Why FreeBSD 644
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
Why? (Score:5, Insightful)
FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
Flaimbait (Score:5, Insightful)
Can it get anymore flaimbaitish than this. Ironicaly enought it comes from I.B.M developer works.
P.S: Opinions are like assholes, everyone has one.
News? (Score:3, Insightful)
I've know that FreeBSD was much better than Linux for ages
Joking aside, FreeBSD is a bit hard to install and get working if you're using it as a workstation OS...
I've been using it for 4 years now and it still took most of my free time in a period of 2 weeks to get it installed properly on my newly bought laptop (with all the details and little stuff, that is)
Of course when I was done, it was very much worth it. I don't think any system is as robust and stable as FreeBSD.
A huge "Thank You" to the developers!
The "Life" section (Score:2, Insightful)
Let me make an analogy to a newspaper. Not everything you get in a newspaper is "news". For instance, there's the "Life" section of USA Today or the "Living" or "Features" section of a typical local daily newspaper, which typically runs plenty of articles other than news. Even the "Business" section (called "Money" in USA Today) usually has some articles other than news.
FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users (Score:5, Insightful)
FreeBSD is free'er than Linux, or more accurately the BSD license is free'er than the GPL. That said, the less free GPL's restrictions are meant to be benevolent for certain users.
Mac OS X's share is growing wildly. For some it is replacing Linux as their general purpose unix. Now some people have more specialized needs and Linux may be a better choice but many folks using Linux just need a general purpose unix box and are not into the politics and Mac OS X combines unix, a consumer GUI, FOS software, and off-the-shelf retail software very nicely.
Goes both ways (Score:5, Insightful)
Not that it's news anyways...
pointless (Score:1, Insightful)
Silly Question (Score:3, Insightful)
R.
Re:The "Life" section (Score:3, Insightful)
And for the record, I prefer FreeBSD over any other operating system. I'm currently sitting surrounded (well, surrounded on three sides) by FreeBSD boxes, one of which I've even convinced my wife to use as her normal desktop.
There's a lot to like (Score:5, Insightful)
Now that there is a push to support binary updates, my last major complaint has been addressed.
Anyone who has ever been stuck in the perl dependancy hell will absolutely love the ports tree - I really don't understand why there hasn't been more adoption of that concept in Linux.
Also, I am suprised that Linux is the platform of choice for all of these appliances that companies are pumping out, like wireless routers, security devices, etc, when the BSD license is so much more attractive to business.
The major stumbling block that FreeBSD has left is their development team. It seems like the way things are organized really creates a lot of opportunity for personality clashes.
Jerry
http://www.cyvin.org/ [cyvin.org]
Extremely fast? (Score:3, Insightful)
This sounds like FreeBSD performs vastly better than any OS in the world. And how much faster is exteremly compared to Linux or Windows? Twice the speed? Four times?
Re:FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"FreeBSD, FreeBSD, Uber Alles" (Score:1, Insightful)
I mean, this is slashdot, after all. Let's try not to take it TOO seriously...
Is release 5 stable yet? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Seriously. (Score:5, Insightful)
BSD is great, but it's not the only game in town. Suggesting that it is what Linux should have been is nothing more than troll bait.
Re:FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users (Score:1, Insightful)
The GPL removes your freedom, as it forces you to release software which doesn't even contain GPL code, it's like a virus. All the GPL is good for is stroking the egos of fat bearded nerds.
On the other hand, the BSD licence gives everyone freedom, it's the true free software. The GPL talks the talk, the BSD walks the walk.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
FreeBSD is a full OS. I have no idea what you mean by your statement.
Yes, compiling from source does take a long time. Have you tried the pre-compiled package system? Same dependancy tracking but with pre-compiled binaries?
FreeBSD has the best documentation of any of the unix-like OS's that I have found. The handbook covers lots of cases.
FreeBSD also has softupdates... very much like Journaling. And that is on by default through the auto command in the installer.
And I think you are missing the point of FreeBSD, it is a server OS... I think most of your complaints come from the fact that there is no GUI by default. This is because you don't usually sit on the console on FreeBSD servers.
Re:FreeBSD is nice and clean (Score:4, Insightful)
Great idea, sir! Spend 6+ hours compiling something. Hooray!
