FreeBSD 7.1 Released 324
Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:
The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads.
Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework.
A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client.
Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices.
KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3.
DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."
Benchmarks? (Score:2)
Is there some sort of benchmark comparing FreeBSD 7.1 with other operating systems and distributions? I would be more than happy to run it on a couple of systems that I have hanging around but the user experience needs to be at least comparable to what I'm already running (kubuntu 8.10)
Benchmarks?!??!!!!11one!!? (Score:5, Insightful)
Benchmarks between competing free software projects? Don't be silly! Next thing, you'll be advocating some sort of sane system, like choosing the best of breed technology based stats like benchmarks, and uniting behind it! Think what kind of chaos Free Software would be in, if everyone decided that OpenGL was THE low-level graphics layer, that gstreamer was THE codec API, that Vala was THE high-level language, that Git was THE modern version control system, or that FUSE was THE place to develop filesystem stuff. Why, you'd have a straightforward stack, with very little bloat, and tons of people honing a single implementation.
Pandemonium, I tell you.
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Diversity in ideas, yes. Diversity in attempts to improve those ideas, and test implementations, yes. Diversity in implementations of the same concept? That's as silly as encouraging everyone to try to build a suspension bridge in their own wacky way.
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yeah, but once you get past the learning curve, it becomes very easy and very reliable.
Actually, I found the documentation well organized (at least for what I used), along with the mailing lists, it ended up having a lower learning curve for me, than for most Linux distros.
And that is the best niche for FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop". They'd never win and they'd stop paying attention to the stuff that makes it so good for servers. FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
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As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop". They'd never win and they'd stop paying attention to the stuff that makes it so good for servers. FreeBSD, and the other BSD's for that matter, belong in the data center. I'd argue the same for Linux, but that might get me slaughtered in these parts...
Let's not forget the embedded market. FreeBSD seems very popular in that world, I'd assume because of the permissive licensing.
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As a lover of FreeBSD, I hope the guys in charge never try to "win the desktop".
That's what PC-BSD is for. I played with it, and it was very polished, and a few reviews I've read put it above Ubuntu for out-of-the-box usability. Being able to bundle nVidia drivers on the CD without violating the kernel's license helped there I suppose.
FreeBSD isn't a great desktop out of the box, but it's a good component for building a great desktop. Things like in-kernel sound mixing just work, so you can have multiple sound sources all using your speakers at once (music, a game, and a machine
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Things like in-kernel sound mixing just work, so you can have multiple sound sources all using your speakers at once (music, a game, and a machine that goes 'bing' for example).
That hasn't been a problem on Linux for years. Not quite sure how it works, but I haven't had to do anything special to my Debian systems to enable it. It just works out of the box.
Re:And that is the best niche for FreeBSD (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's on its way, but with the awful moniker "usb2". There's much willy-waving going on on current@ about it becoming default in 8.x.
*Finally* DVD media (Score:5, Informative)
This is one of the better parts of this release. The lack of speed/clue on putting out both CD sized and DVD iso images has been highly frustrating, telling the users to basically "roll-their-own". I've already upgraded a few systems and things appear to be going well.
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I hate to be a 'me to' post, but i have to totally agree.
CD is great for the net installs, but when you want to do a local install a DVD makes so much more sense then a pile of cds.
Now if we can get a 'ports' dvd with source that is *easy* to grab... :)
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I agree on the USB, the wife got a 16GB USB device for ~$8 back in November iirc. Reusable and I could likely put multiple bootable installs on it w/ grub (eg: freebsd, linux, xp) with a few service packs too (eg: XP SP3.. dear god, I upgraded a family member laptop this christmas from XP [not even SP1] -> SP3).
I'd also like the ability to (without building a custom kernel) use com2 as my console, but I can't have everything I want.. sigh. Time to hack more code i guess.
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People use CDs other than CD 1 and the live cd? :-)
ULE by default (Score:2)
Kind of took them long enough...
FreeBSD kind of lost me with the 5 and 6 releases. I haven't tried 7, but maybe it's worth a shot again.
They would be wise to port WAPBL; it looks better than gjournal, seems to perform comparably to Softupdates (which are a data gamble), and doesn't have huge system requirements like ZFS.
