I'm getting a surplus Dell Latitude from work. Was going to load Ubuntu but FreeBSD 8 plus KDE 4.3.0 (or later) looks like a fairly crisp choice for me. Anybody have any experience with this combination?
It's what I run at work, runs well but have to know what you intend on using it for. Also IME KDE 4 is easier to install and has less quirks than on linux.
Virtualbox runs vista quite well for me so it takes care of that problem to.
If you run 64 bit, use the nouveau driver, it's far better than nv.
I was going to make a joke like "You mean other than Apple?" but that's too easy.
BSD's desktop users fill the same nitch as Slackware. Advanced users that want to do it themselves. That said, most Linux distro's were put together because, as we all know, Linux is a kernel, and not a complete OS. BSD's, are a more complete distro, and the ports system alleviates the need for a lot of stuff that Linux distros take care of (like a package manager.) Still, they both are "worth it" to develop for for their devel
Gentoo fills the same niche with the Linux kernel. And since when is Slackware not a complete distro? Perhaps you meant “Linux From Scratch”...
P.S.: Please get your spelling right. It’s “niche”, “distros”, “BSDs” (second one only), and “develop for their developers”. Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
"Seriously though, is there even enough BSD desktop users to even worry about? That must be a truly itty bitty number, like 0.0001% or something."
Seriously though, does it matter a damn? If it's good for the purpouse, then it's good for the purpouse no matter how many (or how little) people use it. If number of users were a quality indicator, Windows would be the best system by an order of magnitude (hint: no, it's not).
And then again, for the casual desktop user, there's no difference between KDE on Free
A number of apple employees are FreeBSD committers. I believe a number of FreeBSD guys were hired by apple, and still work on the FreeBSD core. If you don't know about FreeBSD give it a shot. Its different from Linux, so it will take a little while to get your head around, but its good. I left linux for it after 5 years of linux. The learning curve going from Linux to BSD is nowhere near the curve as say, going from Windows to Linux. Most of the ideas are the same, they're just implemented slightly dif
True, you can get caught out if you make assumptions. However if you read the docs before assuming, its easier than being totally foreign. Also, once you get the "BSD way" for a few applications, the rest of the OS is configured and operates much more consistently than the mish-mash of ways linux apps seem to do things.
Stick with it... might take a little while for the thought process behind BSD to "click" but once it does for you, linux is full of glaring inconsistencies and just feels "dirty" by compa
"First of all, there is no reason to act like a douche when someone asks a question."
Any kind of question? Yours was obviously a "flamebait" one. And your answer to mine is too, so I betted my opinion on the first answer and I'm sure of it on this second.
"it is THAT kind of attitude that has non Windows/OSX platforms labeled as Operating Systems for the maladjusted. Nobody likes THAT guy"
You seem not to understand -again. All your rant basically begs for this answer: so what?
Some of the network utilities in windows did originate with BSD but the stack in Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server and beyond was written by Microsoft.
False. Windows XP has the same stack as Windows 2000, which was lifted from BSD. We know because of fingerprinting and the attacks that it was once susceptible to. The new stack is in Server 2003 as you suggest, but it doesn't appear in desktop Windows until Vista. The same stack is also used in Windows 7. You can tell the change doesn't happen in XP due to the lack of integration of IPv6, which still demands the use of all the same management tools as on Windows 2000.
If i'm running a free unix desktop, its usually freebsd. Give it a shot if you're a linux person, and give your head a little while to get around to the unix way of doing things (rather than the bastardised linux way) and you may like it.
I used to use Linux, but found FreeBSD to be easier to configure from the command line, more consistent in its filesystem layout, more responsive under load, and generally "smoother" in terms of process scheduling. I gave up linux desktop use (for FreeBSD, and later, OS
That depends on your definition of BSD. Some people look at the userland and the large amount of BSD code in Mac OS X and call that BSD. I'd say there are more than 0.01% of users that are on mac os.
I started a project to make a desktop friendly BSD operating system called MidnightBSD. There's also PC-BSD and the now defunct DesktopBSD. The new problem is that Linux folks have grown inpatient with the linux on the desktop idea. They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing linux down. A few projects have really done some serious changes to their software to make it function poorly (or not at all) on other OSes including *BSDs. Sometimes it's a lack of people to make reasonable updates to the kernels for various things like "new" video interfaces. Even things like X.org have done shifts that make hardware acceleration a real pain in the butt on BSD platforms. I've been shunned many times for trying to provide patches both for MidnightBSD and previously FreeBSD to other projects.
The FreeBSD project has had trouble getting patches upstreamed for things like GCC and binutils in the past. In general, I think many GNU projects are starting to get grumpy with respect to *BSD patches. There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive. Also, you get into situations like Apple buying cups and switching to LLVM because of fear of the GPLv3. Perhaps fear is not the right word.
