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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review 196

Posted by Hemos from the read-more-about-it dept.
MRE writes "Well it's been out for a week an a half, but here's the first review of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. Or if you want to download the new release and try it for yourself, it's only one ISO image away."
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FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review More

FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review

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  • Uhh... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Well, it's been two and a half hours, with no comments on this story.

    BSD is dying...?
    • I downloaded 5.2 the day of its release and so far I concur with the author's opinion that it's not quite as robust as 5.1... I have an nvidia fx5700 ultra card and freebsd is giving me fits with X. I tried using the nv driver without any acceleration (using the same settings in xf86config as I have on my working X installation under linux). It seems to be messing up the refresh rate (the picture is skewed) - I tried pkg_add the nvidia drivers, but it asks for a kernel .config file (admittedly not knowin

  • Not bad at all (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Snake_Plisken ( 666881 ) *
    Got it and just finished with the install - everything you'd expect and more!

    • I tried 5.1 (Score:2, Insightful)

      by wathead ( 730323 )
      I tried 5.1 right after RedHat announced no more Linux just enterprise or Fedora.
      I liked it real well except for the fact it was missing more than a RedHat or Fedora release.
      No screensavers and no sound drivers.This is something that might have been fixed but it was the end of a long day and I was through. I put Slack 9.1 back on that box.
      Other than that is was a nice quite desktop setup.
      I am sure that the BSDs make very good server's but Joe SixPack (Me) it is not the best OS to use.
      I like sound and multi

      • Re:I tried 5.1 (Score:5, Informative)

        by phoenix_rizzen ( 256998 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @11:40PM (#8062748)
        It comes with screen savers and sound drivers. Did you bother to look in the /modules directory to see all the kernel modules and drivers that you can play with??

        It never ceases to amaze me how people who use Linux and kernel modules all the time never bother to look / think about kernel modules when they move to FreeBSD. With *very few* exceptions, if it isn't explicitly listed in the kernel config IT'S BUILT AS A KERNEL MODULE.

        • Re:I tried 5.1 (Score:2, Informative)

          by archen ( 447353 )
          I'm thinking the same thing because if you have a common soundcard (and perhaps even not so common), it's pretty easy to get sound on FreeBSD. I have a ESS1868 on a P133 that I've always had a hard time with. Win95 could barely get it to work, Win98 it was a pain in the ass and sometimes just stopped working. Back when I could fit RedHat on it I couldn't get that to work. So I didn't have high expectations for FreeBSD either. It was a surprise to me that while reading the handbook it just took enabling

      • Re:I tried 5.1 (Score:5, Informative)

        by inquisitor ( 88155 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @11:05AM (#8065674) Homepage Journal
        The default kernel is shipped with ancilliary features as modules, in order to save space and avoid conflicts. This includes sound. Go to /modules, type ls snd*, look at the modules that are there. Text mode screensavers are in there too; they're all of the type *_saver.ko. As long as you know what type of sound card you have, it should be supported either by default or via a patch. The FreeBSD modules commands are kldload, kldunload, kldstat; look at the man pages (in FreeBSD, the system man pages are actually useful, as is the module system). You can also configure modules to load on startup; edit the file /boot/modules.conf. I'm still using 4.x (about to set up 5.2 on my laptop), and you probably should be too; 5 is still very much developer's release territory, and will be until 5-STABLE is created.

        Also, read the Handbook [freebsd.org]. Everything FreeBSD you ever wanted is in there. The appropriate section for sound is 16.2 [freebsd.org]. It's a wonderful operating system - much more sensible and well-organised than any Linux distribution I've used, although admittedly not as newbie-impressing as something like Mandrake 9.2 - and its documentation is very high quality, so I suggest you do look at it.

  • Timely (Score:2, Offtopic)

    by Shurhaian ( 743684 )
    I was just going to reinstall FreeBSD tonight after work. Perfect timing for a review of the new release.

    Dead OS, indeed.

  • Uh.... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by DashEvil ( 645963 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:40PM (#8060982)
    dhclient is broken in 5.2?

    Odd, because it's clearly working on the box I have beside me.

    *shrugs* 5.2 seems to be a very solid release, I have no issues with it. I think that DevFS is something that should be more mainstream, it makes a lot more sense than the traditional method.

