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WinMX World :: Forum  |  Discussion  |  WinMX Lyte  |  anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
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Author Topic: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?  (Read 1789 times)

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Offline Forested665

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anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« on: July 12, 2010, 03:48:10 am »
Being an avid BSD fan i try to watch what goes on and i've notice a new trend.
There are alot of spin off distrobutions offering precompiled packages and other goodies and its starting to make BSD gain some popularity.

Theres four main distrobutions and a fifth unique one in rapid developement.
FreeBSD - by far the most popular
OpenBSD - has the most hardware and arch support of just about any OS out of the box
NetBSD - basic Unix mostly used in scientific studies.
DragonFLY - in rapid developement
Solaris - Full featured OS

My main guess at the lack in popularity is that all of these except solaris have no graphical installer or window manager by defualt.
Lately theres been a few projects that have caught my eye

http://www.tomahawkcomputers.com/ - KDE

http://www.ghostbsd.org/ - Now ghost bsd is freeBSD based. its a live cd with gnome and up until a few weeks ago did not have a graphical installer. This project is very buggy as its leader has no coding experience until he picked up the project.

http://gnobsd.sri-dev.de/ - GNOBSD is another live cd like GhostBSD except that it is based on OpenBSD instead of FreeBSD

http://www.midnightbsd.org/ - midnightbsd is kind of like Olive except its installable, is based on FreeBSD 6.1 instead of 8.0 and it has a graphical ports management system (kind of like self compiling repositories)

And lastly one of the greatest attempts has been PC-BSD
This project uses the current freeBSD code (new releases shortly after FreeBSd makes its release) and some solaris code. It features a full graphical ports management system, your typical graphical installer and media options like on linux. USB cd net dvd ect. though i have to admit i cant get the 64bit to install on my system it crashes just after it loads the solaris code before it even gets to the graphical part. - http://www.pcbsd.org/

I figure ill leave this open to see what others think of the new attention BSd is getting and what they think of it.
BSD -  The Daemons Are No Longer Just Inside My Head.

Offline Pri

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Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #1 on: July 12, 2010, 05:55:28 am »
I use Mac OS X day to day which as we all know is based on BSD. I absolutely love BSD and I use derivative works all the time. FreeNAS is a great BSD based network storage operating system, it's quite popular and full featured, if I didn't need the Win32 operating environment with a GUI I'd probably run FreeNAS on my main storage server actually.

Offline Forested665

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Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #2 on: July 13, 2010, 04:05:40 am »
I hadnt even thought about FreeNAS. OSX is almost the ba****d child of them all.
I remember having this conversation a while back on it. The kernel is officially listed as being a posix compliant variant of the mach microkernel but its a hodge podge of that, the nextstep which was a combination of older FreeBSD and the mach kernel, XNU (x is not unix) this came from nexstep its a mach and FreeBSD4.3 hybrid, then after all those were merged they added more from both FreeBSD and OpenBSD to get darwin. Oh and i remember reading on wiki about some solaris not sure if that was kernel or just APIs. But either way that kernel has been buggered with ALOT. which i guess thats ok since it works.
BSD -  The Daemons Are No Longer Just Inside My Head.

Offline Pri

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Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #3 on: July 13, 2010, 04:46:36 am »
Yes OS X is an unusual operating system especially because of its diverse underpinnings. One of the things I like about it from a BSD standpoint is usually if a hardware manufacturer has developed BSD drivers they will more often then not go the extra few steps to make it fully OS X compatible. HighPoint for example is one of my favorite hardware makers, they produce RAID cards and they support all versions of Windows from 98 to Win 7/2008 and Linux including open source drivers and BSD including FreeBSD, FreeNAS and OS X.

Offline Forested665

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Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #4 on: July 13, 2010, 06:24:26 am »
hardware can always be tricky. you can walk into any store and everything is going to be windows compatable. somethings will have legacy windows and some mac but very few have open source drivers for linux and others.
BSD -  The Daemons Are No Longer Just Inside My Head.