The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.
So you've found one algorithm bug that affects some tiny number of users (in 10 years of using BSD, both in an ISP and a 13 site international company, i've never encountered or heard of it).
There are plenty of bugs in linux that don't get fixed because the patch was "not invented here".
As far as BSD being useless as a modern desktop system, apple don't seem to think so, and neither do i or plenty of other users. There's certainly less visible brain damage in it than plenty of other "modern" operating
It's not quite true to say that there is no corporate backing for FreeBSD. There are no major companies that heavily back the project, but Yahoo! used to employ six developers full time to work on the kernel (not sure if they employ anyone now - do they have any money left?), Apple's Darwin team often contributes code, Juniper sends patches back, and a few other companies contribute financially. You may remember a couple of years ago that the FreeBSD foundation was in danger of losing its non-profit statu
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities;-)
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities;-)
So would you say that if my primary goal is to run Pf, it will make no difference if I install either freebsd or openbsd ?
I am thinking ease of installation, patches, etc. where there could be a delay before updates for freebsd. Also, does the freebsd port support 100% of the features implemented on openbsd and can it be considered as a totally equivalent alternative ?
The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.
If you run FreeBSD, having PF ported gives you a more sane choice of firewall there, but if you're setting out specifically to run PF, OpenBSD gives some major benefits. The code is several years ahead of FreeBSD's port. Watch some of the recent presentations to see what's changed - see links to a couple of related videos at http://spacehopper.org/pfvids/ [spacehopper.org]
by Anonymous Coward writes:
on Thursday November 26, 2009 @04:15PM (#30239338)
Seriously - some anonymous person makes vague claims about how it's "higher quality" - without defining "quality" or providing any citations, reasons, or examples, and it's modded "insightful"?!?! TWICE!??!!
What. The. Fuck!??!!
Here's my refutation of this post - containing just as much "insightful" commentary as yours:
Given that any sysadmin worth his salt knows that Linux and FreeBSD offer different tradeoffs between "completeness" and "rigorous quality", it's not unreasonable for him to point out that FreeBSD has a "higher quality", even if the actual words he uses are subjective. Everyone familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros would know what he's saying and agree.
Unfortunately, I can't say that your "nuh-uh" also resounds with common experience in this way, so I disagree with your contention that it is a val
I'm sure FreeBSD some times performs better or with greater stability than Linux, and I'm just as sure that some times it's the other way around. Some times Windows beats them both. And who knows, perhaps even Solaris. It depends on a lot of things, though, and to say that FreeBSD is simly 'better' for 'serious' tasks just makes me convinced that you've never used a computer for serious tasks.
As for your other claims, that "FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or
"That's just ignorance speaking. After extensive experience with both operating systems in both corporate and home environments, I can assure you that BSD is the clear winner for consistency of quality and use as a serious server. "
Well, I always say that it's very easy to say "this is that way" when you know the answer but it is always very dangerous to say "that's impossible" or "that's not the case" because you don't know everything.
In example, all you are really saying is that after extensive experience
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.
We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.
Tell me about it. When I was new here I always used to read the articles before posting, but by then everyone had already commented and spent their mod points so I never got any karma! But then I learnt the proper way of doing things and now I've got karma to burn on offtopic posts about slashdot!
Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.
Your blog has been a great resource for me for a very long time. Thanks for all the informative posts... you were the only set of instructions that made sense for doing a binary upgrade:-)
Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update.:-)
Unfortunately that's not always the case - the person who writes the software might find its usage obvious and not know how to explain it well to others. And often the users who find it unobvious, and finally figure out by themselves how to use something, forget which parts were unobvious. They weren't taking down notes on the unobvious bits - typically too busy just trying to get things to work. So it might be useful to have some people taking notes on "questions" they have that aren't answered by the docum
Sorry if this comes across as a flame, but as the guy who wrote FreeBSD Update, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions:
Firstly, why is it so slow? I can cvsup and recompile the tree and install in less time that it takes freebsd-update upgrade to run; the two install steps then take even longer. If I run systat -iostat, I see it hitting the disk incredibly hard. Couldn't it just compare the last modification date of most of the files with the time of the last upgrade? Possibly this has been fixed
Good point... come to think of it, I'm not sure how it's possible to do that even with a source upgrade, since trying to run an 8.0 world on a 7.x kernel would break too.
That's a sort of byproduct of the way the last stages of a release go. It isn't put up as a final release until the build is done and it's been distributed to the ftp sites and they've been given a bit of time to prepare.
Which means that the source as well as the ports tree for that release have been hanging out on one server or another for a bit.