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For such a use, data loss isn't a big deal; your cache directories blow up, you re-create them, and restart your cache server. I had a similar setup first with Linux/Murder^H^HReiserFS, then with NetBSD/LFS. If the fs where the cache spools were stored got screwed up, I'd just re-make the filesystem.
Softupdates maintains synchronous operation, while giving the illusion of async. Anything that wasn't written before the machine went down is just gone. And an unclean shutdown still requires an fsck after r
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I agree with you, as I have a number of FreeBSD qmail servers in production and do not use softupdates or any forms of caching, and in the many years t
Did they fix the atheros driver? (Score:2)
Or does it STILL kill the box every time it receives a fragmented packet?
Contributions (Score:5, Interesting)
And don't be nervous about making contributions either. My first ports looked like shit, but the port guys were patient and over time I've gotten the hang of the system.
FreeBSD (and probably the other BSD's) are much easier to work on then the other guys. For starters, since you are using a *system* and not a collection of libraries, all your patches and bug-reports go to the same place [freebsd.org]. In other words, you aren't talking to "the website and the people who maintain the 'tar' utility", you are talking to "the freebsd guys". Your patch for "tar" goes to the same repository as the code for "libc".
Plus since it is licensed as BSD, you can actually contribute modifications and not worry about the nasty side effects found in other licenses. I've never contributed to a GPL project, but I've contributed tons to BSD projects.
Bottom line, FreeBSD is a great place to get your feet wet contributing to open source stuff. Good times.
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Because he doesn't have to think about the repercussions.
Booting USB? (Score:2)
I've been using a USB-based FreeBSD5 image for a project for some time now. I wonder what they're talking about with USB boot support.
SMP + Stability = Win! (Score:5, Interesting)
That being said, regarding some of the comments here, FreeBSD (in my opinion) is more suited to uptime, stability, and reliability in servers than it is to offering a performance oriented desktop experience. Want a good starter project? Try to make a FreeBSD stateful firewall with transparent proxy server (pf / squid) for your home using some spare parts you have kicking around.
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I have FreeBSD running on a laptop with gnome.
This is the only configuration under which it is even reasonably responsive (well it's more responsive with XFCE but I don't like it).
The hdd is only 20 GB, and install of XPSP3 with all the updates is not roughly 16 GB.
FreeBSD install with gnome/firefox3/openoffice.org-3? 5GB. And I still need to clean out the ports tree (I forgot to do it while installing the ports :|)
are you building by hand? (Score:2)
As in going into a port and "make -> make install"?
If you are go grab "portupgrade" (/usr/ports/port-utils/portupgrade, I think). Portupgrade will do the "make" crap for you and has the side-effect of doing a "make clean" when it is done. It has some other nice parts like letting you set all the config variables in one file as well has helping you do crazy gentoo-like dependency swaps.
PPS: "make portsnap" while you are at it and then put it on a cronjob. cvsup is for people who are gonna fuck with th
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If I was going to make a small firewall box using a BSD, it would be OpenBSD not FreeBSD. For an Internet-facing device that's all about security, I can't see where FreeBSD could possibly be a better choice.
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Re:SMP + Stability = Win! (Score:5, Informative)
Hi!
I'm one of the Squid developers and I have some experience with FreeBSD :)
FreeBSD-6 and FreeBSD-7 both rock for Squid (and my squid-2 fork, cacheboy.)
FreeBSD-7 is pretty scarily scalable when it comes to web stuff. I'm working on threading cacheboy/squid-2 over the next few months enough to take advantage of the parallelism that the FreeBSD guys have introduced into -7 and -current. I've got some test code here for fully transparent web interception caching with FreeBSD-current, and some stuff to use FreeBSD's fantastic POSIX AIO support.
Its all lookup up, up, up from here. :)
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Using FreeBSD 6.3, Squid 2.6 for caching, a nice script called LightSquid for user web usage reporting, Apache 1.3.3.7 for displaying the web logs, OpenLdap to log Windows usernames and a few other things here and there, for a perfectly transparent web proxy. None of the users have any idea they're b
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6.x? Far too new-fangled! I have been running Squid on 5.3 for about 4 years
Considering that 5.x was never declared -STABLE, 6 is a lot less of a gamble. There's a reason a lot of us went from 4.x to 6.x with our systems...
I would love to win the lottery and... (Score:3, Funny)
...devote my life to Open Source. FreeBSD in particular.
No real reason why FBSD. I just remember really liking Lehey's 'FreeBSD.'
