thelinuxlink.net

I think I just had one of those epiphanies Linc and ESR had. After spending days compiling, and trying to make FreeBSD into a usable desktop, I got fed up, and installed the alpha release of Ubuntu Feisty. It actually works so well, and required such little configuration, I figured I'd try it on the laptop as well. No surprise, it works flawlessly, and wireless, hibernate, suspend, compiz, etc, all worked out of the box without even touching the command line. I close the lid, it sleeps! I click on my access point in NetworkManager, it connects! I'm kicking myself for not installing Ubuntu sooner.

Oh yeah, there are over 20,000 applications available in Synaptic, and you can easily install MPlayer, VLC, Flash, Java, Nvidia/ATi drivers... you name it. They are all there without even messing with extra repositories. Click and they're installed.

Comparing ubuntu with FreeBSD is wrong, its like comparing a chisel to a chainsaw.
FreeBSD is primary a server product, even though it works wonderfull on the desktop or laptop , i run FreeBSD on a laptop, in fact i am writing on that laptop.

Me or Troels have said in the past that not all applications are available as packages , hence you were compiling. In reply to suspend, thats something relatively new to the BSD's , in time it will work, and hopefully other hardware vendors will adopst think linux bios and that will make it work on any format as long as its a open standard, i think its under the gpl anyway , so that should not be a problem.

NetworkManager has not yet been ported to any of the BSD's because it was implemented with a very linux centric mindset, however DBUS and HAL have been ported which is needed for it to work, and from what i understand , work is on its way to get that de-linuxfied and more portable to other *nix's.

desktopbsd is a better choice , for the desktop, as they have there own packing manager which has a point and click interface . pcbsd is another, as well as midnight bsd.

Install MPlayer, VLC, Flash, Java, Nvidia on FreeBSD is quite simple, use a linux browser such as linux-firefox or linux-opera and it there is a package for flash and it just works, natively its not as stable from what ive heard. ATI drivers i am not sure, but on Freebsd and its derivate , nvidia blobs will work.

Don't misunderstand me, i love linux as much as FreeBSD, but i do not like unfair judgments

allix wrote:Comparing ubuntu with FreeBSD is wrong, its like comparing a chisel to a chainsaw.
FreeBSD is primary a server product, even though it works wonderfull on the desktop or laptop , i run FreeBSD on a laptop, in fact i am writing on that laptop.

Me or Troels have said in the past that not all applications are available as packages , hence you were compiling. In reply to suspend, thats something relatively new to the BSD's , in time it will work, and hopefully other hardware vendors will adopst think linux bios and that will make it work on any format as long as its a open standard, i think its under the gpl anyway , so that should not be a problem.

NetworkManager has not yet been ported to any of the BSD's because it was implemented with a very linux centric mindset, however DBUS and HAL have been ported which is needed for it to work, and from what i understand , work is on its way to get that de-linuxfied and more portable to other *nix's.

desktopbsd is a better choice , for the desktop, as they have there own packing manager which has a point and click interface . pcbsd is another, as well as midnight bsd.

Install MPlayer, VLC, Flash, Java, Nvidia on FreeBSD is quite simple, use a linux browser such as linux-firefox or linux-opera and it there is a package for flash and it just works, natively its not as stable from what ive heard. ATI drivers i am not sure, but on Freebsd and its derivate , nvidia blobs will work.

Don't misunderstand me, i love linux as much as FreeBSD, but i do not like unfair judgments

Well, FreeBSD can make a decent desktop if you are willing to spend the time configuring it and compiling your userland. I'm not knocking FreeBSD as a server OS, it is up there with the best for server applications, but for me, anyway, it left alittle bit to be desired as a desktop.

Things that annoyed me:

- You have to dedicate 9-10 hours a week minimum to update your userland
- No native Flash 9 support
- Linux binary support is kind of kludgy, it actually uses Fedora Core 4 binaries I believe.
- No ATi driver support
- Very slow and unstable Firefox
- No graphical frontend to Ports
- Low resolution virtual consoles
- OSS. ALSA is better IMO
- UFS. Ext3 is better IMO

/grouchy early morning rant/

So, it's only kubuntu that they keep fscking with in bad ways? It's been almost 10 months since a cd on my desktop said anything other than "disc0." It's been at least 5 or 6 since I've had anything besides /home and /media in my konqueror side bar. Also, before I moved a friend of mine to edgy, he couldn't mount anything at all that was attached via USB - it would just fail with a totally useless error and not mount. IIRC it was some fuckup in HAL.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I regularly hear about how great and "just works" ubuntu is, but personally I find that I deal with minor and major breakage on it about as regularly as I do Arch, and the Arch devs tend to have things fixed within a week instead of burying until "next time around." I'm starting to get the suspicion that Kubuntu is *not* the first class citizen Shuttleworth said it was going to be...

