New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD 149
tearmeapart writes "The teams at FreeBSD have reached another great achievement with FreeBSD 9.1, with improvements to the already fantastic zfs features, more VM improvements (helping bringing FreeBSD to the next generation of VMs), and improvements in speed to many parts of the network system. Support FreeBSD via the FreeBSD mall or download/upgrade FreeBSD from a mirror. Unfortunately, the torrent server is still down due to the previous security incident."
And new submitter northar writes "The other day the NetBSD project released their first update to the 6.x series, 6.0.1. They also (rather discreetly) announced a fund drive targeting 60.000 USD before the end of 2012 in the release notes. They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."
netbsd=hobby (Score:0, Interesting)
Accessing netbsd.org [netbsd.org] from our corporate network gives permission denied
The explaination for the site access ban is netbsd=hobby site by the ranking of the net filtering service my company uses
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:2, Interesting)
FreeBSD kernel: perhaps. It's userland, though... What I remember about IRIX was nicer to use than current BSD, and that was aeons ago. I have no need for BSD at the moment, but if I did, it'd be a toss-up between Debian/kFreeBSD and unstable hacks [zfsonlinux.org].
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:2, Interesting)
You can (and, on a long-enough timeline, will) unwittingly destroy a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint system, leaving it unbootable, simply by selecting a wrong package in Synaptic. Package installer also enables and launches daemons without asking you, which is a huge security problem. That's never the case on any BSD's. The base system is kept separate, and screwing up with packages never screws up your whole system.
Linux distros also tend to be desktop-oriented and bloated. (For example, can you name one Linux distro that doesn't absolutely require perl? FreeBSD doesn't - in that aspect it is even more flexible than Gentoo!) For me sound always "just works" in FreeBSD, while all popular Linux distros require a huge bloated stack of needlessly-complex crap (ALSA, PulseAudio, etc) in order to make it work. I run `top` on my FreeBSD desktop, and I know what everything is, with no process being redundant; I run `top` on Linux, and I feel like I'm trapped in Mumbai during rush hour! As the result of this Linux bloat, FreeBSD actually runs faster than Linux without even trying!
--libman