Oh well, it's back to Visual C++ for me...
Speaking of uptime (Score:2, Interesting)
Its ext support reliable yet? (Score:2)
I used to dual boot a BSD 6.0 system with linux but after it chewed up my ext2 /home directory on a couple of occasions I just stopped using it. Not worth the hassle of restoring from backup just to use an OS that offered little over Linux aside from quicker bootup/shutdown times.
what about smb speed-ups? any?? (Score:4, Interesting)
been a freebsd user since 4.x days.
I use bsd to run my mail, antispam, dns and other public web services.
I'd LIKE to also have it be a fast samba server but for some reason, samba on bsd really SUCKS. why is that??
my similar hardware linux box runs circles all over bsd on samba. that's the last hold-out, really, in wanting to go all-bsd at home.
is there EVER going to be equiv speed on freebsd as linux has, for smb?
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Wow. Do you have a link to a description of that bug? I'm curious.
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Flow charts (Score:2)
Xen support? (Score:2)
Does it have Xen virtualization support? It would be nice to run it as a guest OS for testing on a server without using emulation.
Dolby Surround 7.1 (Score:3, Funny)
ZFS (Score:4, Informative)
FreeBSD is the only distribution, other than Solaris, to have ported and implemented the ZFS filesystem (and no, a FUSE port doesn't count).
I've been looking forward to build a file server for personal use, and I'm eager to try out ZFS, which really puts FreeBSD high on my small list of candidates for an operating system. I'm going for consumer-grade hardware, and I'll be experimenting with stuff like using CompactFlash cards to store the OS.
OpenSolaris was my initial choice due to its higher maturity on the ZFS implementation, but I feel it's too constraining. I tried searching around for information about installing the system on flash mediums, information about wear-levelling, filesystems for flash media, and their forums and mailing lists fall short on these topics. The OpenSolaris installer doesn't even allow one to customize the installation, forcing me to install X.org, Gnome, and a ton of other stuff. No thank you, I'd very much like my file server to be command-line only, and to be smaller that your 3.1 gigabyte minimum for an installation.
As soon as I feel that FreeBSD's implementation of ZFS is stable and feature-rich enough for my needs, I'll definitely be rolling a file server with it. And I don't care if Netcraft disagrees with my decision; I really do feel BSDs deserve more and more notoriety these days.
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Yeah mean, other than Yahoo, and HotMail before MS took them over and they got super crappy, and a whole bunch of other people? I dunno... no one I guess.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Insightful)
A significant improvement on a crappy OS is still a crappy OS.
I respectfully disagree. At its first release Linux was probably a crappy OS but each subsequent release grew better and better until it wasn't crappy. Who knows, maybe even Windows 7 will live up to the price they ask for it?
No flame intended, but really... who uses FreeBSD anymore?
I certainly don't. But I like the idea of another free operating system for me out there. What would have happened if the courts had screwed Linux and SCO had won and successfully shut down anyone using the Linux kernel? Well, I'd tell you what I would have done: switched all my machines to FreeBSD and recompiled the packages on all the software I used for it. Luckily (and rightfully), I don't have to do this.
... if they want to continue with their operating system, I say let them! Who knows what it could become one day? I wish the FreeBSD team the best of luck and am certain I have inadvertently gained from them in some way and therefore appreciate all their hard work and efforts.
You don't mean to flame but what other reason is there for you to ask who uses FreeBSD? Leave the community alone, there are very few fanboys and annoyances about it
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Isn't FreeBSD a good chunk of the core of the BSD layer in Apple's XNU (Darwin) kernel and some of the user-space utilities? I'm not sure if it's still true, but my understanding was that a substantial amount of code went in both directions between MacOS X and FreeBSD.
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At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code". In fact, better they do. The BSD licence makes it easy for those companies to contribute because they can use FreeBSD and contribute only the parts that aren't special-sauce. Companies *want* to merge their changes in with the mainline, it is expensive to apply patches to every version of FreeBSD. The BSD licence lets paid employees of these companies send in bug-fixes and patches without ensnaring the companies IP in a legal mess. Other licences have a tendancy to be all-or-nothing--either you hold on to your bug-fixes and merge them in for every version or you release your entire codebase to the world. BSD lets you pick and choose what bits can go into the world. Very flexible.
Bottom line... if Apple wants to use BSD code, who cares. Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.
Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Nobody in BSD land gives a shit who does what with code. That is one of the nicest features found in BSD systems--the ecosystem is pretty much free of open-source politics.
Nobody give a shit if you wrote your patch on a windows system and mailed it to the ports maintainers using outlook. Nobody cares if Apple, Tivo, or Cisco "locks up the code".
Oh yes, what a charming little statement. Absolutely nobody from BSD land cares if companies like Cisco run away with BSD's code and never give anything back in return. Not a single grudge at all. Well, except from people like Theo de Raadt. From a Theo de Raadt interview from 2006: [linux.com]
That does sound like somebody in the BSD camp does give a shit. In fact, it sounds like the BSD camp does get right out pissed off from the lack of contributions. So, care to retract your statement?
No (Score:5, Insightful)
There is a difference between "You guys aren't playing fair..." and "our operating system is your religion, either embrace it or go away".
If somebody like $VENDOR_X takes and takes but never contributes even minor shit like bug-fixes to kernel code, they should be called out. But unlike other, more political organizations, you will never see an Anti-$VENDOR_X clause added to a BSD license. That is the important bit.
BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
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BTW, one big peeve in BSD land is when the GPL guys will take BSD code like drivers. The GPL license will "infect" any modifications and prevent those changes from being send back to the original BSD code. Kind of a tease, don't you think?
A private corporation can take BSD code, use it, modify it, sell it, and never give anything back. Their proprietary license will infect any modifications and prevent those changes from being sent back to the original BSD code. This seems to be OK with the BSD folks. W
Oh no whine (Score:2)
But you have to admit it is kinda a tease. Here you go and modify my code and then dangle your changes in front of me and yet I can't use them. At least when you put it in your Fortune 500 breath-mint testing software I can't see your changes--out of sight, out of mind. With the GPL stuff, I can see but I can't touch :-)
Bottom line is no, I dont give a crap if you never give me a line of code in return. But I still am human and am thus subject to fuzzy, non logical things like culture and being nice to
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It would indeed. Again, there is a difference then calling out some ass who never gives back and trying to make a new religion.
Not really. The BSD license did exactly what it was intended to do. If people don't want to contribute changes back to the mainline, that reflects badly on them not the license.
Frankly, it is in your best interest to give back anyway. Merging the mainline code into
Re:At the risk of sounding like a freebsd fanboi (Score:5, Insightful)
Um... maybe I read it wrong, but he was disgruntled that Sun didn't offer to pay for accommodations... not code. It's pretty fair for him to ask Sun to foot a bill here or there to enable interoperability for their own products. It doesn't sound disgruntling at all really. More of a "shame on you Sun" post as he ended that quote.
Of course, people read whatever they want to read into things.
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DE RAADT RANTS ANGRILY
Also inside:
Pope revealed to be a Catholic; new study sheds light on toilet habits of bears.
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Code is code. It isn't like it has feelings.
That hurts. What do you think half of us posters here are, you insensitive clod?
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I think these days the code only goes one way (to Apple) but if some Apple fanboy wants to point me to their recent BSD contributions, I'd be interested in seeing them.
Since all the code is downloadable from http://www.opensource.apple.com/darwinsource/ [apple.com], the FreeBSD team is free to take whatever they like.
I'm not sure what official contribution Apple makes these days in 7.x, but I think the entire FreeBSD 5.x release was mostly centered around what Apple brought back to FreeBSD after the first few MacOS X releases, including quite a bit of SMP work. According to Trollaxor [trollaxor.com], though, there continues to be significant bi-directional work on file system journaling, gcc modifi
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Not all of that code is usable. Most is using the restrictive APSL that is not BSD compatible.
Apple do release some stuff using the BSD licence however. launchd [apple.com] is an example of a good piece of code other OS vendors should consider (though it could use one more turn of refactoring). They've also contributed a lot to llvm [llvm.org], which I think is likely to replace gcc in many systems sometime in the future.
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Funny)
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I'm not sure whether you're referring to BSD "fanboys" or Apple ones. But MacOS X isn't pure BSD it *is* UNIX. It passed official UNIX certification, as did most of the BSDs. Linux, of course, isn't UNIX. So UNIX fanboys as opposed to BSD ones are happy :).
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I wasn't aware that the BSDs ponied up the money to certify their software. And considering that revisions also have to be certified, that's a lot to deal with. Where did you read that most of the BSDs were certified?
