http://www.osnews.com/story/571/FreeBSD_Week_Introduction_to_FreeBSD Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2009, David Adams adam+nospam@osnews.com Wed, 25 Nov 2009 03:23:42 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I love the smell of FreeBSD in the morning - the smell of victory. Mon, 28 Jan 2002 19:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I was just looking at the QA/release team's mailing list archive and from what they are saying 4.5 should be out sometime next week. They still don't have all the packages in 4.5-RC3, but they plan on having that fixed, plus some additional security fixes in by the end of this week. Then, one more round of testing and we should be able to get at the 4.5 ISOs.

Apparently Yahoo wasn't able to wait for the blessed version of 4.5, according to the release team's page they already deployed one of the 4.5-RC's on their systems. I love that no matter how much press hype Linux gets FreeBSD silently powers Yahoo and Hotmail, arguably two of the busiest sites on the Internet. Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:13:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A couple of errors:

1. /stand/sysinstall is the curses interface which allows you to format a drive,mount nfs partitions and set up a network. If I remember right linuxconf has a tcl/tk and a ncurses version?

2. ee is also installed by default and has to be one of the most friendly editors available. Mon, 28 Jan 2002 20:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Interesting - I have been thinking about giving FreeBSD a test drive. Guess I'll wait another week or so for 4.5 Mon, 28 Jan 2002 21:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I wouldn't mind if at the end of this BSD series there would be a short paragraph describing the differences between Free- Open- and NetBSD as I'm a bit confused as to which one is best suited from a users perspective. Mon, 28 Jan 2002 22:59:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? FreeBSD is better for a "desktop" and also as a heavy db/web server.
NetBSD is also pretty good as a desktop, but prefer it from FreeBSD only if FreeBSD does not run on the particular platform you want to run BSD on.
Choose OpenBSD if you have security concerns or as a firewall in your network as it is the most secure of all. Mon, 28 Jan 2002 23:04:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? wow, i didn't know that 4.5 was coming out so soon!

i just spent $50.-- on a book on 4.4

doh, still it'll be good reading.........

yes, ee is a nice tect editor for newbies such as myself Mon, 28 Jan 2002 23:08:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? and hated it. i'm afraid to say i'm just too dependant on linux now. i tried netbsd which is, as was said, minimal to say the least. not that that is a bad thing, i just could get used to vi and the (seemingly) strange layout of files, especially config files.

i have yet to try the wonderful ports system because i can never get that far without running home to linux. its not that i cant cut it at the prompt: this box i installed from scratch, and many before it, but bsd seems a harsh and unfriendly environment...

even after i changed my keymap i still cant get vi to delete anything less than a line (i confess, i like joe) at a time, and my networking config never even got off the ground. wscons confused me, even though the docs are very well written and theres no command history. as i said it didnt help that my delete key wasnt working properly ^H^H^H, etc...

maybe freebsd will be more welcoming, but i do hope theyve got bash Mon, 28 Jan 2002 23:40:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? bsd has bash...... Tue, 29 Jan 2002 00:19:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? freebsd has bash, but it is not installed by default. you can either install it via the ports tree, or from the bash package on the CD

natha Tue, 29 Jan 2002 01:00:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I tried to install FreeBSD a few weeks ago on VMWare. A quick warning for 56k modem users: It can't resume an ftp install, hence why I've not yet given it a go. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 02:37:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? A small correction: IIRC, the ports collection contains appr 6000 makefiles, not 4000 as stated in the article.

And to the linux user that cant handle vi, you do know joe is available in BSD as well, dont you?
Its as simple as 'cd /usr/ports/editors/joe && make install', wait while it downloads and compiles, and you will have joe. Same for bash, just cd to /usr/ports/shells/bash instead. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 02:55:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? cool! FreeBSD week! Tue, 29 Jan 2002 03:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? On the server ftp.freebsd.org the release 4.5 is already available. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 03:56:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? Only the main server has that particular files. The mirrors are not updated yet.
In fact, I just reloaded the particular ftp page and the second disk is STILL UPLOADING as of this writting. This means that both the FreeBSD 4.5 disk will be finishing uploading in LESS than ONE hour. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 04:07:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I tried Linux and hated it and ran back to FreeBSD.

