Here is a detailed introduction to FreeBSD especially geared for current Linux users.
FreeBSD Introduction for Linux Users
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
At last there’s someone who try to steer these ‘Linux users’ towards an alternative. Sometimes PR is everything. FreeBSD is no worse in any way than Linux, but… Linux is a buzzword today.
Thank you Mr Fuller for shedding some light on this issue. Not to say that the penquin is usesless or bad in any respect, but its nice for someone to illustrate the similarities, differences and basically shedding light on the philosophies behind Daemon and the penquin. Very nicely done.
I liked the intro…
The handbook is great introduction and guide to fbsd, but this guide is still good and someone may read this since it’s less reading
I am a fbsd user, went over from linux (slackware), I don’t care what kernel I am using and it suites my needs. What I liked about fbsd was that to me it’s slackware with a better package system
The author wants to know what specificcally is harder about FreeBSD. Well, install FreeBSD and then install Xandros 2.0. If you can’t figure out what is harder about FreeBSD, you’re just not paying attention.
Of course, by ‘hard’, I mean, non-intuitive – like how many times do you have to consult the handbook? The FreeBSD partitioning system is pretty simple once you learn how it works, but is about as intuitive as the Chinese alphabet.
Altough I am a Linux user and happy with it, this was a very good, impressioning introduction to the distinctions between Linux and the BSDs…
The FreeBSD partitioning system is pretty simple once you learn how it works, but is about as intuitive as the Chinese alphabet.
It’s not harder just different. Like the author mentions it’s a remnant of the olden Unixes, you’ll find a similar system on Solaris (disks > partitions > slices). The naming of the devices will throw most people off at first but then again you’re not meant to fiddle with them on a daily basis 🙂
If you choose to go with an LVM on any platform (Linux, *BSD, AIX, etc) you’ll have to get used to yet another idea about disk organisation, such is life i guess.
By intuitive I suppose you mean “works the way I expect”. A thing may be said to be intuitive if it is, amongst others, “derived from or prompted by a natural tendency”.
To you a GUI with graphical admin tools is “intuitive” (I presume that is Xandros’ draw card). To me, vim and /etc/ and 7-command pipelines are “intuitive”.
A nice article, though I don’t think he emphasised the documentation bit enough. The state of the Linux [kernel] documentation is truly disheartening when one looks at that of the BSDs.
Yes, but:
“To you a GUI with graphical admin tools is “intuitive” (I presume that is Xandros’ draw card). To me, vim and /etc/ and 7-command pipelines are “intuitive”.”
We’re not talking about you, we’re talking about the average user, you’re obviously the above average user. I’m a programmer too, but I don’t like FreeBSD’s installation program either. It’s not terribly difficult for me, but compared to Xandros or RedHat it’s not nearly as convenient or nice.
-STABLE is not production. It’s not even “production”. It’s a code branch under active development that could, at any time, be rendered unusable for an unknown period of time. It’s rare, to be sure, but it does happen – and Murphy’s Law guarantees that when it does happen, it’ll be just after you’ve CVSupped to -STABLE and installed it on some important server. Don’t use -STABLE for your production machines, use RELENG_4_9, or equivalent, which *is* guaranteed to always be a working branch.
To summarise, -STABLE is an active development branch that has new, untested features regularly added and can break at any time[0]. RELENG_X_Y is FreeBSD X.Y release, plus any critical bug and/or security patches and will always be in a usable state[0].
FreeBSD users should know this, but I think it’s a topic that deserves clarification in a page oriented towards people who aren’t FreeBSD users.
The only other gripe I’ve ever had about FreeBSD in the years I’ve been using/adminning it, is that I’ve never found a simple way to build a package and all its dependencies (as packages) at the same time, to allow easy transport to and installation on a machine without /usr/ports or a compiler.
[0] Note that this is in terms of developer policies, not absolute truths. A typo can crop up anywhere
.
The Complete FreeBSD
http://www.bsdmall.com/cofr.html
very detailed overview of FreeBSD and well written.
FreeBSD: An Open Source Operating System for Your Personal Computer
http://www.bsdmall.com/freebosforyo.html
This is a wonderful introduction to FreeBSD. Good details on installation, setting up sound and X.