I was intending to install RC3 on a new desktop machine a few days ago, but got the error message "this version not available on this server". So I went to the options screen and changed it to 8.0-RELEASE just on a hunch and happily it was there and installed without a hitch. Definitely several good performance improvements over 7.2, especially when copying large amounts of data from a USB disk.
So far this seems like a nice, solid release and I look forward to migrating my servers to it (after a month or so, just to be sure).
wpa_supplicant needs to either be dumped and replaced with something better or the people that work on wpa_supplicant need rework it to support a wider variety of wifi cards
I'm confused... how the hell is it wpa_supplicant's job to support specific wifi chipsets/cards? Isn't it the kernel's job to implement drivers for each card while exposing a general API that wpa_supplicant then uses?
FreeBSD 4.x was hot back in the old days of 2003ish. After pulling my hair out with Gentoo FreeBSD was well integrated and stable.
I know there is experimental 5 year old patches for java 1.3x which I successfully compiled which looked like a bootstrap hack with an emulated jvm just to compile it. FreeBSD 5.x was just terrible and i kept using 4.x until 4.12 before switching back to Windows. I hope it got better as not even my simple usb keyboard that was supported with FBSD 3.,x and 4.x would not work with
Billy you'll be happy to learn USB received some long needed love in 8.0. A new well performing library has been integrated into base, chances are your cheap keyboard will now work under FreeBSD again.
native and ported jdk's and jre's have been available and usable in FreeBSD for quite some time. FreeBSD has a special licensing agreement with Sun which the reason you need to bootstrap a native build. However the linux-sun and diablo ports install quite fast and usable for most anything.
Flash problem will hopefully go away with HTML 5. 3d acceleration works fine once set up. What probs have you had with library management? Being able to build from ports to suit the version of library X you have on your sytem, rather than what the package depends on is a great strength, imho...
Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?
FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software.
But to each her own.:)
What? You can emulate Linux binaries?
For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.
Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to/dev/dsp (back then they needed to have/dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.
ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.
The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).
Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.
DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
I'm almost convinced. I've been toying with FreeBSD 7 on a vm a while ago, and I liked it. There's a certain "feel" about the whole system, and I really like that feel. Now I'm considering putting it on my laptop. I'm just wondering about a few possible showstoppers. Tell me about...
- Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like i
Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt?
Install portupgrade and then installing from both source and binary works nicely. I've never had uninstalling fail, but if you like testing and uninstalling stuff then just create a cloned copy of the base system (with ZFS), set it as a jail, try it there, and then delete the whole jail later. It's fast and easy, and will definitely clean up anything that's left over (temporary configuration files and so on).
- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.
Depends on the machine. It's been a few years since I tried to run FreeBSD on anything that wasn'
> Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo > if you're expecting true suspend to disk;
My current setup is an encrypted volume, containing an LVM volume, containing root, swap and home. When I resume from s2d, it asks me for the passphrase just like during a normal boot, and only when the swap shows up it tries to resume from it. I guess that this is just as safe as a normal shutdown.
Big thanks to you (and everyone else) for all the replies.
ports: cd/usr/ports/[package class]/[package name] && make && make install - done. however, if there is a package available, i just use that - pkg_add -r packagename will install the package off the network, with any dependencies as well - in a single step
can't comment on 1 year old laptop support, haven't run it on a laptop for a while
not sure
sysinstall will do this
3d support on intel = x.org - works as far as i know, the driver is open source
So does package management. Video, networking, performance.... The FreeBSD was much more organized environment then the feathered alternative was at the time, which is why I also switched over back in the 4.x days.
Sure, everyone has advanced over the years, but i still haven't seen many reasons to leave the bsd camp.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
The real time, low latencey kernel available to user accounts is pretty much the only reason I do. It's a must for multitrack sound recording.
The last time I was using FreeBSD regularly (late 4.x through 6.0), the real-time kernel access required for low-latency recording (a must for multitrack recording) was only available if you were running as root. At this time it was available via Igno Molnar's kernel patch and a rebuild.
My understanding was that the structure blocking users from real time kern
That's a pretty poor definition of 'works'. To me, it means that I just install the OS and it goes. Windows frequently fails this test, mind you, as do many Linux distributions (and Ubuntu often fails on older hardware, where some other distribution would succeed, so it's not like there's a one size fits all fix from the Penguin either.)
Have to disagree with you. I find Linux (well, Debian anyway) to be more consistent than FreeBSD. I manage a few FreeBSD boxes at my work, and I've found that configuration files and service startup scripts are better managed in Debian.
Linux has iptables instead of pf. From what I've used of pf, it doesn't have anything that cannot be done by iptables.
I do like Jails. While you can achieve the same thing with virtual machines, Jails is better with resources. Still, if we're talking about a desktop user
Yes, FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for years. A little effort on your part to do some research before you post could have saved you from looking like a fool. Oh, wait..
