Re: Testing - my emails don't seem to be getting through
On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 04:12:55AM -0700, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 10:24:27AM +1000, Da Rock wrote: I've been getting a lot of rejections: Helo command rejected: Host not found (in reply to RCPT TO command). So now I'm running a test to see if this one will get through. I do not know why on earth you are testing this crap using a public mailing list, rather than mailing an account at Gmail or Hotmail or some such. Sorry to sound sour about it, but it's rude. Maybe he's testing it on a public mailing list because his Gmail or Hotmail (or whatever) account doesn't reject his emails, but the public mailing list does. I think the correct response here would have been to direct him to the freebsd-test mailing list: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-test -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] A: It reverses the normal flow of conversation. Q: What's wrong with top-posting? pgpMiJHFea9G5.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Installing Samba : FreeBSD Vs Linux ?
On Fri, Oct 17, 2008 at 04:34:00PM +0200, Frank Bonnet wrote:
Hello
I am on the way to setup a brand new Samba server with OpenLDAP backend
I am very interrested by feedback of real world samba admins running it
with FreeBSD
or Linux , my boss push hardly to use Linux but I would much prefer FreeBSD
so good arguments are welcome ( my boss is a smart guy , if I give enough
litterature that says FreeBSD is better, he will be OK )
More seriously I'm also searching for eventuals benchmarks that compare
those two configurations.
Linux-based systems and FreeBSD systems should support Samba roughly
identically well. I seem to recall seeing some benchmarks for FreeBSD
network server operations under heavy load just crushing comparative
Linux-based servers, but I don't recall where.
Anyway, if you can find benchmarks to that effect, or at least benchmarks
that don't show Linux substantially beating FreeBSD, you should be
covered. Add in some stuff about how FreeBSD is better (for your
purposes, at least) in general, regardless of the specific Samba stuff,
and you should have a win.
FreeBSD support for Samba is, in my limited experience (haven't used
Samba much in the last four years), excellent. So is Samba support on,
for instance, Debian. I believe you'll have to look outside of Samba
support for reasons to pick one over the other.
--
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
print substr('Just another Perl hacker', 0, -2);
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Re: flash-9, 10 on FreeBSD
On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 06:31:13PM +, Craig Butler wrote: The way forwards has to be to jump onto the gnash band wagon I think that project is moving leaps and bounds. Why be tied into proprietary closed sourced drivel that the people who write it aren't prepared to support a decent Operating System ?? gnash all the way for me.. I've had better luck with swfdec than gnash. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] A: It reverses the normal flow of conversation. Q: What's wrong with top-posting? pgp1PjPV9LIHV.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: about vi editor and turkish char
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 06:33:10PM +0100, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Friday, October 31, 2008 a las 06:31:02PM +0200, Yavuz Maslak escribió: I use Freebsd7.0. I am not able to use turkish char while I edit a file with vi editor. How can I correct that ? You could use a 'xterm' with UTF-8 support, a correct LANG environment, for example LANG=es_ES.UTF-8, and the editor 'vim' (from the ports); to enter UTF-8 chars which are not on your keyboard you could use, for example, KDE's application KCharSelect . . . or you could use another terminal emulator that supports Unicode, such as rxvt-unicode. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] McCloctnick the Lucid: The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do. pgploo7Hjzf1H.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Funny slogans to put on tshirts
On Fri, Oct 31, 2008 at 08:44:57PM +1030, en0f wrote: Redd Vinylene wrote: Hello guys, It's my friend's birthday tomorrow. I was thinking I'd make him a tshirt with some funny slogan on it or something. Preferably something UNIX related. But I'm all outta ideas. Perhaps y'all can help? Alright, much obliged, thanks. * hold it right there buddy. + silent * that scruffy beard... those suspenders... that smug expression... + silent * you're one of those condescending unix computer users! + here's a nickel, kid. get yourself a better computer. Isn't that the script of a Dilbert strip? Maybe, for shirt purposes, just distill that down to its essence: Here's a nickel, kid. Get yourself a better computer. It could also be modified a bit: Here's a nickel, kid. Blank CDs are cheap. Get yourself a better operating system. . . . maybe with a Windows logo crossed out, or with a FreeBSD logo, or something like that. Of course, one of my favorite one-liners is one I made up: Power corrupts. The command line corrupts absolutely. . . . or, altneratively: Power corrupts. Unix corrupts absolutely. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against? pgp6Rf1MgTrU6.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 08:49:09AM -0700, mdh wrote: I rather like KDE4. I don't find that it's like Windows at all, given that Windows is an operating system and KDE4 is a development framework, application suite, and window manager. There're hefty differences there, not the least of which being that KDE4 isn't an operating system kernel. In general, I've found it to be well-maintained (some of the window managers I've used in the past went defunct when the 1-2 developers actively working on them got bored or whatever), nicely designed, attractive appearance-wise, and easy to configure. Let's face it, spending a whole bunch of hours over the course of a few weeks writing a perfect afterstep config was really cool when I was a young'un and didn't have a life to worry about, but nowadays I just want to get on with what needs doing. KDE allows me to accomplish just that, efficiently, and without leaving me unable to toggle/modify/configure certain things as GNOME does. My preference is to simply find a window manager that acts as much like my ideal as possible in its default, unconfigured form -- and make a few minor tweaks as necessary. What I don't want is something that has a whole bunch of stuff heaped on it to cover every possible eventuality the developers envision, leaving me still wanting more, with an easy configuration interface to try to make up for the lacks. That, I'm afraid, is how KDE feels to me. Worse yet, KDE4 strikes me as significantly counter-intuitive. I'm aware that intuitive in interfaces is a matter of familiarity -- but I think it's relevant in this case, in that KDE and GNOME seem to a fair degree to have a need to cater to the familiarity of people who also use OSes like MS Windows and Apple MacOS X. While my primary sense of familiarity (and thus the intuitive) isn't with MS and Apple OSes, they do kinda fill in the secondary and tertiary spots for me; KDE4 falls into line somewhere back around 20th for me. It seems to me like it has several configuration options lacking in something like MS Windows, and lacks several that something like MS Windows has -- but has made poor trade-offs, adding less important configuration options and removing more important options, based on what I've seen so far. This view of KDE4 is based my recent experience (a few days ago) of installing and configuring PC-BSD on a laptop for a friend. PC-BSD's default version of KDE4 is a newer iteration than what's in FreeBSD ports, so it certainly isn't a matter of the default install having a slightly older minor version number and needing to be upgraded. The somewhat broken functionality is a bit of a problem, too -- such as the Plasma Desktop Folder View's inability to just show the damned icons properly, the tendency of KDE to crash and restart when I try to make certain changes with widgets unlocked, panels that might vanish from view when I try to move them but are apparently still running *somewhere*, and so on. I've never been much of a fan of KDE, ever since I discovered the joys of window managers that aren't derivative of the MS/Apple WIMP style, but KDE4 strikes me as a case of some visionary project manager stepping on his own virtual genitals. I don't know -- maybe I just don't get the new direction for KDE4. Maybe it's awesome for someone's purposes. It's terrible for mine. . . . not that I think GNOME 2.24 is any better. I'll stick with AHWM for now, long since abandoned by its developer, but so elegant in operation and configuration that it really doesn't even need any further development. It does what it needs to do, and doesn't screw around with a bunch of singing and dancing and backflips to distract me from the fact it doesn't do anything fundamentally new. Just one man's opinion. Yours is surely different. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'. pgpXJ9VJn0uMZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 05:04:15PM +0100, Matthias Apitz wrote: El día Saturday, November 01, 2008 a las 04:34:38PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar escribió: the question should be Is KDE usable at all on any OS? the answer is no, it's crappy imitation of windoze. If someone needs windoze like soft, just buy windows vista. For someone who need unix, FreeBSD is a good choice. I disagree concerning KDE windoze; I'm using KDE 3.5.8 and it is a very good and stable desktop, even for kernel folks and hackers; I run it with FreeBSD 7.0R on my daily work laptop; My impression, over the last few years, is that the above description is backwards. MS Windows seems to be emulating KDE, rather than the other way around. Vista looked surprisingly like KDE3 when it made it into the public eye, and the rumor now is that the 7 pre-beta looks surprisingly like KDE4. As such, KDE appears to be an excellent choice for a gentle transition from MS Windows to the Unixy world -- and it may provide a better experience overall. Still . . . KDE isn't for me. Besides all that, this thread was spawned by reference to KDE4, which is significantly different in behavior than KDE3 in some insidious ways. As such, I'm not sure one's experience with KDE3 is the best litmus for whether KDE4 is or will be a good choice. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Bill McKibben: The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield. pgpsq3VL0DwrW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