Ok, so how about a Linux primer geared towards the FreeBSD user? (end of joke)
The only other gripe I’ve ever had about FreeBSD in the years I’ve been using/adminning it, is that I’ve never found a simple way to build a package and all its dependencies (as packages) at the same time, to allow easy transport to and installation on a machine without /usr/ports or a compiler.
make package-recursive
We’re not talking about you, we’re talking about the average user, you’re obviously the above average user. I’m a programmer too, but I don’t like FreeBSD’s installation program either. It’s not terribly difficult for me, but compared to Xandros or RedHat it’s not nearly as convenient or nice.
Average users rarely install OSes and practically never have to deal with disk partitioning (and when they do, it’s pretty much always the “use all available space” option). Basically, as soon as you start talking about installing OSes at all, you’re outside the realm of the “average user” (and, yes, that includes installing Windows). If a machine breaks such that it requires an OS (re)install, “average users” call up the computer shop or their resident expert and ask them to do it.
This should be patently obvious to anyone who has to deal with “average users”, which is why I’m always somewhat mystified when reviews and people harp on about how easy installation is.
Note to OS reviewers: The only time an OS review – particularly on a site like this – should spend more than a sentence or two talking about the installer is if it’s dealing with the ways it can be automated for sysadmins. “Simple like OS X” and “Complex like Debian” is pretty much all the detail really necessary. Step by step procedures, screenshots and explanations belong in HOWTOs, not reviews.
[Apologies for branching OT, I got carried away]
Also, I’m not sure how anyone could call the standard PC (ie: Linux, Windows) partitioning scheme any more or less “intuitive” than the BSDs’. I’d say anyone trying to call the arcana of primary/extended/logical partitions “intuitive” is having a lend of you
.
This article makes a good read and explains the ports system which is what Gentoo linux has re-implemented.
So now you can have the best of both worlds – enjoy the bandwagon of linux and use the ports system.
But the biggest advantage of Gentoo is that the packages for the lastest software are available very quickly – for example the kde3.2beta2 package install scripts (ebuilds) were available 3 days before the kde packages were released 😉
make package-recursive
Then do a :
# find /usr/ports -name “*.tbz” -exec mv {} /var/local/somedir ;
to move all packages to some dir to await transportation
And don’t forget to make clean ( a clean system is a happy system 🙂 )
One major difference between Linux and FreeBSD/Unix is that most Linux distribution don’t adhere to having a base system. You can see it throughout all the different distro’s, dependencies on bash, perl, python, and thousand other small programs. There are exceptions (Debian is very well planned out) but those are trully the exceptions. Examples of Linux distros abusing scripts includes the way gentoo handles it’s ports, the method RedHat uses for it’s Installer, the initialization scripts. There isn’t anything that is necessarily wrong with what they are doing, but as a personal preference I don’t like it. I will take the good ole’ executable for base system functions anyday.
Of course it took 3 days to build KDE3.2beta2 and all its dependencies so the point is moot 😉
Gentoo is based on the FreeBSD way. I think Robbins even mentioned that he was a FreeBSD user for a long time. Gentoo is okay, but like the author says, suffers from the piecemail Linux way. Upgrades never seem as easy as in FreeBSD. Sure, it says “emerge –deep –update system” and “world”, but it never seems to actually *work*. I get done compiling for 3 days straight, and Mozilla has been upgraded from 1.2.1 to 1.2.3, instead of 1.3. (That’s the reason I tossed gentoo last time). Look in the forums, there’s hacks needed to actually upgrade everything, not just most of the system. The USE variables seem to make sense, but turn out being very unwieldy in practice.
I just wish someone would package up FreeBSD’s userland with a Linux kernel. I do have a couple things that don’t work in FreeBSD, namely a Sandisk 8-in-1 memory reader (although haven’t tried 5.2, and it mentioned USB storage updates in the Changelog)
To you a GUI with graphical admin tools is “intuitive” (I presume that is Xandros’ draw card). To me, vim and /etc/ and 7-command pipelines are “intuitive”.
But assuming you had never used a computer before, which do you think would be more intuitive .. vim, /etc, and 7-command pipelines, or a button that says ‘Click here’ ?
how good is CD-RW and DVD-RW support on FreeBSD? Can I use them like floppy discs forpacket writing? I must sy the cathedral appeals to me more than the bazaar.
but what about third-party commercial software like Acrobat JavaSDK Quiktime RealPlayer Flash Player etc?