Dtrace, zfs, pf, jails, configuration files done the right way and a scheduler that has not crapped out under load of more than about
2-3 - for decades.
None of this is available on Linux. Yes there are half-assed work arounds to do the same thing, but they don't work as well.
The solaris implementation of DTrace is also significantly better than the one found in FreeBSD. If these are the features you are interested in, you really should be using OpenSolaris, not FreeBSD.
As above. However, i've run freebsd quite happily on a laptop before (back in the 6.0 days, even). You just need to make sure the hardware support is there. AS you do with any OS - even on Windows i'm particular with the hardware I buy as the shiniest/cheapest/best value hardware in the world is no good without stable driver support...
parent is not a troll, the bullet points are accurate. gotta love the moderation system - any time anyone brings up anything in any way anti linux.... as someone who has used both (in a 2500 employee company) for a decade+... he speaks the truth.
Support for more hardware, especially workstation oriented hardware? Greater availability of applications? (Most desktop oriented apps are written for linux first and later possibly ported to bsd, many closed source apps cant be ported to bsd at all).
When i tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, it worked well on my desktop (which was self assembled and intentionally bought using well known hardware) but wouldn't boot on my laptop (an ibm thinkpad 600e) and wouldn't run vmware (which
Umm, I must be missing something. FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for well over a decade. And this was a FreeBSD release, some developers work on both, but it's a different set of priorities and interests.
Not to mention that unlike the second example where the obvious answer is that.deb is better, the other ones are more a matter of philosophy for most people than pragmatism. A sort of choice between having an actual OS or a Kernel plus whatever packages were available to cobble together an
FreeBSD gained read-only support for XFS in December 2005 and in June 2006 experimental write support was introduced; however this is supposed to be used only as an aid in migration from Linux, not to be used as a "main" filesystem.
Think lucky. If you fall in a pond, check your pockets for fish.
-- Darrell Royal
Awesome! (Score:2, Insightful)
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I'm getting a surplus Dell Latitude from work. Was going to load Ubuntu but FreeBSD 8 plus KDE 4.3.0 (or later) looks like a fairly crisp choice for me. Anybody have any experience with this combination?
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It's what I run at work, runs well but have to know what you intend on using it for. Also IME KDE 4 is easier to install and has less quirks than on linux.
Virtualbox runs vista quite well for me so it takes care of that problem to.
If you run 64 bit, use the nouveau driver, it's far better than nv.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I was going to make a joke like "You mean other than Apple?" but that's too easy.
BSD's desktop users fill the same nitch as Slackware. Advanced users that want to do it themselves. That said, most Linux distro's were put together because, as we all know, Linux is a kernel, and not a complete OS. BSD's, are a more complete distro, and the ports system alleviates the need for a lot of stuff that Linux distros take care of (like a package manager.) Still, they both are "worth it" to develop for for their devel
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Gentoo fills the same niche with the Linux kernel. And since when is Slackware not a complete distro? Perhaps you meant “Linux From Scratch”...
P.S.: Please get your spelling right. It’s “niche”, “distros”, “BSDs” (second one only), and “develop for their developers”. Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Funny)
Be happy that no grammar Nazi is close. With that amount of errors he would have ripped you to shreds. ^^
Yes, well, you'll do until he shows up.
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"Seriously though, is there even enough BSD desktop users to even worry about? That must be a truly itty bitty number, like 0.0001% or something."
Seriously though, does it matter a damn? If it's good for the purpouse, then it's good for the purpouse no matter how many (or how little) people use it. If number of users were a quality indicator, Windows would be the best system by an order of magnitude (hint: no, it's not).
And then again, for the casual desktop user, there's no difference between KDE on Free
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Stick with it... might take a little while for the thought process behind BSD to "click" but once it does for you, linux is full of glaring inconsistencies and just feels "dirty" by compa
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"First of all, there is no reason to act like a douche when someone asks a question."
Any kind of question? Yours was obviously a "flamebait" one. And your answer to mine is too, so I betted my opinion on the first answer and I'm sure of it on this second.
"it is THAT kind of attitude that has non Windows/OSX platforms labeled as Operating Systems for the maladjusted. Nobody likes THAT guy"
You seem not to understand -again. All your rant basically begs for this answer: so what?
"My question is very simple-
Re: (Score:2)
Some of the network utilities in windows did originate with BSD but the stack in Windows XP / Windows 2003 Server and beyond was written by Microsoft.
False. Windows XP has the same stack as Windows 2000, which was lifted from BSD. We know because of fingerprinting and the attacks that it was once susceptible to. The new stack is in Server 2003 as you suggest, but it doesn't appear in desktop Windows until Vista. The same stack is also used in Windows 7. You can tell the change doesn't happen in XP due to the lack of integration of IPv6, which still demands the use of all the same management tools as on Windows 2000.
