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Ubuntu Operating Systems Unix BSD Linux

Meet UbuntuBSD, UNIX For Human Beings 219

prisoninmate writes: What's ubuntuBSD? Well, it's not that hard to figure out yourself, but just in case you're not sure, we can tell you that ubuntuBSD promises to bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux. The best part of using the FreeBSD kernel is that you'll end up using the famous Z File System, or ZFS. Xfce is also included along with the popular Firefox, LibreOffice, and Ubuntu Software Center apps. ubuntuBSD is inspired by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project, it is hosted on SourceForge, and has been created by Jon Boden.
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Meet UbuntuBSD, UNIX For Human Beings

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  • by Anonymous Coward

    You should have put that sentence first so I would not have wasted 5 minutes reading everything before it.

    • by cfalcon ( 779563 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @11:26PM (#51741145)

      There's nothing wrong with Sourceforge. That's a 2015-era complaint, get modern!

      • by DrXym ( 126579 ) on Monday March 21, 2016 @04:43AM (#51741839)
        There's nothing wrong with Sourceforge except for the fact that they hijacked "abandoned" open source projects in order to bundle crapware into the installer, tried to persuade popular projects to bundle crapware, placed fake download links on project download pages, created fear distrust in their community, and failed to keep up with rival hosting services.

        So nothing wrong at all. Even if they're trying to make amends or correct these things, it's too late. The trust is gone. Most active projects have decamped to the likes of Github.

      • by kuzb ( 724081 )

        When sourceforge stops injecting adware in to the binaries you can say there's nothing wrong with sourceforge.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:28PM (#51740915)

    I've tried to run FreeBSD in the past. Hardware was poorly supported with frequent system crashes. Software was poorly supported; many packages and ports simply wouldn't install or build. The ports collection, often touted as a great benefit of BSD, often failed to properly build software. Because ports are built as root so they can be installed, I once had a port try to build and install a rootkit in the process. There are far fewer BSD users, so bugs are infrequently reported and the lack of developers means that bugs often go unfixed. Ubuntu isn't perfect, but why would anyone want to bring this experience to Linux?

    • by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:33PM (#51740935)

      That's funny. I'm an OpenBSD user and I'm saying this seriously -- you've just summarized my experience with Linux. I tried using a Linux distro and after lots of pain came back to OpenBSD which has been so much easier to use (once you get past the bare bones installation. I'll admit).

      • by drinkypoo ( 153816 ) <drink@hyperlogos.org> on Monday March 21, 2016 @07:09AM (#51742265) Homepage Journal

        I wanted to use OpenBSD on my netbook for secure mobile computing, but they denied the patch that someone submitted for my wifi hardware on specious grounds so that they wouldn't have accept his patch — they claimed that getting some values from a Linux driver was a copyright issue when it has been conclusively proven that it hasn't. So I can't use it without buying additional hardware, so I installed Linux.

        No joke, someone actually submitted a working patch, and they denied it on bullshit grounds. They don't want decent hardware support.

        Last time I built a box just for OpenBSD it choked hard on "supported" NICs and failed to route my packets, almost costing me a job. Admittedly, that was over ten years ago. Still not going down that road again.

        • I agree that is complete bullshit, but your experience mirrors every Linux experience I've had in the last decade. I try and try to get basic things to work, and they just never do. Actually, Linux worked *better* for me 10 years ago than it has in the last few, so I just stick to BSD. I don't dislike Linux by any means, it just doesn't work for me.

          • I agree that is complete bullshit, but your experience mirrors every Linux experience I've had in the last decade. I try and try to get basic things to work, and they just never do. Actually, Linux worked *better* for me 10 years ago than it has in the last few, so I just stick to BSD. I don't dislike Linux by any means, it just doesn't work for me.

            What on earth happened? In a build problem program I was having recently in Mint, I installed and compiled a program I needed badly on several computers, after Installing Linux Mint 17.3, Lubuntu, Xubuntu, and Ubuntu Mate.