On Sat, Nov 01, 2008 at 10:43:56AM -0700, Yuri wrote: Wojciech Puchar wrote: it's SLOW and resource hungry - giving nothing else than a good look. that's why i compare it to windoze. and why you need desktop (whatever it means) at all? You need desktop for Unix (Linux) to be adopted by simple users. Also GUI makes life much easier even for advanced users. I don't want to deal command lines/config files for mundane things like finding and setting up wireless networks, playing CDs/DVDs, etc. GUI integrated with desktop would make this much less time consuming. A couple of things: 1. It's true -- many users require a gentler transition than simply giving up the richness of MS Windows and moving to some spare, productivity-enhancing user environment like some of those available on Unix systems. Luckily, Unix can accomodate many different approaches to a GUI environment, so all can be happy with what they have. That's one of the benefits of a Unix architecture, as opposed to one where the underlying OS is wedded to its desktop metaphor implementation. 2. One doesn't need a Desktop Environment to have a GUI -- a point I think you glossed over or even missed entirely. One doesn't even need the DE for GUI-based configuration. 3. The command line is not more time consuming than the GUI for most purposes. It is, in fact, *less* time consuming, as well as being more powerful and flexible, for most purposes. There are some tasks for which a GUI approach is the most effective, and there are many more for which a TUI is better. What makes the GUI easier for many people is that it doesn't tend to have as high an initial learning curve. Once you get past the initial learning curve, though, the CLI is far more productive and efficient than a GUI in most cases, at least in my experience. It's all a bit like the relative learning curves of various editing environment: http://unix.rulez.org/~calver/pictures/curves.jpg just window manager is enough, try fvwm2 maybe icewm maybe other etc. not really enough. Unfortunately open source is pretty much a failure when it comes to GUI and desktop. Any kind of GUI, look at ddd for example. Untested development-stage software (like kde4) is being released to the public for some reason. No, it isn't a failure. It's a raging success in many ways. Its only failures are in marketing, for the most part. KDE4 is buggy as hell in my experience, but it's no worse than the GUI environment for Millenium Edition. In addition to that, we in the open source world still have significant advances over the bells-and-whistles aesthetic of MS Windows, in more ways than one: 1. We have better bells and whistles. Compiz Fusion comes to mind. 2. We have better interface design. Even though Compiz Fusion is a steaming pile of unnecessary crap in my personal opinion (where UI design is concerned), it's still leagues ahead of Aero Glass for purposes of productivity enhancement (or at least refraining from getting in the way of productivity), and both GNOME and KDE4 are better than XP's UI in that regard. 3. A bunch of other GUI environments are far, far better than the typical DEs of the OSS world in terms of productivity enhancing UI design; they stay the hell out of the way while providing functionality that improves user task completion efficiency. The ddd example is kind of unfair, by the way. That's a common GNU problem, not a broader open source problem. It's my experience that the GNU project is full of people who have absolutely no idea how to design a decent interface. The GNU project is so influential, though, that once they come up with something that fits within a specific niche, the rest of the open source world seems reluctant to do anything to reach into the same niche and replace the GNU train-wreck of UI with a better UI. I mean, come on -- just look at Info Pages. What a disaster area. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Georg Hackl: American beer is the first successful attempt at diluting water. pgpbGCaMKcUlI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
easy to create a new keyboard shortcut in AHWM's configuration file using Vim, even if I had to get past an initial learning curve before it became easy -- and I find hacking configuration files quite intuitive, though part of the reason for that is, of course, the simple fact that I do it a lot. As far as KDE4 being untested, I'd send you over to the KDE folks to let them set you straight on that. The short of it is that you're just flat-out wrong. It may be heavily tested, but in my experience, it is not *thoroughly* tested. It was . . . problematic, trying to get things to work properly, in my case. Turning off the desktop folder view was the only way to work around the display problems with that widget last week, for example. I, personally, don't like desktop icons anyway -- but the computer I was working with was for someone else, and the lack of desktop icons would be kind of a burden on the person for whom the computer was intended. Since the folder view thing is KDE4's official way to do the desktop icon thing, this seems like kind of a big deal to me. I've never had problems of that kind with KDE's version 3, nor with MS Windows. Of course, I'd never trade that problem for the kinds of problems I have had with MS Windows -- but this seems like just one more piece of evidence of a step backwared from version 3. For my purposes, KDE4 is beta software. At the end of the day, when you find bugs in closed-source software, you call the vendor and file a ticket. With open-source software, since you aren't paying anything, you ought to deal with bugs through the community. Bug trackers for KDE exist. So do mailing lists. There's a community there with people - usually unpaid volunteers - who are willing to help debug the software, just as commercial software vendors have paid support staff for such issues. If you don't like free UNIX-like systems, you can buy a nice Sun box and get Solaris support from Sun. In fact, Sun's support has been really good in my vast experience, so I'd even go so far as to recommend this if what you want is that level of support. Even Sun releases bugs sometimes though. This is why they, like those of us in the open-source world, release patches. Indeed. I agree with that -- as far as it goes. KDE4 seems to have some bigger bug problems than what I'd expect from supposedly release-worthy software, though. This whole argument just strikes me as a lot of meaningless complaining in lieu of actually productively trying to identify and fix bugs. If you want to get involved in bug fixing, using a beta version is a great idea. If you don't have the time or inclination, a supposed release version that feels like beta test software is not the answer. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Nat Torkington, on Perl internals: . . . an interconnected mass of livers and pancreas and lungs and little sharp pointy things and the occasional exploding kidney. pgpFbYr7BnXRc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 12:48:12AM +0100, Polytropon wrote: On Sat, 01 Nov 2008 13:36:30 -1000, Al Plant [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Aloha, Try XFCE 3 or 4 for an excellent OS window manager. XFCE 3 can be turned into a CDE lookalike if it's desired. It's very lightweight and still features all the nice things you know from a UNIX X environment. Zsers coming from CDE will feel comfortable, if you take the time to tweak the settings a little bit. Correction: XFCE is very lightweight *compared to KDE and GNOME*. It's pretty hefty compared to a lot of other options -- many of which are comparable, in terms of popularity, to XFCE. In my opinion - and that's very individual, you know - WindowMaker is one of the best window managers around. Fast, lightweight, easy to configure, excellent keyboard support (that's where the other ones are lacking), ah, and did I mention it's fast? You can provide a useful (!) system even on a P1 150 MHz system with it. No joke. In the medium-to-heavy weight class, WindowMaker is definitely in my top five window managers. There's also a complete desktop environment for it comparable to KDE, GNOME, and XFCE desktop environments, in the form of the GNUstep framework and all those applications built on it. It manages to be significantly lighter on resources and better performing than KDE, GNOME, and XFCE. It's quite a bit less intuitive to people coming from MS Windows or MacOS, of course, because it emulates NeXTSTEP rather than those other OSes, but if that doesn't bother you, it's an excellent choice in my opinion. It was the first window manager I discovered that did more to stay the heck out of my way than it did to try to help me do things the way someone else decided they should be done. If the magic of the tiling window managers opens up to you, you will even be more productive. Allthough I tried several of them, their magic wouldn't open up to me... :-) I find wmii to be quite easy to pick up, in general, among tiling window managers. It also allows floating window management, and can even be configured to do that by default rather than the tiling thing, if you so desire. It's currently my second choice window manager, after AHWM (which is *not* a tiling window manager). -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Bill McKibben: The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield. pgpKEApAJPgiS.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Is KDE4 usable on FreeBSD?