Good read, a good description of BSD in a nutshell, and why one might try it out. I find the concepts of the “base system” and ports to be different, even refreshingly so.
but what about third-party commercial software like Acrobat JavaSDK Quiktime RealPlayer Flash Player etc?
/usr/ports/print/acrobatviewer/
/usr/ports/java/jsdk/
/usr/ports/multimedia/openquicktime/
/usr/ports/multimedia/linux-realplayer/
/usr/ports/graphics/flashplayer/
Take a look at http://freshports.org/
Acrobat
You can install linux version of Acrobat Reader 5 from the port. Or alternatively xpdf or gpdf etc to view PDF files. To save a pdf use openoffice/staroffice.
JavaSDK
Java 1.4 port is progressing. Not quite usable yet. there are 1.3 port and linux versions of 1.3 and 1.4 as well.
Quiktime
I don’t think there is the Apple implementation of quicktime player on Linux platform either. Use mplayer to play most of the media file formats even Sorenson format (quicktime).
RealPlayer
You can install linux version of Realplayer from the port tree. It works well enough.
Flash Player
You can install linux version of flash plugin and linuxpluginwrapper from the port and then you can view flash media contents on the native mozilla/firebord.
“I just wish someone would package up FreeBSD’s userland with a Linux kernel.”
Not likely to happen, but why not try Arch Linux? It has simple BSD-style init scripts, package manager ‘pacman’ that installs/uninstalls i686-optimized binary packages and handles dependencies, and ports-like ‘ABS’ system to install source packages.
Arch Linux hasn’t yet reached release version 1.0 (the current version is 0.6) but it’s already quite usable. I wouldn’t recommend Arch as your first Linux distro, but anyone who has successfully installed and used Slackware or FreeBSD it should feel right at home with Arch Linux. What is simple is easy – and once you know it, it’s simple. 😉
The title of the article should have been “How condesending and misleading can a FreeBSD user be?”
I don’t have a problem. I ran it for a little while and will probably run it again. It is a fine OS. But the way the author delivered the material it immediatly came across as everything he said it wasn’t going to be.
Isn’t it sad that the author had to spend a good portion of the essay trying explaining his opinion so as not to be flame bait? What happend to the simple technical merits opinion piece. If i was a fanatic linux user(is the any other type..JOKE) This article would not even make a dent. Perhaps it was not intended to but then why bother writing it? I believe that those who have worked with commercial Unices and then had an urge to play with Linux or BSD would feel that BSD is more familiar than linux. I like Linux its from knowledge of linux that i got a job as an HP-UX SA. I found ot quickly that the differences between linux and commercial Unix are immense!(I used to be the guy pushing Linux over commercial Unix)
From my experience with primarily HP-UX and Solaris i found out why these Os’es along with the hardware are worth the huge amount of money it takes to purchase and deploy them and since then i have never taken Linux seriously. When i finally toyed around with NetBSD i found a system that to me seemed more like commercial Unix like what i was used to working with on the big iron. I still use linux mainly to toy around and to run a game server, but i would never use linux for anything mission critical in its current state nor would I recommend it to my employer to use. I would however consider BSD if i commercial Unix was not available. Again these are just my personal views….
Gentoo is based on the FreeBSD way. I think Robbins even mentioned that he was a FreeBSD user for a long time. Gentoo is okay, but like the author says, suffers from the piecemail Linux way. Upgrades never seem as easy as in FreeBSD. Sure, it says “emerge –deep –update system” and “world”, but it never seems to actually *work*. I get done compiling for 3 days straight, and Mozilla has been upgraded from 1.2.1 to 1.2.3, instead of 1.3. (That’s the reason I tossed gentoo last time). Look in the forums, there’s hacks needed to actually upgrade everything, not just most of the system. The USE variables seem to make sense, but turn out being very unwieldy in practice.
I just wish someone would package up FreeBSD’s userland with a Linux kernel. I do have a couple things that don’t work in FreeBSD, namely a Sandisk 8-in-1 memory reader (although haven’t tried 5.2, and it mentioned USB storage updates in the Changelog)
You know you are trolling, right? I can’t count how many FBSD users who have seen the light through Gentoo. Mr Robbins only used FBSD for 3 or 6 months, I can’t remember. For more info click the link below:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerworks/library/l-dist3.html
And he found it boring. The only thing he found amuzing about FBSD was the port system. It was instrumental to the development of portage — which I find better than ports.
