Re: Newbie Experience

{expunged the old, typ}

I've only been around since FreeBSD 5.4
myself,
and
found during installs that sysinstall would
get
confused if you changed your mind and went
backwards
through the menus to reconfigure options. it
seems
like the one in 6.1 is a lot better, but maybe
I
just
move back and forth less...

That being said once it is installed it is a
million
times easier to maintain and upgrade then any
Linux
I've used. I had an old Digital 486 I had to
install
Redhat 7.3 thinking I could easily update to
the
latest kernel. I found I had to go through so
many
dependancies to do so I finally said whatever
kernel
was there was good enough. Talk about having
to be
a
GNU guru to get things installed correctly
without
clobbering the old stuff and running into
trouble...


I'm unconvinced you could take FreeBSD 4 box and
run
the kernel from 6.1 on
it without changing anything else.


well cvsupping to Rel_5 and running a make
buildworld
&& make buildkernel && make install kernel a
reboot
some mergemaster magic an installworld some more
mergemaster magic and then cvsupping to Rel_6 and
repeating is still lighttyears easier then
watching
the Linux kernel build stop, downloading the
sources,
configuring the dependancy properly, uninstalling
the
old, and reintalling the new. Especially when you
will
be tracing dependancies for weeks, unless your a
pretty good programmer, which I am not, and know
the
dependancy chain of the core system. My point was
the
relative ease of upgrading, not the technical
points
of having missing object stubs. Of course you
can't
put a cummins deisel in a pinto without working on
the
frame first.


Shrug. I've had problems trying to recompile the
FreeBSD kernel too.

It happens, I will admit it. I find things like
enabling wpa_supplicant and forgeting device wlan is
what trips me up most, or things along those lines...
dependancies can be frustrating at best... And I have
had experiences where a "patch" had a few typos in the
commit and nothing works until it is recommitted
correctly. I'm not going to even try to say FreeBSD is
always sunshine and linux is farts. I still like the
fullscreen console on my linux console, vs the tiny
have utilized LCD on my FreeBSD console with my Dell
Inspiron 1100. Know there has to be a fix, but haven't
liked the answers I've read so far...


Of late I was using Gentoo which I found to be
FreeBSD
like with its portage system, until recently
when
it
seems they changed many system level interface
stuff
sometime after April 2006 and now I cannot
seem to
update it.


The developers say you should not leave updating
too
long... True, if you
are running FBSD 5.1 and need to update to 6.1,
5.3
is still there on the
servers, but you do have to go through the steps
of
installing that
intermediate version.

well it was current as of april 8th when I made
the
tape. I went on vacation in May and got back on or
about the 17th of May. Updating HAS NOT WORKED
SINCE
THEN. so if waiting 6 weeks is too long then so be
it.


6 weeks too long? 6 months, *maybe*.

yeah between that tape which was the last update I
recall doing (always TAPE things up before messing
with it, learned that the hard way toooooooooo many
times) and me getting back home from Tortola to plug
in to the net and update portage and try to update. At
that point I was only updating, and PAM was Blocking.
I deleted it, the update failed at some point I got
sick turned off the box and without PAM could never
log back in. VERY FRUSTRATING, and I actually liked
Gentoo a whole lot. But updating the penguin has never
gone smooth for me in the long run...

I'm not going to constantly be emerging an update on
a
daily basis to stay current, especially since
Openoffice seems to change its release tag
everyother
day on Gentoo and it puts a machine out of
commission
for 8-12 hours to build it. When:

emerge --update --deep --newuse --emptytree world

fails with PAM blocking, mozilla blocking, and now
Xorg blocking as well as some other odds and ends
thats when I say BSD is for me. to me it is
incomprehensible why I cannot rebuild the system
tree
from scratch without software blocking the build.
It
was fun while it lasted, and it was nice to be
away
from winblows but in my experience linux is
slower, a
pain to configure, impossible to update, and a
project
started to emulate Unix. I'd much rather spend my
time
learning Unix, then fighting with the emulator.


That was my point, that BSD was rewritten from the
ground up to avoid AT&T
patents. So whilst some might consider BSD "real
unix", it's really only
"emulating" V7 with Berkeley extensions.


BSD was always trying to rewrite the original AT&T
code, while being compatible with the specification.
They were researching how they could make the system
more functional, more stable, more network friendly.
Many of the features of later AT&T releases were from
BSDs Work and research, FFS, TCP/IP, just to name a
couple. FreeBSD extended this and did run into trouble
in some of its earlier releases with AT&T "patents" (I
would have to check my law books as I'm still studying
for the patent bar, but software patents are still a
fairly new concept. in the hey day of AT&T Unix I'm
fairly certain the courts regarded algorithms to be
applications of computer science; science of course
being unpatentable by statutory bar. however the
processes that defined what Unix was may have been in
fact patentable, as a process can be patented.
computers required some trickery to get it done in
that it produced a tangeble result. However running
the computer as an os would do produces no tangeble
result and so would likely be barred.) and copyrights
when the tradename was sold to Novell and the fun
began...

rewritting your code to follow the written standardize
spec for Unix while avoiding copywritten code does not
make you an emulator; it makes you an implementation.

Linux does not follow the spec so much as writing a
time sharing process oriented kernel with a system
that is independant of Unix and its defined
subsystems. It seeks to operate like Unix, but not be
Unix. That to me is an emulation of Unix. It seeks to
do all the things Unix can do, but not in a way that
is what unix is.

