FreeBSD 8.2 Released 183
meta coder writes with word of the release of FreeBSD 8.2: "This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights includes improvements in Xen support and various bugfixes."
ZFS improvements (Score:3, Informative)
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I would have no reason to use ZFS on anything other than a file or NAS server. I don't think its worth the risk unless maybe for the deduplication feature on a backup server (while maintaining periodic backups on removable media).
It's sorta sad that FreeBSD makes ZFS, perhaps the most reliable filesystem to date, 'risky'. But there are certainly man corroborating stories.
I've read previously that FreeBSD 9 will have the necessary plumbing to make it run well.
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It's sorta sad you and others like you assume the ZFS corruption on FreeBSD is somehow FreeBSD's fault. I can provide examples of how ZFS pools/ZIL's can be corrupted regardless of the OS it's running under. (Hint: Lying hardware is to blame so it's neither OS or file system's responsibility)
http://mail.opensolaris.org/pipermail/zfs-discuss/2010-January/035740.html [opensolaris.org] -- After digging into a few ZFS corruption complaints on FreeBSD, this type of error seems to be the most common one.
Can you demonstrate a sce
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Can you demonstrate a scenario where FreeBSD is the cause of ZFS corruption?
The lists are full of corruption and panics with the ZFS+BSD stack. It's possible that they all have faulty SSD's that ignore write cache flushes, but it doesn't seem likely.
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The lists are full of corruption and panics with the ZFS+BSD stack.
Since I'm a member of every logical list one would seek out support for FreeBSD ZFS issues, I can assure you that there is not nearly the level of stability as you seem to believe. I've never had a single kernel panic or corrupted file due to ZFS in the nearly 2 years I've been using the setup, and that's including extensive "die mf, die" stress testing.
It's possible that they all have faulty SSD's that ignore write cache flushes, but it doesn't seem likely.
Yes faulty SSD's are not the lone culprit and that was shown in the thread I linked to as well. Other offenders are other types of flash media and some ba
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Here's just one that I noticed last time I checked in:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2010-June/057239.html [freebsd.org]
Perhaps you could illuminate that example?
It also seems that in 2GB systems, lots of hand tuning is required to avoid kernel panics but the Wiki is not kept up to date with the required information. Keeping up with the mailing list seems to be required.
A filesystem can't be considered 'stable' if it panics the kernel without a disastrous underlying hardware failure.
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Perhaps you could illuminate that example?
Sure, it says right in the thread that when he reverted to default values the system was stable.
Anyways, there are some problem with uma(9) and ZFS so it's disabled by default.
It also seems that in 2GB systems, lots of hand tuning is required to avoid kernel panics but the Wiki is not kept up to date with the required information. Keeping up with the mailing list seems to be required.
The wiki has all the information you need to run stable regardless of RAM. For good understanding of performance, and other tunings participation in mailing lists and ongoing research is still a requirement. It's not like ZFS is perfect yet, there are still some corner cases where both performance and stability are affected(e.g. sen
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Hopefully everything will autotune at some point, but this type of in depth administration is actually pretty typical of introducing a new FS/features.
OK, thanks, that gives me a better understanding of where ZFS/FreeBSD is at this point.
If you're an ext3/4 user, I hope you have barriers enabled.
They're on by default in ext4.
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I did not exactly suggest it. I just said I was doing it and that I had encountered no issues with it. Your kilometrage may vary, I've only gone as far as mirroring and no heavy activity on the volumes. I basically wanted to communicate the fact that if you need the newer version for some reason, it can be done and where you can find it.
As for the NFSv4 ACL modules for Samba, they work just as you described and it's pretty neat.
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At one of my previous jobs, we ran ZFS on Solaris in a financial enterprise environment and never had a single problem with it. Mind you, the entire Unix administration team hated just about every other aspect of Solaris (we only used it because we were stuck with the hardware), but for logical volume management, ZFS is leaps and bounds better than any other filesystem on Solaris.