            The machines were a dual core Dell Optiplex, a eePC netbook, a Toshiba Satellite, and one of those damned Vista basic computers. Install was from a USB thumbdrive for the Dell, and DVDs for the others.

            All of them worked perfectly in that Rogues gallery of computers and distros. Were

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I've tried both (I run a FreeBSD server now, Linux is relegated to a VM for now) and I'd say you are both kinda right.

        Hardware - On Linux people expect things like their GPU to be fully accelerated and capable of running games and a fancy desktop. On BSD you just expect desktop support at resolutions you monitor supports with some reasonable 2D acceleration, but your network card damn well better benchmark close to line speed.

        Software - It's pot luck, popular stuff is well supported on both platforms but an

      • That's funny. I'm an OpenBSD user and I'm saying this seriously -- you've just summarized my experience with Linux. I tried using a Linux distro and after lots of pain came back to OpenBSD which has been so much easier to use (once you get past the bare bones installation. I'll admit).

        Imposing BSD upon Linux? This isn't trying to be a smartass (I'm an ass, but not smart) I don't have so much experience with BSD, but I've noticed that Windows users trying to use Linux often have issues when they try to use the knowledge they've acquired in Windowsworld and try to force it on Linux.

    • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:41PM (#51740979)

      Hardware was poorly supported with frequent system crashes.

      This is the trick I've figured out with FreeBSD: They don't support crap hardware. The best hardware support comes from companies that pay developers to make FreeBSD drivers. (See RealTek vs Intel ethernet drivers). If you look at who the core users of FreeBSD are and look at who sponsors development it's mostly servers.

      For most of my desktops I've returned to server hardware anyway. Whitebox builds were fun when I was poor and my time was free. But after the N'th time of dicking around with figuring out why my Motherboard and RAM won't play nice or the monster heat sink I added scrubbed off traces I'd rather just buy a machine that's supported.

      Buy good hardware. Get good results.

      so bugs are infrequently reported and the lack of developers means that bugs often go unfixed.

      I've had the opposite experience. Bugs are so infrequent that if it's not a PEBKAC error then the FreeBSD guys can usually drill down to the bottom of it quick. If it's a problem someone else has experienced then the fix is most likely out there already anyway. Google will return results with the error I'm having instead of threads of noise from the Ubuntu forums.

      often failed to properly build software

      [Pics or it didn't happen].

      Even if you somehow screwed the system up so bad that ports wouldn't build, there's always pkg.

      I once had a port try to build and install a rootkit in the process.

      [Citation Needed]

      • by Bruce Perens ( 3872 ) <bruce@perens.com> on Sunday March 20, 2016 @11:39PM (#51741189) Homepage Journal

        They don't support crap hardware.

        :-)

        It would help me believe this if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap, and show that BSD developers decided not to support it because it was crap, with reference to mailing list messages.

        Otherwise, it might be better to say "the developers support what they had at a point in time and now only buy what is supported.

        • It's how gamers think too. If it works for him then the fault must lie with the other person's system. No one wants to admit that it worked for them because they were lucky.

        • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

          The example that the GP used and which I've seen before is Realtek. Now, it's true that Realtek hardware is kinda crap... I seem to recall a comment in the driver about "redefining the low end". It's certainly not high performance, high reliability stuff, but it also gets the job done perfectly adequately most of the time and it's only people in need of high performance who care.

          So in this case "crap" is defined as "wasn't good enough to attract any developers, and the manufacturer isn't interested in BSD e

          • by damaki ( 997243 )
            I had issues with a dedicated 3Com pci board on FreeBSD, had to switch to OpenBSD for the damn thing to work. Never had issues with this card on any other OS. I could not even think how a network card driver could be so f*cked up on an OS. I mean, if the damn driver does not work, as automated tests should show (did they even have automated non-regression tests by then, around 2004?), why was it in the kernel? It should have been disabled and documented.
            So I do not think the issue is about crap hardware. I
        • His position is completely accurate. Linux hackers will work tirelessly to reverse engineer some pile of shit and write something comparable to support it, while *BSD people simply ignore it for being closed crap. All decent hardware from reasonable vendors is well supported in the BSDs.