I find the article biased. But what else can I expect from a FBSD lover? Especially, the part where he says BSD is designed and Linux is grown. Haha, that was funny. Yeah, developers just planted a linux seed and it grew to be the most dominant free Unix today, while “well designed FBSD” just…ummm…err…
CD-RW has worked just fine on FreeBSD for years. My DVD works great; sorry, don’t have a DVD-RW to talk about from personal experience, but I believe I’ve read messages on the mailing lists from people who are using them happily with FreeBSD. You can search the mailing lists to find out more at <URL: http://freebsd.rambler.ru/>.
Didn’t know the URL would be munged that way (I should have read the stuff in red below about leaving spaces); here’s a second try: http://freebsd.rambler.ru/
care to elaborate? both on the value of commercial UNIX and on the BSD/Linux differences?
That was an excellent article. Kudos for the writing style, the simplicity, the clarity, the brevity, and the levity of the article itself and the remarkably simple, readable web page design. Trully a pleasure to read. In fact it is the only article I have read by someone from the BSD camp that makes me as loyal linux advocate feel as though we are neighbors.
I found his description of the -RELEASE vs. -STABLE vs. -CURRENT just as confusing as this issue has always been for me, I had to swallow many a chuckle trying to grasp the apparent self-contradictory naming scheme which BSD uses. I feel as though I can vaguely appreciate some of the pro-BSD differences, particularly those regarding the homogenous, tightly controlled base system notion. His article allows for a slight glimpse into something I have never used before- and that is an accomplishment in and of itself.
The author was more than even-handed in his covering of the differences and similarities. Any loyal advocate of Linux is likely to feel that they have recieved a compliment when Linux is seen as being the result of chaos and growth as opposed to order and planning/control. For a Linux user to take offense at such is just to show how little that Linux user understands as to how the ecological chaos of the Linux community has spawned the sucessive evolutionary growth of what Linux has become.
I could not agree with the author more, albeit I have no direct experience with *BSD and I am taking his word for this distinction. His focus on ports and source-compiling as being fundamental for *BSD does have a bearing on both my appreciation for his article and my appreciation of Gentoo, which is the Linux variant which has so powerfully won my allegiance, and the relationship between the portage-based nature of Gentoo and the *BSD’s in general.
Gentoo is not the only source-based distribution around, but it clearly captures this *BSD-esqueness most of all. I have always been hesitant to install *BSD, primarily due to concerns about hardware compatibility. More likely I would have issues with the lack of GNU syntax options which I have grown accustomed to and truly love. I made a brief foray into Solaris when Sun first released their OS for the cost of CD shipping and handling.
It was a horrific experience, and it was very, very discouraging, proving to me the absolute superiority of all things desktop on Linux. Yet over time I have come to understand that there is not so much massive difference between userland *BSD and Linux. Which makes me feel far more comfortable with the notion of eventually trying *BSD out, and perhaps even really liking it.
I still far prefer GPL/LGPL licensese to the BSD and MIT licenses, I still have far more respect for GNU software in terms of quality than of any other software I have ever used and I feel that the values espoused in Linux community are much closer to the values which I personally hold. But I am not so fanatical about these things as to preclude eventually foraying into *BSD territory.
(un)Fortunately I really do feel that Gentoo offers me much of what BSD promises, and this lessens the acuteness of *needing* to try out *BSD. Of course many *BSD’ers will likely state that I am simply mistaken, I believe that *NIX variants which remain true to the source all share much in common, and that this distinction is larger and more fundamental than many of the other philosophical differences.
Remaining true to the source is perhaps a even more primary philosophical difference, for it demands a level of self-same system integrity which binary distributions simply do not need. It has taken Gentoo a long time to get to where it now is, and the current developments taking place witrh portage-ng will only further this process.
I can finally rebuild the entire “world” of software on my machine with virtually no manual changes- from the gentoo “system” level through networking (openldap, ltsp, and apache) up to the desktop (GNOME,KDE, and XFCE) extending to all of the myriad development and multimedia tools at my disposal.
And seven days is not bad for building the world, particularly if that world is as rich and varied, colorful and chaotic as my current Gentoo system is.
Great article. It dispells a lot of myths. After its clear explanation, I feel that all the Linux-BSD OS war seem so silly. Each has its own valid approach and philosophy, with its advantages and disadvantages. One person may prefer one approach; another persona, the other. BSD is an evolution along the BSD/Unix “genetic line”, and Linux is a reinvention of Unix (in someone’s image?
