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BSD Operating Systems

The State of the Demon Address 310

Posted by michael from the not-dying dept.
Kelly McNeill writes "It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going."
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The State of the Demon Address More

The State of the Demon Address

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  • BSDs (Score:4, Interesting)

    by brilinux ( 255400 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:14PM (#10567512) Journal
    As a user of FreeBSD and OpenBSD, I must say that I have been quite satisfied with both, especially FreeBSD. While it could use some help in the ports and upgrading department, it is all around a wonderful piece of software, and it is quite interesting to watch the development of all the BSDs. Way to go!

    • Re:BSDs (Score:5, Informative)

      by AKAImBatman ( 238306 ) * <akaimbatman@ g m a i l . com> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:20PM (#10567566) Homepage Journal
      I can't read the article, so I'll just post a standard response here.

      While it could use some help in the ports and upgrading department

      FreeBSD does quite well in both departments. For ports, you have the option of either compiling the source via a simple "make install", or installing the binaries via "pkg_add mypackage.tgz".

      For OS updates, you again have a choice. To update form sources, simply run a CVSUp and type "make buildworld; make installworld". To install from binaries, pop the latest CD in, reboot, and go through the "upgrade" instructions. I honestly haven't seen any OS do a better job in package management. :-)
      • I do all that, and use portupgrade, I just did not see how to do upgrades without having do manually remove the old packages/ports. On Gentoo and Debian, it is automagic. I can do it fine manually, and it works great, but I could not find a way to do it automagically. Thanks, though.

        • Re:BSDs (Score:2, Interesting)

          by Brandybuck ( 704397 )
          With portupgrade the removal of the old port is automatic. Occasionally you'll have a problem with it, such as when the name of a port has changed, but for the most part you just don't have to worry about it.

          What problems are you having that this is not happening?
          • Well, I think that the problem was that I had packages as well as ports, as someone else pointed out. The problem was that there was another program that depended on the same dependency, and it refused to upgrade because of that. I think that it might have to do with mixed ports, and packages though.

            • Re:BSDs (Score:2, Interesting)

              by tristan-jt2 ( 820528 )
              Based on what I've seen in a few years of using FreeBSD, ports and packages do not mix. You've got to make your mind up once and for all and stick to one way of doing things.

              I've also had my fair share of grief from using CPAN to install packages, and then having a portupgrade fail on me because of broken dependencies when the same Perl packages is in the ports.

              I'm sure the only person who can be blamed is good old me, since I tend to overlook the documentation, stupidly safe in the feeling that I've us
      • ports and packages are good ideas, but never the twain should meet.

        Simply installing FreeBSD will most likely (unless you try hard to avoid it) will install some packages. Seemingly harmless, but try to upgrade one of those packages via the ports mechanism and you will begin to feel true pain, young jedi.

        Ports are a better path, IMO, because they are far more frequently updated. But mixing an installation of ports and packages will send you down a compatibility and non-compiling path to hell.

        Fortunate
        • I think that this was my problem- combining the two. In the future, if I do another FreeBSD install (which I may on my laptop once 5.3 comes out, since it should have NDIS support), then I will try not to install any packages. Of course, I think that X is installed from packages, so I will have to be careful. That is good advice, though.

        • This is totally wrong, do not listen to this guy. (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          Ports and packages work just fine together. Using a port is just compiling and creating a package on your machine, and then installing it for you. pkg_info will list the packages you've installed via ports. There is no conflict or problem at all. If you had a problem, it was likely because you used 4.4 packages on a 4.3 system or something like that, meaning the dependancies would be all wrong.
          • I use FreeBSD on an in-depth basis daily in a FreeBSD based development house. I wouldn't call myself a guru, but I know wtf I'm talking about.

            I know what packages to get for my system. Packages are rarely updated. Ports are updated frequently. Use both and you're mixing old code with new requirements and you will feel pain.

            Packages work fine by themselves. But if you ever want to upgrade your browser with the current release, you'll need to use a port. If you ever want to upgrade gnome, you'll need

            • Re:You are mistaken, Mr. Anonymous (Score:5, Informative)

              by SillyNickName4me ( 760022 ) <dotslash@bartsplace.net> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @04:10PM (#10569366) Homepage
              > By keeping to just ports on your system, you only have to resolve the needs of one mechanism. And that pretty much works. Since I took that approach, my upgrades have been headache free.

              Now lets get something very clear here.

              When you install a package, it gets registered in /var/db/pkg

              The exact same thing happens when you install a port.