Then again, you could have just installed FreeBSD and saved yourself 5.5 hours.
Re:FreeBSD is nice and clean (Score:1, Insightful)
Yeah. Obviously all linux programmers and moreover linux users are morons. In contrast, the freebsd guys are as gods, and if they can't figure out a problem, they turn to you, the most brilliant entity on the planet.
No shut down your computer and take your medicine, then you're off to bed, it's almost quarter past six.
Re:Silly Question (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's because the BSD section is intended for BSD users, whereas this article is intended for non-BSD Unix users.
Re:Uh Oh. (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they didn't. That's exactly what Windows is; you can boot NT into a command line environment and run it completely without a GUI. It would have been insane if they hadn't done that.
Use of a text interface and system fiddling is inevitable. Not so with Windows.
That's total bullshit. There are millions of Linux systems that don't even have a command line and do everything graphically (e.g., Linksys routers). And desktop Linux installations usually come with a full complement of graphical administration tools.
On the other hand, a lot of Windows system management involves going to the command line. It's just that many people give up at that point and just reinstall Windows.
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm having good experiences running NetBSD on a quad CPU server here, but you didn't mention NetBSD...
And I know that isn't necessarily a 'large SMP system.'
Frankly, who *cares* what proprietary vendors are able to twist Linux into doing on their specific hardware? They could do the same thing with any OS they focused on.
Re:Uh Oh. (Score:1, Insightful)
You must be out of your mind: the Windows administration GUI is a usability nightmare. If it were easy to use, people wouldn't have to study so much to become Microsoft certified engineers.
Bzzzt... (Score:4, Insightful)
...not so fast there sparky, a common misconception.
You are right in thinking that the true "guts" of the kernel is mach, however, it's only really used for the very very low level stuff and message passing, the rest of the system is provided by a BSD server for mach that takes care of 90% of the system duties. What apple have created is a bit of a bastard child of a microkernel and a monolithic kernel.
Re:FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users (Score:2, Insightful)
So, wait, if I spend weeks if not months writing a kernel module or a driver, I don't own it? Good to know. *runs to BSD* What if I harden the kernel to make up for your security lacking, huh? What? Again, not mine? Even though I worked so hard on it, going through many cases of Red Bull? *runs faster*
Funny, the BSD license is the best way to lose control over what you create. Someone like Microsoft can take all your "hard work", modify it slightly and sell it back to you. A big part of what OS X is worth is what BSD is worth. But the BSD developers all have to pay full price to use their own work. Granted, not the best of examples since Apple has contributed a lot, but you get the general idea.
I didn't lose anything. I still own it. It's still mine. I can do with it what I want. Microsoft used the power I gave them. Likewise, any modifications they make they fully own.
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:4, Insightful)
Just as a factual matter, Linux and GPL software have recieved about 10^6 more corporate support than BSD-licenced software in recent years. The GPL has proven to be a very corporate-friendly license because it allows copyright holders to share their code without giving away the 'exploitation rights'.
Plus, I think you could argue that the big exception (Apple), was driven more by technical reasons than licensing ones. They started with an 1980s BSD-based OS, so FreeBSD code was a better fit. If OS X was a clean slate, who knows?
Re:FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
The Ports system is far superior to the rpm system. It actually tracks dependancies, and has a system to grab them for you. You are way off base on that statement.
Why did you leave out Debian's dpkg, which the GP mentioned? It's been doing everything you describe for at least 6 years. In the last two years, the rpm based distros have all added dependency tracking systems, such as Suse's excellent Yast tool. If you really want to compile things, Gentoo has a ports system just like the BSDs, and it has worked quite well for a couple of years now.
These discussions are always funny becuase you can see how people never poke around looking at alternatives, and then go and make comments that are way our of date. Read about the other systems, or just admit "I have no idea what they do now". Sites such as KernelTrap are good for cross-OS news stories. Even though I'm regularly a Debian user, that's how I found out about the work on DragonFly BSD, which I think is pretty cool. I think some of that work will percolate into the other OSes, which is why I'm glad most developers *do* keep track of the current work in other free OSes.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:5, Insightful)
1. drivers: more devices supported in the Linux world
2. install: bsd install still primative, and disk partitioning is weird especially for novice, and multiple boot can be hard to set up
3. smp - scaling: 5.x freebsd is still having trouble with its spinlocks, and can still sieze up under heavy load (4.x version with giant lock doesn't have this problem). The core issue is that the freebsd folks don't seem to realize releasing locks in the same order they are applied makes things easy, while what they are doing can make trouble. This is why I use 4. in production.