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I used to use Linux, but found FreeBSD to be easier to configure from the command line, more consistent in its filesystem layout, more responsive under load, and generally "smoother" in terms of process scheduling. I gave up linux desktop use (for FreeBSD, and later, OS
Re:Awesome! (Score:5, Interesting)
That depends on your definition of BSD. Some people look at the userland and the large amount of BSD code in Mac OS X and call that BSD. I'd say there are more than 0.01% of users that are on mac os.
I started a project to make a desktop friendly BSD operating system called MidnightBSD. There's also PC-BSD and the now defunct DesktopBSD. The new problem is that Linux folks have grown inpatient with the linux on the desktop idea. They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing linux down. A few projects have really done some serious changes to their software to make it function poorly (or not at all) on other OSes including *BSDs. Sometimes it's a lack of people to make reasonable updates to the kernels for various things like "new" video interfaces. Even things like X.org have done shifts that make hardware acceleration a real pain in the butt on BSD platforms. I've been shunned many times for trying to provide patches both for MidnightBSD and previously FreeBSD to other projects.
The FreeBSD project has had trouble getting patches upstreamed for things like GCC and binutils in the past. In general, I think many GNU projects are starting to get grumpy with respect to *BSD patches. There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive. Also, you get into situations like Apple buying cups and switching to LLVM because of fear of the GPLv3. Perhaps fear is not the right word.
The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.
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There are plenty of bugs in linux that don't get fixed because the patch was "not invented here".
As far as BSD being useless as a modern desktop system, apple don't seem to think so, and neither do i or plenty of other users. There's certainly less visible brain damage in it than plenty of other "modern" operating
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It's not quite true to say that there is no corporate backing for FreeBSD. There are no major companies that heavily back the project, but Yahoo! used to employ six developers full time to work on the kernel (not sure if they employ anyone now - do they have any money left?), Apple's Darwin team often contributes code, Juniper sends patches back, and a few other companies contribute financially. You may remember a couple of years ago that the FreeBSD foundation was in danger of losing its non-profit statu
Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:2, Insightful)
Most of this could be from a Linux distribution list of new features... Slightly ahead in some ways, slightly behind in others.
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Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
Agreed, installing openbsd and packet filter has been on my to do list for years and I swear it is only the lack of time that prevented me to do so, I am still using Linux netfilter.
Linux is more multi-purpose (desktop for instance), has a wider audience hence more functionality available, a little like Windows ;-))
P.S. No, I am not confusing freebsd and openbsd but I assume freebsd also has neat functionalities ;-)
FreeBSD has ported pf from OpenBSD.
Pf is nice.
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Yep, I know this.
So would you say that if my primary goal is to run Pf, it will make no difference if I install either freebsd or openbsd ?
I am thinking ease of installation, patches, etc. where there could be a delay before updates for freebsd. Also, does the freebsd port support 100% of the features implemented on openbsd and can it be considered as a totally equivalent alternative ?
Thanks for your reply.
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:4, Informative)
The maintainer of the freebsd port of pf is the same person as the openbsd author. FreeBSD current usually lags a few weeks in patchset from openbsd in regards to pf, and in either release you're generally running the same version.
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Thanks a lot ! ;-))
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> always from the command line
Of course !
Thanks for your reply ! ;-)
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How the fuck is this insightful?!?!?! (Score:4, Insightful)
Seriously - some anonymous person makes vague claims about how it's "higher quality" - without defining "quality" or providing any citations, reasons, or examples, and it's modded "insightful"?!?! TWICE!??!!
What. The. Fuck!??!!
Here's my refutation of this post - containing just as much "insightful" commentary as yours:
Nuh-uh!
So, where are *my* "insightful" mods?
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Given that any sysadmin worth his salt knows that Linux and FreeBSD offer different tradeoffs between "completeness" and "rigorous quality", it's not unreasonable for him to point out that FreeBSD has a "higher quality", even if the actual words he uses are subjective. Everyone familiar with FreeBSD and several Linux distros would know what he's saying and agree.
Unfortunately, I can't say that your "nuh-uh" also resounds with common experience in this way, so I disagree with your contention that it is a val
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What utter drivel.
I'm sure FreeBSD some times performs better or with greater stability than Linux, and I'm just as sure that some times it's the other way around. Some times Windows beats them both. And who knows, perhaps even Solaris. It depends on a lot of things, though, and to say that FreeBSD is simly 'better' for 'serious' tasks just makes me convinced that you've never used a computer for serious tasks.
As for your other claims, that "FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or
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a jar full of fanboy wank
Thanks for the image.
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The FreeBSD Nvidia 64-bit driver should be coming soon (a few weeks minimum): http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showpost.php?p=2129411&postcount=445 [nvnews.net]
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"FreeBSD is way ahead for serious users."
