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FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

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Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#11
post #3

This is great to hear. I'm a huge fan of the BSD OS's, but it's been concerning that lately FBSD seemed to be falling out of favor. Unfortunately, many 'unix' people these days have only ever worked with Linux distros. While the distro model does provide a novel approach to packaging an OS that has it's strengths, there are some downsides. I love Linux for the suppor, the rapid release cycles, and the many different…

The first time I really had to use a BSD (OpenBSD) system for more than some simple tasks, I was blown away. There's a definite feel of design, as opposed to a large set of features and interfaces that happen to work together to varying degrees as in Linux.

And the man pages. Oh, how wondrous they were. This first thing I had to do was learn to NOT google for how to accomplish something, but just read the man page. Often, there's not much on google about something because there was no need for someone to document how they accomplished it, they just did what the man page said and it worked.

In linux, the man pages are generally skeletons outlining some flags and what something might support. In BSD (or at least OpenBSD) for core OS items, they are canonical. Compare:

  http://linux.die.net/man/8/ifconfig

  http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi?query=ifconfig
Note: One the reasons the OpenBSD ifconfig man page is so big is because on OpenBSD ifconfig does the job of multiple Linux utils, because it makes sense to have ifconfig control all the interface state.

That said, I still mainly use Linux, specifically RHEL and derivatives, specifically because I think the enterprise Linux distros have a better support model for enterprise environments, where multiple machines need to be kept up to date or in sync, and you need to deploy identically (and repeatably) to systems.

Frankly, I'm surprised there's not a alternate, distro model for FreeBSD that's aimed at the enterprise to address these issues (or if there is, it's not popular enough for me to know of it). Maybe FreeBSD as an organization is coherent enough and does a good enough job at support for the distro in general that there's never been enough of push to really compete in the enterprise server market. Or maybe I'm just misinformed about how much BSD is in use in the enterprise. That's always a possibility.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#12
post #10
post #3

This is great to hear. I'm a huge fan of the BSD OS's, but it's been concerning that lately FBSD seemed to be falling out of favor. Unfortunately, many 'unix' people these days have only ever worked with Linux distros. While the distro model does provide a novel approach to packaging an OS that has it's strengths, there are some downsides. I love Linux for the suppor, the rapid release cycles, and the many different…

Would you recommend a BSD VM for web development? That's my use for linux, and would love to try something new, FBSD has a good reputation.

FreeBSD is just fine for web development, and it runs great on VirtualBox if you want to try it. PC-BSD (the "Desktop" edition of FreeBSD) has live CDs and pre-installed VirtualBox and VMware images if you want to give it a try:

http://www.pcbsd.org/en/download.html

Where FreeBSD really shines though, is web deployment -- i.e, it's an awesome platform to deploy your webapps on once they're ready.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#14
post #10
post #3

This is great to hear. I'm a huge fan of the BSD OS's, but it's been concerning that lately FBSD seemed to be falling out of favor. Unfortunately, many 'unix' people these days have only ever worked with Linux distros. While the distro model does provide a novel approach to packaging an OS that has it's strengths, there are some downsides. I love Linux for the suppor, the rapid release cycles, and the many different…

Would you recommend a BSD VM for web development? That's my use for linux, and would love to try something new, FBSD has a good reputation.

That's kind of a hard question to answer without knowing your definition and requirements for 'web development'.

First, keep in mind that some of the packages will simply not run on FreeBSD because it's often overlooked by developers. Same logic applies for technical support for applications that are running on FreeBSD powered machine.

You also will need to learn how port system works on FreeBSD and it might be a weird learning curve. Same applies for kernel patching/upgrading/etc.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#15
post #13
post #4

Happy to hear. With the systemd-pocalypse looming in Linux land, we who love Unix need an alternative.

I don't understand. There are lots of alternatives. - Aix - HP-UX - Solaris - Tru64 - MacOS X - QNX Or do you mean you don't pay for your OS?

How many of those closed-source Unix variants run the applications Linux users are familiar with?

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#16
post #7

Guys if you've got some spare cash I recommend putting a bit towards having FreeBSD working flawlessly on a single well-defined desktop platform (e.g. thinkpad). It doesn't need to be fancy, but the little things like suspend-and-resume need to work correctly without tinkering. That way if someone wants to run FreeBSD, you give them a straightforward starting point. At the moment some FreeBSD fans reluctantly turn to…

This is a great idea! I think it would be a waste of time for FreeBSD to take the entire desktop market on -- Linux has been fighting that battle for years -- but it would be awesome if Dell/HP/Lenovo came out with a PC-BSD-based laptop with official support. (For those not familiar with FreeBSD, PC-BSD is the "Desktop" edition of FreeBSD.) Another feature I'd really like to see the FreeBSD Foundation focus on this y…

On that note, what are the best laptops/netbooks out there for *BSD in terms of hardware support? I was thinking of doing what the grandparent comment was suggesting, but had trouble finding a list of (near) 100% supported machines.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#17
post #13
post #4

Happy to hear. With the systemd-pocalypse looming in Linux land, we who love Unix need an alternative.

I don't understand. There are lots of alternatives. - Aix - HP-UX - Solaris - Tru64 - MacOS X - QNX Or do you mean you don't pay for your OS?

I don't think any of those are Open Source. There is OpenSolaris, but you didn't list that.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#18
post #3

This is great to hear. I'm a huge fan of the BSD OS's, but it's been concerning that lately FBSD seemed to be falling out of favor. Unfortunately, many 'unix' people these days have only ever worked with Linux distros. While the distro model does provide a novel approach to packaging an OS that has it's strengths, there are some downsides. I love Linux for the suppor, the rapid release cycles, and the many different…

Two reasons I recently switched to FreeBSD on my home servers, Dtrace and ZFS. In GNU/Linux I would need sort combination of strace,mpstat,ltrace,vmstat,iostat etc.. to find out the the things that a simple Dtrace script can tell me and also without dramatically affecting a running daemon process as the ptrace* system calls do.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#19
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. There are lots of alternatives. - Aix - HP-UX - Solaris - Tru64 - MacOS X - QNX Or do you mean you don't pay for your OS?

I don't think any of those are Open Source. There is OpenSolaris, but you didn't list that.

The complaint was about UNIX alternatives, not free beer.

Re: FreeBSD expands activities as funds flow in

#20
post #15
post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't understand. There are lots of alternatives. - Aix - HP-UX - Solaris - Tru64 - MacOS X - QNX Or do you mean you don't pay for your OS?

How many of those closed-source Unix variants run the applications Linux users are familiar with?

The complaint was about UNIX alternatives.

Linux distributions are not even UNIX, just UNIX compatible.

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