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Solaris ZFS is not as stable either. I do not administer such systems but from what I read many Solaris admins still run UFS on new server builds for this reason.
UFS is conceptually simpler, and ZFS has been traditionally hard to boot from, but today everybody on *Solaris puts all their data on ZFS. It's as rock solid as any filesystem ever created.
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I would have no reason to use ZFS on anything other than a file or NAS server. I don't think its worth the risk
You are doing it wrong. I don't think it's worth the risk to use anything else except ZFS on a file or NAS server.
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But I just installed 8.1 (Score:3)
But I just installed 8.1.
Sigh.
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Looks like it's another 2-3 hours of compiling packages and the odd several hours of library/package build error resolution for you!
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Looks like it's another 2-3 hours of compiling packages and the odd several hours of library/package build error resolution for you!
You can use freebsd-update [freebsd.org] to do a binary update. Also, recompilation of ports is not usually necessary in between minor upgrades (ie. 8.1 to 8.2). Of course, you may have chosen to build a custom kernel and then you need to build it manually. On my dual core CPU with 4GB RAM it takes about 10-12 minutes to build the kernel and 30-40 minutes for world. To deal with etc scripts you can use etcupdate [freshports.org].
Also, if you don't like this way of doing things and you are a more desktop oriented user, you can look at PC- [pcbsd.org]
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On the contrary: rebuilding ports is usually perpetually necessary due to package security problems. Seems damn near half the time I update a ports tree, some prerequisite library port gets 'updated' to something that breaks a significant portion of the system, silently - something not noticeable until after you start (or even complete) your ports upgrades.
Access to ports is not a badge of pride. Someone running ports on a server, without an extensive in-house vetting and change control system for ports its
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CAIMLAS, do you never tired of trolling FreeBSD articles?
There is a binary upgrade path to both base system and ports. It takes approxiamately the same time to binary upgrade a Debian system as a FreeBSD one, except for certain ports which FreeBSD is not licensed to redistribute a binary form of the program. An example of this would be FreeBSD native JDK.
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THe real reason I am bellyaching is because this particular system is a 1.5 GHz VIA C7 Esther with an ancient 1 gigabyte CompactFlash card on the IDE port. It's not fast in any notion of the word.
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Were you replying to someone else?
I've yet to have an issue doing a simple: aptitude update && aptitude upgrade && aptitude dist-upgrade (or the various equivilent across the years). Worst case, I've had issues with desktop applications or esoteric/old/consumer hardware on the newer releases.
What I was referring to was ports (where anything usable comes from), not the FreeBSD/jails/build system/bind/sendmail/whatever blob that comes with a FreeBSD minimal install. You're kidding yourself if
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# /usr/sbin/freebsd-update -r 8.2-RELEASE upgrade
Xen? (Score:2)
Does this mean full headcrab support?
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Yes, but it's experimental headcrab support. That means it's full featured, you've just got to read the source to figure out how to use it.
Either or.. (Score:3, Insightful)
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Even if FreeBSD just manages to keep up with Linux I for one am glad its around. Remember Open Source is about choice. BSDs provide one more. One that is far better than Hurd, Haiku etc. at the moment.
Reality is that the user probably doesn't want FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD, there's choice but not in a good sense. What the user wants is probably one system where everything works. I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken. That kind of thing is just a lot of effort and wasted time for little or no gain. That Linus has managed to keep the kernel from fragmenting I think has only been a strength for Linux ov
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You know that by comparing different BSDs you are comparing totally different products? Developers are exchanging/porting code, of course, but it's hell difficult. Point is... a FreeBSD system, for example, is exactly one single distribution. You cannot say it about Linux. It does not even have a default configuration that everyone would pick (see: "GENERIC kernel" in FreeBSD).
And btw, desktop user would rather use a preconfigured FreeBSD environment like PCBSD or DesktopBSD.
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When you want to have everything served for you (not everyone likes to have the computer set up by someone else), you should search for a distribution and service that you expect. Take a look at PCBSD [pcbsd.org].