/grouchy early morning rant/

Snarkout wrote:/grouchy early morning rant/

So, it's only kubuntu that they keep fscking with in bad ways? It's been almost 10 months since a cd on my desktop said anything other than "disc0." It's been at least 5 or 6 since I've had anything besides /home and /media in my konqueror side bar. Also, before I moved a friend of mine to edgy, he couldn't mount anything at all that was attached via USB - it would just fail with a totally useless error and not mount. IIRC it was some fuckup in HAL.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I regularly hear about how great and "just works" ubuntu is, but personally I find that I deal with minor and major breakage on it about as regularly as I do Arch, and the Arch devs tend to have things fixed within a week instead of burying until "next time around." I'm starting to get the suspicion that Kubuntu is *not* the first class citizen Shuttleworth said it was going to be...

/grouchy early morning rant/

Kubuntu performed so poorly for me on two different computers that I had to switch to Suse. I prefer KDE on my machines that I spend any time on at the desktop. I used Ubuntu for months before I just couldn't live with gnome and nautilus any more. Kubuntu just doesn't compare.

I do use Ubuntu on my mythbox though and it is rock solid.

If you like Ubuntu, but want KDE, is there something wrong with SimplyMepis? I've never tried it, but it seems like it's basically Ubuntu tuned for KDE.

Vogateer wrote:If you like Ubuntu, but want KDE, is there something wrong with SimplyMepis? I've never tried it, but it seems like it's basically Ubuntu tuned for KDE.

Nothing wrong per se. I've never tried it. Suse has been flawless for me so far so I had no reason to really venture any further.

I would use Arch or distros like it but they require a lot of time to maintain and fix. I guess I always thought of Mepis as one of those kinds of distros.

Wally Balljacker wrote: Well, FreeBSD can make a decent desktop if you are willing to spend the time configuring it and compiling your userland. I'm not knocking FreeBSD as a server OS, it is up there with the best for server applications, but for me, anyway, it left alittle bit to be desired as a desktop.

Things that annoyed me:

- You have to dedicate 9-10 hours a week minimum to update your userland
- No native Flash 9 support
- Linux binary support is kind of kludgy, it actually uses Fedora Core 4 binaries I believe.
- No ATi driver support
- Very slow and unstable Firefox
- No graphical frontend to Ports
- Low resolution virtual consoles
- OSS. ALSA is better IMO
- UFS. Ext3 is better IMO

You do not need to recompile userland once a week, its been a while since ive done that, infact releases ie 6.0,6.1,6.2 etc are just snapshots of the userland when the developers think its stable enough and ready for a new releases. All the bsds work like that, recompiling stable or current is keeping upto day, but it by no means that sticking with release until a new release is a bad idea, in fact many people do that.

FreeBSD cannot be blamed for not having a native flash player, adobe can.
Its no secret that the linux binary compatibility layer is old, i believe its still based on the 2.4 kernel system calls, i believe in current its 2.6, but more testing has to be done before it can touch stable then release. At the same time, is there FreeBSD or any bsd binary support in the linux kernel? nope, because the bsds and other unix os's that have it and therefore linux has have been to some extent the de-facto unix development market. ATI are too blame for no FreeBSD blobs.

Firefox on any platform is not the cheetah , there is a native port of firefox on windows called K-Meleon, based on the same Gecko rendering engine as Mozilla Firefox, but uses the native Windows API to create the user interface (instead of using Mozilla's cross-platform XUL layer), which makes it faster. It would be great if linux,bsds etc had a native port made from the firefox codebase.

There are some gui frontends to ports
http://www.freshports.org/ports-mgmt/


What do you by low resolution virtual console, do you mean the one that appears when you login the console? if so, i think there is framebuffer if you compile your custom kernel.

Alsa stands for Advanced Linux Sound Architecture, so its unlikely its going to be on other unixs due to it being tied to the linux kernel, oss on the other hand according to the wikipedia article is available in 11 different Unix systems, where as alsa is one.
As much as linux is great, i still believe in portability because you never know what non-linux kernels do in other areas that linux might not have.
A bit like assembly language, you can make mean and lean ,ultra fast applications, but its tied to that cpu.

UFS is not a bad FS from what ive heard, besides Freebsd has intial support for zfs, of course if sun gpl it , then linux will get it.
I am not sure if you heard Andrew Morton's talk at fosdem, which is available as a video recording on fosdem website which he mentioned that ext3 is not very scalable and that he wishes that it could be like xfs. Of course that has nothing no effect to a home user untill we start using terrybytes of data at home. Ive not seen anything complaints at UFS on the freebsd mailinglist that UFS does not scale.
What has been known is that when it comes to mulitiple cpus ie over 32 cpus , freebsd is not at the moment as good as linux.