    • Re:Uh.... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Shurhaian ( 743684 ) <veritas.cogeco@ca> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:54PM (#8061123) Journal
      My computer is a semi-old and quite unreliable pile o' junk. That Windows hates it is no surprise(though Windows actually does support my nVidia GeForce card's 3D acceleration). I've tried Red Hat, two versions of Mandrake, and Debian.

      FreeBSD is the only thing I've tried that'd keep running if I didn't poke at it. And when I did choose to poke at it, it was most tolerant of it, and - thanks in large part to the devfs system - it's FAR easier to tell what I should be poking AT. Especially for my USB card reader - attach the device, and there it is, a brand new entry, /dev/ums0. Much easier than muddling through a whole tangle of device nodes and hoping that one of them is what I'm looking for.

      And for all the extra time it takes, I'm very fond of the ports tree's default-ish approach of "compile from source to suit the system". My Linux experience was fraught with library conflicts in binary packages; in FreeBSD I've hit a few snags, but they were much more easily resolved - although the process was time-consuming, it was not terribly attention-consuming.

      For a supposedly dead OS, FreeBSD lives quite well indeed on my system, when the Linux distros I've tried all died in short order. If only I had the space to compile OpenOffice, I'd be set.

      Now I just hope the review hasn't been /.'d by the time I get home from work(.com is blocked by the firewall, .org is not. Maybe there's a /.er on my IT staff?).

      • Re:Uh.... (Score:1, Informative)

        by Anonymous Coward
        I've tried Red Hat, two versions of Mandrake, and Debian ...
        My Linux experience was fraught with library conflicts in binary packages

        You're lying, Shurhaian.
        • Okay, Debian wasn't conflicting packages, it was KDE not running properly, outdated version of (e.g.) Gaim, getting my sound card to work...

          Mandrake killed itself, Red Hat was erratic, Debian just plain got replaced.

          • Re:Uh.... (Score:1, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            Oh really? Thats nice for you.

            I couldn't use FreeBSD because even the latest FreeBSD 5 code scales like a scale that doesn't work anymore.

            Yep, their almighty SMPng is unusable for more than 2 CPUs.
    • The AMD64 64-bit version of dhclient has a few issues.

  • ~/.signature (Score:4, Funny)

    by xyxy ( 742859 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:40PM (#8060988)
    This is a rather amusing e-mail signature I saw recently:

    Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
    Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
    FreeBSD: Are you guys coming or what?

  • you tools (Score:5, Insightful)

    by timmarhy ( 659436 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:44PM (#8061023)
    how can anyone claim an OS is dieing right after a new release?

  • MacOS X (Score:5, Interesting)

    by rsidd ( 6328 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:46PM (#8061044)
    From the article:
    "It is questionable whether any significant portion of the old FreeBSD-specific code remains in present-day OS X Panther. So to sum up, the new release of FreeBSD means absolutely nothing to OS X development."
    Apple seems to disagree [apple.com]:
    Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin, the Open Source base of Mac OS X, to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.

    • Re:MacOS X (Score:4, Interesting)

      by ValourX ( 677178 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:23PM (#8061393) Homepage

      The OpenDarwin FAQ [opendarwin.org] is where my facts came from:

      Justin Walker's description of Darwin's heritage is: Mac OS X began life as a child of OpenStep 4.x. The first stage in the evolution was the move from OpenStep 4.x to Rhapsody, which was based on BSD Lite2, with a batch of NeXT-instigated changes. When we shifted to Mac OS X from Rhapsody/Mac OS X Server, we incorporated FreeBSD 3.2 changes for the networking piece. The rest of the BSD portion of the kernel remained more or less as it was. At the same time, we (i.e., Fred, with your [Darwin's] help) pulled in command and library updates. Most of these are from FreeBSD, although I'm not positive about the heritage of the pieces that are now in the system.

      -Jem
      • Back when they used FreeBSD 3.2, for the networking piece and presumably also for the command and library updates referred to, that was the actively maintained stable version. I don't see where in your quote it says that they're no longer merging stuff from FreeBSD.

        • Re:MacOS X (Score:3, Interesting)

          by ctr2sprt ( 574731 )
          It doesn't say that in the quote he gave, nor is anyone claiming it does. OSX has about as much in common with FreeBSD as FreeBSD has with OpenBSD or NetBSD: a common ancestry and a good-sized chunk of similar code. But the time since the fork has created a lot of really dissimilar code too, so it's no longer correct to think of OSX as FreeBSD with a different GUI. Instead, it's just a BSD. That's the point he's making when he says "FreeBSD-specific."

