“Don’t mistake DragonFlyBSD 1.0A for a complete, finished, polished operating system. At this stage of development, DragonFlyBSD isn’t good for much, as it has problems with SMP on systems that use Hyper-Threading Technology, and the XFree86 port (among others) didn’t compile properly for me despite using the special compatibility overrides.” Read the review at NewsForge.
DragonFlyBSD 1.0A: A strong start
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
The article has a few minor inaccuracies and needs comment. I’m one of the members of the Installer team for DragonFly BSD (http://www.bsdinstaller.org). So consider me a “fairly authoritative source.”
I will attempt to correct or make comments below:
By the way, you might be wondering why the version number has an A after it; it’s because the 1.0 release had a critical bug relating to disk slice sizing.
Actually, the installer did, and only when installing to a slice other than the last slice on a drive. DragonFly itself did not have an issue.
These problems rule out a lot of customization, and the lack of a working XFree86 port disqualifies DragonFlyBSD for desktop use. I’m not quite sure why this release was necessary if it doesn’t fully work yet, but here is what you’ll be up against if you decide to give it a try.
I’m not sure what the author was doing wrong, because I have a fully working Gnome 2.6 desktop installed and running under DragonFly. Additionally, you can install binary packages of most programs by doing:
pkg_add -r pkg_name
For example to install XFree86:
pkg_add -r XFree86
The outdated FreeBSD sysinstall installation utility has been replaced by installer. It’s still ncurses-based, but it’s easier to navigate and use.
Somewhat incorrect, while the default installer frontend on the CD is ncurses-based. We also support a web browser based install process from the 1.0A cd, and we are working on providing a graphical installation using the Qt f/e that I just finished writing (not very pretty at the moment, but fully functional).
In spite of the easy installation procedure, you have to know your way around FreeBSD in order to use DragonFly, as the manual pages are all still FreeBSD-centric and there is no handbook or guide to help you learn the system.
While this was true at the time of the 1.0A release, this is no longer true. A Guide that has been ‘DragonFly-ised’ is now done and available here: http://forknibbler.com/guide/
A lot of work has been done to ensure that man pages and documentation are brought up to date to reflect DragonFly.
If you have further feedback or questions about the installer visit #bsdinstaller on EFNet’s IRC Servers, or see the forums link on http://www.dragonflybsd.org for other methods.
If you have further feedback or questions about DragonFly visit #dragonflybsd on EFNet’s IRC Servers, or see the forums link on http://www.dragonflybsd.org for other methods.
Doh. The irc channel for the installer is #dfinstaller, not #bsdinstaller. My mistake.
The things you’re pointing out are not factual inaccuracies; the installer is part of the release and I treated it as such. At the time I wrote the review — two weeks ago — there was zero documentation anywhere on the DragonFly site and there was no native DragonFly documentation in the base system. If it existed at the time, it was not properly documented on the web site. Unfortunately I can’t control the editorial schedule on NewsForge; if it were possible, this review would have posted the day it was submitted.
XFree86 did not compile from Ports according to the installation procedure given. At this point I don’t remember the error code it gave, but I tried a lot of different approaches to try to solve it, and tried on two different machines. Both OpenBSD 3.5 and FreeBSD 5.2.1 compiled XFree86 perfectly on the same machines.
I only saw brief mention of the web installer, but I had to cut it out of the review because other than that brief mention, there were zero docs on how it works, where it is, what it does, or how to use it. I would offer to help with documentation, but I’m a little tied up with other projects at the moment.
-Jem
I should note that I do not represent the DragonFly project, only the Installer Project.
@Jem
XFree86 did not compile from Ports according to the installation procedure given. At this point I don’t remember the error code it gave, but I tried a lot of different approaches to try to solve it, and tried on two different machines. Both OpenBSD 3.5 and FreeBSD 5.2.1 compiled XFree86 perfectly on the same machines.
The DragonFly project doesn’t maintain /usr/ports (FreeBSD project maintains these), only those found in /usr/dfports are maintained by the DragonFly Project, and because we use the current version of whatever’s in ports you may have build breakages from time to time as the FreeBSD project updates ports.
