“When you have to get work done (especially if you’re self-employed) it’s important to choose the right tools to enhance your productivity. If your work has something to do with a computer, the operating system is especially important. Of all of the OSes that I have used and reviewed over the years — and I still have all of them available — I prefer FreeBSD’s “new technology release” as my main workstation operating system. Why? Because I can get more work done with it.” Read the article at NewsForge.
My workstation OS: FreeBSD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The article doesn’t really mention what the author does with FreeBSD.
It basically comes down to “I like ports better”.
While I like FreeBSD a lot and think a good, substantive article could be written explaining why it’s a great OS, this is not that article.
it doesn’t explain WHY he’s more productive with it
I’m currious how much productivity he gain. TCSH over bash, wow, how could that really make a selfemployed *really* more effective? I think it’s more a question au knowledge of one or the other.
But even if it’s not related to the subjet, I must admit that apt-get and portage have too many duplicated useless apps. It would serve better the user if the concentrate on stable optimize system instead of old apps in unmanageable number.
But the thing, as a self employed person, that serve me really, is the simple but powerful ibank and iwork application on MacOS X. It really miss me on linux, as much, that I’m planning to build one in python/gtk.
(Gnucash is overcomplicated for me and a pain to use)
And a good french grammar corrector in openoffice will be welcome, MS is far ahead. Thus saving me time and money.
it doesn’t explain WHY he’s more productive with it
Exactly.
It sounded like some guy trying to be 3l33t by using something more obscure than Linux.
it doesn’t explain WHY he’s more productive with it
Exactly, he’s just one of these guys writing useless articles
annyoing the shit out of everybody. (at least me)
I fail to see any point in arguing wether this or that
unix is more productive and why. How much time do these “productive” people spend de/installing the latest GAIM and theming the shit out their Desktop Environment, yet come back here uttering nonsense about their productivness …
I’d rather have those people putting their articles where the sun don’t shine
Jem Matzan is the author of three books …
well
What’s your desktop OS of choice? Write an article of less than 1,000 words telling us what you use and why. If we publish it, we’ll pay you $200. (from the website, after the article)
If you think you could do a better job, why not see if you can get a couple of hundred dollars for it?
If you think you could do a better job, why not see if you can get a couple of hundred dollars for it?
No mate, its not a matter if anyone can do it, its a matter of having to say something. And this guy hasn’t. At the end of the day these $200 won’t by him a clue.
“Exactly, he’s just one of these guys writing useless articles
annyoing the shit out of everybody.”
Because that’s the one constant of this website, a place where other people tell you which OS you SHOULD be using, and if you’re not than you’re either stupid, incompetent or both. Windows, OS X, Linux, Unix, BSD, Beos…they’re all either handed down by God, Himself, (or Herself)or they’re complete crap with no redeeming qualities depending only on the person whose post you happen to be reading.
Contrary to what the article says you can “manually navigate” the portage tree:
cd /usr/portage; ls
(I only just found this out recently actually.)
Contrary to what the article says you can “manually navigate” the portage tree:
cd /usr/portage; ls
(I only just found this out recently actually.)
Now, Scott me man (I’m on a roll now). With your observational skills, you definitely qualify for another article at NewsForge. Be brave, give it a go …
The quantity of the word “I’ in that article says enough about it’s quality.
What’s your desktop OS of choice? Write an article of less than 1,000 words telling us what you use and why. If we publish it, we’ll pay you $200.
That means that you can write all you want but they never publish it ’cause they don’t want to hand out $200 😛
So many linux distro’s are full of security vulnerabilities and there seems to be no interest in fixing that.
There is alot to learn from FreeBSD. Code audits, and extra security features should be a very high priority I am not saying linux distro’s should sacrifice all the features…but at least give some of the FreeBSD tried and true techniques a go.
Take for example Redhat 9. At work management came over and said “this 3rd party software now”, the 3rd party vendor requires the use of redhat 9 or we don’t get support. Now out of the box this thing can be just as fast as a windows server..not something redhat should be proud of. Securing it without breaking things the 3rd party software needs..is another task all in itself.
Now if this distro was built more secure from the ground up…at least I would have a fighting chance! Many people say “ohh i can make my (place linux distro here) far more secure then anything else out there blah blah” Ok that is true you can make a Linux machine VERY secure, but there are alot of things in many production equasions that are forgotten about. This is why security needs to be one of those things when building a production level OS that is on equal ground with features.
