They might be also begin trolling some hacker lists... making claims about the invincibility of their server, and pissing off everyone.. Then if they stand for more than a month, than perhaps they might qualify...
I knew when I read the post that this would lead to another FreeBSD v. Linux flamewar, despite the author's claims of 'hoping' to end those.
I don't think using 5.1-CURRENT is a problem, but the way the benchmark results were layed out was begging for a flamewar. As I explained earlier the results are not as bad as either linux fanatics, or FreeBSD fanatics would have it. It would have been simple to avoid such flamewar (or am I too optimistic?) by doing two things:
Explain the status of both (linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.1) development branches - as I have outlined in my earlier post. If you take into consideration what I have written above, than you would have realized that results for FreeBSD are not that bad, in fact, they are excellent.
Include results for 4.8 - or 4.9 rc3 (but I would be happier with just the production release) in the test, just as 2.4 was included on the linux side.
To sum up: I believe that these benchmarks confirms what I thought for a long time: FBSD 5.1 development is on par with Linux 2.6. Perhaps this was the reason for his last "Or may be not" remark.
I read many comments claiming that linux 2.6 is _much_ better than FBSD 5.1 - re-read the article please. I know its hard for a linux zealot not to exaggerate the results, just as it is difficult for a FreeBSD zealot not to get over-defensive.
As to the quirks. As someone pointed out, the author should have read the handbook.
Also, the FreeBSD kernel (well, the OS, as the kernel isn't developed separately from the rest of the system) development is more in its earlier stages than linux kernel development. There is no code freeze yet (I think) and I very much doubt that the 5.x branch will be stabilized until we see a 5.3 release. Thats not going to happen until spring (5.2 is due in December). In other words, while 2.6 underwent some stages of optimization, this is yet to happen to the 5.x branch. Yes folks, the results you see from FBSD is still that of an unoptimized kernel - and that's not as bad as zealotry (from either side) would have it,no?;-)
I use 5.1 - I am writing this in Opera 7.21 on the XFCE4 destop. Have Mozilla 1.4, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), KDE 3.1.4, etc. installed.
Tried it first a couple of weeks ago. Before that I used Mandrake 9.0/9.1 for a year and before that... I don't want to remember;-)
I was (well, still am) a computer noob - no formal computer education (I'm studying literature) - but after installing linux, I understood what distrowatch's "put fun back into computing" means. I even mostly forgot about the hot windows games - playing with linux (and now BSD) is more fun.
I just wanted to say: I admire the people making FreeBSD (just as I admire linux developers). This is a very decent review of FreeBSD, but it makes it sound more geekish than it really is (well, I know this can't be helped, and I see the effort to emphasize the fact that the FreeBSD documentation is so good, that it really makes things simple, more simple than in linux in fact.)
As to the dying trolls: I don't really get that. Can someone tell me when this started? It is as if someone had a personal vendetta against BSD - and I can't think of a reason for it. Is he/she (are they?) linux zealots (I _am_ a linux zealot - I like it as much as I do BSD, I just prefer the latter right now)? Disgruntled BSDi users? It doesn't make any sense. It is funny, however, that they point to netcraft to confirm their claims, whereas it was netcraft that reported a continuous and steady growth of the FreeBSD user base in the past years.
Anyway, its a fantastic OS - and I think the current kernel development is on par with linux (KSE, PAE, whatnot). I didn't have problems with hardware support either, in fact, my on-board via8233 is working flawlessly, while I had to download an updated driver for Mandrake 9.1 to get it working. I also believe that anyone who isn't unconfortable with the command line in linux, would really like and appreciate BSD (gentoo/slackware users: give it a try!):)
Hey, Enderle is an old friend. He wrote such masterpieces as "Opinion: Reasons To Shun Open Source-ry" and "Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise (Opinion)" - check the links below the article. Mr Enderle's past articles are good bases to formulate an opinion of him. He should be banned from the Internet.;)
Or may be not. His articles have some entertainment values, they are funny. I never seen such clueless dude as he is.
