FreeBSD is very inconvenient as a development platform. Many tools - sed, m4, make, csh - are inherited from UNIX. They don't have many nice features offered by their GNU counterparts. Other tools - gcc, as, ld - are old versions of GNU software. But if you upgrade them, you almost certainly lose the ability to recompile the kernel.
I guess you're saying that if it isn't GNU its craaap! I guess Solaris, AIX, IRIX, and HP-UX all suck too since they are SVR4 descendents with BSD extensions. Installing a new compiler won't break your kernel compilation unless you do something like RH did with 7.0:)
But what annoys me most - the sources are packed together and split in chunks. So if you need the sources of sed, you have to download the sources of the whole/usr/bin!!!
Were you breast fed till you were nine? If you just want to cvsup sed then "cd/usr/src/usr.bin/sed; make all install". Baboom! That easy. FreeBSD also has all the most up-to-date GNU utilities in the ports tree if you want them. gmake, etc.
And because when I talk to the network managers at work, my fellow consultants/contractors, and my clients, they all talk about Linux, not FreeBSD. I've convinced a few of the wonders of OpenBSD and audited source, but many still compare Linux and FreeBSD in terms of market share: who is the bigger? Linux. Which is a customer more likely to ask for? Linux over BSD, but Solaris and AIX and HP-UX above Linux.
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Care to justify that statement? Easier to learn, again, is questionable. It's easy to learn something if you have, say, a friend next door that runs the same thing. At my university, FreeBSD became very popular (much more so than Linux) because the people who took the time to help out and organize things knew FreeBSD best, and suggested people try it. Those same people who used Linux before considered FreeBSD much easier to learn. The same may apply the other way around in your area. It isn't a matter of ease, but your surroundings. If you go it alone, like I pretty much did, it ends up being a personal matter (discussed below). As for documentation, I'd say it depends on the person. The FreeBSD Handbook helped me through most of my trials, but some find it too complicated, and some find it too abstract. Greg Lehey's book is good. There're FreeBSD courses offered by BSDi, amongst others. The NetBSD documentation is technically great and complete.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster,...
The problem there is Linux NFSv3 implementation. Quite honestly it sucks.
PCs are full of legacy technology, not legacy hardware or designs.
I bet to differ. Legacy technology and legacy design are the same in most instances. Look at the way PCs still handle those interrupts. There's still nothing close to UMA in a PC either. Thus, it is laden with legacy hardware and design as well as technology.
My boss used to work in IT at several of Qwest's East Coast shops, and according to him the vast majority of Qwest's business backend runs the standard 'Solaris/Oracle on Sun' setup.
Most operations are a Solaris/Oracle core. Yahoo! uses FreeBSD for its kr4d pure serving ability but for the number crunching they run Solaris.
Last year's BSDi/Walnut Creek merger affected FreeBSD immediately (as I'm sure other BSD users noticed between 4.1 and 4.2), but I'm not yet sure if BSDi's Internet Server OS has been affected.
The 4.1 -> 4.2 releases were just routine bugfixes, minor tweaks, etc. The average user won't reap any benefits of the merger until SMPng is completed. Ahhh threading!
Nothing of any magnitude in your comments. We all know x86 hardware is nasty, etc.
How come when ever someon states something about the BSD's... its almost always about FreeBSD...
Because it's the most used.
Yes I know that FreeBSD is great and all, but is it the only one being used for server usage?
Read above.
OpenBSD is very reliable, stable, does just about everything FreeBSD does, and more secure than just about anything out there. But the question remains, why just FreeBSD?
More applications, has SMP, and a better VM system for starters.
WHen was the last time you heard some one speak of NetBSD or BSD/OS...?.. exactly....
Earlier today. Just because you don't see them on your computer at home doesn't mean its not out there. So I guess Tru64 or AIX are non-existant to you.
But does it really matter which BSD is used? So please quit whining.
"There is no official commercial support for NetBSD at this time. "
Well, that may be true. I don't know. Keep in mind the word official
Yes there is OFFICIAL for NetBSD. It's a company called Wasabi Systems. It was formed a few months back by many of the core NetBSD group.
"NetBSD support for network applications, such as ICQ and messenger clients, is seriously lacking."
It is. Not everyone wants to port and compile source. Not everyone knows C. Most people don't. Slashdot is the only place where end-users don't exist, and you can tell somebody to `code it themself'.
I disagree. Most of all your GNU/Linux clients are already found in the ports tree. You should check it out.