The FreeBSD team does a great job, and more people should learn from them, even companies such as redhat.
Unix is a philosophy. (Pipes, redirecting output/input, lots of small programs that do one thing very well, etc..) To say FreeBSD is a more real Unix than Linux is, is dumb. That’s like saying black is more black than black.
But if you insist on being a moron, then FreeBSD isn’t Unix either. Only Unix is Unix by the pedantic definition.
http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/philosophy.html
That is what the name implies. I would be quite interested to hear a review on his 5.3 release both as an 32/64 bit systems.
“The FreeBSD team does a great job, and more people should learn from them, even companies such as redhat.”
Agreed!!!
“Matthew Dillon reported that he and David Rhodus have tracked down and eliminated a longstanding bug that caused VM/filesystem corruption, dating from FreeBSD 4, which may even still be present in FreeBSD 5.”
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/kernel/2004-11/msg00105.ht…
You shouldn’t generalize all Linux distributions based on a few. Depending upon their emphasis some cater specifically towards enhanced security and others towards user friendliness.
Linux itself, has many security frameworks, PAX, seLinux, rsbac patches, etc… In a matter of fact, Linux has more security choices than any BSD. There are distributions that emphasize security to an extreme, Trustix, Immunix (based on RedHat), and the soon to be Trusted Linux.
And some distributions cater towards tough security, and user friendliness, for example Fedora Core 3 shipping with seLinux.
As I recall the only operating systems to have system-level security vulnerabilities on by default are OpenBSD and Windows XP and like Window systems.
but that article didn’t do a very good job of defending it. It basically said:
Ports rocks, portage sucks and is written by hackers (negative), ports is written by bsd hackers (positive). GPL is evil to some, so use unix tools. Linux useradd makes you use the commandline (didn’t last time I used it, but ok). AMD64 port of FBSD sucks and is unusable; they don’t wanna fix it and call me a baby when I ask.
This just isn’t newsforge material, much less osnews.
And I plan to start using fbsd after my next desktop purchase!
All through the article I only see disadvantages to FreeBSD. I too use amd64 technology and Gentoo. At first Gentoo was very unstable since most things had not gone through proper amd64 patching and kernel issues still persisted. But now its stable as a rock and the devs at gentoo are doing some amazing work on amd64 with gcc 3.4. FreeBSD lacks alot of my normal GNU apps I use and love and to boot its a pain to update. Updating a FreeBSD system requires lots of cvsing and a several page howto on working in /usr/src/sys. In gentoo its two commands. If one likes FreeBSD just because its FreeBSD then obviously one will put up with its differences. But I’ve grown up with Linux and can’t stand GNU immation systems that lack the commands,versions and options I use on a daily bases. Theres my opinion.
What is a GNU immation system? The word immation is not in the dictionary. If you mean “imitation” Then I must point out that no BSD is an IMITATION of a GNU/Linux system. This is just too funny to comment on any further.
Secondly, the number of people working on BSDs is far less than people working on GNU/Linux, the resources are available are also far lesser. So if something doesnt work, here is where you can do your part by sending problem reports, along with core dumps and relevant info.
There is no need to take part in active development or send patches, but unless someone gets proactive and submits bug reports, how will these problems be fixed? You will find that its a lot more rewarding to work in any BSD environment when you do your part to make it a better system. Isnt this what free software is about?
I forgot about all the time I wasted compiling things. And when I had to downgrade my entire OS because its AMD-64 version was too unstable to run.
And all the time I wasted making miniscule optimizations in my make.conf file!
How did it make me more productive again? What is it that I got my computer to DO in the first place? Geez, I can’t even remember any more. Better leave that part out of the article.
Maybe I’ve been using BSD and Gentoo and smoking the bowl too long.
I guess it was good enough for $200. . . now to write something about Win 98 😉
Linux based operating systems and BSD based operating systems basically function the same way, so it really can come down to personal preference. For example, my favorite unix-like OS is NetBSD, but I wouldn’t say that it is better than FreeBSD or Gentoo; rather, I would say it is better for me.
I’ve honestly been much more productive since I kicked my linux / freebsd habit. Windows XP running as much open source software as I can get my hands on works for me, and I don’t have to worry about compiling things and finding packages.