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Totally. In OSX, open the terminal and enter "offer Jesus-juice to McCauley Culkin". Then burn your MacBook.
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People who like reliable, low maintenance computer systems.
By what regards is it a crappy OS anyway?
Re:Hmmm... (Score:4, Funny)
Longest uptime in the world, son. Take your tinkertoys and go play with the other kids downstairs, the grownups are talking here.
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Netcraft is not reliable anymore. From the site:
Why do you not report uptimes for Linux 2.6 or FreeBSD 6 ?
We only report uptimes for systems where the operating system's timer runs at 100Hz or less. Because the TCP code only uses the low 32 bits of the timer, if the timer runs at say 1000Hz, the value wraps around every 49.7 days (whereas at 100Hz it wraps after 497 days). As there are large numbers of systems which have a higher uptime than this, it is not possible to report accurate uptimes for these systems.
The Linux kernel switched to a higher internal timer rate at kernel version 2.5.26. Linux 2.4 used a rate of 100Hz. Linux 2.6 used a timer at 1000Hz (some architectures were using 1000Hz before this), until the default was changed back to 250Hz in May 2006. (An explanation of the HZ setting in Linux.)
FreeBSD versions 4 and 5 used a 100Hz timer, but FreeBSD 6 has moved to a customisable timer with a default setting of 1000Hz.
So unfortunately this means that we cannot give reliable uptime figures for many Linux and FreeBSD servers.
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A significant improvement on a crappy OS is still a crappy OS. No flame intended, but really... who uses FreeBSD anymore?
I do. On my servers as well as on my workstation and my laptop. It's a solid and stable operating system that has earned its place.
Apart from that, only some some [yahoo.com] smaller [nyi.net] companies [netcraft.com] use it.
No flame intended, but really...who critizes operating systems that are not sold by Microsoft on /. anymore?
Dont forget documentation (Score:5, Interesting)
All the BSD's win for man pages that actually contain more information then "man pages are obsolete, please use the info documentation". In FreeBSD the entire core system has documentation. All of it written in the format god intended--roff.
Did you mention all the man pages are online [freebsd.org] and can be searched by version? Comes in handy when you are still using FreeBSD 6.1-RELEASE.
And did you mention the fact that BSD's aren't like Linux distros? FreeBSD isn't just a pooling of libraries and code from random people, the core of FreeBSD (shell and userland tools) are all done by the same large team. FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD are *cohesive systems*, not collections.
Want my year 2009 prediction? This will be the year of the BSD's in the data-center. There is a lot going for BSD based systems, and quite frankly the only reason I can see to go back to a random collection of tools and kernel code (i.e. a Linux distrubtion) is for running code that requires vendor support (Oracle, Dell, etc...). In 2009, I predict (hope) more of these big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD and friends.
Re:Dont forget documentation (Score:4, Insightful)
*And* FreeBSD easily beats linux in the networking speeds and firewalling departments. Of course they're lagging behind in hardware support.
Linux is becoming the new windows
Hardware suport for desktop users, yeah (Score:5, Interesting)
But honestly, FreeBSD is a server OS. And for servers, it has pretty much any driver you need. Granted not all of it is vendor supported binaries (yet, but hopefully someday), but still, if you have a server from *big-co*, odds are good everything will work.
Hmmm (Score:5, Insightful)
There are more important things in the world then how well an operating system does in some assholes random benchmark. If you are standardizing your servers around an operating system based solely on "speed", I question your abilities as a server dude.
I'll just name one thing, out of many, that are vastly more important than "speed". Stability. No, not "never blue-screens". I'm "does the maintainers of the system make major changes in every single release and then stop supporting older releases". Under this definition of stable, FreeBSD wins over linux hands down. Especially after the "we can't be bothered to maintain a stable branch of the linux kernel, so we will add new shit in with the old all the time". You might get a dozen exciting new bugs and security fixes when you "upgrade" between 2.6.1114492 and 2.6.1114493. In fact, this was one of the major reasons for me dumping linux in the first place. The 2.4.x kernels are the last stable linux kernels out there.
That is just one example of something more important than "passes 4*10^30 fps in WoW" benchmark.
As for security? Which is easier to audit and verify? A random pool of code and libraries distributed across hundreds of websites and maintainers, or a cohesive operating system whos entire codebase is in exactly one place [freebsd.org]?
