Submitted by Last week it was BSD week: OpenBSD 4.5, NetBSD 5.0, and DragonFlyBSD 2.2.1. FreeBSD 7.2 completes the picture, with every major BSD now having a new and fresh release waiting to be installed on your desktop, laptop, or server.
FreeBSD 7.2 obviously builds upon version 7.1, but introduces a few new features as well. The team lists the following changes as the most important of this release:
- support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory
- Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails
- csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository
- Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2
- sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors
FreeBSD 7.2 is available for amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, and sparc64, and can be installed through plain old iso images or over the network. Torrent downloads are preferred, but the release announcement also has a list of mirrors.
Still waiting for Adobe to put their money where their mouth is and to release their promised Flash player for FreeBSD. No, LinuxCompat + Adobe Flash Player 7 for Linux, Gnash and swfdec don’t cut the mustard.
Waiting for adobe to release Flash for a system not used as Desktop.
Or let’s say, used, with market share of 0.0001 %
Oh joy oh market share… never mind usage share, because it doesn’t appear in market figures. 🙂
By the way, I’m using FreeBSD on the desktop exclusively since version 4.0 without any problems. Needless to say that “Flash” doesn’t matter to me.
That’s alright if Adobe didn’t care because the market share is tiny, they’re a company after all. But they promised they would release it, and they even showcased a development version in an IT fair.
Of course you could live without Flash, that would mean no video and no navigation for many web sites. But you could also live without a computer. My swimming teacher doesn’t have a computer, and he doesn’t even have an email address either. He doesn’t miss it.
Oh, and yes, BSD is used as a desktop system by…FreeBSD users themselves, PC-BSD and DesktopBSD users. And maybe more…
If waiting for Flash on BSD is a deal breaker for you, then perhaps you’ve misunderstood FreeBSD’s target audience.
While the main market for BSD users is the server there are many people that do use and would like to use it on the desktop and like it or not more and more sites are using flash. I personally look forward to Gnash being 100% flash compatible but right now that isn’t the case.
“If waiting for Flash on BSD is a deal breaker for you, then perhaps you’ve misunderstood FreeBSD’s target audience.”
How is the “target audience” for BSD any different than the target audience for Solaris, which has a supported 64 bit Flash Player readily available? Or are you implying that BSD isn’t meant to be run on the desktop, in which case I respectfully disagree, as I have been doing so for ten years (I’m sure users of PCBSD would disagree as well).
If I’m a hardcore system administrator, does it mean I’m not supposed to access the web site of my company supplier that uses Flash for its navigation bar? Should I be satisfied with a dual-boot to access those Flash sites? (No, I’m not going to send a rant letter to valuable customers because they use Flash) What about online videos? Am I not supposed to watch them in the first place?
When did Adobe ever promise that?
Even if they did, waiting for Adobe to deliver on their promises is like waiting for world peace–it’s a nice hope, but very unlikely to ever happen.
When did Adobe ever promise that?
Even if they did, waiting for Adobe to deliver on their promises is like waiting for world peace–it’s a nice hope, but very unlikely to ever happen.
We all remember when Flash was developed for Linux and all comments requested FreeBSD version of it was blatantly deleted. They just ignored *BSD or just didn’t want to code for OpenSound- they wanted Flash for ALSA shit (I guess their coder was/is plain GNU/Linux fanboy).
http://blogs.adobe.com/penguin.swf/
Pardon my ignorance, but what’s wrong with linux compatibility & Flash for Linux?
Flash works fine on Ubuntu for me, so why wouldn’t it work well enough on FreeBSD?
Or is there a version problem?
I hope you do appreciate that BSD and Linux are not the same kernels and that the executable formats and APIs differ, which is why FreeBSD has its Linux compatibility layer, which in turn makes Flash run on FreeBSD albeit not natively, which is what the discussion is all about.
Basically a FreeBSD user couldn’t care less if Flash works *great* on Ubuntu as this does nothing for the situation on the FreeBSD side of the fence.
FreeBSD and Flash is the same as Linux and Shockwave.
The way to get Shockwave to run on Linux is to install Wine, Windows Firefox, and the shockwave plugin.
