GoBSD Preview1 Release Available
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Looks good. In other news HawkinsOS was postponed
i agree with the reasoning:
* allow the dragonfly developers go about their core aims of developing the dragonfly kernel… this was in fact the raison d’etre of dragonfly.
* free them from userland packaging, extraneious ports, gnome, kde, etc etc
the wholepoint of dragonfly was to try new ideas in the kernel (see their website for details) and not to spend time maitaining another ports/pkgsrc tree or installer routines or admin tools.
Man, with all these repackaging and forking going on, it will be fun to add all these to the unix family tree
— I started doing the linux distro family tree and that IS a handfull…
“I started doing the linux distro family tree and that IS a handfull…”
distrowatch.com is doing this and it isnt a enviable job. personally I think people shouldnt just bother with all kinds of distro. many of them are heavily specialised and dont have a single impact outside its niche so mainstream distros are the only one we can track with interest. if some distro does boil up to the top we can take a peek as whats the fuss all about.
distributions are not in anyway forks of linux or freebsd, they are in many ways a rearrangement or cherry picking of components with amount of changes that depends on the target market at the *user* level outside the kernel and does not create forks as such. some of these combinations can be intersting and if it proves well enough then other distro can pick up the innovation, if not it will just live in a distrowatch.co page and possibly die anytime the community or maintainer(s) lost interest.
remember that gobsd itself isnt a distribution, it just aims to take care of the dragonbsd offshoot of freebsd 4.x tree
Now I am a devoted Linux user, have been for a very long time. I also have to hatred towards BSD, infact I do think what the BSD are doing are great work. But with the release GoBSD, Dragonfly BSD, Fresbie, I have to think that it is possable that in a few years BSD **might** become more framented like linux is.
BSD(more specifically FreeBSD, as it has the most ports out of all the BSD variants.) is already where linux is. It has all (most) of the same software you would run on a linuxbox and it also has multimedia support(sound, 3d accel and whatever).
It was a nice experience when I tried it as a desktop, but honestly it just didn’t fit with my way of thinking. Linux does, hence the reason why I use it. BSD community is also very nice, welcoming new users but sometimes they just cut to the point(eg: READ THE HANDBOOK, type answers). It may rub off as rude to some but I didn’t take it that way as I usually did find the answer I was looking for(though to be honest I looked there first, but hey whatever).
I am a GNU/Linux user and I want to try BSD because I like the way of installation and package management.I downloaded FreeBSD cds 5.3.(I dont now why they have removed the Xserver configuration during installation?)and I installed sucessfully but I couldnt fix the Xserver,then I gave up and back to Linux,What Linux?Debian or Gentoo sure.I will try GoBSD sure.thanks to the *BSD developers,that they spread the GREAT OS around the world
There is real danger in fragmentation. What strikes me with FreeBSD (have only small experience though) is that it feels integrated and well engineered as a whole. If you compare that with Gentoo (my main OS since 5 years) you see that gentoo is nothing more than a pile of sourcecode forced toghether just to bundle portage (a great tool) with something.
Someone said that all the forks can share its innovations and all is well. In real life that doesn’t happen. When it’s easier to fork than wade through the politics of your current distro. A new distro is born with that one thing fixed but the rest of the system will suffer. Because the older system keeps the experience and REAL knowledge of the veterans.
Now it is not fair to request that all progammers in the world unite and work for a common goal, so the notion that all GNU/Linux should become one is just as childish as the belief that KDE should merge with GNOME.
There are some fundamental differences in the BSD vs. the Linuxes that should be known. The BSD’s are complete operating systems, products aimed at system deployers.
Most linux distributions are just collections of software with tools to easily assemble a system.
Dragonfly threads sure attract a lot of schizophrenic people…
http://gobsd.com/node/127
Thanks
This is a pretty funny remark, as it illustrates the difference between the BSD community and the GNU/Linux community.
A BSD has a pretty monolithic development paradigm. There is the base system that is developed as the cannonical foundation of a BSD flavour. It completely contains “the feel” of a BSD. If a user wants to add functionality, he has to lay this on top of the base.
GNU/Linux is completely modular. There are reference software projects, but they all are highly customizable and a distributor is free to put the system together as s/he sees fit. This offers the ability to tailor niche specific implementations, while retaining overall compatibility with the reference projects.
Both avenues have their merrits. With BSD you get a very stable, thouroughly organised base system that is the same for a flavor of BSD everywhere. With GNU/Linux you get a customized product that can have combinations that go where noone thought they would go before, but it is at the cost of losing dependable uniformity.