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I've done this as well. SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo for varying periods of time. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD for various reasons as well, but ran into software incompatibilities that may be fixed by now.
I've found Arch Linux to be absolutely right for my needs and wants, it's like a best of breed between Debian and Gentoo,
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Well, there's the whole init system, rc.conf, the minimalist base system install, a choice between precompiled and source packages and so on.
It is very unlike Fedora and Ubuntu, which are filled with semi-functional config tools, default GUIs, SysV init madness and a lot of other things I don't like.
The biggest difference compared to BSD (apart from the kernel) is that Arch is rolling-release and generally has more up-to-date packages.
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So write a patch or stop whining?
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I'd say it's very similar to Slackware, but with a solid dependency-solving package manager and a rolling release schedule.
the one true user (Score:3)
What the user wants is probably one system where everything works.
I agree with you. It's very important I can fix anything that breaks. That's the only way you can achieve a system that works. If the component doesn't come with source code, my efforts to address brokenness are stymied.
Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works. How nice to live in a world where you never reach a fork in the road, such as a stable 2D video card with source code vs a faster 3D video card with no source code. When confronted with a fo
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Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works.
Are you on crack? The closed nVidia driver is probably an order of magnitude higher quality than the open ATI one, which doesn't support hardware which has been out for quite some time, and which doesn't properly support hardware which has been out for years. If I want my Linux system to work I NEED binary blobs. I would PREFER open-source drivers all else being equal but for example the only vaguely compliant hardware-accelerated path to OpenGL on free Unix is through nVidia.
The ISOs have been up for a couple of days... (Score:2)
A couple of comments down the original story, JKH would make an angry comment and insist that slashdot stop that practice....
Those were the days ....
;-)
KDE 4.5.5? (Score:4, Interesting)
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It's a tradition that FreeBSD has recent desktop environments earlier than Debian. When I moved from Debian to FreeBSD almost a decade ago, FreeBSD already had KDE3 since over 6 months and Debian could not get it into the package manager somehow. I've been fed up with this slowness and was impressed how great the FreeBSD portage system is being managed. I sticked to FreeBSD since then with occasional excursions to different Linux distributions, but I always ended up on FreeBSD.
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And 4.6 is just about ready to hit the FreeBSD ports tree. :)
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I will feed the troll.
Where does BSD fail while Linux succeeds? Citations plz.
Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? (Score:5, Informative)
Where does Linux fail where BSD succeeds?
For some people it's the licensing (BSD vs GPL). For others it is the coherence of the system (how many places hide an IP address in Red Hat?). For others, it is a question of style (BSD vs AT&T type Unix). For some, its functionality (I always liked the way the BSD _______ command worked). From some, it's the simple Joy [wikipedia.org] of BSD, or the McKusick [mckusick.com] - take your pick. For some, it could be the approach taken to a particular problem taken by one of the BSDs, such as the continuous OpenBSD code audits [openbsd.org]. For some it might be a particular platform maintained as part of the main distribution. For some, it may be the continuing BSD innovations. For some it might be the counter-culture aspect BSD in the Linux world. Plenty more reasons that people could have, including: Linux - 5 letters, BSD - 3 letters. Do the math.
You could say that the only truly popular Unix desktop is Apple's Macintosh running OS X.
Mac OS X: What is BSD? [apple.com]
What's The Greatest Software Ever Written? [informationweek.com]
OpenBSD [openbsd.org] FreeBSD [freebsd.org] NetBSD [netbsd.org] PC BSD [pcbsd.org]
FreeBSD Mall [freebsdmall.com] BSD Magazine [bsdmag.org]
To each his own.
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For others, it is a question of style (BSD vs AT&T type Unix).
There are distros that are more BSD-like than others. Some have gone most of the way and scrapped the SYSV-init style, others keep in the traditions of older commercial unicies.
Of course, that doesn't affect the other stylistic things like having working man pages for every file in /dev.
