Rick Collette discuss the projects’ plans ahead and the roadmap for ekkoBSD.
BSD Vault interviews Rick Collette Interview
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Very interesting article about a new project name ekkoBSD. Seems like some impressive ideas brewing for this new startup *BSD group. Based on OpenBSD 3.3 with various tweaks in the pipe.
One of the most provocative statements:
We want the security and stability of BSD, but there is so much that could be added to it to make it easier to operate. We’ve been through the whole “if you can’t do it by hand from a commandline, then you shouldn’t be doing it anyway” routine, and frankly, that’s a crock. I personally can do anything I need from the commandline, and I find myself more and more stringing together things in scripts, or putting a web front end on them, or something of that like.
Does this mean the security with some nice GUI help along the way. The interview goes on to their next OS release. Hmmm. Seems like a project to keep an eye on.
Is it me or is there more projects comming from the OpenBSD Universe?
MirOS, ekkoBSD
I love the fact that BSD development is still going on strong, but why do we need more BSD distributions? Why can’t people make one distribution strong instead of scattering their efforts all over the place, redoing things which have been done so many times. This will be the downfall of the free software!
Make something useful instead. Fix cdrecord for linux, or concentrate your efforts on an area that really needs it (XFree86 has finally collapsed, now let’s see a good windowing system come out of this.)
Also, I’m not sold by the commandline speech. Some of us actually like the commandline, because we’re actually using BSD as servers (which I beleive is it’s primary intention) rather than a desktop system. I don’t want to bloat my installation with graphics stuff. But if ekko’s only intention is making BSD available for desktop systems, maybe the focus should be on creating installers for an existing BSD instead.
let me take the typical OSS argument:
strength through diversity
after-all if ekko develops something cool can’ts the other bsds just copy it back into their os?
I love the fact that BSD development is still going on strong, but why do we need more BSD distributions?
People, please stop say that again and again all over and over in the different articles. That’s just plain stupid.
The very easy answer is: No one can agree on the same thing, so their another choice is to fork or create another distro. That way, they can contiune develope, hack and do anything what they want to do on their OS without bug one project that will not or not agree to add their cool stuff.
after-all if ekko develops something cool can’ts the other bsds just copy it back into their os?
Yes, they can as long the license allow them to. It won’t be first time for FreeBSD, OpenBSD and NetBSD to copy each others.
http://ekkobsd.pegasosppc.com/
We are looking forward to Genesi/Pegasos support of EkkoBSD.
R&B
damn right
(XFree86 has finally collapsed, now let’s see a good windowing system come out of this.)
1. It hasn’t “collapsed” in the slightest. Quit with the hyperbole. The core team, long having been redundant, has decided to split and make the development process more open. This is a great boost to the project. 4.4.0 is just about to come out.
2. How is X not a good windowing system? It’s stable, it’s cleanly designed, and it works. Sure, XFree86 itself could do with some improvements in a few areas, but it’s fine. A lot of newcomers enjoy dissing X for reasons they don’t fully understand — terms such as “bloated” and “slow” are thrown around. And those of us who’ve been using XFree86 for many years know that it can run fine on 486 machines. GNOME and KDE are making it slow. X is fine. X still allows me to set up a graphical terminal on an old Pentium box.
X is coming along just fine with freedesktop.org’s modifications. In fact, they are already in ports. You can see what they are capable of on freedesktop.org. The extensions I have in mind are: libXdamage, libXcursor (finally), libXcomposite, damageext, compositeext, libXrandr etc…
I also read that FreeBSD will soon switch to freedesktop.org’s xfree, and these extensions will be added as dependencies to the xfree-server. Currently they are in for testing purposes:
“New port: Prerelease version of compositeext from freedesktop.org:
X Composite extension headers and specification
Testing is encouraged, but please do not use these ports as dependencies until
they are updated to release tarballs and the XFree86 ports have been updated to
depend on them.”
http://www.freshports.org/x11/compositeext/
http://www.freshports.org/x11/damageext/
http://www.freshports.org/x11/libXcomposite/
http://www.freshports.org/x11/libXcursor/
http://www.freshports.org/x11/libXdamage/
http://www.freshports.org/x11/xextensions/
Check out these screenshots from Keith P. for composite extension: http://freedesktop.org/~keithp/screenshots/
So it is very much alive, and it is already in a usable state.