Um, yes. Comapred to Free and Open, yes. Sorry, its a fact of Life. I'm a Linux user. Linux application support is also pretty minimal comapred to Windows or MacOS.
Not true. NetBSD support is behind FreeBSD. OpenBSD support is by far a distant third. Take a look at package growth charts. It is a couple simple line graphs illustrating the growth of the ports trees over the years. FreeBSD leads the rest with around 4,500.
The guy immediately signs a paper that denies basic rights to hundred of thousands of women. If that doesn't send us back to the stone age, I don't know what will.
Hardly. I don't want my tax dollars funding the sucking of brains out of unborn children in Nairobi.
Yet let me point out a flaw in your commie-liberal b/s. If I killed a three month pregnant woman I would be charged with double homicide. Sure I support a woman's right to choose. I support her right to keep her panties on and her legs closed. She wouldn't get pregnant then.
He talks about being a uniter. Traditionally the way politicans did this was to create something that distracted people away from politics and got them arguing over something else.
Uhm.....what do you think Fuhr Clinton did with Iraq several times? "Let's do it for democracy!" Even though we're a Constitutional Republic. It reminds me of "Wag The Dog."
I see this in Bush's missile shield plan. Who exactly is he trying to shield America from?
Ah more obfuscation. The missile plan isn't uniquely Bush's. It has been tossed around several times. Don't forget that China (a borderline communist country) has Nuclear missiles aimed right at us and they don't like capitolism. And Fuhr Clinton is telling us they should be our #1 ally! Russia still has a few pointed right at your daughter's playground as well with their aging system. It'd be nice if a missile defense system took a few out.
Give Herr Bush a chance before you crucify him. Whatever happened to being open minded?
Ok troll let's be objective. Linux firewalling (ipchains/iptables/whateveranewoneis) has always been humbled by other OS ability in this area. Compare it to Solaris and *BSD for example. Stateful filtering has been out available for a long ass time. It's still possible on Linux as if as you're not using glibc (yuck!). The title for the story is flamebait in itself "...Linux 2.4 firewalling Rocks!" Kudos to the guys who worked their keisters off on it. They deserve it. But there are more mature implementations out there as it is. A better topic would've been "Linux 2.4 firewalling improvements" or something.
...would the BSD guys say the same thing?
You don't even realise that people are behind the monitors do you? We're all people you troll. No one is out to get you you paranoid megalomaniac troll.
Try to be an ambassador for whatever your choices may end up being.
...with a million Atari games; Two chicks at the same time. I've always wanted to do that. And if I had a million Atari games I think I could manage it. Yah, I know not all chicks like Atari games but the kind that would double-up on me do.
Ok, after having reading up on many of the posts on here I don't find any of them are a good enough answer for your question. So here goes.
Why isn't there a Redhat/BSD release, or a Debian/BSD release, or a Suse/B....Anyway, you get the idea...There are releases using the Linux kernel (DUH!), and releases using the Hurd kernel, so why don't I see distributions using the Open/Free/Net/Whatever BSD releases as the kernels in distributions?
This is because of OS design. *BSD is an integrated OS. Meaning that kernel/userland overlap a lil. 99% of the OS's out there do it this way. And to use the hackeneyed slogan yet again: Linux is just a kernel. When you upgrade from Linux 2.2.18ac5-pre-test-mdk4 to Linux 2.2.18ac6-beta-alpha-spoon you just gotta do the make; make depend; make install then all those bzlilo (or however its done) you don't have to upgrade any of your distro's applications (yes there has been are 1-2 instances). I don't really agree with Linus on separation of userland/kernelland.
IMHO, it's a shame....Although Linux 2.4.x seems to be a vast improvement over 2.2.x and is claimed to be more scalable than BSD, I like the security ethos that seems to go with the BSD projects....
Yeah Linux 2.4.x clears up a many of my gripes about it, its still not as great as the hype makes it seem. It reminds me of how all the MS/W2K people are loving these NTFS5.0 quotas that they just got and all the Novell dudes are scoffing. When it comes to scalable, thats just one of those trendy words stupid people use to sound important. Like paradigm and proactive.
I'm rambling now I suppose but learn as much as you can about their differences and similarities, advantages, disadvantages, have fun, increase your knowledge, and try to be an ambassador for whatever your choices may end up being.
A company is actually going to make a full time venture of creating/selling ISO's? Why would a company actually go to all the trouble to deal with TuxTops when they can go create their own ISO image from mkisofs or just go and use that slow rsync process with Debian? Many IT departments make their own lean version of some distro anyways.