). Nothing wrong with that. So be it.
Linux integrates support for a piece of hardware before BSD does. But when BSD integrates it, it works.
That used to be one of my reasons to stay away from BSD, but not any more. Mac OS X (which is BSD!) has hardware support for the latest hardware. And FreeBSD has better hardware support now, too.
BSD is hard to use, more advanced, more complicated, less user-friendly
I used to think that too, but not any more. Again, Mac OS X is as user-friendly as Windows, if not more so. FreeBSD has advanced a lot along that line too.
So, I am with you on BSD. I am hooked on Mac OS X, and I like FreeBSD.
I played with lots of Linuxes before — Redhat, SuSE, you name it — but with Mac OS X, I am “home”, baby.
There’s just one more thing…
BSD wish list: hard real-time. Linux is getting real-time patch. I hope BSD will have a hard real-time variant, too ( I am not talking about the dual-kernel thing out there).
Very, very well done. Don’t think I need to say more.
…I’ll say something else. Yes, Gento has a ‘ports’ system. I tried Gentoo for a short time (dialup and gentoo don’t really go together) and, besides portage, didn’t really see anything special about it. It’s still a pieced-together Linux system. (Not that that is bad, I’m using Slackware so I’m not bashing Linux.) But Gentoo doesn’t have that clean, logical feeling I get from FreeBSD. Sure, it’s on the very edge of development, but that comes at a price. I love being able to upgrade a package when I new one comes out Right Then. I just got tired of all the hacks and works arounds and ‘do this and this and this and it’ll work, hopefully’ that it took. Granted, this was a while back, and I plan on tryin Gentoo again one of these days when broadband finally makes it out here to BFE, but it still definatly will feel like Linux. Wich is a great thing for those who like the feel of Linux and want a ports system, but if you like the feel of BSD, you’ll be dissapointed. I’m not saying don’t try it out, try it! Just dont’ expect it to feel like a BSD.
I must say my time with free BSD provided me with a very fast
system,but it could,nt find much of my hardware not even my
floppy disk!!! maybe one day i’ll try it again but for now
i’ll stay with linux
It would be interesting to see the dmesg and hardware list to back up that statement…
I find it odd that it did not find that unless you intentionally excluded it from the kernel or something of the like.
And that is not trolling?
BTW that article you posted is complete fud…
Go and freaking check for your self and you will find that it does perform rather bloody well, blowing 2.4 out of the water and doing good against 2.6.
If he is running generic, which is most likely, of course he is going to run into problems… it is not optimized… Which given some of his comments and failures to mention some things, pkg_add and ect, seems most likely…
Take the time to tune it for your system and the performance of 4stable will rock.
BTW 3D is nicely supported under fbsd.
Dude, btw flash readers have worked for a nice bit of time now… I use one with my digital camera rather nicely under 4stable.
Bah! like there are OS articles out there promoting something and are unbiased…
OMG – why would you compare Xandros to FreeBSD?! — Would you use Xandros on a server, have you ever heared of a hoster using Xandros?! Uh, no? So then compare a RH or SuSE install minus X to installing FreeBSD and then you will have about the same thing.
As far as I could tell from a quick skim, the whole piece is all fluff. I find it particularly amusing how much weight he seems to put on the idea that *BSD is somehow ‘real unix’. So what? If it had been ‘real Amiga’, I’d be interested.
Nice introduction to the FreeBSD way of doing things. Easy to read explanation of the history and the ports system.
The comparison with Linux is terrible. Equating all Linux distributions like the author does is simply plain wrong. It sounds to me like he has experience with older versions of RPM based distributions. I agree those are less coherent than FreeBSD. But when I upgrade my Debian systems I usually don’t have to fiddle with configuration files like he describes having to do with FreeBSD. It just works, which seems to be one of his selling points for FreeBSD over Linux.
The author wrote that he wouldn’t write about why BSD is Right and Linux is Wrong. But all his comments about order vs chaos are just that.
If you want to evangelize FreeBSD, that’s fine. But don’t say you don’t do it, when you do. That just makes you look silly.
A lot of people say that Gentoo provides all of the advantages of BSD…it doesn’t. It only provides the advantages of the ports system, and even improves on it.
