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Software Operating Systems BSD

BSDForums Interviews Scott Long 121

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the but-everyone-knows-linux-is-better dept.
Dan writes that BSDForums is featuring and interview with FreeBSD's Scott Long. Scott fills us in on some of the new things in FreeBSD 6.0 including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64, and wireless compatibility. In addition to specifics Scott also abstracts on the overall snapshot of BSD development with respect to OpenBSD, NetBSD and the ongoing debate between BSD vs. Linux.
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BSDForums Interviews Scott Long More

BSDForums Interviews Scott Long

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  • What debate? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ChrisF79 ( 829953 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @01:37PM (#13723605) Homepage
    There's a debate between Linux and BSD? Hmm, I must have missed it.

    • Re:What debate? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @02:12PM (#13723847) Homepage Journal
      Parent post is not offtopic - in fact, it is right on target: there is no linux vs. bsd debate, except here on slashdot (and that's the point Scott Long makes, except for the slashdot part). That is my experience as well. I came to bsd from a linux background (mandrake), and I only met friendly people at bsdforums.org. Friendly as in not trying to convince you to use bsd instead of linux at all cost. In fact, I read good reviews of various linux distroes on bsdforums. Generally speaking, bsd users (and I think bsdforums is a good representation of the userbase) are basically friendly towards linux - so don't let ./ trolls convince you otherwise (or journalists, who like this kind of x vs. y stuff because, like all controversies, they make better headlines).

    • FreeBSD vs Linux (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      From the interview:
      4. Some critics claim that FreeBSD has not been as popular among corporations as Linux, not even close. Microsoft acknowledges Linux as a viable threat but FreeBSD is not even on their radar screen.

      Wasn't FreeBSD the only other operating system Microsoft ported C# to? Didn't Hotmail run for a LONG time on FreeBSD? Doesn't Microsoft use BSD code in their operating system?

      There's your debate.
  • Scott Long is dying!!!

    Speaking of which, whatever happened to all the "FreeBSD is Dying!" drumbeats in the last year or two? I haven't kept up with FreeBSD/NetBSD news, but it would seem some series of events has really turned people around, even though it doesn't seem BSD use is necessarily skyrocketing.

  • Moving forward quickly (Score:5, Informative)

    by Sv-Manowar ( 772313 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @01:44PM (#13723658) Homepage Journal
    FreeBSD seemed to have some issues around the 5.0 release because of the major features that release brought (and the ensuing nervousness about upgrading). Hopefully 6.0 won't be plagued by these kinds of issues and should be taken up rapidly. I've had nothing but good experiences of FreeBSD in server environments, and the fact that increasing out of the box hardware support is being included for desktop platforms is great.
    • FreeBSD seemed to have some issues around the 5.0 release because of the major features that release brought (and the ensuing nervousness about upgrading).

      Reminds me of one point (.) upgrade in Linux where it switched from one library to another and half my applications suddenly malfunctioned. I'm sure it was all for the good in the long run, but I was certainly in a panic while trying to decide if I should just go back.

    • Re:Moving forward quickly (Score:5, Informative)

      by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @02:05PM (#13723792) Homepage Journal
      I agree - with one addition: I had nothing but good experience with FreeBSD (the 5.x line) on the desktop. Everything works as expected, packages/ports are up to date, kde performace is great, what else needs to be said?

      The day to day tasks I use FreeBSD for include text editing, watching tv, encoding video, browsing the net, and occasionally playing some games (wesnoth!), in other words, the usual stuff. Let's take these one by one:

      • Text editing: OpenOffice.org support is excellent. We had always the latest builds not only in ports, but as packages from goodday-net. What's more, not only english builds, but all language packs. Of course, I like to build these oo.o myself, so I switched from latest snapshots (all of which built fine) to beta and I'm now building rc1 (with KDE support and all).
      • multimedia: mplayer of course. H.264 being the next standard (for future dvds) and all, I began to use it instead of mpeg-4 (ffmpeg or xvid). Downside is that it is painfully slow to encode, but still, it's the future. In the case of rapidly developing encoders like h.264 (and its opensource implentation, x264) it is important to have the latest and greatest. Right now, I have x264-0.0.20051004 (yesterday's snapshot) installed :)
      • games: the number of games available in ports is impressive, but as usual with opensource games, few of them are impressive. Luckily, the important ones (for me at least) are also always up to date, like wesnoth.