...is a great idea, considering that the complications of making sure a particular distro works predictably and reliably with AcmeCorp's computers is probably one of the major reasons it's so tough to buy laptops running Linux.
It might be a square peg round hole approach but there are better ones out there. Something along the lines of the LBP would work much better but I don't ever see it happening as the major Linux companies would be against it. A more logical method would be a BSD approach to it all: an actual source tree (gasp!) that has structure in its development.
... Hell, Sun is funding the port of FreeBSD to UltraSparc.
Sun is NOT funding FreeBSD to any sun4x architecture. The FreeBSD/SPARC port was started in 97 by Jason Evans, who, at the time worked for Sun MicroElectronics (SME). SME had approached the FreeBSD core offering monetary compensation for FreeBSD on sun4u's. The core team turned down this offer with jkh saying that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use of FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun. Eventually Jason Evans left Sun and the port remained largely untouched since October 10, 1998. The core team's response was reasonable at the time. Now if Sun came with an identical offer today, you bet that gorilla vagina thats grafted on your right hand they'd pounce on it now. David O'Brien and some others have been tinkering with it since early 2000 though.
As of late, Jason Evans has been working on the KSE project
To throw in a bit of dramatic irony, while the FreeBSD/SPARC port was in its ragnarok, Sun signed that deal with Red Hat:|
In a utopian world yes but we are in an anti-utopia. A good example is Linux calling/bin/sh but in reality its really/bin/bash. Small things like that can ruin my week.
Did you consider the port maintainer might have made a tiny boo-boo? You could have fixed the problem by getting a newer ports tree in all likelihood. Blaming an entire OS because some high college kid forget a ${MAKEDESTDIR} in a Makefile do you? You don't throw the baby out with the bath water...
Uhmm....no. *BSD support for USB was done NetBSD a while back and merged into project from there. This was done back in mid '99. Dont say as of 4.1 as that is mere FUD.
When I installed RedHat 7.0...
You're actually using RedHat 7.0!??! Are you on coke? You obviously didn't read about their shitty gcc version they packaged with it. If I remember correctly, Linus called RH7 "Unsuitable for any use". It's ok you're a newbie.
So does FreeBSD have usb support, Yes. Is it as clean and complete as it should be, not yet.
My God thats incorrect. If you have even bothered to follow any mailing lists you'd see you were woefully wrong. Go spread your unsubstantiated FUD elsewhere.
FreeBSD has had USB support since 3.3 iirc. Go check LINT, search FreeBSD.org, look at FreeBSD Diary and the FreeBSD Handbook for further information about setting up your FreeBSD box. I'm sure you'll see just how solid it is.
Slashdot Mirror
So it's flamebait to post a POSITIVE review of FreeBSD? My God, you must love censorship.
I guess you're saying that if it isn't GNU its craaap! I guess Solaris, AIX, IRIX, and HP-UX all suck too since they are SVR4 descendents with BSD extensions. Installing a new compiler won't break your kernel compilation unless you do something like RH did with 7.0 :)
But what annoys me most - the sources are packed together and split in chunks. So if you need the sources of sed, you have to download the sources of the whole /usr/bin!!!
Were you breast fed till you were nine? If you just want to cvsup sed then "cd /usr/src/usr.bin/sed; make all install". Baboom! That easy. FreeBSD also has all the most up-to-date GNU utilities in the ports tree if you want them. gmake, etc.
You sir, are a fuck-twit.
Popularity is really not a good reason to choose something. Windows is a lot more popular than Linux. It has more users, more commercial programs, more programmers, certifications, and possibly books, training courses, and any number of other things. It doesn't make it any better, really, now does it? Yes, there are more Linux users than FreeBSD users. It doesn't really make that much of a difference.
And besides that, FreeBSD out of the box isn't as friendly as most Linux distributions.
Care to justify that statement? Easier to learn, again, is questionable. It's easy to learn something if you have, say, a friend next door that runs the same thing. At my university, FreeBSD became very popular (much more so than Linux) because the people who took the time to help out and organize things knew FreeBSD best, and suggested people try it. Those same people who used Linux before considered FreeBSD much easier to learn. The same may apply the other way around in your area. It isn't a matter of ease, but your surroundings. If you go it alone, like I pretty much did, it ends up being a personal matter (discussed below). As for documentation, I'd say it depends on the person. The FreeBSD Handbook helped me through most of my trials, but some find it too complicated, and some find it too abstract. Greg Lehey's book is good. There're FreeBSD courses offered by BSDi, amongst others. The NetBSD documentation is technically great and complete.
