Here is a new FreeBSD-based distro, HawkinsOS, but this time is commercial and offers services.
HawkinsOS: Commercial FreeBSD Distribution & Service
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I expect that this initiative brings some market attention to the BSD community. They deserve the support and the money involved.
“A company takes a BSD Lisensed OS like FreeBSD, Makes changes, doesn’t give those changes back to FreeBSD, to the FreeBSD community… ”
It was only a matter of time before corporations start trying to capitalize off BSD. Guess they finally think the Linux distroy playing field is full. They should have called it Hawkinspire…wonder if they’ll have a Click ‘n’ Run warehouse…
You know, you propably started a flame war.
Oh well… How do you know that Hawkins won’t give any changes back?
BTW: “The current estimated time of arrival is June 15th 2003.”
*LOL* 2003…
That logotype must be one of the worst i’ve seen for a long, long time.
Your wrong, this OS remains open source. the source will not be closed.
ALSO: The logo will be changing once it is released so don’t panic.
Come’on we’re tech guys not english majors 😉
Also: We are concentrating on services..not closing the OS.. Once this project is profitable we plan on donating to open source projects.
O.K. FreeBSD is already available in CompUSA in a commercial box and plus there’s mac os X… This does sound nice though.. Just wondering if apple donated any money to BSD..
OK will this be including a default DE and if so which is currently planned.
Not trying to start a flame war, just interested. Im personally looking for something that defaults to Gnome, and have recently been looking at installing FreeBSD and Gnome.
Looking forward to seeing what your finished product is like, good luck with the venture.
Solkaris
Apple has donated equipment and money to the BSD, particularly FreeBSD. Apple employs many FreeBSD developers, including Jordan K. Hubbard.
“It was only a matter of time before corporations start trying to capitalize off BSD.”
Well there’s been BSD/OS / BSDi for ages. They have been around since 386BSD days I believe.
“O.K. FreeBSD is already available in CompUSA in a commercial box and plus there’s mac os X”
I bought the FBSD power pak at about $60. I don’t know how much support, if any, it came with. My SuSE boxed set only had 30 to 60 days.
we will throw more initial support behind KDE, but we will support both KDE & GNOME, which can easily be installed and utilized. But things can change due to customer demand.
Thanks!
“We are concentrating on services..not closing the OS.. Once this project is profitable we plan on donating to open source projects.”
I’ve read the About page on your website, but I’m not sure if I see the difference between what you’re offering and buying a packaged BSD flavor at BSDmall.com.
Well, this is a little different than BSDmall.com in these ways:
1) Support for multiple applications, not just the OS
2) Unlimited upgrades
3) low priced consulting & support
4) packaged differently, may also contain commercial software to boost its value.
5) eventually, it will seperate from FreeBSD–if the userbase allows for it, although containing compatability, if successful it will become its own open source operating system which still will relie on the FreeBSD kernel. It really depends on the direction of the OS depending on what the customers request.
Overall, It’s priced lower than what BSDMall offers. Although mainly focued on the server we will release a desktop version as well and will work on a graphical installer and automatic upgrading service as well.
Seems like an interesting project. But I was wondering what is the pricing, and what does one get, besides support, with this distribution. Are there any plans for custom server/desktop packages? Also are there any job openings, I notice you guys are located in Arkansas.
i doubt the source will change that much. let them close the source, it will be just like rhel.
they can make mods and choose whether to submit a patch back. if they don’t then so what? they’ll be doing a lot more by promoting bsd in general.
its a good idea too – “hello sir would you like to buy a freelemon?” “is it free?” “uhh yes” “but your not selling it for free? did you even make it” “no we just offer support”
OR
“Hello sir would you like to buy a hawkinslemon” “ummm” “you wont regret it sir, it is grown with proven techniques dating back to groovy 1979” “sure ok then” “plus when you buy this hawkinlemon you can ring me 24/7 for recepe support” “SOLD”
bad analogy but im tired
haven’t had my morning coffee yet.
sorry cant help this =)
** picks up flamethrower
<flame>
gpl isnt more open than bsd because you HAVE to keep the source available. with bsd your free-er to do what you wish.
</flame>
We don’t want to close the source… We view it as less valuable if it were closed.