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I'm sorry, those KDE and Gnome versions are some random software the FreeBSD people maintain that have nothing to do with the third party KDE and Gnome systems available on Linux?
How about SSH? You don't use the OpenSSH maintained by the OpenBSD guys then? This is some other version of SSH that is completely maintained by FreeBSD?
Stop with the FUD. Maintaining a local code base for applications doesn't change what they are. The Fedora people do the same thing, so does Ubuntu and many other distros. Sla
You are correct (Score:5, Informative)
Everything in the ports tree is essentially random crap. The only thing FreeBSD does is wrap the source code with a (really nice) build system. Ports aren't "stable" the same way the core is. That said, a lot of the big-name stuff like apache has separate ports. For example apache-1.3, apache-2 and apache-2.2 have separate ports (I think there is a port that follows the trunk too).
The difference between the BSD's and Linux's are in scope. In FreeBSD there is a whole lot more junk that is maintained by a single group then in most linuxes.
But still, you are correct in the "real applications" are all ports.
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Desktop - Linux - Fast (for user programs) simple (for users) compatible (with more hardware)
Server - *BSD - Stable Secure Simple
Linux is more cutting edge ... with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails ... with all the advantages and disadvantages that entails
*BSD is less cutting edge
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I'm a huge Linux supporter and always have been, but no Linux distribution I've ever seen has the security record of OpenBSD.
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Without support from one or a few big vendors, a la Red Hat for Linux, it'll never happen.
True (Score:5, Insightful)
So I'll revise my statement and say this will be the year that more big-name vendors officially support FreeBSD. By "vendor" I mean hardware guys like Dell, IBM or HP, not just software vendors.
I think while it isn't discussed much, GPLv3 made a lot of vendors think twice about Linux. My gut tells me that you'll quietly see more and more vendors back BSD based systems. There won't be much fanfare about it (the BSD world is pretty chill), but it will just slowly inch forward until most servers wind up running FreeBSD or OpenBSD instead of $RANDOM_COLLECTION_OF_CODE.
Just a hunch. Times are changing, and I could be wrong...
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Amusingly, I misread that as:
The worst part was that it made perfect sense when I read it. (!)
Re:Dont forget documentation (Score:5, Informative)
Man pages are not a quality control technique! (Score:4, Insightful)
As someone who both enjoyed discovering GNU Info (as it was about the only part of the GNU platform I could run on a 2MB Amiga 1200), and also enjoyed discovering the quality of FreeBSD's man pages, let me give another perspective:
There's absolutely no reason not to use HTML for documentation these days. There are plenty of lightweight text-mode browsers that would suffice in emergencies or during ssh sessions, but also nice desktop apps that would let new users browse them and feel at home. More importantly, it supports modern features, like links to the actual organisations online who support a particular app, or where bugs can be reported, links to email, diagrams, unicode for multilingual support, screenreader support, etc.
Yes, manpages can be nice, and coherent, quality documentation is important. GNU's horrible info browser is certainly not up to it. BUT... let's get with the times. There's no point advocating man pages in the modern world. If you want good docs, argue for good docs in modern formats, not old formats that happen to sometimes have instances of good docs.
Re:Man pages are not a quality control technique! (Score:5, Insightful)
You'd really happily build window manager dependencies into Gnu/Linux? I mean, you could use lynx, but the presentation would be a lot worse than the current man / info pages...
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It's not such a bad idea, you could add links or w3m to the base install and design the documentation so it is legible in either graphical browsers or the preferred text browser.
The real question should be: do the benefits of HTML documentation make it worth the time/effort to redo/reformat all the %PROJECT% documentation?
People have been suggesting this for probably 10 years, and no-one has done the metric buttload of work required to make it happen. 10 years from now, people will still be suggesting it.
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If I want to grep the documentation, HTML will be in my way.
Man pages are a solved problem. It works, and it works well. No change needed nor wanted.
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Man pages are a solved problem. It works, and it works well.
Yeah, that's why no-one has done the work to HTML-ize them.
No change needed nor wanted.
Come on now, nothing is perfect. Suppose I'm reading fstab(5), at the bottom under SEE ALSO wouldn't it be nice if I could just tab over to mount(8) and read that manpage? Once I'm in the mount(8) manpage wouldn't it be nice to be able to tab to mount_nfs(8) or mount_cd9660(8) or whatever?
