The Ultimate BSD Thread™ - The Devil Wears a Neckbeard

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Mar 15, 2008 08:05

I noticed we have a Linux thread, but not a BSD one; that is sacrilege, plain and simple.

So, use this thread to ask questions, bitch, comment, piss, moan, consult, confer, preach, discuss, report, rumor, spiel and/or bombast all things BSD.

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What is BSD?

Wikipedia posted:

Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD, sometimes called Berkeley Unix) is the UNIX operating system derivative developed and distributed by the Computer Systems Research Group of the University of California, Berkeley, from 1977 to 1995.

Historically, BSD has been considered as a branch of UNIX — "BSD UNIX", because it shared the initial codebase and design with the original AT&T UNIX operating system. In the 1980s, BSD was widely adopted by vendors of workstation-class systems in the form of proprietary UNIX variants such as DEC's ULTRIX and Sun Microsystems' SunOS. This can be attributed to the ease with which it could be licensed and the familiarity it found among the founders of many technology companies of this era.

Though these commercial BSD derivatives were largely superseded by the UNIX System V Release 4 and OSF/1 systems in the 1990s (both of which incorporated BSD code), later BSD releases provided a basis for several open source development projects which continue to this day.

Today, the term of "BSD" is often non-specifically used to refer to any of these BSD descendants, e.g. FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD, which together form a branch of the family of Unix-like operating systems.

Is it better than Linux?

every

No. They each have very valid uses. The right tool for the job, as the saying goes.

Does it have different distributions like Linux?

What are some popular versions of BSD?

FreeBSD is meant for performance and relative ease of use.
NetBSD is meant for working on everything, even your mother, and a toaster.
OpenBSD is meant for security. It is the benchmark for a secure OS, and is generally accepted to be the most secure out of the box, with only two major security issues in the last decade.
DragonFly BSD is basically FreeBSD with different SMP handling.
OS X isn't technically a true BSD operating system, but I'm listing it here anyway. It's a merging of some BSD and some NeXT; so it's like the bastard love child that you don't like because he whines a lot and thinks he's arty and bohemian because he wears a beret and drinks fair trade coffee. It's at best a derivitive, like Solaris.

whetu posted:

DesktopBSD

PC-BSD

DesktopBSD is my preference because it's a lot closer to a standard FreeBSD. PC-BSD has .pbi packages that come with binaries and all dependancies that it installs into /programs, neither of which are FreeBSD standard - so FreeBSD documentation that applies equally for DesktopBSD does not necessarily apply for PC-BSD.

Links

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_{The Ultimate BSD Thread™ is a trademark of TimbCo Enterprises LTD GmbH. All rights reserved.}

HATE TROLL TIM fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Jan 5, 2009

Adbot · # ? Jan 13, 2025 03:37

claym001 · # ? Mar 15, 2008 09:28

timb posted:

Is it better than Linux?

Yes, in every possible way.

Please show your work. I'm not going to dispute that BSD is a good system (I ran it for a couple years on my laptop), but to make a claim this bold I'm going to have to ask you to show some merit for it. Especially if this thread is supposed to drum up interest, this doesn't tell anyone ANY information at all.

I'm interested to hear more about the virtues of Linux vs BSD, but I'm afraid this is off to a poor start.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Mar 15, 2008 09:59

claym001 posted:

Please show your work. I'm not going to dispute that BSD is a good system (I ran it for a couple years on my laptop), but to make a claim this bold I'm going to have to ask you to show some merit for it. Especially if this thread is supposed to drum up interest, this doesn't tell anyone ANY information at all.

I'm interested to hear more about the virtues of Linux vs BSD, but I'm afraid this is off to a poor start.

Take no offense, it was meant as a light hearted joke.

In reality, it's a hotly debated matter of opinion.

Here's my take on it:

The FreeBSD project is managed in a much more structured and organized way than the Linux Kernel.