The pricing is found on the main page. We will reveal the packages that will become available soon. There are plans for customer server/desktop packages. Currently we are not accepting employement but may be doing so. If you are interested you can always e-mail me directly.
this makes sense. especially as every commercial organisation I have worked with has used FreeBSD over linux … if there can be a RedHat of BSDs t would do very well – i know that many companies using BSDs often spend time and resources fixing bugs or making modifications and spending time working out how the BSDs work, when they could all be drawing upon a BSD expertise base / consultancy.
in that light, it makes much more sense to offer services for BSD than Linux … simply because many corporations are actually using BSD in appliance and server systems.
Good luck to them. I wonder how app-compatible this is to linux – can linux apps run on it after a recompile, or not even needing a recompile (assuming it’s intel based)? Is it as posix-compliant (or Unix.Org-compliant) when it comes to system calls as linux?
When can I expect a well developed desktop offering from this company?
It can run most linux applications, exactly like FreeBSD currently can. NetBSD and OpenBSD can run linux applications as well.
The Desktop will come later since we are all server admins. unless if someone wants to help us 😉
I’ve sometimes been wondering what would happen if there was a fourth major open source BSD flavor, an easy to use desktop OS, something like “EasyBSD”, or Mandrake & SUSE in the Linux world? Would BSD then be much more popular among others than just sysadmins and geeks too? Probably. Could BSD compete more effectively for the place on future desktops too, not just on servers? Maybe.
Yeah, we have Darwin/Mac OS X, but that’s, not the same thing. I mean a new BSD flavor that would be a working and well supported OS out of the box, rather newbie friendly but not geek unfriendly, cheap or free, open source, very secure and network ready like other BSDs, and would have good and easy to use installer and configuration tools (mostly GUI). Yeah, it would mean a whole lotta work, but MacOS X proves that it is possible.
Maybe this HawkinsOS thing (or something else) could develop into something like that too? Or maybe that’s not their cup of tea? But good luck anyway.
DragonFly BSD might become that.
DragonFly BSD might become that.
I am a tremendous fan of DragonFly, and I mostly agree with you. I’m just not entirely sure that it will be any more “newbie friendly” than the other BSDs. I could be wrong, but we’ll have to see.
We will try to simplify everything regarding server usage, the desktop will come later. I personally thought OpenBSD was pretty easy to use 🙂
But remember, an easy to use OS will reduce the amount of the support tickets and calls submitted 😉
As a polite nitpick – how about a name other than “HawkinsOS”… IMHO, it just doesn’t grab my attention, is generally non-descript, has no direct name association with “BSD”, and doesn’t contain much imagery. Linux has “Redhat”, “Linaire”, “Mandrake”, etc. It would be nice to have something a bit more pleasant on the ear. Maybe just a one word noun (no ‘BSD’ at the end, that’s just overdone). As a couple off the top suggestions – “Pitchfork”, “Crucible”, “WeldIron”… Ok so those are lame. Maybe something reminiscent of the naming scheme from the 4.4BSD-Lite branches (Tahoe, Reno, etc.). Maybe some names related to the hottest areas on earth (regions of the Sahara, trails at Death Valley nat.,etc) Just some suggestions.
-unofficial marketing dept.
Apple employs many FreeBSD developers, including Jordan K. Hubbard.
Jordan Hubbard is no longer a FreeBSD developer. He tried juggling both for a while, but simply did not have the time nor the energy to be a productive member of both teams.
“Jordan Hubbard is no longer a FreeBSD developer. He tried juggling both for a while, but simply did not have the time nor the energy to be a productive member of both teams.”
So now he just works for Apple? What a waste.
would you like to trademark those names and give us an exclusive royalty free license to use it? lol
Well, we wanted to call it “Doors Server System 2004” 😉
Currently we are picking out all the applications that will be distributed and supported as well as provided with upgrades… as well as tweaking the installation processs and changing some stuff up abit.. clean the system of unfriendly licenses and pack the OS up…this will be the first release which will provide us a testing ground. we will then work from there.
Provided you make FreeBSD fully supported by Mono and MonoDevelop (here the main problem is the debugger), and you default to GNOME.. I’ve been dreaming of something like that for ages… *drool*
/me goes back to dreaming and updating his desktop using ports
To my understanding, mono is not fully functional yet. We will certainly support it once it becomes fully functional and stable. As for desktops.. we will support multiple desktops.. The beta release will be freely downloadable and it will not be that impressive its the long term progress that will be impressive.
