Given the rapid growth of Linux in the technology industry, it might be easy to overlook other open source Unix variants. But recent numbers from research outfit Netcraft show that past is prologue. FreeBSD, that other Unix variant, has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year.
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
So FreeBSD is not going to die easly
LongLive FreeBSD .
We all knew it. 😉
At least Netcraft has some good news about BSD for once. 😉
Did they go up or down?
As FreeBSD as my favorite platform I’m myself surprised that it hadn’t grown in popularity before. I’m glad to see atleast that there are linux dists such as Gentoo out there that mimick FreeBSD.
Linux has become a buzzword and frankly that hurts *BSD. People will say is FreeBSD a Linux distro? and you’d have to honestly say no… and that ends the conversation. Rename it to FreeBSD Super-Linux and it’s growth will triple.
It’s good to see that FreeBSD is showing growth. I’ve tired of the major Linux dists and avoid them for my projects. Now it’s a matter of trying to get the idea of FreeBSD accepted in the same places considering a move to Linux. Unfortunately the lack of a corporate entity to provide official support is probably the biggest drawback when it comes to that. Such a thing won’t stop me from using or advocating it, I’ve already made a few converts.
“Apple based Mac OS X on a FreeBSD kernel due in large part to its reliability, and the ability to create an open source Darwin community around a proprietary product,”
Really? I thought it was derived from a MACH kernel and only the userland tools of Mac OS X are based on FreeBSD.
I used Linux for many years, from the first Slackware release (I missed out on SLS) but a couple of years ago I switched to FreeBSD and haven’t looked back.
The thing that made the difference to me is the manner in which FreeBSD and it’s packages (ports) are released and distributed. I got sick of RedHat and dependency hell, I got sick of Debian and having to make the choice of being a year behind the times in software or running a very aptly-named unstable branch of the distribution.
Then I came across FreeBSD, a system that is released as a coherent set of kernel and tools and has a package-management system that is second to none in terms of supplying a huge number of up-to-date packages and trivially easy dependency management.
The Linux kernel on it’s own has a whole lot going for it, and a while ago I tried to switch back but after going through every major distro I could get my hands on, yes, including gentoo I gave up in utter disgust and realised something else about FreeBSD that makes Linux no longer worth looking at – documentation. I got so sick of looking things up and finding years-old howtos, out of date FAQs and obscure truncated manpages. And I’m not even going near the abomination that its GNU info. The FreeBSD handbook http://www.freebsd.org/handbook has it all, up to date, well written technically coherent documentation for the _entire_ system.
Linux has a long, long, long way to go to catch up and I seriously doubt it ever will with the distributions being the way they are these days. I deeply hope that someone ports the FreeBSD system to the Linux kernel – and I don’t mean just build an obscure undocumented source-based distro like Gentoo – or that Linux just quietly scatters to the four winds and leaves the free unix space to something usable.
Sorry but Gentoo has excellent Docs.
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/index.xml
Seriously why so much hostility towards linux from the *BSD users?
Hurray! Another Freebsd vs. Linux flamewar is about to ensue.
Why post this absolute bullshit when everyone knows what it will lead to..?
will that be news worthy enough to draw attention and people trying it? 5-stable sounds like a great reason for anyone to give FreeBSD another shot.
will that be news worthy enough to draw attention and people trying it? 5-stable sounds like a great reason for anyone to give FreeBSD another shot.
Problem adopt *BSD is licence is too much freedom arount BSD ex OSX Linux GNU is diferent thing you can not just take you must put somthing back.
The only problem I have is that my connection to the internet is a lame ass winmodem and FreeBSD doesn’t have any drivers (HCF conexant) the last time I looked for them.
With open drivers the world could be a much better place, really not only for BSD or Linux but for all the alternative OS.
> Sorry but Gentoo has excellent Docs.
Sorry, they are excellent, but they aren’t like a handbook for the whole system like the FreeBSD-Handbook. And please compare the manpages. The most GNU/Linux manpage are really bad.
It has a Mach-like kernel known as XNU. It’s not Mach though.
Sorry for posting this yet again, Eugenia, but it seems that the clueless are a dime a dozen here, so it needs to be repeated.
Really? I thought it was derived from a MACH kernel and only the userland tools of Mac OS X are based on FreeBSD.
http://www.apple.com/lae/macosx/technologies/darwin.html
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch.html
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/Darwin/Conceptual/KernelPr…
Thanks for clarification.
i was linux user but one thay i try FreeBSD …
i can say this is the day when i was born 
FreeBSD R0X
The FreeBSD people don’t give a rat’s arse about the hype. Hypes blow over. Hypes are over-rated. FreeBSD (and the other BSD’s, I love you all
) is a steady value, which doesn’t need the hype, and quite frankly is better off without the hype.
Good sysadmins (sorry all you mandrake running *censors* thinking you’re sysadmins) will know what to choose, regardless of unfounded hypes.
“Linux has become a buzzword and frankly that hurts *BSD. People will say is FreeBSD a Linux distro? and you’d have to honestly say no… and that ends the conversation. Rename it to FreeBSD Super-Linux and it’s growth will triple.”
You really think you want those people who come over for the buzz. If so, you can have them!