          I think it's kind of an empty comment, since by def

          • Re:MacOS X (Score:3, Informative)

            by rsidd ( 6328 )
            That's the point he's making when he says "FreeBSD-specific."

            I can agree with saying it's not "FreeBSD-specific" but he says more than that. The statement I took issue with was "the new release of FreeBSD means absolutely nothing to OS X development." Not true: Apple themselves say FreeBSD 5 already means something to Panther.

            Meanwhile he makes enough other errors. OS X isn't derived from OpenDarwin; Darwin (not OpenDarwin) is the "core" of OS X, also distributed separately by Apple, while OpenDarwin i

          • OSX has about as much in common with FreeBSD as FreeBSD has with OpenBSD or NetBSD: a common ancestry and a good-sized chunk of similar code.

            Not true; OSX recently imported almost all of the FreeBSD 5.x userland. In contrast, Free/Net/Open/DFly BSDs swap bugfixes and feature enhancements, but each have a continuous line of userland code.

    • Re:MacOS X (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Apple used FreeBSD as a reference system. They claim that recent versions are pretty much feature compatible with FreBSD 4.8 with some stuff from 5.x thrown in.

      BTW MacOSX is not based on Opendarwin, it is based on Darwin.

      To Jem Matzan
      Read the FAQ, that usually helps.
      http://developer.apple.com/darwin/projects /darwin/ faq.html

    • Re:MacOS X (Score:2, Insightful)

      by bark ( 582535 )
      regardless of whether freebsd 5 is in osx or not, OS X does have various features of Freebsd 5 integrated into darwin. for example, softupdates was a FreeBSD 4.x thing ... that's been integrated. in Freebsd 5, there is the background fsck and filesystem snapshots work that resulted directly from the work on softupdates. that is being integrated into OS X for those snappy power-on to usable times for Mac OS X. OS X powers on, checks all the devices, then just loads into the User interface. The fsck'ing

  • Mod the parent down (Score:5, Informative)

    by UFNinja ( 726662 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:50PM (#8061084)
    Too bad you can't mod the article down. This guy was testing primarily on the amd64. Gimme a break. Of course it's gonna have major bug issues. It's not even fully supported (and has major bugs) in any of the Linux distros (yes, even my beloved Gentoo). Had he used the i386 on a stock x86 processor I might give him some credibility.
    • So, he reviews it on a system that's not properly supported my almost anything else, and goes on to say that in spite of being an -UNSTABLE release it's quite usable. And you don't consider this to be a useful review?

  • Under VMWare (Score:4, Interesting)

    by digitalhermit ( 113459 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @07:59PM (#8061156) Homepage
    I got it running under VMWare 4 on a Linux host recently. Largely uneventful except that I needed to use the Safe Mode kernel and add the following entry to the .vmx file:

    monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE"

    It took a few hours to run updates and rebuild the kernel but is functional now. It seemed to take a lot longer this time than normal, but this may be because of the new GCC. Not sure.

    • If you're comparing to 4.x then yes it's most likely GCC 3.3 creating the slow builds. However I believe there's still additional debugging options enabled in the default make.confs.
      • Yes, that is true. Turned off debugging but still somewhat slower than before. No big deal, and if GCC 3.3 gives a decent increase (3%-5% or more) then it's worth it.

  • And... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by utlemming ( 654269 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:04PM (#8061225) Homepage
    My experience was pleasent, and I am very happy. I have noticed a speed enchangement over 5.1. But I did have a problem with the update. I blew my whole system to pot when I did not uninstall the NVIDIA drivers. Other than that I have noticed that the ports collection is working very nicely, with a few new toys, and that the system is very stable. In fact, I must say that I like the new version much better.

    Not much of a review if you ask me. The reviewer did not address anything other than the install. I did not HAVE ANY trouble with the dhclient. In fact I had quite a bit of fun with it and MAC spoofing.
    • Hmmm, NVIDIA's driver didn't like my system, either - to the point that when X tried to start with it, my system would totally lock up. The open-source driver works much better for me.

      And the logs didn't show any sort of error - everything just kinda stopped - so there wasn't much for me to submit for a bug report. Ah well, if it happens again I'll just try to be less apathetic.
    • I blew my whole system to pot when I did not uninstall the NVIDIA drivers.

      Oh man, I feel your pain! I got burned by that driver too.