          Beyond that, they don't really target desktops much beyond the FreeBSD distro (even then, it's not as good as a Linux experience on most hardware). If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.

          • Except for graphics tablets, many mice and game controllers, laptop video and audio chipsets, laptop power control systems, and bleeding edge graphics cards. It's why FreeBSD was a good choice for the Apple kernel: they had control of the hardware and could judiciously invest driver development in only those components they actually used.

          • As I replied to him, BSD claims support for half a dozen RealTek models, so I can't say he's even accurate about RealTek vs. Intel Ethernet. Now, you at least gave a reason that they might be crap. They're closed. Except that some of them weren't closed enough for a driver to appear on BSD. Did someone get documents, or did they just copy the Linux driver?

            If you want uptime, don't have a graphics card in the box. Memory mapping hardware devices into user space is always going to make your box unstable. Both

          • If you want uptime, you do not run Linux.

            Guess that depends on what expectations you have for uptime. 200+ days for a desktop suits me pretty well.

        • if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap,

          If the vendor doesn't think it is worth their time to develop drivers for it then it must not be good enough to develop drivers for.

          I already gave the RealTek vs Intel Ethernet drivers.

          Another is Nvidia vs AMD/ATI. I hand Nvidia money. Nvidia hands me a working video driver. No reverse engineering needed. No "here's a bunch of specs, write your own driver".

          Yet another is Supermicro and Intel motherboards vs consumer boards. Turns out Intel and Supermicro designs and develops motherboards with full driver su

          • You haven't given any technical explanation of why RealTek hardware isn't worth the effort, and on this page [freebsd.org] it shows support in BSD for half a dozen model numbers from RealTek. You must be talking about a different model? There could be many reasons the developers haven't spent time on it other than the quality of the design. For example, a simple lack of people.

            You could explain, for example, how the DMA engine in the card is broken or that it drops interrupts (if either of those is the case). Just saying

          • If the vendor doesn't think [BSD] is worth their time to develop drivers for it then [BSD] must not be good enough to develop drivers for.

            You sure that's the point you meant to make?

        • They don't support crap hardware.

          :-)

          It would help me believe this if you could point out "crap" hardware, explain why it's crap, and show that BSD developers decided not to support it because it was crap, with reference to mailing list messages.

          Good hardware = Whatever works with BSD

          Crap hardware = Whatever doesn't work with BSD

          As long as it doesn't have systemd, some users will love it, warts and all.

        • by Bengie ( 1121981 )
          If you use the same type of hardware the devs use, you'll have a mostly good time. If you use some obscure integrated hardware that you got with your $40 motherboard or some crazy exotic hardware with your $200 motherboard, it probably won't be supported. Most of FreeBSD devs are running Intel servers and similarly speced desktops.
      • by epyT-R ( 613989 )

        For most of my desktops I've returned to server hardware anyway. Whitebox builds were fun when I was poor and my time was free. But after the N'th time of dicking around with figuring out why my Motherboard and RAM won't play nice or the monster heat sink I added scrubbed off traces I'd rather just buy a machine that's supported.

        Sounds more like pebkac issues than anything else. I'd agree with this for building a server farm or datacenter, but for personal machines it's overkill and ludicrously expensive unless you're willing to live with 10 year old technology from ebay.

        Buy good hardware. Get good results.

        This applies anywhere regardless of method of acquisition.

        Otherwise, I agree with your experience of freebsd. It's a solid system that has drivers for good hardware.

      • "They don't support crap hardware."
        I find that to be a lame excuse for things not working. It is excusing the problem that BSD doesn't have the markets interest that Linux and Windows has in order for a diverse set of drivers to be made for a wide range of Systems.