For FreeBSD that entails running the Linux compatibility layer, Linux Firefox, and the Linux Flash plugin. Frankly, the experience is miserable, and I had stability problems with it.
You don’t need Linux Firefox. Just the Linux Flash plugin, and nspluginwrapper. Then you can use the Linux Flash plugin in your native FreeBSD Firefox.
This mix is unstable. It often crashes.
It’s unstable and causes a lot of problems (take a look at the FreeBSD forum and here: http://www.jail.se/software/freebsd/)
Yes, it works great on Ubuntu, but not on *BSD.
Unfortunately I don’t see things changing given the uncooperative nature of Adobe towards non-Windows operating systems. When they do support non-Windows operating systems you find that the quality is so poor that you’d wish the plugin never existed. Adobe’s problem is basically the fact that they’ve never actually cared for their customers through the realisation that there is no money to be made off the plugin and thus they should fully document it.
So far the documentation provided to developers is absolutely pathetic and lacking huge details which they claim is under this hocus-pocus ‘intellectual property’. I call it hocus-pocus because when ever a company really wants to get something done – they’re quite happy to sort out all the issues and fast track the process.
For me, the problem I have with FreeBSD is the lack of support for Intel wireless chipsets or where support exists it lacks support for WPA; although FreeBSD now does have HAL I do think that the developers should have developed a superior alternative given the nature of how HAL detects hardware changes – polling every device over and over again resulting the CPU never going into low power state and thus using up more battery power. Then again, a replacement for HAL is more of something that should be tackled via freedesktop rather than a specific distribution or *NIX/*BSD operating system.
Edited 2009-05-04 13:08 UTC
WPI driver aka Intel 3945 works like a charme plus WPA/WPA2. Of course you don’t have any luck with newest chipsets, but there is at least comming support for 4965AGN (aka lwn driver) in current (FreeBSD 8). So it’s just a matter of time.
OpenBSD currently has support for WPA on the 4965AGN (as well as the newer 5100/5300 series)—so the nature of the code sharing between the BSDs should simplify support on FreeBSD.
FreeBSD has a working, properly developed device notification framework in devd and devfs. Things have been working great without any need for hald. Just check the dmesg output after plugging things in and removing them. (You may need to edit devd.conf for some strange devices.)
The problem is that Linux doesn’t have anything like this in the kernel, so they’ve developed hald to do it in userspace (which is fine). Unfortunately, the problem is that too many other big software frameworks/projects (like X.org) has started using hald as a reference and coding directly to/for it, bringing in forced dependencies on hald and d-bus.
Too many developers, nowadays, are coding for Linux, on Linux, with no thought about anything but Linux, and adding all kinds of extra layers to support Linux. Portability is going down the tubes.
What would be really nice is if hald became a compat layer that used the native device notification methods for the OS it is running on. Then it could OS-native methods on each OS (separate backends) and provide a uniform access-method on top (frontend).
I couldn´t agree more …
The problem is that hal is written for linux and that big software pieces and proyects are starting to use it and depend on it to run as if hal was a universall piece of software when it´s actually not. It´s a linux piece of software.
In my humble and personal opinion, all BSD should get together to write a BSD hald and “standarize” (or so to speak) on it.
Same goes for filesystems (Hammer should be the one AFAIC), MTA (smtpd from OpenBSD), C compiler (PCC), etc, etc … I´ve been seeing a lot of reinventing the wheel lately :s
Why should all the BSDs copy a workaround for Linux kernel limitations and standardize on it?
It is not only that it is a Linux specific hack, it is also a completely unelegant way of doing things.
BSDs should stop providing Linux emulation and Linux libraries then maybe application developers would realize they suck at being portable.
Also this whole thread is based on a non-issue. Swfdec does cut it.
I use a recent 0.8 swfdec on OpenBSD and the vast majority of flash sites work with no issue and those with issues usually work well enough. Maybe the port GGGP tried was outdated?
The problem goes beyond HAL and those who are dependent on HAL – there is also the problem that many open source projects make the assumption that the whole world revolves around Linux and thus they hard code their programming to only support Linux’isms.