              When you use portupgrade, it will look (using pkg_info!!!!! that should really ring a bell there) in /var/db/pkg to see what packages/ports you have installed and in which version.

              IT DOES NOT MATTER FOR THAT IF YOU USED A PORT OR A PACKAGE (sorry for shouting)

              What does matter is using portupgrade correctly so it will resolve dependencies in both directions, ie, ALWAYS use -r -R

              I just upgraded a 4.10 system that had everything installed using packages, and I used portupgrade and let it built the ports for them.

              This resulted in one problem, which was extremely well documented in /usr/ports/UPDATING, the problem was KDE, I had to manually remove some components and install the new versions. This is very exceptional, and again, was well documented.

              You can ask portupgrade to use packages for installing as well as ports )see the -P flag) and you can also instruct portupgrade to create packages from compiled ports with the -p flag.
              The later is an extremely usefull feature when you have multiple machines that need the same packages, compile once, install as often as you need.

              Saying that ports and packages dont mix is not true in most cases. It is true in a few cases tho. For example, the firefox package will not include the development tools needed for compiling the mplayer plugin from a port, that will only work if you built firefox as a port. This again is an exception, and I consider it a problem of the firefox package.

              That said, if you install both as package, and then use portupgrade to upgrade them (and use -r -R !!) the system will figure out that the plugin depends of firefox and build firefox first.

              > If you don't agree, fine, suit yourself. Spend hours futzing with builds. I'd rather be USING the system or be off doing something more enjoyable with my time.

              You could also spend a little more time reading the documentation. Most of what you suggest is simply not true. Ports and packages use the exact same system for registering themselves, and so can be mixed and still be upgraded with as much or little trouble as when you only used ports (or packages)

              A very important commandline to remember:
              portupgrade -r -R -p -a

              Sorry if I sound annoyed here, but yes, it annoys me when people who claim to have used the system for a long time, still did miss the fact that portupgrade explicitly supports packages and ports for installing and upgrading, and then make wrong claims about it.

              • While I have never had problems using the packages with freebsd and using ports that I built myself, I have had problems building packages myself and installing them elsewhere. Origonally I planned to sync servers and simply have a port build server for all the others, but ended up with problems that the packages I built would fail to install correctly (basically died in portupgrade) for some reason. At first I thought it was the CFLAGS I was using, but I was building against i686 so it should have worked
        • What kind of problems did you have? The only problems I've had with packages is that they seem to look for particular versions of other packages for dependencies rather than looking to see if certain library versions are available on the system, something I'd like to see fixed. But if you use portupgrade to handle it, there shouldn't be any upgrade troubles.

    • Re:BSDs (Score:2, Informative)

      by ulib ( 816651 )
      About FreeBSD ports installing/upgrading, I found these articles extremely useful:

      Ports Tricks [onlamp.com]
      Portupgrade [onlamp.com]
      Cleaning and Customizing Your Ports [onlamp.com]

      Besides being well written, they contain a couple of hacks that turned my port maintenance tasks into piece of cake :-)

  • Netcraft confirms it! (Score:5, Funny)

    by adam613 ( 449819 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:20PM (#10567560)
    BSD is slashdotted :)

  • (almost) slashdotted article (Score:5, Informative)

    by GrAfFiT ( 802657 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:20PM (#10567561) Homepage
    It's an exciting era in the Berkeley Software Distribution world; indeed, things started off with a litigious bang over a decade ago, but now BSD solutions are more varied than ever before and offer the user heretofore unprecedented choice and power. So many are the options today that it's time for a roll call from the various distributions. Paul Webb submitted the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which takes a look at what each BSD has to offer and also looks at where each is going.
    --

    Each of the four major BSD projects are pushing forward with development and experiencing growth, diversifying the Open Source playing field's offerings Let's take a look at what each project is up to these days.

    FreeBSD

    FreeBSD is in a precarious state. While it has almost hit critical mass in the corporate world, their latest growing pains have left potential adopters confused. The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting technology, generally regarded as comparable with or superior to what is offered in Linux. The FreeBSD foundation is still upgrading its FreeBSD 4.x line and suggesting its use for production environments over FreeBSD 5. The reasons for this are very simple -- FreeBSD 5 won't be ready for prime time until FreeBSD 5.4 or 5.5 -- but users are left confused and timid.

    FreeBSD's last major release, which now sits highly optimized at version 4.10, works just as well as always. For systems already running with FreeBSD 4.x that see no need to adopt the new technology in FreeBSD 5 or jump to Linux, this operating system is a godsend in stability and continued support. FreeBSD 4.11 is scheduled for a February '05 release, while plans for FreeBSD 4.12 are on the backburner should FreeBSD 5 not achieve -STABLE status by the fourth quarter of 2005. But what if you need the technology available in FreeBSD 5 and don't want to jump to Linux?