Too bad that the licenses our communities use are not symetrically compatible. BSD can aggregate GPLed code, but they can’t merge good developments at the code-level.
Chill dude!
First he was bashing Gentoo (which he, by the way, was using) as a bunch of sourcecode to show of Gentoo. He was not bashing Gentoo, read his post again for the actual statement.
He also did NOT say forks were created over ONE patch but over fixing ONE ISSUE. That is a very true statement. Just look at Gentoo for instance. What created Gentoo? the desire to have better sourcecode package management. Have portage been used in any other distro? Each of the distros have at least one (and in many cases only one) issue that their creators wanted to be solved.
The fact that the Linux distros are complete OSes, does not hide the fact that they were bolted together rather than developed together. The BSDs develops userlands along with their kernels.
It is evident that you know very little of BSDs as you then would understand that they are not distros but complete and separate OSes that share a mindset and a heritage (mostly userland) from the 4BSD. They have separate kernels that cannot be swapped for “added effect” that is developed along with their userlands. The fact that the Linux distros have severe compatability issues DESPITE having the same kernel (ableit different versions) is even more pathetic than having 4 different OSes with different kernels having caompatibility issues. The different BSD systems reuse a lot more code in between them than the different Linux distros (that is code specifically developed for one distro). That is not only a huge waste of effort and time but a sad fact of having to rebuild the wagon each time (even if the wheel already is invented).
Of course the first paragraph should read:
“First he was bashing Gentoo (which he, by the way, was using) as a bunch of sourcecode to show of portage. He was not bashing portage, read his post again for the actual statement.”
What all this nonsense about compatibility between BSDs ? Porting from one BSD to another is trivial, besides which NetBSD has FreeBSD and Linux binary compatibility (and ofcourse some more)
FreeBSD has Linux binary compat, but no NetBSD since apps are released for FreeBSD first anyway. OpenBSD stands apart, which is sort of their philosophy anaway.
Talking about DragonFly, it also has Linux binary compatibility and except for very specific cases binary compat with FreeBSD 4. I compiled the XFCE4.2beta on FreeBSD 4.10 and it works perfectly on DragonFly 1. BTW I’ve never found a program that wouldn’t run under Linux compatibility.
Most of the time I try to be nice when it comes to *BSD vs GNU/Linux, but the “BSD Syndrome” just is too vexing.
The “official” *BSD stance on GNU/Linux:
“We came from Unix, we are a real *Nix, we have a superior designed and engineered OS and that makes it the epitome of “being better”. GNU/Linux is just a bin of thrown together rubbish.”
The real funny part comes when you look at overall acceptance of the two OSes. GNU/Linux is killing *BSD in momentum, popularity and invested interest by users and companies (money-wise too).
When pointing out this discrepancy between uptake and supposedly better design methodology, you get the feeble answer that GNU/Linux is being hyped and, oh yeah, in some dark and long forgotten age we had a lawsuit that killed our momentum.
GNU/Linux is in the middle of a similar lawsuit now, not to mention a slander campagne. Still, it is gaining ground. So there must be something to GNU/Linux that keeps it going and it’s not the Open Source nature of the code. I think it is because of the GNU/Linux community.
I think that *BSD’s problem is this:
The Source is Open, but the Community is not.
Odd this isn’t my experience. Besides most BSD users are also running Linux and a few other unix on various machines (at the moment I’ve got AIX5.1, FreeBSD4.10, DragonFly1, Fedora Core2 and Solaris (x86) 9 running.) You can hardly blame us for liking BSD the best 😉
And a factual error : Linux is not in a lawsuit, IBM is in a lawsuit involving Linux. Linux great strength is that it cannot be in a lawsuit, since it is not really a product but a concept.
I don’t care that some people like BSD better. I’m glad that the choice is there.
What is really vexing is this incessant talking down on GNU/Linux from the BSD crowd. I know this doesn’t really extend to all individuals from that crowd, but the main noises, when heard, is always: “GNU/Linux is inferior”. The subtle undertone going with this dismissal is that GNU/Linux has no right to be so popular as it is.
Plus the license crap about how “the GPL is not Free”. Unfortunately, a large faction of the GNU/Linux community returns the favour with stupid crap about the BSDL.
SCO claims that IBM wrongfully incorporated Unix SYS V technology in the Linux kernel, so how can you say that only IBM is in court? When SCO has their way, GNU has lost its Linux.