On Sun, Nov 02, 2008 at 10:21:17AM -0800, Bruce Cran wrote: And what about OS X? To me it seems it's a combination of the user-friendliness of Windows with the power of *NIX. And lots of people have moved over to using it. Unix is *very* user friendly. It's just picky about who it considers friends. I don't remember who said that first, but I find it accurate. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Malaclypse the Younger: 'Tis an ill wind that blows no minds. pgpZJa5TR22x1.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Java and FreeBSD
On Mon, Nov 03, 2008 at 11:28:10AM -0800, mdh wrote: My advice is to install the following ports in the following order: java/jdk16 java/eclipse-devel Does licensing BS still require out-of-band agreement to EULAs on the Sun website in 7.x, or has that finally changed for the better? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. pgpli2IBgla7u.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: recommendation word processer for xfce
On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 08:51:06AM +0200, Ross Cameron wrote: On Fri, Nov 7, 2008 at 5:34 AM, FBSD1 [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Top posting is how Microsoft outlook works. Nothing I can do about it. sorry Ditch Outlook and use Evolution or Thunderbird or KMail or hell anything . . . or, as someone else pointed out, one could just learn to scroll to the end before typing. It's not that difficult -- even in Outlook. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: You can never entirely stop being what you once were. That's why it's important to be the right person today, and not put it off till tomorrow. pgp5LCEezZ19L.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: (no subject)
On Fri, Nov 07, 2008 at 06:28:07AM -0500, Michael Powell wrote: If you are totally new to Linux/Unix and have zero experience and just want an easy, out of the box something other than XP you might try the latest incarnation of Kubuntu. I know in a FreeBSD list these comments are sacrilege, but the broader picture is what your needs truly are. I'd suggest PC-BSD instead, and not only because it's a FreeBSD spin-off. It also provides PBI for software management, which will surely provide a gentler transition for people used to the Microsoft way of installing software, and doesn't make a lot of the design mistakes I see in Ubuntu and its spin-offs. DesktopBSD is a pretty good choice along those lines, too. Still better than Ubuntu, in my opinion. Furthermore . . . they both use KDE by default, and you don't have to use a red-headed stepchild or second-hand citizen like Kubuntu to get it. Now running a real live Web presence out of your house is probably not really a good idea if it has anything to do with business. A personal blog can go down for indefinite periods and no harm done, but a business site is a different story. First, the reason for having your servers located in a data center is they are sitting directly on the fat pipes of the Internet. Second, these data centers are multi homed in their peerage to other backbones. If one connection path develops a problem your site is still going to be accessible via one of the other paths. You simply will never have the kind of connectivity found in a real data center at home. Make sure the colocation facility of your choice is multi-homed before simply assuming it is. Some aren't. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: Just don't create a file called -rf. pgpjWixg2rE94.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: root /etc/csh
On Wed, Nov 12, 2008 at 02:14:07PM -0500, Jerry wrote: I usually just use: #!/usr/bin/env bash It seems to work on both Linux and FBSD. That does work -- as long as you have bash installed. How portable do you want your script to be? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Sterling Camden: The Church doesn't want people calling for inquisitions. pgp4YFWISV7og.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:51:07PM +0100, Mel wrote:
Not anymore. They were when it was still IBM. Some in-depth discussion here:
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-mobile/2008-July/010831.html
Well, that's disappointing.
My current laptop is a Thinkpad R52, from just after the sale to Lenovo
but while production was still going on in IBM facilities here in the
States. It's a great piece of equipment and, aside from the fact that I
made the mistake of getting the model with an ATI graphics adapter rather
than an Intel adapter, it has perfectly suited my needs. I've been a
long-time fan of Thinkpads, and I haven't found another laptop I like
nearly as much. Even the feel of the keyboard is better than that of any
other line of laptops I've encountered.
I wondered if there might be dropping production value issues when the PC
division of IBM was sold off to Lenovo. I'm pretty disappointed to
discover that was probably the case. Another R52 purchased for my
significant other, a year after acquiring this laptop, has seemed to be
exactly as good as this one, with one exception: while the keyboard feel
is still better than that of any non-Thinkpad I've ever encountered, it
feels just slightly more flimsy and cheap than this Thinkpad's keyboard.
I'm pretty sure that second R52 was manufactured in a Lenovo facility
that was *not* inherited from IBM, and I wonder if that might be why the
keyboard has that different feel.
And of course, there's:
http://www.ixsystems.com/products/bsd-laptop.html
I just spoke to a representative from iXsystems about the Invincibook.
It sound very promising. My only complaint so far (having not had a
chance to check out how the keyboard feels, how heavy it is, how hot it
gets during operation, and so on) is that it's only planned to provide a
touchpad as an integrated pointing device. One of the surprising
benefits of Thinkpads over the years has been the trackpoint, in part
because I don't have to break contact between my thumbs and the spacebar
when using the pointing device (I'm a Vim user), and in part because with
touchpads the heels of my hands occasionally brush across the thing
causing interesting problems with mouse pointer behavior while I'm
typing. I'm also not too keen on the relative lack of mouse cursor
precision with a touchpad.
If it's all it promises to be, though, the Invincibook will probably be
worth the sacrifice of the trackpoint, especially considering the
apparent drop in production quality for Thinkpads.
In the conversation with the iXsystems representative, by the way, I was
told that the major holdup at the moment for Invincibooks going into
production is ACPI support -- of course. I'm not terribly surprised,
since ACPI seems to *always* be the bugbear of laptop support. I'm
pretty keen on the idea of finally having a laptop that can suspend to
RAM and, even more importantly for my purposes, to disk. I'm willing to
wait until they get that part right, because hibernation is kind of a
killer feature for me -- or would be, if someone would finally get it
right. I suppose one could say that it works just fine on my Thinkpad,
with the caveat that it fails to come back from suspension to either RAM
or disk, but that kinda defeats the purpose.
Anyway . . . I started out with my two cents on the matter, and ended up
rambling about a bunch of tangential nonsense. I think that means it's
time to close up this email.
--
Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ]
print substr('Just another Perl hacker', 0, -2);
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Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:23:24PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: I have read briefly on FreeBSD and it seems to be the winner on speed and stability versus Linux and of course MS Windows. versus linux - of course, versus windows - it's different OS, we should define how do you compare. for example running windows apps under FreeBSD with wine will probably be slower than under windows. This is not as constant a truism as one might think. I haven't run much software in Wine, but what I have has performed comparably with how it did on MS Windows, for the most part. The one case where I could even detect a difference in performance was with World of Warcraft -- and it performed much better under Wine than on MS Windows, even on the same machine. Anyway, how about you plus Google cash, and others (?), putting a simple easy partition of MS hard disks and FreeBSD install with a nice GUI. And getting Google to distribute it to the World. My question is, how much once again i repeat - FreeBSD is not windows replacement. it's unix. All nice GUI for unices turned to be bad idea, every windows user will say it's poor compared to windows. and they are right. Poppycock. There are several desktop environments for Unix-like systems that compare well with MS Windows and Apple MacOS X for matters of glitz and glamour, even giving a far more confection-laden user friendly appeal overall than the proprietary competition, as I've pointed out before: http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=335 In fact, I seem to recall responding to *you* in particular about this subject on this mailing list before: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/2008-June/176889.html it will be very nice if someone/some company produce true windows compatible OS, running windows programs, windows installers, but being much better and faster. Why the hell would I want windows installers? The Microsoft model of software installation is antiquated, inefficient, restrictive, and difficult to manage. While I'm at it, I'd miss more of the software available on FreeBSD if I switched to MS Windows than I do of MS Windows software when I'm on FreeBSD. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Niccolo Machiavelli: It is a common failing of man not to take account of tempests during fair weather. pgpdeaex5yKNp.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:18:13PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: By constantly repeating that UNIX is no Windows replacement you are and i will repeat it because it's true. it's every other unix replacement. It did a quite admirable job of replacing MS Windows for me. I don't know why you're so down on it. as linux tries for many years to be windows replacement - it's both low end unix and low end windows replacement, windows for poor. Replacing MS Windows is not the same as becoming MS Windows. Ubuntu has been pursuing the specter of MS Windows feature parity for a while, and as a result has become something I have no interest in touching. Meanwhile, PC-BSD has been pursuing the goal of *replacing* MS Windows, which is not at all the same thing as *becoming* MS Windows, and it seems to be doing a great job of that without adopting MS Windows' flaws. The only limitation on the quality of PC-BSD, in my experience, seems to be KDE, but I've long since given up caring about the default GUI facade on open source OSes, since they *all* use KDE or GNOME (except a rare few that use XFCE by default, when they want something light). KDE and GNOME (and even XFCE) are frighteningly bloated user environments that seem lightweight only in comparison with the even more awfully huge and lumbering GUIs of MS Windows and Apple MacOS X -- so I just take it as a given that every OS in the world uses something bloated and cumbersome for its GUI, and resolve to either not install the GUI (if that's an option) or uninstall the GUI after the system is installed, then install something different in its place. In other words, there's basically no escaping the problems inherent in something like KDE, GNOME, or even XFCE if you go with default GUI setup -- but aside from that, PC-BSD is doing an excellent job of becoming the definitive MS Windows replacement OS without adopting MS Windows problems. . . . and, as I said, FreeBSD is a great MS Windows replacement for me. I don't miss MS Windows *at all* when I'm using FreeBSD on my laptop every single day. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against? pgpkRnEyFGQ7r.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 07:10:48AM -0800, Jeremy Chadwick wrote: On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 03:40:09PM +0100, Manfred Usselmann wrote: I have a lot of reasons for loathing X. A *lot*. I've spent a lot of time (and even money; anyone remember AccelX back in the 90s? Yep, I bought it) trying to adapt over the years, and I cannot. I'm not going to provide details because it'll just induce more parking lot burn-outs and that's not what I want. I loathe Firefox. I find it incredibly annoying, bloated, cumbersome, and otherwise sucky. Unfortunately, the disadvantages of every other Web browser I've encountered are *worse* (though Chromium shows promise, if it ever gets ported to BSD Unix systems), so I keep using Firefox as my primary browser. The same applies to the X Window System. It sucks. It is laden with various and sundry big problems; annoyances and poor design decisions litter the X Window System. The drawbacks of Luna, Aqua, and Aero are all even worse than those of the X Window System, though, so I still with X. Comparatively: I have co-workers who love X and KDE, and hate Windows -- and I have co-workers who absolutely love OS X's GUI, and hate X and Windows. (In fact, the few OS X users I know get quite irate when they find some OS X program actually relies on X11). I'd be annoyed by that, too. Software that is ported to other systems should not drag along baggage like assumed reliance on other software particular to the source system. I get similarly irate at discovering I've discovered an application that depends on a metric crapload of KDE or GNOME libraries. I don't think getting irate over software relying on software that you otherwise don't have on your system, and that does not provide functionality actually important to the operation of the software you actually want, is really much of an indicator of how individualized GUI taste can be. The only time I curse Windows is when CMD.EXE or command-line utilities come into play. Anyone who's used *IX will know what I mean by this. PowerShell/Monad is a joke, Cygwin is an atrocity, 4NT/4DOS is too quirky, and *IX application ports often have too many bugs (either not handling NTFS filenames correctly (resorting to 8.3 format), or having filesize limitations due to the porter doing it wrong; 2GB limits are found in common programs including Win32 wget). I'm curious -- what exactly do you dislike about PowerShell? This is the first time I've really heard such a complaint about it. Every operating system/GUI/environment has its share of quirks. It just depends on which ones you can tolerate. I can tolerate some of Windows' quirks (sans focus stealing, although I'm told KDE applicationg are starting down this road too), but cannot with X or OS X. I suppose it's because I've a mental stigma; I associate *IX and UNIX with servers, and I likely always will. *IX/UNIX on the desktop is a crazy idea to me. This is in line with my experience of people who prefer the MS Windows interface over that of the X Window System -- their preference is usually dominated by matters of familiarity. I'm kind of the opposite type of person in that regard: I regularly try something new, because I'm always looking for a better way to do things. That's all I have to say on the matter; I won't reply here on out. That's a bummer. I'd like to know your thoughts on some of my above commentary -- particularly on the subject of PowerShell. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] A: It reverses the normal flow of conversation. Q: What's wrong with top-posting? pgpVkKp2rUFlu.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:42:26AM -0500, Dan wrote: Wojciech Puchar([EMAIL PROTECTED])@2008.11.18 12:23:24 +0100: FreeBSD is very good in hardware support now, with most of drivers being very stable and high performance. for now there is no such thing, except ReactOS which is in early alpha state. Have you used, erm... Linux? Both Linux and FreeBSD run pretty much at hardware level. You benchmark either, you'll get very close results in speed and scalability. Both are well optimized. Unix is for servers, Windoze/OSX is for clients. They're much better clients than Unix. Cut and paste still doesn't work well in Unix GUIs. Think about that. Uh . . . what? I'll try pasting something: Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Yep, works great. In fact, I *love* that middle-click paste thing, and on the rare occasion that I find myself sitting down in front of an MS Windows machine, I find myself quickly lamenting the existence of middle-click pasting, and start wondering why MS Windows is such a primitive excuse for a desktop operating system. I don't know where you get the idea that MS Windows is so good at being a client and FreeBSD is so bad at it. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Mike Maples, as quoted by James Gleick: My job is to get a fair share of the software applications market, and to me that's 100 percent. pgpECzQ3hgqPF.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 11:13:40AM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: I read once that: The difference between the lab and the real world is that, in the lab, there is no difference. I wish I had noted the source. The way I'd heard that sentiment was slightly different: In theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they aren't. . . . or something to that effect. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Larry Wall: A script is what you give the actors. A program is what you give the audience. pgpqWQ189sBSL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 10:49:44AM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: Time to buy a new printer. I don't print much from FreeBSD; but the need occasionally arises. Most of my printing is done while using Mac OS X. The Epson Artisan 800 is looking awfully nice; but it's not in the Linux printing database yet (http://openprinting.org/printer_list.cgi). Question: Since Mac OS X uses CUPS, if I share the printer on the Mac, will I need to worry about FreeBSD compatibility of the printer? I only need printing functions (not scan, etc) for the FreeBSD computer. Your best bet for printer compatibility is to ensure that it's available as a network device rather than having to connect to it directly, and that it's a Postscript printer. If you want to get a printer and connect it directly to your Mac, and you're sure it'll work with your Mac, then you should be able to share it with the rest of the network without problems -- as long as it's a Postscript printer. If it isn't, you may have to do some digging to determine whether other computers on the network will be able to use the shared printer at all, including FreeBSD systems. Alas, I know basically nothing about the Epson Artisan 800. I'm happy with my HP laser printer connected directly to the network. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. pgpeTq55kbEGs.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 12:37:21PM -0700, Chad Perrin wrote: The same applies to the X Window System. It sucks. It is laden with various and sundry big problems; annoyances and poor design decisions litter the X Window System. The drawbacks of Luna, Aqua, and Aero are all even worse than those of the X Window System, though, so I still with X. This might be relevant to that, in fact: http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p=650 -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. pgpnChs6HFsF2.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 08:26:36PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: are happy to find that to be true.Give them a hand rather than a kick in the face. Amen to that! This is something I am also asking for. Wojciech you often help others here. Let's keep it this way. Please?! i will do exactly what i'm doing now. no more no less. helping those who ask questions that make sense, and i know the answer (or think i know). And fixing bad statements and bad ideas. like the idea of replacing windows with unix without first learning unix from basics. And the idea that having as much FreeBSD users as possible is a good thing. it is not. I don't think that making having as many FreeBSD users as possible a primary goal is a good idea, to be sure. On the other hand, if we do so only within the constraints of current design philosophy and an attempt to focus more on quality than quantity, having more users *is* a good thing for a number of reasons -- in large part because of the benefits that can be gained from a stronger user base. What we should *not* do is take such a hostile attitude toward potential new users that the user base of FreeBSD ultimately dwindles due to the attrition of time. That seems to be your approach, and I find it quite counterproductive, especially when you couple it with weirdly anti-Unix statements like your continuing insistence that no Unix system can effectively replace MS Windows. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin: The decisions that really matter are made outside the democratic process. pgpykmJ1fIoFI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 08:22:56PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Time to forget this.It is a semantic and religious battle playing hair splitting games with words.It is not a MS clone but it is an MS replacement. If you overwrite your MS-Win with FreeBSD, it completely replaces it. and you get something completely different. FORTUNATELY different. That doesn't change the fact that it *replaced* MS Windows. but - if millions of now-windows users starts switching to FreeBSD, it will quickly become more and more similar. as linux did. Correlation does not imply causation -- just as repeating something many times doesn't make it true. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. pgp8FFoSN189G.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: [OT] printing question
On Tue, Nov 18, 2008 at 02:00:03PM -0600, Andrew Gould wrote: So the bottom line is: Get a postscript printer. They're rather expensive. It may be worth the inconvenience of sharing drive space and printing from the Mac via VNC window. ;-) The reason Postscript printers tend to be expensive is that they tend to be high quality. Only cheap, crappy desktop printers of the sort that people buy for their home MS Windows systems, then replace when they run out of ink because replacement ink cartridges cost more than half the cost of a brand new printer, tend to be incapable of using Postscript. There are exceptions, of course, in the form of very expensive, highly specialized printers that are unsuitable to home or even most office use and don't understand Postscript. . . . but generally speaking, if it doesn't speak Postscript, it's probably a heap of junk anyway. That's my experience, at least. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Naguib Mahfouz: You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. pgpHkkkMQ4gGE.pgp Description: PGP signature
BSD-licensed text utility updates
I've been trying to keep generally aware of where things are with the attempts to port and develop BSD-licensed text processing utilities for FreeBSD: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/ideas/#p-bsdtexttools Apparently, the Google Summer of Code project that tackled the problem met with some success, notably in the area of grep porting and development, as noted on this year's GSOC notifications page: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/summerofcode-2008.html That page contains the following note: If we can accept the regex differencies in grep, it is ready to enter SVN after some thorough testing. Where can I find discussion, or at least updates, on the status of projects like this? Considering its completeness, and the fact that it has been declared ready for inclusion in the base system, I think this is a topic that might deserve some attention, and it certainly piques my interest. I'm similarly interested in other matters such as the license auditing infrastructure project (also mentioned on the GSOC page). If there's a mailing list appropriate to this sort of thing, whether for discussion, development, or just progress announcements, I haven't been able to find it. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Arthur C. Clarke: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. pgp0QW2TxNOVW.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Thu, Nov 20, 2008 at 04:53:03PM +, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: (Forgive the top-posting) Why? Your assertion that linux is both low end unix and low end windows replacement is factually wrong: As a high end unix I think it's earned it's stripes, currently dominating the top 500 supercomputer systems in the world, some no other unix has managed to accomplish this time round. Notably, when compared to freebsd it offers support for virtualisation where bsd is nowhere close to doing, just one example of high end unix feature it provides. As a gui desktop, I'm certain kde is a superior interface to windows in many ways. While I agree that, without some kind of supporting argument, the statement that Linux systems are low end Unix replacements are kind of spurious sounding, I don't think that market share is really an effective metric for determination of the quality of a replacement for a given class of OS. I'm also not sure I see how virtualization makes or breaks the quality of any Unix-like system, or qualifies it as high end. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Zat was zen, dis is tao. http://tao.apotheon.org pgpat2uiW7mAn.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 01:25:24PM -0500, Bob McConnell wrote: On Behalf Of Chad Perrin While I agree that, without some kind of supporting argument, the statement that Linux systems are low end Unix replacements are kind of spurious sounding, I don't think that market share is really an effective metric for determination of the quality of a replacement for a given class of OS. I believe that he forgot to reference this article from ServerWatch. This shows more than a marginal increase in market share. It suggests that Sun and others have good reason to be nervous about their future prospects, and need to find new ways to make money. http://www.serverwatch.com/eur/article.php/3787586 Market share is still not an effective metric for determination of the quality of a replacement for a given class of OS. Your statements and the article to which you linked in no way contradict what I said. Even though the article whose URL you provided does talk about Linux suitability for certain tasks traditionally handled by commercial UNIX systems, market share itself is not a very effective metric except, perhaps, by accident -- because growing market share can indicate any of a number of different potential causes. On the other hand, both Unix and Linux have a long way to go before they can match Microsoft's ease of use on the GUI. I believe the best way to attack that problem is to find a new paradigm to replace the desktop, which is not a great interface model to begin with. I guess that depends on your definition of ease of use. In my little world, ease of use involves the ease, efficiency, and speed of task completion via an interface with which I'm familiar. It seems from what you said that in your little world ease of use means familiarity, since that's really the major win for MS Windows interfaces, to the majority of its users. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Friedrich Nietzche: Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. pgpKqmFGb4VEh.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: FreeBSD and hardware??