Comparing to what?
"I'm talking about people running high-availability and high-traffic servers, and workstation users who need a stable and reliable operating system."
Oh, you mean like there are high-availability and high-traffic servers and stable workstation perfectly running Linux?
"Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer."
Which is a great tribute at both the versatility and diversity of the Li
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"That's just ignorance speaking. After extensive experience with both operating systems in both corporate and home environments, I can assure you that BSD is the clear winner for consistency of quality and use as a serious server. "
Well, I always say that it's very easy to say "this is that way" when you know the answer but it is always very dangerous to say "that's impossible" or "that's not the case" because you don't know everything.
In example, all you are really saying is that after extensive experience
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FreeBSD may not have the best accelerated 3D graphics drivers, or the flashiest X desktops and themes, ...
Hey, Neither does Windows 7!
Re:Funny how similar the free Unices are (Score:5, Informative)
Most Linux distributions just can't provide the high level of quality that the FreeBSD project manages to offer.
Wow - your impeccable logic has convinced me! Where do I sign up?
Right here! [freebsd.org]
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Linux emulation is broken and has been broken for ages.
Works for me.
Live UFS dump is broken.
Works for me.
USB mass storage support is broken.
Wine is not supported;
And this is FreeBSD's fault why?
http://wiki.winehq.org/Wine64 [winehq.org]
ZFS in double parity mode is broken
Haven't move to zfs yet, but given your pattern I'm guessing you're wrong again.
MTRR for older ATI cards is broken
If you're referring to bug I think you are, it was fixed awhile ago and was non-serious in first place. As with the rest of you're statements it's hard to know what you're talking about without referencing a bug report.
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Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.
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We all know that slashdotters don't rtfa, but he'll probably get some traffic from people who aren't regular slashdot readers and don't know how things work around here.
Re:Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Jumping the gun... (Score:5, Informative)
I should also add that one link the submitter didn't include was instructions for upgrading to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE from a previous release: http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2009-07-11-freebsd-update-to-8.0-beta1.html [daemonology.net] (obviously, apply s/8.0-BETA1/8.0-RELEASE/ to the instructions).
Before anyone asks, yes, that link is on my personal website -- but no, I'm not just posting it here to drive traffic in my direction. That link is going to be in the official release announcement too.
Hey, you're the guy! (Score:2)
Your blog has been a great resource for me for a very long time. Thanks for all the informative posts... you were the only set of instructions that made sense for doing a binary upgrade :-)
Thank you sir!!!
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Thanks for the kind words -- I certainly should be able to write coherent instructions for doing a binary upgrade, though, given that I wrote FreeBSD Update. :-)
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And often the users who find it unobvious, and finally figure out by themselves how to use something, forget which parts were unobvious. They weren't taking down notes on the unobvious bits - typically too busy just trying to get things to work. So it might be useful to have some people taking notes on "questions" they have that aren't answered by the docum
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Sorry if this comes across as a flame, but as the guy who wrote FreeBSD Update, perhaps you can answer a couple of questions:
Firstly, why is it so slow? I can cvsup and recompile the tree and install in less time that it takes freebsd-update upgrade to run; the two install steps then take even longer. If I run systat -iostat, I see it hitting the disk incredibly hard. Couldn't it just compare the last modification date of most of the files with the time of the last upgrade? Possibly this has been fixed
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Good point... come to think of it, I'm not sure how it's possible to do that even with a source upgrade, since trying to run an 8.0 world on a 7.x kernel would break too.
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I was wondering about that; I saw "FreeBSD 8.0 Final" a few days ago on FileForum [betanews.com], but the FreeBSD homepage said RC3 was the latest.
Was it released by RAZOR1911?
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Which means that the source as well as the ports tree for that release have been hanging out on one server or another for a bit.
FreeBSD rocks :) (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll try it. (Score:2)
Using it now for my home "superserver" (Score:2)
PF + AltQ, a ZFS raidz array, and booting from a CF card. Excellent job, kudos to the FreeBSD team!
Great job! (Score:2)
Congratulations to all involved!
FreeBSD is a great Free Unix system.
Nothing yet... (Score:2)
Nothing yet on the website. Only 8 rc3 released on November 12th.
But on the FTP there is something on Nov. 22 labelled as 8.0
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i386/8.0/
wpa_supplicant replacement? (Score:2)
Re:wpa_supplicant replacement? (Score:4, Informative)
Are you running into the "need to create wlan0 instead of using the wifi device directly in 8.0" change? This has tripped up a lot of people.
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I'm confused... how the hell is it wpa_supplicant's job to support specific wifi chipsets/cards? Isn't it the kernel's job to implement drivers for each card while exposing a general API that wpa_supplicant then uses?
