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 It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth."
Giant FreeBSD (Score:1, Interesting)
FreeBSD is the the guts of Apple's Mac OS X. Which incidentally outnumbers all other forms of Unix/Linux by about five to one.
And although OS X on Intel is coming, it is still 99.999% PowerPC.
Re:Seriously. (Score:3, Interesting)
Yep. A slow day indeed.
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:1, Interesting)
Why we use FreeBSD (Score:5, Interesting)
In general, it is rock solid; I've seen a FreeBSD server with a load of 80-something (process went nuts), and still been able to login and take corrective action without rebooting. I remember being quite shocked to find a console reporting that / was inaccessible due to a drive error - but server processes on other partitions continued to run just fine anyway. We've had a few hiccups with 5.x (although 5.4 fixed most of them), but our testing of 6-beta is going really well. FreeBSD is the masochist of operating systems: you hit it, and it just keeps asking for more!
There are other reasons to love it. The ports system is very solid, and it's been years since we had problems applying an upgrade due to dependency issues. The documentation is marvelous - man pages are useful, and the handbook covers most things. The community support mailing lists are very useful, too. Jails provide a convenient way to partition processes on a single server, although they are far from perfect at this point (they keep improving, though).
I really can't say enough good things about FreeBSD. It has been running most of our hosting setup, and many of our client's networks for years, and the only time we ever seem to run into problems is when hardware dies.
(For the record, I also use Debian - and it is good, but I prefer FreeBSD for servers that have to be trusted)
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:5, Interesting)
At least for companies to use the OS with there products.
Now the licenses issue is not going to concern me if all I am doing is setting up a machine to run at home. And I think it comes down to what you are use to. I have been mostly a old Sun Admin and I like FreeBSD over Linux, although I do like the rc start up scripts of Linux over FreeBSD.
And it did make the move to OS X easier coming from FreeBSD. However I am not sure I will ever get use to the changes in the startup files that Apple has introduced. Maybe some day.
-S
FreeBSD makes sense (Score:5, Interesting)
If I install software, it's going to be in
I've used FreeBSD for about 6 years and I really don't see myself using Linux anymore. The community is very supportive, intelligent and open minded, I always seem to get things done with FreeBSD, I haven't found a problem I couldn't solve within a few hours, it just works, and works well. Try it, you might find that it works as well for you.
What about NetBSD? (Score:1, Interesting)
Better question: (Score:5, Interesting)
The article was really sketchy on this point.
Re:Uh Oh. (Score:1, Interesting)
On a non-technical level, Windows is the OS that Linux should have been... think about it...
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:3, Interesting)
http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/ [bulk.fefe.de]
Re:FreeBSD is free'er, MacOS X better for users (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Uh Oh. (Score:3, Interesting)
Fortunately, saner minds prevailed.
As advanced as current iterations of Linux are over BSD in useability and sanity (Gentoo notwithstanding) they still harken back to phosphor terminals and text interaction at every turn. Want to install everything in FC3 off the DVD and work with nothing more than what is on there? Fine. But it won't include Java, Macromedia Flash, the latest Firefox, drivers for any webcams or a dozen other things you might have or want to put on your box, etc.
Use of a text interface and system fiddling is inevitable. Not so with Windows.
If the BSD community could drop their (admitedly less than the Linux crowd's) dislike of Windows and Microsoft, they might see that useability and integration do not have to be wholly separate from security. I would love to see OpenBSD as the guts of a good GUI-centric OS with modern packaging systems as easy as those found on Windows. Then you could say, "here's an OS that is as easy to use as Windows and infinitely more secure because its parentage was all about security."
And I could finally stop referencing BSD/M.
Re:Linux And The BSDs (Score:4, Interesting)
At least for companies to use the OS with there products.
Linux doesn't require that applications running on top must be free/open (Or Red Hat, Suse, IBM, Oracle and everyone else doing that would be in trouble), so what would be the difference? The only thing they can't do is modify the kernel, distribute it, and not ship the code. And that is only relevant to an OS company. Hell, they could even do all the in-house customization they want, like the NSA did. Or just publish their modifications, since they're not in the OS business anyway. So to claim there's any relevant licensing difference for companies using either OS is just FUD, in my opinion.
Kjella
Re:FreeBSD (Score:3, Interesting)
I think he is saying that FreeBSD is like Gentoo is like one of those old RadioShake "build your own radio" kits. To him, and to many others, an OS is something that works out of the box to perform common tasks. In other words, it's a largely binary-based distro, rather than ports-based.
After everything has been built, he would consider it an OS, but out of the box, you have to spend quite a bit of time before your box is actually able to fully "operate."
Doesn't seem too unreasonable, though it is a question of semantics.
Re:Uh Oh. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:386 (Score:2, Interesting)
Because I can.
(I run Minix on a 286 laptop)
Re:FreeBSD vs. Linux ideologies (Score:1, Interesting)
Try having 1000+ NFS clients hammering a 2-3TB fiber channel filesystem over 2 gibabit ports for over five days generating and deleting terabytes of data, with a whole mix of more than 5+ million files which include filesizes ranging from a few kb upto a gigabyte.
Rock.
Another lame excuse for journalism (Score:2, Interesting)
The net result is just a lame advocacy attempt.