    FreeBSD 5, currently available at FreeBSD 5.2.1 with FreeBSD 5.3 in late beta, tantalizes the BSD world with the culmination of several year's hard work and narrow escapes. Back in the late Nineties, when WindRiver bought BSD/OS (a closed-source BSD operating system owned by the now-defunct BSDI), FreeBSD users were promised a next-generation BSD made possible by crossing the ultra-robust corporate OS with its Open Source counterpart. While WindRiver let go of its plans leaving the future of FreeBSD in peril, the realization of its goal is almost here thanks to the FreeBSD community and Apple Computer, Inc.'s contribution of FreeBSD code.

    That almost is a killer, though, in that it now causes potential users to look elsewhere for modern operating system features elsewhere until FreeBSD 5 is blessed as stable. Given FreeBSD's track record and the corporate sponsors now behind its operating system, however, it has a bright future ahead of it despite these stumbling blocks. Sadly, the same can't be said for its two little brothers, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

    NetBSD

    NetBSD's claims to fame aren't its optimization or secure code -- it's instead known for running on a wider variety of platforms than any other operating system out there, including Linux. NetBSD's binary releases include support for an amazing 40 platforms and an additional 12 platforms in the source code. In other words, it runs on everything but the kitchen sink. NetBSD forked from the 386BSD/4.4 BSD merger in 1993 and continued on its own in parallel to FreeBSD since then, albeit at a slower pace. It's currently at version 2.6.1, with aggressive testing on the new NetBSD 2.0 promising fruition by the first half of 2005.

    Those familiar with NetBSD swear by it, though its use in serious environments is limited. It is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best. NetBSD's true usefulness comes in providing developers of other operating systems -- such as FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux -- with hardware support to base their own new ports off of. For instance, much of the code for the PowerPC FreeBSD port comes from NetBSD. OpenBSD implemented support for A

    • Re:(almost) slashdotted article (Score:5, Informative)

      by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:39PM (#10567754)
      Assuming your post is the original article and not a clever troll, I'd have to say the original article is a stupid troll.

      [NetBSD] is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best

      Excuse me? What's insecure about NetBSD? If you look at actual security records, in the past few years all the BSDs are pretty comparable. And as for device drivers, it is the original source of many device drivers in the other BSDs, and was the first free OS to get USB support (before even Linux).

      [OpenBSD] runs on very few platforms

      Actually, many more than FreeBSD, not so far from NetBSD and Linux: nothing to sneeze at.

      And of course, he omitted DragonFly [dragonflybsd.org].

      • I'd have to agree. I thought the original point of NetBSD was not security, but platform compatibility. As I understand it, whatever security is in the system gets added by the platform developer, which can vary wildly. In such a situation, it seems like a lack of security would be an asset, rather than a problem. As for driver development, does that not fall under the same roof?

        • Re:(almost) slashdotted article (Score:3, Informative)

          by Anonymous Coward
          You do not understand correctly. Distribution-wide security in NetBSD is coordinated by The NetBSD Security Officer . First of all, nearly all security issues are in platform independent code, which means that running on as many platforms as NetBSD does helps to get many bugs noticed earlier (endianness, alignment, data type lengths). Once those are fixed, they improve security on every platform.

          There are very few types of security issues that can exist in platform dependent code, such as the pmap modules.

          • Vulnerability listings (Score:4, Informative)

            by Saucepan ( 12098 ) on Wednesday October 20, 2004 @02:26AM (#10573319)
            The article's comment about NetBSD being "insecure" raised my eyebrows, as well. NetBSD is not known for being particularly insecure, and the comment struck me as out-of-place and ill-informed.

            But, I couldn't let this slide (even giving up my mod points): counting security advisories is just not a good way to judge the relative security of an OS, especially one of the more uncommon ones. SecurityFocus [securityfocus.com] has no vulnerabilities listed for either MS-DOS or EROS [eros-os.org], but few people would conclude that both operating systems were equally secure, or that MS-DOS's unblemished security record means it's more secure than OpenBSD (which has many dozens of vulnerabilites listed, most of which are advisories for bundled programs like Apache which OpenBSD nevertheless takes responsibility for).

            Even worse, the more that people are believed to be using vulnerability lists to compare OSes, the more pressure vendors feel to improve their scores by sweeping security problems under the rug. Microsoft is notorious in this regard -- years after promising to make security their #1 focus, whenever they think they can get away with it they continue to hide known security bugs from sysadmins (who would be able to deploy work-arounds if they were told about the problems) in favor of silently sneaking the fixes into the next service pack many months later.

