FreeBSD 8 released | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD 8 released

freebsd.org

78 pointsptn33 comments

FreeBSD 7/8 are really starting to feel like the decisions made in 5.x are starting the pay off. Between the ULE Scheduler, ZFS filesystem, DTrace (even if not as good as on Solaris) and the new Jails, Its a pretty sweet technology packed release.

Hopefully we will be upgrading some of the apache.org server soon :)

Speaking of Apache, why do none of the Linux distros use YAWS? It's always Apache.

Both Fedora and Ubuntu include nginx. The reason Apache HTTPd is the default is because people know it (that said, I don't entirely agree with that reasoning).

Debian has it.

  joey@mute:~$ apt-cache search yaws
  yaws - High performance HTTP 1.1 webserver written in Erlang

If you want ZFS and DTrace, is there a good reason to prefer FreeBSD to OpenSolaris?

Because the FreeBSD userland enviroment and ports collection are sane, and there is a reasonable way to do upgrades, while with OpenSolaris you have... what?

I've heard the community around BDS tends to make the Linux community look like a bunch of happy go lucky hippies.

A Synaptic-like package manager? It's really easy to use and self-updates the system every time there is something new without need to make the human attached to the computer go and check.

The big one is that there's a pretty good chance FBSD will run on your hardware, and there's a really slim chance that OpenSolaris will. Solaris just doesn't have the driver selection that BSDs or Linux have.

I can't confirm your observation. I have thrown OSol on many notebooks and it found stuff out-of-the-box my Linux installs didn't. Oddly enough, the Broadcom wireless one of them uses had problems, but that's about all the problems I had (and that Broadcom was a source of grief for a long time under Linux).

It sure doesn't seem pickier than Linux or BSD.

FreeBSD seems to make more sense to me than Solaris or OpenSolaris. I always have to go looking for HOWTOs on simple things. Plus, there is more available for it, and IMO it has a better community.

Sometime I wish FreeBSD and OpenBSD are more popular than Linux...

Sometimes I think half the opensource advocats are offering me tweaks and utilities to make Windows and OS X more like {star}nix so everything can be The One True Way, and the other half are trying to convince me that all the {star}nix variants are life changingly different and charmingly unique.

Mac OS X is already UNIX. In fact, OS X implements more of POSIX than Linux.

POSIX message queues. SysV message queues. POSIX realtime signals. POSIX monotonic timers like clock_gettime(). POSIX semaphores living on shared memory for inter-process synchronization. Pthread spin locks.

Linux has them, OS X does not. These are just a few things that I encountered while developing on OS X. Where did you get the idea that OS X implements more POSIX than Linux?

Yeah, I've also found linux to be a better unix than OSX. Many OSX calls seem lacking compared to linux ones. Compare mmap and threads on both systems for example.

Which shouldn't be surprising considering how much work is going on with linux, compared to the OSX kernel. There's thousands of developers, many of whom work for much larger companies than apple(many of which work on their own Unix too... or have in the past).

Ah. My information comes from Wikipedia: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX

The article might be wrong, of course. Since you appear to have more experience in this area, I'll just take your word for it :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/POSIX requires editing then, both,linux and Freebsd are listed in the incomplete side. http://developer.apple.com/leopard/overview/osfoundations.ht... seems to say the same damn lie !

Technically this is already true, since OS X is a FreeBSD variant and is more popular than Linux (at least in the desktop world).

But I know what you mean. I actually host two development servers for FreeBSD and employ one of the core devs (laszlof). I'm trying to help! :)

The kernel is different, and the userland is different. OS X may be FreeBSD-derived, but it has moved a long way from its roots since then.

FreeBSD 4.2 was my first copy. I had so much fun tinkering with it. It's still my favorite unix os.

Great! Just in time for me to build my new ZFS-based file server. =)

Does FreeBSD have something like Synaptic?

FreeBSD setups typically use the BSD Ports collection for package management, which compiles from source + patches (vaguely similar to Gentoo Linux).

There doesn't appear to be a mainstream UI for BSD ports.

(Curiously, the Mac OS X equivalent, MacPorts, has at least two current UI projects.)

To append to what your are saying this is because ports is set up for unix people to work it.

To search you use ls, cd, and find. To install you "cd <dir> && make install".

If you are installing freebsd you should already be comfortable enough to not need a pretty gui hiding these very simple details.

You could use find, but it is easier to use the built in facilities to search for ports. If you are in the ports directory you can:

make search name=name_of_port

to search for a port by name and:

make search key=key_to_search_for

to search by key. You can also use quicksearch instead of search to reduce the verbosity of the results. If you read the ports man page, you will find a bunch of other nifty things you can do with the ports system.

I tend to just search at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/

FreeBSD also has a binary package management system, see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en/books/handbook/packages-using..... The ports take precedence, though, in that they can have newer versions and not all packages on all architectures may be available as binaries.

I'll try to put it on my EEE 900 this weekend (which is running Arch at the moment)

You just read my mind. I've got a Dell 2100 with Arch on it, and I was just looking for a freeBSD usb image.

Post some recent instructions if you get it working? I had numerous problems with networking (which I solved) and swap/RAM overhead (which I didn't) when I tried installing to my Eee 900.

According to this list it should work: http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head-6d00dcb960b731976447f25...

Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

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