Then once you get around those Linux’isms then there are the wonderful GNU’isms that result in all manner of hell breaking loose; on OpenSolaris parts of Xorg have to be compiled with GCC rather than Sun’s own compiler due to programmers not considering the need for not only cross platform and architecture but also the ability to compile it using non-GNU compilers.
Back to HAL; I was under the impression that HAL was an abstraction layer to the native device management underneath; Linux had its own device management, FreeBSD etc and HAL merely provided a uniform way of addressing those needs; hence the reason for ‘polling’ by HAL should be a non-requirement because in reality it actually does little more than ‘message passing’ back to the native infrastructure.
Yes .. I think we all three agree on the same thing .. linuxisms and GNUisms .. that´s why I said “written for Linux” .. and yes .. i do agree with you . the problem goes beyond HAL.
Apple is working on LLVM and BSD Foundation is apparently getting behind pcc; what I hope is that they refuse to support GNU’isms. It would require massive code replacements for the various components but hopefully what it’ll mean is cleaner code that is compatible with the standards rather than deviating from them for the sake of convenience.
There needs to be a line drawn in the sand where incompatibilities are heaved out because ultimately it is these compiler and operating system specific calls in code (rather than creating an abstraction layer) that fracture the open source community and result in duplication by way of numerous patches for non-Linux operating systems and non-gnu compilers.
Edited 2009-05-05 01:24 UTC
The LinuxOnly-crowd is rapidly becomming as big a problem for the Unix-world as they often seem to think that Windows is.
I have to say that one the most stupid example of this is the god-awful code in the FastCGI part of XSP-server (Mono-project) to detect if a system supports pipes:
src/Mono.WebServer.FastCgi/UnmanagedSocket.cs
using (Stream st = File.OpenRead (
“/proc/sys/kernel/ostype”)) {
StreamReader sr = new StreamReader (st);
os = sr.ReadToEnd ();
}
supports_libc = os.StartsWith (“Linux”);
Now, there’s not only “one” fault within this small portion of code, it actually does not work very well on Linux either in several situations.
First assumption: reading from /proc/sys/kernel/ostype
While other Unices support /proc it is not guaranteed to exist
Second assumption: Checking if the OS-name is Linux
As far as I know, nothing guarantees that /proc/sys/kernel/ostype starts with “Linux” even on Linux but on other Unices it definetly doesn’t
Now, one coulde use a counter argument and say that Mono and XSP is targetted only towards Linux, fine, lets forget that the above code is C#, what about running the code on a virtual installation of Linux say using VServer or OpenVZ, will it work? No
While a small and limited example it is symptomatic of what the LinuxOnly crowd is churning out. No wonder the BSD’s have to duplicate efforts in open source (even disregarding potential license issues).
While I’ve singled out the above code it is, apart from the above code snippet, well working code (used in production on a Debian VServer here, hacked of course with patch soon being sent upstream).
Now it looks like HAL may be going the way of the dodo. Fedora is moving DeviceKit and it’s ilk to using libudev directly instead of using HAL. Which means, GNOME could very well become a Linux-only desktop as it becomes more and more tied into all the *Kits, and as the *Kits get more and more directly tied into Linux-only libs like libudev.
Overview here: http://ostatic.com/blog/a-peek-at-devicekit-in-fedora-11-and-beyond
Mailing list post here: http://mail.gnome.org/archives/desktop-devel-list/2009-May/msg00007…
Unless I’m totally mis-reading what DeviceKit is all about, and that DeviceKit is more portable than HAL, in which case, ignore this post.
You can run nspluginwrapper, with Linux Flash Player 9, and have working Flash running inside native Mozilla Firefox. Works quite well.
It’s a pity, though, that the Adobe Flash Player 10 for FreeBSD that was shown as a pre-alpha a couple of months ago hasn’t materialised as a real release.
Well, while I do agree Flash for Linux + compat mode sucks, what it sucks more is Flash at all. Almost 99% of sites using Flash suck and they don’t give an alternative for those who don’t want (or can) run this stupid piece of software.
Actually the only site I really care to visit and that it uses Flash is YouTube, altought they suck even more because they can use a free codec and they don’t.