Again the lame point about linux being merely a kernel is made. What decade is this author living in? Has anyone ever decided to deploy linux in the enterprise by simply downloading the latest kernel for the install? Hell no, linux is installed as a distribution, always. This tedious harping on semantics and unix purity is nonsense.
In the replies the lamo 'RPM doesn't handle dependencies' rears its ugly head yet again. What modern distro now doesn't have a package management wrapper? If you violate dependencies with RPM's or whatever your package of choice may be, it's because you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how to manage your system of choice. I haven't had dependency issues *ever* using RPM's created for the installed base I was running. Sure if I chose to install rogue, poorly built RPM's from a source that doesn't use a consistent build environment, they will have issues...but that makes it my fault, not the fault of the system I'm running. The system, at least for now, isn't smart enough to keep me from using my free will and breaking it.
What happened to informative journalism? It's dead. Everyone from mainstream media to bloggers lives in a three sentence, paragraph header mentality. 90% of anything 'published' online now consists of a 'story' that is merely a collection of paragraph headers with no meat.
Just read all the 'security' articles weighing linux vs windows and it's evident. People with an obvious misunderstanding of both platforms, spouting off daily as though they are experts. The unfortunate part of all of this is that the average reader of any of these topics won't even realize the inherent flaws in the 'articles'.
Re:Bzzzt... (Score:3, Interesting)
A GUI version of FreeBSD with easy installer (Score:3, Interesting)
I didn't want to use it at first because you didn't have control over partitioning in the first few versions.
Thankfully, they changed the installer so that you can partition and install over multiple partitions in the newest versions.
I'm going to install it soon as a server even though it's intended as a desktop. The reason is that, in my opinion, text-only administration of my server is way too much hassle, I've got better things to do than memorize dozens of text commands and their flags. On top of that, the installation of programs is easier and cleaner, even easier and cleaner than Windows.
I'm a visual person and handling my FreeBSD 5.3 install with text-only programs was not good enough, not enough feedback and not enough usability. I didn't have a good mental overview of my system with shell-only programs and everytime I wanted to do anything I had to consult the (excellent) FreeBSD manual. With Windows I could figure things out just by clicking around the GUI. GUIs can be seen as having built-in manuals in my opinion.
One thing that worries me is that I've been told that X is a big security vulnerability. Is KDE an X system? Is it open to attacks by default? It'd be great if someone can help answer. Thanks for helping out a newcomer.
Re:Kernel performance (Score:3, Interesting)
I've looked at every "Linux kernel with a BSD-like userland" package I've found, and I haven't found a "Linux kernel with a BSD-like userland" yet. And I haven't seen one that claimed that that had the same userland two years running. The way Linux is built out of packages, rather than having a stable core OS that's more than just the kernel, ensures that.
Linux kernel performance has gotten better on some of these benchmarks, to the point where it's comparable to FreeBSD... ahead in some places, behind in others. The only place it seems to choke is a test that the author acknowledges isn't realistic: there's no reason to expect that mmapping every other page of a 200M file will behave similarly to performing the same number of mmaps on small files. Linux filesystem performance has often been very good, too: until FreeBSD got softupdates, Linux was clearly ahead there (albeit at the cost of stability).
The big problem with the Linux kernel is that it's unstable. Not unstable as in "it crashes too often", but unstable in "it changes too fast". 2.6 is changing so fast that Linus had to take time out to write a version control system that could handle his workload. And there's no indication what kernel APIs should be considered stable and which are subject to being pulled out from under you.
I've been able to debug problems in Tru64 UNIX (based on 4.3-Reno) using the FreeBSD (based on 4.4-Lite) source tree. Apple Merged NeXTstep and FreeBSD to form Darwin and has been pulling in chunks of FreeBSD kernel code into Darwin on a regular basis. These are source trees that forked years ago, and they're still close enough to make this kind of thing reasonable.
The BSD userland is similarly stable and reliable over the long term, and across separate systems. Linux? I went from Red Hat 2.1 to 4.1 to 6.0 to 7.1, to RHEL 3... and it was a different OS every time. And that doesn't begin to address the differences between Debian and Gentoo and Red Hat.
Re:Kernel performance (Score:3, Interesting)
Let me say a few words about consistency:
Some software developers complain (I don't need to post URLs, you'll find it if you google) about GCC, glibc and library developers, even kernel hackers, who every now and again break existing software, or change interfaces on GNU/Linux. Just this week I saw a ML compiler that ceased to work properly under the new 2.6 kernel.
I've read a presentation about kernel development by an IBM guy whose philosophy was: "submit code first, fix it later."
This is just crazy. Even Linux vendors complain.
If you want to build a business that lasts, you have to be able to rely on consistency. I keep having trouble on OpenBSD trying to compile software that "was written for Linux." I mean, what's up with that? Write for UNIX. On that note, about consistency being an important requirement for a solid business, this interview with Joel Spolsky [itconversations.com] has some nice thoughts about it. He mentions a firm from Canada, "incredibly profitable" - he says - whose specialty is supporting VAX!
Now, it maybe that the Microsoft approach of breaking things to sell you a solution is a good way to make money. However, some industries just can't fucntion that way. I'm thinking here, e.g., banking, medical, aviation, etc. So consistency is a real problem and a big issue.