trip home on a train. Apparently, my friend didn't buy into the "I'm now a geek cause I installed gentoo" myth, and was very very frustrated. Finally, I dug up the excellent Machtelt Garrels guide (still the best in linuxland for newbies I think) and I lent it to him.
(Then later he switched back to Win2000, and just upgraded to XP recently).
His SUSE 'review' His FreeBSD 'review'
Some gems (pun intended) from the latter:
The bold parts are hyperlins to articles that supposed to show how "slow" AMD64 under FreeBSD 5.3 is supposed to be does in no way even mention FreeBSD and in fact only tests SuSE and Fedora Core along with Windows XP SP1. Same with 'completeness'. On the other hand, I remember his amd64 review of FreeBSD 5.2.1 - which was an excellent and well detailed review. I guess he didn't even try FreeBSD on amd64 since then.And don't even start me on his 'new feature list'. Forgets to mention important things like backports of many features of ULE to SCHED_4BSD, inclusion of pf and altq framwork in the base system (for sysadmins, this is perhaps one of the most important features), multithreaded network stack (although he mentions it elsewhere, but not under new features!), etc. He is even wrong in his pathetic attempt at humour (if it was that) about the naming of ULE:
Well, yes, ULE might not be an acronym, and no, its name is not SCHED_ULEI would take this guy's comments with a grain of salt, except for his older work, which I think was excellent (I don't have problems with criticism, and his old amd64 review was quite critical. I have problems with FUD and unsubstantiated claims and badly written articles). What happened to this guy?
Not just GPL I would say. It is the spirit of Open Source. Take the BSD's for example. They not only think that code sharing between projects is fine, they also pay extra attention to portability - to make code sharing easier (and that's not just NetBSD, I've seen changelogs of commits in FreeBSD that's main purpose was to make the code more portable across BSD's).
I good example is ehci (usb 2.0 support) that was written by FreeBSD devs, and then maintainer abandoned it. It was picked up by NetBSD devs, who enchanched it, and went trough OpenBSD as well - now FreeBSD folks are reintegrating the code (it's still work in progress). Note that the BSD licence wouldn't even force anyone to give back ... it just makes a lot of sense, and I say: forget the whino. If he wan't to spend time on obsfucating changelogs instead of developing, there won't be too much his fork could offer you after a while.
I don't think that's a good idea. When I'm high I don't make very good deals.
In other words, you can have an 5.3-STABLE (warning, that is still a development branch, but as the name suggests, it's pretty stable) system or 5.3-RELEASE, or even 6-CURRENT if you want - depending how you set your standard-supfile.In short, you'll have a fully functional FreeBSD system, you can even decide which version you want.
Cvsup, ports/src tree ... these might sound alien if you never used FreeBSD, but the concepts are really easy to pick up (me came to FreeBSD from a mandrake background, and their documentation is so excellent, that I picked up the basics in a few days). In fact, I believe that FreeBSD is the easiest unix system a non-techie person can learn! Also, the community is very newbie friendly and helpful (on bsdforums.org). You can read the Handbook on their homepage.
Also, FreeSBIE made a very nice fluxbox desktop (I learned about torsmo and idesk through it) and now I use it as a template for creating a light-weight, yet nice looking fluxdesktop for lower end machines. Also, another nice thing was that TVcard worked out of the box (just had to give the proper chanlist in motv, and in a minute after boot up I could watch TV on the machine of my roommate (winxp box).
Here is a must have screenshot of a FreeSBIE-like screenshot.
MSN is under no obligation to support ANYONE else's browser... Sounds familiar? Of course it doesn't have any obligation to support (support implies actively working on it), but I think working on disabling rival formats is very uncool.
"Apple can do whatever it wishes with its own products, and consumers may decide whether or not they would like to purchase them."
Agreed.
Cool! Made it my home url in konqi. Will make it the default homepage for the few windows boxes I administer as well. Thanks for the link :)
I have a fairly good idea how nvidia's binary drivers will affect my system. It makes neverwinter nights playable on linux/freebsd. It makes those fancy screensavers work. It provides 3d accelaration. etc.
This is sooo old, I don't even think where to begin. I know that _my_ ideas of what the binary drivers do are the layman's ideas. But do you have an idea of how [insert random opensource driver here] will affect your system? Do you read the source code of every opensource driver you happen to have on your install? And even if you do, how many of us does that regurarly?