Just as an example: http://www.philips.com
A simple and well designed site with only few errors using the W3C validator. I’m tired of looking an ever growing sites with white rectangles asking for plug-ins.
That is done to make sites inaccessible, especially for disabled (read: blind) users. It’s intended. You can carefully code, so that if “Flash” is not available, content is presented in a non-restricted way.
Then the tool youtobe-dl (from FreeBSD’s ports collection) is for you. It downloads from “YouTube” and leaves a .flv file on your disk that you can play with mplayer. You can use mencoder to convert it into a more convenient format, Ogg/Theora, MPEG, or AVI. Or everything else that exists.
No “serious web developer” uses validation today. They know everything better, read: their authoring tools do. Those tools don’t output HTML, they output crap.
Can you imagine what would happen if a web browser would include a W3C validator, and if it’s not HTML, wouldn’t display anything? Almost no web sites would exist anymore. 🙂
And for “Flash”: What would you think if simple images, pictures, in simple and common formats, such as JPG, GIF and PNG, would require you to install a proprietary plugin that is available only for some selected operating systems? A plugin that seems to hook so deeply into the OS that it’s nearly impossible to create on your platform? I know that “Flash” is more complicated than an animated GIF, but in most cases, it is used where in the past an animated GIF was used! Used to annoy users, to distract attention, to nag, nag and nag – while occupying system resources and making everything slower. Today’s user, still, consider “Flash” as essential as support for graphics in their browser.
The day I can use “Flash” as any JPG image, built-in in my browser with the option to SWITCH IT OFF, I will review my opinion. But today, “Flash” is of NO interest to me, so I keep my system clean from this annoyance. (I tried “Flash” in the past, but found it so useless I deleted it from the system again.)
Install Opera, it won’t ask. 🙂
(Sad development: In the past, you could right-click on a plug-in to bring up a context menu, allowing some things like “copy target address”; this isn’t possible anymore, now it asks for a plug-in.)
Oh, give me a fscking break. Do you really think most web developers or flash users are even aware of accessibility? They’re not, I can attest to that personally, seeing as how I’m affected a great deal by this. Yes, it’s annoying, but to state that there’s this malicious intent to cut off accessibility is an overexageration and nothing more.
Now, on Adobe’s end… that’s a different matter. All of the Flash accessibility work–what little there actually was–had been done by Macromedia, and Adobe has no interest either in improving it or extending it beyond non-windows platforms. If you’re going to throw around accusations of intent, you might as well throw them in the right direction.
And, btw, these wild accusations do not help those of us who are trying to improve web accessibility.
They don’t do it on purpose. They do it by ignorance. They don’t imagine a blind can surf the web with Jaws for instance.
BSD can be used on the desktop and I have (in the past) but as time goes on, it keeps lagging behind and I am relegated to emulation and hacks to get it working. So I no longer run FreeBSD and am contented with Ubuntu and – for Now.
The Question is what would it take to get FreeBSD (or any other OS) to be my Desktop. The following two will bring me back to FreeBSD/Desktop.
1. A good virtualization solution – so that I can install other OS’s to fill in missing pieces (I can run Flash inside other OS). Something along the lines of KVM for linux.
2. Binary package management – Everyone else has this. I have been harping about this for years with FreeBSD after I got fedup with broken ports and taking hours to compile large software – either no packages or the package would introduce upteen library conflicts.
Well some people do like binary packages others don’t. Most people using FreeBSD do it due the quality of the ports and the control of it. You can see a similar behaviour among Gentoo people. Binary packages are nice for huge applications like e.g. OO or KDE 4.x, but then there are to many caveats. Using ccache, the possibility of building some ports in parallel or the availability of stable packages are possibilities enough in my opinion. But your mileage may vary – if you think about binary packages, think about manpower first, then money, traffic etc.pp. Last not least think about the audience – my “desktop” isn’t your “desktop”,so please stop talking about the buzzphrase established by Microsoft and Apple to sell more hype instead of quality.
You could always try PC-BSD. Its a desktop version of FreeBSD, with binary package management, and also gets rid of all the messy setup that you’re used to doing with vanilla FreeBSD. (It is 100% FreeBSD, just made easier for desktop users) It includes Flash9 as well, and has packages for QEMU if you need virtualization.