      • Re:(almost) slashdotted article (Score:5, Informative)

        by meme_police ( 645420 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:51PM (#10567859)
        I concur. OpenBSD runs on several more platforms than mentioned and it's done SMP for at least a release. And the comments about Theo are pretty exagerated and inflammatory.
        • Adding to that, the author gives the update cycle as "every 3 or 4 months" when it has been 6 month cycles for a while. The author's comments about NetBSD are also offbase.

          I would guess it is another poorly researched article that looks good enough to get a mention on slashdot. Normally that website has some pretty good articles, so I guess it was probably accepted on reputation of the source.

    • Ridiculous (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      This article text was already smelling bad, and the strong points of next version of darwin are:

      "support for Java 1.5, XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3.0"

      Yeah. Sure.

    • What about... SecureBSD and TrustedBSD - efforts to bring Orange Book B2 compliance to FreeBSD? (They're in many ways separate distributions and if they actually get certified, they'd be the first FOSS distros that would be authorized for Secret or Top Secret military networks.)

      Although 386BSD hasn't been developed in a long time, it is worthier of a mention than BSDI, being the first-ever port of the BSD tapes to the Intel architecture. Indeed, it beat Linux for X11 support, networking and many other Uni

    • Cheap FreeBSD propaganda (Score:5, Informative)

      by xbsd ( 814561 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @04:19PM (#10569464) Journal


      FreeBSD is worth advocating, but I bet the avergage BSD connoisseur can come up with better arguments. The article is full of stereotypes and garbage. I really wonder if the author really took an hour to visit the WEBSITES, let alone experimenting with the systems by himself:

      The new FreeBSD 5 branch offers some exciting technology, generally regarded as comparable with or superior to what is offered in Linux...while plans for FreeBSD 4.12 are on the backburner should FreeBSD 5 not achieve -STABLE status by the fourth quarter of 2005.

      What a fair comparison, let's benchmark STABLE technology available in Linux by the end of 2004 with technology that might be stable in FreeBSD by the end of 2005!

      [NetBSD] it's currently at version 2.6.1, with aggressive testing on the new NetBSD 2.0 promising fruition by the first half of 2005...Those familiar with NetBSD swear by it, though its use in serious environments is limited.

      OK, first of all, NetBSD is at version 1.6.2, not 2.6.1, and if you are looking for "serious environments", what if I tell you that the world's fastest computer is running NetBSD? Maybe NASA's Lewis Research Center, NEC Europe and Sony Japan do not count as "serious environments". http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html. [netbsd.org]

      Forking from NetBSD in 1995 after a very heated -- and embarrassing -- personal argument, OpenBSD's one and only focus is to offer security. Every line of code is hand-audited and, as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years. Striking a balance in hardware support somewhere between FreeBSD and NetBSD, OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode.

      I don't know who got embarrassed w/ that argument, but certainly not Theo since he keeps a record of it in his own personal website for visitors to see:http://zeus.theos.com/deraadt/coremail.html [theos.com]. There hasn't been a hole in the default install in over EIGHT years, not seven.

      OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode

      OpenBSD runs in more platforms than FreeBSD!!! http://www.openbsd.org/plat.html [openbsd.org]

      OpenBSD isn't acceptable as a desktop system or 3D workstation, however...One factor that mars OpenBSD's fair weather is its primary developer, Theo de Raadt...developers may wish to remain wary of this platform and its creator.

      What a bunch of nonsense! I've been using OpenBSD in my desktop for years, and had developers listened to you, OpenSSH wouldn't exist, nor have over 88 percent of the SSH server market!http://www.openssh.com/press.html [openssh.com]

      I could go on and on, but I got tired already. I wonder why you guys promote these articles.
    • Wow!

      That's incredibly stupid.

      Sounds like someone skimmed a few marketing brochures and wrote about the results at length, without doing any actual research.

      FWIW, I use all three on and off, NetBSD being my favorite, and OpenBSD being my second-favorite. FreeBSD is a little too dodgy for my tastes. :)

  • That's "Daemon" (Score:4, Funny)

    by Eric Smith ( 4379 ) * on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:20PM (#10567563) Homepage Journal
    ... you insensitive clod!

  • openbsd mistakes (Score:5, Informative)

    by grub ( 11606 ) <slashdot@grub.net> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:20PM (#10567567) Homepage Journal

    There are a few mistakes in that article.
    as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years.