Ah, I see. Good luck with 4.8 (tried it as well - there wasn't much difference between 5.1 and 4.8 as far as usability goes, its only that 5.1 had more up to date precompiled packages).
As to linux vs. FreeBSD - I never really understood that. I've been following the BSD section of slashdot for 2 weeks now, and I just can't figure out from where "BSD is dying" trolls come from. See their recent march-september report on kerneltrap.org - as far as features go, development is on par with the 2.6 kernel series. (sorry for my bad english, its not my native language). And it shouldn't be a linux vs. BSD. Fact is, BSD is easier on resources, so sometimes its the only choice. For newbies considering switching from Windows I would still recommend Mandrake (probably they are not interested in compiling everything from source and in the fact that this is soo easy in FreeBSD).
Broken packages... hmmm. Currently I have 256 installed (from ports) and only Java gave me a pause, since I accidentally installed linux-java instead of diablo, and I had to edit the makefile to refer to linux-java directory instead of diablo. Mplayer could be broken, though I'm not sure - I had to download the win32 codecs manually and put it in/usr/ports/distfiles to work.
And now... with paragraph breaks (sorry for my negligence).
I spent a few days with FreeBSD 5.1 - and I have fallen in love with it. Been using linux for a year before that (got fed up with windows, but I have no formal training in computer science, I study literature). What was really surprising in my experience is that I expected FreeBSD to be much harder than linux was - its not!!!
Well, you need some experience with CLI (if you can install and configure Debian, than your are set to try out FreeBSD) - but that's just it. Everything seems more simple and easy than in linux. And BSD is way much faster than my Mandrake was, and is easier on resources. XFCE4 (+ sshd and sendmail and some panel apps) after startup consumes 49Mb (!) memory! WOW! That's resource management.
And the best thing is: DOCUMENTATION. Their handbook is up to date, and even though 5.1 is not the stable branch, it already reflects the changes - wherever something works differently in the new release, those differences are explained in detail.
Another thing: package management! Think of a combination of apt-get and gentoo - and you got FreeBSD - The best of both world. Kernel compilation. I tried it many times in linux, and it worked (for most times), but wading to xmenuconfig was a time consuming. When I recompiled the BSD kernel, I was prepared to spend an hour with it. Got the Handbook ready, followed the steps described in it, and after 5 minutes I noticed that MC's editor would not scroll further, and went: what? That was it? I even checked if I was editing the wrong file, but no. EASY! The only pain in the buttock was installing JAVA, but everything else works just like they should be. I have KDE 3.1.4, Mozilla 1.4, XFCE4, FLASH, MPlayer, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), XINE (Kaffeine), GIMP 1.2.5, etc.
Also, the community is great. They are indeed polite in their RTFM - RTFM translates to politely directing you to the relevant chapter of the FreeBSD handbook. And they are right! The Handbook is comprehensive, easy to follow, and very accurate. (After all, the main writers were paid for making it. Also, I noticed that in their to-do list for the next release, updating the Handbook is always there!) BSD earned my utmost respect, in every way - if you don't feel unconfortable with the command line, you should try it out (and if you want a working and bleeding edge Desktop OS, its way much easier to configure than Debian. For instance, my USB wheel mouse was detected automatically. So far, no packages in ports were broken, and I never seen such a beautiful Enlightenment desktop by default in any of the linux distroes). GREAT!
Final note: I would have never tried 5.0 - and I don't understand why OFB writer choose that. It was the first release for the new branch almost a year ago, and 5.1 is out since August! Its fast, its stable, and ports are not broken. I didn't have a single issue with 5.1! (and sysinstall, its installer is way more user friendly than debian's installer, in fact, its almost like a wizard if you choose the standard install - there is extensive help, and everything works exactly like it is described in the handbook - lots of screenshots! -.)
I spent a few days with FreeBSD 5.1 - and I have fallen in love with it. Been using linux for a year before that (got fed up with windows, but I have no formal training in computer science, I study literature). What was really surprising in my experience is that I expected FreeBSD to be much harder than linux was - its not!!!