Now I find my self actually using my computer to complete tasks, do research, and even play games occasionally. When I was addicted to linux I would either be online reading about linux, installing a new distro / app, or fianlly just trying to configure something that I either wouldn’t have to worry about with Windows.
As someone above put it, I finally remembered why I had bought my computer to begin with and stopped worrying about being 1337.
Though I agree with the author writing an article like this is like writing an article for coca cola drinkers on why you prefer pepsi (or vice versa).
On the other hand if it was on Linux it would be more like why you prefer Mecca Cola ( http://www.mecca-cola.com/ ) over coca cola.
I am a BSD user…have been for quite a bit. However, I will be joining my..ehh…”Linux Brothers/Sisters” in saying that this article sucked. Linux has advantages..BSD has advantages…Solaris has advantages…BeOS has advantages…can we all just stop converting each other? Even windows has advantages.
On another note: There is this fad recently of Linux users going to WinXP and then posting about how they actually get “real work” done now. I would like to point the following out. If you are getting more “real work” done using windows, you never really learned how to use UNIX/LINUX. I am NOT saying switch back…I am saying..just cause you can’t figure out how to use the stapler…doesn’t make the paperclip better.
Charlie,
Use what makes you happy. And there is some really nice free software available for Windows. Where I work, I have to use a Windows machine, so I have installed Putty, Firefox, Filezilla, Vim, and Foobar2000. It makes for a pretty nice environment.
Oddly enough, the only modern FreeBSD is not STABLE. FreeBSD-5 is not intended to be used in a stable productive environment. Once freebsd 5 becomes stable we will adopt it and offer it to customers.
We do believe that freebsd 4 has major flaws that would prompt us to choose linux over it, due to technical concerns. However… DragonflyBSD would be a great sucessor to freebsd 4 if it were supported. FreeBSD 5 aims to fix alot of the problems in 4.x which will enable it to effectively compete with linux. I don’t see the point of running freebsd on a productive server at this moment when you can use other OS’s that have better threading and scalibility on multiple cpus. .. most people import linux threading into freebsd :/ …
The progress is great though, they have done so much with such little funding.. it took linux millions of investing to do this.. this shows how dedicated and intelligent these core developers are.
>>>On another note: There is this fad recently of Linux users going to WinXP and then posting about how they actually get “real work” done now. I would like to point the following out. If you are getting more “real work” done using windows, you never really learned how to use UNIX/LINUX. I am NOT saying switch back…I am saying..just cause you can’t figure out how to use the stapler…doesn’t make the paperclip better.
>>>
Thanks for your ASSumption,
No actually I know quite a bit about linux and unix in general. However, I prefer having one system that works properly and can be used for everything I need. One example of things that annoyed me, is that I grew very tired battling with XWindows to get both my tv and 3d funtions for my ATI Radeon AIW card to work. X.org put the nail in the coffin for me, becuase last i checked gatos only support xfree86. I also prefer having a system that will run games properly without having to mess with wine or dual booting. What exactly is the point of having two desktop environments installed on my machine with similar applications, except one can only do have of what I use my machine for.
Don’t give me crap telling me I don’t know how to run linux. I just prefer to spend my time doing other things than chasing down the latest security patch or recompiling my entire system when gentoo updates something. In the future if I ever need a webserver or something, I would probably throw together a machine with debian stable on it, but for my personal desktop, XP makes much more sense. BTW, incase you haven’t used XP, XP SP1 is extremely stable.
I really don’t know why I just wasted my time defedning my self to you, but I truly am sorry that I’m not as l337 as you.
Why compare linux to freebsd? there are only few differences. Here’s a quick run down.
FreeBSD:
– CPU affinity design issue (fixing in 5-stable)
– multi-cpu poor scalibility (fixing in 5-stable)
– fast on single CPUs
– designed to be a server OS
– Liberal License, few restrictions
Linux
– moderately fast on single cpus
– great scalibility on single cpus
– first designed to be a hobby OS.
– kernel is not totally modular
– Licese that requires you to give back
They both can run the same applications and freebsd can use all the gnu tools. I don’t see the need to argue here. Both are working on all the issues outlined above quickly.
The GNU response to the problems in linux and freebsd is this: HURD… Yes, hurd is the best designed OS I have ever seen but it’s not that popular because there is not much support for it. I suggest you take a look at the superb desing of GNU/HURD–great OS but we won’t use it because it’s not supported.