I run FreeBSD and Gentoo, and while I prefer portage for managing add-on apps over FreeBSD ports, I prefer the FreeBSD way of managing the base system. It’s more consistent and complete and has far more complete manual pages (Gentoo lacks manual pages for many important commands, FreeBSD has manual pages for everything including a new section – man9 – for kernel internals).
A lot of people are also claiming that FreeBSD installation is more difficult than Linux installation…that certainly isn’t true if by Linux you mean Gentoo, which is far more difficult to install by any measure.
Anonymous — Put “docs” in your USE variable for the extra documentation.
Gentoo has been a pleasure and a nightmare.
At the moment I’m rebuilding my system because of a problem with autoconf and the latest qt libraries. There’s a command-line fix for it, but it’s unaesthetic. This happens a lot with Gentoo, I’ve found — an ebuild finds its way into the tree and promptly nukes a tool or dependency. Masking out ebuilds with ~x86 helps, but something slips by every so often that makes the emerge logic run in circles. That’s the nightmare part.
The pleasure part is that despite the above, emerge is a *really* nice tool for *nix virgins like myself. Configuring and using emerge teaches me enough to at least have an idea what the forums are talking about when it comes to dependencies and so on. Going from Point A to Point Z is easy, since emerge will fill in the intervening steps.
The forums are also quite awesome. Answers tend to come quickly and politely, without a whole lot of conversational drag. There’s not enough l33t-speak to trigger my lameness flag.
(Sorry for the double post)
The point I wanted to make was that I’d like to see a combination of Gentoo’s emerge system with the strident adherance to buglessness that FreeBSD has a reputation for. On the other hand, that sacrifices the latest/greatest thrill that Gentoo gives.
why is chaos a negative thing? chaos is more dynamic. i perfer order but that doesn’t mean there doesn’t exist something to be said about chaos. same time about designed versus grown. plz stop over-reacting to objective comments. he made no value judgement about the value of choas/order and designed/grown.
plus despite using linux i can say that there is NO WAY you could argue that linux is more organized than freebsd and its base system. thas not an objective fact. the closest thing linux has is LSB and still plentyo f distros don’t use rpms so there. (no t saying rpms are tyhe best but they ARE the standard).
These are the only things I always asked before moving to FreeBSD from Slackware :
How about SMP at FreeBSD now?
Is it already as good as Linux kernel? I don’t want to waste my processor’s power if Linux can handle better (My server running at dual PII Xeon so it’s been rather outdated now).
And how about oracle? Is anyone running oracle under linux emulation on production server?
The author wrote that he wouldn’t write about why BSD is Right and Linux is Wrong. But all his comments about order vs chaos are just that.
If you want to evangelize FreeBSD, that’s fine. But don’t say you don’t do it, when you do. That just makes you look silly.
That’s my opinion too when I read the article. Too much negative about linux and too much positive about FreeBSD for an article that show not about right and wrong.
I hope a balance and technical comparisons about differences of Linux and FreeBSD without which one is good and bad. And let me to decide which one suit better for me.
I think this kind of article can only be written by someone who loves both equally
care to elaborate? both on the value of commercial UNIX and on the BSD/Linux differences?
I will try he he. my experience with HP has been hugely positive. This is a credit to the way HP does business though. We had what i felt was a partnership with HP rather then just being another company using their hardware. Due to the complexity of our environment and the age of some of the hardware we were using on call could be pretty busy sometimes. But always no matter what the problem was it was fixed within 8 hours of the problem surfacing most times within 2-3 hours, CPU’s going bad disks crapping out you name it.HP techs we there ready to fix it at all hours of the night. Sometimes we dealt directly with the software developers in regards to patch fixes and the like.I feel it was well worth the money we spent to get that kind of service. I don’t see linux providing that level of detail anytime soon.
HP-UX is a dream to use and administer and is perfectly integrated with the hardware. Everything in the OS was layed out to be easy to understand and patching the OS(something we did quarterly) was very simple and rarely ever created problems due to bad software. Configuring the kernal was a snap using SAM.
Alot if what i feel makes HP-UX a great OS is present in BSD. When you fiddle with a BSD system you can tell that there was alot of thought put into it even the most simple things. Everything is logically ordered and consistent between BSD’s. Building a kernel is BSD is easy. I can finely hone my BSD kernel to get every last ounce of performance out simply my commenting out lines in one configuration file that is well documented.