      So I'm eagerly waiting for 6.0 - by all accounts it's gonna be great!

      • Re:Moving forward quickly (Score:2, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        The day to day tasks I use FreeBSD for include text editing

        FreeBSD: The OS choice of text editors everywhere.
      • I agree - with one addition: I had nothing but good experience with FreeBSD (the 5.x line) on the laptop ;)

        Seriously, I installed FreeBSD on my laptop to dual-boot with Windows and didn't have any serious problems. Had to go through some trouble to get the onboard sound working, but that mainly consisted of following a forum post. The newest games I can reasonably play under windows is quake so I'm not missing anything when I'm in the FreeBSD in that sense. I still use mainly Windows, but sometimes FreeBSD
    • 6x is an incramental upgrade. I'm using the beta versions on a laptop to get a good heads up. I really can't tell the difference, and it's been very stable for me (not that it experiences heavy loads). I think there was something in the changelog about having 5x compatibility libraries in place to make SURE that everything still worked. If you choose you can compile out 5x support of the kernel, but some ports may have issues until they are recompiled as well (didn't have any problems myself).

  • Better 'out of the box' support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by fak3r ( 917687 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @01:56PM (#13723729) Homepage
    The main thing I've noticed is just better 'out of the box' support for hardware in 6.0. I don't have massive requirements, as I'm running FreeBSD 6.0 for my primary server (mail, web, chat, database, file) at home. I didn't need to rebuilt the kernel as I did with 5.2 - but that was to support an older NIC. Basically it 'just works' and I've stuck with GENERIC for the kernel with no issues. I use Ports like they're going out of style, and I haven't had anything break (that I couldn't fix ;))

    Anyway, better 'out of the box' support, which would manifest mostly for folks installing 6.0 for a desktop, or someone who has some new(er) RAID or 1G NIC to support. I couldn't be happier, not using Linux for a server anymore, but it's still my Desktop of choice.

  • A n00bs look in (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    From a TI-99/4A to years of wintel boxes, then Linux, I've now made the move to AMD 64 and freeBSD. I've moved onto freeBSD because somewhere I saw a quip that went...Linux is for people who hate windows; *BSD is for people who love Unix. I see Unix is an OS written by scientist for scientist and, as much as possible, I'd to discover that idea.
    • Yeah I read that one too. Clever.

      "I've moved onto freeBSD because somewhere I saw a quip that went..."

      You changed your OS due to a quip you read on a website?

      If I were you, I'd stay away from sco.com ... With that many quips, your quip-o-meter might explode.

      • Re:A n00bs look in (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Thalagyrt ( 851883 )
        It may be a quip, but at least in my experience, most people I know personally who use Linux use it out of hatred for Microsoft, and those that use BSD use it because they love Unix.

        Of course I can't say this is true for everyone, because I don't know everyone. I'm just saying this out of experience with my personal real life friends and coworkers. There's definitely exceptions to this - it can't be said that every Linux user uses it out of hatred for Microsoft and that every BSD user uses it for love of U

        • Re:A n00bs look in (Score:3, Insightful)

          by ettlz ( 639203 )

          ...it can't be said that every Linux user uses it out of hatred for Microsoft and that every BSD user uses it for love of Unix.

          There are BSD fans like to "rile" Linux users with [friendly] jibes of "weenie" and "get a proper operating system". But it really goes without saying what some of them think of Microsoft products. Not so much hatred, as sheer, unbridled contempt: they barely acknowledge Windows as software. And for the record, I use Linux because I like Linux.

          (I also read Playboy for the articles

          • Exactly as I was saying, not everyone fits into that model that I've observed. Like yourself for example, using Linux simply because you like it. That's a damn good reason to use Linux, the best reason to use it I'd say. I'd also guess from what you said that you're the type of person who would help a newbie out instead of yelling something along the lines of "RTFM NOOB! >:O" :)

            I think all of the OSes have their place. If I wanted a Unix type OS on my desktop I would use some form of Linux for that as i

            • Yes, those "RTFM n00b" types are a real pain in the backside. Like those idiots who tailgate learner drivers. They don't help free software, especially when TFMs are sometimes quite complex. Some people need to be reminded of the help others gave freely to them.

              I try not to hold any OS or manufacturer in contempt - I think everything has its use and I'll reccomend the most appropriate software to someone for what they're trying to do.