Wikipedia posted:

The FreeBSD Project is run by FreeBSD committers, or developers who have CVS commit access. There are several kinds of committers, including source committers (base operating system), doc committers (documentation and web site authors) and ports (third party application porting and infrastructure). Every two years the FreeBSD committers select a 9-member FreeBSD Core Team who are responsible for overall project direction, setting and enforcing project rules and approving new "commit bits", or the granting of CVS commit access. A number of responsibilities are officially assigned to other development teams by the FreeBSD Core Team, including responsibility for security advisories (the Security Officer Team), release engineering (the Release Engineering Team) and managing the ports collection (the Port Manager team). Developers may give up their commit rights to retire or for "safe-keeping" after a period of a year or more of inactivity, although commit rights will generally be restored on request. Under rare circumstances commit rights may be removed by Core Team vote as a result of repeated violation of project rules and standards. The FreeBSD Project is unusual among open source projects in having developers who have worked with its source base for over 25 years, owing to the involvement of a number of past University of California developers who worked on BSD at the CSRG.

The FreeBSD team not only writes the kernel, but the entire core operating system. Things are inherently more secure and standardized because it's written that way from the ground up. No Linux distribution can say that.

FreeBSD is a very stable, mature and secure operating system straight out of the box. The downside is you give up a little freedom and speed; you won't be ricing it out like Gentoo.

I would much rather run a web hosting server on FreeBSD than Linux, however, the opposite is true of running a workstation. It really comes down to using the right tool for the job.

If you have any specific questions about Linux vs BSD, I'll be happy to try and answer them.

HATE TROLL TIM fucked around with this message at 11:20 on Mar 15, 2008

H110Hawk · H110Hawk Dec 28, 2006

claym001 posted:

Please show your work.

One of the primary reasons many developers will cite is ease of licensing. The BSD license is pretty much the easiest with which to work, especially since they removed the attribution clause. You can simply use BSD code for whatever purpose you wish.

For example, in FreeBSD, ZFS has been implemented in the kernel. Due to licensing restrictions under Linux, it will likely only be implemented as a FUSE mounted system. This will prevent booting from ZFS under Linux, among other things.

jail(8) and securelevel(8) provide a strong means of security native to the kernel. Securelevel, once raised, cannot be lowered without a system restart. This prevents both local and remote users from tampering with the system in many ways.

sysctl(8) is of course pretty drat awesome at tuning your kernel, or dumping statistics. Why use /proc and a million file handles when you can simply ask the kernel?

But why bother you with boring technical details, when :nws:

this

is all the reason you need?

Edit: Different, still potentially underaged pictures.

H110Hawk fucked around with this message at 16:03 on Mar 15, 2008

Combat Pretzel · # ? Mar 15, 2008 13:09

Three simple questions:

- Is there driver support for the Intel Wireless 4965? Including WPA support?
- Is there something like hdparm, so that I can disable a today's laptop's drive's annoying power management?
- How stable is ZFS in 7.0?

Actually, I'd like Solaris on my laptop, but the inability to control a drive's power management, which is slowly killing my drive, I guess I have to resort to the next best cousin (though I'm running Ubuntu on it for now, since yesterday).

I guess NVidia still doesn't do x64 drivers, either, huh?

covener · # ? Mar 15, 2008 13:28

H110Hawk posted:

sysctl(8) is of course pretty drat awesome at tuning your kernel, or dumping statistics. Why use /proc and a million file handles when you can simply ask the kernel?

This isn't really a point of differentiation.

H110Hawk · H110Hawk Dec 28, 2006

covener posted:

This isn't really a point of differentiation.

Point taken, to an extent! My argument against /proc stands. sysctl for Linux seems to not provide as much information about the kernel, though:

code:

$ uname -rs
FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE
$ sysctl -a | wc
    1565    3757   49460

# uname -rs
Linux 2.6.22.6vanilla
# sysctl -a | wc
    428    1388   14004

I feel the BSD userland is strongly superior to GNU userland. Take `top` for instance. On a busy Linux server, top is painful to use, and can suck as much CPU as you're trying to reclaim from busy processes. top in BSD uses a fractional percentage of CPU for similar load sets.