On Mon, Dec 01, 2008 at 07:39:39PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: unix is not windows replacements. all of these GUI overlays for which that much noise is heard are not just overlays, but are poorly designed even more poorly than windows. Windows is poorly designed too but at least it's somehow complete. What are you -- a troll? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'. pgpnKFz2J6TBm.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Performance benchmarks pitting FreeBSD against Windows
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 01:09:36PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: a Windows system it's the virtual memory management, with the same amount of RAM Windows swaps a *lot* more. it may be not VM subsystem but memory usage of windoze software. or both. again - it's too different to be benchmarked There's no reason one cannot generate benchmarks comparing the two. You just have to choose your benchmark tasks carefully. Of course, microbenchmarks are usually suspect no matter what systems you're testing -- whether it's FreeBSD vs. MS Windows, OpenBSD vs. Linux 2.6.x, or Ruby 1.9 vs. Python 3.0, there are always ways to arrange your benchmark tests to favor whatever you want to favor. That doesn't change the fact that FreeBSD vs. MS Windows benchmark tests can be every bit as (un)useful as any other benchmark tests. They're not just too different. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth C. Hoare: Two ways of constructing software: (1) make it so simple that there are obviously no bugs, (2) make it so complicated that there are no obvious bugs. Making it simple is far more difficult. pgpO7juZPJTwC.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Performance benchmarks pitting FreeBSD against Windows
On Fri, Dec 05, 2008 at 02:26:50PM +0100, Mel wrote: Well, one can find stories like this of course: http://www.postgis.org/documentation/casestudies/globexplorer/ But I'm sure one can find some of the contrary. It does show the value of the benchmark: Is it economically viable to use configuration X vs Y, and performance is only one factor of the descision. Actually, the only other story that comes immediately to mind of a PostgreSQL vs. Oracle comparison is this one: http://www.enterprisedb.com/about/news_events/press_releases/06_27_07.do . . . so, in my experience at least, stories to the contrary are pretty hard to find. Of course, that seems to be more about PostgreSQL vs. Oracle than FreeBSD vs. MS Windows. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed PDL: http://pdl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Thomas McCauley: The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. pgpHGZdFjXqjl.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 08:29:32AM -0500, Jerry wrote: IMHO, before FreeBSD can make a significant market share improvement, it has to improve its hardware support. NVidia, for one, has expressed a desire to support FreeBSD; however, it needs the FreeBSD organization to improve its basic product, especially in the 64-bit systems, which are the future of computing. Please explain your use of the word improve in this context. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Mediocrity corrupts. Bureaucracy corrupts absolutely. pgpI1UyKLlAty.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 07, 2008 at 07:18:08PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Does anyone know of any recent progress on a 64bit Nvidia Driver? there is mention of progress on this page http://www.nvnews.net/vbulletin/showthread.php?t=41545page=24 most freebsd users don't need 3D at all, or don't need super-high-speed 3D. so simply don't use nvidia/ati That strikes me as short-sighted, narrow-minded, and self-fulfilling. 1. As long as there is not as much support for 3D accelerated graphics with FreeBSD, people who need 3D accelerated graphics will tend to use other OSes more often. 2. The fact that you apparently have some kind of zealous hatred of the idea of FreeBSD on the desktop doesn't mean there are not legitimate uses for FreeBSD on the desktop -- uses that may even include things like 3D accelerated graphics. Hell, I get better performance for WoW using Wine than I do on MS Windows. 3. There are uses for 3D accelerated graphics that don't even include desktop use. Rendering farms come to mind. The more you say Most FreeBSD users don't need 3D at all, so just use something else if you need 3D, and sweep the problem under the rug, the more likely we are to never have a FreeBSD that offers broad, stable support for 3D accelerated graphics. I would like it if you'd stop trying to convince people that my favorite OS shouldn't be improved. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Henry Spencer: Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. pgppp00o6muqI.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:44:23PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: that's the most narrow minded post i've seen here since i'm on this group or your narrow mail reading . As if the only work that can be considered real work is the work you do... The reason why I CAN'T do any serious work on FreeBSD is because it lacks the NVidia drivers (i'm in the film/commercial industry). it's not bells and whistles but drivers. Your whole bells and whistles line of BS started with your assertion that we don't even need fully functional NVIDIA drivers, though. You seem to think that there's no legitimate use for 3D accelerated graphics, for some reason -- and yes, that's pretty damned narrow-minded. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Anonymous quoth: Blind faith is an ironic gift to return to the Creator of human intelligence. pgprtZ4ltc7IQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 12:28:00PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote:
The possibility here is the bells and whistles strangely enough DO work
in tune and without sore lips... FreeBSD could be THAT good.
in bells and whistles windows is best. for those who require it paying a
bit for windows is not a problem.
Those who need to do actual work, we have FreeBSD for example
Bullshit:
http://sob.apotheon.org/?p=335
Please stop trolling.