Someone once had a bunch of scripts that trawled the FreeBSD man pages and built an HTML index like I describe, but it appears to be dead now :(
Couple technical problems (Score:2)
I've got a couple problems:
1) How do you deal with an HTML document that links to something outside the filesystem? As in, what if I'm offline?
2) You can do a hell of a lot in HTML that you cannot render on a console. What if the document you wrote uses an image or some javascript?
3) You need to make it compatible with "man". While 'info' sucked big time, one of the suckiest parts was that it fragmented the linux documentation. Whatever you propose must exist when I type "man joeblow". Failure to do so
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What was that quote again?
Those who don't know UNIX are doomed to reinvent it -- badly
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With the same source files you can get beautiful typeset documents. In fact, that is how the manuals of old where made.
Check out the different formats [freebsd.org], even HTML is included.
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In the end, management decides what software will be used. And you know how long it took before they took Linux seriously...
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To most people (including management), BSD is Linux.
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There is one big thing hindering BSD in the data-center, namely employees. In a market starved for competence, I've noticed there has to be a compromise between using the best systems and finding enough employees. While the best linux system admins and programmers have no problem dealing with BSD, when you want to lower your requirements a step it is not so easy.
Speaking of command-line stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
(and boy I'm posting in this thread ;-)
For those who've never used a BSD system but have used Linux, be prepared for the command line to work a little different. BSD utilities are often way more picky about the ordering of arguments.
With the GNU tools, "chmod 775 * -R" will recurse down a tree and set everything to 775. "chmod -R 775 *" will do the same thing.
In FreeBSD, only "chmod -R 775 *" will work right.
In BSD userland, the patten is almost always command [arguments] [strings of goo]. In GNU land, you can usually interchange [arguments] and [string of goo] and get the same result. Some will argue that only the BSD way is proper and the GNU way is sloppy. Whatever your feelings are, if you've gotten used to being sloppy about ordering, it will take some adjustment to get used to BSD tools.
The good news is the "proper" way will work on either set of tools.
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Still, those smelly hippies brought us some very nice software. On the other hand, it's the birthplace of emacs, so it's not all roses and moonlight...
No... (Score:2)
My point was that things are different. Personally I actually like the more sloppy approach used by the GNU utilities, even if the programmer in me disagrees.
Another thing that takes a little getting used to is the device names are different. Rather then "hdd0" and "eth1", they are named after their kernel module - maybe "ad0" and "ee0". I'm sure there is a good argument for either approach, but it is something that takes adjustment to.
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The whole rc.d thingamajig is quite different too, that was a whole barrel of fun...
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The same is largely true of GNU/Linux. See that "GNU" there? That's the name of the single source of the vast majority of the standard Linux command-line tools, which all have a standard interface, take the same options, etc.
The big exceptions are things like Perl and so on, but that's exactly the same in *BSD. At least, the BSDs were still using Larry Wall's Perl last time I checked. Maybe they've completely rew
Re:Hmmm... (Score:5, Informative)
FreeBSD fanboyz shouldn't go mouthing off about "half-assed" considering the way since 5.x it's crappy smp and threadlocking would seize up tighter than a great-grandma on a straight brick cheese diet with lock-mgr panics. Problem persisted in 7.0, who knows if 7.1 will finally put the issues to rest?
Are you talking about this SMP [slashdot.org]?
5.0 was released in January 2003, I think 6 years of passage should have allowed you enough grumping time that you can let it go now. I think you could also take a look in your wayback machine and remember that Linux was not exactly perfect at the time either. FreeBSD 5 did have its teething problems with all of the new technologies introduced, especially KSE and the ULE scheduler, but progress has continued to be made and your unsubstantiated claim otherwise is just the pathetic grumblings of a troglodyte.
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How do you get it to freeze up? I've not had freezeups on my SMP box.
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Re:Java on FreeBSD (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm (Score:2)
The closest you'd get to an official java release (which I assume you mean is a binary compiled by Sun) is a binary package compiled by the FreeBSD guys. The only thing about FreeBSD packages is they usually lag behind the ports tree by several weeks.
Vendor support like what you are asking is one of the things FreeBSD and friends lack. My gut tells me that it won't be long before you'll see FreeBSD get enough mind share that companies like Sun start offering support.