DaGr8Gatzby · # ? Mar 15, 2008 14:33

Just wanting to jump into this thread because I am a HUGE proponent of *BSD.

Ports is great. This makes software management a breeze. BSD offers both binary and source based methods of installing software. If you are lost in FreeBSD, run this command:

$ man hier

FreeBSD runs PGSql like a champ. Google FreeBSD 7.0 performance benchmarks. Kris@freebsd has posted a good scaling graph on FreeBSD 7.0-Release vs. other BSDs vs. The Latest Linux kernels. If you need more information, I did email Kris about hardware specs.

Neurozys · Neurozys Apr 15, 2004

H110Hawk posted:

But why bother you with boring technical details, when this is all the reason you need?

Not that she's showing any of the naughty bits, but that's Sarah Peachez and she is under 18 in those photos. She's perfectly legal these days, of course, and spends her time masturbating on camera, with an occasional blow job. Anyway, back to your nerd talk.

Only Shallow · # ? Mar 15, 2008 15:24

Toiletbrush posted:

I guess NVidia still doesn't do x64 drivers, either, huh?

Nope. They have a list of things they want to see in the amd64 kernel before they can make it happen, but that's almost two years old and I don't know what's been accomplished.

This is the reason I use i386 FreeBSD on my desktop, for the record. There's a request thread on NVnews from 2004 being bumped to this day but I still can't see it being a big priority for them.

H110Hawk · H110Hawk Dec 28, 2006

Neurozys posted:

Not that she's showing any of the naughty bits, but that's Sarah Peachez and she is under 18 in those photos. She's perfectly legal these days, of course, and spends her time masturbating on camera, with an occasional blow job. Anyway, back to your nerd talk.

Hah! Good to know. I updated the link.

Combat Pretzel · # ? Mar 15, 2008 18:21

jnr posted:

Nope. They have a list of things they want to see in the amd64 kernel before they can make it happen, but that's almost two years old and I don't know what's been accomplished.

I remember that list. It's sad, considering it's basically just a shim between the OS and the unified driver. Hell, even I have 64bit drivers, under Solaris.

H110Hawk posted:

Hah! Good to know. I updated the link.

AFAIK Ceren wasn't underaged in the latex catsuit pictures.

vanjalolz · # ? Mar 15, 2008 19:23

Toiletbrush posted:

AFAIK Ceren wasn't underaged in the latex catsuit pictures.

That girl in the pics looks twelve.

SmirkingJack · # ? Mar 15, 2008 19:28

H110Hawk posted:

jail(8) and

Jails are awesome, as is FreeBSD's documentation.

Absorbs Quickly · # ? Mar 15, 2008 22:17

SmirkingJack posted:

Jails are awesome, as is FreeBSD's documentation.

Agreed. I started at a job that runs freeBSD on a few hundred machines globally, thanks to the awesome handbook and my background with linux I was up to speed and comfortably running my own custom kernel within a week.

Jails are so awesome I'm going to pull my linux+vmware machine for a freeBSD 7.0 machine with zfs and jails.
I actually miss the /proc filesystem from linux, alone with the watch command, but other than those I couldn't love freeBSD more.

The Gay Bean · # ? Mar 16, 2008 00:15

You can use proc in FreeBSD, it's just not there by default. Add to /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

or for linux-compatible proc:

linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Mar 16, 2008 00:24

The Gay Bean posted:

You can use proc in FreeBSD, it's just not there by default. Add to /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

or for linux-compatible proc:

linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

Don't forget to enable the following in your kernel:

code:

options          PSEUDOFS
options          PROCFS

Ninja Rope · # ? Mar 16, 2008 02:55

You don't need to recompile your kernel to get (lin)procfs, they should be available as modules if they're not already there in your kernel. You might need to load the modules, though, via kldload. I don't remember if they're in the GENERIC kernel by default.

Ninja Rope fucked around with this message at 02:58 on Mar 16, 2008

DeciusMagnus · # ? Mar 16, 2008 04:23

Ninja Rope posted:

You don't need to recompile your kernel to get (lin)procfs, they should be available as modules if they're not already there in your kernel. You might need to load the modules, though, via kldload. I don't remember if they're in the GENERIC kernel by default.