Maybe when my hardware needs change, I'll run FreeBSD. If FreeBSD NFS and Linux NFS start talking to each other faster,...
The problem there is Linux NFSv3 implementation. Quite honestly it sucks.
I bet to differ. Legacy technology and legacy design are the same in most instances. Look at the way PCs still handle those interrupts. There's still nothing close to UMA in a PC either. Thus, it is laden with legacy hardware and design as well as technology.
Take a look at this IRIX Theme. You'll find it l33t0. A rather full E theme of IRIX's desktop. Has over 100+ original icons etc.
Uhhh, its not the BSD implementation of OpenGL thats the problem there son. It's X.
MIPS mean nothing. Neither do MFLOPS.
Most operations are a Solaris/Oracle core. Yahoo! uses FreeBSD for its kr4d pure serving ability but for the number crunching they run Solaris.
Last year's BSDi/Walnut Creek merger affected FreeBSD immediately (as I'm sure other BSD users noticed between 4.1 and 4.2), but I'm not yet sure if BSDi's Internet Server OS has been affected.
The 4.1 -> 4.2 releases were just routine bugfixes, minor tweaks, etc. The average user won't reap any benefits of the merger until SMPng is completed. Ahhh threading!
Nothing of any magnitude in your comments. We all know x86 hardware is nasty, etc.
Neither is Solaris or Tru64. So whats your point troll?
Because it's the most used.
Yes I know that FreeBSD is great and all, but is it the only one being used for server usage?
Read above. OpenBSD is very reliable, stable, does just about everything FreeBSD does, and more secure than just about anything out there. But the question remains, why just FreeBSD?
More applications, has SMP, and a better VM system for starters.
WHen was the last time you heard some one speak of NetBSD or BSD/OS ...? .. exactly ....
Earlier today. Just because you don't see them on your computer at home doesn't mean its not out there. So I guess Tru64 or AIX are non-existant to you. But does it really matter which BSD is used? So please quit whining.
Well, that may be true. I don't know. Keep in mind the word official
Yes there is OFFICIAL for NetBSD. It's a company called Wasabi Systems. It was formed a few months back by many of the core NetBSD group.
"NetBSD support for network applications, such as ICQ and messenger clients, is seriously lacking."
It is. Not everyone wants to port and compile source. Not everyone knows C. Most people don't. Slashdot is the only place where end-users don't exist, and you can tell somebody to `code it themself'.
I disagree. Most of all your GNU/Linux clients are already found in the ports tree. You should check it out.
Um, yes. Comapred to Free and Open, yes. Sorry, its a fact of Life. I'm a Linux user. Linux application support is also pretty minimal comapred to Windows or MacOS.
Not true. NetBSD support is behind FreeBSD. OpenBSD support is by far a distant third. Take a look at package growth charts. It is a couple simple line graphs illustrating the growth of the ports trees over the years. FreeBSD leads the rest with around 4,500.
Hardly. I don't want my tax dollars funding the sucking of brains out of unborn children in Nairobi.
Yet let me point out a flaw in your commie-liberal b/s. If I killed a three month pregnant woman I would be charged with double homicide. Sure I support a woman's right to choose. I support her right to keep her panties on and her legs closed. She wouldn't get pregnant then.
Uhm.....what do you think Fuhr Clinton did with Iraq several times? "Let's do it for democracy!" Even though we're a Constitutional Republic. It reminds me of "Wag The Dog."
I see this in Bush's missile shield plan. Who exactly is he trying to shield America from?
Ah more obfuscation. The missile plan isn't uniquely Bush's. It has been tossed around several times. Don't forget that China (a borderline communist country) has Nuclear missiles aimed right at us and they don't like capitolism. And Fuhr Clinton is telling us they should be our #1 ally! Russia still has a few pointed right at your daughter's playground as well with their aging system. It'd be nice if a missile defense system took a few out.
Give Herr Bush a chance before you crucify him. Whatever happened to being open minded?
You don't even realise that people are behind the monitors do you? We're all people you troll. No one is out to get you you paranoid megalomaniac troll.
Try to be an ambassador for whatever your choices may end up being.
...with a million Atari games; Two chicks at the same time. I've always wanted to do that. And if I had a million Atari games I think I could manage it. Yah, I know not all chicks like Atari games but the kind that would double-up on me do.