Really? No package management?*
FreeBSD has an entire suite of package tools.
I think that FreeBSD’s package management works just fine. The library conflicts you speak of are probably because you were mixing ports and packages. If you stick with packages, you get stable, proven software although sometimes a bit out of date. Using ports is not a requirement.
*sarcasm denoted with italics
Yes. I have tried PC-BSD. Its good but I did not take a shine to it (persoanlly like Gnome). I would rather install FreeBSD/Gnome then.
And Yes. FreeBSD does not have a packemanagement tool like the Debian and Fedoras. Try upgrading an already installed package and see the depndency hell it creates for other packages. I do stick with packages on the server side where I need more stability and do compile the freeBSd kernel for some of the things I need for it.
There are many package management tools for FreeBSD that are the equivalent of yum and apt. Portupgrade and portmaster are two for the command line, and the DesktopBSD tools and barry for the GUI.
There are more tools here: http://www.freshports.org/ports-mgmt/
I’ve upgraded many a preinstalled package on my DesktopBSD computer, and I wouldn’t characterize the experience as dependency hell. What exactly was the issue you were seeing?
The main difference between third-party tools like portupgrade/portmaster and apt is that apt is part of the OS and as such tends to be a bit more stable. I have used FreeBSD for just over 5 years on the desktop and I cant tell you how many times I have gotten my system in a nasty state because of portupgrade (even with reading /usr/ports/UPDATING). I dont understand why FreeBSD does not have a tool for updating ports in the base system. With everything else the ports system does, this seems like a natural direction to take.
Technically, the whole ports tree is “3rd party” and not part of the base system, so all tools that manage it, etc… are also 3rd party. Sure, you have the basic csup installed to download and portsnap, but anything else is 3rd party.
I would easily use FreeBSD exclusively as it’s a superior OS to Linux in many ways. OSS vs. ALSA just being one of many. How come OSS can do hardware virtual devices and ALSA has to relay on a PoS program sound server sitting on top of it to do the same?
However, I digress. Flash is a pervasive part of the web and many sites I use require it to some extent or another, so I rather give them a Linux / Flash traffic hit vs. dual-booting into Windows and giving them those traffic stats.
I don’t understand why Adobe can’t just release a “beta”, even only downloaded from their dev site, of Flash for FreeBSD. We’re all more or less power users and would be happy to give feedback. If it was even 80% stable I would be happy with it.
This is not quite true. I would consider the entire ports system part of the base OS as well as pkg_add, pkg_delete, etc. Tools like portmaster/portupgrade have been created mainly because of the gap that exists in the way FreeBSD handles third party software (it is not easily upgraded). Considering the tools that install/removing third party software (pkg_add, pkg_delete, the ports system) along with the record keeping are all part of the base OS, a tool that upgrades should be there as well.
The ports system most certainly isn’t part of the base OS, its a framework to install (mostly 3rd party) software from source more easily; I don’t think any FreeBSD developer would agree that ports are part of the base OS, they’re not even tied with any particular release of the OS.
The ports themselves are not part of the OS, the framework that manages the ports I would consider to be part of the OS. While calling the framework part of the base OS may be debatable, I do think that the ports system shapes the feel of the OS as a whole and is a major reason people like/hate FreeBSD.
The ports tree framework is part of the base OS (the collection of Makefiles and /usr/ports/Mk/*). But none of the software that gets installed by the ports tree is part of FreeBSD. It’s a fine line, but one worth pointing out.
They’re working on it. There’s been a couple of SoC projects to improve the pkg_* tools, and this year’s SoC includes an upgrade tool.
However, nothing that requires non-standard software (like Ruby for portupgrade) will ever get installed as part of the base OS. Something like portmaster, which is just pure /bin/sh scripting and uses the ports tree and /var/db/pkg for everything, could be included in the base OS. However, as the ports tree is always changing (there is only 1 ports tree), it makes sense to have ports tools installed separately from the base OS. The base only changes a couple of times a year, while portmaster gets upgraded a whole lot more often than that, to pick up new bits from the ports tree.