The bottom line is people use what is supported and what works. Despite freebsd & linux’s design flaws it works and fulfills it’s purpose… another reason why windows has held so much share without being threatend that much by 3rd party OS’s.. FreeBSD vs. Linux is mainly a political issue. They both do better than each other in certain situations and are both improving. I personally prefer FreeBSD-5 but Linux has more support(and freebsd5 is not stable yet) and thus I will use it
Where-O-where is the rp8 for freebsd 5.3????!!!
got kde 3.3.1 on this 5.3 and just built gnome 2.8.1 yesterday and today. got a kdm.core sitting in / when logging out of gnome after using gdm to get into gnome.?!
….I wasn’t attacking you personally, but the examples you gave are what?…you can’t run games and your graphics card is not really well supported? I am going to ignore the security updates and gentoo re-compile thing because they are so obviously bullshit. Oh, and windows XP sp1 is NOT stable..it may be stable for YOU, but I have some personal trouble with a representative sample of one. Again..I DON’T CARE what you run on your desktop..seriously..I could not care less if you attached a monkey to the top of your monitor and had it dance for you. I am not attacking you….but don’t come here and spout some idiotic thing about WindowsXP being an OS for “real work.” Oh, and I accept your apology
.
How do I setup a http proxy to work with ports?
The best way I have found to do that is to change your default fetch command to: FETCH_CMD = /usr/local/bin/wget (you will have to install the wget package from ftp or cd) and then set httpd_proxy and ftp_proxy env variables
info is here: http://www.burdell.org/technotes/freebsd/ports_via_proxy.txt
There may be an easier way now, I have not really used a proxy in quite a bit.
…as per fetch(3), but no help. I know ports uses fetch to do it’s magic. I know that I have to set those environment vars.
no go
replacing fetch with wget seems a bit extreme, though. I’ll have a look into it anyway. Live on the edge.
the problem was that I didn’t export the vars
now I did, and managed to install lynx-current
I am saying..just cause you can’t figure out how to use the stapler…doesn’t make the paperclip better.
well said
though, as for the another person that said this:
As I recall the only operating systems to have system-level security vulnerabilities on by default are OpenBSD and Windows XP and like Window systems.
*cough* Are you calling OpenSSH a “system-level security vulnerability”? I think thats a wee bit excessive.
Of course, if you really do mean to say OpenBSD ships with system-level security vulnerabilities then I think Theo might want to hear, though, I dont think you really mean that
.
I havent read the article, judging by the comments its not worth the time.
Heres my random comments (some related to what folk have said and some not):
1. I use linux and I waste no time compiling shit or recompiling (if its a system upgrade). Why? I use binary packages.
2. Dependancy hell is over now, its out of the picture and not with mentioning.
3. I had to use a win2k laptop, it belonged to the boss, I was honestly scared that it was going to mess up on me and I’d promtly after end up dead.
4. If your *actually* doing work, be it writing a report or filling out a spread sheet, I fail to understand how its going to be any quicker on one os then another. We are nerds, thats why we’re here, no matter what the os theres a good chance one of us is going to be pissing around theming something, or installing xyz so we can encode to theora (<3).
That of course is provided your os doesnt crash whilst your writing your report, which suggests windows might be a little bit less productive..
This article is worthless, not even worth commenting over. The guy didn’t even test out FreeBSD 5.3, even thought it’s been out for a week.
I run FreeBSD 4.10 right now, and I have heeded the advice of the developers: “FreeBSD 5.x is a New Technology Release”. Hence I kept using the 4.x releases and not had to mess the system in a long while. If you used 5.x in the past, then you _knew_ what you were getting into.
Now that 5.3 is out, the first Production Release from the 5.x branch, I think it’s about time to upgrade. Looking forward to all the goodies it offers.
Gee, what a useless article.
How exactly does BSD make him productive?
And how is that even possible when half the article he complains about having problems with it.
Kind of contradictory.
It’s like saying Windows makes me most productive although I have constant crashes and new virus and spyware infects my computer every day.
LOL.
Very useless article
1. I don’t get it, it just feels like a begining of an article, not even half done.
2. Apparently it’s very easy to make $200.
3. I’m sure he will be more productive with fedora/debian.
4. Using Freebsd doesn’t make him “more” l33t.
5. I’m sick of reading useless stuff like this.
From the article:
>The default shell, for instance, is TCSH for root and SH
>for users — no Bash, although you can install it from
>Ports and make it the default if you like. Many BSD hackers
>are notoriously anti-GPL, so you won’t see much in the way
>of GNU utilities in the base system, with the obvious
>exception of GCC
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/faq/book.html#MINI…
I don’t see any GPL arguments from that link, right ?
