"After using PC-BSD several days, I was impressed with how easy it is to use. It's a good desktop OS, and a great way to introduce BSD to new users. The 1.0 release has a few rough edges, but nothing that should scare off prospective users. For the future, I'd like to see something like Synaptic to manage PBI packages and allow users to browse for software without having to visit the PC-BSD Web site, and it would be nice if the site had a little more documentation, but I expect such things will come along in due time as the project matures."
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Member since:2006-02-10
I spent two months with gentoo and came back screaming to ports, which gives me the same lean system with 1/10 of the configuration headache. And you can't have "more" recompiling - when you upgrade, you upgrade the packages you have installed.
FreeBSD ports miss information about versions (package abc requires def >=2.5). So, either you recompile all dependencies, even if you didn't intend to, and be on the safe side or try your luck and skip it. Also, I think there isn't a "stable" branch for ports, only "current" exists - that would be equivalent to running ~arch in Gentoo.
As for .pbi, it's intention is probably to install a few desktop apps e.g. firefox, but the rest of the system e.g. Gnome is still using tradional packages? (or I am wrong). That doesn't look good to me.
Re: CaptainFlint. portupgrade helps, but can't solve the above problems. As I said I haven't used binaries much though.
Edited 2006-02-15 13:52
Member since:2006-01-24
For me it comes down to liking source compiled packages better. With faster machines now a days it is not that cumbersome. I did compile gnome 2.8 on a 450 mhz p3 with 128 megs of ram last year... took 2 days in total for everything. Did it again this year on a dual amd64s with 5 gigs of ram and it was < 2 hours.
Member since:2005-09-10
FreeBSD ports miss information about versions (package abc requires def >=2.5). So, either you recompile all dependencies,..
No, not really - there are some occasions when you have to update related ports, but these are the exceptions, always notified in /usr/ports/UPDATING. So, for instance, there is an update to mysql. You compiled amarok with mysql support - which means, amarok now depends on mysql. When you portupgrade -a - which updates mysql to the newest version - you don't have to recompile amarok. Also, if you take a look at the Makefiles, most ports depend on the presence of specific libraries, not package version. Everything is handled automatically by portugprade/install tools - you don't have to skip anything, or have additional recompiles: most of the times (there are exceptions as I noted) when you update, you only update those packs that have newer version available in the ports tree. I might have misunderstood your post however, so please clarify if I missed your point.
Ports is a single version - supporting at least 4 branches of FreeBSD (4.x, 5.x, 6.x, 7-CURRENT) - I think that this is not a problem, in fact, it is a small miracle I believe 
Ports are also very stable compared to ebuilds (except stable branch, which is slightly more outdated than ports). Yes, there are always broken ports (but currently, www.freshports.org doesn't differenciate between broken on $arch or $version - but they are working on it, so half of the ports marked as broken will probably work for you, because they might be broken on Fbsd 4.x, or on the Alpha, or any combinations).
Official Apple statement on PRISM and privacy: "Regardless of the circumstances, our Legal team conducts an evaluation of each request and, only if appropriate, we retrieve and deliver the narrowest possible set of information to the authorities. In fact, from time to time when we see inconsistencies or inaccuracies in a request, we will refuse to fulfill it." This is basically Apple re-publishing their earlier statement in a more official manner. You either believe it, or you don't.
The open source Contiki operating system and its commercial Thingsquare distribution are making strides towards the connected home. According to a Computerworld article, a new LED light bulb manufacturer is putting small computers into their light bulbs. Each computer runs the Contiki OS, which gives each bulb an IP address and allows them to be controlled with a smartphone application. To connect the bulbs to the application, the bulbs use both Wi-Fi and the much lower power IEEE 802.15.4 mesh technology.