Fragmenting is the last thing the BSD community needs right now. If “HawkinsOS” is still a working project in three months, I will at my hat. What do they add that DragonFly and Wasabi don’t? At least those projects have biggish names behind them.
Fragmenting, How? alot of the bsds use different kernels, this one won’t use a different kernel.
Perhaps we are small people with big, hopeless dreams.. Yeah lets try to kill people’s spirits.
I never used RHEL, I always just used whitebox.. strip those copyrights 🙂
>> Provided you make FreeBSD fully supported by Mono and MonoDevelop (here the main problem is the debugger), and you default to GNOME.. I’ve been dreaming of something like that for ages… *drool*
so why not just install FreeBSD and build the GNOME and mono ports???
are you implying that open source should stay out of the business world, that in fact, the models are flawed?
Because I would like commercial support, and I would like to see some more FreeBSD development, therefore I see this HawkinsOS thingy as good thing for me and for FreeBSD, I would be happy to buy their product, since I don’t mind paying for good software and support.
I currently have a FreeBSD-Current desktop running GNOME 2.6.1, but Mono is broken on -current. As Mono has entered final beta stages it would be nice to have it working on FreeBSD5 soon, but the mono developers aren’t really interested I think, since they focus a lot on NPTL (Linux specific) for their debugger fx. So it’s probably has to be fixed by real FreeBSD developers.
But yeah, I use and love FreeBSD, hell I gave phk my cash when he asked politely – regardless of the fact that I’ll probably never benefit from the work he wanted the cash for – it was nice proof that OSS users aren’t just a bunch of freeloaders.
“i doubt the source will change that much. let them close the source, it will be just like rhel. ”
RHEL is open source lame-ass. They do not provide binaries but the source is freely available.
dont be a moron. i meant the different between the open source bsd and hawkinsos. you can get the source and binaries for FREE with freebsd,openbsd, etc and fedora BUT you have to pay for the binaries w/ support for hawkinsos and rhel
Lovechild
Provided you make FreeBSD fully supported by Mono and MonoDevelop (here the main problem is the debugger), and you default to GNOME.. I’ve been dreaming of something like that for ages… *drool*
/me goes back to dreaming and updating his desktop using ports
Hello,
Why mono? The .NET runtime + source was made available on FreeBSD by microsoft a long time ago..
If the source is under an acceptable license, new things can make it into other BSD projects.
Just a note of support: fantastic of you to provide the commercial bridge between the OS and the customer, and wish you all the best. There is certainly a market for this, especially if you can focus on the carrier grade hosting and server market, and focus on the aspects of a make it cheaper and easier to install the OS for certain use cases, automate upgrades, etc.
Why the announcement so soon? Why not announce something when it’s available?
I always perceive pre announced software with some scepticism, especially when it’s coming out of the blue.
This will go against the popular opinion here, but keep in mind that this site is very much pro GNOME… but this is just my opinion.
I think that initial KDE support is a very good idea. Yeah, I’m a KDE guy, and I’m biased, so what? Other ppl. are biased too, but I think that there is at least as many KDE users on FreeBSD as GNOMErs – in fact, the poll (kde vs. gnome) on bsdforums shows that more ppl. are using KDE – so there is definitely as much a demand for KDE as there is for gnome among FreeBSD users.
The reason I think KDE is a good choice is that devs make sure the KDE works perfectly on FreeBSD. In fact, kpackage supports FreeBSD ports out of the box – so you have already a nice GUI for package management (oh, and there is also Barry of course).
Ok, I heard only good things about gnome on freebsd as well, but I can only comment on KDE on FreeBSD because that’s what I know – and I know that the FreeBSD (KDE) team is on excellent terms and works closely with the KDE team. This is a ++ for support, an important aspect for your project I guess (see latest kdelibs update for instance…). I also like the attention they give to minute details – like breaking up kdeaddons (so you can install individual parts – like kfile- or kate-plugins – without the need to bring in new dependencies like kdeagames – I don’t know if any linux distro does that!).