--
Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
print substr('Just another Perl hacker', 0, -2);
pgprWauSDqJsx.pgp
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Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 02:40:06PM +0100, Julien Cigar wrote: Just to share my point of view : I use FreeBSD only since 6.2, before that I was a long-time Debian user. For the little experience I have with it I must admit that it looks pretty solid and a perfect choice for a server (for proof: I replaced almost all my Debian boxes with FreeBSD, both at work and at home) : That very closely mirrors my own experience; I too moved from long-time Debian GNU/Linux use to FreeBSD circa 6.2. I have no regrets. - on almost all my machines I have problems with CD/DVD drives, mostly things like READ_BIG timeout, etc. I tried almost everything (disabling ACPI, DMA, upgrading the drive BIOS, etc), disabling DMA resolved some problems, but it's still impossible to burn a DVD for example. That boggles my mind -- but then, I remember having even worse problems with the hardware interface to the optical disk drive in a ThinkPad T43 at one point when using Debian GNU/Linux, so I suppose it's not unprecedented. I suspect it's an issue with some nonstandard hardware interface that hasn't been resolved yet. - my mouse (a Logitec MX 300, USB) is still undetected at boot. Every time I have to unplug/plug it after boot. Not a big deal I admit, but boring. I'm surprised to hear you have that issue. Are you, perhaps, using an older version of FreeBSD -- and might this be something fixed in newer releases? I'm just curious, because my experience has been quite the opposite; my mouse and keyboard experience with FreeBSD has actually been better than with Debian GNU/Linux and MS Windows in the past. - USB mass storage plug/unplug sometimes causes system panic. I know that this is a well known bug that require some rearchitecting and that a proper umount has always been the way to umount a drive, but, honestly, you cannot seriously convince someone to use FreeBSD with things like this ... This is actually supposed to be fixed by Tomasz Napierala, with an estimated project completion date of February 2009, according to this announcement: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-announce/2008-November/001214.html - Altough ports are fantastic, building things like OpenOffice or ... is just inhuman, especially when you cannot use -j for building ports (but it's being resolved I think). Of course there are packages, but it's far less friendly to use (and manage) than apt-get/dpkg. I'd like to see management of packages made simpler and easier, without package management getting any further diverged from ports management of course. The unification of package and port management is kind of a must-have feature in my opinion, but surely something can be done about making installing and upgrading from packages simpler and easier without further damaging that unification. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Edmund Burke: Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. pgp3mtM0tFET6.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 06:38:30PM +0300, Ole wrote: Also you can use portupgrade -PP -PP --use-packages-onlyNever use the port even if a package is not avail- able either locally or remotely, although you still have to keep your ports tree up-to-date so that portupgrade can check out what the latest version of each port is. In in some cases re-compiling it better then package usage. For example you may wish for GnomeVFS support by OO, or drop GNOME support and KDE support instead. This function sets in configure by program author and when you working with ports you can play this options I'd love to drop GNOME and KDE support for OO.o, but on my laptop I really don't have the resources to spare for compiling OO.o, so I live with whatever's in the package. Such is life. Actually, I'd love to drop OO.o too, but I haven't gained the level of familiarity with LaTeX yet to do the things I do with OO.o when making invoices. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Sterling Camden: The Church doesn't want people calling for inquisitions. pgpP3lQP7pmxQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 08:32:20PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Please stop trolling. having different opinion than yours isn't trolling. and i WILL NOT stop writing my opinions just because your is different. It's not just that you have a different opinion than me -- it's that every time someone brings up anything related to migration from some other OS to FreeBSD, you basically tell them to go away. This is unproductive, leads to endless argument on the mailing list, and generally makes everyone unhappy. That sounds suspiciously like trolling to me. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] My first programming koan: If a lambda has the ability to access its context, but there isn't any context to access -- is it still a closure? pgpKDRypnRgN7.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 08:46:36PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: instead. This function sets in configure by program author and when you working with ports you can play this options I'd love to drop GNOME and KDE support for OO.o, but on my laptop I really don't have the resources to spare for compiling OO.o, so I live with whatever's in the package. Such is life. simply make your own package somewhere and then use pkg_add Sometimes, that isn't an option. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Georg Hackl: American beer is the first successful attempt at diluting water. pgplTAIp46Vx5.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:23:03PM -0500, michael wrote: I agree. nothing wrong with his posts. the mailing list was never described as a warm, social gather. you want answers, and you get them here. i for one would rather him be abrupt and short. no need for the pomp and circumstance. I have no problem with honest abruptness. What I do have a problem with is patently absurd statements about the superiority of MS Windows for classes of uses for which it is *not* superior, and the claim that such classes of use are somehow bad or unworthy. I'm also rather annoyed by the fact that he persists in making such patently absurd statements in an effort to scare off anyone who might actually become a contributing member of the FreeBSD community even after someone has provided evidence to the contrary -- and seems to make it a policy to utterly ignore any evidence that contradicts his own narrow view of the world so he *can* persist in being a fork in the eye for anyone that is interested in FreeBSD but hasn't yet really gotten familiar with it. There's a big difference between people who ask RTFM-worthy questions and people who ask *good* questions that don't measure up to his standards of someone who should use FreeBSD. I'm tired of reading shit about how anything that could stand to be improved in FreeBSD is just catering to people who are better off using MS Windows instead, about how anyone using MS Windows should just stay in Microsoft's world and never bother trying to improve their computing environments, and so on. When someone other than him elects to be helpful, his interjections a dozen posts into a thread about how the person asking the question should just fuck off and die, and MS Windows is better anyway, are pretty damned counterproductive. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Marvin Minsky: . . . anyone could learn Lisp in 1 day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take 3 days. pgp5Ucwjyt5tU.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 01:24:19PM -0800, prad wrote: On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 12:12:19 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: Please stop trolling. chad, i don't think this is fair to wojciech. he is expressing his feelings and considerable knowledge about an os that he doesn't want to go the way of certain others. i find he writes concisely and backs up his statements. His manner of expressing his feelings seems to be to try to crush others' beneath his heel. Try examining the definition of the word fair before you use it in the future. nor do i think there is anything wrong with the concept that if you don't find what you're looking for here, look elsewhere. that's not 'driving people away'. that's encouraging them to figure out what they want and get it where it is available - which is precisely what he and many others have done by going to freebsd. If he just said If this doesn't suit your needs, try something else, I wouldn't have a problem. Telling people patent falsehoods about how FreeBSD simply can't do what other OSes can, even in cases where FreeBSD can do them *better* than those other OSes, in an attempt to drive away anyone that might be looking at FreeBSD as a possible migration path, is rather suboptimal in my opinion, however. You talk about how many people have gone where they can get what they want by migrating to FreeBSD, completely ignoring the fact that about half a dozen times in the last year (wild guess on frequency) he has done his level best to dissuade people from even finding out whether FreeBSD is where they can get what they want. What kind of cruel, sadistic bastard tries so hard to prevent people from bettering their circumstances like that? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: Perl is, in intent, a cleaned up and summarized version of that wonderful semi-natural language known as 'Unix'. pgp0aWBszyB8X.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 01:46:22PM -0800, prad wrote: looking further we see: ... As a result, FreeBSD may be found across the Internet, in the operating system of core router products, running root name servers, hosting major web sites, and as the foundation for widely used desktop operating systems. so this would seem to clarify specific uses. the last bit about desktops is certainly true - freebsd is an excellent foundation for any desktop use, but that doesn't necessarily mean you get all the goodies thrown in. Indeed. FreeBSD is, in terms of its architecture and design philosophy, the best desktop system I've ever used. I would like it to continue to improve as a desktop system -- and, as such, I am vehemently opposed to anyone that suggests that for desktop bells and whistles everybody should just fuck off to Microsoft-land. I certainly don't want to sacrifice the things that make FreeBSD great, not only for servers but for my laptop as well. We don't have to sacrifice those things to improve support for common desktop task functionality such as better 3D accelerated graphics support. My mind boggles at the protestations I see against improving such support. Refusing to support such things will not make FreeBSD better: it will only make FreeBSD more limited. Can we stop trying to dissuade people from improving FreeBSD, and from advocating for improvements? I don't see any reason we can't try to talk hardware vendors into providing better specs so better drivers can be produced, nor any reason we can't welcome people who want to use Compiz Fusion and run currently popular games on their FreeBSD desktops into the community. We don't have to adopt Ubuntu's sudo-only administrative model, decide bugs aren't important to fix, or adopt a more monolithic approach to system design that would reduce the performance and stability of FreeBSD, in order to work on better driver support and desktop usability. in an interview with a german magazine many years ago, bill gates plainly stated that microsoft wasn't too interested in fixing bugs. they were far more interested in providing the stuff the customers want. while that might seem to some like good business sense, it assumes that the 'customer is always right' (which is really another way of saying that the customer is always ripe for the picking). i don't think that's where we'd want freebsd to go. I certainly don't want FreeBSD to go there -- but that's not the same as wanting FreeBSD to offer better support for common desktop functionality like 3D accelerated graphics. Why does everybody seem so eager to assume that FreeBSD isn't, and shouldn't be, a good desktop system? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Paul Graham: SUVs are gross because they're the solution to a gross problem. (How to make minivans look more masculine.) pgpPe1YHrzhpY.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 04:47:23PM -0800, prad wrote: On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:11:25 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: His manner of expressing his feelings seems to be to try to crush others' beneath his heel. Try examining the definition of the word fair before you use it in the future. ok, chad, here's what you find on dictionary.com that are relevant: 1. free from bias, dishonesty, or injustice: a fair decision; a fair judge. 