When compiled and installed X there wasn’t a version in /usr/dfports, so I can’t speak for your experience 100%.
@Jem
Additionally, as I might note from the FAQ on DragonFlyBSD.org :
Is DragonFly ready for production?
DragonFly is generally stable and speedy at this point. DragonFly still uses the FreeBSD ports system for third-party software, and some ports may not build correctly on DragonFly. You are advised to keep a close eye on the forums.
http://www.livebsd.com/cgi-bin/trac.cgi/wiki/InstallerDocs
Try to turn off the ttyd0 line in /etc/tty and reboot.
Apart from the horrid state of the temporary, FreeBSD-inherrited ports system, and minor issues with the new installer, it’s been a pretty smooth ride for me since I started using it in february.
Of course, that’s not to say that I’d seriously recomend if for anything important at the moment, but judging by the progress they’ve made in their first year, and the apparent commitment of the developers, I’m sure it’ll be quite a capable OS in a year or so.
you really picked the wrong time to do a review. Also your review is moot. Thanks for trying anyway. I did not see any emails on the mailing list from you. I did not even see you try joining in the IRC channel on EfNET #DragonFlyBSD. What was the point of giving a review when you are going to “click once, not work, and say its broken”? Please, for future occurances when software does not work, drop us a line via mailing list. And again, your review is moot. Thanks –David Ross
when 1.0 came out i did not have problems installing xfree.
from the newsforge comments discussion, by the author of the article:
“I had no idea the DragonFly community was filled with people like you. If I’d known, I would have ignored DragonFlyBSD accordingly. When I repost this review on my site in two weeks, I will make sure that I update it to reflect the spirit of the DragonFly community.
FYI: Just because you disagree doesn’t mean it’s FUD. This is nothing close to FUD. Maybe you need a trip to the Hackers Dictionary?”
Good going osnews, lets have more articles from this person.
You guys should really get your act up and publish articles where the authors have done decent work, instead of publishing these half-assed “point and click, it didnt work, boo hoo, lets write negative things”.
I think that this labelling of the DragonFly BSD community is absolutely outrageous! Because two users post posts attacking the validity of the article, we are all unprofessional?! Am I the only one who thinks this is ridiculous?
I must also say that the review is totally bogus. We do have (in-progress) documentation that is accessible within 3 clicks from our main site.
nivenh: Indeed: A little professionalism goes a long way. We have plenty of forums for help. The mailing lists are one of them. We have active mailing lists with active contributors. These are plainly stated on our page, and have been since the project began over a year ago.
Two weeks ago, the forknibbler.com documentation was underway. I can find references to all these things with a simple Google search.
I really don’t want to come across as elitist, but it really doesn’t appear to me, as an active contributor to DragonFly BSD, that this person even did a half-hearted attempt at getting support: I read all our mailing lists, I’m active in the #DragonFlyBSD channel of EFNet (although it’s not an official community, many contributors and developers hang out there). The DragonFlyBSD log that Justin Sherril maintains contains lots of up-to-date information on changes.
My thoughts on the review:
The first 3 paragraphs are full of untruths: the main points that are made (it doesn’t work properly yet, it’s not suitable for a desktop system and there was a critical error in DragonFly in the 1.0 release). DragonFly BSD has been working for me for four months now since I started doing development in that camp, I use it on my laptop in a workstation environment and I’ll let you guys read the stuff that my fellow installer teammates posted about the 1.0 bug that was quite obscure that Chris Pressey and I fixed very quickly in cohort with Matt Dillon. Considering this (the installer) project was started in June by Hiten, Chris, Scott and myself (with others eagerly joining development in the time thereafter and before the release), I think we did a damn good job at making mostly bug-free and functional software in a little less than 2 months.
The fourth paragraph implies that our installer has the same functionality as sysinstall, which it certainly does not. Our 1.0A installer will only install from a livecd environment at the moment (no FTP/NFS/other install methods). The installer is a work in progress, and we’re all working hard to make it better.