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MidnightBSD [midnightbsd.org], MirBSD [mirbsd.org], DragonFly [dragonflybsd.org]. Let's mention everybody if you're going to talk about the pc bsd distro.
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One example:
I have some server apps still on python2.4, and some on python 2.7. They're completely unrelated apps.
On fBSD, just create two jails, and set up the two environments how you like, update them independently.
On Linux (are vservers at the convenience and security level of jails?) goodluck installing a myriad of python2.4 and python2.7 packages, hope the "system python" points to the right one, make you sure everywhere replace "python" with "python2.X" in your apps; or set up virtualenvs or such, wh
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In the Linux world, the combination of OpenVZ and btrfs would offer a very close approximation to what you describe.
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#!
or
#!
Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? (Score:4, Insightful)
Where does Linux fail where BSD succeeds?
Sound. I switched to FreeBSD 4.x almost a decade ago, when Linux had two sound stacks. OSS didn't support sound mixing, ALSA did, but needed apps rewriting for it. So you needed a userspace sound daemon if you wanted more than one app to play audio at once. Some of my apps used the GNOME one, some the KDE one, and some just opened /dev/dsp. With FreeBSD 4, you could set up multiple /dev/dsp.x devices, and set each sound daemon or app to write to a different one. With FreeBSD 5 (2003), each device that opened /dev/dsp got a new audio channel. Multiple apps all playing audio just worked.
With FreeBSD 8, the sound system added full OSS 4 compatibility, and a few things that the 4Front OSS implementation lacks. It also added a new sound mixing algorithm, which has even better performance. Oh, and per-channel (i.e. per app) volume control. From a developer perspective, audio is simple: open /dev/dsp and write audio data, with a few ioctl()s to tweak parameters. No libraries to link, no complex APIs, it's simple to use. From a user perspective, there's no messing around with sound daemons, no dependencies, stuff just works. Every time I hear a Linux user complaining about PortAudio, I wonder why they're still bothering with Linux.
What else? Jails are useful - lightweight VMs that cost about as much as a chroot. The ez-jail port uses union mounts to allow you to create new jails in a few seconds, with about 5MB of disk space each. It also integrates with ZFS, so you can use ZFS cloned volumes instead.
From a developer perspective, BSD libc is a lot less painful to work with than glibc. The system actually comes with documentation - compare GNU/Linux man pages with their FreeBSD equivalents some time. There's also the fact that FreeBSD doesn't change user-visible interfaces without a good reason. If you learned how to use FreeBSD 2.x, most of that knowledge is still valid. New stuff gets added, but the older stuff still doesn't get changed randomly. You may get new implementations of features, but they're exposed using the same set of commands or the same APIs.
Not sure about performance these days. Last benchmarks I saw showed FreeBSD outperforming Linux. Not sure if this is still the case. I did some tests recently for a course that I'm teaching, with large numbers of threads and found that Linux seems to have much lower defaults for the maximum number of threads - not sure what the FreeBSD limit was: Linux was running out of threads but with 64 times more, FreeBSD was still going.
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Where does Linux fail where BSD succeeds?
Sound.
OSS doesn't support my hardware but ALSA does.
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Sound. I switched to FreeBSD 4.x almost a decade ago, when Linux had two sound stacks. OSS didn't support sound mixing, ALSA did, but needed apps rewriting for it. So you needed a userspace sound daemon if you wanted more than one app to play audio at once. Some of my apps used the GNOME one, some the KDE one, and some just opened /dev/dsp. With FreeBSD 4, you could set up multiple /dev/dsp.x devices, and set each sound daemon or app to write to a different one. With FreeBSD 5 (2003), each device that opened /dev/dsp got a new audio channel. Multiple apps all playing audio just worked.
You realize OSS works on Linux too, right? Everyone who complains about the sound systems in Linux doesn't seem to get it: They all work, they're all compatible (code written to use OSS or ALSA will work right with OSS, ALSA, and PulseAudio), and if one doesn't work, you can use another.