Everyone are just attracted towards Linux familiarity.
It doesnt show that BSD is dying.
Many native things like nVidia, Opera, JDK, … are starting slowly. No one will support for a dying product!!!. The power and stability of BSD will be soon understood by everyone when they start using it.
It will HAPPEN. Mark my words !!!
Will all the 12 year old Slashdotters please crawl back under the rock whence they came? And preferbly die while doing so.
I grow weary of the trolling.
Plenty of attitude but no current facts.
1) Fact ext2/ext3 filesystems are based on FFS. Which was developed by BSD.
2) Microsoft and Linux both use *bsd implementation of their TCP/IP stack.
3) Over 2 million servers on the web use BSD. Check out netcraft for more details. I would post a link but you wouldnt look it up anyway.
If popularity and death have some sort of inverse relationship then you might be right. However if that is the case then all the BSD Trolls have no leg to stand on (combined). Walking dead I tell you.
Cheaper operating system and more stable (NT)? Fan of ye old crack pipe I see.
I forgot to mention that microsofts own unix tool set is based on BSD (openbsd).
http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/03/09/29/1352217.shtml?tid=109&tid=122&…
If *bsd is dying then why does Apache.org/Sendmail.org/yahoo and etc have all their servers on *bsd?
Why is Nokia’s firewall is based on *bsd?
Why is Juniper’s routers software (Junos) based on *bsd?
For a dead operating system, you apparently have a lot of business (commercial and not commercial) using it.
Also a footnote, how about checking Netcrafts uptime list.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Please tell me what other operating systems are listed in those spaces? What OS dominates the board? If you look you might be surprised.
Is indeed shown in this thread.
Anyone posting this much flamebait and being completely ignorant and blinded by a kernel is just too much for me to rely on.
That just made me decide that I’ll keep propagating for freedom of choice for all OSses for another couple of years with one exception, Linux as on every field Linux attempts to be best on, it allways come second as in, there is ALLWAYS better choice than Linux no matter what task you might have.
Thank you for providing me with this energy Mr Wank Medical Engineer
Why all *bsd posts become a flame about how bad is *BSD and how other OS are better ???
what is or will be the window manager for ekkoBSD?
Just an illusion dear Turok. BSD userbase is actually growing in numbers, even though percentages might fool you as the market grows faster.
The thing about BSD is that the entry level is higher than Linux entry level resulting in that BSD steals many users from Linux territory after they gained some experience.
This is also a reason to why certain Zealots hate BSD and they are many more than BSD zealots. This results in flamy debates.
OSs simply don’t die just like that, especially not an OS so popular and with such experienced coders as *BSD’s have.
“The thing about BSD is that the entry level is higher than Linux entry level resulting in that BSD steals many users from Linux territory after they gained some experience.”
Yes, exactly, that’s how it happened with me
On the other hand, I encourage people to use linux as well. My roommate is a gentoo (and linux) newbie himself, although seeing how difficult is gentoo, he is considering switching to BSD 
Doesn’t like the fact that you can’t configure your scrollback buffer, and that portage doesn’t work as advertised (at the moment, openoffice.org won’t compile on his machine – yeah, cflags are commented out in make conf, no j2 or whatever -, a week ago, fluxbox wouldn’t, etc.). Big + of BSD ports: its bleeding edge. Date of gimp 2.0 prerelease: jan 7. Date it was added to ports: jan 7 
Big + of BSD ports: its bleeding edge. Date of gimp 2.0 prerelease: jan 7. Date it was added to ports: jan 7
Of course it’s going to be quicker in something that uses a ports system.