4. filesystem - ext3 and reiserfs can get into inconsistent unrecoverable state, pure and simple. XFS and maybe some other Linux filesystems don't have that problem.
5. Linux GPL great for some things and horrible for others, BSD license ditto.
6. startup scripts easier to understand in BSD, getting pretty hairy in some Linux distros. My favorite commercial distro SuSE and RedHat are really getting tangled.
7. More Enterprise software available (and supported) on Linux, maybe not a big deal unless you're in big SAN environment or absolutely MUST use Oracle and such. I'm betting though you'll see more stuff popping up for Debian and friends now that Debian has bounded back into life.
Clap trap (Score:2, Insightful)
Wow I gotta stop believing all that Linux FUD I've been reading. So Linux can't, hasn't or done any of that? Talk about tooting your own horn at the expense of something else.
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:3, Insightful)
FreeBSD has a bit of an identity crisis, they sorta see themselves as "Linux Junior", with a chip on their shoulders. Which is why every single pro-BSD article is basically a comparison to Linux.
If you look at how Linux has been positioned and marketed, they've never felt the need to "eat their own" and convert FreeBSD users. At least not in the last 10 years.
Linux has always been positioned for "world domination" -- first they convinced UNIX/RISC systems to convert, then scientific systems, then embedded systems, and now they are working on Windows systems. Whether it's Java/J2EE, or Oracle, or ERP, or StarOffice, Linux finds a way into a market. These are all new customers.
Meanwhile FreeBSDers sit back and look at the load-average on their sendmail servers and then wonder why the world isn't knocking on their door . Rather than define themselves somehow, they respond by nipping at Linux's heels.
Re:FreeBSD is so unknown to Taco (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:worth it (Score:1, Insightful)
even assuming zero maintenance for bsd (ha !) and 30 mins every 2 week for windows (windows update + norton) it is hard to see the advantage, particularly given the wealth of windows apps and ease of communicating with others
The wealth that is in FreeBSD and other UNIX-like OS' is the userland tools and scripting. If you learn the UNIX way, you might find that there are lots of things that you can do really quickly if you are creative enough. Windows is great for certain tasks, but the UNIX-like OS' give you power to apply your creativity seemingly without bounds.
I've just come out of a contract where I was competing with other contractors who had been working on this large project for years. I came in 2 years after it and they started and in a matter of *DAYS* I quickly rose to the top and my methods were chosen to take the lead because I had provided in days many points off a list which other contractors had been trying to provide or claimed were impossible or infeasible. It all came down to the fact that these contractors were using Windows and off-the-shelf applications for this particular industry. I on the other hand was using UNIX-like OS' in addition to Windows and some off-the-shelf applications (using some amount of Windows was unavoidable due to the nature of the project). Through UNIX scripting I very quickly delivered the final chosen solution (in months), what the other contractors had failed to deliver in years.
The problem with off-the-shelf is that you are bound to the constraints of someone elses generic application, whereas employing scripting of the hundreds of text based UNIX tools and applications gave me the flexibility to extract what the customer needed. Gluing some parts together with some C code was also very simple where I could not see a scripting method, because the "glue" could be so small, since the userland apps covered almost all requirements. What's more, the data flowed through processes gracefully until completion. As opposed to the Windows way which attempted to open whole data files at once and often multiple times, causing system crashes on machines which had to have far great memory and CPU resources.
The irony was that I was beating optimized binaries with scripting! All because of the efficiency of pipes. I could avoid having the same or derived data opened multiple times and being held open. Disk, memory and CPU did not have to be thrashed. It just flowed efficiently. Data was getting read once, processed and then results written.
When a project goes on for months or years, system setup of 2 weeks is an investment.
PS, it took me about 2 weeks to set up Windows XP on my laptop. This includes removing all the crap that comes with them nowdays, patching, hardening, installing apps, patching, testing, imaging and putting together a quick full restore DVD of my efforts. Next... the same for FreeBSD on another partition...