With what should we replace the Linux kernel if it were to becomes undistributable? If you are going to say a BSD-base, I’m going to bitch-slap you
(When you mention HURD, you’ll make me laugh myself to death. HURD needs at least a decade more).
Although i’m a trusty linux fan, linux IS a distro hell! Even I have trouble doing something as simple as making sure a certain service starts the “proper way” everytime i have to deal with a machine running a new distro.
Why do you think freedesktop.org has been adopted so fast by various desktop software? Because there is a need for streamlining open source software to some common standards. Yea i know that the very essence of open source is freedom of choice. But if everyone walks in their own direction, no one will meet and unite.
Stop inventing the wheel, when you can help making a new propulsion system instead!
“Bring back the times when we only had zeros!”
There hasn’t EVER been a time mankind had only zeros. The zero had to be “invented” first. The Egytpians didn’t have it, neither did Rome and in Europe, it is only since 1400-1500ish (?) that we have a zero.
So clearly, we had the “1” first, not the zero.. 😉
The “official” *BSD stance on GNU/Linux:
“We came from Unix, we are a real *Nix, we have a superior designed and engineered OS and that makes it the epitome of “being better”. GNU/Linux is just a bin of thrown together rubbish.”
First. There is no official statment/stance on GNU/Linux. Not even an unofficial one, not even an under the table or in the wardrobe one.
Second. 4BSD came from ATT:s Unix beginning as a patchset. That’s a “fact”. It is a real UNIX. Linux is UNIX compatible. Slight difference in words but very little difference for actual use. Linux is also becoming the “de facto” standard (for good and bad). You also cannot shut your ears to the fact that any given GNU/Linux distro is a bunch of independently developed software that is put together. That is not necessarily a “bad thing(tm)”. That makes the individual parts more easily exchangable but that comes at the cost of consistency and integration.
Third. This is also an effect of how the BSDs and GNU/Linux are developed. Both views have merit and none is superior to the other.
GNU/Linux is in the middle of a similar lawsuit now, not to mention a slander campagne. Still, it is gaining ground. So there must be something to GNU/Linux that keeps it going and it’s not the Open Source nature of the code. I think it is because of the GNU/Linux community.
Yes, some in that community is a bit like rabid dogs. Attacks anyone who even dares to mention something bad about GNU/Linux (just read Slashdot for a day or two and you’ll see them).
The two lawsuits are not similar. IBM was sued, not Torwalds. Get the difference. Linux is not in any danger and never really was. If there had been no AT&T lawsuit, then people would feel a lot more insecure about tthe future of Linux but as it is and the fact that BSD survived is a clear indication that Linux would also survive. The BSD lawsuit sort of paved the way.
The Source is Open, but the Community is not.
This is obviously an uninformed oppinion rather than an experienced fact.
What is really vexing is this incessant talking down on GNU/Linux from the BSD crowd. I know this doesn’t really extend to all individuals from that crowd, but the main noises, when heard, is always: “GNU/Linux is inferior”.
And here you are, in a BSD thread, talking down BSD?!
Are you that insecure about the state of Linux or can you give a few links to posts where a few MAIN propponents of the BSDs give rise to such views.
The usual comment when asking a BSD user what one should use for OS is “whatever suits you better, Linux is good, *BSD is good to, I prefer BSD”. WHen asking a Linux user, you almost always get the answer “Linux”. Why is that?
Plus the license crap about how “the GPL is not Free”. Unfortunately, a large faction of the GNU/Linux community returns the favour with stupid crap about the BSDL.
Yes, both licenses are free. The main issue is who/what that freedom is directed to. GPL makes sure the sourcecode is always free and that any modification is free as well. BSDL gives the developer the freedom to do whatever he/she choses to do with it including not making changes available. I prefer the latter freedom (RMS prefers the former). Both have their drawbacks.
HURD is for all intents a lost cause. Mach have more breath of life than HURD.
There are certain programs (Firefox, Thunderbird, Sunbird, Azureus) that I like to install myself from their respective websites
Strangely three of your examples are from Mozilla.org and the fourth is a Java program which therefore should be platform independent.
Not exactly overwhelming evidence… I’m not saying you’re wrong (it can be made easier) but your example is not a homerun
No, I am not talking down *BSD the OS. It mostly is the noises coming from the BSD community when they hear the word GNU/Linux. The BSD OS has a very long lineage and as such has proven itself, no doubt. My problem is not with the code, but with the people.