I don’t see the needs to add <<Many BSD hackers…etc>>
> if I want a binary instead of installing from source, one
> is usually available through the FreeBSD package database.
Yup execept that many packages are not available so often.
Gnome2.8.1 was added recently to ports.
To install from binary 2.8.1 and not compiling from sources I have to use marcuscom.com,
because at the ftp freebsd site that package is not available yet.
Same story for firefox…
Also because using a freebsd workstation we are more productive, installing java seems a little tricky…we need a linux emulator…
http://www.freshports.org/java/linux-sun-jdk14/
(that’s not freebsd fault, that’s sun not allowing binary distributions of java for freebsd)
also http://www.eyesbeyond.com/freebsddom/java/jdk14.html
> people wishing to run it in a production environment do so
> at their own risk.
is not so that good
Also…openoffice requires java…too…right ?
Sincerely as a FreeBSD newbie I would have liked to read good tutorial teaching on how to keep up-to-date a (kde|gnome)/openoffice/desktop by using freebsd5.3
1)
I think portupgrade is not spot as he deserves…
It will allow me to upgrade package/s only when binary packages are available, so no needs to compile from sources.
It has a lot of interesting features.
2)
Also I know there was an utility to binary upgrade a 5.x-RELEASE with security patches without worring to recompile the kernel.
imho more spolights on 1) and 2) would help a lot, at least me!
Story juice:
more tutorials please for newbies as me, rather than arguments as the ports is good or I can install packages.
Give examples, instructions, etc.
I like freebsd a lot but I’d like to see more tutorials on how to keep a freebsd/dekstop up-to-date without having to compile from sources for big apss such as java/openoffice/gnome/et cetera
I drink Diet Pepsi and I can’t believe you all drink Coke…
Pepsi makes me burp a little less and it makes me more productive therefore…
I used to drink Coke as well but when I switched to Pepsi I lost weight…
Will say no more…
Diet Pepsi’s a horrible drink but Pepsi Max is both a diet drink and tastes better than other Pepsis and Cokes
Both of you down under! Stop drinking Pepsi or Coke and start drinking pure mineral water. It is better for your diet and I promise you, you won’t get any gas from drinking it.
I haven’t read the article yet but it sounds like an extremely unintelligent article akwardly trying to pimp FBSD to the power-users. The guy should wake up and smell the stale water and realise you can get more work done with almost any modern OS as long as the OS got the application support you need. Another way to get more work done in general is to unplug your PC from the Internet and just plainly focus on what work you need to accomplish. I need to do just that now myself. Cheers.
<eom>
What makes my work easiest is Ports. If I need to accomplish something I can’t manage with my currently installed programs, I just change directory to /usr/ports/ and look in the appropriate category for programs that do what I require. I found manual navigation through the Ports directory tree much preferable to Gentoo’s Portage or Debian’s APT systems because I wasn’t inundated with scrolling pages of mostly worthless results, and I could sort by category much more easily.
Well, if the writer of this article finds that “manual navigation through the Ports directory” makes him more productive, he’ll be even more delighted once he discovers that there are GUI frontends available for FreeBSD’s, Gentoo’s and Debian’s mackage managers. For FreeBSD there are at least Portsman and Pbrowser, for Gentoo Kentoo and Porthole, and for Debian Aptitude and Synaptic. These will, no doubt, double his productivity.
And he ostensibly got paid $200 for the entry. Sheesh.
So why exactly is BSD better for him? Inquiring minds want to know!
….I wasn’t attacking you personally, but the examples you gave are what?…you can’t run games and your graphics card is not really well supported? I am going to ignore the security updates and gentoo re-compile thing because they are so obviously bullshit. Oh, and windows XP sp1 is NOT stable..it may be stable for YOU, but I have some personal trouble with a representative sample of one. Again..I DON’T CARE what you run on your desktop..seriously..I could not care less if you attached a monkey to the top of your monitor and had it dance for you. I am not attacking you….but don’t come here and spout some idiotic thing about WindowsXP being an OS for “real work.” Oh, and I accept your apology
.