        Most system with "Crap Hardware" will work perfectly well on other os for years and last well beyond the useful life of the device. Unless you want to build your PC by yourself (something much more difficult if you want a Laptop) you normally n

        • While BSD it will just fail to recognize the device.

          It may not recognize the device as "something" but it will always recognize the device. Any time I have a problem with a USB device on Windows I'll plug it into a FreeBSD machine and it'll tell me exactly what it is, no obfuscation

          However for Personal Computing they suck,

          My wife's laptop aside, in which she's happy with Windows 8 everything in my house is FreeBSD of some sort. Down to my HTPC which is FreeBSD running Kodi. All of the sound devices, including SPDIF out, are recognized. It was easier to setup than Kodi on Windows.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      I run FreeBSD and I can attest that nothing you say is remotely true.

      In other words you full of shit, but you already knew that.

    • by convolvatron ( 176505 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @11:05PM (#51741061)

      Why would anyone want this?

      FreeBSD is hardly a perfect system. But why would I want to cripple it further by making it look like Ubuntu?

      • Imagine Funity . Unity for FreeBSD .. But thats just for joke sake . No one's gonna see the kernel anyways .. except that odd webcam you bought which just isn't running ..
        • by armanox ( 826486 )

          I actually like Unity - it is one of the big reasons I moved to Ubuntu from Fedora (that, and LTS versions rather then the short life cycle of Fedora). It is like having a modern WindowMaker or AfterStep.

      • by Antique Geekmeister ( 740220 ) on Monday March 21, 2016 @06:56AM (#51742207)

        To avoid systemd, I suspect. Since systemd only works with the Linux kernel, and so far has produced a great deal of difficulty in return for its very aggressive re-engineering of the entire Linux back end infrastructure, it seems very very reasonable to try simply replacing the kernel to get a clean divorce from the systemd infrastructure.

    • I'm typing this message from FreeBSD right now, on a Thinkpad laptop with Intel graphics & wireless.

      It really depends on your hardware. With the right laptop it's a great system, and in my opinion much clearer than Linux.

    • Are you sure it was FreeBSD, not Net or Open? If so you were either on some oddball hardware where support was just coming into existence, or you were doing something wrong.

      BSD forked three ways and the three branches are specialized for three purposes:
      - FreeBSD is about running on as many kinds of hardware and peripherals as possible. If it runs under BSD it runs under FreeBSD. Once the driving code is solid it might get imported into other branches, or ported to other things (like Linux). Mean

      • by Anonymous Coward on Monday March 21, 2016 @12:16AM (#51741275)

        Not even close. NetBSD's focus has always been on portability and running on as many platforms as possible. FreeBSD is a general purpose operating system. DragonflyBSD is a fork of FreeBSD, originally for the purpose of improving performance for symmetric multiprocessing and threading. OpenBSD is focused on security and reliability.

      • NetBSD is about being a reference platform for developing, and pushing the envelope on, networking technology (at the expense of only bothering to be guaranteed to run on a limited number of platforms and configurations).

        Before Linux, Netbsd was THE distribution for running on weird platforms. Since Linux, Netbsd has no particular reason to exist. Linux runs on dramatically more hardware than netbsd now. Several ports have withered and died since Linux took on all the weird architectures.

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Infidel! Wash your mouth out with soap immediately! Didn't you know that BSD is perfect and not to be criticized?

    • by DNS-and-BIND ( 461968 ) on Monday March 21, 2016 @03:19AM (#51741623) Homepage

      Ah, I know this one. We had the same problem when Solaris came out with an x86 version back in the early 2000s. These drive-by linux users downloaded the ISO as if it were the distro-of-the-week, attempted to install it on whatever random crap hardware they had, and then loudly declared that Solaris sucked because they couldn't get something or other to work properly. The problem isn't the OS, the problem is between the keyboard and chair.