Roundabout (Score:2)
Seems pretty roundabout... to make youtube work they needed Flash. To make Flash work they got Fedora 10 compatibly going.
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``Seems pretty roundabout... to make youtube work they needed Flash. To make Flash work they got Fedora 10 compatibly going.''
The joys of proprietary software ...
So, any VMware images of this release? (Score:2)
Anyone post an image to run on VMware Player?
If only java was supported (Score:2)
FreeBSD 4.x was hot back in the old days of 2003ish. After pulling my hair out with Gentoo FreeBSD was well integrated and stable.
I know there is experimental 5 year old patches for java 1.3x which I successfully compiled which looked like a bootstrap hack with an emulated jvm just to compile it. FreeBSD 5.x was just terrible and i kept using 4.x until 4.12 before switching back to Windows. I hope it got better as not even my simple usb keyboard that was supported with FBSD 3.,x and 4.x would not work with
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Billy you'll be happy to learn USB received some long needed love in 8.0. A new well performing library has been integrated into base, chances are your cheap keyboard will now work under FreeBSD again.
native and ported jdk's and jre's have been available and usable in FreeBSD for quite some time. FreeBSD has a special licensing agreement with Sun which the reason you need to bootstrap a native build. However the linux-sun and diablo ports install quite fast and usable for most anything.
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It has been supported officially supported for years.
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml [freebsdfoundation.org]
What's the point in the screenshots? (Score:2)
What's the point in the screenshots? It looks like every other GNOME desktop. (or KDE desktop for the KDE screenshots)
Re:What's the point in the screenshots? (Score:4, Insightful)
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LOL. I'd think people who spend their time evaluating screenshots aren't the folks who would grasp the inherent irony.
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s/Linux/Windows/g
s/FreeBSD/Linux/g
There will be your answer.
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No, because Linux does add features not available on Windows.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:4, Informative)
FreeBSD is a very nice, clean system which is a pure joy to use as a server or desktop -- especially if you like to build your own software. But to each her own. :)
For quite a few years now we've had the ability to run linux binaries via a kernel module called the linuxulator. Handy for flash and a few other things.
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But to each her own.
Well, aren't you hip and and with it.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:4, Funny)
Her? This is Slashdot you know.
Re:Why would a desktop user would run it? (Score:5, Informative)
Sound works. That's why I switched for FreeBSD. Back in the 4.x days (around 2001) multiple applications could write to /dev/dsp (back then they needed to have /dev/dsp.1 and so on, but that was fixed with FreeBSD 5), and all could play sound even though my cheap AC97 on-board sound didn't support mixing in hardware. On Linux, apps needed to be rewritten with ALSA to take advantage of mixing, or needed to use sound daemons which gave horrific latency. Meanwhile, I was playing music with XMMS, getting sound effects in BZFlag, and having my mail and IM clients go bing in the background when I got a message. FreeBSD 8 improves this with a full OSSv4 implementation, including per-application volume channels. Unlike the 4Front OSS implementation, there are some hacks that let apps that use the old OSS 3 API (and ABI) use these by faking a mixer device for each app. It also has the highest-performance mixing algorithm around and supports a few things like encoded digital pass through (for AC3 and similar on an external decoder) without disabling the in-kernel mixing.
ZFS is pretty useful to a desktop user. Run hourly / daily snapshots as cron jobs to guard against accidental deletion and then use zfs send to transmit them to your backup server.
The ULE scheduler originally provided better performance on latency-sensitive workloads (a typical desktop) at the cost of throughput. As a result, it wasn't enabled by default. With FreeBSD 8, it's been improved and now does better on all workloads (including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks) and scales linearly to 8 cores (I've not seen tests beyond that).
Jails probably aren't useful to most desktop users, but they are to power users. With ZFS, creating a new fail filesystem is just a matter of cloning a fresh install, which is an O(1) operation (and very fast) and that gives you an isolated install to work with. Great for running untested or untrusted apps; just install them in a jail and they can't get out. With FreeBSD 8, you can now assign a CPU to a jail and each jail has a complete virtualised instance of the network stack, so FreeBSD jails are effectively very lightweight VMs.
DTrace, again, is more useful to developers than end users. It lets you insert probes into running applications (using binary rewriting tricks, where function prologs are replaced with unconditional jumps to JIT-compiled code that does the profiling). This is by far the most powerful profiling and debugging framework I've come across.
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
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Well said. I agree with everything except one bit:
So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
Laptops. Power usage.
FreeBSD isn't (AFAIK) tickless. Furthermore, a lot of my laptop's power saving features (SATA power saving, FB compression) aren't supported at all. My WiFi card is, but I'm not sure if the power-saving stuff is supported for that either.
With Linux, all of the above features are supported. As soon as FreeBSD gains support for those, I'm switching.