      The FreeBSD NVidia driver has a fragile interface. You change your kernel or XFree86, you have to rebuild it. I forget that I was automatically loading the NVidia driver in my loader.conf. So the first boot after the 5.2 build crashed hard. Nothing I tried got around it.

      So I did an "upgrade" install back to 5.1, and restored my /etc backup. I was very sleepy at this point,

  • The beer-ware license :) (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pointwood ( 14018 ) <jramskov AT gmail DOT com> on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:10PM (#8061280) Homepage

    Quote: You'd be hard pressed to find a license less restrictive than the BSD License.

    Well, the beerware license as taken from Poul-Henning Kamp's website [freebsd.org] is nice and short:

    "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
    <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp

    • So it is basically a BSD license without the "You can't sue me if you hurt yourself with this code." clause.
    • The WTFPL is also short and clear. It covers some parts of WindowMaker [windowmaker.org], and I've used myself on some tiny applets I wrote:

      do What The Fuck you want to Public License

      Version 1.0, March 2000
      Copyright (C) 2000 Banlu Kemiyatorn (]d).
      136 Nives 7 Jangwattana 14 Laksi Bangkok
      Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
      of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.

      Ok, the purpose of this license is simple
      and you just

      DO WHAT THE FUCK YOU WANT TO.

      Both the Free Software Foundation and

  • sk0 multicast is fixed now (Score:5, Informative)

    by Saint Aardvark ( 159009 ) * on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:11PM (#8061293) Homepage Journal
    ...at least, I'm pretty sure it is. I was having the same problems as he was: interface would not pick up DHCP or IPv6 route unless it was in promiscuous mode. I managed to get in contact with Jung-uk Kim, who was working on the sk0 driver, to test some patches, and they worked perfectly.

    Looking at FreeBSD's CVS site, it looks like the patch has just been commited [freebsd.org]. My thanks again to Jung-uk and the rest of the FreeBSD team!

  • Very few people should be choosing 5.x (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    A lot of people pick FreeBSD 5.* as their introduction to the OS. These same people also choose apache 2.x.

    As a FreeBSD user who still has 3.x machines in production, I am hesitant to deploy 5.x. Why would I give up the rock solid stability of 4.9 for an unknown?

    I also run 4.x as a desktop. Opera, firebird, mplayer, gaim, xpdf, blah blah all work just fine from ports.

    I tried to install mrtg in a jail from the tarball last night until i saw the dependency list. Thank jeebus for ports.

    Oh yea, speaking
    • That's good, because they don't want you to. FreeBSD 5.2 is production-ready, but it's not "stable" yet, which is why this is 5.2-RELEASE instead of 5.2-STABLE. They seem to be aiming for STABLE with 5.3, but there's not much incentive for someone like you to switch just yet.
    • Do not fix what isn't broken. If only I could follow that simple proverb.
    • Why would I give up the rock solid stability of 4.9 for an unknown?

      Three reasons I can think of:

      1) 5.2 supports a lot more hardware than 4.9. Granted, some of the support has been backported, but a lot has not. 4.9 won't run on my current desktop or laptop. 5.2 will.

      2) New features. Unlike above, very little has been backported. UFS2, devfs, rcNG, etc.

      3) "-CURRENT" doesn't necessarily mean "will crash all the time". 5.0 was a bit flaky around the edges, but 5.1 and 5.2 are very robust.

      I wouldn't run 5

  • Correction... (Score:5, Informative)

    by cperciva ( 102828 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @08:40PM (#8061557) Homepage
    There is a [...] utility to perform binary security updates [daemonology.net], but it does not yet work with 5.2-RELEASE.

    FreeBSD Update works with i386 FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. There haven't been any security fixes yet, so it doesn't do very much, but it does work.

  • Is it dead yet? Guess not. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by bsd_usr ( 140514 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:00PM (#8061715) Homepage
    [4:41pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) # uname -a
    FreeBSD bsd.ircla.intexcorp.com 5.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 16 22:16:53 GMT 2003 root@hollin.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/G ENERIC i386
    [4:48pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) # uptime
    4:49PM up 112 days, 1:57, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    [4:49pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) #

    Hmmm, is it dead yet? It's been over 100 days and all. Guess not.

    Yeah, this is a box that I mess around with at work. I don't run anything serious on it, but I do have a few userull utilities to help me diagnose network problems.

    This machine, as you can see, is 5.0-RELEASE and it's like the Energizer Bunny. I goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on...