I didn't have to recompile to get it working in 6.2 or 6.3. IIRC, the kernel should come compiled with most drivers and options enabled in order to be as generic as possible.

The Gay Bean · # ? Mar 16, 2008 05:03

GENERIC will come with all of the necessary options I believe. If you have a custom kernel you definitely want to check your configuration file to make sure you didn't comment it out.

Mina · # ? Mar 16, 2008 07:21

I run a small web server in my apartment for web development between a few people. It currently runs Ubuntu, but I've been considering switching to FreeBSD. One thing is, I use the computer for other things besides the web server. My video card (Radeon X1300) only works properly in Ubuntu with the fglrx driver, and I'm not sure how well it would work in FreeBSD. I really only need it working so it can support a widescreen resolution. The vesa driver will not support it, from what I've read and experienced. It's pretty much the only thing holding me back from switching.

Anyone know if there's some way to get that specific video card working on FreeBSD?

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Mar 16, 2008 08:03

Krittick posted:

I run a small web server in my apartment for web development between a few people. It currently runs Ubuntu, but I've been considering switching to FreeBSD. One thing is, I use the computer for other things besides the web server. My video card (Radeon X1300) only works properly in Ubuntu with the fglrx driver, and I'm not sure how well it would work in FreeBSD. I really only need it working so it can support a widescreen resolution. The vesa driver will not support it, from what I've read and experienced. It's pretty much the only thing holding me back from switching.

Anyone know if there's some way to get that specific video card working on FreeBSD?

http://www.fglrx-freebsd.com -- Though, the site appears to be down right now.

FreeBSD 7.0 may have better support built in, I'm not entirely sure.

In all honesty, you can blame ATI / AMD for being a bag of cunts.

Mina · # ? Mar 16, 2008 08:15

timb posted:

http://www.fglrx-freebsd.com -- Though, the site appears to be down right now.

FreeBSD 7.0 may have better support built in, I'm not entirely sure.

In all honesty, you can blame ATI / AMD for being a bag of cunts.

Yeah, I'm never buying another ATI card after the issues I've had with their lovely drivers. Thanks for the link. I'll check it out when it comes back up.

ZippySLC · # ? Mar 16, 2008 11:34

Krittick posted:

but I've been considering switching to FreeBSD.

Out of curiosity, why?

Mina · # ? Mar 16, 2008 12:11

ZippySLC posted:

Out of curiosity, why?

Just to broaden my knowledge really. I've always used some flavor of Linux, but have hardly any experience with BSD. I know the two are similar in some ways, so I figure that learning it won't be terribly hard. There's nothing on the web server that needs to be accessed 24/7. It's just a code testing pool really, so any downtime due to me figuring things out is 100% acceptable. It's a personal machine of mine in the end, which I let some friends use to occasionally develop stuff.

ZippySLC · # ? Mar 16, 2008 12:48

Krittick posted:

Just to broaden my knowledge really. I've always used some flavor of Linux, but have hardly any experience with BSD. I know the two are similar in some ways, so I figure that learning it won't be terribly hard. There's nothing on the web server that needs to be accessed 24/7. It's just a code testing pool really, so any downtime due to me figuring things out is 100% acceptable. It's a personal machine of mine in the end, which I let some friends use to occasionally develop stuff.

Ahh, cool. That's just about the same reason why I'd try BSD.

I've never really had good luck even getting FreeBSD installed right. I should download the newest version and give it a shot.

CrzyDTpBoy · # ? Mar 16, 2008 17:38

Krittick posted:

I run a small web server in my apartment for web development between a few people. It currently runs Ubuntu, but I've been considering switching to FreeBSD. One thing is, I use the computer for other things besides the web server. My video card (Radeon X1300) only works properly in Ubuntu with the fglrx driver, and I'm not sure how well it would work in FreeBSD. I really only need it working so it can support a widescreen resolution. The vesa driver will not support it, from what I've read and experienced. It's pretty much the only thing holding me back from switching.

