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The Internet Operating Systems BSD

FreeBSD Project Launches New Website 95

Posted by CowboyNeal from the still-not-dying dept.
UltimaGuy writes "The FreeBSD Project has launched a new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is also still available."
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FreeBSD Project Launches New Website More

FreeBSD Project Launches New Website

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  • Heck of an improvement (Score:3, Insightful)

    by danbond_98 ( 761308 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @05:25AM (#13738041)
    Well that's a heck of an improvement on the old one. Now if only some of the other BSD's (Open, i'm looking at you) would do something similar, would be good. And yes, i know, better they spend time hacking at the source than making their site pretty, but as was shown by the summer of code thing, finding people willing to take on the responsibility of sorting it out isn't hard.
    • Am I the only one who thinks it looks horrendously derivative of Red Hat's Bluecurve theme? The old look was distinct, although not entirely intuitive. The new one looks very generic.

      • Re:Bluecurve? (Score:5, Funny)

        by Nimrangul ( 599578 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @12:32PM (#13740966) Journal
        Yeah, when I first saw the site I was expecting the to see phrases like, "using our optimal community user-base, FreeBSD intensely expands its marketecture through a synergy between private and public parties which desire optimum performance on the Intel architecture," or, "through the maturation of our dynamic enterprise system, FreeBSD has engineered the means for swift, clean and easy vulnerability handling, taking the worry away from end-users," and, "with FreeBSD's worldwide penetration of the enterprise server market, FreeBSD has become one of the most essential operating systems to have in your NOC.

        You know what I mean? I thought we'd see; "In today's ever-shifting market one must dynamically synergize when the chance arises, in order to properly facilitate the introduction of vital new resources for the further progressive development of their intellectual property portfolio."

        Or at least something more along the lines of, "here's where it all comes together in one operating system; Middleware, Applications and Management Tools."

    • Ok, it needed some improvements, and also a lot may be because I'm used to it, but overall, I preferred the old site.

      For a start, it made full use of my browsers screen size (the new site only uses a quarter of my browsers window.. damn 'fixed sized' web sites)

      It also (and maybe as a consequence) squashes too much into a small space.

      The news/upcoming events/in the media/security advisories sections now have too much prominence. Sure, this may be handy for 'regulars', but regulars know where to look anyway.

      S
      • what size is your screen resoloution??? i have mine up at 1152 by 864 and it looks perfectly balanced on my screen... Im imagining some mamoth 24" scren over 1920 x 1200 widescreeen kinda huge here... care to put my curiosity to rest???
        • lol fair enough!

          19inch screen (Samsung SyncMaster 959NF)

          Most of the time I run at 1600 x 1200 but I do sometimes go higher (never lower), -- 1920 x 1440 or even 2048 x 1536.

          I'd probably stick with 1920 x 1440 but the refresh rate is 75Hz which gets to me after a while! Basically, whilst I do run with the default size fonts, I'd prefer to run with as high a resolution as I can, and then make the fonts bigger if necessary... To me the running resolution is a technical thing not a visual preference... It just
          • Dual 17inch screens
            ADI Microscan M700 and Sun microsystems (cant be buggered leaning over to check the model number on the back)

            the sun is by far the best CRT ive ever used, theyre both running 1152x864 at 32Bit colour at 75 Hertz, While the slight flicker on the ADI monitor is noticable over extended use, on the sun, i cant see any flicker at 60 or 75 hertz.

            Ive noticed theres a HUGE difference between consumer style CRTs and "proffessional" ones... My Sun monitor originaly went on an Ultra 5 (second genera

  • About time.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by eztiger ( 790405 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @05:25AM (#13738042)
    ...this is much much better than the old website. The important details are much clearer (i.e where to get it, what the current releases are) and the whole thing generally feels very fresh and modern.

    Hopefully they will give the handbook a bit of a spring clean next...whilst informative it sometimes lacks in either explaining concepts sufficiently or just assumes a lot of prior knowledge in certain areas.