    My uptime is actually kinda small due to a power outage some one hundred and twelve days ago. I think the longest uptime I've had on a FreeBSD box was over 200 days and I accidentally unplugged it.

    Yeah, I know uptime doesn't mean much but it's nice to know it's been that stable and the hardware has been stable too. It's running on an old Compaq Prosignia 200 box. Runs great.

    I don't know if I ever plan to upgrade this box since it's not externally accessible on the Internet and I really don't use it for production use. Besides, if it ain't broke why fix it. Right?
    • That doesn't mean much.

      $ cat /etc/redhat-release
      Red Hat Linux release 9 (Shrike)
      $ uptime
      22:03:00 up 150 days, 23:30, 3 users, load average: 0.51, 0.87, 0.96

      See, didn't everyone go on and on about how RH9 is a .0 release?
    • I've got two 4.1 webservers at work that have over 365 days of uptime. They average about 10K hits a day.

      • That's nothing. This is a server that averages 12 million hits a day, updating a custom database on each hit:

        % uptime
        12:44AM up 617 days, 8:20, 2 users, load averages: 1.15, 1.59, 1.15
        % uname -rs
        FreeBSD 4.1-STABLE i386

        This box, along with three others like it with similar loads and uptimes, has been up since it was moved into its present datacenter. I could have had the OS upgraded to 4.3-STABLE at that time, but these systems had been so reliable in their previous datacenter that we just left them

  • careful about the upgrade! (Score:5, Informative)

    by TheGratefulNet ( 143330 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:09PM (#8061771)
    I was at an old 5.1 and just tried to cvsup to 5.2

    yes, the CHANGES file talks about this. but not enough:

    you want to make buildworld FIRST!!

    THEN make the kernel.

    or, at the very least, cd /usr/src and make make

    or you'll get makefile parsing errors and it will seem like the /usr/src/ tree is broken. its not. its just that they use more new features of bsd MAKE and you need the new version. old make can 'make' the new make, but you NEED the new make (nb: not gmake) to build 5.2

    fyi

    • There is no CHANGES file. It's called UPDATING.

      And any idiot knows that you build the world *before* you build a kernel.

      Anybody who runs into problems without first reading the docs (Handbook, UPDATING) has no right to complain when things die on them.

  • reinstall? (Score:2, Informative)

    by insomaniac ( 469016 )
    I ran into a mysterious bug with KUser which deleted my root password... the only solution to this problem was to reinstall the base system from the CD.

    Why not just reboot the system with ctrl+alt+del and boot -s at the prompt you get if you press any key before it loads the kernel? After that just mount the root filesystem r/w with mount / -o rw and mount /usr, then type passwd root, and you can change your password.

    This will work if you don't have single user password protection on, or have ctrl+alt+de

  • only one ISO???? (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    See how much smaller your distro is when you don't include the SCO code?

    [/ducks]

  • FreeBSD to OS X (Score:2, Interesting)

    by bsDaemon ( 87307 )
    I started out on FreeBSD 2.2.8 when I was 12 years old. I then started running Linux with RedHat 5.0 when it was brand new, went to Slackware, to RedHat 5.2, then to Slackware and FreeBSD 3.0 dualboot. At FreeBSD 3.3 I went fully to FreeBSD and kept on using it (with upgrading) until i bought the new iBook G4 when it came out this past fall.
    Honestly, while I sometimes still pine (no pun intended) for the days when I had 15 Eterms running and all kinds of Vim and BitchX windows open. Hell, I ran EVERYTHIN
    • I remember when I was 16, I spent all of two days trying to figure out /etc/X11/XF86Config, and I knew NOTHING about *NIX, I was a 'mac boy', I didn't even know how to edit text before I read how to use vi on a web-connected Mac. Anyway, I spent two days getting X up and running, only to use it to have 10 terminals in plain view (and high-resolution). Ever since the I've been a CLI guy, people ask how I can work that way, and I ask how they can work with their mice.

  • Jem Report = Bogus newbies doing news (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Zefram ( 49209 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @09:45PM (#8062076) Homepage
    I don't know where to begin with this. He installed on an AMD64 and complains that Linux binary support didn't work. However, there's trouble finding ANY binaries for AMD64. Java doesn't work? That's binaries. If he did Java from source, I bet that'd work.