Anyone know if there's some way to get that specific video card working on FreeBSD?

I ran a few X1300s through the radeonhd driver. I haven't tried widescreen (only dual) and there's no direct rendering, but to be fair, I haven't tried all that hard to get it working. I switched one machine over to the 6.8.0 xf86-video-ati driver that hit ports this month, and it seems to cope a little bit better without DRI.

Sergeant Hobo · # ? Mar 16, 2008 17:52

Is there a website somewhere that has a conversion table that can tell me what the device names are under FreeBSD versus Linux? I understand what eth0 and eth1 are in Linux but I have no clue what the hell le0 means. Note that I'm running FreeBSD under VMWare, should that make a difference.

quote:

I've never really had good luck even getting FreeBSD installed right. I should download the newest version and give it a shot.

The hardest thing for me to pick up was the partition versus slice moniker they have going. It seems to me that slices act as a kind of sub-partition under a normal FreeBSD partition. Is this a correct statement or am I way off?

EDIT: Well, I found part of what I was looking for in the FreeBSD handbook, ~~though I'm not sure how they come to use ad for IDE hard drives, unless that's short for ATA drive or something.~~ Found it. ATAPI disk. Back to work on Ethernet device names.

Sergeant Hobo fucked around with this message at 18:01 on Mar 16, 2008

adorai · # ? Mar 16, 2008 18:05

ethernet devices are typically named after their driver. like xe0 or rl0 are two that I know of off the top of my head.

Sergeant Hobo · # ? Mar 16, 2008 18:10

Aha. FreeBSD Handbook Chapter 11 Section 11.8.1: /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES and /usr/src/sys/arch/conf/NOTES will give you the list of network interface drivers with some information about the supported chipsets/cards.

I think I'm starting to like this handbook.

adorai posted:

ethernet devices are typically named after their driver. like xe0 or rl0 are two that I know of off the top of my head.

That makes sense. Thanks.

whetu · # ? Mar 16, 2008 18:56

timb posted:

What are some popular versions of BSD?

FreeBSD

NetBSD

OpenBSD

DragonFly BSD

OS X

For anyone wondering what the differences are

FreeBSD is meant for performance and relative ease of use
NetBSD is meant for working on everything, even your mother, and a toaster
OpenBSD is meant for security. It is THE benchmark for a secure OS, and is generally accepted to be the most secure out of the box, with only two major security issues in the last decade
DragonFly is basically FreeBSD with different SMP handling

I wouldn't list OS-X as a version of BSD. It's a merging of some BSD and some NeXT, so it's like the bastard love child that you don't like because he whines a lot and thinks he's arty and bohemian because he wears a beret and drinks fair trade coffee. It's at best a derivitive, like Solaris.

For desktop use you can choose from two pre-packaged FreeBSD's (i.e. NOT forks, and NOT 'distros' - that's Linux speak):

DesktopBSD is my preference because it's a lot closer to a standard FreeBSD. PC-BSD has .pbi packages that come with binaries and all dependancies that it installs into /programs, neither of which are FreeBSD standard - so FreeBSD documentation that applies equally for DesktopBSD does not necessarily apply for PC-BSD.

Also, read.

whetu fucked around with this message at 19:02 on Mar 16, 2008

Vulture Culture · # ? Mar 16, 2008 19:05

whetu posted:

It's a merging of some BSD and some NeXT

Plus a Mach 3-derived microkernel.

HATE TROLL TIM · # ? Mar 16, 2008 21:50

whetu posted:

For anyone wondering what the differences are

FreeBSD is meant for performance and relative ease of use

NetBSD is meant for working on everything, even your mother, and a toaster

OpenBSD is meant for security. It is THE benchmark for a secure OS, and is generally accepted to be the most secure out of the box, with only two major security issues in the last decade

DragonFly is basically FreeBSD with different SMP handling

I wouldn't list OS-X as a version of BSD. It's a merging of some BSD and some NeXT, so it's like the bastard love child that you don't like because he whines a lot and thinks he's arty and bohemian because he wears a beret and drinks fair trade coffee. It's at best a derivitive, like Solaris.

