http://www.osnews.com/story/14599/Review_FreeBSD_6_1 Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 15 Feb 2012 14:02:30 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://www.osnews.com/thread?124208 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124208 I had a little trouble with the Nvidia nve driver -- I got intermittent device timeouts in the AMD64 edition of FreeBSD. It's possible the problem also occurs in the i386 version, but I didn't see it happen there, and the error was rare to begin with.

I experience the same flaw on i386:-) Sat, 13 May 2006 18:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (netpython) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124212 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124212 http://archive.netbsd.se/?ml=freebsd-current&a=2006-03&t=18...

It seems thereis a workaround by disabling the watchdog timer. Sat, 13 May 2006 18:58:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (netpython) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124225 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124225 sudo, bash3, cvsup-without-gui and portupgrade are on the same disc already? It was crazy switching the discs back and forth when I need at least those apps in the default install. Sat, 13 May 2006 19:24:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kill) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124229 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124229 Installation of default config files

Although I can see his point, I'd rather not clutter up /etc with sample files, so keep them in one easy to find place where they are now.

Better organization of the ports tree

WTF? Move all foreign languages into one directory? I prefer using english software but I don't feel like discriminating and grouping everything non-english into one place. Better to have every application directory code numbered directories underneath with the language versions/patches if the amount of languages under /ports is such a bother. Sat, 13 May 2006 19:33:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (JamesTRexx) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124231 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124231 It was crazy switching the discs back and forth when I need at least those apps in the default install.

Heh,that's a good one :-) Sat, 13 May 2006 19:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (netpython) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124236 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124236 From :

/usr/ports/Tools/scripts/release/README

This directory contains the scripts that are used to break up the packages
for a given release, so that they fit on a particular 4 CD set. They rely
on src/release/scripts/print-cdrom-packages.sh to give preference for
particular packages to be located on particular CDs. Sat, 13 May 2006 19:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (petrasl) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124246 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124246 a while ago I move from SuSe 9.1 to FreeBSD 5.3 on my main machine. I had already experience with 4.*. While 5.* was not as stable as 4.*, it wasn't that bad either. I manage a dual Xeon under FreeBSD 5.3, serving dynamic pages to 30k to 60k people per day. It ran 315 days without a reboot! Sat, 13 May 2006 19:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (manix) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124261 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124261 I choose FreeBSD against linux, because of the "way of doing thinks" - In FreeBSD you don't have to dig too deep in internet to find a solution, you have a handbook,a developer handbook..(http://www.freebsd.org/docs/books.html).
I read that review and I felt that BSD are different at so many levels.I recommend to people who have server to administrate.Good system, good (short) review Sat, 13 May 2006 21:21:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (csousa) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124283 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124283 the 6.x series is keeping the faithful in the flock. after 5.x something was needed to hold them. i would be surprised if 6.x will change the user-share for freebsd much though...having used both systems at work for a decade now, they are both so similar in ways that not only users, but even developers would care about, that its not clear why you would replace one with the other. the supposed "under the hood" differences won't matter unless you are a die-hard kernel developer. Sat, 13 May 2006 22:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (theGrump) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124286 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124286 once again, having been exposed to both systems for a decade i do not understand why people think ports are such a huge deal. i would take apt/dpkg over them in almost any case. if i could make one significant improvement in freebsd it would be to adopt the debian package model. not to say ports doesn't work, its simply far less elegant than modern package management chains. and very often it breaks. Sat, 13 May 2006 22:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (theGrump) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124290 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124290 I have to agree. FreeBSD feels more mature than GNU/Linux and not as limited as OpenBSD. It is also very well documented and quite easy to use, if you take the time to learn it first (no fancy gui to admin it).

For me, only system that comes close to it for the ease of use is Slackware, and for the Documentation and maturity, Debian.

Versions > 6.0 RELASE are very stable. I had crashes with versions 5.* and sometimes with the very first release of 6.0, due to the sound system. This hasn't happened to me for a very long time now.

Most of the very latest programs are ported on FreeBSD. When a new version of KDE or Gnome comes out, it gets ported to FreeBSD in a week or so.

There are also not so good sites with FreeBSD. One of them is while there are many ports (about 14000), some of them are broken; and unlike Debian ports, they are not checked by the FreeBSD team for security. Also there is no way to upgrade you ports just for security. You upgrade them all to the very latest and the port collection is upgraded almost every day. With Debian, unlike FreeBSD, I can tell it to fetch security updates, and leave the rest as it is.

Also the way to upgrade the ports to the latest, is by rebuilding them using the command "portupgrade -a". That usually works quite well, but can take a very long time if you have a slow computer.

You don't have all the latest 3D drivers for graphic cards.