When the other guy talks of 2 week installs, I know what he means. Installing an OS is not just a matter of inserting a CD and answering a few superficial questions about yourself, when the task at hand is to get some real work done. I also realise that an initial install and on-going maintenance are two very different beasts.
Here is the kicker though... it takes me about 5 to 15 minutes to install any of OpenBSD, NetBSD or FreeBSD, including X. Then perhaps another 15 minutes to install application packages and a *COPY* of the configuration files for my favourite Windowing environment. I can have a BSD up and ready to go in half an hour. A system which I feel has potential only limited by my creativity to problem solving. What's more, I know at least with OpenBSD that I can package my additions and changes into a tarball for inclusion at install time. Taking future installs of OpenBSD back to about 5 minutes. FIVE MINUTES.
I don't know how easy this is to do with NetBSD or FreeBSD, as I've never tried.
Re:The real difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
Through most of the 90s, the BSDers prided themselves with their elitism and their old school Unix cliquishness. I read the lists -- "If you aren't smart enough to figure it out, maybe you should go run Linux, haha." was a common sentiment.
Then, in about 1998, they realized that Linux was being deployed 100:1 over BSD and they had a collective "Oh shit!" moment. They then started a positive effort to be more open and helpful to new and less clueful users, but at that point it may have been too late.
I still read comments like "Well, if you aren't reading such-n-such mailing lists, you shouldn't be running FreeBSD 5", which implies that BSDers still see their world as being pretty small. Consider how many support outlets there are for Linux, and that only a miniscule portion of users read the development lists or come anywhere close to flamethrower-range of the main developers.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:2, Insightful)
That's true.
Some BSD users may argue that the level of support is not very good or that Linux kernels tend to include support for "highly beta, experimental features" in stable kernels, which is not entirely false.
Others will note that the size of the BSD development teams is far smaller than "the world at large", so it's normal to have less people who can develop drivers and/or test them.
The truth is, as usual, somewhere in between :-)
If by "primative", you mean "primitive", then I have to respectfully ask that you elaborate why you think the installer is primitive.
Oh, but we do. Have a look at the description of "WITNESS" and "lock order reversal", what it is and why FreeBSD people are making their best to improve parallelismm but avoid the problems of the second with the help of the first :-)
Admittedly it's been a long way since 4.0 was "CURRENT", or even since 4.0 was first released, but there have both been an amazing amount of improvements in both the kernel and userlevel side of applications that support and make good use of parallelism. There is, of course, still a lot of room for improvement, but that's not inherently a bad thing :-)
I've had ext3 filesystems die on me or lose /etc/inittab or something worse, so I can agree about ext3fs here. I don't know about the rest though.
Yes. Your point, here, is?...True. I can bring up a FreeBSD machine after typing just a couple of lines in /etc/rc.conf, i.e.:
It's usually far more complex and some times (oh the horrors!) it practically requires a GUI to configure interfaces of a Linux machine, or guesswork for tweaking some complex, barely documented set of files underIt takes a lot of effort to support, and I mean really SUPPORT, as in be prepared to answer technical questions and resolve bug reports 24x7, a dozen or so different types of UNIX systems, be they Solaris releases, Linux distributions, or BSD versions. That's understandable. Not something I really like, but understandable...
Kernel performance (Score:5, Insightful)
In that light, these benchmarks [bulk.fefe.de] are the most enlightening comparison I have seen to date. Some BSD users have attacked the methodology, but none of them has gone on to do alternative tests of their own, and the author has been very conscientious about addressing some of the criticism. The bottom line is that FreeBSD is, whichever version you choose, at best equal to Linux in low-level kernel performance, and usually slower.
When you also take into account the greater ease of use of most common Linux distributions, broader hardware support, greater availability of commercial software (yes, you may be able to run it under FreeBSD's Linux emulation layer, but the vendor is unlikely to officially support that, which matters to large corporations), and better scalability, it really isn't suprising that most people considering a free Unix-like operating system choose some distribution of Linux.