For desktop use you can choose from two pre-packaged FreeBSD's (i.e. NOT forks, and NOT 'distros' - that's Linux speak):

DesktopBSD

PC-BSD

DesktopBSD is my preference because it's a lot closer to a standard FreeBSD. PC-BSD has .pbi packages that come with binaries and all dependancies that it installs into /programs, neither of which are FreeBSD standard - so FreeBSD documentation that applies equally for DesktopBSD does not necessarily apply for PC-BSD.

Also, read.

I've shamelessly stolen this and incorporated it into the OP.

If anyone else has things they wish to include; links, sections, operating systems, pictures of them making GBS threads their pants, let me know and I'll add it.

H110Hawk · H110Hawk Dec 28, 2006

Sergeant Hobo posted:

Aha. FreeBSD Handbook

I think I'm starting to like this handbook.

This cannot be stressed enough. For a newbie, simply open the handbook on page 1 and read the whole thing through once. It only takes about an hour or two, and it will simplify your life. When I first picked up FreeBSD 4.4 my friends told me that, and life was good.

Also, `dmesg` has driver->device mappings, just like under Linux. fxp are intels, bge are broadcom, I believe, rl are realtek, etc. I think you can even rename them to be eth0/eth1/etc, but why bother.

kapalama · # ? Mar 17, 2008 00:49

_{Is there a liveCD for scaredy cats?}

Lukano · Lukano Apr 28, 2003

kapalama posted:

_{Is there a liveCD for scaredy cats?}

Better yet, is there a live-cd with a gui and some tools?

Specifically I have an NVRAID raid-0 array that's not detecting in Windows or Linux (dmraid is giving me headaches and I was informed that BSD will work with nvraid arrays with a lot less effort) so I'd like to give it a try in BSD.

I do believe the array is being detected, as it sees ad4 and ad6 which are then turned into ar0 (or so says dmesg).

I just haven't the foggiest clue what to do with ar0 once it's there. Various attempts to mount it or the ar0s1 showing up in /dev/ are without result. I've been trying the basics like 'mount -t [fs] /dev/ar0 /mnt/temp/' with [fs] being ntfs or auto - but they're not working.

So I guess it's a problem with two solutions. If there's a livecd that'll make this easy as pie, great - alternately if someone can suggest some command line solutions.

The Gay Bean · # ? Mar 17, 2008 01:48

Frenzy is my favorite FreeBSD live CD.

Ninja Rope · # ? Mar 17, 2008 01:59

Have you fdisk'ed it? Created partitions and slices? Have you newfs'd it? It sounds like you haven't, so you'll need to start there.

I think /sbin/sysinstall has a fancy GUI (well, text mode GUI) for partitioning, but if you want to be really lazy you can just "newfs -O 2 -U /dev/ar0", which creates the filesystem on the device without partitioning or slicing. You should then be able to mount it and add it to /etc/fstab.

Absorbs Quickly · # ? Mar 17, 2008 01:59

The Gay Bean posted:

You can use proc in FreeBSD, it's just not there by default. Add to /etc/fstab:

proc /proc procfs rw 0 0

or for linux-compatible proc:

linproc /compat/linux/proc linprocfs rw 0 0

I'm working on production MTAs for a rather large corporation. I can't even install bash without a change control document and approval, let alone mess with fstab just for personal comfort.
But for my personal machines thats awesome, thanks.

Adbot · # ? Jan 13, 2025 03:37

Sergeant Hobo · # ? Mar 17, 2008 02:44

H110Hawk posted:

This cannot be stressed enough. For a newbie, simply open the handbook on page 1 and read the whole thing through once. It only takes about an hour or two, and it will simplify your life. When I first picked up FreeBSD 4.4 my friends told me that, and life was good.

Will do, after finals are done that is.

quote:

I think you can even rename them to be eth0/eth1/etc, but why bother.

Yeah, I definitely see the advantage in the naming scheme here. I'll leave the Linux-isms to Linux.