Well, you need some experience with CLI (if you can install and configure Debian, than your are set to try out FreeBSD) - but that's just it. Everything seems more simple and easy than in linux. And BSD is way much faster than my Mandrake was, and is easier on resources. XFCE4 (+ sshd and sendmail and some panel apps) after startup consumes 49Mb (!) memory! WOW! That's resource management. And the best thing is: DOCUMENTATION. Their handbook is up to date, and even though 5.1 is not the stable branch, it already reflects the changes - wherever something works differently in the new release, those differences are explained in detail. Another thing: package management! Think of a combination of apt-get and gentoo - and you got FreeBSD - The best of both world.
Kernel compilation. I tried it many times in linux, and it worked (for most times), but wading to xmenuconfig was a time consuming. When I recompiled the BSD kernel, I was prepared to spend an hour with it. Got the Handbook ready, followed the steps described in it, and after 5 minutes I noticed that MC's editor would not scroll further, and went: what? That was it? I even checked if I was editing the wrong file, but no. EASY! The only pain in the buttock was installing JAVA, but everything else works just like they should be. I have KDE 3.1.4, Mozilla 1.4, XFCE4, FLASH, MPlayer, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), XINE (Kaffeine), GIMP 1.2.5, etc. Also, the community is great. They are indeed polite in their RTFM - RTFM translates to politely directing you to the relevant chapter of the FreeBSD handbook. And they are right! The Handbook is comprehensive, easy to follow, and very accurate. (After all, the main writers were paid for making it. Also, I noticed that in their to-do list for the next release, updating the Handbook is always there!)
BSD earned my utmost respect, in every way - if you don't feel unconfortable with the command line, you should try it out (and if you want a working and bleeding edge Desktop OS, its way much easier to configure than Debian. For instance, my USB wheel mouse was detected automatically. So far, no packages in ports were broken, and I never seen such a beautiful Enlightenment desktop by default in any of the linux distroes). GREAT!
Final note: I would have never tried 5.0 - and I don't understand why OFB writer choose that. It was the first release for the new branch almost a year ago, and 5.1 is out since August! Its fast, its stable, and ports are not broken. I didn't have a single issue with 5.1! (and sysinstall, its installer is way more user friendly than debian's installer, in fact, its almost like a wizard if you choose the standard install - there is extensive help, and everything works exactly like it is described in the handbook - lots of screenshots! -.)
>I mean how hard would it be to tune these portals to work on browsers other than IE? These portals should be fixed anyhow, not just for Linux, but for other browsers out there such as Opera, Mozilla, etc, etc.
sorry - mouse section (the command starting the mouse) in usbd.conf + I added the same param. to to XFree86cfg. Mouse worked before that, but without wheel.
Setting up an usb wheel mouse in debian is a nightmare, in fact, I could not do it. FreeBSD (both 5.1 and 4.8) automatically recognised it (you had to say no to mouse configuration in sysinstall). To get the wheel working, you must add one parameter: "-z 4 5" to your usbd.conf (not rc.conf, X picks up settings from usbd methinks).
I won't use slack btw, cause I have a slow machine. FreeBSD offers the best of both worlds: use ports to compile stuff, or use pkg_add to install binaries. Both tools handles dependencies automatically, and its pretty up to date (XFree86 4.3, KDE 3.1.4, etc..)
Now, as of 16 June, we also increased our claims amount to include all
AIX-derived hardware, software and services, given that they are now - in deriving that revenue - on an unauthorised route for use of the software.
- from the interview on vnunet.
They are absolutely crazy! How can they include in their claims hardware and software services? And who is going to take them seriously after this? Its time McBride quotes such as this to appear in humour magazines. I'm not sure McBride can hear what he actually says any longer.
I've been using Mandrake for a while, and I would hate to see this company go - they have many great tools, and they put every single line of code they wrote under the gpl (unlike YAST for instance, even though I love SuSe too). They probably need as much PR as they can get, and this was a good idea.