    He complains about the license. I am so sick of people crapping on anything that isn't GPL. "in fact Microsoft at one point took a great deal of BSD code relating to networking to include in early versions of Windows NT." - alot of people got the stack from BSD. Why? It's good code.

    Lastly, if he had read the main FreeBSD page, he would see that 5.x isn't production quality. Why did he use this version? He doesn't even mention that it's the "New Technology" release and doesn't highlight the fact that he's using a new CPU type.

    After the hack job done on FreeBSD and on Sun's Blade 1500, I wish /. would realize these people have no idea what they're talking about and stop linking the stories.
  • Overall 5.2-RELEASE is disappointing from a desktop perspective, but it's still more advanced than any community GNU/Linux distribution that you'll find, especially in the area of AMD64 support.


    Umm, no. SuSE has the best AMD64 support and I dare say Gentoo has second or third best. And in my own experience with FreeBSD 5.2, I find that linux is a much more viable desktop/server OS than freebsd.

  • Statement about license is incorrect (Score:5, Informative)

    by Ricin ( 236107 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @10:36PM (#8062397)
    The writer argues that the BSDL "doesn't protect the rights of end-users the way the GPL does because it does not require the publisher to make the source code available". I don't get this. Unless one would s/end-users/the-code. And I have never understood what giving freedoms to a work means.

    In other words, the writer is suggesting something to distract from the real point which is at the heart of the controversy BSDL vs GPL: whose freedom and freedom in the sense of "freedom to (do ...)" or "freedom from (other entity doing...)".

    To argue that the fact that BSDL code can be incorperated into a proprietary product is somehow an attack on the rights of the end user of *that* BSDL code certainly doesn't stand if one thinks about it for five seconds.

    So it's the freedom of "the code" itself then? Please. Don't even *try* to make that argument.

    Or the freedom to give something away with strings attached. There's nothing wrong with that, but then one shouldnt represent it as if it has any other meaning. Giving something away with no strings attached would somehow inherently be less of a contribution to society?

    I have nothing against GPL personally but I do take offense at the ways its implications are time and time again used to discredit the BSDL with a completely reversed reasoning.

    I think GPL is great for some things, linux kernel, gcc, and many more. BSD/MIT alike is more appropriate for other projects like apache, *BSD, and many more.

    Look at GUI toolkits or the layers between toolkits and real focussed middleware. GPL does hamper the adoption of open source solutions (let alone development) there. Finance software for instance. So this is where (in terms of layers and libraries), BSD/MIT, or LGPL but thats a slippery one, makes sense. This is one (possibly not the most important, but it does count) reason for there being so much abandonware on sourceforge. People tend to slap a GPL license onto their work "because then it's free and not for MS".

    Getting back to the GPL vs BSDL argument made, it's pretty clear that if you're feeling that someone else does something better you'd pour some moralism into your version of the difference in order to spin it your way. People should understand that if SCO is smart enough to understand how that works then RMS and his church certainly also are.

    It's a delusion and yes it does prey on (often young) idealists providing them a world view just like any religion. There, I said it. Now, where's my protective suit.

    Luckily many happy Linux users and developers realize this. But mod me down anyway.
    • Sorry, I forgot to mention this. Credit where credit is due.

    • Re:Statement about license is incorrect (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @11:46PM (#8062782) Homepage Journal
      It all comes down to "BSD versus Linux". The licensing is just a red herring. Linux users have been taught that Linux is the only worthwhile Free Software operating system. They think it's the pinnacle of creation. So when they're forced to think of the equally worthwhile BSD systems, they're minds twist up. One popular way out of this mental quandary is to attack the license.

      Evidence: continual and constant attacks on the BSD license in relation to the BSD operating systems, but absolutely no attacks on the virtually identical licenses of XFree86 or Apache. Every slashdot article that even tangentally mentions a BSD system will be plastered with GPL vs BSDL posts. But it never happens on articles about XFree86 or Apache.
  • I've never installed any *bsd before. How does this release compare overall with, say, Redhat 9?

    I mean in terms of its general usability immediately after install, general performance, available software, etc.

    Is it friendly for use as a desktop/development workstation?

    • Re:a simple question from a bsd newbie (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday January 22, 2004 @11:53PM (#8062827) Homepage Journal
      Well, if you don't run away screaming at the presence of an ncurses/dialog based installer, and follow through to the configuration section of the install, you're going to end up with an extremely usable system afterwards.