              I'm not saying that you would. (I have also seen a lot of Linux users st

        • I use BSD because I hate UNIX, but everything else seems to suck more, and the BSDs seem to be the least bad implementations of UNIX I've used to date.
          • that's about as academic 'a statement as i've ever seen. but generally right on, but you should maybe give solaris/open solaris a try.

            think about it, solaris has the potential to be the desktop unix (other than os x) that we want. it can have binary driver support, something linux doesn't want (video, wireless networking, etc), since it has a stable abi. plus it's rock solid.

            • I've read a lot of papers by Sun people on the Solaris kernel, and I am very interested in trying it. I'm not sure about the userland - SMF shows some promise (and let's face it, it can't be worse than SysV init), but it's still not a mature technology. Java and the Java Desktop hold no real appeal for me - I'm more of an Objective-C / GNUstep person - but I'm trying to persuade my supervisor to get hold of a dual (or possibly dual, dual core) Opteron system from Sun for me to use for some development wo
        • "It may be a quip, but at least in my experience, most people I know personally who use Linux use it out of hatred for Microsoft, and those that use BSD use it because they love Unix."

          I don't care about Microsoft, and I use Linux in addition to BSD. What does that say about me?
    • From a TI-99/4A ...
      Interesting, my first home computer was also a TI-99/4A. When you're 10 years old and you have the Speech Synthesizer Module saying curse words on command for all of your friends, you rule!
      • I too had a TI-99/4a as my first box as a kid. Couple that with a cassette recorder to save all my Basic programs that I typed in from computer magazines and the beloved Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus games that I played for hours... Ahhh, fond memories. But you are right, the speech synthesizer was the cat's meow when it came to impressing your Atari 2600 owning buddies.

        Boy we have a lot in common... I too was in the Navy, got started with BSD in the mid 90's after I got out, and live in/near Denver as wel

        • 99'er was the best mag, followed distantly by COMPUTE! Oh, the fond memories of slogging away entering code. And yeah, Parsec was my first cartridge game, and it was awesome. Good times, good times. Don't know about the Franklin Ace. I think I vaguely remember a friend having one, but nothing more than that. Oh, and Never Again Volunteer Yourself ;-)
  • First 3 questions said nothing about Linux.

    First 3 answers did.

    muahahahahhahaha

    Anyways my take on the debate: Multiple times I've written some simple software without even CONSIDERING portability, written on my (Linux/BSD/OS-X) box, and when the time came to make it run on a new platform (Linux/BSD/OS-X), it did, with barely any modifications. So who cares, target any UNIX, they all rock, and you probably wont end up permanently stuck to one of them.

    • So you write in Perl?
    • Well, that's fine as long as you don't directly interact with /proc, don't assume sysctls are going to be in the same place, don't use STREAMS (or, worse, Mach ports), don't use sendfile, don't assume bash is in /bin, or that you know the location of any system files not specified by POSIX, don't assume anything about data sizes or byte orders, don't use any of the more advanced bits of the sockets API...
      • man, I'm so shocked you were able to find exceptions!!

        Point is, I've written some rather large software and ported it no problem. If you want to be a geek and talk about how you shouldnt assume "bash is in /bin", I guess thats more important then the fact that I wrote a GPS chartplotter _complete w/ the interface to talk to an actual handheld GPS_, never thinking about portability, and was able to just take it off my linux box and compile it on an OS-X box changing _2_ lines of code.

        But you are right, por
        • Sure, you can write cross-platform code. Interfacing to a GPS is easy if you use some kind of abstraction layer for serial port access, but a novice programmer is likely to just open /dev/tty0 (or whatever), and then be bitten when they move to another platform that puts the serial ports in a different place.

          Many people write #!/bin/bash at the top of shell scripts (I've even seen this suggested in books), and then wonder why it doesn't work on anything other than a GNU system.

          Just because you don't us

  • People will wonder why this is great. Darwin is not FreeBSD... there are too many things going on with the Mach Kernel. Yes, Fink or DarwinPorts solves some problems but still. I'm a happy fella.
  • When challenged with the notion that Linux is more popular that FreeBSD, Scott answered:

    ``There is no denying that Linux is gaining popularity, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the BSD family is not. A great example is Mac OSX. Under the hood it is very much a BSD operating system. That means that BSD is now the second most popular desktop OS, far more popular and widespread than Linux.''

    That's utter crap. First of all, the question was about FreeBSD vs. Linux, not *BSD vs. Linux. Secondly, Darwin isn

    • Re:Why Darwin? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Arandir ( 19206 )
      Scott's FreeBSD code is *in* Darwin. This isn't deception, it's pride that he helped write a code base with such high quality that Apple decided to use it.