We could start a whole new thread if you want? , Linux vs FreeBSD

Speaking of this sort of updating business, I have a server running Ubuntu (debian wouldn't install on that machine at one point, for some reason), and I've been sticking with Dapper. It seems stable, and there are only a few updates a week, if that.

So, if I stick with Dapper for three years, the full length of their LTS, will updating to Jive Jackalope or whatever be a pain? I mean, will I really be able to use their "update-manager" or just change the repositories from "dapper" to "jive" and update everything to the next LTS version of Ubuntu? On my desktop I just run the latest version of Ubuntu, whatever that is, and have never skipped a version, so I don't even know if it's possible to skip without problems.

allix wrote:We could start a whole new thread if you want? , Linux vs FreeBSD

If you do, here is a good starting point:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ra ... linux1.php

It's actually kind of interesting, pretty well-written with a sense of humor.

Chess wrote:
If you do, here is a good starting point:

http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/ra ... linux1.php

It's actually kind of interesting, pretty well-written with a sense of humor.

i remember reading that a few years ago, its classic in its own way.

I didn't mean for this to turn into a FreeBFD vs. Ubuntu debate. FreeBSD was just an example, really. I was also referring to distros like Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo as well. My realization was that I'm tired of always having to use the command line and configure stuff manually, and compile from source. It's so nice to use something that just works out of the box, and is completely polished and graphical. Again, not referring specifically to Ubuntu, just user friendly distros in general. I guess my days of tinkering with Gentoo USE flags. and rolling my own Slackware packages are behind me.

Snarkout wrote:/grouchy early morning rant/

So, it's only kubuntu that they keep fscking with in bad ways? It's been almost 10 months since a cd on my desktop said anything other than "disc0." It's been at least 5 or 6 since I've had anything besides /home and /media in my konqueror side bar. Also, before I moved a friend of mine to edgy, he couldn't mount anything at all that was attached via USB - it would just fail with a totally useless error and not mount. IIRC it was some fuckup in HAL.

I guess what I'm getting at is that I regularly hear about how great and "just works" ubuntu is, but personally I find that I deal with minor and major breakage on it about as regularly as I do Arch, and the Arch devs tend to have things fixed within a week instead of burying until "next time around." I'm starting to get the suspicion that Kubuntu is *not* the first class citizen Shuttleworth said it was going to be...

/grouchy early morning rant/

It all comes down to this: KUBUNTU IS A SECOND-GRADE, CRUD DISTRO!!!
Sorry, just couldn't resist!

But seriously, if KDE is oh so equally prioritized (In layman's terms, are on the same level as GNOME) in the Ubuntu project, how come Kubuntu has sucked a giant's nuts for freaking forever, and still continue to suck?

Just had to get the off my chest.

Vogateer wrote:If you like Ubuntu, but want KDE, is there something wrong with SimplyMepis? I've never tried it, but it seems like it's basically Ubuntu tuned for KDE.

It uses the same packages as Kubuntu, with some MEPIS tweaks here and there, I don't see why it would be that much better than Kubuntu.

hellonorman wrote:

Vogateer wrote:If you like Ubuntu, but want KDE, is there something wrong with SimplyMepis? I've never tried it, but it seems like it's basically Ubuntu tuned for KDE.

Nothing wrong per se. I've never tried it. Suse has been flawless for me so far so I had no reason to really venture any further.

That's awesome man, I assume you got ZMD out real good!?

hellonorman wrote:I would use Arch or distros like it but they require a lot of time to maintain and fix. I guess I always thought of Mepis as one of those kinds of distros.

After this whole Novell-Microsoft debacle and some things about the SUSE distro that has begun to sour me a little, I have considered trying out another distro for a few months, specifically I have considered trying out Debian etch when it's out (I don't use development release, period!), FreeBSD or OpenBSD.

allix wrote:You do not need to recompile userland once a week, its been a while since ive done that, infact releases ie 6.0,6.1,6.2 etc are just snapshots of the userland when the developers think its stable enough and ready for a new releases. All the bsds work like that, recompiling stable or current is keeping upto day, but it by no means that sticking with release until a new release is a bad idea, in fact many people do that.

If you're gonna run a production system, you either wanna patch your system manually, use freebsd-update, or track an errata branch. Running development branches (-STABLE or -CURRENT) on any time of production-critical system (Which I consider my main desktop to be) is not a good idea.

allix wrote:It would be great if linux,bsds etc had a native port made from the firefox codebase.