Its time for some features, like their excellent urpm* tools to get more attention (I wonder why it received such scare coverage, for it is the only package management tool that is on par with apt-get among rpm-based distributions - maybe with the exception of apt-rpm). Another great tool, excellent in large deployments is draksync.
Seeking to invalidate SCO's claims, ESR managed to round up 60 users who had access to SysV code. Is it going to be enough? BSD could claim that thousands of users had access to that code. If what ESR claims is true (SCO licencinc SysV to universities) than the whole case looks more and more like BSD (+Univ. of California) vs. USL case.
Read IT
If they really offered the sources publicly, they are doomed. I know that not many people read the BSD case, so I'll post the relevant sections here:
However, as shown by the briefs arguing Plaintiff's
motion for a preliminary injunction against BSDI, the threshold issues here are not issues of who did what, but rather issues of similarity among source codes, of contract interpretation, and of law. How closely does Net2 or BSD/386 resemble 32V? Was 32V published without notice of copyright? What sorts of publications do Berkeley's licenses permit? Can any part of 32V possibly be considered a trade secret, given that much of it is industry standard and known to a generation of users and programmers? These are all issues without a particular geographical situs.
and more specifically:
In order to prevail, Plaintiff must prove that it has a
valid copyright in the UNIX code. Plaintiff's chief difficulty here is the "Publication doctrine." The publication doctrine denies copyright protection to works which the copyright owner "publishes," unless the owner has properly affixed a notice of copyright to the published work. This doctrine has suffered steady erosion over the years, and it now applies in full force only for works published prior to January 1, 1978. For works such as 32V (published in 1978), which were published after that date but before March 1, 1989, the doctrine is subject to the escape provisions of 17 U.S.C. 405(a) and the common-law "limited publication rule." For works published after March 1, 1989, the publication doctrine has been eliminated by the Berne Convention Implementation Act, 102 Stat. 2857 (1988).
What comes after this section is the definition of what can be considered to fall under the "Publication Doctrine". Essentially, the issue here is whether publication of the source code happened to 'selected groups' or it was published to a wider audience. If SCO actually published the source code on their website, there was no screening procedure - which is needed to make a convincing point. Even if they had a screening procedure, they would have to convince the judge that this screening procedure can be successfully applied to narrow down the audience selected for viewing the source code. Apparently, plaintiff was not successful at convincing the judge.
Plaintiff cannot avail itself of any of these provisions.
Notice was omitted from thousands of copies of 32V; no contractual agreements require the licensees to affix notice; Plaintiff failed to copyright 32V until 1992, well over five years after 32V was published; and Plaintiff has not yet made reasonable efforts to add notices to the many noticeless publications of 32V. Consequently, Plaintiff must try to fit within the common-law doctrine of limited publication.
Note that we talked about Copyright infringement so far. What comes next is more similar to SCO's claims. You can see how SCO's doom is spelled out in this verdict:
2. Trade Secret Misappropriation
Plaintiff also claims that BSDI misappropriated trade secrets when, via Net2, BSDI incorporated parts of 32V into BSD/356. This claim raises two key issue. First, is Plaintiff's claim preempted by federal copyright law? And second, after a generation of scrutiny and imitation as a highly-regarded computer operating system, does any part of 32V remain secret? Section 301 of Title 17 expressly preempts state laws protecting "legal or equitable rights that are equivalent to any of the exclusive rights within the general scope of copyright as specified by section 106." Section 301 explains the scope of this preemption by listing the exceptions:
The concept of preempted claims is quite difficult to
Hmmm... An interesting read. I liked that warns of SCO having a tight circle of friends. Well, I'm sure IBM has a much broader circle of friends, and if we think of linux, there is HP, Intel, Fujitsu, Sony.... and so forth.
Well, OK, I'm sorry to hear that. On the other hand, dropping support right now won't affect you that much, since it is about future updates/bugfixes. So for the time being, you can use whatever you have on your system, you just can't upgrade. Switching to linux is a good idea in the long run anyway, but I understand that you can't do it right now.
Now the OSS community is really scared, I'm sure.