Linux on the other hand seems rushed there doesn’t even appear to be any kind of logical organization. Parts and pieces of linux can be in entirely different locations on the file system between distros of linux. Some aspects work well where others you have to constantly tweak and tune. I don’t mind tinkering that one of the best parts of working with Unix/Unix type OS’es but i should not have to spend the majority of my time with it. I have yet to sucessfulyl build a linux kernel. I attempted it back in the 2.0 kernel days. I eventually gave up and have never tried it since mainly for fear of breaking dependencies.
This is mostly personal preference i suppose. Each to there own. i personally like stuff to just work with the minimum amount of hassle and BSD provides that for me Linux to me falls well short thats not to say in the future it won’t come around.
Don’t need emerge… we have the package tools that can install both using binary and source…
pkg_add -r <portname>
portinstall <portname> for src install
portinstall -P <portname> use binary package when aviable
portinstall -PP <portname> install using only binary packages even if no port is aviable
portupgrade <portname> to upgrade a port
portupgrade -a upgrade all
portupgrade -ai upgrade all interactively
any there are more….
It should be good. It has been reworked for 5.x which will be hitting stable in about 6 months.
And afaik it is pretty nice in 4stable too.
Linux is a buzzword today.
Careful. If you think its only a buzzword you might be swept away by the coming tides. Linux is a movement. That movement started 20 years ago and its known as GNU. The philosophy and methodology may be different than BSD, however, it is better.
Linux, early on, realized it doesn’t need these universities and corporations to grow, to learn, to adapt and change and improve itself. It can do that by using the resources of the planet, each and every one of us has the ability to contribute. BSD still seems to think that professional programmers trained in some university environment are the only people intelligent enough to design and develope the system. That’s fine, but even with its government grants its developement model is still less efficient when compared with Linux and the future of GNU.
Lose your ego and come to terms with the reality that everyone is as smart as you and capable of being smarter. Then you will see that what matters isn’t this technology or code at all, but how we interact with eachother, how we build our environment and work together to make sure everyone can work and learn and participate.
It doesn’t really matter if its Linux or BSD at the center, it does matter if its easy to use, feature complete, stable, secure, works for everyone, easy to maintain, etc. Without the philosophies its all just code and technology, which we can spread around the world with ease. But how can we do that when we don’t talk to eachother.
LOSE YOUR EGO! Its not about you anymore, its about all of us. Everyone. Together.
I mean, just look at Debian. Why not GNU/Hurd, GNU/Linux, GNU/BSD, etc. Why the pointless battles?
>Careful. If you think its only a buzzword you might be swept away by the coming tides. Linux is a movement. That movement started 20 years ago and its known as GNU. The philosophy and methodology may be different than BSD, however, it is better.
BS… dif approach, but both are perfectly workable.
>Linux, early on, realized it doesn’t need these universities and corporations to grow, to learn, to adapt and change and improve itself. It can do that by using the resources of the planet, each and every one of us has the ability to contribute. BSD still seems to think that professional programmers trained in some university environment are the only people intelligent enough to design and develope the system. That’s fine, but even with its government grants its developement model is still less efficient when compared with Linux and the future of GNU.
You don’t have to be a professional programmer to contribute to FBSD what so ever…
>It doesn’t really matter if its Linux or BSD at the center, it does matter if its easy to use, feature complete, stable, secure, works for everyone, easy to maintain, etc. Without the philosophies its all just code and technology, which we can spread around the world with ease. But how can we do that when we don’t talk to eachother.
A lot of cross developement goes on and a lot is borrowed from each other… pay more attention…
>LOSE YOUR EGO! Its not about you anymore, its about all of us. Everyone. Together.
The same could be said for you…
>I mean, just look at Debian. Why not GNU/Hurd, GNU/Linux, GNU/BSD, etc. Why the pointless battles?
Why not the pointless battles? Both sides have their jerks so let the hash it out and stay out of areas where the flack is flying… I personally find the linux group to be much more annoying generally becuase it tends to attract many annoying juvenile users that latch on to it, bash everything else cluelessly, don’t contribute any thing what so ever, and constantly troll…
BTW Linux is a buzzword today and not movement. Linux exists in the open source world, but I doubt that it counts as a movement. Things naturally migrate to the path of least resistance, including bussiness, and this happens to be open standards. Yeah, flukes happen and it is slow, but it is entrophy in action. A movement needs a political side or something like that. Nothing like that exists in the computer world and very few ppl afaik are actually working on that side. Many users don’t give a rat’s what happens and can’t stand the thought of standing up flipping the gov. or what ever the bird when their rights are tred upon. Yeah, there are a few orgs out there that stand up to companies and whack laws, but nothing the constitutes a movement. A movement requires a active public interaction and backlash. Such as what happened in the civil rights movement. It is slowly getting to that point thought.