    Actually the claim is "Only one remote hole in the default install, in more than 8 years!"

    OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode

    If you're using an i386 system then SMP has been available for a while and is shipping in 3.6 (I have my CDs already.

    OpenBSD isn't acceptable as a desktop system

    I've used it as a desktop for years and the ports system works very well.

    • More OpenBSD mistakes... (Score:5, Informative)

      by ^BR ( 37824 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:29PM (#10567655)

      OpenBSD is updated every three or four months...

      Wrong : OpenBSD has sticked to its schedule of a release every 6 months (November 1 and May 1) since years, and the OpenBSD 3.6 [openbsd.org] release won't be any different (CD already started to ship to those who pre-ordered by the way).

  • support for Java 1.5, XHTML 2.0 and CSS 3.0

    I bet the Darwin developers worked for years for that one! Tell me again how the kernel implements web standards, George.

    • Re:oooh, xhtml (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Tet ( 2721 ) *
      Tell me again how the kernel implements web standards, George.

      Yep, the article is almost utterly devoid of useful content, and much of what it does have is simply plain wrong[1]. It reads very much like some of the Linux articles did a few years ago... "Oooh, I've just found this great new OS, so I'm going to pimp it everywhere I can, even though I don't know enough about it to do a decent advocacy job and avoid looking like a fool". Sigh. FWIW, I use both Linux and OpenBSD.

      [1] The particular one that g

      • Platforms (Score:3, Insightful)

        by ^BR ( 37824 )

        Unless you use NetBSD's somewhat arbitrary definition of a platform. Either way, Linux runs on more CPU architectures than NetBSD does.

        Well, having support for the CPU is nice but each platform needs its bootloader, often specific system utilities (NVRAM manipulation, disk-partitionning...) and more importantly support for everything around the CPU (also kernel init is often slightly different depending on the platform, CPU being equal. Starting up a Mac68k and a Sun3 is not exactly done the same way).

    • I bet the Darwin developers worked for years for that one! Tell me again how the kernel implements web standards, George.

      There's more to Darwin (the WWDC Developer Preview release of 8.0b1, in particular) [apple.com] than xnu. There's also, for example, WebCore [apple.com]. (Those links might require APSL registration [apple.com].)

  • Flaimbait Story (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the morgawr ( 670303 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:22PM (#10567590) Homepage Journal
    Too bad I can't mod the story flaim bait; the treatment of Net and Open is a bit heavy handed and the article seems to be written as a FreeBSD advert....
    • Well, honestly, while N and OBSD have their merits (as were mentioned) I know that I wouldn't want to deal with Linux if Linus was as big of a raving fuckwit as Theo is.

      Now, I can't say that Theo's erratic and basically socially unacceptable behavior would be my only reason for not using it (as the blurb seems to suggest) but it certainly would be a major deterrent.

      • Re:Flaimbait Story (Score:3, Informative)

        by rsidd ( 6328 )
        Well, honestly, while N and OBSD have their merits (as were mentioned)

        No, both were flamed. He says NetBSD is not secure and has poor device driver support: he doesn't know what he's talking about. NetBSD is as secure as the other BSDs and a lot more secure than linux: check the records. And if it weren't for NetBSD, FreeBSD would have pathetic device driver support. (It also wouldn't have rcNG and other innovations).

      • Re:Flaimbait Story (Score:3, Informative)

        by the morgawr ( 670303 )
        1. You missed my point; the article gets information wrong and is clearly biased
        2. I've used OBSD for ~4 years and have never seen Theo act "erratic and basically socially unacceptable". The only things that people could possibly be refering to are his insistance that OBSD not add or keep any software with restrictive licensing in the tree. OR the attitude of most of the people on the misc list (theo included) that dumb questions (that could be answered by RTFM or google) deserve dumb derisive answers. I don't

      • Re:Flaimbait Story (Score:3, Insightful)

        by LurkerXXX ( 667952 )
        Funny, lots of folks don't like Bill, but do use Windows.

        Frankly I like to run a secure OS (OpenBSD) for my firewalls, etc. I don't really care if Theo flames folks every so often. It doesn't really affect me as a end-user. My network is still locked down. If Linus went on a rant and flamed a bunch of folks, how exactly would it affect your usage of Linux on your computers?

  • Decade? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ajs ( 35943 ) <ajs.ajs@com> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:24PM (#10567601) Homepage Journal
    I was using BSD 4.2 in college over 15 years ago, and the litigation didn't happen for quite some time.

    BSD's roots are in the early 80s when they were working closely with Bell Labs, and both versions of Unix were quasi-official.