Why isn't there a Redhat/BSD release, or a Debian/BSD release, or a Suse/B....Anyway, you get the idea...There are releases using the Linux kernel (DUH!), and releases using the Hurd kernel, so why don't I see distributions using the Open/Free/Net/Whatever BSD releases as the kernels in distributions?
This is because of OS design. *BSD is an integrated OS. Meaning that kernel/userland overlap a lil. 99% of the OS's out there do it this way. And to use the hackeneyed slogan yet again: Linux is just a kernel. When you upgrade from Linux 2.2.18ac5-pre-test-mdk4 to Linux 2.2.18ac6-beta-alpha-spoon you just gotta do the make; make depend; make install then all those bzlilo (or however its done) you don't have to upgrade any of your distro's applications (yes there has been are 1-2 instances). I don't really agree with Linus on separation of userland/kernelland.
IMHO, it's a shame....Although Linux 2.4.x seems to be a vast improvement over 2.2.x and is claimed to be more scalable than BSD, I like the security ethos that seems to go with the BSD projects....
Yeah Linux 2.4.x clears up a many of my gripes about it, its still not as great as the hype makes it seem. It reminds me of how all the MS/W2K people are loving these NTFS5.0 quotas that they just got and all the Novell dudes are scoffing. When it comes to scalable, thats just one of those trendy words stupid people use to sound important. Like paradigm and proactive.
I'm rambling now I suppose but learn as much as you can about their differences and similarities, advantages, disadvantages, have fun , increase your knowledge, and try to be an ambassador for whatever your choices may end up being.
Quit whining.
A company is actually going to make a full time venture of creating/selling ISO's? Why would a company actually go to all the trouble to deal with TuxTops when they can go create their own ISO image from mkisofs or just go and use that slow rsync process with Debian? Many IT departments make their own lean version of some distro anyways.
It might be a square peg round hole approach but there are better ones out there. Something along the lines of the LBP would work much better but I don't ever see it happening as the major Linux companies would be against it. A more logical method would be a BSD approach to it all: an actual source tree (gasp!) that has structure in its development.
Sun is NOT funding FreeBSD to any sun4x architecture. The FreeBSD/SPARC port was started in 97 by Jason Evans, who, at the time worked for Sun MicroElectronics (SME). SME had approached the FreeBSD core offering monetary compensation for FreeBSD on sun4u's. The core team turned down this offer with jkh saying that SME's offer was not of major interest since to be of long term use of FreeBSD, such a proposal would need to include support for a number of years from someone internal to Sun. Eventually Jason Evans left Sun and the port remained largely untouched since October 10, 1998. The core team's response was reasonable at the time. Now if Sun came with an identical offer today, you bet that gorilla vagina thats grafted on your right hand they'd pounce on it now. David O'Brien and some others have been tinkering with it since early 2000 though.
As of late, Jason Evans has been working on the KSE project
To throw in a bit of dramatic irony, while the FreeBSD/SPARC port was in its ragnarok, Sun signed that deal with Red Hat :|
Meandering abit offtopic but oh well...
In a utopian world yes but we are in an anti-utopia. A good example is Linux calling /bin/sh but in reality its really /bin/bash. Small things like that can ruin my week.
For the second year in a row: crack whore trainee.
Did you consider the port maintainer might have made a tiny boo-boo? You could have fixed the problem by getting a newer ports tree in all likelihood. Blaming an entire OS because some high college kid forget a ${MAKEDESTDIR} in a Makefile do you? You don't throw the baby out with the bath water...
Uhmm....no. *BSD support for USB was done NetBSD a while back and merged into project from there. This was done back in mid '99. Dont say as of 4.1 as that is mere FUD.
When I installed RedHat 7.0...
You're actually using RedHat 7.0!??! Are you on coke? You obviously didn't read about their shitty gcc version they packaged with it. If I remember correctly, Linus called RH7 "Unsuitable for any use". It's ok you're a newbie.
So does FreeBSD have usb support, Yes. Is it as clean and complete as it should be, not yet.
My God thats incorrect. If you have even bothered to follow any mailing lists you'd see you were woefully wrong. Go spread your unsubstantiated FUD elsewhere.
FreeBSD has had USB support since 3.3 iirc. Go check LINT, search FreeBSD.org, look at FreeBSD Diary and the FreeBSD Handbook for further information about setting up your FreeBSD box. I'm sure you'll see just how solid it is.