    Kev
  • Didn't know it was that new... I was just looking for info on FreeBSD Java on wednesday on those pages (the new ones).
  • The FreeBSD website was in dire need of an overhaul.

    Looks like the new site keeps the best of the old site, but in a better form.

    It'd be nice if the 'Large' stylesheet also made the columns wider however.

  • Quite an improvement. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by St. Arbirix ( 218306 ) <matthew.townsend ... il.com minus cat> on Friday October 07, 2005 @06:50AM (#13738277) Homepage Journal
    I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious [apple.com] product [microsoft.com] rather than something made by a group of hippies [debian.org] and slackers [slackware.com].

    *dives under a table with his Powerbook*
    • Yeah -- if I had some free time I'd offer to help Debian fix their site. It's pretty awful.

    • Re:Quite an improvement. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Alwin Henseler ( 640539 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @08:05AM (#13738605)

      I must admit, it makes it look more like they're providing a serious product rather than something made by a group of hippies and slackers.

      One might think it's weird how much the quality of some products seems to be judged based on the looks of the box it comes in. But wait - maybe these are related?

      I can't help to think that any quality product needs 1 thing at least: not suck badly in any aspect. Meaning it doesn't need to shine in every aspect, but if it really sucks in any department, overal quality is affected.

      Why? Because this signals bad attention to details. And it's exactly attention to details that makes great products. Many developers working for months on useability-features, bugfixes and performance improvements for a desktop OS? And then they fail to pick some nice-looking backdrop(s) and meaningful icons to finish it off? Or fail to properly document how it works? Says more about overal project quality than developers would like to admit, IMHO.

      Lesson to be learned: if you have something great, make it look good as well. Get some HTML coders and graphic designers onboard, besides C coders and beta testers.

      • Re:Quite an improvement. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by aztektum ( 170569 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @03:42PM (#13742554)
        You know if this story was about some start up who raised a buncha money in VC and had a slick website and was promising a unique product that would revolutionize the world and it turned out to be a battery operated hammer, I might agree with you. But the story is about FreeBSD, which isn't dead btw, and the majority of /. readers, whether they want to admit to it or not, recognize the quality of this product.

        Could we be a little less cynical and jaded over something as trivial as FreeBSDs website redesign?
    • Given their unshakable devotion to that stupid looking demon guy, maybe they should rename it Satanix.
    • *dives under a table with his Powerbook*

      That is so awesome. I think that from now on when anyone dives to take cover in a television program or film, particularly behind a piece of furniture, a Powerbook or at least an iBook should be included in the shot.

  • Late 24 hours+ (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Lucractius ( 649116 ) <Lucractius AT gmail DOT com> on Friday October 07, 2005 @06:53AM (#13738285) Journal
    I posted this yesterday
    ( " The New FreeBSD Website is UP Thursday October 06, @06:15AM Rejected" )
    as news only to be rejected. I dont know why it was rejected so i cant complain i was treated unfairly. But when someone posts news and is rejected then the news appears a day later posted by someone else. It makes me wonder what the fsck is going on round here.

    On the topic. The new design is a major improvement, much nicer to look at, and hopefuly it can get carried through to a HTML version of the Handbook some time soon. that could do with a style overhaul, just to make reading the thing online nicer :)

    • Re:Late 24 hours+ (Score:5, Informative)

      by wolf31o2 ( 778801 ) on Friday October 07, 2005 @08:24AM (#13738742)
      I posted this yesterday
      ( " The New FreeBSD Website is UP Thursday October 06, @06:15AM Rejected" )
      as news only to be rejected. I dont know why it was rejected so i cant complain i was treated unfairly. But when someone posts news and is rejected then the news appears a day later posted by someone else. It makes me wonder what the fsck is going on round here.

      Well, with a multitude of editors and tons of people submitting articles, they simply just pick them at random. You might have been the first, you might have been the last. It doesn't matter. They simply pick one. This is also one of the main reasons for duplications. So many people post variations on the same thing, and with the multiple "editors" on the site, things simply get posted by more than one of them. The only real way I can see to improve this situation would be to get people that actually check the site for duplicates, and check the submission queue for duplicates, and pick the best submission for a topic. I think time constraints are probably the main reason this isn't done.