Last but not least. Only few TV applications run on FreeBSD and they are totally outdated.

This being said, FreeBSD remains my favorite OS on servers and on my desktop. Sat, 13 May 2006 22:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (manix) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124307 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124307 i would take apt/dpkg over them in almost any case.

Dude... Whereas I understand that ports *might* break anytime, I *know* from experience that apt is broken more often than I'd like it to be (to be completely honest and already wearing my flame vest, I can't recall a single time I tried Debian and not managed to have apt go crazy on me), which is the extreme opposite of my experience with ports: I have actually NEVER experienced ports breakage.

Debian stable is definitely not for me (and I hope I emphasized "me" enough). Not that I enjoy the bleeding edge, but the servers I manage are sufficiently under constant attack that I feel safer to just upgrade whenever a new underscore-revision-level port appears.

It just kills me that apt will drive itself into a wall whenever I want to upgrade something and some common dependency on a given package makes another package go nuts. Ports always solved those for me in a graceful manner.

And I just love how easily I can tell portupgrade to install binary packages if available and source ports whenever they're not. Not to mention the compile time tunables. If there was an automatic way to make apt install a package and its dependencies from sources (that unsupported shellscript hack doesn't count!), and if they improve apt's dependency solving mechanism, then I might consider giving Debian another try on hardware that FreeBSD won't support (like the HP-PA machines in the lab). Otherwise I'll either go pure NetBSD with the lovely pkgsrc (maybe pkgsrc on Linux, even) or leave the native operating system and pray for it to be supported on pkgsrc.

Operating systems are tools, so please don't takt this personally; if your operating system of choice comes with a application/port/package management system that works for you, great! If the operating system itself performs the tasks that matter to you better than others, excellent! If it is so performing and ALSO comes with a good app management system, awesome! Is Debian faster? Maybe. Does FreeBSD work superbly well for my demands? Definitely.

Tools are tools. Swiss army knives and electric screwdrivers will fasten screws just the same. Electric screwdriver will fasten those screws faster than a swiss army knife, but I find those army knives to be just so damn convenient... Sat, 13 May 2006 23:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (meianoite) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124350 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124350 Debian stable is definitely not for me (and I hope I emphasized "me" enough). Not that I enjoy the bleeding edge, but the servers I manage are sufficiently under constant attack that I feel safer to just upgrade whenever a new underscore-revision-level port appears.

I think you are missing the point of Debian Stable. The security fixes from the new versions are backported to the version in stable, maintaining security without adding new features (and potentially new bugs) from the new upstream version.

Stable isn't for me, as I run debian on the desktop, but it does seem to make sense for a server.

My opinion is hardly authoritative though, I don't run a server, and I have no experience with BSD (no free primary partition ). Sun, 14 May 2006 02:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (MamiyaOtaru) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124408 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124408 I've upgraded myself to FreeBSD 6.1 from 6.0p7, its an upgrade in some cases, and a downgrade in others.

1) When running Xorg, if you have a radeon video card, remember to remove the option DRI from the xorg.conf file, or otherwise the whole system locks up - hopefully someone in the ports will fix that soon.

2) The make buildworld still doesn't compile; hence my use of the FreeBSD 6.1 iso rather than trying to cvsup.

Sorry, NOTHING should stop compiling just because a person has CFLAGS=-Os -march=pentiumpro in their make.conf! hopefully someone a programmer will get off their fat chuff to fix up the problem ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=97240 ) - I can tolerate problems if I were using insane optimisations, but the fact is, the options I chose in my make.conf are very vanilla and shouldn't cause the said problems in the link.

Maybe once that issue has been fixed, I might be persuaded to donate some money to the FreeBSD foundations and other FreeBSD orientated projects. Sun, 14 May 2006 08:30:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (kaiwai) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124415 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124415 once again, having been exposed to both systems for a decade i do not understand why people think ports are such a huge deal. i would take apt/dpkg over them in almost any case. if i could make one significant improvement in freebsd it would be to adopt the debian package model. not to say ports doesn't work, its simply far less elegant than modern package management chains. and very often it breaks

Once again, no serious FreeBSD user wants apt/dpkg. Compiling software is much more flexible. Also there _are_ packages, which you can install with pkg_add -rv. So use Debian if you want to go with stupid apt-get. Sun, 14 May 2006 09:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dennis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124417 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124417 I think you are missing the point of Debian Stable.
...
My opinion is hardly authoritative though, I don't run a server, and I have no experience with BSD (no free primary partition ).