Offline shamil

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Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #5 on: August 15, 2010, 01:59:55 pm »
I've tried to use desktop bsd distributions before. Tried desktopbsd back in the day before development stopped. The graphical ports system on it seemed cool, until i realized it sucked, it needed a lot of polishing. Desktopbsd had promise until development stopped.

Then there's pcbsd. It's probably the best well known desktop bsd distro around. It's not bad, i rather liked its prepackaged binary system for grabbing and installing applications, but those tend to suffer from user contributions in uploading binaries that don't work or may have had install packaging errors that keeps something from being installed. No biggie, pcbsd can use the ports system, but had no graphical port utility...don't know if they still don't have one or not. The main reasons i stopped using bsd distributions...

1. I want something i can use, desktop bsd distros could definitely benefit from the ports system having binaries of everything along with the already existing source code for everything. I install some programs from ports either command line or graphical utility in desktopbsd, and you are given choices for what tags you compile the source with. Not exactly good for a desktop bsd distro to be doing to desktop users (however just fine for compiling from source enthusiasts). Pcbsd would benefit from maintaining there own ports repository for binaries as an addition to the pbi system that they use and could eventually phase out (the idea of a binary repository would be easier to use and manage than the existing pbi system).

2. I install some programs and they don't appear in the start menu of kde in pcbsd and desktopbsd. WTF? They have no post installation script to handle this for the user?

3. There is a linux compatibility layer for bsd's. I use mostly linux applications, on mostly linux, so i guess i'll continue to use linux which is much more mature as a desktop os (and especially since i know how to use it...i would however never fallback to windows just because i know how to use it).

4. I can learn some new cli skills for operating bsd. A lot of the commands after all are the same ones used in linux. With of course commands specific to bsd cli. No biggie. But, the kernel sort of scared me away. The freebsd kernel is an ALIEN thing to me! Learning what comprises it and how it does it's thing isn't quite in the public light so much as the linux kernel or the windows kernel (with fame for the windows kernel bsod'ing people). That's sort of my fault though, i didn't really have that much time back then to go looking through documentation as was busy with a lot of homework.

Desktop bsd's still have a ways to go in maturation. Desktop bsd's is still a new thing on the scene for alternative desktop os's too. I'm surprised with the push for users desiring linux to become a desktop os (and has happened fantastically), that desktop bsd distros didn't start at the same time or just a little bit after. Either 2006 or 2007 was when pcbsd and desktopbsd started getting in the mainstream notoriety of linux/unix news.

I have checked the other bsd's on the list provided, and i wasn't really impressed. Most of them appear to be still relatively new distros in the early stages and have a long way to go following in the footsteps of pcbsd.

At the end of the day, i'm a binary repository guy who loves a fantastic package manager like APT. Sorry, but YUM sucks, and the mandriva package manager URPMI will uninstall your whole system if it detects orphaned packages. The idea behind urpmi is awesome and admirable, but urpmi is undependable as it is buggy and not as reliable for downloading packages because it doesn't make multiple connections to provide redundancy for simply downloading one package. In other words is that i had to click retry when downloading packages in mandriva basically anytime i got something from their repositories. Yes, a good distro's crappy package manager made me switch back to debian with apt, that does have download redundancy and has a proper working orphan detection system (similar to my experience with ports, but just that ports is overwhelming for someone who doesn't compile source much).

Rant off.

Offline Forested665

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  • Linux:2003 FreeBSD:2004 Debian/BSD developer:2006
Re: anyone have input on the new BSD projects showing up?
« Reply #6 on: March 28, 2011, 06:51:22 am »
theres a bin and src ports system the binaries are preconfigured to run on a generic i386 system the src gets compiled which is why its slow but your programs and OS as a whole benefit from the custom configuration. in that sense its almost similar to gentoo who is even moving away from its namesake 100% user compiled and switching to generic libraries
BSD -  The Daemons Are No Longer Just Inside My Head.

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