2. legitimately sought, pursued, done, given, etc.; proper under the rules: a fair fight. My point exactly -- you rush to his defense, making statements that seem intended to skewer me for things he has done. I don't consider that the epitome of fairness. ok no one is really free from bias when it comes to these things. as shaw (i think) once wrote an unbiased opinion isn't worth a damn. i do not think you have provided specific evidence that he has been dishonesty or unjust ... much less so that he has even been incorrect. Let's take, as an example, the link I provided in response to a comment of his that prompted a couple people to defend him. I've given him that URL three or four times in the last year, in direct response to some statement he has made suggesting that FreeBSD desktops simply cannot compare with MS Windows desktops in terms of flashiness, bells and whistles, et cetera. Each time, I have very clearly stated my disagreement with his estimation of FreeBSD as being thoroughly beaten by MS Windows in that area, with that URL provided as evidence to back my claim. Each time, he has completely ignored what I said and the URL I provided. He keeps coming back to make exactly the same sort of claims he has before, utterly failing to addresses arguments against his hand-waving statements without any logical or evidenciary support. Nobody else has bothered to dispute what I've said, either. In absence of, at *minimum*, some half-assed attempt to make a case against what I've provided, I will continue to regard his repetition of disputed, unsupported statements to be dishonest or at least wildly inaccurate. That's generally how *reasonable* people treat hand-waving arguments like his, with no logical or evidenciary support -- nor even personal, anecdotal support -- when they are disputed by a counterargument *with support*. Would you prefer I just accept his statements, which fly in the face of my own experience, even after he fails to answer supported disputations of their content, just because it's him and you say he has to be right about everything? Even if his statement itself isn't dishonest, his unwillingness to either back away from it or offer a counterargument when it is effectively disputed is dishonest. He pretends there is no other side to the matter, no other valid opinion, yet resolutely refuses to acknowledge such other side arguments when they arise. I use an example of my own statements only because I'm most familiar with my own statements -- not because others do not exist. and as far as 'sticking to the rules', he hasn't abused anyone from any of the posts i recall reading, so within the terms of conduct of an email list, i don't find your picturesque expression 'crush others beneath his heel' legitimate. I guess you haven't been reading very closely. If he just said If this doesn't suit your needs, try something else, I wouldn't have a problem. Telling people patent falsehoods about how FreeBSD simply can't do what other OSes can, even in cases where FreeBSD can do them *better* than those other OSes, in an attempt to drive away anyone that might be looking at FreeBSD as a possible migration path, is rather suboptimal in my opinion, however. it would be suboptimal, if it were true. however, i really can't recall anything of the sort, chad - ever. and certainly not in this thread. i also don't understand why you think he'd be even motivated to do this. of what possible interest could it be for him to drive others away from freebsd? Oh, poppycock. Go back and read the very post to which I responded when I called him a troll. Notice how he says things that seem carefully calculated to make people think Oh, this FreeBSD thing obviously sucks as a desktop OS. Take off the blinders. I have no idea why he'd be motivated to do that. I'm not him. All I know is what I've seen him do increasingly often over the last year. If you want me to speculate, the best I can offer is that maybe he thinks keeping the community from growing too much will help keep his advice more exceptional within a smaller niche, or perhaps he really does think that good desktop functionality and good server functionality cannot coexist (as he certainly seems to think) -- so driving away anyone that wants to make the move to FreeBSD as a desktop OS might be a good way to keep it improving as a server OS in his mind. In fact, he has as much as said so in the past, though not in so many words
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 05:00:11PM -0800, prad wrote: On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:28:13 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: Can we stop trying to dissuade people from improving FreeBSD, and from advocating for improvements? i don't think that's really what is happening, chad. i think there is just some disagreement as to what is considered an improvement. So . . . are you saying that increased support for 3D accelerated graphics is not an improvement, and should therefore not be considered a worthy goal? Why does everybody seem so eager to assume that FreeBSD isn't, and shouldn't be, a good desktop system? from what i see, that isn't the concern. the concern specifically seems to be twofold: 1. that freebsd not lose its integrity in an attempt to support certain wishes of certain desktop users This is completely orthogonal to the question of whether people who express a desire for better support for desktop functionality should be excoriated publicly on this mailing list, and spanked for having the audacity to want to migrate from MS Windows to FreeBSD for use as a desktop OS. 2. that desktop usage is possibly not a primary goal and therefore should not detract from development in the other areas I agree that desktop usage should not take priority over more fundamental quality concerns in FreeBSD development. Telling people to stick it in their ear when they say it would be nice to have Flash support is not related to the ability to prioritize development goals, though. i think it is always an excellent idea to talk hardware vendors into providing better specs so better drivers can be produced. this is something the openbsd group also advocated strongly for and it can only be good for all opensource (assuming it be done properly). however, i think the concern your opposition has is that the wishes of the desktop contigent not control the reins of development of an os we all find to be excellent ... so far. Desire for better desktop functionality doesn't have to equate to wanting desktop-oriented development to control the reins of development for the whole system. Why the hell do you seem to think it does? Hell, I think the more server-oriented development philosophy of FreeBSD is actually a big part of the reason it works so well as a desktop OS! Maintaining a more server-oriented development philosophy in *no way* precludes giving some attention to strictly desktop-related functionality, though. Pretending the two are incompatible goals, as a few notable people here seem to want to do, is counterproductive in my opinion. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Alan Perlis: LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. pgppBS10OuO8A.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
from FreeBSD when it might be the best option for them is cruel and sadistic. I used hyperbole; he said things that seem calculated to draw flames. on the other hand, some of the words you have used (hyperbole notwithstanding), do ignite the fire - it is likely we wouldn't be engaged in this discussion if more appropriate words were used. You should pay attention the next time he tries to justify his opposition to letting people learn about FreeBSD as an alternative to MS Windows some time -- specifically, to the appropriateness of the words he uses. I'm done trying. I guess, when someone offers a supported argument, he simply ignores it -- and therefore doesn't have to admit to having been effectively disputed. chad, i think it's great that you are such an opensource advocate. i think there is little doubt wojecieh is too. i happen to agree with him on this freebsd matter though and i haven't found your arguments convince me otherwise. nor have i found some of your comments about him either accurate or appropriate. perhaps, some others feel the other way around because of your posts. This has nothing to do with being an opensource [sic] advocate, and everything to do with someone spreading unsubstantiated fear, uncertainty, and doubt, flying in the face of counterarguments without even acknowledging they exist. Feel free to disagree with me -- and good work, having the common decency to tell me you disagree. Hopefully, if someone offers reasonable disputation of what you say, you'll address it somehow rather than just repeating the same thing the way he did. . . . though it would be nice if you'd stop defending people for behaving that way, as well as avoiding acting that way yourself. i think you and i have exchanged enough information on this topic, so if you are done trying, i won't continue this beyond this post since i think we are both possibly polluting the list at this stage. (if you do wish to continue discussing, you are welcome to email me privately.) Whoops, I typed up this entire response before I read the end of your email -- and it's typed up in a manner intended for public consumption. When I said I was done trying, it was within the context of exactly what was said at that point in your email -- and not as a reference to the concept of talking to you at all. If I find I have more to say, I'll send it off-list, as you suggest. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] My first programming koan: If a lambda has the ability to access its context, but there isn't any context to access -- is it still a closure? pgpCVPCNiTNW6.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 11:45:20PM -0600, Tyson Boellstorff wrote: On Thursday 11 December 2008 19:58:14 Chad Perrin wrote: On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 05:00:11PM -0800, prad wrote: On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 17:28:13 -0700 i don't think that's really what is happening, chad. i think there is just some disagreement as to what is considered an improvement. So . . . are you saying that increased support for 3D accelerated graphics is not an improvement, and should therefore not be considered a worthy goal? Not so much considered 'unworthy' as it is a balancing of limited resources. If I was a hardware programmer, had unlimited time, beer, and cheese dip, I'd add everything just because I could. I don't think anyone said anything about taking development effort away from, for instance, the network virtualization project to put into achieving better 3D accelerated graphics -- just that it would be nice if we had better support for 3D accelerated graphics. One need not entirely write off the notion of putting more effort into one thing to assure that we don't cease putting effort into another. One of the great things about open source development is that, often, more development talent can be found for new projects from people just idling around the periphery. It would be cool if there was a way to ensure that all foo items would be supported. However, even then, high performance video would lag. It is often proprietary, and many vendors simply won't publish their specs and need a reverse engineer to get any support at all. You can't force them to do it, and in the case of an open source OS, they may not want the world+dog to see their code for any number of reasons. nVidia is a rare exception, and even they are not going to put FreeBSD support at the top of their list. What does that have to do with whether or not it's a good idea to solicit graphics and driver developers who aren't already doing something to work on it, if they're so inclined? Long story short, there's room for all types. Enjoy the diversity. Fix what you can. Avoid the problems you can. Use the appropriate tools for their best purposes. Judging by the responses of some people on this list, there *isn't* room for all types. That's my problem with this whole mess. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Georg Hackl: American beer is the first successful attempt at diluting water. pgpZdnKLZb4aN.