      You don't always have to brag about your kids, sometimes you can brag about your nephews and nieces.

    • Re:Why Darwin? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @03:57PM (#13724553) Journal
      Darwin sure looks like a BSD to me. It uses a BSD-style hierarchy, the system calls and commands are all BSD-style. The userland is mostly from FreeBSD (so du, thankfully, has a short option for depth, and ftp supports tab-completion).

      Mach itself is a direct descendent of BSD - the original Mach implementation ran a BSD kernel as a service on top of the Mach microkernel, and userland was all BSD. The NeXTStep kernel put the BSD portion in kernel space for performance reasons, making it a BSD system running on a Mach hardware abstraction layer. The Rhapsody kernel threw away some of the old BSD code and replaced it with more modern code from NetBSD. More recent versions of Darwin have done the same with FreeBSD.

      I moved to OS X from FreeBSD, and found the system very familiar. I also play with a NeXT machine on occasion, and that machine is also clearly a BSD family member.

      FreeBSD is not out to take over the world. The point of the BSD license is to allow people to take your code and do whatever they want with it. Apple took a lot of BSD (and, specifically, FreeBSD) code, and made the second most popular OS on the planet. This means that the second most popular OS on the planet contains FreeBSD code. NetBSD and OpenBSD also periodically take code from FreeBSD, as does Linux. FreeBSD, in turn, gets code from Net and OpenBSD, along with contributions from Apple. Examining FreeBSD makes no sense out of the context of the BSD ecosystem.

      To put this in a Linux context, imagine if someone from Red Hat had been asked to talk about their OS and about, say, OS X. Would you expect them to just talk about Red Had Enterprise Linux, or would you expect them to talk about the entire Linux ecosystem?

    • That's utter crap. First of all, the question was about FreeBSD vs. Linux, not *BSD vs. Linux.

      And isn't *that* question crap? How can you answer about a particular distribution of BSD vs. all Linux distributions combined? If you're going to compare apples to oranges, you might want to sync up the comparison. So that means either *BSD vs. *Linux, or FreeBSD vs. RedHat (or pick another distribution).
       
  • I have a love for operating systems (and programming languages, but that's for another time), and I've tried most of the open source operating systems that I'm aware of. These days, I have three favorites: OpenBSD, for being the only OS _really_ serious about security; NetBSD, because I love the portability, minimalist feel, and pkgsrc; and GNU/Linux for generally being up to date (in features and hardware support) and easy to maintain (apt-get is the best). FreeBSD seems to have fallen by the wayside; it's
    • OpenBSD: I like it a lot, and love it for security-biased applications, but it still has issues [slashdot.org] in my opinion. All that secure goodness comes at a price, such as incredibly poor performance on certain hardware configurations when compared to other OSes (such as taking a good 10 minutes from poweron to being logged into Xfce on my aging laptop, rather than 2-3 minutes with Gentoo on the same machine). Is the tradeoff worthwhile? Depending on the intended use, quite possibly so. It's still something to co

      • Re:Enlighten Me (Score:2, Interesting)

        by dadragon ( 177695 )
        NetBSD: Nice OS. However, it just "feels strange" to me in ways that I can't really quantify. For example, according to everything I've read, you rebuild the system by crosscompiling it to your own platform (and if I'm wrong, please enlighten me). It always gave me the subconscious impression that it tries really, really hard to prove how cross-platform it is by never really feeling completely at home on any of them. Justified? I don't know. That's just how it seemed to this outsider.

        Largly you are cross co
    • FreeBSD has only fallen by the wayside if you listen to the trolls.

  • BSD .vs. Linux (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Medievalist ( 16032 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @03:11PM (#13724237)
    It has generally been my experience that the people who argue "BSD versus linux" fall into one of two categories.

    1) BSD people who have no in-depth knowledge of linux, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance

    2) Linux people who know very little about any particular BSD, and therefore speak from a position of ignorance

    The people with truly deep knowledge of both systems always say "use the right tool for the right task" and typically have no time for OS religious wars.
    • I long for the days of "Sixers" vs "Eighters" flame fests. But those were at 300 baud.

      • what are sixers and eighters? I've only been using the internet for a decade so i doubt I was around then and those terms look to general to do a wikipedia check on.