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I'm almost convinced. I've been toying with FreeBSD 7 on a vm a while ago, and I liked it. There's a certain "feel" about the whole system, and I really like that feel. Now I'm considering putting it on my laptop. I'm just wondering about a few possible showstoppers. Tell me about...
- Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt? I like i
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Ports. I'm very used to apt&dpkg. I haven't spent a lot of time learning to use the ports system, so tell me: can I expect the ports (after learning them a bit) to be as comfortable in everyday use as apt?
Install portupgrade and then installing from both source and binary works nicely. I've never had uninstalling fail, but if you like testing and uninstalling stuff then just create a cloned copy of the base system (with ZFS), set it as a jail, try it there, and then delete the whole jail later. It's fast and easy, and will definitely clean up anything that's left over (temporary configuration files and so on).
- Hardware support. Can I expect the new FreeBSD to "just work" on a 1-year old laptop? I don't care about stuff like the wifi light, but other small things like SD card reader or the webcam are something that I'd hardly be giving up.
Depends on the machine. It's been a few years since I tried to run FreeBSD on anything that wasn'
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> Not sure about suspend to encrypted swap, but it's a placebo
> if you're expecting true suspend to disk;
My current setup is an encrypted volume, containing an LVM volume, containing root, swap and home. When I resume from s2d, it asks me for the passphrase just like during a normal boot, and only when the swap shows up it tries to resume from it. I guess that this is just as safe as a normal shutdown.
Big thanks to you (and everyone else) for all the replies.
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Sound works
So does package management. Video, networking, performance.... The FreeBSD was much more organized environment then the feathered alternative was at the time, which is why I also switched over back in the 4.x days.
Sure, everyone has advanced over the years, but i still haven't seen many reasons to leave the bsd camp.
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including beating Linux on MySQL SMP benchmarks
No, it doesn't. However, beating Linux was one of motivations for rewriting the old O(1) scheduler.
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So, I guess, the real question is why you'd use Linux over FreeBSD?
The real time, low latencey kernel available to user accounts is pretty much the only reason I do. It's a must for multitrack sound recording.
The last time I was using FreeBSD regularly (late 4.x through 6.0), the real-time kernel access required for low-latency recording (a must for multitrack recording) was only available if you were running as root. At this time it was available via Igno Molnar's kernel patch and a rebuild.
My understanding was that the structure blocking users from real time kern
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That's a pretty poor definition of 'works'. To me, it means that I just install the OS and it goes. Windows frequently fails this test, mind you, as do many Linux distributions (and Ubuntu often fails on older hardware, where some other distribution would succeed, so it's not like there's a one size fits all fix from the Penguin either.)
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Why on earth would a desktop user run FreeBSD instead of Linux, when it doesn't add a single feature available on Linux?
I'm not staying FreeBSD is better than Linux but FreeBSD is a more consistent system.
Linux, even with the best distributions, is a bunch of separate bits stuck together with 15 ways to do any given thing.
FreeBSD also does have some stuff Linux doesn't like PF, Jails, and better ZFS support.
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Have to disagree with you. I find Linux (well, Debian anyway) to be more consistent than FreeBSD. I manage a few FreeBSD boxes at my work, and I've found that configuration files and service startup scripts are better managed in Debian.
Linux has iptables instead of pf. From what I've used of pf, it doesn't have anything that cannot be done by iptables.
I do like Jails. While you can achieve the same thing with virtual machines, Jails is better with resources. Still, if we're talking about a desktop user
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What? You can emulate Linux binaries?
Yes, FreeBSD has been able to run Linux binaries for years. A little effort on your part to do some research before you post could have saved you from looking like a fool. Oh, wait..
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Because it has a BSD license and not a GNU license.
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None of this is available on Linux. Yes there are half-assed work arounds to do the same thing, but they don't work as well.
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If ZFS is what you want (and on a desktop that's unlikely), Solaris has more mature ZFS support than FreeBSD.
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The solaris implementation of DTrace is also significantly better than the one found in FreeBSD. If these are the features you are interested in, you really should be using OpenSolaris, not FreeBSD.
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If you want to use it on a laptop ... better look elsewhere. It will run, though.
Runs great on my Inspiron M600.
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Support for more hardware, especially workstation oriented hardware?
Greater availability of applications? (Most desktop oriented apps are written for linux first and later possibly ported to bsd, many closed source apps cant be ported to bsd at all).
When i tried to use FreeBSD as a desktop, admittedly a few years ago, it worked well on my desktop (which was self assembled and intentionally bought using well known hardware) but wouldn't boot on my laptop (an ibm thinkpad 600e) and wouldn't run vmware (which
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Not to mention that unlike the second example where the obvious answer is that
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Yet cheers on the new OpenBSD release of FreeBSD?
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