      But it's still not really done yet. That's because FreeBSD does not presume to know what you want. It's not going to install a desktop until you tell it to, for example. In fact, it's not going to install anything outside of the base system unless you specifically tell it to. You are in full control. For some users this will be a breath of fresh air. But for others it will be a horrifying discovery that they're not as l33t as they thought they were.
      • "But for others it will be a horrifying discovery that they're not as l33t as they thought they were."

        Yup, that's me. Recognized myself immediately. Thanks, this sort of answers my questions on the subject as well.

        Oh well, back to my gui, got my mouse here, yep, all set.
      • I guess my next question would be, once you do decide on a desktop (say, Windowmaker), how much of a pain is it to get it and X working? Does it autoprobe, your video card, etc? Or do you have to know the arcane settings in advance of the install?
        • I'm afraid it's not as easy as knoppix, but with a little bit of patience it's not too bad [freebsd.org].

        • Re:a simple question from a bsd newbie (Score:5, Informative)

          by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @02:30AM (#8063653) Homepage Journal
          XFree86 under FreeBSD absolutely identical to XFree86 under Linux. Well, not quite. It does support the FreeBSD sysmouse device (think gpm).

          On the other hand, you DO NOT get a distro-supplied front end tool like YaST. If you're used to configuring XFree86 the XFree86 way, you're home free. Otherwise...

          My advice is to get a basic configuration using "XFree86 -configure", and see if that works. It will do all the detecting and decide stuff for you. Unfortunately, it tends to give you as high of a resolution as possible, which typically is not what you want. But it will tell you what your hardware is. After that you can use "xf86config" and answer the questions manually.

          If you're using an NVidia card, and want the proprietary NVidia driver, you'll have to install it manually from the ports system. There's instructions there on how to do it, but it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world, since you're dealing with kernel. But you can put that off for a while, since the "nv" driver that comes with XFree86 works great if you don't need hardware accelerated 3D.

          FreeBSD also won't automatically add fonts to your XFree86 configuration. It's an unwritten law that no third party package or port can alter any system wide configuration file (a good thing if you think about it). But if you read the messages after installing them from packages/ports, they'll tell you what to do.

  • First Impressions (Score:2, Interesting)

    by iNiTiUM ( 315622 )
    I recently began using 5.x on a workstation in preperation for upgrading my router/doesitall server from 4.9 to 5.x. Overall it seems very stable, all the apps I've installed have gone in without a hitch. This includes many apps from the ports collection, some added via 'pkg_add -vr (pkgname)', and some handbuilt from source. The new DevFS setup is amazing and the new /etc/rc.d setup is just as killer as NetBSD's setup.

    The only issue I've manage to run into, is that CPU Usage is not reported in top, systa
    • top works for me with 5.2 and a dual PIII 933mhz Dell 1400sc...
    • A number of people have reported this while using the ULE scheduler and/or switching from UP to SMP.

      You want to cvsup your source tree, compile world and your kernel, install kernel, reboot in single user mode, make installworld then run mergemaster.
  • > Overall 5.2-RELEASE is disappointing from a
    > desktop perspective, but it's still more
    > advanced than any community GNU/Linux
    > distribution that you'll find, especially in the > area of AMD64 support.

    say what? they *just* started working on using fine-grained locking in kernelspace. i cant grasp how people could claim it works well for servers when you cant run it on smp boxen without handicapping them to death.

    suse has good amd64 support. gentoo is decent as well.

    fbsd is not more advance
    • i cant grasp how people could claim it works well for servers when you cant run it on smp boxen without handicapping them to death

      Maybe because not all servers are SMP machines?
    • Glossary for the above post:

      "handicapping them to death": turning off HTT
      "quite a few features i cant live without in kernelspace": stuff Linux roxors at
      "cant run it in production": FreeBSD suxors
      "i like fbsd": FreeBSD suxors
      "not possible": part of the Handbook I haven't read yet

      Here's [infomed.sld.cu] a Ph.D. duscussing the results of dual xeon stress testing and benchmarks under FreeBSD 4.4 back in November, 2001. It was apparently quite ready for production use on dual-xeons back then and 4.9 is running just fi
    • Dude, I want whatever it is that you are smoking. It must be very strong and exotic for it to cause you spew out the things you did.

  • Oh, Ye of Little Faith (Score:5, Interesting)

    by vga_init ( 589198 ) on Friday January 23, 2004 @12:59AM (#8063159) Journal
    This post attempts to discuss the stability issues of the FreeBSD New Technology release and make some sense out of the situation as there seems to be varied opinions flying around.

