FreeBSD Archive

BSDVault.net has published the transcript of a Q&A chat with Jordan Hubbard, the prominent FreeBSD leader who also works for Apple's kernel team. The chat took place at the #freebsd IRC channel on the OPN server. In the very interesting chat, Jordan talks about MacOSX, BSD, SMPng and X11: "Well, I certainly have been using the X window system for a long time and have written a fair amount of software for it; for what it does, it rocks, but for what it doesn't do, it really sucks too. Don't even talk to me about font handling or printing. So I think that before you're going to see X really get some decent applications, you're going to have to finish the missing 5% of X, the part that was scheduled to take 90% of the time and so nobody got around to it. Plus, the whole UI war thing needs to end. Adobe is never going to port photoshop while nobody can answer "Which GUI environment is dominant and therefore recommended for use?" So I think X will probably remain the DOS of window systems. It is used for a lot longer than anyone predicted, deeply loved by its adherants who know how to do absolutely anything with it, ignored by the mainstream who will have moved on."

The BSD family of operating systems date all the way back to the 1980s when AT&T owned the legal rights to the OS known generically as "Unix". During that time, the source code was licensed out to a few communities, each of which developed their own proprietary version. One of the versions was BSD-Unix, named after the University of Berkeley. Due to license agreements with AT&T when Berkley tried to release their BSD-Unix for free, AT&T sued. The outcome of that lawsuit was the creation of BSD/OS, which was basically AT&T/BSD Unix with the proprietary AT&T code removed. Later on the commercial BSD was branched into what is today FreeBSD. FreeBSD currently runs on the Intel and Alpha architectures, with ports to Arm, Itanium, PowerPC and Sparc on the works.

"Bob Bruce, founder of Walnut Creek CDROM--the company that in 1993 first published FreeBSD--will once again be in charge of the core FreeBSD business. That's because the current owner, Wind River Systems, announced Monday that it is selling off its assets related to FreeBSD, an open-source version of Unix. Bruce has also become CEO of FreeBSD Mall, the new name of Walnut Creek CDROM and one of the FreeBSD assets that Wind River has owned." This sounds like good news for FreeBSD, especially when announced only one week before the expected FreeBSD 4.5 release.

KernelTrap has interviewed Matthew Dillon, a well-known FreeBSD kernel hacker. He has recently been in the spotlight due to many impressive NFS related bug fixes, as well as fixes to the TCP stack. In the KernelTrap interview he talks about these bug fixes as well as his history with computers, programming and FreeBSD. He also discusses Linux, open source, embedded systems, the Amiga (and his DICE C compiler), and much more. OSNews also interviewed Matt a few months ago.

Linux, the BeOS, Solaris, QNX, AtheOS... the list of "alternative OSes" seems ever-growing, and an increasing amount of computer users want to keep their options open. Meanwhile, sitting quieting on millions of servers --very likely on your ISP's servers-- is FreeBSD, originally developed at University of California Berkley, based on the same core as the new MacOS X, currently at version 4.4. FreeBSD is a complete, free, stable, multi-user, Unix-based Operating System available for download at freebsd.org. While FreeBSD has come a long way of late, it's far from ready for the average user, however, as it matures, it has great promise in becoming a serious player in the OS market next to Linux.

"Despite all the praise the FreeBSD ports system gets, it has limitations. One of these limitations is actually related to one of FreeBSD's other strengths -- the upgrade system. The two interact in a very clumsy way." Michael Lucas discusses how to go over the potential FreeBSD ports problems by unveiling the 'portupgrades' application.

FreeBSD boots in single user mode on the SPARC platform. The boot log can be found here. FreeBSD already runs on x86 and Alpha, the SPARC port seems to go well, however the PPC port is not moving that fast.

To pick up the slack from the recent WindRiver news, the DaemonNews Mall announced that we will be publishing our own FreeBSD CD sets, beginning with the next release, 4.5, scheduled for January 2002. They will also offer subscription plans. Here's the entire article.

Alan Clegg reports in a story at Daily DaemonNews that twelve people associated with the FreeBSD project were laid off from Wind River Systems. Only four remain. Also, at least one FreeBSD person was let go from iXsystems (formerly BSDi). David Huff notes, "The comments to the story are worth reading, as they include a lengthy response to this from Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD release manager and current Apple employee)."

FreeBSD is a well known and advanced BSD UNIX operating system for the Intel compatible (x86), DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures. The new version, 4.4, came out just some days ago. Announcement here, the BSD Installation Guide here and the release notes are here.