Conveniently you completely ignore my quotation marks around key words in my post, in essence twisting what I say. Don’t ask for hard links to common known phenomena. Of the few writings I’ve read out there about *BSD in relation to GNU/Linux the contempt for GNU/Linux just drips of the screen.
My experience (as an outsider) with relation to *BSD is built over the course of the years, just like your knowledge about GNU/Linux is built over a period of time. *BSD people always tend to have the knack to say something about GNU/Linux and convey this undertone of “GNU/Linux is a scrapheap OS”.
I’m not arguing that GNU/Linux is not higly componentized and that integration is trickier. It is that tone of this somehow being inferior. It is annoying, pure and simple. I’m not saying you do it, but elsewhere I keep bumping in to it.
If you would ask me what OS to use, I’d say use whatever rocks your boat. Explore and find what you like, I’m not your shepherd. If someone needs to know something about GNU/Linux he can ask, but I won’t shove it to the front.
Insecure about my OS of choice? No way, GNU/Linux does exactly what I want from it, so no second thoughts.
Some nitpicking:
BSDi and Berkely University were sued, not 4BSD itself. Linus wasn’t sued because there is no money to be gotten and suing IBM get’s more press.For saving GNU/Linux from the court case, I don’t think a secret sealed AT&T suit did that. I’d point to Groklaw.
*BSD’s are derivatives of the AT&T codebase (if it isn’t the other way around
) As such UNIX and BSD have code ties, but since no *BSD has a UNIX certification from the Open Group, they are not UNIX. Just a UNIX inspired system. (Works well though, all the same).
Well, I know that GoBSD makes a chance of being tried out as soon as I’ve sniffed Solaris 10 in Qemu.
Looking back I’m sorry I’ve brought this “BSD talking down GNU/Linux” up. It completely clouds the topic at hand, which is GoBSD.
Having read the page it seems like a good idea. Having DragonFly sorting out the bare metal details and GoBSD delivering a more polished enduser friendly variant on DragonFly. When executed right, such a symbiotic relationship could further the projects tremendously.
why did someone have to bring up linux? Aren’t there enough linux threads as it is? Haven’t you realized that as soon as you compare the two the 14 year olds come out and start redefining the word “free” for some reason and then they start complaining about how they tried freebsd but it didn’t work like linux so they switched back after 20 minutes.
I think it would be a good idea if on BSD, Solaris, etc articles to not mention linux from now on. Even if you actually have evidence to prove what your going to say don’t say it. Don’t even respond to people that say “I’m a linux user, why should I try FreeBSD?”. If they can’t think of a reason on their own, we aren’t going to be able to give them one.
Take care,
Jared.
No, I am not talking down *BSD the OS. It mostly is the noises coming from the BSD community when they hear the word GNU/Linux. The BSD OS has a very long lineage and as such has proven itself, no doubt. My problem is not with the code, but with the people.
Conveniently you completely ignore my quotation marks around key words in my post, in essence twisting what I say. Don’t ask for hard links to common known phenomena.
Common known phenomena? Where? In troll-land? Because you would be hard pressed to find a more open-minded community than the BSD user community. Of course, you claim just the opposite… I say you are a lier, but unlike you, I can and I am willing to prove my point. Visit http://www.bsdforums.org. They have a linux section, with linux noobs (be it noobs coming from BSD-land or noobs coming from windows-land) asking questions and folks there actually helping out. There are threads about various linux distroes. These are just the recent ones:
http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2463…
http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2660…
http://www.freebsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=2560…
bsdforums is representative of the bsd user community more than any other forum. So where is the ‘noise coming from bd users’ you are refferring to? What I don’t get is this: why is it in the interest of some people to not only deride FreeBSD and its developers (current trend, this is not about your post), and now, its user community? It is a FREE os, you see, no one forces anyone to use it!
I like FreeBSD better than any linux I have tried (slackware came close though). Is that bothering you so much that you can’t resist the urge of spreading FUD in a BSD specific thread no less? And the first time I tried, I received tremendous help from its community, even for some of my stupid questions. When I was using mandrake, it was the community that partly kept me with it for two releases (9.0, 9.1) – mandrakeusers.org and most importantly, pclinuxonline. I thought of FreeBSD and its users as probably geekish in a debian kind of way. And I was very much surprised to see just how patient and helpful everyone was to me on those forums.
Of course, I realize that one can come up with proof for almost anything. If you look hard enough you’ll find BSD users talking down gnu/linux, just as you would find users of distro X talking down distro Y. But the point is: you’ll have to look harder to find those kind of bsd users you described,than it was for me to find those posts disproving your point. Also, it is very easy to point out the massive amount of trolling going on _against_ bsd … users (just read slashdot, as someone suggested).