I call bs… You claim you have used FreeBSD and still you claim there arent any Binary package management. You might wanna look into Packages System…
I’m a big fan of using precompiled packages. I do compile only what’s absolutely neccessary (e. g. mplayer / mencoder due to options to be set at compile time). Take a look at the pkg_* tools. What you want is, for example:
# pkg_add -r xmms
It installs XMMS and all the libraries it needs from precompiled packages – fast and elegant.
FreeBSD needs some additional features like native Flash. I don’t like to execute anything with Linux compatibility layer. It’s not the same as on the real thing. Once upon a time I was a dedicated FreeBSD enthusiast, but I had to change my interests because of a requirement to develop some Java-based solutions. I switched myself to Linux because of that – and no… Not to Gentoo, Debian or Ubuntu. I was always using Slackware (I don’t see troubles in working with simple .tgz packages with tools which are not providing automatic package dependency resolution, as long as I’m working on my workstation or development server), so my decision was really simple. I’m now using Slackware 12.2 without any problems having Java and NetBeans, Flash, VirtualBox… It’s nice and clean set of tools. I prefer to spend some time to select my tools and then I’ll use them for a long time. That’s why Slackware suits my needs. There is also something I like in *BSD systems in Slackware – simplicity, clean structure, this feeling that you’re managing your workspace in 100%. Don’t get me wrong, I’m ready to come back to FreeBSD (I would even like to), but my list of required additional features are:
– native Flash
– a good virtualization solution (QEMU is not an option) like VirtualBox (this is my personal choice over VMWare, which I consider to be a kind of bloatware now)
– I know that Java support in FreeBSD looks much better now than a few years ago, but I plan to give up Java right now, so this is not as much important for me, like during the time of my “switch to Slackware” decision.
Without these features I can recommend (at least to myself) FreeBSD to be installed on web or database servers etc. I cannot use such system on my workstation.
The main question is – how we can get these features made for FreeBSD as probably a lot of people used, are using or would like to use FreeBSD as their main operating system on their workstations?
And I would also like to ask about some other things.
1) Please tell me, why I’ve found OpenBSD very usable and nice (I like this system very much in fact) on my routers? I don’t need any Java, Flash, VirtualBox etc. in OpenBSD. It’s excellent as it is right now. I even prefer OpenBSD over FreeBSD in this field. Hmm… A kind o stereotype. I can’t explain this to myself to be honest 😉 I just see OpenBSD suits better here.
2) Why I cannot fall in love with NetBSD, although I’ve tried several times. Each time I try I see this is great piece of work. I can even install new version and… I have enough. I remember my disappointment on Sushi – I thought it would be nice tool like old-good Smitty in AIX, but it was not – it was hanging each time I was trying to configure network adapter (it was a few years ago). Then… I skipped Sushi. As far as I know they also decided to skip the development of Sushi. Yet, it has some potential.
3) Should I give a try to NetBSD once again and is the latest 5.0 version as scalable and efficient as they showed in their marketing presentation, showing us comparison to other systems like FreeBSD and Fedora Linux? If yes, it has a lot of chances to be my operating system of choice to host MySQL database.
Thanks in advance for all your answers, suggestions and possible discussion to my – so long – post here.
Regards,
wawrzyn
Like so?
http://vbox.innotek.de/pipermail/vbox-dev/2009-April/001328.html
Yes. It’s interesting news, but please note, that it’s still in development phase. On my Slackware box I have working version of VirtualBox, stable one, same on my MS Windows workstation. In case of FreeBSD we still have development works, moreover, these works are done by developers (respect to them) in their spare time. So we will have to wait some more time. During that time I’ll not come back to FreeBSD on my desktop for sure. I’ll rather stuck with Slackware for some more time (actually I’m doing this all the time since I discovered Slackware back in the 90s. This is my best GNU/Linux distro in fact).
Please see this statements cited from the URL presented in your reply:
Even though the basic functions are working there are still a lot of
things to do and we do not recommend to use it on production machines.
Furthermore Sun does not officially support FreeBSD yet. This is a
port done by developers in their free time. However if you are a developer or want to test it you can checkout the latest code and build
VirtualBox yourself. A list of working and unimplemented features and
known bugs is below.
