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The Case for FreeBSD
Posted by
Zonk
on Sun Feb 27, 2005 01:34 PM
from the i-don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
from the i-don't-want-to-go-on-the-cart dept.
essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the
accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is
a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of
their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."
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hmmm (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Thursday October 10 2002, @03:54PM)
One serious thing about FreeBSD over linux distro's... It feels like it has more of a structure, especially when installing utilities and apps... I find with linux distros, the stuff included feels like it's all over the place, hard to find where things end up installing... but I'm really a vxworks fan... so take what I say with a grain of salt...
Re:hmmm (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.hyperlogos.org/ | Last Journal: Wednesday July 18, @08:19PM)
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Without advocacy, your product/whatever will seem inadequate, small, meaningless. This will make your whatever simply useless in the eyes of those who have not decided for themselves at the moment.
People who are not making money out of this have all to lose if they don't get the advocacy they need. They don't have marketing might, and advocacy is all they have. The moment they lose advocacy, they lose mindshare, they lose users. They will them either wither and cease to exist, or become mediocre and simply unimportant, a relic of the past, with the people unwilling to just move on.
You have already decided what you need/want. This makes advocacy useless for you. For the rest of those who have not finalized that decision, they need this stuff to understand the advantages as viewed by those who use the stuff.
Of course, you are also advocating Linux and NetBSD by stating you use those. You didn't give hard facts, but it's still advocacy in a simpler form.
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Insightful)
Actually there's a key difference. Most marketing is carefully directed at potential new customers. Most "advocacy" takes place in forums specifically designed for advocacy (comp.*.advocacy, slashdot, ars technica battlefront, etc), where a tiny number of relatively knowlegable users quibble amongst themselves for kicks.
Let's take this very article as an example. Both FreeBSD and NetBSD have relatively small userbases which primarily consists of Unix and BSD-saavy users. Neither project has very much to gain by converting the other's users. (Unless there really is some threat of one or the other dying.) Either project would have much more to gain trying to convert the HUGE market of fleeing commercial UNIX users instead of arguing amongst themselves. You'll notice that's what RedHat is doing rather than trying to pick off Debian customers.
Re:Who cares about this battle? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.daemonology.net/)
To answer your question: You lose.
Linus Torvalds has said that the idea behind Linux is "do it yourself". The idea behind BSD -- coming, as it does, from an academic background -- is "there's lots of trash out there. Let's give people something better".
As far as providing people with a better alternative is concerned, writing FreeBSD doesn't accomplish much if everyone keeps on running the Linux distribution of the day.
Not to mention... (Score:5, Funny)
More people need to try and use FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://kipwinger.com/)
In fact, for those who haven't tried it, it's quite an excellent full-featured Unix, with everything you'd find under Linux. In fact, it's fully binary compatible with Linux.
The only difference is that it does things the old way -- vi is vi, not vim, and you get sh, csh or tcsh instead of bloated bash. It doesn't have anyone pushing for "ease of use," though it's about at the level of slackware, except with ports, the greatest package management system known to man. Gentoo's portage doesn't even come close to the flexibility and reliability of ports.
Internally, it runs great, because it's not doing things the kernel shouldn't do to boost benchmarks. It's not deeply involved in corporate America, but remains strong due to good management.
Plus it's far more secure. With how much Linux websites are hacked these days -- see http://zone-h.org/ [zone-h.org] and check out the statistics section, at least 70-80% of website hacks are Linux based -- I wouldn't run it on Linux. FreeBSD is the obvious choice, as it runs its services flawlessly.
Re:Reliability of ports? (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.daemonology.net/)
If by "a decent number of them", you mean "1.5% of them" (192 / 12396 at last count), sure.
Gentoo has superior coverage in portage.
Gentoo may have fewer ports which are marked as BROKEN at any given time; but does it actually have fewer broken ports?
I agree (Score:5, Interesting)
I also heard that Windows used or at least used some BSD work in it's internet capability push years ago. One question will always dog me: Why aren't the BSD's as popular with their very good license at least in the eyes of the IBMs and HPs?
Requiem for the FUD (Score:5, Informative)
... facts are facts. ;)
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004) [internetnews.com]
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004) [slashdot.org]
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004) [slashdot.org]
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004) [netbsd.org]
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004) [eweek.com]
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004) [newsforge.com]
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;) [keltia.net]
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004) [mi2g.com]
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Is it just me? (Score:1, Funny)
(http://supercheetah.livejournal.com/ | Last Journal: Friday March 04 2005, @03:24AM)
Not only that, but most of the jokes I hear from Linux people are often in jest, and not serious in any manner.