Besides, you might want to think next time before saying silly things: there is a flaw in your logic. You see, if SCO would succeed, there would be no OSS product to evaluate in the first place (no OSS product in a GPL sense). pfffffffft.
silly. SCO would not support their platform unless they win the case - otherwise they will be broke. Since the probability of winning this case is 0.00001% - actually you do a favor to SCO users by preparing them to switch in time.
lol:))
actually, they began their research in the US, and moved to Hungary because they say its cheaper here. Also, they already spent 1.200.000 $ in research, and their lab is quite high-tech. I could provide I link, but I read this on a Hungarian news portal. The article is serious, but its title is funny, it translates to: "Antigrav Hungarian Saucer" and its in the middle of other headlines that are 'normal' stuff, like news pertaining to economics, politics, etc. http://www.index.hu/
Slashdot Mirror
They might be also begin trolling some hacker lists ... making claims about the invincibility of their server, and pissing off everyone.. Then if they stand for more than a month, than perhaps they might qualify...
about email leakage: ...cryptography...cryptography...cryptography...
I knew when I read the post that this would lead to another FreeBSD v. Linux flamewar, despite the author's claims of 'hoping' to end those.
I don't think using 5.1-CURRENT is a problem, but the way the benchmark results were layed out was begging for a flamewar. As I explained earlier the results are not as bad as either linux fanatics, or FreeBSD fanatics would have it. It would have been simple to avoid such flamewar (or am I too optimistic?) by doing two things:
Explain the status of both (linux 2.6 and FreeBSD 5.1) development branches - as I have outlined in my earlier post. If you take into consideration what I have written above, than you would have realized that results for FreeBSD are not that bad, in fact, they are excellent.
Include results for 4.8 - or 4.9 rc3 (but I would be happier with just the production release) in the test, just as 2.4 was included on the linux side.
To sum up: I believe that these benchmarks confirms what I thought for a long time: FBSD 5.1 development is on par with Linux 2.6. Perhaps this was the reason for his last "Or may be not" remark.
I read many comments claiming that linux 2.6 is _much_ better than FBSD 5.1 - re-read the article please. I know its hard for a linux zealot not to exaggerate the results, just as it is difficult for a FreeBSD zealot not to get over-defensive.
;-)
As to the quirks. As someone pointed out, the author should have read the handbook.
Also, the FreeBSD kernel (well, the OS, as the kernel isn't developed separately from the rest of the system) development is more in its earlier stages than linux kernel development. There is no code freeze yet (I think) and I very much doubt that the 5.x branch will be stabilized until we see a 5.3 release. Thats not going to happen until spring (5.2 is due in December). In other words, while 2.6 underwent some stages of optimization, this is yet to happen to the 5.x branch. Yes folks, the results you see from FBSD is still that of an unoptimized kernel - and that's not as bad as zealotry (from either side) would have it,no?
I use 5.1 - I am writing this in Opera 7.21 on the XFCE4 destop. Have Mozilla 1.4, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), KDE 3.1.4, etc. installed.
... I don't want to remember ;-)
:)
Tried it first a couple of weeks ago. Before that I used Mandrake 9.0/9.1 for a year and before that
I was (well, still am) a computer noob - no formal computer education (I'm studying literature) - but after installing linux, I understood what distrowatch's "put fun back into computing" means. I even mostly forgot about the hot windows games - playing with linux (and now BSD) is more fun.
I just wanted to say: I admire the people making FreeBSD (just as I admire linux developers). This is a very decent review of FreeBSD, but it makes it sound more geekish than it really is (well, I know this can't be helped, and I see the effort to emphasize the fact that the FreeBSD documentation is so good, that it really makes things simple, more simple than in linux in fact.)
As to the dying trolls: I don't really get that. Can someone tell me when this started? It is as if someone had a personal vendetta against BSD - and I can't think of a reason for it. Is he/she (are they?) linux zealots (I _am_ a linux zealot - I like it as much as I do BSD, I just prefer the latter right now)? Disgruntled BSDi users? It doesn't make any sense. It is funny, however, that they point to netcraft to confirm their claims, whereas it was netcraft that reported a continuous and steady growth of the FreeBSD user base in the past years.