Alot if what i feel makes HP-UX a great OS is present in BSD. When you fiddle with a BSD system you can tell that there was alot of thought put into it even the most simple things. Everything is logically ordered and consistent between BSD’s.
Could you perhaps be specific about something?
Linux on the other hand seems rushed there doesn’t even appear to be any kind of logical organization. Parts and pieces of linux can be in entirely different locations on the file system between distros of linux.
First off, you’re applying a double standard here. See if you can spot it. Nevertheless, perhaps you could be specific about some of these major discrepancies?
Some aspects work well where others you have to constantly tweak and tune.
Like what?
I have yet to sucessfulyl build a linux kernel. I attempted it back in the 2.0 kernel days.
But you haven’t actually tried for a number of years? I managed to build a customized kernel my second day of Linux use, seven years ago. I had next to no previous unix-experience, yet I found that following the instructions actually worked. That was with kernel 2.0.14.
I eventually gave up and have never tried it since mainly for fear of breaking dependencies.
Dependencies huh? Like what? Do you think the distros are going to start uninstalling core stuff needed for the system to be operational because you haven’t installed a kernel package?
This is mostly personal preference i suppose. Each to there own. i personally like stuff to just work with the minimum amount of hassle and BSD provides that for me Linux to me falls well short thats not to say in the future it won’t come around.
Again, I’d urge you to be as specific as possible.
Strange thing is, these kind of posts NEVER are.
I kept it general for a reason to avoid pointless debates with linux zealots(not that you are one) blindly defending their OS. I think this has been covered here add nauseum. However what the hell i will humor you
Could you perhaps be specific about something?
HP-UX /etc/rc.config.d Not everything but most all the settings advanced or otherwise for services tucked away nicely in one directory. Everything clearly labeled(for the most part) Driver config files, service config files etc.. saves alot of screwing around with startup scripts.
NetBSD /etc/rc.conf one file configuration again for the most part, everything clearly documented.
Linux(Redhat) /etc/sysconfig/* /etc /etc/xinetd.d among others. Not 100% fair because Redhat doesn’t represent all of the Linuces however emphasizes my point about Linux being different from distro to distro.
Some aspects work well where others you have to constantly tweak and tune.
Like what?
Good question! it been a while since i used linux for any moderatly serious tasks. With my recent use i can’t think of anything specific. So that criticism is no longer valid. So if i may i will rescind that statement.
Dependencies huh? Like what? Do you think the distros are going to start uninstalling core stuff needed for the system to be operational because you haven’t installed a kernel package?
Oh like kernel modules perhaps. Perhaps i should have presented a better argument on this one. For BSD one file to edit….don’t need a driver # is your friend. Run the compile copy new file in place reboot. Redhat linux at the time had an unituitive gui based check box style kernel build interface or the equally worse text based one. Is this still the case?(I need to check it out again it seems) Now to be fair the documentation for Linux at the time just plain sucked a 2 year old howto didn’t cut it. My main point being that building a kernel in linux is not as easy as it is with BSD.
perhaps not the best retort, maybe i am just being petty but these are just a few things that irritate me about linux.
I really dont need to justify to you why i perfer linux
over bsd, it simply did’nt work for me
Hmm, interesting, since I never asked you to justify any thing. What I said I believe your post was nothing but FUD. Unless there is some odd circumstance you did not mentioned, then it is extremely unlikely what you said is true and if it is it is most likely do to something brain dead you did.
Thats real funny, i think know what worked on my computer and
what did not BRAINDEAD? OH my that will really help your BSD
cause, do you really think everyone is going to have a good
experience with BSD? not even linux is that good
your personal attack solves nothing and if i dont know
something i can get help in the linux side not attacked….
Since you took it upon yourself to call me a liar,
you prove that bsd works on evry configuration.
OH am i being unreasonable ? who else. not everyone wants
BSD. I chould claim that linux works on all setups
but that is not true either.
Was ‘FreeBSD for Dummies already taken?
Just kidding