      When you install a serious OS, you first must do something very unfamiliar and disconcerting. First, you must look at the list of supported hardware. The importance of this cannot be underestimated. If your hardware is not on the list, then the OS will not support it. Most linux fans come from Windows, which supports just about every bit of random junk Taiwanese hardware in the world. Other OS's aren't like that.

      After you look at the hardware list, you then must do another thing that is totally counter-intuitive and out of most people's experience - go and buy supported hardware. They won't do this, they install the OS anyway, and surprise surprise when something doesn't work because the documentation clearly states it's not supported, guess what happens? They get frustrated, feel insulted, and begin screaming loudly online that the OS sucks ass. They wonder why they heard so many great things about the software. If it's so fucking great, why doesn't their wireless trackball and webcam from 1997 work seamlessly like under Windows? This happened so often back in the day with Solaris x86 that we had a slang term for the people who did it, though I forget what it was.

      • by armanox ( 826486 )

        Yup. I remember how surprised I was when I installed Solaris 10 on my Inspiron 8100 (P3 1GHz, 512MB RAM, GeForce 2) and everything worked out of the box - GPU acceleration, Flash Player, MP3 codecs, sound - you name it, it worked perfect. I picked the system after checking the HCL and deciding to give it a shot despite all the stories I was hearing about Solaris sucking. Worked just as well as Ubuntu (6.06) did on the box, and all the proprietary stuff worked without a hitch! It was beautiful. I've r

    • The problem with any open source OS is that your experience with it can be highly subjective depending on the hardware. Many including myself have had the opposite experience to you and also mixed - all depending on hardware... The important thing is to not be an absolutist jerk based on purely your own anecdotal evidence like yourself and realise that the world is not that black and white.

      I use both various Linux distros and FreeBSD, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, and they all work with

    • by MeNeXT ( 200840 )

      I seriously do not understand your post. I've ran (and still run) FreeBSD on 1000's of systems for over 10 years. On supported hardware I have yet to have a crash without hardware failure. Rock solid. Now on the latest and greatest newest hardware which was not yet supported I had the same success as Windows, Linux and Mac (which means luck was involved). I have one system on 6.3 which the client is too cheap to upgrade which is still running. Gets rebooted when there is a power failure. I have old systems,

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Ubuntu isn't perfect, but why would anyone want to bring this experience to Linux?

      Want to know why? Because some Linux users are so frothing at the mouth about systemd, that they go right to their happy place when BSD is mentioned.

      I've also looked at BSD, and all your issues are spot-on. To put up with the crap you have to put up with in BSD is not worth whatever advantage there is to losing systemd.

      side note - I was having an issue compiling a critical program in Linux Mint 17.3, so I tried out Ubuntu Mate. Worked nicely, and quite configurable, with a nice GUI. I'm not so certain

  • by Anonymous Coward

    ...BSD on the desktop.

  • by 0100010001010011 ( 652467 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:34PM (#51740945)

    It has everything 'pretty' that Ubuntu could have, minus the weirdness of a kFreeBSD/GNU userland. It sets everything up from install. You can even select what window manager you want to use during install.

    Personally bare FreeBSD itself is just fine if the command line doesn't scare you. It takes less time to install FreeBSD and the 5-10 packages needed to get to a 'normal' desktop than it does to install any version Windows. I'm just kicking myself for not making the switch earlier.

    Additionally. Describing projects as "For Humans" must stop [charlesleifer.com]. FreeBSD is already for humans. I could teach a middle schooler to install it and get to Facebook. It's honestly not that hard.

    • by Anonymous Coward

      For me it's the lack of Plex and CrashPlan support. I would LOVE to go straight BSD as I'm very comfortable in Solaris with my career, I realize both have Plex and CrashPlan have supported BSD but their support has been an afterthought. I believe CrashPlan recently officially (last year?) stopped supporting FreeBSD but left their headless config docs up as an unsupported config. I just want ZFS, a slick GUI (not a tablet one -- since its not headless and I use it with Synergy every day), Plex, Samba, and

    • by Xtifr ( 1323 ) on Monday March 21, 2016 @04:01AM (#51741719) Homepage

      The "weirdness" of the *nix userland that most people in the *nix world have standardized on these days. Yeah, can't think why they'd possibly want that.

