There are a lot of options in the Free UNIX market at the moment. Everyone's favorite buzzword is Linux, and Sun is in the process of releasing Solaris under a Free Software license. One family, however, receives less attention than it is due. Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) has grown into almost a complete replacement for UNIX, with numerous enhancements. David Chisnall explains why the BSD family has found its way into a large number of systems and what these systems can do for you.
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Member since:2005-07-06
My favorite distro is OpenBSD. It's the way ALL OSs should be written, with security in mind. PLUS, it doesn't loose ease of use or potential eye candy as a trade off. You can still install and window/desktop manager and is no easier/difficult to operate than any other BSD (as far as I know).
I always had the impression that OpenBSD was super hard to install and only for the faint of heart. Now, though, having experienced all 3 main BSD's, I find that OpenBSD is fairly easy to setup and administer. It's NetBSD that I find downright daunting. I can setup NetBSD, but then things get pretty wierd for me. No home directory? No adduser command? I guess it is Unix the old school way. I'm not a newbie, but I found it pretty confusing. I have a nice wireless OpenBSD laptop to go with my Debian and Mandriva laptops.
Member since:2006-01-11
Hmm. I have no experience with OpenBSD, but I do have lots of experience with NetBSD and some with FreeBSD. I don't find either of them terribly difficult to configure or maintain. If anything, both are a lot simpler to setup and maintain than a Debian or RedHat system, at least from the command line.
As for the no home directory thing, the root user is in /root I believe and you can add users with useradd -g users -m -s /bin/ksh foouser, just like you can on most Linux distros. If you specify the -m flag the program will create the /home/foouser directory and copy over any skeleton files. I guess NetBSD doesn't create a /home folder during installation because there are no users that can login (besides root) by default.
Btw, I have a nice wireless NetBSD laptop to go with my Ubuntu desktop. To each his own 
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Ars nails it: "The answer is that Google did announce what amounts to a fairly substantial Android update yesterday. They simply did it without adding to the update fragmentation problems that continue to plague the platform. By focusing on these changes and not the apparently-waiting-in-the-wings update to the core software, Google is showing us one of the ways in which it's trying to fix the update problem."
"It is good for programmers to understand what goes on inside a processor. The CPU is at the heart of our career. What goes on inside the CPU? How long does it take for one instruction to run? What does it mean when a new CPU has a 12-stage pipeline, or 18-stage pipeline, or even a 'deep' 31-stage pipeline? Programs generally treat the CPU as a black box. Instructions go into the box in order, instructions come out of the box in order, and some processing magic happens inside. As a programmer, it is useful to learn what happens inside the box. This is especially true if you will be working on tasks like program optimization. If you don't know what is going on inside the CPU, how can you optimize for it? This article is about what goes on inside the x86 processor's deep pipeline."
"It was the only moment I heard regret slip into Otellini's voice during the several hours of conversations I had with him. 'The lesson I took away from that was, while we like to speak with data around here, so many times in my career I've ended up making decisions with my gut, and I should have followed my gut,' he said. 'My gut told me to say yes.'" The world would've been a much different place - Apple would have been less dependant on Samsung for its chips, which probably would've meant less money for Samsung to develop its Galaxy business.Glass is getting some love at Google I/O as well. New applications have been released - Facebook, Twitter, Evernote, Elle, Tumblr, and CNN. Perhaps more interesting: the newly announced Google Glass Developer Kit will allow offline applications and direct hardware access - great for hacking and expanding Glass' potential. This kit will really allow hackers to put Glass through its paces."But Beck and Merrill decided that simply banning toxic players wasn't an acceptable solution for their game. Riot Games began experimenting with more constructive modes of player management through a formal player behavior initiative that actually conducts controlled experiments on its player base to see what helps reduce bad behavior. The results of that initiative have been shared at a lecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and on panels at the Penny Arcade Expo East and the Game Developers Conference." Absolutely fascinating stuff. I'm a League of Legends player, and to be honest, the community isn't nearly as bad as some make it out to be. I'm happy Riot games has the guts to employ science to address the issue.
Member since:
2005-10-18
BSD rocks (as my subject says
)
My favorite distro is OpenBSD. It's the way ALL OSs should be written, with security in mind. PLUS, it doesn't loose ease of use or potential eye candy as a trade off. You can still install and window/desktop manager and is no easier/difficult to operate than any other BSD (as far as I know).
Over all, BSD is awesome
(note: I only read parts of the article ATM, more in a couple mins)
--ZaNkY