The DragonFly BSD CD does not contain packages because we don’t want to bloat our distribution. That’s why our ISO stays around 72MB in size.
There are a lot more differences in our source tree than are listed on the page. Check out the diaries for more on the site.
No offense meant, but I really don’t think you’re the most qualified person to perform benchmarks of DragonFly BSD, and the benchmarks you discuss in the next paragraph are benchmarks based on fairly specific hardware, instead of a more general purpose system. You also showed no interest in getting help with your problems before writing this somewhat defamatory post on newsforge, so I think you should leave benchmarking to somebody who has more of an eye for working with members of the team to do benchmarking: a fairly tedious process that needs fairly nitpicky information. You don’t appear to be cut out for this work.
I understand that you don’t mean to be negative in your review, and I appreciate the goodwill. But the negative comments you’ve made on DragonFly are all bunk, and hence your review’s substantial material comes down to mostly: “I’m impressed with the work Matt Dillon and the DragonFly team have done”.
Before the rest of you start associating this post with the thoughts / actions / feelings of other DragonFly users, members, their dogs, their goldfish or their benefactors: these are my opinions and experiences only. Don’t try applying any of what I say to “the DragonFly BSD community”.
> The DragonFlyBSD-1.0A was moot
Should be
The DragonFlyBSD-1.0A review was moot
Reason: Jem did not do research. He clicked, doesn’t work, and gave a bad review
i did some tests on dragonfly 1.0 (notA) relative to freebsd 4.10 and 5.2.1. unscientific testing using multithreading and networking – the results showed that dragonlfy was not faster (unsurprising) but was more consistent (less scatter in kernel timers, i know they’ve done some work on this – there was an article on an improved usleep()).
good work – innovation and improvement. much appreciated.
forget installers and guis – its the kernel that’s the point of dragonflybsd.
The most noteworthy aspects of this article are the misguided direction and the piss-poor quality of writing.
I am not an OS hacker, but a student with some basic scientific programming experience so those with more experience should decide if the following is reasonable:
The stability of DragonFly BSD at this point is not so relevant because at this point, it is not stable from a developer’s perspective even if it doesn’t crash very often–this being the first release of a very ambitious multi-year project means that development will hopefully continue to be quite rapid. Daily stability will be useful for those that wish to join the community of developers and testers of DragonFly BSD, but not to any end-user as of yet.
Focusing on “should I switch yet?” or “would I switch in the future?” is pretty silly since it’s still a work in progress. Much more interesting would have been a review that talked about what’s been accomplished so far, what the roadmap of DragonFly BSD, and how it differs from the main OSs of today or from the future paths of the main OSs of today.
I hope very much that such a review will be written.
Jem did not research the topic
more info at
http://reviews.b0x.com/
This is the truth, it is not an attack on the editor. He had an attitude when I confronted him
then he turned around and insulted us behind our backs on the jemreports forum.
*note: this is not abusive. Please moderator, this needs to stay where people can read the truth
I will be posting on the linked site what Jem did wrong on another page and give answers.
Jem is just wrong, thats all. Maybe a little hasty in making his decision.
–David Ross
Being a DragonFly newbie, the impression I’ve got so far is that the community is dominated by developers. (The fact that I’ve mostly read the kernel mailinglist may be a reason for that impression.) If that means ‘RTFM’s are said more often than in other communities I don’t know, but the BSDs in general have great documentation so its not necessary to stay clueless unless you really are.
Yes, DragonFly is still a moving target. Read the
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/goals/
and compare it to
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/status/diary.cgi
This OS is going to rock! Don’t let the occasional grumpy person hold you back from trying it out if you’re really interested.
This OS is going to rock! Don’t let the occasional grumpy person hold you back from trying it out if you’re really interested.
Agreed.
:/ In other news, I seemed to have picked a bad hosting company that harbors adware that infects windows clients. I did not see this because the javascript that executes doesnt run on my machine because it is not windows. Guess I should move the review
–David Ross