Again you’re kind of taking what I said out of context. FOR ME I just like to use Windows XP, it makes my life easier, and it has been extremely stable. I’m not saying that it is the only OS you can be productive with. To say that would be absolutely absurd.
I believe you should use the best tool for the job. In my case it’s XP, but I don’t really do any programming or hosting at the current time. I’m more interested in multimedia and games. Also most of the applictations that I actually used on linux (mozilla, firefox, oo.org, gaim) are all available for windows. Finally, I had several perphrials that simply were not compatible with linux. So should I just throw them away to be 1337?
My original point was that I was spending more time maintaning my computer, than actually using it. Linux was fun to use for a while, it was something new and different and I really did learn a lot while using it. However, at this point I consider it a server / hobby os. It is extremely powerful for server applictions and programing, but I don’t use either of those functions. If I’m doing neither of those and I have a copy of XP sitting in my drawer, the only reason to use linux is a philosophical one, which for me isn’t enough. (Again, if that’s your thing, I don’t have a problem with that.)
Finally, provide me with some real world examples of XP SP1 (not SP2) being unstable. It’s real easy to just throw that out there, becaue M$ is evil, but I have never seen it crash with the exception of having a bad driver installed.
Charlie,
I agree with you. Using linux is more of a hobby. I used to use linux for my desktop for many years. Then I finally broke down and got a Mac. Everything was so much easier, and it made me realise that a computer works for you, and not vice versa. At work I switch over to Windows Xp, because everything works out the box. I can put a blank cd in, and right click on an iso, and it just burns, plus I don’t have to fight to work with other people, and only get half the content. People need to stop lookig at their computers religiously. Just step back, and look for the best solution out there. If everyone around you is using windows, and you have to interact with those people, then maybe the best solution is to use windows. On the other hand, if everyone around you is using linux, then linux might be the way to go.
the development of “alternative” operating systems is a necessity. soon microsoft. aol, msnbc, yahoo, charter may wrap up the internet and make options illegal. think i’m crazy? the people will buy it in america. they bought bush.
develop the underground in all seriousness.
In all seriousness, I believe that people should just use what they feel best meet their needs. I don’t buy into all the religious crap. Computing will continue to evolve, and so will the Internet. The Internet won’t suddenly become the domain of only one entity, nor will they take away your precious alternatives.
If you think freedom is in danger, then fight for it. That is, educate people to value freedom, and why it is in danger. Just by coding, you won’t save anything.
(And in case that’s what you intended with this post – I meant educate ‘normal’ people about freedom vs. the internet, not the techies you find here!)
The author of this article is obviously a complete zealot. Take a look at this article from his website:
http://www.thejemreport.com/modules.php?op=modload&name=News&file=a…
It’s one of the stupidest things I’ve ever read. He is mad because his gym is using Windows XP to run their check-in system, when they should be using “GNU/linux.” The problem here isn’t the choice of OS, it’s the person who set up the system. What makes him think that if they installed linux it would all of a sudden be more secure. Windows XP can be extremely secure when administered properly. Windows NTFS permissions actually allow a lot more fine tuning than linux rwx permissions.
Shane. I like your spirit but the history of the telephone (especially the telephone) and air waves has not supported free for all activities. The internet is”currently” in a unigue position, comparable to print in it’s freedoms. Make sure it lasts.
am watching pbs online news hour with freebsd5.3, gnome 2.8.1, firefox-1.0,1 and mplayer plugin.
This is a first for me on freebsds.
I installed gnome by spying the makefile in /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 and installing the depedancies in order as presented, skipping accessability and printing. I have no mozilla and when I ran pkgdb -F I got a dependancy break with several gnome apps. I made those things link to firefox. who needs big old mozilla. ihave kmail and chat without mozilla.
am watching pbs online news hour with freebsd5.3, gnome 2.8.1, firefox-1.0,1 and mplayer plugin.
This is a first for me on freebsds.
I installed gnome by spying the makefile in /usr/ports/x11/gnome2 and installing the depedancies in order as presented, skipping accessability and printing. I have no mozilla and when I ran pkgdb -F I got a dependancy break with several gnome apps. I made those things link to firefox. who needs big old mozilla. ihave kmail and chat without mozilla.
I used to seek to do things like that. I don’t even know how many hours I wasted getting mplayer, mplayerplug-in, and mozilla to play nice, just so I could watch trailers on quicktime.com. (I did eventually get it to work, but ugghhhh installing all those codecs).