This is very subjective of course, but I always felt that KDE treats FreeBSD and Linux on equal terms (no linuxisms) – for instance, the aforementioned kpackage support, but not only that… If you use knewsticker, you’ll see that freshports, and all the major bsd-related sites are there by default. And this splash-screen just rocks
) http://kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=12323
For those who would mod this down: I’M NOT AGAINST GNOME SUPPORT, I just wanted to say that I am (and many BSDers are) happy with KDE as well.
>> Fragmenting, How? alot of the bsds use different kernels, this one won’t use a different kernel.
Fragmenting as in market fragmentation. Now the dwindling BSD community will be further divided just at the time when there should be concerted effort to rally support behind two versions at most (bye-bye NetBSD) so there can be enough developers focusing on one version to keep BSD competitive. And don’t tell me “all of our changes are open” – it *matters* where and how development takes place. Maybe your code (is there any new useful code?) will make it back into FreeBSD, but it will take longer than if it was done as a FreeBSD project proper.
lol, dwindling? not bloody likely
Well, why would yT do this (athlough its really different) Comments and opinions alter business decisions. It’s marketing and its to get an idea of what people would like in later releases
Well, your ‘dwindling’ BSD community makes me suspect that you are a troll (the BSD community is growing at a fast pace – check bsdforums to see how many new accounts are created, the panic on gentooforums – there is a thread about “Stop users switching to FreeBSD” there -, the new src commits each month, etc.). Anyway, you are wrong about market fragmentation as well.
No OS can cater to every need (a kernel maybe), and there is a distinct focus of each BSD branch, including Dragonfly (testbed for new tech + clustering). This has only helped the BSDs: do you seriously believe that OpenBSD’s many achievments would have been possible without forking Net~? Add to this that generally all BSDs strive for code portability (check -current mailing lists to see how important portability is) among themselves, and you got the only way of efficiently handling wildly different tasks: performance, security, portability, clustering. Now about the market:
FreeBSD alone wouldn’t satisfy all market segments – it is a favorite among general hosting providers, but if a hosting company’s main marketing point is security, than OpenBSD is a better choice, not necessarily because FreeBSD can’t be made as secure as Open is, but also because of name recognition. NetBSD satisfies entirely different needs – and their focus on portability results in a very clean (perhaps the cleanest) codebase, that can be used as a reference platform as well.
None of the existing projects do what HawkinsOS strives to do. Its not about forking the code-base, its about _integrated_ support. Although many companies offer freebsd support, they are not FreeBSD vendors themselves. I believe timh & co recognized this gap – and I wish them success! This won’t ‘fragment’ the FreeBSD market, because currently there is no FreeBSD solution similar to what they are going to offer! To put it simply: this is an entirely new offering (well, there was BSD/OS but HawkinsOS seems to be cheaper and more open).
“the panic on gentooforums – there is a thread about “Stop users switching to FreeBSD”
Heh heh. Made my day
on linux ABI: wine won’t work well for me on BSD. There are a few other linux progs that don’t seem to run. the FBSD handbook claims about 90 percent compatability.
on BSD/GPL: i’ve always thought the BSD license gives the developer more freedom, but the GPL license gives the code itself more freedom.
on RHEL: it is open-source, so the analogy isn’t totally valid. with RHEL though u can use whitebox and others (mentioned above) and have a good clone.
Its an invasion!
lol: http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=137284
Calm down children.
One idiot started an idiotic thread but if you actually read it you´d find out that most posts in this thread are very positive about *BSD.
To quote one post from the thread:
“Of course anyone should choose the OS they want to use. This isn’t a contest “who has the biggest d… — ehm — userbase””
Actually, it’s kind of silly. People who like Gentoo because of its portage ought to be interested in where the idea came from. BSD has quite a fascinating history to it.
Friendly competition between BSD and Linux is one thing, but I really can’t understand why some take it to extremes. Personally, I’d like to know at what point in history did computer enthusiasts/geeks adopt a gang mentality toward their OSes?
