DragonFly BSD 1.4 is the third major release of Matthew Dillon's fork of the FreeBSD operating system, and significant progress has been made towards reaching many of the project's numerous goals. New in this release include a more up to date version of the GNU Compiler Collection (required due to the incread use of thread local storage in DragonFly), an import of NetBSD's Citrus code (Comprehensive I18N Framework Towards Respectable Unix Systems), major reworking of all core subsystems in preparation for removing the MP lock, rewrites of various VFS related code and many updated drivers, frameworks and contributed programs.
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Member since:2006-01-18
It's a quick review. It raises awareness about what Dragonfly is. Gives a couple of tips to get going, points out some problems and offers a conclusion.
Herein lies the problem. It seems that all the reviews are "quick". I am sick of "quick" - perhaps because I take the time to read about the project. Furthermore, the article is full of assumptions, for example:
Setting up 1.4 to do anything useful (as a desktop system for example) of course requires a number of third party packages, which currently are in short supply.
I think most *nix users can get a long fine for most tasks without a GUI - infact the only reason I usually have a GUI is for the convenience of having multiple terminals open.
I also have to point out that just saying DFly is "a logical extension of FreeBSD 4.x" does not mean it is supposed to be the Ubuntu. It simply means that Dillion felt that plans regarding the internals of 5.x were not the way to go - and when I say internals I speak of things like scheduling, SMP, internal APIs, etc. It has nothing to do with creating a fool proof GUI platform for grandma.
Lastly, I applaud the author for sticking his neck out, and I hope that he sees these criticisms as a way to improve future attempts. Will I put my money where my mouth is? I just might do that because it is easier to illustrate what I would like to see by doing it myself.
Member since:
2005-07-06
I am personally getting sick of OS review articles that simply discuss how to install something and that it has few packages, yada yada yada.
It's a quick review. It raises awareness about what Dragonfly is. Gives a couple of tips to get going, points out some problems and offers a conclusion.
It was lucid and well done for what it offered, which is why I rated it 8.
You can write your own uber-leet review with indepth analyses, benchmarks and such if you want you know.