Again, multimedia is one of the reasons why I prefer Windows. All I need to do is make sure I have quicktime and real player installed and i’m set. It’s things like your description of getting pbs online news to work, that make me glad to be using what I’m using. It’s tough to justify spending hours working on something in linux/bsd that practically works out of the box on Windows and Macs.
“I”
It is totally a personal preference.
With FreeBSD 5.3 they adchieved a good allround,secure OS.Compiling the kernel is very easy.Installing nvidia is easy as well:make install.Dma is enabled by default.Advanced MAC can be enabled in the kernel, its quite similar to SeLinux.Remarkable , there isn’t one complaint while compiling the kernel, no errors , nothing.It’s slightly more difficult to install then most others,but when installed it runs like hell.It’s now my main OS,can’t find any disadvantages for now.
Charlie:
I am not taking you out of context..your post just reminded me of many I have seen lately. You cannot make a post on a forum read by a large number of people stating a personal preference and expect anyone to think “Oh, he is just saying what works for him..he isn’t trying to convert anyone.” AGAIN…I don’t care that you are using WinXP. All I cared about was your implication that Windows is better for “real work.” However, it is better for multimedia, which sounds like most of what you do. I like OSX better for that, but straight UNIX/Linux is totally out of the question for multimedia right now (won’t stay that way). Btw…your continued attempt to connect *nix with “l33t” is annoying and useless. Anyone who uses UNIX/Linux because they want to feel l33t deserves what they will get. Also, I am on the IT staff for my college right now. On my campus, we have around 50% WinXP SP1, 40% OSX and 10% various *nix (servers). The IT staff pretty much ignores the OSX/*nix machines. The WinXP machines take up 99% of our time. Trust me…SP1 ain’t that stable
..I am happy it works for you though.
Bob: At least Charlie is worth discussing this with. Your arguments will be debunked at some point..would probably take around 3 sentences each. However, it will not be me who does it….too boring.
In closing (and it is closing because I am leaving this thread now), I use FreeBSD5/Solaris/Linux for what I do (not multimedia). I have used UNIX for around 8 years. If you know Windows well, then you can get more done on it then on *nix. To change that, you would have to work at it. I don’t mean learning GNOME/KDE or figuring out your distro’s system utils. To get the most out of *nix you have to understand why it was built the way it was..how to script it..awk..sed..grep. It is my opinion, through personal experience and watching others, that someone who learns all these things can be much more productive in *nix then in windows. (not for multimedia)
If your are not willing to do that (totally understandable), it doesn’t mean count out Linux/UNIX. The stability/security is worth giving it a shot anyway and I know many who have 0 clue what is going on under the DE who use *nix happily. It is sometimes difficult for these people, but it will get better.
Cya in another thread Charlie
“Again, multimedia is one of the reasons why I prefer Windows. All I need to do is make sure I have quicktime and real player installed and i’m set. It’s things like your description of getting pbs online news to work, that make me glad to be using what I’m using. It’s tough to justify spending hours working on something in linux/bsd that practically works out of the box on Windows and Macs.”
It’s your delivery that needs work, Charlie. If you simply said that Windows works for you, that would be fine and dandy, but no, like the average Windows user you want to accuse Linux users of trying to be “1337”. God forbid that someone should actually prefer Linux or BSD, that maybe they’re tired of Windows kicking them out of apps or needing to constantly be patched to fend off the multitudes of malware, and even more ridiculous, maybe they just don’t have as hard a time as you running Linux. Maybe when they install something like Mandrake or Suse, things do work out of the box. Or maybe you just haven’t had to configure Windows to work with drivers it would rather not work with.
Either way, you should have quit while you were ahead and simply said “diffrent strokes for different folks” or such.
Max, stop with the Windows XP patching rubbish. It’s a one tick option (and has been for years.) That’s a whole lot better than any FreeBSD or Linux update process I’ve seen.
I’ve had more trouble with OpenOffice playing up than MS Office. And the Explorer crashes I’ve had have caused less interruption than the Gnome crashes.
And the overwhelming majority of Windows malware relies on the user doing something stupid (like installing or running software by choice.) If the people reading this can’t avoid malware on Windows, they certainly don’t have the knowledge to be running any Unix clone. Ask a friend or knowledgeable friend, relative or company to run your computer for you if you find yourself with Windows spyware or malware. (Just make sure they really are knowledgeable though. Knowledge of file sharing and IM applications really doesn’t mean that a person has any idea of managing Windows)
Windows NTFS permissions actually allow a lot more fine tuning than linux rwx permissions.