        • Re:BSD .vs. Linux (Score:3, Informative)

          by Nethead ( 1563 )
          CPU architectures. i.e.: 6800 vs 8080 to 68030 vs 80386. An early form was SWTPC vs Altair or C64 vs TRS-80. The end of the era was Macintosh vs IBM-PC. Also see Harvard vs. von Neumann Architecture (obe.ibme.utoronto.ca/presentations/Microcontrolle r/sld007.htm)
    • True that. Most of my annoyances with CentOS stem from "WTF? I know exactly how to do this on a *BSD box." After I get past a difference I'm fairly content again. There are some things I still don't like (such as the Red Hat tools eating my damn config files) so I've stripped down new CentOS installs to barebones systems and just do configuration by hand or script.

      But the people that are truly look at BSD vs. Linux as a holy war I find fall into this one category.

      1) complete and total nerds

  • Switched from FreeBSD to SUSE/Novell (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Deviant ( 1501 ) on Wednesday October 05, 2005 @03:20PM (#13724292)
    I had used FreeBSD excusively in the 4.x's on both my desktop and servers up until about a year ago. I really liked ports and found that everything just seemed like it fit together like one seamless product instead of the hodge-podge that my previous experiences with RedHat and Slackware had been. Subjectively I also found that it felt faster than the Linux at the time of my switch. I stuck with FreeBSD but also with the 4.x tree because I was a bit put off by the whole stable vs development nature they kept putting forward for 5.

    That changed when Novell bought SUSE and started offering their certifications. I was asked to evauluate it by some people at work who had fond memories of Novell and wanted to see what they did with Linux and I was given the opportunity to sit for the Novell CLP (Certified Linux Professional) practicum exam if I wanted as a carrot for doing it. I decided that the only way to get comfortable enough with it for the test was to dive in and install it on my primary desktop OS and force myself to use it.

    What I found was surprising. There, obviously, were some growing pains when it came to various BSD vs SYSV things and directory layout and ports vs RPM etc. What I was surprised by was that everything worked out of the box. I am used to, and almost looked forward to, having to roll up my sleeves and figure out the config files and recompile the kernel and go through newsgroups and mailing lists for fixes. This has been especially true since my primary machine is a laptop (Dell Inspiron 8600). What also surprised me was that Yast configures, with either a console or X-Win GUI, just about eveything that I wanted to configure and every setting that I wanted to change. I kept waiting to run into a gotcha so I could swear it off and convince myself I had to do it all by hand but it hasn't come yet. The whole magic-black-box aspect of it scares me a little but I am amazed how little I have had to get my hands dirty. It almost feels like Windows Server 2003 -- in a good way. Also, while I was put off by the 6 CD thing at first (I have always had a pretty streamlined and small FreeBSD install for my desktop) I find that having pretty much any piece of software that you might want in RPMs you can trust (and don't suffer from the dependency hell I remember) right on the CDs is actually pretty nice.

    After I take my practicum in the next few weeks I am going to try Novell's desktop offering. If it is as slick as SLES then Novell, especially when you figure in NDS and ZenWorks, is going to make huge inroads versus the other distros and FreeBSD. And, strange as it sounds to me who missed the Novell hayday, there are alot of people in the industry who seem to remember their interaction with Novell fondly for whom their name and support seems to be a big plus.
  • Which text editors are being used for the debate between Linux and FreeBSD? Vi or Emacs?
  • I use Linux. I like it. It's plenty "good enough" for reliable, production use. Any area that BSD is better than Linux, it's not "better enough" to justify the expense and time to port over all our apps and data to it.

    Linux has supported SMP for longer, and is thus more likely to be mature and stable on it. More hardware is supported by Linux than BSD. At numerous things it's faster than BSD, and at others, it's not much slower.

    Linux has more mindshare - nobody talks about "Windows vs BSD", but "Win v. Lin"

  • Oh God, I hate this! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I'm also named Scott Long, and whenever this other Scott Long is mentioned somewhere (which isn't often) I get a tidal wave of chiding (from those in the know) and congratulations (from those who aren't) for my outstanding achievements.

    "Scott, I thought you used Linux? Anyway, I never knew you were so important!"

    DAMMIT, here we go again!

    • Are you the Scott Long that is overdue on his credit card payments? If so then I have a crapload of mail and phone messages for you =-D
    • There are worse things. Did you hear what happened to the fellow named Rod Long - you know, the porn movie fellow ?

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