Anyway, its a fantastic OS - and I think the current kernel development is on par with linux (KSE, PAE, whatnot). I didn't have problems with hardware support either, in fact, my on-board via8233 is working flawlessly, while I had to download an updated driver for Mandrake 9.1 to get it working. I also believe that anyone who isn't unconfortable with the command line in linux, would really like and appreciate BSD (gentoo/slackware users: give it a try!)
> I do know that the reason we have Microsoft Server today is that the lawsuit scared companies into abandoning BSD.
:)))
Link :)
No Microsoft Servers in the TOP 50 sites (longest uptimes) - guess what OS they are running on
Yeah, sure the fastest ...
http://www.pcworld.com/news/article/0,aid,112749,p g,1,00.asp
Hmmm. Put linux (or new FreeBSD) on the machine, compile wine, and run your legacy dos apps. Seems like the best solution at the moment.
Hey, Enderle is an old friend. He wrote such masterpieces as "Opinion: Reasons To Shun Open Source-ry" and "Linux Is Not Ready For the Enterprise (Opinion)" - check the links below the article. Mr Enderle's past articles are good bases to formulate an opinion of him. He should be banned from the Internet.;)
Or may be not. His articles have some entertainment values, they are funny. I never seen such clueless dude as he is.
Ah, I see. Good luck with 4.8 (tried it as well - there wasn't much difference between 5.1 and 4.8 as far as usability goes, its only that 5.1 had more up to date precompiled packages).
... hmmm. Currently I have 256 installed (from ports) and only Java gave me a pause, since I accidentally installed linux-java instead of diablo, and I had to edit the makefile to refer to linux-java directory instead of diablo. Mplayer could be broken, though I'm not sure - I had to download the win32 codecs manually and put it in /usr/ports/distfiles to work.
As to linux vs. FreeBSD - I never really understood that. I've been following the BSD section of slashdot for 2 weeks now, and I just can't figure out from where "BSD is dying" trolls come from. See their recent march-september report on kerneltrap.org - as far as features go, development is on par with the 2.6 kernel series. (sorry for my bad english, its not my native language). And it shouldn't be a linux vs. BSD. Fact is, BSD is easier on resources, so sometimes its the only choice. For newbies considering switching from Windows I would still recommend Mandrake (probably they are not interested in compiling everything from source and in the fact that this is soo easy in FreeBSD).
Broken packages
And now ... with paragraph breaks (sorry for my negligence).
I spent a few days with FreeBSD 5.1 - and I have fallen in love with it. Been using linux for a year before that (got fed up with windows, but I have no formal training in computer science, I study literature). What was really surprising in my experience is that I expected FreeBSD to be much harder than linux was - its not!!!
Well, you need some experience with CLI (if you can install and configure Debian, than your are set to try out FreeBSD) - but that's just it. Everything seems more simple and easy than in linux. And BSD is way much faster than my Mandrake was, and is easier on resources. XFCE4 (+ sshd and sendmail and some panel apps) after startup consumes 49Mb (!) memory! WOW! That's resource management.
And the best thing is: DOCUMENTATION. Their handbook is up to date, and even though 5.1 is not the stable branch, it already reflects the changes - wherever something works differently in the new release, those differences are explained in detail.
Another thing: package management! Think of a combination of apt-get and gentoo - and you got FreeBSD - The best of both world. Kernel compilation. I tried it many times in linux, and it worked (for most times), but wading to xmenuconfig was a time consuming. When I recompiled the BSD kernel, I was prepared to spend an hour with it. Got the Handbook ready, followed the steps described in it, and after 5 minutes I noticed that MC's editor would not scroll further, and went: what? That was it? I even checked if I was editing the wrong file, but no. EASY! The only pain in the buttock was installing JAVA, but everything else works just like they should be. I have KDE 3.1.4, Mozilla 1.4, XFCE4, FLASH, MPlayer, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), XINE (Kaffeine), GIMP 1.2.5, etc.