FreeBSD cannot call itself Unix because Title 35 of
the USC, not because it is not necessarily unix. Linux
is the kernel of the GNUnix system, but it alone can't
be unix, because even when in a distribution of a
linux system the core utilities do not follow the
standards of Unix. They operate how the GNU community
has come to expect them to using new options and
non-standards compliant switches and interfaces. Their
intent has always been to start from scratch with
their own thing following a general POSIX spec where
possible, but staying away from the overall Unix spec,
and those nasty Copyright issues. They wanted to bake
their own cake, and have been fairly succesful at it;
but some folks just like pie.


Even a full system rebuild has blocking
packages that boggle my mind as they were
compile
from
source originally...


Stuff usually blocks if something about the way
it's
installed has changed
in an incompatible way - X.org moving from
monolithic to modular builds, for
example. This doesn't seem to have anything to
do
with (binary) packages.


well if I just delete the blockers and let them be
fixed in the rebuild via them being dependancies
it
still fails. and use flags are basically useless
in
binary packages right? I don't like packages, I
like
to see that the port(age) will build on my
machine,
because I am a firm believer if you build it, it
will
run... Not to mention you can set the options you
want.


My point was that binary packages and blocking are
two separate issues.


I guess my point was I try to avoid packages like the
plauge. What can I see I like to see the nonsense
flying across a console while it is compiling from
source... I find that over time it starts to make a
lot of sense and let me see if I have other issues.
Plus I often am using deprecated boxes my office has
thrown away. and the proper CFLAGS on a pentium2
266Mhz machine MAKE A HUGE DIFFERENCE when compared to
generic code.


Linux is chaos?

ABSOLUTELY, but only because I am not a developer,
and
know of C code... I find you have to be completely
on
top of what it is and then some to get anything
done.
None of the core utilities seem to work together
with
a common configuration. But this is my biased
opinion.
Each POSIX system follows a spec, how they follow
it
is up to them. I find Linux takes a helical route
occastionally emergeing from event horizons. Plus
can
any one really list what and why the kernel was
changed since its creation??? No even Linus can do
that,


Do you have proof of it?

patches come in from everywhere,


But are only accepted if they get the go-ahead from
the "core team", to use
a FreeBSD term...

yeah of course these patches come from everyone
thinking they can help/hack their way around problems.
And I meant the accepted patches are all documented or
at least recorded as to what they changed as far as
"documentation" is concerned.

I know you can get FreeBSD 1.0 based on in parts the
original 4.4BSD-Lite Tape, which at that point
contained only minor amounts of AT&T code anyway, some
of the licensing issues were sentances in man pages.
The major point is BSD/FreeBSD was is a research
project that was always given specific features to
add, and all the patches were recorded so you could
get a snapshot of every accepted patch to the system
that was ever posted.

Linux was never centralized in development until
recently. It all started when Linus was trying to get
through College and had to do something for his
thesis/senior project in computer science. Its goals
were to make it run on i386 computers at the time and
get as much functionality as possible. It now strives
for POSIX compliance and is documented. My
understanding is that serious documentation started
around the 2.x.y kernel. All older kernels had no
central repository other then what Linus included in
his releases, and then their are all the vendor
patches like Redhat, Gentoo, and everyone else. While
they maybe documented somewhere, they're not/weren't
in a centralized repository.

I guess my main point of the whole discussion is there
is one FreeBSD project tree, but Linux has its tree,
and all the vendors versions floating around. To me
that is chaos


and weren't
docuemented until releatively recently. That is
Chaos
my friend...

Sysinstall does take a few installs to get down
pat,
but once you do it can be setup almost in your
sleep.
You do need to get used to the differences of
Unix
vs
most PC OSs whereby you need to in laymens
term
partition twice. A feature I love because it
keeps
fstab making sense.

Like anything you can't expect to try
something
completely new without expecting to fall on
your
face
a few times. I wouldn't just through on scuba
gear
and
dive the Atlantic Ocean in search of the
Titanic... I
would expect to have to read, maybe take some
classes
(mess up FreeBSD bad and start over) and try
in a
pool
instead of the ocean a few times (use
non-mission
critical machines to learn with)

The unfortunate truth is Unix is not Microsoft
Windows, well some might consider it
unfortunate...


Yeah, I think you mean "fortunate truth"!

Windows tells you what to do, what software you
must
use, what drivers you must use, where you must
install
things, what daemons listen to what ports and
their is
little you can do to change it. Unix is just a
set
of
simple commands strung together in scripts and
pipes
that can do whatever you want it to do. X11 is
not
Unix it is a software package designed to
allow
netrocentric GUI applications to talk to a
screen,
keyboard and mouse. Its a monster in and of
itself...
Complete with its own documentation...

Unfortunately it takes some time to learn how
to
work
with FreeBSD and Unix in general. Some people
have
been doing it there whole professional lives
and
probably still are amazed when they see a new
little
trick come out of some new hackers "toolbox."
There
are a few simple rules, and the rest is on
you.
It's
Unix's greatest strength and weakness rolled
into
one.
Please don't give up on FreeBSD because of one
bad
experience. Take the time to mess around with
it
and
learn the basics and go from there. Or stick
with
Linux its up to you. I will guarantee that
when it
comes to upgrading the Linux box you will come
back to
FreeBSD real quick...


Or Gentoo, Ubuntu or SuSE! ;-)

if you must but I'm done with that penguin and its
a
messy break up. I've always liked what Linux was
doing, but I HATE the way it does it, and thats my
totally biased opinion.


Well, at least you're honest!

I find it is the only way to get away with being a
stubborn prick. Well sometimes you can get away with
it anyway... 8^)


Jeff Rollin



-brian
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