I think you miss the point of this thread. Go away with your Debian, it's annoying. Sun, 14 May 2006 09:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dennis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124419 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124419 hopefully someone a programmer will get off their fat chuff to fix up the problem ( http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=97240 ) - I can tolerate problems if I were using insane optimisations, but the fact is, the options I chose in my make.conf are very vanilla and shouldn't cause the said problems in the link.

Go fix it yourself.Edited 2006-05-14 09:43 Sun, 14 May 2006 09:29:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dennis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124420 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124420 So use Debian if you want to go with stupid apt-get.

Err...mister, would you be more careful with your language? It might be regarded as an offensive remark...plus I don't think apt-get is entirely stupid. Sorry. Sun, 14 May 2006 09:41:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Nyte) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124421 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124421 Err...mister, would you be more careful with your language? It might be regarded as an offensive remark...plus I don't think apt-get is entirely stupid. Sorry.

Is this a Debian thread? If you are Debian user and FreeBSD is not for you don't post in a FreeBSD thread. Sun, 14 May 2006 09:45:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dennis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124576 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124576 I had the same issue not with buildworld, but with buildkernel. I found out that somehow cvsup didn't pull the revisions correctly; I ended up erasing the whole /usr/src directory and asking sysinstall to get the sources collection of 6.1-RELEASE.

It then worked flawlessly. Even risking deep voodoo by specifying COPTFLAGS="-O2 -s -march=athlon -fprefetch-loop-arrays" on a test Duron system. Feeling quite snappy so far

Regarding xorg, MAYBE your DRI was hosed somehow; maybe if you recompile your kernel after getting a fresh /usr/src will work? 6.0 had the same DRI issue with SiS cards, but it was fixed on 6.1.

Good luck!

Edit: forgot to mention that cvsup'ping to 6.1-RELENG after I pulled 6.1-RELEASE with sysinstall worked just fine.

p.s.: Where in hades is the edit button? I keep having to copy the permalink adrress and changing it to edit.php in order to edit my posts... =PEdited 2006-05-14 18:39 Sun, 14 May 2006 18:34:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (meianoite) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124586 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124586 Once again, no serious FreeBSD user wants apt/dpkg.

Hi, please don't speak for me, 'k thx?

I am a serious FreeBSD user, and there are bits of apt that I happen to like better than ports.

Sometimes I'm willing to trade flexibility for convenience. Sun, 14 May 2006 19:38:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Cloudy) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124587 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124587 Err...mister, would you be more careful with your language? It might be regarded as an offensive remark...plus I don't think apt-get is entirely stupid. Sorry.

nah, his language is not as bad as linus. linus always uses offensive language in his interviews. Sun, 14 May 2006 19:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (happycamper) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124588 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124588 I am a serious FreeBSD user, and there are bits of apt that I happen to like better than ports. Sometimes I'm willing to trade flexibility for convenience.

OMG. this person is being converted, please resist.
FreeBSD's ports is the only true path. Sun, 14 May 2006 19:44:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (happycamper) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124625 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124625 From /usr/share/examples/etc/make.conf:

CFLAGS controls the compiler settings used when compiling C code. Note that optimization settings other than -O and -O2 are not recommended or supported for compiling the world or the kernel - please revert any nonstandard optimization settings to "-O" or -O2 before submitting bug reports without patches to the developers. Sun, 14 May 2006 21:32:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (rajj) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124636 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124636 OMG. this person is being converted, please resist.
FreeBSD's ports is the only true path.

I don't understand why people are whining about ports in a FreeBSD 6.1 Review. And every time again when there's a FreeBSD article. Go debian or build you own APT-get. Not to speak about the senseless logo debate over and over again.Edited 2006-05-14 22:06 Sun, 14 May 2006 22:01:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (dennis) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?124849 http://www.osnews.com/thread?124849 It has solution to deal with disc switching, but it is not suitable for beginner! User must have experience how to custom install FreeBSD and portupgrade

1) Select only must install "base" + "ports". Then, reboot

2) After reboot:
mkdir /usr/ports/packages
put FreeBSD 6.1#1 in CDROM drive
mount_cd9660 /dev/acd0 /cdrom
cp -Rpv /cdrom/packages/* /usr/ports/packages
umount /cdrom
repeat last three steps to copy FreeBSD 6.1 Disc 2
cd /usr/ports/packages/All
pkg_add portupgrade-2.0.1_1,1.tbz
rehash
portupgrade -NPP
# note: your can go to sysinstall to look which packages your want to install from CD and write down the name which ports you want to install Mon, 15 May 2006 15:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Jabbba Leung) Comments http://www.osnews.com/thread?125887 http://www.osnews.com/thread?125887 Then Linus would surely be modded down here.... at least by me! Thu, 18 May 2006 16:35:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (AlexandreAM) Comments