…BSDers despise Linux so very much…
Oh please, BSDers don’t despise Linux at all. Some of them might, I don’t know, but it IS NOT a general trend.
@everyone: please don’t believe these zealots. Check the facts for yourself on the main forums of bsd users: bsdforums.org Of course, if you look very hard, you’ll probably see some negative posts, but I read more posts prizing one linux distro or another on bsdforums than on osnews (well, that’s a bit of an exaggeration, but your average bsd users doesn’t care about the issue so much to actually _hate_ or invest any emotion in the linux vs bsd issue.
We are users primarily, not priests, and we don’t really care that much about linux. Note that this post, just like my previous one, is concerned with an attack on a community of which I am part of. So, let me stress it again: I don’t want you to use BSD. I don’t want you to use linux. I don’t care what OS you use on your puter. What I care about is this: does FreeBSD satisfy my needs? It does. And that’s it.
Anybody has information whether DragonFly BSD / GoBSD will pay attention to having 3D card support too? I suppose that DragonFly is still so similar to its FreeBSD roots that the official nVidia FreeBSD 3D drivers might work?? But how will it be in the future when Dragonfly starts to become its own distinct BSD flavor more and more?
I have a hunch that things like 3D support may seem trivial to many in the BSD world (no need for 3D on servers), but I feel that it is the small details like that that often make the difference why, for example, Linux is so much more popular than BSD. (The idea being: Why choose an OS that doesn’t have 3D if, for the same price, you get another and rather similar OS that has it, even if you wouldn’t necessarily need 3D so much yourself.)
BSDs are excellent for servers, perhaps better than Linux (better security record etc.), but I’m afraid Linux outshines them on a desktop, because of many “small” advantages like better 3D support.
Btw, DragonFly people should update the news section on their website much more often, or start to publish a monthly news page or something like that.
To an outsider like me, it is often completely unclear if and how alive the DragonFly project really is. That ain’t good at all for a new and ambitious project. (And don’t think that everyone potentially interested in the project will automatically subscribe to your email lists.) So, you should pay some attention to PR work always too.
The same suggestion applies to this new GoBSD project too. You should let people know more often what’s happening in the dev land and in the project generally. That is one of the best ways to get more users, developers and general interest -> make the project a real success, and not just another hobby OS project.
…Like it often happens, just after my message above I happened to find this (unofficial?) DragonFLY BSD digest online: http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/
I don’t remember to have seen a link to that Digest on the DragonFly home page, however (I found it with Google only)? Anyway, the official Diary page on the DragonFly home site is updated all too seldom to make the DragonFly home page worth visiting more, I think.
You need to check the DFly online log, then.
http://www.shiningsilence.com/dbsdlog/
Updated almost daily, gives you a breakdown of everything that is happening on the dfly lists, and more.
“”because of many “small” advantages like better 3D support.”
3d support by no means is a small advantage. unfortunately no open source driver support is there for many cards
I am a GNU/Linux user, though I am not a priest or zealot.
Its sad to see any BSD thread, become a linux vs bsd war.
Hubert Feyrer has drawn a helpful picture to clarify the BSD forkings.
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html
I use Windows mostly, mainly because it’s my desktop OS at my job and we run more windows servers then Unix ones. What *Nix based machines we do have (which is still quite a bit) is HP-UX and Solaris with a couple of Linux boxes floating here and there. I use FreeBSD at home, and have toyed around with plenty of Linux distros at home. Every OS has a place and I like most of them. I will be honest in stating that I like some Linux distors better then others (I personally like Suse), but I prefer FreeBSD over any of the Linux distros I have used.
There a a few reasons for this but I will only state a couple here. One is the organization, I know where to find everything in a FreeBSD system because it’s better organized. Number two, the ports collection is one of the best software packaging and mangament tools I have seen and I like it. I have tried Debian, Slack, Fedora and Suse and I just like FreeBSD the best. Plus, FreeBSD seems closer to Solaris to me, but that’s just opinion. However both OSes have a common goal and should support each other. It seems like people are more fanatical about thier OS more so then thier country or religion. It was funny at first, but now it’s just plain annoying.
On an added note, I have recieved a lot more friendly responses on BSDForums.net as opposed to let’s say Linuxforums.org, or Slashdot, or even tek-tips.com for that matter. BSD users seem to be a little friendlier and willing to help, but then again that is just my personal experiences.