    Obviously, the big break for the modern BSD was 386BSD, which brought the OS to the personal computer a little over a decade ago.

    Today, I think it is the rich set of userland capabilities that distinguish the BSDs to the point that occasionally Linux distributions pop up that emulate their functionality (e.g. Gentoo's use of a BSD-like ports system).

    BSD is a rich OS with a long history, and I'm glad that it's still around and growing into niches that need it. Today, I'm mostly a Linux user, but I remember my roots and the joy that life was when BSD gained popularity over the proprietary OSes of the day back in the 80s.
    • Yes, a decade. See this [wikipedia.org] WikiPedia [wikipedia.org] entry: the lawsuit started in 1992
    • He's referring to the lawsuit (I believe it was in the early-mid 90s) between BSD and AT&T, when AT&T claimed that the newly open source BSD distribution contained a lot of AT&T's Unix source code. However, during the suit it was discovered that all of AT&T's code had been removed and replaced by the BSD coders and AT&T's Unix still had a lot of BSD code, and the lawsuit was dropped/settled.

      Just a bit of history ... but that's what he was talking about.
    • Why dont you install it again?

      FreeBSD comes with a big book that is highly detailed.

      FreeBSD still uses the possix utilities by default and you will feel right at home with sh and not bash and make instead of gnumake(linux distro's rename it plainly as make).

      Nethack is there too from the early 80's. Type in hack.

  • Live and let live (Score:5, Insightful)

    by YCrCb ( 707622 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:27PM (#10567630)
    I am a BSD user since 386BSD days, and a frustrated linux admin.

    There is enough room in the world for both, and hopefully many more. Vote with what you run, be proud, but don't knock the other guy.

    I get what I want out of my FreeBSD installations, I hope there are many Linux and any other flavor OS users out there just as happy with their installations.

    Life is to short, enjoy it the best way you can with what you like!

  • Too bad its all wrong. (Score:3, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:28PM (#10567652)
    Wow, what a crappy article. The guy couldn't even be bothered to read the websites for each project so as not to fill his article with incorrect information.

    As an OpenBSD user, I quickly saw tons wrong in the OpenBSD section, I am sure its the same for Free and Net. OpenBSD's security claim is right there at the front of the main page, and he manages to get it wrong? And he says it runs on "few" platforms, and to avoid alpha and PPC, which is rediculous. The supported platforms page seems to list 12 supported platforms, and 3 more being actively worked on. And alpha and PPC are both fine, in fact some devs have only PPC machines themselves. And he also claims its single CPU only, even though it has SMP support on i386 and amd64, with PPC in the works.

  • I Love BSD (Score:3, Funny)

    by HenryKoren ( 735064 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:45PM (#10567808) Homepage
    The love affair started with FreeBSD 4.5. Now years later I administer two production servers running FreeBSD 4.10. I have a server at home running FreeBSD 5.2.1 with 549 ports installed and running flawlessly in unison.

    I have tried most common flavors of Linux. Some are nice, but something keeps me coming back to BSD.

    It was love at /usr/ports/
    It had me at pkg_get -r

    No Red Hat, Fedora, Slackware, Gentoo, SuSE, Debian or Mandrake could give me that same feeling. Call it a personal preference, call it zealotry. But FreeBSD has won my heart.

    BSD I love you...

    • apt-get install seems to work quite well on Redhat at least. Many good repositories for apt-rpm.

      However /usr/ports makes me tingle... When it works... There's been a few bugs in there too...

      It's a bit frustrating when you got install Gallery for example, and you run Apache2 with php5 and Gallery goes to install php4 and apache1.3... that's a bit frustrating, but can deal with that...

  • DragonflyBSD (Score:4, Informative)

    by merdark ( 550117 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @01:52PM (#10567875)
    Hm. No mention of DragonflyBSD. I don't have time to give it a proper blurb really, but DragonflyBSD is probably the most promising of the BSDs.

    It uses a message passing framework, like a microkernel, but still keeps most things in kernel space. This quite a divergence from the other BSDs and Linux and will hopefully enable some really cool features.

    Check it out for yourself at http://www.dragonflybsd.org [dragonflybsd.org]!

    • I second this.

      I'm posting this message from DragonFlyBSD and I can confirm that this is really the most promizing *BSD operating system today. It really tries to rewrite stuff in a clean and modern way rather that tweaking code that is really getting old.

      Performance is also excellent and huge progress is made every day. Matthew, Joerg and other developpers are doing an awesome job in quickly fixing rather complex issues.