Undoubtedly for a long time, perhaps until the 2.4 kernel came out, FreeBSD probably was superior, and had a well-deserved reputation as a better choice for serious usage. For some purposes (there are some routing benchmarks that FreeBSD people always bring up, which I can't find right now) it may still be. But through some combination of the AT&T lawsuit, media coverage, and pure chance (licensing may also have played a part), the commercial support and developer mindshare swung decisively to the Linux kernel, and today it is clearly the best choice for most uses. We can wonder what would have happened if FreeBSD had won out instead -- the resulting kernel might very well be better than either Linux or FreeBSD is today -- but that doesn't change the facts about which is the better choice today.
Re:The real difference... (Score:3, Insightful)
In comparison, yes.
Linux community = larger, therefore we have more "fanboys". With such a broad culture of people you're bound to run into a few you don't particularly like. I have been using Linux for 5 years. I'm not insanely anti-Microsoft, no I don't like their business but I don't go around telling everyone they are idiots for using their stuff. I really don't care what people use. I use my computers to get things done, I can do all those things in Linux so I choose to.
Yeah, so what? I like a small community as opposed to a large one, mainly because it doesn't attract band-wagon jumpers-on, who then naturally become part of the "It's the greatest thing since sliced bread!" crowd.
So I guess I kinda break up your statistic there huh? Probably the other thousands of people who just use Linux to get things done might as well.
Not really. You fit into them rather nicely.
You act like people just walked into developing Linux. "Jee you know what, I have no clue about anything computers but I think I'll make a kernel today!".
Um... That was almost the approach Linus took. He didn't really study existing kernels or anything. He just went for it. In fact, it started out as a terminal emulator and evolved from there. Not exactly screaming great engineering.
Post when you actually have something other then anecdotal evidence to try and make you look intelligent. Oh wait this is Slashdot, thats asking too much.
Highly suggest you do the same. As you said, that is far too much to ask (okay, I added the "far").
"Each problem that I solved became a rule..." (Score:1, Insightful)
This, in my opinion, is what *BSD has over Linux. The *BSD's have more stable API's, better documentation, and well-established procedures for system management, etc. Some of the quirks have to do with not invalidating old-knowledge, not breaking things that work, not causing radical upheavals. Linux, of course, has no problem doing these things on a routine basis.
I have run Debian. The boot(7) web-page mentions that
Re:OpenBSD (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Why FreeBSD when there's NetBSD? (Score:3, Insightful)
Its certainly not the clear-cut decision it was two years ago though, when I would have said Free on x86 and Net on anything else.
Re:FreeBSD is so unknown to Taco (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Goes both ways (Score:3, Insightful)
Look, there's a lot of good reasons that Windows got where it is, both historical and current, and that have nothing to do with anti-trust or market manipulation. Likewise, there's many many substantial reasons that Linux is deployed and FreeBSD isn't.
The tendancy of various communities to refuse to understand why their competitors become popular, and simply throw up their hands explains quite a bit why they are unpopular. You see this with Linux in the desktop market, and with FreeBSD in the the non-ISP server market.
I see this all over this discussion -- The BSDers are saying "Anything Linux can run, FreeBSD can run too". This is simply false. And until they figure it out, and make an effort to fix it, *BSD will be far behind in popularity.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
You should check again, the rpm specs and packages have had a requires section for dependencies since the very beginning. More recent versions have also included a build-req field to allow developers to specify what is needed to rebuild the rpm from source.
Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
I am not going to get into which OS "is better" because actual performance is not the issue here. If I had to rate what I saw, FreeBSD (4.1x) worked okay for the hardware it was put on, although it probably would have worked better on a "stock install" than the kludged clusterfuck that we deal with now.
The background is this: a few years ago, the small company I worked for had two admins who were FreeBSD fanatics. They pressured the IT department to use FreeBSD because it was free, their Windows infrastructure was taxed, and they had just bought a whole lot of new hardware. The pressured FreeBSD over Redhat, and made an impressive demo. So the company started going to FreeBSD. The admins, who had impressive mod skills, "tuned and tweaked" FreeBSD to work under the specific loads of the various server functions.
This would have been a good situation to be in, but then one of them got lazy, and updates got further and further behind. The other quit. The lazy one got fired. The other admins didn't know FreeBSD and barely knew Linux. Both of them eventually quit, too. I don't blame FreeBSD for the personnel problems, but this is leading to the main problem.