I use OSS on my desktop and ALSA + PulseAudio on my laptop (because OSS wasn't working right). Sound on both computers works identically. What do you do with a machine where OSS doesn't work?
Oh, and per-channel (i.e. per app) volume control.
Yeah, PulseAudio does that too.
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You realize OSS works on Linux too, right?
Kind of. You can use the 4Front implementation of OSS, but it doesn't support as many cards as ALSA. You can use the ALSA compatibility shim to run OSS apps, but (last time I checked, may not be the case anymore), it didn't do software sound mixing, so only one app could use it unless your card does hardware mixing (as increasingly few do, now everyone has CPU power to burn).
They all work, they're all compatible (code written to use OSS or ALSA will work right with OSS, ALSA, and PulseAudio)
Code written to use OSS may work with ALSA, if you've configured ALSA to provide OSS emulation (not the default in a lot of distros)
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However, I have tried a range of distros and I have also tried FreeBSD and OpenBSD. When I ran Linux, I had the feeling that I knew what was happening and that I could fully dominate my hardware. When I used *BSD, I felt that we had a pretty install and a lot of useless crap that doesn't usually come with comparable Linux distros. That's ok, because I can just gradually adapt the OS to suit my needs. But one thing still pissed
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I also felt that there was some kind of lack in BSD documentation
What? The BSDs and especially FreeBSD has well maintained manpages and a very comprehensive handbook. How can you possibly claim they lack documentation? They're by far better than most Linux distributions in this regard.
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If by "platform specific binaries" you mean the 32-bit packages are optimized/compiled for i686, that is certainly true - but really, who runs anything older than a Pentium Pro these days? And now I'll probably get a reply from someone still on a 486; but my point is, the vast majority of PCs still in use are at least i686-compatible, as such it doesn't make sens
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If by "platform specific binaries" you mean the 32-bit packages are optimized/compiled for i686, that is certainly true - but really, who runs anything older than a Pentium Pro these days? And now I'll probably get a reply from someone still on a 486; but my point is, the vast majority of PCs still in use are at least i686-compatible, as such it doesn't make sense to have 386-optimized packages.
Not to mention that if you really wanted to, you can use the AUR to get a different kernel [archlinux.org] if you want. Example: Fedora's kernel [archlinux.org]. I'm actually surprised there's not a kernel26-386 package, but I guess even Arch users aren't that crazy ;)
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Whaa? As a user of both FreeBSD and gentoo, I'd like to remind you that there is no difference in the GUI, they both use xorg. In fact, the only real advantage I've found Linux has over BSD is the support for so many filesystems and partition types. I do wish they'd add that to BSD, but whenever I've brought it up the devs were somewhat antagonistic toward the notion. Can't imagine why, really... But anyway, that's why gentoo became my pr
Security is the real advantage (Score:2)
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The vast majority of those servers are being compromised through insecure web applications and misconfigured mail servers. The underlying platform has almost no bearing on that. From an attacker's perspective, there's little difference between a Linux box and a FreeBSD box running nothing but SSH.
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Let's not forget that big one from last year:
The one where you need to be already logged in? If someone malicious has an account on your server, it's only a matter of time before they do something bad, no matter what OS you're using.
Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? (Score:4, Informative)
I'll bite. ZFS was designed with a different train of thought when it came to the file system and storing files. ZFS lets one do everything from just formatting a single drive with one partition to doing a RAID array with three parity stripes, file system compression, file system encryption, block level deduplication, with file cloning and/or snapshotting to another server with ZFS. The ability to setup an array, selectively apply features (encryption, compression, dedup, etc.) to different directories, mount directories elsewhere in the OS hierarchy, clone, do snapshots, etc. is so easy and only needs a handful of commands.