      The project is also shamelessly taking good ideas from other operating systems includ

  • state of BSD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by minus_273 ( 174041 )
    to understand how BSD is doing, go to your local coffee shop, book store or student union. Take a look around, how many people do you see using BSD? 3 or 4 laptops. Now how many linux laptops do you see? none. I think thats pretty good.

  • Quality Control (Score:3, Informative)

    by peacefinder ( 469349 ) * <`alan.dewitt' `at' `gmail.com'> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @02:00PM (#10567972) Journal
    I wonder if the rest of the article is as poorly researched as this:

    "Every line of code is hand-audited and, as the site claims, there hasn't been a hole in the default install in over seven years. Striking a balance in hardware support somewhere between FreeBSD and NetBSD, OpenBSD runs on very few platforms and even then only in single-processor mode. [...]

    OpenBSD is updated every three or four months [...]

    It is dead obvious from the OpenBSD.org website that they claim one remote hole in the default install, that they are including SMP support in the version shipping week after next, and the release schedule has been every six months for many years.

    This doesn't give me a lot of warm fuzzies about the accuracy of the rest of the article.

  • I'm a switcher (Score:5, Informative)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @02:17PM (#10568200)
    A long time (well, relatively speaking- (6 years)) user of Linux i'm finding myself spending more and more time in my FreeBSD installation than anything else.

    This isn't a rant against linux- Debian and Slackware have both been very good, stable, and fun for me over the years. I have no regrets! But i must say that the grass is greener on the FreeBSD side of the fence, at least for my purposes.

    Package management is concise and consistent. The whole OS and all its packages can be found in one place. No sifting through rpmfind.net (we have RH machines at work), sourceforge or freshmeat, or any other craziness. Documentation is well done and up to date. Software installation is almost mindless. Configuring the kernel is amazingly simple. The gripes about hardware support and detection seem to be a non-issue for the hardware i have (which is pretty typical of what 90% of /. readers would have too). It's more elegant in that UNIX way. Things are less complicated through better design and implimentation.

    The BSD folks highlight how the BSD system is all made by one small team, vs. GNU/Linux being made by hundreds or thousands of folks on separate projects. I must attest that there truly *is* a difference in the end product. Everything in a BSD system "fits" and "gets along".

    Once again- this isn't a criticism of linux either. The `fragmented' or `modular' method of assembling a GNU/Linux system gives it other strenghts in different areas that some BSD systems might otherwise not have. It's all about the right tool for the job.

    A side benefit of the BSD side of the fence is the lack of Crusading To Subjugate The World type of mentality. It's all about the UNIXy goodness instead, which is why -I- got away from Windows in the first place. I find this a very refreshing change.
    • Package management is concise and consistent. The whole OS and all its packages can be found in one place.

      Are you saying that all third-party software that I may want for my BSD system is all in one place? Wow.

      No sifting through rpmfind.net (we have RH machines at work), sourceforge or freshmeat, or any other craziness.

      To be fair: The existence of rpmfind.net, et al, and the inconsistencies in rpm-packaged software at those sites is not RedHat's fault for the same reason that the existence of incomp

  • This is not a State address. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Nimrangul ( 599578 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @02:37PM (#10568421) Journal
    This is one man spewing invalid opinions and using outdated information. He hits hard on NetBSD and OpenBSD as though they were evil or the spawns of some demon's loins.

    He says of NetBSD, "...its desktop and production applications are so limited as to be nonexistent...," yet this is a foolish and downright insulting thing to say. Desktop applications are not dependant on Linux or FreeBSD as much as they are on X. The issue of production applications are a problem with companies, not the system itself. And even then there are means to emulate other systems to allow most programs for Linux to run on NetBSD.

    Of OpenBSD he says: "Sticking with Intel and compatible chips is a safe bet as its Alpha and PowerPC ports are still in their infancy." I find this once again rediculous. The macppc and alpha ports are better than what FreeBSD has to offer and are pretty much comparable to the NetBSD ones (what with the code sharing). He also takes a personal slam at Theo de Raadt himself, not at all something to make his opinion more valid or acceptable.

    Of Darwin he speaks as though it were a complete system and not an incomplete husk of one. He even calls it a Unix, while it is not. His views seem tainted and hazed by his own prejudices.

    He does not even touch on DragonFlyBSD, a system which I find to be far more a BSD than Darwin considering Darwin uses Mach and not BSD for a kernel.
    • He hits hard on NetBSD and OpenBSD as though they were evil or the spawns of some demon's loins.

