I do recall FreeBSD getting wifi support a long time before the linux kernel ever did. As for graphics cards Nvidia releases new drivers for FreeBSD whenever they release a new card... FreeBSD is not behind in hardware... FreeBSD also is now releasing more versions each year than most linux distrobutions. We actually have a very very large base of developers.

Gentoo's portage is just a paltry imitation of the ports system and in no way comparable to the real thing.

Lastly a damn good reason to use BSD is because of their license which gives the developers more freedom instead of locking them forever in GPL hell...

See now the answer you provided me along with many others is more than enough to convince me to go down and buy FreeBSD server edition from CompUSA or off the internet. or the option of utilising my 1.9 mbits connection and download as much as I can. Now the packaging system is that basically setup the sameway that gentoo is. Basically what i'm trying to say is thank you I intend on making either the switch from Gentoo -> FreeBSD, or setting up another box with BSD on it. Thanks to all those who helped me out.

When you do indeed make the switch i would like to suggest you drop us a line at freebsdforums.org(i did not see any rules against this)... Like it or not the BSD section of this forum is a little slow

bsdforums.org has links to all the BSD message boards I use it quite frequently since I have both OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

It is well known and documented that the BSD strains have always had a
more efficient and stable stack in comparison to any other OS. This was
more true when I started out on my first linux kernel 0.94.p6, long before
all of these distro's emerged.

However, with that said, I would not install a *?BSD on the desktop, a
desktop is an environment that is supposed to be little hassle when you
change things and break things.

My platforms of choice are FreeBSD for my servers and RH9 or debian on
my desktop.

Servers = Lean and Mean
Desktop = Fault tolerant and "SUE" proof

I just spent a week out more or less, due to the flu, and I gotta tell you that when I looked in on the BSD forum with a thread title like this, I was a little scared... Emacs vs. Vi might have set me more on edge, maybe.

Regardless, my faith in the LQ population is restored. This thread could have devolved into a messy flame war and no one crossed that line. Thank you for that.

I haven't got much to add... I really don't like FreeBSD, never have... each install only survives about a couple of days or a month before I switch the machine over to OpenBSD or a new Linux distro. I'm not an OS'hole in this regard, I just find it tedious to get the install the way I like it. I can get an OpenBSD machine into a happy state for me much quicker... dunno why. And packet filter.... ohhhh baby a firewall written in plain english! wheeee!

FreeBSD did indeed have wireless drivers first... by a couple of weeks or something. Regardless, this was back in the 802.11b pre-spec days when there were drivers on either side for the then $250 Lucent pcmcia cards and ISA bridge cards that were the only thing on the market. (No, I'm not counting all of the non-standard spec 900Mhz gear) This was... 1999, maybe a few dozen people had really heard of wireless back then, and I wasn't even one of them.

With that out of the way, the BSDs sure have kept up better drivers since then, their prims2/2.5/3 kernel driver does access point mode... meanwhile the linux kernel driver, orinoco_cs, still can't handle the newer prism firmwares with aplomb and of course is limited to infrastructure and ad-hoc. Meanwhile there's two 3rd party drivers...

Someone else mentioned Linux's tendency to stay ahead in hardware support, and for the most part that's true, but certain things tend to stay in the dev tree for too long... for instance HPT37x and PDC2027xx ata cards were in 2.5 for a bloody year before they were finally backported into 2.4.20... meanwhile on the BSD side I only know about Open, but the lag was only 1 release cycle, so 6 months after the cards came out at the most.

The one thing that I really like about Linux, and I mean the kernel really, apps are apps, and for the most part they compile on either system fine and you can chroot jail on either system if you want to, and arguing that X does it by default over Y just is arguing that you get to be lazy; but its that the Linux kernel just has everything in it. You could argue feature creep, but between weird stuff like framebuffering drivers per card, pre-emtible kernel, the tux httpd, having the oss driver for the cmi 8783 sound cards be able to switch line-in to bass-out, 33 filesystems, there's just more of a philosophy of "why not" that I enjoy the hell out of. Even if the crap is broken or buggy.

Recently I switched out an OpenBSD install on my laptop for my first twirl with Gentoo, no politics, I was just bored one afternoon. Yes, Gentoo did borrow the ports tree system from the BSDs, but just like everything developmental they took it that one step further... and its incredibly easy to upgrade everything under Gentoo's portage. I'm still running Slack and RH and OpenBSD on my servers, probably won't change that.

Oh, the 497 day thing... jiffies, 1/100th of a second. All of those OSes mentioned above that address the time in jiffies and by design were limited to a 32-bit address space, so 497 days equals out to the maximum addressable integer in jiffies. About two years ago a friend of mine and I had an ssh term open to a server we had accounts on with "watch uptime" running so we could wait and see it flip. Debian 2.2r3 I think, 2.2.16 kernel. Linux offhand took care of that in 2.4.12 I think... released longer then 497 days ago so there should be some newer kernel machine out there with a 500+ uptime. Then again, they really should replace the sucker for the ptrace bug...