Also, the community is great. They are indeed polite in their RTFM - RTFM translates to politely directing you to the relevant chapter of the FreeBSD handbook. And they are right! The Handbook is comprehensive, easy to follow, and very accurate. (After all, the main writers were paid for making it. Also, I noticed that in their to-do list for the next release, updating the Handbook is always there!) BSD earned my utmost respect, in every way - if you don't feel unconfortable with the command line, you should try it out (and if you want a working and bleeding edge Desktop OS, its way much easier to configure than Debian. For instance, my USB wheel mouse was detected automatically. So far, no packages in ports were broken, and I never seen such a beautiful Enlightenment desktop by default in any of the linux distroes). GREAT!
Final note: I would have never tried 5.0 - and I don't understand why OFB writer choose that. It was the first release for the new branch almost a year ago, and 5.1 is out since August! Its fast, its stable, and ports are not broken. I didn't have a single issue with 5.1! (and sysinstall, its installer is way more user friendly than debian's installer, in fact, its almost like a wizard if you choose the standard install - there is extensive help, and everything works exactly like it is described in the handbook - lots of screenshots! -.)
I spent a few days with FreeBSD 5.1 - and I have fallen in love with it. Been using linux for a year before that (got fed up with windows, but I have no formal training in computer science, I study literature). What was really surprising in my experience is that I expected FreeBSD to be much harder than linux was - its not!!! Well, you need some experience with CLI (if you can install and configure Debian, than your are set to try out FreeBSD) - but that's just it. Everything seems more simple and easy than in linux. And BSD is way much faster than my Mandrake was, and is easier on resources. XFCE4 (+ sshd and sendmail and some panel apps) after startup consumes 49Mb (!) memory! WOW! That's resource management. And the best thing is: DOCUMENTATION. Their handbook is up to date, and even though 5.1 is not the stable branch, it already reflects the changes - wherever something works differently in the new release, those differences are explained in detail. Another thing: package management! Think of a combination of apt-get and gentoo - and you got FreeBSD - The best of both world. Kernel compilation. I tried it many times in linux, and it worked (for most times), but wading to xmenuconfig was a time consuming. When I recompiled the BSD kernel, I was prepared to spend an hour with it. Got the Handbook ready, followed the steps described in it, and after 5 minutes I noticed that MC's editor would not scroll further, and went: what? That was it? I even checked if I was editing the wrong file, but no. EASY! The only pain in the buttock was installing JAVA, but everything else works just like they should be. I have KDE 3.1.4, Mozilla 1.4, XFCE4, FLASH, MPlayer, OpenOffice 1.1 (rc5), XINE (Kaffeine), GIMP 1.2.5, etc. Also, the community is great. They are indeed polite in their RTFM - RTFM translates to politely directing you to the relevant chapter of the FreeBSD handbook. And they are right! The Handbook is comprehensive, easy to follow, and very accurate. (After all, the main writers were paid for making it. Also, I noticed that in their to-do list for the next release, updating the Handbook is always there!) BSD earned my utmost respect, in every way - if you don't feel unconfortable with the command line, you should try it out (and if you want a working and bleeding edge Desktop OS, its way much easier to configure than Debian. For instance, my USB wheel mouse was detected automatically. So far, no packages in ports were broken, and I never seen such a beautiful Enlightenment desktop by default in any of the linux distroes). GREAT! Final note: I would have never tried 5.0 - and I don't understand why OFB writer choose that. It was the first release for the new branch almost a year ago, and 5.1 is out since August! Its fast, its stable, and ports are not broken. I didn't have a single issue with 5.1! (and sysinstall, its installer is way more user friendly than debian's installer, in fact, its almost like a wizard if you choose the standard install - there is extensive help, and everything works exactly like it is described in the handbook - lots of screenshots! -.)
>I mean how hard would it be to tune these portals to work on browsers other than IE? These portals should be fixed anyhow, not just for Linux, but for other browsers out there such as Opera, Mozilla, etc, etc.
