6 ms·

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' p

by deelowe 14y ago

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 approaches to things(e.g. init systems). However, sometimes I have a project that requires an OS that just works as cohesive product(eg. file server or network appliance) and FreeBSD typically fits that bill for me. The support is much more limited, but the things it does support are almost always rock solid.

r0s 14y ago
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.
- profquail 14y ago
  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 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.
- alekseyk 14y ago
  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.
  - deelowe 14y ago
    Ehh. I don't think it's too bad these days. Especially with tools like portsnap and portmaster(which are well documented in the handbook).
  - profquail 14y ago
    The learning curve isn't too bad for FreeBSD. I primarily develop F#/.NET apps on Windows; I've used Linux occasionally for research over the past few years, and more recently, to try out the F#/Mono combination. I decided to try FreeBSD last year and was able to learn enough in a week to do some basic development work with it. In fact, I submitted patches for Mono 3.0 and F# 3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree: http://www.freshports.org/lang/fsharp/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/fsharp/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/mono/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/mono/ The folks on the FreeBSD forums are also very helpful (and patient!) so if you do run into trouble, you'll likely find the solution by asking there.
kbenson 14y ago
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.
- self 14y ago
  "Linux doesn't have man pages. It has boy pages." -- Glen Pritchett.
  - justin66 14y ago
    I've always had the strong preference for BSD documentation as well. But you know what's crazy? The guy who coordinates the Linux man-pages project, Michael Kerrisk, is definitely one of the greatest technical writers out there. His book "The Linux Programming Interface" is fantastic. It'd be interesting to know why the BSD man pages are so much better.
joshbaptiste 14y ago
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.
- kostya-kow 14y ago
  Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.
  - profquail 14y ago
    "license problems" ∈ "problems" One thing I like about FreeBSD, and the BSDs in general, is that they don't suffer from such problems. It's odd that Oracle (who now own Sun's IP) paid to develop a whole new filesystem (btrfs) for Linux instead of just changing the licensing terms for ZFS. It would be nice to have a really good, Apache-licensed filesystem that could run across Linux, OS X, BSD, and Solaris.
    - GalacticDomin8r 14y ago
      Actually there is HammerFS. Porters welcome, I'd love to see it more widespread.
  - nosequel 14y ago
    > Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. ZFS is stable and released. Pretty sure that makes it instantly "better" than btrfs right now.
  - 286c8cb04bda 14y ago
    > Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. It may be awesome, but I'd say "soon" is a pretty optimistic timeline. Our testing pretty conclusively demonstrated that btrfs was still a long way from production-ready; We've seen numerous problems with deadlocks; Filling up a filesystem pretty much ruins it forever -- And these are not new problems.

by deelowe 14y ago

r0s 14y ago

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.

profquail 14y ago
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 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.
alekseyk 14y ago
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.
- deelowe 14y ago
  Ehh. I don't think it's too bad these days. Especially with tools like portsnap and portmaster(which are well documented in the handbook).
- profquail 14y ago
  The learning curve isn't too bad for FreeBSD. I primarily develop F#/.NET apps on Windows; I've used Linux occasionally for research over the past few years, and more recently, to try out the F#/Mono combination. I decided to try FreeBSD last year and was able to learn enough in a week to do some basic development work with it. In fact, I submitted patches for Mono 3.0 and F# 3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree: http://www.freshports.org/lang/fsharp/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/fsharp/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/mono/ http://www.freshports.org/lang/mono/ The folks on the FreeBSD forums are also very helpful (and patient!) so if you do run into trouble, you'll likely find the solution by asking there.

kbenson 14y ago

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.

self 14y ago
"Linux doesn't have man pages. It has boy pages." -- Glen Pritchett.
- justin66 14y ago
  I've always had the strong preference for BSD documentation as well. But you know what's crazy? The guy who coordinates the Linux man-pages project, Michael Kerrisk, is definitely one of the greatest technical writers out there. His book "The Linux Programming Interface" is fantastic. It'd be interesting to know why the BSD man pages are so much better.

joshbaptiste 14y ago

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.

kostya-kow 14y ago
Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. Also Dtrace & ZFS originally come from Solaries, so they are not FreeBSD projects. The only reason they do not work on Linux is because of license problems which Sun created.
- profquail 14y ago
  "license problems" ∈ "problems" One thing I like about FreeBSD, and the BSDs in general, is that they don't suffer from such problems. It's odd that Oracle (who now own Sun's IP) paid to develop a whole new filesystem (btrfs) for Linux instead of just changing the licensing terms for ZFS. It would be nice to have a really good, Apache-licensed filesystem that could run across Linux, OS X, BSD, and Solaris.
  - GalacticDomin8r 14y ago
    Actually there is HammerFS. Porters welcome, I'd love to see it more widespread.
- nosequel 14y ago
  > Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. ZFS is stable and released. Pretty sure that makes it instantly "better" than btrfs right now.
- 286c8cb04bda 14y ago
  > Linux will soon have btrfs, which is as good as (if not better than) ZFS. It may be awesome, but I'd say "soon" is a pretty optimistic timeline. Our testing pretty conclusively demonstrated that btrfs was still a long way from production-ready; We've seen numerous problems with deadlocks; Filling up a filesystem pretty much ruins it forever -- And these are not new problems.