Hey all you have to do is: pkg_add -r kdebase
And you have a wonderful, 100% native web browser, and file management swiss army knife, that really shines and is really fast.
But I guess not everybody is a KDE fan (addict?) like I am, but then again ... I'm european!!!

allix wrote:UFS is not a bad FS from what ive heard, besides Freebsd has intial support for zfs, of course if sun gpl it , then linux will get it.

Free software licensing is something that I have become really good at. If Sun ever GPLs Solaris (OpenSolaris) then it will be under GPLv3, they have already clearly said that. One of the reason is the license's explicity about patents and stuff like that. GPLv2 and v3, as far as I know (And I know the GPL pretty well), will fundementally be incompatible, because GPLv3 adds some restrictions, which GPLv2 does not allow. So you can't legally mix code licensed strictly under one or the other, which in the case of Linux, ZFS and OpenSolaris will mean that the Linux kernel developers CAN NOT just port ZFS to Linux, unless they do their own implementation, but then, what's the point?

allix wrote:I am not sure if you heard Andrew Morton's talk at fosdem, which is available as a video recording on fosdem website which he mentioned that ext3 is not very scalable and that he wishes that it could be like xfs. Of course that has nothing no effect to a home user untill we start using terrybytes of data at home. Ive not seen anything complaints at UFS on the freebsd mailinglist that UFS does not scale.
What has been known is that when it comes to mulitiple cpus ie over 32 cpus , freebsd is not at the moment as good as linux.

Hey, I have a shitload of data, so I am a pretty good test for a file system. Any file system that holds my porn collection is a good file system, and both EXT3 and UFS does that quite well.

allix wrote:We could start a whole new thread if you want? , Linux vs FreeBSD

Why continue a flamewar that has raged on since 1991, and that no one will ever win? Waste of tubes, waste of time!!

Vogateer wrote:Speaking of this sort of updating business, I have a server running Ubuntu (debian wouldn't install on that machine at one point, for some reason), and I've been sticking with Dapper. It seems stable, and there are only a few updates a week, if that.

So, if I stick with Dapper for three years, the full length of their LTS, will updating to Jive Jackalope or whatever be a pain? I mean, will I really be able to use their "update-manager" or just change the repositories from "dapper" to "jive" and update everything to the next LTS version of Ubuntu? On my desktop I just run the latest version of Ubuntu, whatever that is, and have never skipped a version, so I don't even know if it's possible to skip without problems.

Sometimes, the answers of the future lay in the past. I'm willing to bet that if you were to install some really really really old version of Debian, and then try upgrading it to etch, that you really will be spending a bunch of time tweaking, and cleaning up old config files. First of all, you'd have new module tools, because of the switch to 2.6 from 2.4. Then you'd have udev instead of the classic /dev file system. I mean the list goes on and on and on, because of the rate of which GNU/Linux develops, and has developed. That avalanche has only been accelerating for the last couple of years, and especially if you have an entire desktop installation (Aka just a desktop installed), and not just a base system with some network daemons etc., then you are REALLY in for some tweaking. This is where I think BSD is really nice, because it completely seperates the operating system from the applications that you have installed, by installing everything from ports into /usr/local and keeping /usr for the OS. This way you can upgrade/change the OS without your apps and settings being affected, or being affected very little, at all. Just a little something that I thought was worth mentioning.

Wally Balljacker wrote:I didn't mean for this to turn into a FreeBFD vs. Ubuntu debate. FreeBSD was just an example, really. I was also referring to distros like Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo as well. My realization was that I'm tired of always having to use the command line and configure stuff manually, and compile from source. It's so nice to use something that just works out of the box, and is completely polished and graphical. Again, not referring specifically to Ubuntu, just user friendly distros in general. I guess my days of tinkering with Gentoo USE flags. and rolling my own Slackware packages are behind me.

Listen to this guy, after bashing my ways for like a year or something, he turns himself into the ease-of-use-distros. What I have to put up with from this community of hours is just incredible to say the least!
Oh well, for the love of the game, I guess.

Tsuroerusu wrote:

Wally Balljacker wrote:I didn't mean for this to turn into a FreeBFD vs. Ubuntu debate. FreeBSD was just an example, really. I was also referring to distros like Slackware, Arch, and Gentoo as well. My realization was that I'm tired of always having to use the command line and configure stuff manually, and compile from source. It's so nice to use something that just works out of the box, and is completely polished and graphical. Again, not referring specifically to Ubuntu, just user friendly distros in general. I guess my days of tinkering with Gentoo USE flags. and rolling my own Slackware packages are behind me.

Listen to this guy, after bashing my ways for like a year or something, he turns himself into the ease-of-use-distros. What I have to put up with from this community of hours is just incredible to say the least!
Oh well, for the love of the game, I guess.

Hehe, well, my opinion of RPM-based distros still hasn't changed.