I use to be a fanboy when it came to hardware RAID with a dedicated RISC processor and RAM. The risk with hardware RAID is if the controller fails, one will probably be in a world of hurt. I didn't like software RAID due to CPU overhead and the damn thing not always working. ZFS has changed that for me. Not only do I not notice CPU overhead, recovery is so easy. I can install an OS on a HDD and then configure three new drives with RAID-Z (ZFS' RAID5 implementation). From there I can replace the OS HDD and start with a fresh OS install; a couple of commands that don't include the paths to the RAIDed HDDs and any backed up config file and my array is back online. All I need are the drives and nothing else. I could even loose a drive and still be fine.
The other beauty is not needing exactly the same drives. Say I have three 1.5TB drives in a RAID-Z and one of the drives fails. Perhaps I can't buy another 1.5TB drive or the 2TB model is cheaper. I can replace the drive with a 2TB unit and ZFS will rebuild the lost 1.5TB. I can either use that 0.5TB for something else or expand the array when the other two drives are replaced with larger drives.
Sure booting from ZFS in FreeBSD isn't perfect, but I don't see a real need for my OS to reside on a drive with ZFS. However when it comes to my storage arrays, ZFS is invaluable.
There's so much to ZFS that considering it just another file system like EXT or UFS is an ignorant assessment. I recommend doing a some research before bashing something you don't understand.
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I wouldn't recommend using MSO on any platform, unless you're really doing something specific Libreoffice does just fine for most purposes. I was however somewhat surprised that saving a powerpoint in MS' format wouldn't read in Powerpoint, but the open format would.
But yes, the lack of support for commonly used Windows software which one might need to interoperate with is pretty much the biggest downside to migrating to either platform.
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Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? (Score:5, Insightful)
Well if you're going to put it this way, it's probably better to ask why OpenOffice isn't a good enough alternative to MS Office and why Linux gaming is so lackluster.
The answer is money. Oh, business customers pay well to have their servers supported so the kernel, network stack, server software, databases etc. is in tip top shape. But the desktop? Very little. Of course open source isn't all about the money, but there's the stuff everyone want to do and there's the drab stuff no one really wants to do. Microsoft and Apple pays people to do a *lot* of boring shit, so do the application developers out there. Ubuntu and friends not so much, least not on the desktop side.
Small money adds up, Angry Birds have now grossed $50m on $1 sales. But most people in the open source community would be violently opposed to a "if you like it, pay a buck" attitude. The software is free/Free/gratis, you pay for service & support. Except I've never wanted nor needed any kind of service or support for Angry Birds and if I did I'd probably declare the game broken and move on. I'm not saying you would be a multimillionaire out of it, but it would help if developers could make a living writing desktop apps. Or at least pizza and beer money. But neither the system nor the attitude is in place.
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Well, I have exactly that mentality. I would gladly support FreeBSD monetarily if I weren't an unemployed grad-student. I'd love to pay for a FreeBSD disc that included good to "par" desktop functionality. Truth be told, I fully plan on making a donation once I've got funds headed my way. For now, I just try to contribute positively on their forums.
That kind of begs the question of what I do with my desktop, though. Lately, that's mostly chat, browsing, and the occasional FPS. BTW: My FPS of choice *
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But most people in the open source community would be violently opposed to a "if you like it, pay a buck" attitude.
Not really. They would, however, be violently opposed to a "if you like it, don't you dare do anything with it including but not limited to giving copies to your friend, you dirty thief" attitude.
It's perfectly alright to ask for payment in exchange of support, as is asking for donations. Demanding you be the sole source of your software, however, and threatening anyone that dares not comply with the full strength of the law is a whole different matter.
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Some of it is the illusion that you loose control of your software when you port to Linux. Some of it has to do with Microsoft's total cost of ownership that makes it so expensive to create with their tools that you can really only invest so much money and that goes into the desktop with the largest target audience. Some of it has to do with the incessant FUD spread by the likes of those fanboi Windows and Mac users that people can't get a real perspective on it's capabilities and use. Some of it has to
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Wanna know where they both fail? At the desktop.
Not at all. They're both excellent on the desktop. I use Linux on the desktop. And, many people I know use linux on the desktop. I like them very much and find that they (well, I haven't had a freeBSD desktop for a while)/it provides by far the best desktop experience available. To ME. I really don't care about anyone else, and I very much doubt they care about me.