:)
Hard? click
sorry - mouse section (the command starting the mouse) in usbd.conf + I added the same param. to to XFree86cfg. Mouse worked before that, but without wheel.
Setting up an usb wheel mouse in debian is a nightmare, in fact, I could not do it. FreeBSD (both 5.1 and 4.8) automatically recognised it (you had to say no to mouse configuration in sysinstall). To get the wheel working, you must add one parameter: "-z 4 5" to your usbd.conf (not rc.conf, X picks up settings from usbd methinks).
I won't use slack btw, cause I have a slow machine. FreeBSD offers the best of both worlds: use ports to compile stuff, or use pkg_add to install binaries. Both tools handles dependencies automatically, and its pretty up to date (XFree86 4.3, KDE 3.1.4, etc..)
- from the interview on vnunet.
They are absolutely crazy! How can they include in their claims hardware and software services? And who is going to take them seriously after this? Its time McBride quotes such as this to appear in humour magazines. I'm not sure McBride can hear what he actually says any longer.
I've been using Mandrake for a while, and I would hate to see this company go - they have many great tools, and they put every single line of code they wrote under the gpl (unlike YAST for instance, even though I love SuSe too). They probably need as much PR as they can get, and this was a good idea.
Its time for some features, like their excellent urpm* tools to get more attention (I wonder why it received such scare coverage, for it is the only package management tool that is on par with apt-get among rpm-based distributions - maybe with the exception of apt-rpm). Another great tool, excellent in large deployments is draksync.
Check out these sites:
urpmi mini-howto and easy-urpmi
Seeking to invalidate SCO's claims, ESR managed to round up 60 users who had access to SysV code. Is it going to be enough? BSD could claim that thousands of users had access to that code. If what ESR claims is true (SCO licencinc SysV to universities) than the whole case looks more and more like BSD (+Univ. of California) vs. USL case. Read IT
and more specifically:
What comes after this section is the definition of what can be considered to fall under the "Publication Doctrine". Essentially, the issue here is whether publication of the source code happened to 'selected groups' or it was published to a wider audience. If SCO actually published the source code on their website, there was no screening procedure - which is needed to make a convincing point. Even if they had a screening procedure, they would have to convince the judge that this screening procedure can be successfully applied to narrow down the audience selected for viewing the source code. Apparently, plaintiff was not successful at convincing the judge.
Note that we talked about Copyright infringement so far. What comes next is more similar to SCO's claims. You can see how SCO's doom is spelled out in this verdict:
The concept of preempted claims is quite difficult to
Hmmm... An interesting read. I liked that warns of SCO having a tight circle of friends. Well, I'm sure IBM has a much broader circle of friends, and if we think of linux, there is HP, Intel, Fujitsu, Sony.... and so forth.
Well, yes, *semi* legitimate - even index made fun of them (I mean the title for their coverage is hillarious).
Well, OK, I'm sorry to hear that. On the other hand, dropping support right now won't affect you that much, since it is about future updates/bugfixes. So for the time being, you can use whatever you have on your system, you just can't upgrade. Switching to linux is a good idea in the long run anyway, but I understand that you can't do it right now.
Now the OSS community is really scared, I'm sure. Besides, you might want to think next time before saying silly things: there is a flaw in your logic. You see, if SCO would succeed, there would be no OSS product to evaluate in the first place (no OSS product in a GPL sense). pfffffffft.
silly. SCO would not support their platform unless they win the case - otherwise they will be broke. Since the probability of winning this case is 0.00001% - actually you do a favor to SCO users by preparing them to switch in time.
lol :))
actually, they began their research in the US, and moved to Hungary because they say its cheaper here. Also, they already spent 1.200.000 $ in research, and their lab is quite high-tech. I could provide I link, but I read this on a Hungarian news portal. The article is serious, but its title is funny, it translates to: "Antigrav Hungarian Saucer" and its in the middle of other headlines that are 'normal' stuff, like news pertaining to economics, politics, etc. http://www.index.hu/