"Google asked the secretive Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court on Tuesday to ease long-standing gag orders over data requests it makes, arguing that the company has a constitutional right to speak about information it's forced to give the government. The legal filing, which cites the First Amendment's guarantee of free speech, is the latest move by the California-based tech giant to protect its reputation in the aftermath of news reports about sweeping National Security Agency surveillance of Internet traffic." Draining the ditch after the cow has drowned in it."I can't find one person who has been using the Nexus 7 for an extended period of time, and hasn't seen a massive downgrade in performance. Just what kind of downgrade are we talking here? I cannot pick up my Nexus 7 without experiencing problems like a lag of ten seconds, or more, just to rotate the display; touches refusing to acknowledged; stuttering notification panel actions; and unresponsive apps." Fully and utterly agreed. My Nexus 7 was blazing-fast and awesome for a few months, and at some point, it just started sucking. Just like that. I've tried loads of ROMs, and nothing helps.A new release of the hobby operating system MenuetOS! The release notes are a bit non-descript, but you'll have to take what you can get: "updates and improvements (picview, httpc, ehci, ...)"."The Internet is one of the most transformative technologies of our lifetimes. But for 2 out of every 3 people on earth, a fast, affordable Internet connection is still out of reach. And this is far from being a solved problem. There are many terrestrial challenges to Internet connectivity - jungles, archipelagos, mountains. There are also major cost challenges. Right now, for example, in most of the countries in the southern hemisphere, the cost of an Internet connection is more than a month's income. Solving these problems isn't simply a question of time: it requires looking at the problem of access from new angles. So today we're unveiling our latest moonshot from Google[x]: balloon-powered Internet access." Insane.
"MineAssemble is a tiny bootable Minecraft clone written partly in x86 assembly. I made it first and foremost because a university assignment required me to implement a game in assembly for a computer systems course. Because I had never implemented anything more complex than a 'Hello World' bootloader before, I decided I wanted to learn about writing my own kernel code at the same time. Note that the goal of this project was not to write highly efficient hand-optimized assembly code, but rather to have fun and write code that balances readability and speed. This is primarily accomplished by proper commenting and consistent code structuring." Just cool.
Jon Rubinstein, former CEO of Palm: "Well, I'm not sure I would have sold the company to HP. That's for sure. Talk about a waste. Not that I had any choice because when you sell a company you don't get to decide that. Obviously, the board and shareholders decide that. If we had known they were just going to shut it down and never really give it a chance to flourish, what would have been the point of selling the company? I think the deal we had with Verizon really hurt us, but who knew that at the time? These things are all hindsight.""And so it is with Dell's Alienware X51 R2, a small form factor gaming PC in console digs. It's shaped similar to Microsoft's Xbox 360 Slim, and though it's slightly larger than either a 360 or PlayStation 3, the X51 R2 would be right at home in a living room setting nestled next to a large screen TV. Indeed, it's adept at running Steam's Big Picture mode, and if your primary objective is to play games in the living room, go ahead and consider the X51 R2 a hybrid game console." This is obviously not the only machine like this - still, these are very valid console alternatives even for those that don't like being hunched over with a cramped WASD-claw. Also, PC gamers among us: could you get away with the $699 model for gaming?
From Bloomberg: "Microsoft, the world's largest software company, provides intelligence agencies with information about bugs in its popular software before it publicly releases a fix, according to two people familiar with the process. That information can be used to protect government computers and to access the computers of terrorists or military foes." The lid has officially been blown off.
Member since:
2005-09-10
I am a Linux person as well, and have used FreeBSD as my everyday desktop for 2 months in the past. It was great from a Slackware/Gentoo perspective, but ports were weak for upgrading the system. Too much recompiling (even more than Gentoo).
I wander why you say that - I spent two months with gentoo and came back screaming to ports, which gives me the same lean system with 1/10 of the configuration headache. And you can't have "more" recompiling - when you upgrade, you upgrade the packages you have installed. If you have more packages installed, there'll be more recompiling during an upgrade.
Now: my dream FreeBSD desktop would use apt-get-ish binary package management (handling versions and such) and still keep ports v2 around, somehow.
Well, pkg_add -r pkgname is roughtly equivalent to apt-get install pkgname. In fact, the FreeBSD ports system (and this feature alone makes it better than any pkg management I tried) makes it ridiculously easy to create binary packages, even from software you installed from ports! a pkg_create -R -b ooo-build* will build an ooo-build binary with all its dependencies in your current directory. This binary will be similar to a .deb - it knows exactly what packages are needed to be installed as dependencies, the pkg_* tools are able to fetch them automatically, etc. This makes deployment of customized, precompiled, optimized (for instance, for i686) binary packages very easy. You can build on one machine, and put the binaries on an ftp, and install them via pkg_add on the rest. Oh, and creating binary packages during installation is as easy as adding a single letter to portupgrade/portinstall: portupgrade -ap. -p will put a binary package in /usr/ports/packages (in fact, it will automatically create the same directory layout you would find on the official ftp repositories for binary packages) if it exists, or in the port directory if it doesn't.
.pbi probably can't scale much
What do you mean? What is "scaling" in the context of package management?