So far, the majority of the ideas for improving the popularity of Linux seem to turn it into a na
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Wikipedia is NOT the official weights and measure system for the internet. By it's very nature and the nature of people to be fanboish about what they own, know, and use, you can't trust statistics bantered about on the likes of Wikipedia, especially for something as difficult to measure as OS use.
The most definitive estimate, based on 20,000 sites over the past 15 years indicate that Linux has 4-5% of the market. When you look at Canonical and Fedora they claim 12 and 24 million respectively (as of last
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Yet it seems if you want to get a job, go to school, do business with anyone, etc, you have to have this pricey, proprietary, garbage office suite.
To hell with MS Office. The sooner people realize that it is discriminatory to require it so broadly when a free version is available, the sooner it will die the death it deserves.
If it is such garbage, why does everyone fall all over themselves to imitate and inter-operate with it. Sorry, I'm an engineer and I deal in reality not someone's rose-colored view of the world. Reality is that it is on the desktop where you work and/or your laptop ad. It's starting to be web accessible as well. It has way more features than most anyone ever needs, so much so that it has to inline help (the ribbon interface) so you don't get lost along the way. And it has no problems, so far, inter-op
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Microsoft Office has huge problems inter-operating with various versions of itself, and the web view has many bugs to give differing presentations. And that ribbon is the biggest UI abomination I've ever had to work with for the last six months at my company. That's why I mostly use OpenOffice and only use the Microsoft shit when absolutely necessary for a client. The sooner the world gets off that overpriced garbage the better. Many entire countries are throwing Microsoft OS and Office Productivity Imp
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There is nothing wrong with PC-BSD per se, but you have to agree with several points on design to get into it. First, you have to prefer DLL hell in windows as they install duplicates of shared libraries with PBI to make it easier to upgrade select software. There are advantages to this, but it's also a security nightmare and you force the user to download png and jpeg libraries countless times. Second, you have to like using an OS tuned for a server platform for a desktop. FreeBSD is getting a lot bette
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Linux has become a server platform, but it was designed as a free alternative for workstation use. There's still a heavy time investment in projects like ubuntu to make it desktop friendly.
I have not looked into the PBI format in the last year or two, but the original version made multiple copies of shared libraries for each package. Comments I've read from Kris Moore when this has come up in the past make me think it's still that way.
Matt Dillon had an interesting solution to this problem that was poste
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Maybe... but I guess the list of companies that build their devices based off it and some of them are security devices...
Cisco (IronPort email appliance)
F5
Juniper
Netapp
Nokia
list goes on...
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Freenas kicks the crap out of the linux-based openfiler, pfsense is a heck of a distro, etc etc.
BSD is still relevant as Im concerned.
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Next time you hear about a network speed record being broken, check the OS. Betcha it's FreeBSD.
Why use Ubuntu when you could use Debian?
To sum up - get bent is why.
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Re:Why use FreeBSD when you can use Linux? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll bite. The main reasons I consider using FreeBSD nowadays are:
1) Reasonable filesystem support. ext3 and ext4 are just terrible filesystem for 24x7 production systems. The potential for long fsck times alone is enough to remove them from a lot of serious applications. XFS does better, but with its lack of popularity the user base is a little scary. Meanwhile, FreeBSD has ZFS, which is just a better filesystem that almost any other choice. And it also has UFS2, which avoids the whole "let's keep the server down while we do a long filesystem check sometimes" problem Linux suffers with by doing background fsck [usenix.org].
2) The new FreeBSD 8.2 includes userland DTrace support, which has been the missing piece that has kept earlier verisons from replacing Solaris for me on a lot of systems. systemtap on Linux just completely misses the point from a complexity and "scary" perspective. It just doesn't have that feel that you're not going to hurt the running process by using it that DTrace has always managed.