      When Gentoo makes a new release, we submit a story to Slashdot. Since we know about our releases well ahead of any users, you would think that our submission would get used. It never has. We even go so far as to make sure our Slashdot submission is more of a teaser/summery, than a full-blown press release, as I could understand not wanting to post something that reads identical to the press release. Instead, hours and hours later, we usually get a posting that was submitted by a user, is chock full of false statements and half-truths, and doesn't point out anything that would actually be of interest to anyone.

      What do we do about it?

      Nothing. We understand that this is the nature of Slashdot, and we submit another story the next release.

      I do think the new site looks awesome. Great job, FreeBSD and Emily!

      • Re:Late 24 hours+ (Score:3, Interesting)

        by Lucractius ( 649116 )
        I can understand the process but it seems somehow unusual that ANY credible BSD news would get rejected given how infrequently it crops up, so im left with the possibilities that they A: didnt care or B: already had one and chose not to put it up for 24 hours.

        But finding out that an official one from you guys has never gotten through to submission is rather surprising.

        ahh well who cares when ive got a lovely new BSD site to look at now :)
        • That's nothing, they consistantly reject 2/3s of the stories I submit, and the stories I submit have never once been duplicated in the days surrounding my submissions. Infact, I had submitted about when OpenBSD 3.8 went to beta and Theo called for testers and nothing, hell noone else seems to have gotten it through to the newspage. Not even the release of the 3.8 music got through.

          The editors just don't like getting too many BSD articles in a short time I think.

        • Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
          • Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.

            A recent study (netcraft confirms it!) of slashdot editors suggests overwhelming preponderance of both malice AND stupidity.
      • How hard would it be to write a script that checks submissions to see if any link to identical URLs? That's right, trivial. This would eliminate 90% of dupes. Throw URLs and story submission IDs as (key, value) pairs into a hash table. If you get a collision, flag both stories--the editor could check the conflict via the hash table. Keep stuff in the table for maybe a week. We'd still get dupes linking to different versions of the source story, but that doesn't really happen that often...

        And I guess it woul
    • Actually, judging from the date of the forum post (10-05-2005, 05:26 PM), the new website has been up even before that.
      • well at least we dont have zonk over here.

        While ( ( pingSlashdotOnlineBoolean() ) = True )
        {
              dupe();
              spam();
              fud();
              fake();
              realNews();
        }

        then again its like hes the only one allowed to subit or post anything round there.
    • It really is a plot against you. Sure, others will pipe up and say how perhaps the submission queue is quite large that it takes a while to get through... or that maybe the other person's submission was better worded than yours, but don't believe any of them! It's actually a personal affront to your good character!
       

  • Where is the new logo? (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    What! A new web page a no new logo? I couldn't see anything about the logo contest at first glance. (disclaimer: I didn't submit any logos, no personal agenda).

    Come on FreeBSD, it has been 3 months since the contest ended, are you having trouble deciding which is best out of the 500 submitted or which is the least worst? At least post the submissions in a gallery.

    • Re:Where is the new logo? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      from http://logo-contest.freebsd.org/ [freebsd.org]

      The result will be announced via announce@ mailing list and on this page (planned before the end of October).

      Chill, coming soon.

    • Re:Where is the new logo? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      At least post the submissions in a gallery.

      They can't. All the submissions remain the copyright of the artist. Only the winner will turn over all copyright to the FreeBSD foundation. All non-winning entrants keep their copyright so unless they get permission from every entrant, they can't display them in a gallery.
    • Yes, we are having trouble deciding.

  • Asking for legal trouble? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Florian ( 2471 ) <cantsin@zedat.fu-berlin.de> on Friday October 07, 2005 @08:42AM (#13738851) Homepage
    The new FreeBSD site boldly states: "Based on BSD Unix (r)". To my knowledge, the AT&T vs. Berkeley case was settled with (among others) the regulation that BSD may not be called Unix. The official Unix trademark FAQ [unix.org] states that Unix "must not be used as a generic term. It must not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed to use the mark".