While this is certainly welcome news, to call it a dramatic increase in market penetration is probably not entirely accurate. The bulk of this growth is due to a couple of large virtual hosting companies.
there are strengths and weaknesses in both linux distributions and the BSD operatings sytems.
my perfects system would feature:
* the marvellous kernel engineering of linux
(at the moment, the bsd kernels do not make better
use of resources as linux does)
* BSD documentation
and something that is often overlooked:
* the academic, designed, planned and published papers
approach to new technologies in BSD. this just doesn’t
seem to happen in the linux world as much.
you can see papers and presentation on why the UVM
behaves the way ot does, the pros and cons of
kernel activations, and so on… but i don’t see the
same for developmets in the linux kernel … other
than personality clashes and soap-opera. this is a
shame becuase the resultant work is superb – but i
and many others are more willing to work with something
explained and transparently documented, and even *designed*!
t
I too have been a Linux user since I got my first 12 debian floppies years ago in a local computer magazine (1996 I think?), but I too have made the switch to FreeBSD.
When you compare BSD against Linux, you quickly see that one is a home-brewed hobby OS and the other is Unix, with all the stability and power that comes with it.
I use FreeBSD & Gentoo and i’m lovin life. I build servers with FreeBSD because I know it better.
FreeBSD rocks. Everything’s great about it, and if I’m not happy with it I simply code it to serve my purpose.
Few years ago I got tired to win98 and all the fixes upon fixes -stuff eating disk space & time to time re-installation & generally _not_knowing_ what just happened and why.
Since Linux was a big thing back then I installed Red Hat.
But it was exactly like Windows 98: it did stuff without asking me, ate hd space and whatever. Fixes upon fixes.
As I was looking for help in the net I bumbed to FreeBSD 4.4 or so, installed it, and was amazed. Clean and easy to use system, magnificient documentation, and useful manpages. So much easier to use than RH. Now it is only OS I have on my HD.
“Since Linux was a big thing back then I installed Red Hat.
But it was exactly like Windows 98: it did stuff without asking me, ate hd space and whatever. Fixes upon fixes. ”
lie. thats a big lie. rh never does anything on its own. go hide behind the bush
well one of the bright sides is the little daemon….
surprisingly the os isn’t funny at all….it’s clean and easy..
and the ports are rather nice…
if someone is arguing that apt is better…maybe it is, but it’s also cumbersome…apt-cache…apt-get…dpkg…..etc..
In Freebsd I cd to /usr/ports and #: make search key=gnome2 | less and I get all the gnome related programs….
always look at the bright side of life…
Apt-get is really not that bad. Check this:
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/archives/000414.html
I keep two types of systems in the house: My play system, a combination of Debian Sid and Sarge, and all the rest. “All the rest” are pegged to Debian Sarge. It’s not the most up to date of distros, but it does feature KDE 3.2 (they grabbed it after the first round of bug fixes went out). The main thing is its stability. Updates don’t break things, security fixes get in there eventually. It isn’t glamorous, but it works.
From what I read in the article, FreeBSD is something like that. Nothing glamorous, but it works, especially for small to mid sized computer systems. The hobbyist won’t get the latest and greatest, but will get a chance to learn Unix. People who need to get work done will get a stable system. Those virtues are nothing to sneeze at. I wish all BSD users well and look forward to the comments when FreeBSD 5 finally goes stable.
“Nothing glamorous, but it works, especially for small to mid sized computer systems.”
I suppose that the guys at Yahoo (and many other big companies) wouldn’t agree with you!
Mac OS X / darwin’s XNU is a hybrid micro-/monolithic kernel, where the micro- side is drawn from mach and the monolithic side comes from FreeBSD. In a pure microkernel design everything but the microkernel runs in userland, but in a hybrid design the microkernel shares the kernel space with other stuff as well, in this case the so-called BSD subsystem (which provides a lot of essential system services). As such, the kernel is neither a mach nor a FreeBSD kernel, however it is directly based on — not merely similar to — both sources. It’s probably best to think about XNU as a the mach microkernel embedded within a FreeBSD kernel. Have a look here for more:
http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html
It’s probably best to think about XNU as a the mach microkernel embedded within a FreeBSD kernel. Have a look here for more:
I agree with what you’re saying, but I think that it’s more correct to explain it as a Mach-like kernel with BSD welded on top of it, as Mach services are used for more of the really low level stuff than are the BSD bits.
For whatever that was worth.
and they called me a liar.
“NetBSD, OpenBSD and FreeBSD. Apple’s OS X (Darwin) is also based on FreeBSD. ”
– OpenBSD is based on NetBSD and quickly adopted and integrateda lot of FreeBSD stuff together…
– FreeBSD is based on BSD UNIX
– NetBSD is based on BSD Lite UNIX
– BSD Lite and BSD are both based off of each other
There are currently three mainstream open source BSD variants
Forgive me, I am the stupid today. 🙁
Linux users are hostile toward BSD users. They bash the licenses, they bash the OS calling linux ‘surperior to all operating systems’ and the like… suggesting bsd OS’s are dying and everyone should just switch to linux.
Ofcourse this is just a few outspoken people that make it seem like the whole movement.
…when an article on FreeBSD elicits discussion about FreeBSD and not comparisons to other operating systems.
Sorry, but Gentoo’s handbook is nowhere near as good as FreeBSDs. Gentoo’s covers installation and portage. FreeBSD’s covers so much more.
I did actually look at Gentoo’s docs after your post, hoping that something had changed in the world of Linux documentation since I last ventured there.
It hasn’t
I remember that FreeBSD works well on servers with one, or several processors. The kinds of massive scaling possible with Linux kernel 2.6, or other forms of Unix. from what I read, that makes FreeBSD quite suitable as a Web server. Hence, I am not surprised that companies like Yahoo use it for their servers.
The exciting thing is that FreeBSD has real potential in version 5. When it goes stable, it appears that at least some threading problems will be solved.