You barely have to do anything to add something like a new Gimp release to a BSD’s ports. You’re just downloading the generic source tarball and adding patches/whatever to it, then building it. It’s just relatively automated compared to building something yourself without the help of a port.
Compare that to something like Debian or Fedora. You have to download the source, sometimes patch, debianize the source/write a spec file (AFAIK anyway. not an rpm person), build the package and upload it.
I can not confirm that there will be a default Window Manager. I know under *BSD that you have several choices (no defaults). If I were to take a “wild” guess, I would say that their might not be a default gui; you will have choices of gui’s via a ports or ports like collection.
1) Care to tell me what’s wrong with UFS? Other from the fact that it works perfectly well unlike certain other FS’s ..
3) Smart people are a minority. Proven fact. Thanks for clearing that up.
Seriously, some people need to grow up.
Once again, facts and truths go out the window when it comes to BSD advocacy:
1) Fact ext2/ext3 filesystems are based on FFS. Which was developed by BSD.
Erm, totally wrong. ext2 was based on ext, which in turn was based on the Minix filesystem. ext3 is a journaling FS; FFS isn’t even journaling (SoftUpdates adds some of this functionality).
2) Microsoft and Linux both use *bsd implementation of their TCP/IP stack.
Erm, totally wrong again. At one point Windows did use a stack derived from an older BSD flavour, but it was complete rewritten. Linux’s was created from scratch.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Please tell me what other operating systems are listed in those spaces?
This is the worst. For the thousandth time, people, Linux’s uptime counter wraps at 496 days. There are Linux boxes that have been up for years, but they simply won’t get on that chart because after 496 days the uptime counter wraps to 0. That proves nothing substantial about BSD.
This kind of FUD and zealotry is unhealthy. Advocate your favourite OS with real facts.
http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/today/top.avg.html
Please tell me what other operating systems are listed in those spaces?
This is the worst. For the thousandth time, people, Linux’s uptime counter wraps at 496 days. There are Linux boxes that have been up for years, but they simply won’t get on that chart because after 496 days the uptime counter wraps to 0. That proves nothing substantial about BSD.
You’re right about that. It’s the wrong link… Netcraft has far more interesting statistics about FreeBSD. See this news article from yesterday, which describes the most reliable hosting services in the second half of 2003:
http://news.netcraft.com/archives/2004/01/11/inetu_most_reliable_ho…
Quote:
Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.
Netcraft also releases there statistics on reliability once a month. You should take a look at them.
Quote:
Seven of the top nine sites run on FreeBSD. The exceptions are Datapipe, which is doing a fine job of promoting the reliability of Windows 2003, and German hosting company komplex.net which runs on Linux.
Wow, that’s pretty good for an OS the GPL zealots claim is dead …
I guess that hype is more important than quality to some…
I guess that hype is more important than quality to some…
No, broad hardware support, commercial software range and extensive support schemes are more important to some. Not to mention releases which aren’t EOLed after 12 months.
Those are reasons Linux is more used than FreeBSD. Not hype.
Telemann aka Realist aka whatever, please don’t start another flamewar. We’ve seen in a previous thread that you’re really good at it.
Now, let’s go on-topic again (please), there’s already enough off-topic talk here. It looks like EkkoBSD isn’t diverting too much from OpenBSD right now, but I’m curious to see the kernel changes they’re planning to do in the next release.
I’m not starting a flamewar, I’m replying to the utter lies being spread by BSD zealots — ext2 is based on FFS, Linux uses the BSD TCP/IP stack, Netcraft is proof that BSD is better than Linux etc.
When I start lying, by all means call me a troll and flamewar instigator. But responding to lies and FUD isn’t wrong.
When I start lying, by all means call me a troll and flamewar instigator. But responding to lies and FUD isn’t wrong.
FUD is a word explicitly used by Linux zealots. Zealots start flamewars…
Couldn’t find the URL to their site after reading the article or the OSNews comments so I thought I’d post it:
http://www.ekkobsd.org
If I overlooked it, someone please don’t flame me! 😛