    I have used the New Technology release extensively and also have a good deal of experience with Ye Olde Technology release. ;) The reason for this is because, at the time I adopted FreeBSD as my main OS 5.1 had just barely been released (I was a bit hesistant to try 5.0, but the extra .1 gave me added confidence). I had been using older versions prior to that, but only casually, and I never really hunkered down with them.

    There are different criteria for what is stable. Being a home user, I consider 5.x to be "stable" in the relative sense that I've never observed a system crash or failure of any kind after successful installation. I concede that I have experienced some issues with some pieces of hardware which proceeded to run 4.x just fine, but once the system is installed and configured satisfactorily there have been no problems. So, in other words, "it's good enough for me." Technically it's "unstable," but I guess I enjoy living life on the edge (or not).

    People must understand that criteria for stability in the *BSD crowd is top notch. Harboring claims of being some of the most stable systems of their kind, the BSDs have an aweful lot to live up to, and are usually very good about not dissapointing their users. When a BSD system is certified as "stable", is it ever! What the BSD crowd considers "unstable" some other software communities might think just the opposite. I suspect the cause of this is that BSD finds a happy home on server systems, and even the slightest possibility of something going wrong can cost somebody big. So, even the most miniscule amount of instability is instability none the less, and the BSD communities are modest enough not to try to claim anything different.

    I personally have a sever of sorts running at school that is loaded with an installation of 5.1-RELEASE. It's a modest machine--one of the school's low-end desktops with no more than a Pentium III and less than 100mb of memory--but it get's it's fair share of work; it works as a local file server (simple ftpd configuration), a web server (apache 2.something), and a vnc server (this is because I encourage the kids to play with the machine and get friendly with a *nix system since all they've ever known is Windows). The load is never too bad, even when three kids are running three vnc sessions, each with xfce4, firebird, and usually gaim running (and, you must understand, for a machine of its calibur this is a lot to handle). What I'm trying to say is that the machine does have it's fair share of work. Granted, it doesn't do nearly as much as a proper server should, but it also does a bit more than what I normally would do on my machine at home all by myself. Point in case is that the system has never done wrong, and though I can't keep it up as much as I'd like (staff shuts all machines off during the weekends), it runs for about a good week at a time--maybe two if I get lucky.

    I'm guessing that won't impress many people, but I sure think it's lovely (guess I'm easy to please). For me 5.1 is getting the job done, and though I wouldn't encourage it for large-scale corporate use to do mission-critical work (who would?), I encourage home users not to be shy and give it a go! Oftentimes I think that people get turned off by instability claims, which are, just for the intents and purposes of a hobbyist user such as myself, a tad exaggerated, and miss out.

    To me 5.2 can only be a step forward; if 5.1 was good for me then a good bet stands that 5.2 will be just as good, if not better. There are no gaurentees that this newer release will actually be more stable (there is always the posibility of new bugs being introduced), but known bugs discovered in the previous version are certainly going to be address. Also, I remember reading that hardware support has been expand

  • If he saw this article and the author mentioning several times that FreeBSD is "Free Software"? ;-)

    Parts of FreeBSD are free software in that they are covered by the GPL and LGPL, but great huge chunks of it are under the BSD license which RMS has a serious problem with and most people would call an OpenSource license, not "Free Software".

    Could be an interesting discussion ;-)

    • I really should bookmark this:

      The Free Software Foundation lists the BSDL as a [gnu.org]
      "GPL-Compatible, Free Software License". The BSDL grants all four of the software freedoms [gnu.org]. To quote from the latter document:

      In the GNU project, we use ``copyleft'' to protect these freedoms legally for everyone. But non-copylefted free software also exists. We believe there are important reasons why it is better to use copyleft, but if your program is non-copylefted free software, we can still use it.

      And if you n

    • He'd probably say this:

      "Free software is a matter of the users' freedom to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve the software. More precisely, it refers to four kinds of freedom, for the users of the software:

      * The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).
      * The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.
      * The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedo
    • I don't think he would have problems with it.

      After all, his own website stallman.org used to run on FreeBSD [netcraft.com] many moons ago.
  • The article states: "The FreeBSD bootloader, while simple and unable to be manually configured, is surprisingly useful."

    Not true - FreeBSD has a swell little utility to configure the behavior of the boot loader, called boot0cfg.

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