The company searched for someone with FreeBSD experience. The few people they found were not the kind of people they were looking for (inexperienced, would not pass clearance, had poor work records), and now they were stuck with a rapidly aging system that wasn't supported by anyone who had a clue. The new admins they hired tried to match the previous admin's skills, but were spending so much time diagnosing crashes, they didn't have time to learn new FreeBSD skills via online sources, which are sparse, confused, unorganized, and unsupportive (don't flame me on this, because this is pretty much the opinion of the whole company). And finding corporate-level supported software and hardware to run on FreeBSD was next to impossible ("We don't support FreeBSD for our fiber channel cards," says a SAN company desperate for our business, "but we hear some guy in the Netherlands had a flaky beta driver that can see things as long as the partitions are less than 256 GB." then the Sourceforge project hasn't been updated since 2002, doesn't work on our kernel version, and the guy's website is 404...)
So they decided to go with Redhat Linux. It just works. It worked faster than FreeBSD. It had an easy-to understand packaging and script-driven administration system, corporate support, and better yet: they could find LOTS people skilled in Redhat Linux in resumes. I was a particular gem because when the hired me I was an RHCT and had experience with OpenBSD and FreeBSD experience to boot. My first project was "Get us off FreeBSD!!!" by direct order. Yes, you could argue this is not a FreeBSD issue at all, but some management of people issue, and you would be right, and that is my exact point.
If FreeBSD had a sensible corporate base, a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in /etc and /usr/local/etc... and have you ever had to diagnose which one broke?), better hardware/software vendor support, and a huge skills base, maybe with some certs... THEN we will see true competition with Linux in the corporate sector. Redhat is the type of company businesses want. They understand the support language Redhat speaks. And maybe I'll see stats that the Redhat kernel is bloated, runs 20% slower the what FreeBSD does on Apache pulls, or some fanatic going on about, "Oh yeah? What about PORTS, dumbass???" But you know what? If FreeBSD wants to be taken out of the hobbyist corner and shine in the corporate arena... it's got a lot of marketing work to do.
Re:Why? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect there is a VERY good reason for this: GPL
IBM has made it clear they want to be a hardware and services company, not an OS company. They won't even endorse a single distro of Linux, even tho they are arguably the largest contributor to GNU/GPL.
So why Linux? BSD software can be closed sourced (Like OS/X's really goodies) but GPL can't. If IBM can't make a successful operating system (and they can't, even tho I loved os/2) then they want to push an operating system that no one can own. Not Microsoft, no one.
If IBM helped create a killer FreeBSD derived system, MS could take the code, close the source up and call it "Windows Hasta la Vista" and market it, because the BSD license allows this. This is one of the downsides of the "unlimited" freedom of the BSD license.
They can likely provide exceptional service for Linux (and Unix) systems because they helped write a good part of the code, and no one can close the source up on them.
So they say "fuck it, lets help with GNU/Linux, no one can close it up, we will be the experts, our hardware will always run super fast with it because we will create our own kernel hacks for it. We can make it pretty much like Unix, without the hassles of licensing."
RPM (and DEB) vs. Ports (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not superior to RPM, nor DEB for that matter. Anyone who has built or managed a large number of servers with disperate services on them should be able to recognise why.
It checks for required dependancies and installs them as required, something even CPAN can do, and it can even (usually) uninstall them (with varing levels of success), that is more or less it.
What it does not do is check for conflicts between libraries or the dependancies of other applications (meaning it's possible to fuck up one application, by installing another because it may overwrite an existing, older, installed library).
Systems like 'ports' do not verify package integrity, nor do they it support using a previons minor revion of the same application (often a requirement when the 'latest' version of whatever application or library your using breaks a feature you've been relying on, or is simply not a release you've had time to test in your test environment).
An even bigger problem related to the reliance of ports system, one of the most time consuming, is the process of upgrades. Upgrading between newer versions of FreeBSD is a mine field, awash with the potential for screwups, because there is no system in place to handle this task elegantly. Upgrading between disperate versions of the same branch (e.g. 4.6 to 4.11) will often cause serious problems you'll have to sort out manually at the console, upgrading from systems that are not in the same release (from 3.x or 4.x to 5.x) will often take up a good chunk of an afternoon to sort out the resulting mess. Upgrading a DEB or RPM system which is fully packaged managed (kernel and all), even between quite disperate releases is far more straight forward (more along the lines of 'apt-get update; apt-get dist-upgrade', or in the case of a Red Hat system, pop in the CD and click the 'Upgrade' button).