Working:
– Software virtualization
– The VirtualBox QT4 frontend
– Sound through OSS
– NAT networking
Not implemented:
– Bridged and host only networking (the required kernel drivers are
missing)
– USB
– Installer
– OpenGL support
– ACPI
– Host CD/DVD access
– Host serial support
– things I forgot
So, it’s still far behind MS Windows or GNU/Linux but there is a big progress and there is a hope I’ll use FreeBSD once again (not on a server but as a main OS for development and usual work). Of course, once again, BIG respect for developers spending their freetime on this project. It’s VERY important in my opinion to have VirtualBox on FreeBSD – and we are another step closer to have native, stable port of this great virtualization solution.
So, I’ll watch the progress and wait.
Edited 2009-05-05 19:41 UTC
When Nvidia gets together some x64 drivers, i’ll switch, some drivers for my soundcard would help as well, but linux doesnt even have that fully implimented yet (X-fi) so not holding my breath.
The missing 64bit nVidia has sparked a very long thread in nvnews’ [1].
Hopefully, the missing kernel bits (required by nVidia) are slowly being worked on.
Another missing bit, at least for me, is working qemu-kvm port (with bridged Ethernet). Again it’s being worked on (at least AFAIK), but I’ve yet to see an official release.
– Gilboa
[1] http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41545
Edited 2009-05-06 15:33 UTC
Is there a Citrix Client for FreeBSD? I don’t seem to find it on citrix.com
If you search for software for FreeBSD, you don’t need to search the Web (in this so old-fashioned way); the OS provides an excellent tool: the ports collection. 🙂
% cd /usr/ports
% make search name=citrix
Port: citrix_ica-10.6_1
Path: /usr/ports/net/citrix_ica
Info: Citrix(R) Presentation Server(TM) client
Maint: [email protected]
B-deps:
R-deps: linux-expat-1.95.8 linux-fontconfig-2.2.3_7 linux-openmotif-2.2.4_2 linux-xorg-libs-6.8.2_5 linux_base-fc-4_10
WWW: http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/product.asp?contentID=18…
Is this what you’ve been searching for? According to the run dependencies, it seems to be a Linux application that runs by the means of the Linux ABI. It isn’t a native FreeBSD version, but who cares? 🙂
And you don’t need a running FreeBSD system to search the ports tree. Just use http://www.freshports.org to search.
A good advice. I didn’t notice the option of searching freshports.org because I’m always running FreeBSD, but not always a web browser. 🙂
It would be nice if this (and other FreeBSD release threads) commented on whats new instead of endlessly banging on about Flash, e.g. superpages and multiple IPs for jails are quite interesting in my opinion.
Edited 2009-05-05 10:16 UTC
They are, but they don’t matter to the end user, the desktop end user. Progress of ZFS and dtrace are other interesting things, but they do matter to server admins and developers only, and they’re a minority, because they don’t have oh joy oh market share. 🙂
Another point of view could be given by explaining wqhat FreeBSD can do what other operating systems can’t do (or can’t do so easily).
Finally, I’d like to point everyone’s attention at FreeBSD’s excellent documentation: Handbook in multiple languages, FAQ, manpages for every bit of the OS (programs, maintenance procedures, tuning advices, device drivers, kernel interfaces, library functions, configuration files etc.) – everything locally accessible right after installation. This is one of the things that helped FreeBSD to become my favourite OS. As a developer, good documentation is an essential part of the OS.
Thanks for all the positive comments. I am downloading the ISO to give it a go now.
One question. How do I play DVD on FreeBSD?
I need to install libdvdcss2 from debian-multimedia.org for my Debian box to play DVD.
It took me about 5 seconds to google the answer. This is when most people will tell you to RTFM, which stands for “Read the FAQ, Moops”. This instruction was originally given to the Moors, but it was mistranslated as Moops.
It’s been a while for me running a FreeBSD desktop, mostly servers but I did use VLC to view a DVD once. I think I had to mount the DVD manually first then point VLC to it with the File menu.
YMMV
Cheers
Speedbuggy