To be fair, 5.x has been botched (Score:3, Interesting)
Also, the development is getting very political, this also scares off people.
Don't focus on microbenchmarks. (Score:3, Informative)
(http://www.puresimplicity.net/~hemi/)
Even more interesting than old troll posts. (Score:1, Redundant)
(http://bsdforums.org/)
Mod me down if you like, but if an old rant from an ex developer is considered "interesting", whis should be as well. ;)
Facts are facts.
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004) [internetnews.com]
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004) [slashdot.org]
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004) [slashdot.org]
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004) [netbsd.org]
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004) [eweek.com]
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004) [newsforge.com]
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;) [keltia.net]
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004) [mi2g.com]
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Getting defensive? (Score:5, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Sunday September 28 2003, @12:07AM)
My experience with FreeBSD is that the 4.x branch is rock-solid stable, fast, and everything works as it's supposed to.
NetBSD has basically reached that level of quality, with better performance.
FreeBSD 5.x has been unstable for me at best. While the userland programs are pretty much the same, the kernel-level changes have killed reliability. Furthermore, some of the much-touted new features simply do not work yet. I'm sure the SMP performance is much better, but I don't have many SMP machines. I've had problems with hard lockups, just doing things like trying to combine vlan and pf. The bridge interface, afaik, also, still doesn't work with pf.
As far as packages go, ports has more packages, true. Still, rarely has there been something not in pkgsrc that I absolutely needed. Pkgsrc is also much easier to work with, and far more friendly when it comes time to upgrade things. Portupgrade is an abortion, especially compared to even *gack* portage from ricerloonix.
There are reasons there's a buzz around NetBSD these days -- and reasons FreeBSD isn't getting the love it used to. I don't know whether the FreeBSD developers bit off more than they can chew, or if they just are rushing things out the door. But until they get their act together and put out a 5.x-RELEASE that truly is release-quality (by which I mean, all the features *work*, and the drivers are supported the same way), I'm going to be using NetBSD and advising my friends to do the same.
VPS Services? (Score:2)
Their new logo says it all (Score:1)
Guys, please! (Score:2)
(Last Journal: Wednesday September 12, @07:10PM)
just to be clear (Score:5, Interesting)
i found one (Score:1, Funny)
Embedded Features? (Score:1)
(http://www.mdcbowen.org/)
But hey, I still use ksh and vi, so what do I know?
A one time try is all that's needed for success (Score:5, Interesting)
I downloaded a minimal boot CD, burned in, booted installed the base system over FTP and then X, KDE etc via ports...
After only a few hours I was totally confused. Everything just worked!! Well, almost everything. I had some problems with the soundcard, that was solved thanks to great documentation pointing me to a very logical solution.
I'm still a bit lightheaded. An operating system just can't be this good, I'm probably going to wake up soon.
Coincidentily (Score:3, Informative)
(http://michael.bacarella.com/ | Last Journal: Friday November 01 2002, @06:19PM)
I just posted an article that's been sitting around on my hard disk for awhile now (I'm testing out nanoblogger). It's about how I'd improve LAMP, but it ended up becoming an advertisement for FreeBSD.
Have a look [bacarella.com] if you can stand an honest critique of Linux (I love and run Linux on everything, so don't accuse me of FreeBSD shilling).
Why? (Score:2)
So why would anyone consider BSD over Linux?
Where's the Java (Score:2)
(http://www.pobox.com/~kwerle | Last Journal: Sunday August 14 2005, @09:57PM)
There are plenty of reasons why it hasn't happened, and plenty of workarounds - but I don't care (welcome to the customer).
acpi (Score:1)
Is this true? I would really like S3 suspend/resume to work. I can't make it happen cleanly with linux 2.6.10. Does FreeBSD do a better job? From reading section 11.16.3.2 Suspend/Resume in the FreeBSD manual, it doesn't sound like driver support is much better than Linux. Anyone have good ACPI experiences?
Fix the threading model and I am on board (Score:2)
GEOM IS BLACK MAGIC (Score:3, Informative)
(http://80d.org/~quietriot | Last Journal: Tuesday September 28 2004, @12:33PM)
The linked man page is "tasty" n'all, but details on implementing such magical wonders, until recently, have been rather scarce.
This man page [freebsd.org] is better than the one linked to in the original post. There's also some information from committer (read: major contributor to ggate [freebsd.org]) Pawel Jakub Dawidek in Poland [freebsd.pl].
Not that the info isn't there now, right under man, but for a while it was all very vague.
When searching about all that is BSD, don't forget Google's special google.com/bsd [google.com] section.