Linux installations blow crud all over your disk with no organization, and you never know where anything is. FreeBSD is nice and neat and everything is organized. During an install you know exactly what you are getting, instead of just getting a dump of 6000 packages I'll never use, like most Linux Distros install.

In FreeBSD it's easy to know what tools to use to administer your system: /stand/sysinstall and emacs (or your favorite editor) manage everything. In Linux, there seem to be 10 different management tools for every feature. Talk about confusing.

FreeBSD also behaves simply at startup. You stick stuff in /usr/local/etc/rc.d, or you edit /etc/rc.conf, and stuff runs. Simple. I never could figure out the silly Linux startup stuff.

The ports tree just rules. Who hasn't downloaded an RPM, gone rpm -U some.rpm, and gotten about 20 failed dependencies? Package management in Linux is just ridiculous. Give me "cd /usr/ports/editors/emacs21 && make install" any day!
Plus, if you don't run release candidates (betas) or the CURRENT version of FreeBSD, and stick to STABLE or RELEASEs, it NEVER crashes. Ever. Linux stuff is always beta.

My two bits. Feel free to flame. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 15:46:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I followed Eugenia's link to the main site and 4.5-mini.iso and 4.5-disc2.iso are there, and from the looks of it have finished uploading, but if you look in the md5sums those are the only two cds listed. I hope they finish uploading all of them, but i'm not sure they will until next week. The images that are up there are the mini bootable version of the os on a single cd and a fix it cd, so they might have been able to finish those images before the final release version is done. Tue, 29 Jan 2002 16:54:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? in my opinion, FreeBSD is many times better than any Linux. A long time ago I used Linux for a bit. Then I found out about FreeBSD. After that I have not been able to use Linux. Why? Because *BSD has everything i need and presents it better. The ports tree is just one of the amazing features the OS provides. I can't be bothered looking for RPMs or DEBs (or trying to install Slackware packages).

To end this little note, I have to say that FreeBSD is the best OS I have tried. Wed, 30 Jan 2002 13:17:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I tried FreeBSD 4.4 on my desktop machine as a dry run for replacing my Slackware Linux server.

I was very impressed by the well thought out filesystem, and how the whole system felt. With native Java support coming, this will be the ideal development platform.

Last night I downloaded all the ISO images for FreeBSd 4.5....can't wait to load it onto my server. Thu, 31 Jan 2002 13:53:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I own my own business and have a few servers too run. Microsoft has been really pissing me off with their liscensing so I became interest in open source solutions. I tried Linux and FreeBSD and I like FreeBSD better. It is made to be a server OS and that is it. The best thing is it does that really really well. I have it running on an old pentium 100 as a test box and apache is flying. I tried Redhat 7.2 on the same box and it was jerky. I've been using Microsoft products for a long time now but have had only minor dificulties so far in learning FreeBSD. As for using an editor if you don't like vi use ee
FREE BSD KICKS ALL ASS!!! Sat, 02 Feb 2002 08:22:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? I wnat to thank Nathan Mace for his clear, informative, helpful articles on FreeBSD.
I've evolved from Red Hat 6.0 through 7.2, over to Corel, then SuSE 7.3 and was contemplating Mandrake 8.1.3 when I read that Yahoo runs on FreeBSD (I think). So I Googled over to OSNews and consumed Nathan's words eagerly. Why can't Linux be less..well, Linux, and more like BSD?
To quote Chris Issak, "I wonder..."
If I can run my beloved KDE on BSD, I'm yours for life! Wed, 06 Feb 2002 22:49:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments http://osnews.com/thread? http://osnews.com/thread? hay FreeBSD is fast then Linux. for what
if u r compiling the software, running the web servers, BIND Servers etc
if Linux solve the query in 10 minuts then FreeBSD can do it with 7 minuts wowoowow

thank's a lot Sat, 30 Mar 2002 05:43:00 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Anonymous) Comments