      Regular FreeBSD is indeed just fine, but it has dozens of minor incompatibilities with both GNU and SysV that will trip you up if you're used to those others.

      GNU/kFreeBSD is a really nice compromise if you're used to either GNU/Linux or SysV. GNU is designed to be as compatible as possible with both BSD and SysV. (So it's also a nice option if you're a BSD guy forced to work on a SysV system. Which is actually how I got started with it.)

      If you're a BSD guy using BSD, then yeah, there's little point in putting GNU on it. But for everyone else, it makes a lot of sense.

      Frankly, I try to stick GNU on everything. I've run it on BSD, HPUX, Solaris, SunOS, Windows, and, of course, Linux.

      Right now, I'm running GNU/kFreeBSD in a vm to port some software to BSD. When I get it running, on that, I'll install regular BSD to make sure everything still works, but I'm interested in the porting effort, not in mucking around learning all of BSD's quirks, so GNU/kFreeBSD is a godsend. I'm not scared of the command line. I just don't want to waste my time remembering all the little incompatibilities of the BSD userland while I'm trying to get some work done. In recent years, every single time I've tried to use straight BSD, I end up getting frustrated at some little thing that just won't work the way I want it to. The way I'm used to.

      Now, for someone who's new to *nix, I agree that BSD is a very fine option. Heck, I started with the BSD-based version of SunOS, and still have fond memories of it. But at this point in time, I am so used to the GNU userland that I just don't want to deal with something that doesn't have it. And I'm pretty sure I'm not the only one who prefers GNU—after all, not only has the Debian GNU/BSD survived for many years, but now there's a second one! :)

    • It has everything 'pretty' that Ubuntu could have, minus the weirdness of a kFreeBSD/GNU userland. It sets everything up from install. You can even select what window manager you want to use during install.

      It's completely insensible since the good part of Linux is the kernel, not the userland. It's not that Linux's userland is bad, but BSD's is fine. But when you give up the Linux kernel, you give up compatibility. You give up drivers for high performance graphics hardware, you give up being able to use vmware... If you're not going to do that stuff (because you have crap integrated graphics for example) then you don't seem to be giving up anything.

    • I could teach a middle schooler to install it and get to Facebook.

      Pffft. That doesn't impress me. You can teach a middle schooler to hack in the NSA, unless of course they are teaching you to do it.

      You want to impress me then teach my mother.

  • by orledrat ( 3490981 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:37PM (#51740957)
    Thanks for answering the question "What's UbuntuBSD?" seeing as this is Slashdot it would have been more useful to explain "What's a human being?". You insensitive clod.
    • Wish I had points to mod you up.

      Slashdot, where being human puts you in the minority.

    • by Kjella ( 173770 ) on Monday March 21, 2016 @06:26AM (#51742083) Homepage

      Thanks for answering the question "What's UbuntuBSD?" seeing as this is Slashdot it would have been more useful to explain "What's a human being?". You insensitive clod.

      It would, but all we got is an undocumented blob written in quad-bits (ACGT) and the original developer can't be reached. Not that it'd do much good, the code is constantly morphing through forking off new child processes while old ones come to a halt so there's probably little of the original left. There was an instruction manual too, but it's equally cryptic like "Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground". Source control seems completely absent so there's billions of versions in production. While we're making some progress on reverse engineering to fix the most critical bugs it's mostly a black box project full of unexplained and absurd behaviors. Like making dry jokes on a nerd website.

    • It's Poettering's answer to people moving to BSD to escape systemd.

  • What? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 20, 2016 @10:39PM (#51740965)

    "[...] bring the power of the FreeBSD kernel to Ubuntu Linux."

    WTF?