I don’t see how our support behind FreeBSD shows the breakup of the BSDs personally. There is simply more applications supported by FreeBSD.. It was a strategic decision. I personally like NetBSD, dragonflybsd and OpenBSD alot.. i feel all the bsds although with different kernels all have their place. Mainly a strategic decision.. due to its popularity… it’s not like we are limiting what version of bsd you can use..but we do not want to seperate from the freebsd kernel and put our funds to develop our own closed kernel we feel that that will close the platform and turn it into another BSD/OS(BSDi) which is no longer even offered i don’t think.
You are right. I didn’t (or I didn’t want) to suggest that this thread represents gentoo community at large – I know it is silly. Yes, friendly competition is good, and I’m proud that there is no such antimony that some ./ trolls would like us to believe between the two (and sometimes overlapping) user bases (most linux-related threads are very positive on bsdforums as well
Personally, I’d like to know at what point in history did computer enthusiasts/geeks adopt a gang mentality toward their OSes?
Our religion is better than yours, our food is better than yours, our taste is better than yours, our os is better than yours, my os is better than yours… there is nothing new here I think. It was bound to happen when choice became available…
keep in mind that FreeBSD already provides an upgrading utility that works very well and it’s performance is oustanding. we will provide the support and will try to simplify some aspects regarding the system…..
> keep in mind that FreeBSD already provides an upgrading
> utility that works very well and it’s performance is
> oustanding. we will provide the support and will try to
> simplify some aspects regarding the system…..
i think someone with indepth knowledge of BSD should help port gentoo’s portage to BSD
http://dev.gentoo.org/~g2boojum/
isn’t portage already ported to FreeBSD?
Why port portage? ports have real reverse dependency checking (as opposed to portage – or at least portage the last time I checked, which was 2 months ago), it is easy to use with portupgrade, good (100%) integration with package management, better documentation,(pkg_info gives more info on default verbosity than portage equivalent on maximum), better search features (the ‘make search key|name=’ stuff, for ‘key’ searches in descriptions – much easier to find what you want, and I know this from experience) and nice web interface via freshports, KDE integration, even some browser integration (‘make readmes’ in /usr/ports) easy to read standard makefiles, and it just works – no use-flag hell (thanks God!) + more sensible defaults (mc won’t bring in XFree as a dependency), less likely to bail out when left to build multiple packages overnight (it just skips failing ports and continues to build, presenting a nice summary at the end, so no emerge resume skipfirst tricks needed). So … why?
It comes down to personal taste of course… you might have greater flexibility with useflags, but they are hardly documented (case in point: “OpenMotif – this will install OpenMotif on your puter” which is hardly a description), and if I need that kind of flexibility, I prefer to keep one thing in mind in contrast to hundreds of use-flags and their (inter)dependencies: I know that I can check the Makefile for additional knobs in 15 seconds if I really want to.
Aside from the ability to run KDE 3.1.4 in parallel with 3.2.2 (not very useful IMHO, or at least not for 99% of the users) I don’t see any advantage in portage compared to ports (in fact my gentoo-using roommate is pretty envious of ports) … so I really don’t get the point of porting portage (well, unless I missed the joke or something…).
I like FreeBSD and wish you well in your venture. I find it somewhat strange that most of the recent fuss has been over Linux when FreeBSD seems to me to be at least as good an OS. If all the Linux effort of recent had been put into FreeBSD I suspect we would not have had so much fragmentation and overall better documentation.
the installer isn’t very desktop user friendly, something like Anaconda (RedHat/FC) is much nicer to work with and it sets up X (and various other components) for you if you need it (since this is FreeBSD we could make it optional to add graphics support during the install.
I know we have a boot splash, but it doesn’t have a nice progession bar like the bootsplash patches used on SuSE/Mandrake/etc. have, it’s eyecandy.. we could use some eyecandy.
Ports isn’t very clean when it comes to complicated upgrades like the recent GNOME 2.4->2.6 fx. Portage handled this for me without any help, Ports needed Marcus’ script to do it, however that did the job much nicer than portage since there were no hidden surprises. Surely the oversall situation could be improved.
I would like to see Robert M. Love’s Utopia work on FreeBSD, I know we have devd which predates it but it seems to be going nowhere – in any event we should have some variant of this feature on FreeBSD, it’s very useful.
GNOME2 (so sue me for being biased) Frontend for Ports, I know there are a few but they never made it off the alpha stage, a frontend would be nice.
Install portsman and run it from gnome-terminal. 😉