Cheers,

Finegan

Just curious as to how this differs in any way or form from using cvs-up and portupgrade under BSD?

Looks like the slashdot trolls dont visit here...

I have tried Redhat, Debian, Slackware, and FreeBSD.
I am ready to thow my computer out the window. I havent found a distro that I can just configure and start using. Ive been working at trying to get some version of *Nix working and Ive never gotten to a point where I could say that all my hardware was working, and the system is configured.
I am really getting tempted to go back to running win2k again, just so I can use my design programs again.

......sorry that was my alter ego talking!
Seriously I would go with either slackware or FreeBSD, gentoo looks like fun, but Im really getting sick of reading up on stuff before installing.
A new *NIX distro is the last thing I need right now. LOL

Well let me say I have definetly gone through my share of distros. FreeBSD isn't something I would recommend someone who doesn't have a good understanding of *nix to start with. Things you might want to start with are Redhat Mandrake. Actually mandrake is what i first used in 8th grade. I would recommend it as a starting *nix. Mandrake is definetly something that installs easily and is good to go. With Gentoo the installing is a bitch but after that oh man it's great. Take it from me I know my Linux distros and gentoo is going to take the cake pretty soon man. Updating your entire system is as easy as typing "emerge -uvD system" and for updating all your software packages "emerge -uvD world"

try it out... then if that fails go to win2k ... i hate to say it
gives me the willies

guess where they got those ideas from...

<HR>
guess where they got those ideas from...
<HR>

Ok here's a good plus point, The documentation that comes with Gentoo is definetly much better than that of FreeBSD, correct or incorrect ? That and I have the same computer that I'm trying to use with FreeBSD, but I'm having a lot of problems with FreeBSD that I'm not having with Linux.

incorrect

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO...ook/index.html
http://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies.html

Plus a lot of man pages and forums dedicated to only freebsd.

And none of that is due to user error i am sure please tell us what these "lot of problems" are...

glad i found this post before posting becuse this is what i was going to say with some changes:

Servers = BSD (I'd go with OpenBSD becuase of their strict security policies)
Desktop = Linux (Gentoo because of portage)

I don't personally have any BSD systems, my server right now is running Gentoo (well Gentoo is being installed on it as i type this...making a bzImage). But I've read enough and have heard enough to know that a BSD system would make a better server. I think the original poster should go with a Linux distro like Gentoo if he is looking for a good desktop system with all the latest hardware support and speed as Gentoo does use the BSD-like ports system and is fairly easy to install, just takes ages.

Well I think I'll drop a little update in here since I've been running Linux for years, and now FreeBSD 4.8 and OpenBSD 3.3/4 for several months now (after previous working experience).

I must say that I'm liking OpenBSD more and more. I like their philosophy and the install comes pretty much the way you want it out of the box. I saw it mentioned earlier in the thread, but it really is true that you can get OBSD up and running in an acceptable fashion much faster than any other UNIX-like OS I've ever seen, including commercial UNIX distributions.

I may hesitate to recommend OpenBSD for a high-performance application server, just because it looks like there are a few outstanding bugs/designs that are still effecting performance (reference benchmark link below). For right now FreeBSD 5.1 seems to be at the head of the pack compeating with the Linux 2.6 kernel.

I must say that for firewalls, OpenBSD blows away everything I've seen before. It's like a slightly easier version of PIX, with nearly all the functionality, for FREE! I cannot begin to describe how wonderful the PF syntax is. I also feel much more comfortable running OpenBSD in a nearly default configuration than any Linux distro. The maturity of Linux 2.4 still worries me.

As far as desktop, my jury vote is still out on that. I've pretty much made the switch completely to BSD (Free and Open) for all of my network now, but it remains to be seen whether OpenBSD 3.4 or FreeBSD 5.1 will be able to replicate my fileserver/workstation setup the way I liked it with Mandrake. I did like Mandrake 9.0 quite a bit, but after duplicating disks (due to one starting to fail) I was not able to mount the root file system while booting, although Knoppix and OpenBSD were both able to do it.

My general recommendation would be: OpenBSD for firewalls, network perimeter boxes, and servers that don't handle high load. FreeBSD for highly load/high performance servers. Linux for workstations and non-mission critical boxes that handle frequent human interaction (although it's quite possible to use either FreeBSD or OpenBSD as a desktop).

Edit: Whoops, here's that benchmark link http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/

Nice link chort. The difference between the different BSDs was pretty surprising. I would have guessed that they would have all performed about the same, clearly that isn't true. I had also heard about the freeBSD "cheating" thing (where the benchmark just drops off at ~3500 sockets) but that was pretty cool to see graphically.