  • "ubuntuBSD is inspired by the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project"

    Is that in the same way as Ubuntu is inspired by the Debian project?

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Inspired: To take an existing project and market it as your own.

  • What's the target demographic for other distros, rabbits?
  • What's the point? (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    I've heard this talked about before, on bsdnow.tv - about people wanting the stability and reliability of the FreeBSD kernel, but with a GNU userland. We use Ubuntu Server at my work extensively, and I use FreeBSD at home, and to be honest, I really don't think it's hard to pick up one if you know the other. Moreover, Linux does have a kernel module now for ZFS, so what's the point? You're almost certainly better off using stock Ubuntu, if you're a Linux guy - it's got actual dollars going into maintaining

    • by dbIII ( 701233 )

      Moreover, Linux does have a kernel module now for ZFS, so what's the point?

      Because ZFS on linux is not yet ready for serious use. It is catching up and is fine for the home PC I'm using now but it still lags a long way behind other systems with ZFS on a lot of points, especially performance.

      • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        > Because ZFS on linux is not yet ready for serious use

        --That is not my experience. Killer-app for Linux is ZFS+Samba, and I have had that going with decent performance (for home / small business use, at least) for the last 2-3 years.

        --This is with an older quad-core 2.4GHz COTS PC box with 6GB DDR2 RAM running Xubuntu 14.04--64--LTS and standard SATA-2 hard drives connected to (2) inexpensive 4-port PCIe cards. With standard 1500-byte Ethernet frames, I can almost saturate the link (~100-120MB/sec) ru

  • Z File System? (Score:5, Informative)

    by xbytor ( 215790 ) on Sunday March 20, 2016 @11:35PM (#51741171) Homepage

    It's just ZFS. It used to stand for "Zettabyte File System" but that was dropped years ago.

  • by Anonymous Coward

    I haven't read ANYWHERE about this new module for systemd called "UbuntuBSD", this must be early April fools, ha! you got me...

    Seriously though, can we expect a good desktop environment like MATE to run on UbuntuBSD without the cancer that is systemd?

  • If it wasn't for humans, was I using the version for robots all this?

  • --Setting up root on ZFS isn't exactly intuitive, not sure if I could duplicate what I ended up doing...

    REF: http://www.tumfatig.net/201205... [tumfatig.net]

    --Basically I gave (sda is 15GB) sda1 300MB UFS /boot, sda2 700MB swap, and sda3 ZFS. When I hit "Configure ZFS", I named the default pool "zroot" and configured the Logical volume to have 100MB less than the default displayed size (IIRC.)

    --When Selecting and Installing Software, I was able to use my local Squid proxy but the step kept bombing out. I ended up selectin

    • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

      --UPDATE: I rebooted the VM and ran the install again, deleted the ZFS config and redid it, proxy went OK (so I didn't waste a lot of bandwidth re-downloading packages) and did the same software selection (1st option, +SSH, +Minimal Xubuntu install) and this time Grub installed OK and I booted into the UbuntuBSD display manager.

      • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

        --1st impressions: Buggy desktop - hangs when I do Edit \ Prefences in the xfce4 Terminal or the XFCE Panel window, **no text virtual consoles** on screens 1-4... Only 1 virtual desktop by default?? Strange choice for X-windows...

        + installed pkgs joe mc screen netcat == OK

        PROTIP: + Installing " lxde " display manager and running " lxrandr " to set the screen resolution seems to get around most of the bugginess so far. Also using LXTERMINAL instead of xfce's terminal.

        + Apt-get update/upgrade works with my

        • by Wolfrider ( 856 )

          --UPDATE: The VM shit itself and wouldn't reboot after converting the disk from Flat to Growable. Reinstalled, this time with a UFS instead of ZFS root, and the 'zpool' command ISN'T EVEN AVAILABLE.

          --Judgement: This is Alpha-level software, not suitable for general distribution yet. No real homepage for the distro except for Sourceforge and no support forum. AVOID unless you like frustration.

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