      Umm... I'm not entirely sure how to break this to you...
    • Well, slamming de Raadt isn't really uncalled for. The man, while competent and productive, probably suffers from some kind of social disorder or two. I once got "flamed off the 'net" by him for politely pointing out an incompatibility between OpenBSD and a few well known MTA's.
      • No, you are completely wrong. In anything that deals with a product, you do not talk shit about the person in charge of the production of it.

        If I am looking at various programming languages, I do not say that you should avoid using Python because the creator is a jackass (he isn't, but I simply picked a language to use as the example). I don't say that D is a great language and could easily replace C++ because it is vastly superior, but I think the creator is ugly so you should not use it (once again, ju

  • Try FreeBSD with a Live CD (Score:3, Informative)

    by cquark ( 246669 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @03:55PM (#10569226)
    If you haven't used one of the BSDs, why not give FreeBSD a try with the FreeSBIE Live CD [freesbie.org]? FreeSBIE lets you try out FreeBSD and a wide array of its applications without needing to install anything on your hard disk.

  • As far as NetBSD's concerned ... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by hubertf ( 124995 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @04:20PM (#10569466) Homepage Journal
    I've never read as much bullsh*t in so little text.

    The person obviously never looked at NetBSD in detail, nor has any deep understanding of concepts like performance and security, else it would be obvious that they are not something that NetBSD has to brag about, but rather something that's considered normal.

    Of course if you have nothing else to sell you can say "we're oh so secure" or "hey, we have all the cool GUI stuff, we can afford the bloat" - NetBSD won't, given it's constraints given through the portability. NetBSD has to offer state of the art operating system that OF COURSE is secure, and OF COURSE is performance optimized, and OF COURSE has about all the drivers available. But there's more to that other than the things that every operating system offers OF COURSE these days.

    Blindly ignoring the facts and judging by some marketing slogan and hear-say proves that the author has no technical background for his writing at all, and obviously doesn't know any code of ethics for writing.

    - Hubert (in bad mood)

  • A Big Fat Troll. (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Eil ( 82413 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @04:55PM (#10569844) Homepage Journal

    I'm a FreeBSD advocate and all, but lets everyone bear in mind that this does not, I repeat NOT, come from any sort of official channel either in Berkeley or the FreeBSD project. It is a freaking OS Opinion editorial. Calling it a "State of the Daemon Address" is deliberately misleading and in extremely poor taste.

    Aside from a few vocal "Linux is teh sux0r" zealots, the FreeBSD community doesn't really worry itself too much about what the other BSDs or Unix-alikes are doing and certainly don't typically engage in penis-length matches such as this editorial.

    The wording is inflammatory, the facts are wrong, and a quick Google [google.com] reveals with near certainty that the author isn't actually involved with the FreeBSD Project on any level.

  • Mod Article Down (Score:3, Interesting)

    by trippinonbsd ( 689462 ) <samchill@[ ]il.com ['gma' in gap]> on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @04:59PM (#10569893) Homepage
    Where is my option to mod this article down? It's full of misinformation and slander. How do things like this get posted? Do any fact checking in the OpenBSD section alone and you will see several glaring false statements, as well as hateful remarks towards its lead developer.
  • It looks like the author never used any BSD except FreeBSD, and he's just trolling without knowing anything about other operating systems. Almost everything he said about NetBSD, OpenBSD and Darwin is false. A 1 minute look at project's web sites would have been enough to avoid writing such bullshit.

    NetBSD: "It is not secure and device driver support is paltry at best". That's a joke. FreeBSD had way more security issues than NetBSD, and when a common security flaw is found, NetBSD is often the first opera
  • # ps -

    PID TTY TIME CMD
    "The State of the Demon Address"

  • A Few Kind Words for Theo (Score:4, Insightful)

    by MeauxToo ( 644228 ) on Tuesday October 19, 2004 @07:40PM (#10571154)

    I don't know all of the of the Net/OpenBSD split, but in my view. As far I am concerned in 2004, it is ancient history. I use OpenBSD for my routers and DNS at the house, and have not had a lick of trouble with it. It just works, and it does its thing on extremely modest hardware (P/133, P/166, and P/200 boxen). In my view, there are not enough accolades available for PF.

    Furthermore, with his all of his unsteadiness and unpredictability, Theo manages to heard the cats every six months for a solid, production quality release. No OS, commercial or open source, has been as consistently reliable for me in terms of operation, quality, or schedule. Let's not get into the patch responsiveness of the OpenBSD team.

    If Theo is the loon this trolling article claims, we need a few more loons like'em. He leads a team that produces a great product. Cheers Theo -- keep up the great work.

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