Actually, most Linux filesystems can support ACLs like NTFS do. -> http://acl.bestbits.at/
FreeBSD/NetBSD’s UFS2 is also supporting POSIX ACLs. -> http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/fs-acl.ht…
I must say that I am personally not aware of any GUI-tool for setting them, though.
I mainly use Windows XP on my desktop because “It Just Works(tm)” but the open-source desktop environments/applications are getting better everyday. I toy with GNOME, XFCE and some other GTK applications and I will probably switch definitely to either Linux or FreeBSD next year if they keep evolving for the better as right now.
I just tried to install FreeBSD 5.3 on my main box, PARSEC. It was terrible. First of all, my USB keyboard wouldn’t even work without passing an obscure boot flag to the boot loader:
hint.atkbd.0.flags=”0x1″
Annoying and puzzling for a STABLE release, but not a show stopper. Then the fact that I could’t get the FreeBSD installer to even write partitions to my hard disk properly is just a travesty, a shocking problem for a STABLE OS. Why suddenly is FreeBSD miscalculating my disk geometry? Why does it STILL not work after manually entering the geometry values (after checking the BIOS). What the heck is going on?
This release is so buggy, that I am scared to upgrade my FreeBSD 5.2.1 server to FreeBSD 5.3. Terrible.
I was going to try and use FreeBSD 5.3 as a desktop for a month. I haven’t had this much trouble installing an OS in years. I am very disappointed.
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE runs perfectly stable for me on my dual Opteron system… it’s supported as a tier 1 platform. If you’re experiencing stability issues, it’s likely bad hardware…
I was going to try and use FreeBSD 5.3 as a desktop for a month. I haven’t had this much trouble installing an OS in years. I am very disappointed.
First of all i don’t have any intention to start a flame war but i feel the urge to react.FreeBSD 5.3 runs very good on my AMD XP2500+ 1GBddr.It’s a little more difficult to install then the average OS.Comming from Debian Linux installing FreeBSD is easy.Compiling the kernel is straight forward, no error messages, buggy modules etc.DMA is enabled as default.No problems with installing the nvidia driver.Make install is sufficient.No nead to tweak some obscure settings,2962.000 FPS with glxgears right after having installed the latest nvidia driver.The ad1980 driver module is supported i only had to add the snd_via8233 module to /boot/loader.conf.FreeBSD 5.3 gives you the opportunity to enable an advanced Mandatory Access Controlled system similar to SeLinux but more advanced and to the point documented.I can do anything i was able to do on Linux exept using dvdrip because the pixbuf package is broken.Besides that i play RTCW,Enemy territory,watch dvd’s with xine etc.
All this made it a nobrainer to switch from Linux to FreeBSD.
Yeah under normal circumstances I would agree with you. I love FreeBSD. I have been running my main server on FreeBSD 5.2.1 for several months.
I am just very angry and frustrated that I cannot get the new version to install on my main desktop machine. It does not have exotic hardware:
http://nerdsyndrome.com/parsec.php
I may try to find out some more information on the web today. The errata doesn’t have any information that I can see on this, but the errata does contain information about the USB keyboard problem.
I have to say, honestly, that even the USB keyboard issue should have been easy to spot, especially for a release that is being declared as the first member of the 5-STABLE branch.
After all FreeBSD has always bee pretty rock solid for me before this.
Last time I checked, playing games didn’t come under the heading of ‘being productive’. Nor did watching TV. Unless you’re a programmer for the Days Of Our Lives TV show, or something…
erm, that would have been both funnier and easier to understand if it said ‘Days of Our Lives computer game’.
“At work I switch over to Windows Xp, because everything works out the box. I can put a blank cd in, and right click on an iso, and it just burns”
I can do that too. Fun, isn’t it? GNOME 2.x…
“but straight UNIX/Linux is totally out of the question for multimedia right now (won’t stay that way)”
that’s weird…my main use for my rather nice Linux HTPC is multimedia.
Mandrake and Fedora (at least, I don’t know about SuSE) have update processes practically identical to Microsoft’s, except without the dependency on the One Holy Browser. You get a notification area icon, you click on it, enter your root password (ooh, security) and the updates get installed.