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.
To view parent comment, click here.
To read all comments associated with this story, please click here.
Member since:2006-01-23
Member since:2006-01-18
Those are pretty big words coming from somebody who's never used Freebsd. I do love how you don't use any facts to back up your statements. Oh and please don't give me performance marks from 1 to 2 years ago. That and I'd like to see performance marks from somebody neutral, not somebody from the linux side of things. Oh and can we not have a flamewar inside another bsd topic please, it's getting rather old. Both Os's are great and should both be used, zealotry won't help either side in recruiting new users.
Member since:2006-01-16
I tried Crux, Arch, Mandrake/Mandriva, Debian and [K]Ubuntu with various WMs and even custom compiled kernels. Now.. let's compare speed.
Bootup with KDE on Linux ~1 freaking minute.
Bootup with KDE on PCBSD ~20 seconds.
But alright I hear you shouting "bootup speed is nothing, everyone can tweak it blah bla" well.. no the linux kernel boot speed is low. Other services can be turned off but the linux kernel will simply boot slow. You can custom compile but it's still going to be slow.
But for sake of clarity let's forget bootup speed.
General WM (let's use KDE as the typical CPU/Mem hog) performance.. same story. KDE starts faster on PCBSD too. And that's precompiled. So please drop the gentoo argument. General responsivness is great I feel like in a usable system again. And now.. why did I try so many Linux distroes? Mostly because of speed and packaging problems.
I for one am not a big fan of ports. It take ages and sometimes things brake because something cannot be updated during portupgrade -a etc. I think for example that apt-get is much better. But performance-wise I find BSD better. I did some basic tests with compilation speed the difference there was lower but still I saved about 5 seconds from 30 on PCBSD compared with Kubuntu with just KDE running. (PCBSD compiled the stuff in 29 secs, kubuntu about 34 on average from 10 times)
Flame war continues 
Member since:2005-07-06
"This is my NeXTstation Turbo Color booting the Mac System 7.1 Operating System using a hardware add-on called 'Daydream'. The Daydream has a Mac ROM and a few custom ICs in it and hooked up to the NeXTs DSP port. Turns your NeXT into a full fledged 68k powered Mac." So cool.
"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce NetBSD 6.1, the first feature update of the NetBSD 6 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed important for security or stability reasons, as well as new features and enhancements. Please note that all fixes in the prior security/bugfix updates (NetBSD 6.0.1 and 6.0.2) are also in 6.1."
"At the end of a week in which Electronic Arts confirmed it wasn't developing a thing for the Wii U, one of the software engineers in EA Sports' Canada studio, in a series of since-deleted tweets, disparaged the console as 'crap' and suggested Nintendo should give up on hardware altogether. 'The Wii U is crap. Less powerful than an Xbox 360. Poor online/store. Weird tablet', tweeted Bob Summerwill, listed as a senior software engineer at EA Canada, in a reply to a tweet posting a link about EA's no-Wii U news. 'Nintendo are walking dead at this point'." The Wii U is turning into the 21st century's Virtual Boy.
"In NixOS, the entire operating system - the kernel, applications, system packages, configuration files, and so on - is built by the Nix package manager from a description in a purely functional build language. The fact that it's purely functional essentially means that building a new configuration cannot overwrite previous configurations. Most of the other features follow from this." Interesting approach. A Linux distribution, sure, but with some very refreshing ideas about system configuration.
Appfour added, among other features, C/C++ support to its new version of AIDE. From Android-IDE, "Now you can write parts of your app or your whole app in C/C++ on your device. AIDE supports the Standard Android NDK toolchain (GCC 4.6 + Bionic, STL, ...). No changes are necessary if you want to build an app developed on a PC with Eclipse. C/C++ development is fully integrated: Build errors appear in the error list and files can easily be navigated to with Go to file. The editor supports C/C++ syntax highlighting."
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:
2006-01-09
1) all BSD's are performant, portable, and secure.
Donīt want to start yet another flamewar, but I donīt think that any of the BSDs are regarded as excelent performers when compared to most other OSes, with the slight exception of FreeBSD which is highly optimized to the x86 platform, but even then, it canīt touch Linux performance-wise (on the 2.6 series, that is).
But then, I donīt think that performance is everything on an OS experience and Iīm looking forward for a time when Iīll have enough spare time to install and play with FreeBSD. From what Iīve been reading about it, Iīm sure that Iīll enjoy it a lot.