Another feature that makes more feature rich package management systems more desirable is the reduced risk. RPM is staggeringly powerful with regard to the sorts of operations it is able to carry out with packages (pretty much every feature you could ever want) and it is also trivial to build packages for - as is also true of DEB. This massively reduces the propensity for mistakes - sure you can write individual custom bash install scripts for packages in ports, but that is not a robust approach when you think about how many packages your likley to use.
There are two practical reasons why people typically dislike RPM:
1) It's refused to do what they wanted because a package was trying to be installed did not have it's appropriate dependancies also installed, or it conflicted in some way.
In these circumstances most users opt to 'force' it to install because they are frustrated at installing dependancies and sub-dependancies, and then they wonder why their system does not work as they expected, and so declare the RPM system to be at fault.
Arguably, it is at least partly at fault, but it was only being accurate by alerting them to problems that they would not otherwise have known about, which is pretty hard to critisize.
2) This is compounded by the fact that they are usually exposed to it in the form of 'Red Hat', or a similar distrobution, which does NOT feature something like 'apt-get'. 'apt-get' is in fact package management system agnostic, at least technically, and their have been RPM based commercial distrobutions which have shipped with it. It's absolutly more associated with Debian, and I think it's a mistake for Red Hat and other vendors not to include it in their RPM based distros because of the frequency of the scenario above, I suspect the cost of maintaining apt repositories (man hours, infrastructure and running costs such as bandwith) are key reasons.
Disclaimer:
I use ports on an almost daily basis, along with De
Re:Why FreeBSD is not good for most businesses (Score:5, Insightful)
That was a mistake. They should have earched for someone with mainstream UNIX experience. Anyone who's familiar with any commercial UNIX... Solaris, AIX, HPUX, whatever... will find FreeBSD a familiar environment. The details are different, but the BSD environment is baked into the genes of every commercial UNIX out there.
And there's lots of people who know UNIX who can pick up FreeBSD far far quicker than they can pick up Linux.
For example...
If FreeBSD had [...] a well-thought out directory structure (I have boot scripts in
That is a well-thought-out directory structure. You have the operating system, a fixed core that's evolved only gradually over the past 15 years, and add-on packages. You upgrade the OS, your packages don't get touched. You upgrade a package, the OS doesn't get touched. And your oldschool SunOS guys? They'll have no problem diagnosing which one broke.
I've used Red Hat versions since 2.1. Every major version has had a completely different structure. You don't have any border between the OS and add-ons, so when you go to upgrade you have to take all-or-nothing. Over the short term I can see the advantage of Red Hat's model, but over the long term you've got to start over again and again and again.
Re:FreeBSD (Score:3, Insightful)
My God, how clueless can you get and still get modded up to 4?
By FreeBSD is a complete OS, he means that kernel + userland software is all BSD, as opposed to GNU/Linux distros (GNU userland + Linux kernel).
No, it is not about semantics. It's about the software installed. For example, the GNU Broken Again Shell is not the default in BSDs.
Re:FreeBSD is nice and clean (Score:2, Insightful)
Linux of course borrowed from the unix source and of course the Linux fanatix
Isaac Newton said that he could see far ahead while standing on the shoulders of giants.
It seems to be so that more and more Linux fans do not look back anymore, so hear the message of the day: UNIXES DO HAVE X WINDOWING SYSTEM!
Solaris and Irix are besides using X too are a lot more stable than Linux is. I'm administering unix systems runnig for years - not days or at best months as Linuxes. Installing Solaris and Irix is not more complicated than Linux.
Indeed, the trouble with *BSD is that they are pain to install and they are proud of it.
Imho Linux, especially RH, became more and more similar to the evil empire fighting it: All these fancy, worthless features, unneccessary complicated solutions (e.g. crontab, init) aimed to lock-in users to a specific distro making it more or less incompatible with all the others. (Started by Mandrake using their "own" libraries breaking programs and mastered by RH bullying other distros and alienating users)
Luckily Linux is GPL OSS so Ubuntu, Gentoo may continue in the right direction