    I am not sure whether the new headline on the homepage is a very wise and professional move of the FreeBSD project.

    • Apple has gotten away with throwing around the word "Unix" a lot more egregiously (and with less justification than FreeBSD). If the Open Group sues anyone, it will probably be Apple.
      • Apple has gotten away with throwing around the word "Unix" a lot more egregiously (and with less justification than FreeBSD). If the Open Group sues anyone, it will probably be Apple.

        There was a lawsuit between them on this issue. I don't know what became of it.
    • There is a "BSD UNIX" and it was distributed by the University of California. I don't know if it ever had a registered trademark, but it does exist, and that is its name. Some people, particularly lawyers, might not like the name, but facts are facts.

      But that's neither here nor there. FreeBSD isn't using the UNIX trademark. They're saying it's "based on" which is factually accurate and does not violate trademark. It's not that much different from a generic pain killer saying "Same active ingredient as in Fr

    • The new FreeBSD site boldly states: "Based on BSD Unix (r)". To my knowledge, the AT&T vs. Berkeley case was settled with (among others) the regulation that BSD may not be called Unix. The official Unix trademark FAQ [unix.org] states that Unix "must not be used as a generic term. It must not be used in connection with products, unless the product is licensed to use the mark".

      The trademark hasn't been owned by AT&T for a long time, it's owned by The Open Group.

      This brings to mind a lawsuit between

    • The full sentence is "It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX® developed at the University of California, Berkeley.", which is irrefutable historical fact. Note they are not using "unix" as a generic term, but referring to the specific software work, and are not saying that FreeBSD is "unix". As an aside, I happen to be one of those people who recognize BSD as the true and pure Unix, and lament the fact that the commercial vendors stole the name. However, as one by one they bite the dust, I thin
    • As far as I know, FreeBSD is UNIX certified, which means that FreeBSD has been allowed to describe their OS as a "True UNIX operating system".
      I dont really know for sure, because I cant find any place on The Open Group's website where they list certified OS's.

      I say this, because I know for sure, that Linux is not UNIX certified - and it never will be, which is one of my main reasons for not using it.

      I will email The Open Group to ask, and post the result as a reply to this post.
  • lets here it for primary colors.. yellow to red.. .. nice layout, but I'm not a fan of the red... I wonder if they did any research on usablilty and making it easier to find things..
  • No.... cant have change.. noo... All kidding aside, i was used to the old format and knew where stuff was, but this seems to address that issue for new comers..
  • Contrast isn't so great now, text is tiny and yet too big with the large stylesheet.

    It's also following the brain-dead trend to LOCK the size/alignment of the layout making window resizing useless; a PRINT versus WEB layout. Sorry, my windows aren't primarily 800x600.

    If you are centering your layout, you have a whitespace flaw/problem.

  • Nice (Score:2, Interesting)

    by HungSquirrel ( 790165 )
    She has some nice OSS designes under her belt. A Google search shows she designed the pgsql site, for one. Her designes are attractive, but not as accessible as I would like. For example, most of her fonts are below 1em (1em being the size you tell your browser that you want). It is fine to go less than 1em for things such as copyright notices and advisory feeds and whatnot, but the majority of the text on the site should always be 1em: the user should have his say on what the font size is. I would als
    • Well you have this Text Size : Normal/Large in the top right corner as soon as you go further than the home page so it's not much of an issue really imho.

    • Re:Nice (Score:2)

      by DES ( 13846 ) *
      For example, most of her fonts are below 1em

      Your statement does not make sense. 1em is the width of the letter m in the current font.

      DES
    • And she doesn't learn when people complain that she makes fixed width layouts and makes stupid assumptions about fonts that make the page messed up. This site contains the exact same problems that were pointed out in the new postgresql site.

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