You can also search the freebsd-geom [freebsd.org] mail list archives to learn more.
geom-gate [kerneltrap.org] sure looks nifty! [freebsd.org] It's akin to block-level NFS (though that's most likely an extremely oversimplified view). All the fun things you can do with geom you can do over your network. Need worldwide distributed, encrypted, multi-level RAID? Go right ahead!
Pretty slick. We'll be hearing more about this.....
zerg (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://www.omletteso...hp3?who=Lord+Omlette)
About politics rather than functionality (Score:1)
FreeBSD / NetBSD (Score:1, Funny)
Reg: Fuck off! We're the People's Front of Judea
I'm always struck by the similarity.
Let's not forget that BSD is about cooperation (Score:2)
(http://bsdforums.org/)
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
"FreeBSD 5.3 ships with x.org, which is **BROKEN** (Score:1)
(http://www.whiteoaklabs.com/)
* FreeBSD's installer has always been, and still is, better than NetBSD's.
* FreeBSD 5.3 ships with x.org, which is **BROKEN**. Sorry, guys, but you don't earn any rating but broken when you can't even produce a usable TWM display on a Radeon 9200.
* XOrg on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE (or -STABLE, take your pick) still dies on this machine. This indicates that insufficient testing was done before the switch to xorg. Obviously they can't test everything, but a radeon 9200 isn't THAT old!* FreeBSD 5.3 ships with x.org, which is **BROKEN**. Sorry, guys, but you don't earn any rating but broken when you can't even produce a usable TWM display on a Radeon 9200.
Poor Java support (Score:2)
Too bad, seemed good otherwise. I'm falling back to good old Gentoo for now.
pros and cons (Score:3, Insightful)
(http://freebsdwiki.net/)
misinformed (Score:1, Interesting)
Ditto for the SMP locking they're touting as an achievement. They've been fumbling around for a year and it's still not right.
*The* case for BSD? (Score:1)
(http://www.thundersplace.com/)
Re:First post "bsd is dying" (Score:1)
Innovative death cycle (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Incredible desktop support? (Score:1, Flamebait)
Because you're forced to use Apple's overpriced hardware.
Re:MODS? (Score:1)
(Last Journal: Friday May 06 2005, @07:02PM)
Re:Does FreeBSD really need to prove itself? (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://www.arbitraryconstant.com/)
Just because NetBSD has fewer users doesn't mean its criticisms are without consequence. After all, by that logic FreeBSD's criticisms of Linux would also be without consequence.
indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
(Last Journal: Wednesday July 26 2006, @04:50AM)
I use three OSs, debian GNU/linux , freeBSD and Mac OS X.. and i think all three are as healthy as ever
im not sure on the whole of apples market share I think about 5% , but considering that OS X has its roots firmly in BSD from its NeXT heritage not to mention the programs it has from the FreeBSD project, then its safe to say that BSD is more alive than ever
Re:Incredible desktop support? (Score:2)
(http://www.arbitraryconstant.com/)
Except PF, jails, ports, etc.
MacOS is an excellent desktop OS, but it can't touch FreeBSD as a server. Even the server edition is behind FreeBSD.
Re:My OS is better than your OS. Sheesh! (Score:1)
(http://michaelandjen.net/)
And what about just having a choice or preference.
Doesn't it make sense to just use what you like.
I have never used BSD, but I know lots of folks who do and love it. Great!
I know lots of people who love Windows XP....great!
I know lots of people who love various flavors of Linux. Awesome.
Why is it bad for people to choose what they like?
I would hate to think that I had to choose something cause someone else decided it was best....for everyone.
Re:Incredible desktop support? (Score:2)
Multiple desktops are trivial in any version of Windows. There are lots of free or very inexpensive 3rd party tools to give them to you.
There's of course the official MS powertoy [microsoft.com] but this is largely a piece of crap.
There's DeskSelect [gbs-design.com] $9.95
There's Cool Desk [shelltoys.com] $24.95
There's a whole section [tucows.com] of them at tucows.
There's Multidesktop [8848soft.com]
There's Virtual Desk [easyfp.com]
There's Enable virtual desktop
Open Source, there's Virtual Desktop [sourceforge.net], Virtual Dimensions [sourceforge.net], VirtuaWin [sourceforge.net], etc... etc... etc..
Unless your company won't allow you to install any software on your local computer, there's no excuse to be whining about lack of virtual desktops.
Re:FreeBSD 5.x; as reliable as a moldy sock (Score:1)
(http://www.open-rsc.org/)
Re:Developer Laments: What Killed FreeBSD (Score:2, Interesting)
Good luck to ya, I hope you can take your expertise with BSD and make Apple's offering that much better. I just am saying that your post is lacking specifics.