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XFS is wholly unsuitable for actual use because I cannot mount it on a crappy little low-memory system to do filesystem checks or repairs; To mount a dirty 1TB XFS filesystem you need over a gigabyte of memory free. btrfs holds some hope for the future. Right now I use ext4.
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I use XFS mainly on production database servers, where it has been a significant improvement over any of the other Linux filesystem alternatives. I agree that it's not appropriate for small memory systems, which is one reason why it's only caught on again recently I think. I really don't care though; I don't own a system with less than 2GB of RAM now, and even the most trivial server I use has 8GB of RAM.
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I like being able to recover filesystems from a netbook, with a USB to SATA bridge if necessary. Or from some crusty system that is sitting in the corner and nobody cares if I install Debian. I like to keep my options open. There is something to what you say, though, about having boatloads of RAM everywhere. I still have hard drives smaller than 8GB which is by no means a lot of RAM any more... but it's what's in my desktop machine.
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I'd also like to point out FreeBSD 9 will have journaling with UFS2 (in addition to gjournal which they have now). I believe NetBSD has been working on journaling as well.
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Yes. I still do not have confidence in either of those filesystems.
First of all, they are fairly old designs. There is no good way to do consistent backups, checksums, or consistent incremental backup. FreeBSD, Mac, Solaris, and even Windows are way ahead here. I'm holding out hope for Btrfs, but it's not really here yet.
And if Linux is going to use an old FS design, you'd think it would at least be stable.
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What exactly is difficult with setting up bind, dhcp3, apache and samba?
Seriously, these are all very mature, well documented pieces of software. It is literally as simple as issuing a few aptitude install commands, editing the config files to your taste (all of which are found in /etc) and writing a basic iptables script to open up the necessary ports.
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Why I prefer BSD over Linux. There are several reasons: ...
1. Tcsh is the best shell ever. I just don't understand why Apple ever switched to Bash.
What on earth are you talking about? Do you even know ANYTHING about unix? Install tcsh and use it! One of the main innovations in unix was userland shells so you could do just this! From the beginning. It's ALWAYS had this feature!
2. Nvi is a really nice vi editor, much better then Vim. Combined with minimal but effective terminal settings I get my work done m
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4. A command-line with strict ordering is fully POSIX 2.0 compliant. I just can't stand anything with sloppy ordering.
Forgive my squirrely ignorance, but this caught my attention and interest, so I figure I'll try to learn something in the midst of a lovely flamewar, troll that I am. :)
What exactly do you mean by "strict ordering" in this context?
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Ah! I see and I understand.
Coincidentally, I also agree. Every time I see 'chown foo ~foo -R' I find the perpetrator and put thumbtacks on his chair.
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"Then there's also the kernel securelevel, extended attributes/ACLs, TrustedBSD/MAC, and pf/ALTQ which is far superior to iptables. BSD has really been leading Linux in the area of security--Linux is more focused on spreading GPL and getting the media wheel on your USB keyboard to work."
From http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/faq/security.html#SECURELEVEL [freebsd.org]
"Securelevel is not a silver bullet; it has many known deficiencies. More often than not, it provides a false sense of security."
Linux supports extended a
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FreeBSD has binary java 1.6 although it's quite out of date on security patches. They've also got openjdk 6 and 7 ports. I think FreeBSD has the best java support of any BSD right now.
I've run many websites on java + tomcat + apache + mysql on FreeBSD servers over the years. It's fine.
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You can either use the openjdk port, build java from source or download packages from here:
http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml [freebsdfoundation.org]
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FreeBSD can run a computer, whereas trains merely run them over.
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well, lucky for you there seems to be general consensus BSD is dying. Something with netcraft.
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I prefer BSD for servers over GNU/Linux when I'm able to make the choice. BSD teams work on the distribution as an integrated whole, less of the patchwork quilt / Frankenstein that is typical Linux distro.
“BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix developers port a Unix system to the PC. A Linux distro is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write and cobble together a Unix system for the PC.” -- unknown
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Why is this modded down? +1 informative, please.