Unsupportable ... by whom? Ah, I know, opensource developers, cause they are proprietary. But is that really so important, or is that really a problem? This can only be perceived as a problem if you automatically assume that opensource devs could provide better support ... because... well, why? Because they are opensource devs, and therefore are better? Because of the many-eyes argument (which was never really proved, because we tend to automatically assume that someone is looking at the code, but this someone often proves to be hypothetical). Nvidia drivers are not unsupportable ... they are just supportable and supported by its developers - just like most opensource software is (even though there is the possibility for Joe Random to begin supporting software X, it rarely happens). And they do an excellent job at providing regular updates, bugfixes, improvements... they even do a better job of supporting their software than some open source projects.
None. The reason: they have excellent and commited developers. They use a unified code-base for all their drivers. Occasionally, they go out of their way to provide support even for less hyped operating systems (FreeBSD, for instance). This is an old thread, and FreeBSD with 5.3 has proper (proper for Nvidia's needs) tls implementation, but still, it is a good example of nvidia's commitment to work with open source developers on issues with their drivers.
So yes, the 'what if company X choses to no longer support opensource' has a ring of truth to it (and opensource advocates can always have it open in kwrite for copy & paste job for every newsbit about closed source drivers), but you always have to think about the specific case. Does nvidia have good support for their chipsets for linux/freebsd? Yes, it does, and these drivers are quite up to date with their windows counterparts. Are they willing to address various issues with their drivers? Yes they are. Are they willing to opensource their drivers? No. And that seems to bring out the worst of zealotry in opensource land. I'm not addressing this to parent post specifically btw, but to all who beat the 'company X suxorz cause they're proprietary' drum.
Oh sorry, didn't pay attention to the first lines of your post (I just realized that you already run FreeBSD on a couple of servers) :o)
Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)
I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.
Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:
In october, the 3 topmost reliable sites were all FreeBSD (4th was either Net~ or Open~ and 8th was again FreeBSD).Read More
One thing they should do is to update the Foundations website. Advertise. Make donating easier and more compelling. An outdated website is not a good incentive to contribute. The best thing would be if they could achieve steady funding. I'm just a student, and my monthly budget is 76000HUF (~380$). Hungary is cheap, so that's OK, but it isn't much (it just covers my monthly expenses, it is not enough to save up), yet I think I could afford a monthly 5$ to help them. But I would only do that if I saw a very well organized 'campaign' to do that. A professional, easy to use website, specific goals (target amount for each month), way to track it, publicity, publicity, publicity. I think it would even be worth for the project to pay someone to organize this (let's say he or she would get x% of the income). I also think that income should be calculable.
In other words, this 'campaign' (I'm looking for a better expression, english is not my native language!) should focus on getting to those who are willing to contribute (even very small amounts, like 5$) for a set amount of time (6-12-x months) - thus to make the 'income' as a said, predictable.
Just an idea...
Of course, I realize that from a user/technical standpoint, this means nothing. But there are too many trolls out here who are bent on conducting a smear campaign against FreeBSD developers, going even as far as to question their programming skills. Now think about this: these developers have kept up with the pace linux development dictates with 1/100 of the resources linux development has. It is still one of the most reliable operating systems out there, no matter what disgruntled HawkinsOS guys will tell you about FreeBSD not being 'enterprise ready.' In fact, if you check netcraft's monthly reports about the most reliable sites, 4-5 sites from the top 10 is always running FreeBSD. In october, the top three sites having the fewest failed requests all ran FreeBSD (the 4th is Net~ or Open~).
So I just can't emphasize enough how impressed I am (as a desktop user btw) with the work of these guys. And now this announcment! Excellent ideas there! And I hope to see ULE allowed in -STABLE again soon :))) (did I say I was a desktop user?).
Thanks guys ... for everything!
I'm primarily a desktop user of FreeBSD, and I miss ULE soo much (hiccups in mplayer - and even JUK sometimes - during compile with 4BSD, and general responsivity issues - on the desktop of course).
Just a minor correction (granpda) : ULE was not made the default scheduler in 5.2/5.2.1! In fact, I think that was the main problem (switching to ULE only in current later meant less exposure, and less chance to find the bugs as early as possible, less time to work on those bugs, etc...)
Note that he compares KDE 3.1.4 with OS X, and yes, there were things he liked, there were things he didn't, some of which has been addressed since then, and there were some things that (be very shocked!!!) he liked better in KDE.
So? What prevents vendors from putting various kdeapps into their own packages? In fact, that's exactly what kde@freebsd does. You don't have to install all the stuff in kdeaddons if you want only the kate plugins part. Look:
Blame your particular distro for not providing separate packages for kuickshow (for example).