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Thu, Dec 11, 2008 at 09:50:36PM -0800, prad wrote: On Thu, 11 Dec 2008 18:58:14 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: So . . . are you saying that increased support for 3D accelerated graphics is not an improvement, and should therefore not be considered a worthy goal? no. access to hardware probably is a worthy goal, however, you need people to write the software and it's up to the freebsd team(s) to determine if 3d graphics is or is not worthy, isn't it? I don't recall anyone saying I'm with such-and-such a FreeBSD development team, and these are the reasons we aren't going to do anything about that at this time:. All I recall is several people cropping up and saying the equivalent of If we work on that stuff, FreeBSD will just become MS Windows, and it'll suck. I disagree with that estimation -- but if someone wants to offer an actually reasonable argument, I'm all ears (or eyes, since this is a textual discussion). This is completely orthogonal to the question of whether people who express a desire for better support for desktop functionality should be excoriated publicly on this mailing list, and spanked for having the audacity to want to migrate from MS Windows to FreeBSD for use as a desktop OS. this is a pretty nice list and i haven't found much spanking going on here. The spanking I have seen largely seems to focus on this particular area, and is mostly championed by one person, though. I guess I find it even more offensive because it's an exception rather than the rule here, and I rather like the otherwise helpful spirit of this community. I agree that desktop usage should not take priority over more fundamental quality concerns in FreeBSD development. Telling people to stick it in their ear when they say it would be nice to have Flash support is not related to the ability to prioritize development goals, though. i agree that telling people to stick it in their ear is not nice, but i don't recall anyone doing so. unfortunately, if i ask for evidence regarding this, you'll probably just tell me to RTFML as you did in your other reply. It was a summary and paraphrase -- I don't recall anyone literally using the phrase stick it in your ear. Please try to follow the discussion, rather than being diverted by paraphrases, since I don't have the whole mailing list archive memorized. Desire for better desktop functionality doesn't have to equate to wanting desktop-oriented development to control the reins of development for the whole system. Why the hell do you seem to think it does? i don't know why you think that's what i think. what i said was that was a concern. i certainly do know that in other areas (computer education for instance), user convenience has destroyed technical know-how (specifically, at some schools when the graphic interface emerged in the 80s, word-processing dominated programming and the some schools lost their thinkers). microsoft's catering to user desires has produced some rather inferior software too. I think that's what you think because control the reins of development was a verbatim quote of what *you* said. I don't see greater core functionality and better driver support is just superficial user convenience. It's not like I'm suggesting FreeBSD should violate privilege separation so people don't have to worry about the difference between user accounts and administrative accounts, or that it should make booting into KDE without a password the default behavior on boot so people don't have to worry about that icky CLI and memorize passwords. I'm not even suggesting that FreeBSD should adopt the MS Windows default, automatic wireless network roaming behavior. I'm just trying to suggest that opposition to discussing whether the resources exist to address some driver issues is kind of silly (for instance). may be it doesn't have to be that way, but often there is a price to be paid for 'convenience'. There is, indeed, a price to be paid for (poorly planned) attempts to improve convenience. Luckily, that's not what I'm suggesting -- nor is it what everybody else who would like an improved GUI environment is suggesting. Hell, I think the more server-oriented development philosophy of FreeBSD is actually a big part of the reason it works so well as a desktop OS! Maintaining a more server-oriented development philosophy in *no way* precludes giving some attention to strictly desktop-related functionality, though. perhaps, but if you have a server-oriented philosophy, why would you give much attention to desktop-related functionality? More server-oriented does not mean exclusive of desktop. It's not like I said it should be strictly, exclusively server-oriented, and screw those people who use FreeBSD as a desktop system. i recall on the openbsd elist a couple of years ago people asking what wm is best. most of the answers went something like
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 02:44:27PM -0500, Robert Huff wrote: michael writes: why don't we all just say it. freebsd sucks because it isn't cp/m. CP/? Poser. I want my TWENEX back. :-) What do you have against ITS? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Paul Graham: Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts. pgpG5Kt3VIZ0N.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 07:15:35PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: cropping up and saying the equivalent of If we work on that stuff, FreeBSD will just become MS Windows, and it'll suck. I disagree with because linux got exactly that way and it sucks now. Are you reading this, prad? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Henry Spencer: Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. pgpF2wqkD7i31.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 11:07:45AM -0800, prad wrote: On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 11:11:48 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: I don't recall anyone saying I'm with such-and-such a FreeBSD development team, and these are the reasons we aren't going to do anything about that at this time:. i don't either, but these development teams do exist: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/index.html and so does a mechanism for initiating projects: If you feel that a project is missing, please send the URL and a short description (3-10 lines) to w...@freebsd.org. That is a much, much better response to questions about improving desktop-oriented functionality than the sort of thing I've been seeing lately from certain anti-lots-of-stuff people on this list: because linux got exactly that way and it sucks now. That's not what I'd call a productive response, nor is it well supported. It doesn't serve as a viable argument -- it's just obstinate refusal to entertain the idea that functionality isn't bad just because its most obvious use is desktop-oriented. and i guess as tyson explained there needs to be a balancing of limited resources. There must always be such a balance -- but I don't see how that in any way prevents us from discussing whether the resources exist. On the other hand, their statements *do* imply that *my* position is illegitimate in some way i don't think so. it's more along the lines of we don't need this in light of the priorities. Actually, it's more like this: because linux got exactly that way and it sucks now. however, i do think michael powell makes a very good point about setting a very dangerous precedent by ending up allowing third parties to have the ability to dictate to the devs what code goes into FreeBSD? I don't think anything I said suggests we let third parties dictate anything. Please point out where I suggested such a thing. We just need to make sure that we don't confuse listening to suggestions and discussing their viability, and their technical pros and cons, with taking orders from MS Windows users. Some people don't know that, and are basically told to go away by some people when they bring it up. Still other people suggest alternate approaches to fixing the problem, and are also basically told to go away, when a more appropriate response would be to say I think you should talk to the people at the swfdec and gnash projects about that, in most cases. ok so here's a solution. whenever someone tells people to go away (i don't think it has been done quite that way, but i see little point in going into that here), surely others can point to those who are in the appropriate projects. that way you have the choice of pursuing the matter or seeking an alternative os. Maybe not quite that way, but the implication has, at times, been unmistakable. Of course, if someone points people at the appropriate venue for discussing something *after* someone else has said FOAD, it may already be too late. My preference would be for people who don't have something productive to say, who only want to scare people away, to keep it to themselves. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth H. L. Mencken: In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. pgpeuPKS3TUsH.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 01:35:46PM -0500, Michael Powell wrote: Chad Perrin wrote: On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 12:05:20PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: So . . . are you saying that increased support for 3D accelerated graphics is not an improvement, and should therefore not be considered a worthy goal? full support of open hardware standards is an requirement. support for closed hardware standards isn't important. I disagree. I believe, rather, that support for closed hardware specs isn't *as* important -- but is still at least somewhat important. My reservation to the 3D driver thing is it is setting a very dangerous precedent if the solution involves allowing a third party commercial enterprise to dictate features FreeBSD must include before they will support it. I agree with you on that matter. Third parties like commercial hardware vendors should not be *dictating* FreeBSD design. I understand wanting to take a careful approach to working with hardware vendors, particularly when they make such demands. I just don't think that one hardware vendor saying something like that is a good reason to abandon all hope of 3D accelerated graphics support beyond what's already there. In this case with NVidia and the amd64 3D driver let's say for sake of argument the developers decide we want the amd64 3D driver so let's go ahead and add in abc_function() and xyz_function(). Later the situation is repeated with ATI mandating that abc_function() or xyz_function() must be altered to ATI's specs to get ATI 3D acceleration. Now you have two commercial companies using FreeBSD as the mud puddle in a tug of war game. Do we really want third parties to have the ability to dictate to the devs what code goes into FreeBSD? I have doubts that this is a good path. No, we don't. When did anyone say otherwise? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth McCloctnick the Lucid: The first rule of magic is simple. Don't waste your time waving your hands and hopping when a rock or a club will do. pgpOQgbBYsaLg.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 03:02:28PM -0500, Jerry wrote: On Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:32:59 +0100 (CET) Wojciech Puchar woj...@wojtek.tensor.gdynia.pl wrote: NVidia MUST INCLUDE full documentation of their hardware. this is normal - hardware manufacturer produces hardware, programmers do make support for it. what is common today isn't normal. I honestly have no idea what you are trying to communicate here. I think he's trying to say that open source drivers would be preferable, and to develop them we'd need the hardware specs so we'd have a target toward which to develop drivers. Of course, preferable is my choice of term -- he seems to be more of the opinion that anything that isn't strictly open source should just be shunned, out of hand. While it would be nice if that was a practical option, it isn't really, at this point. NVidia produces both the hardware and drivers for same. It requested additions/changes to the basic FBSD system to enable their product to be fully functional. Changes that it seems other manufacturers would also need. At least four things need to be clarified: 1. Would the requested changes have a negative effect on system design in some way? 2. Would working on making those changes divert important resources from other, perhaps more important, projects? 3. Are the changes the same as what other hardware vendors would need before they could fully support FreeBSD, or are they different -- possibly even contradictory? If the latter, we need to consider whether such contradictions can be worked around without degrading the stability and performance characteristics of the system, and see what impact such work-arounds would have on the answer to question 2. 4. Is there any way we can talk them into helping us work on fully functional open source drivers, as AMD (which bought ATI) has promised to do for the Linux community? I don't know the answers to any of those four questions -- in part because discussion never gets past the No! You'll destroy FreeBSD if you try to support that hardware! stage of discussion. Now, if FBSD has no intention of working with other hardware and/or software manufacturers/authors, maybe it should just post a big KEEP OUT sign on its web page. I seriously doubt that NVidia, or any other manufacturer is about to divulge trade secrets or patented information. What point would there be in that anyway? It is certainly not necessary. What developer in his/her right mind would be interested in making their product usable on a FBSD system if they knew that they would have to divulge all of their trade secrets, etc. Actually, patents are publicly documented by definition -- we're just not *allowed* to use it, once it has been patented, without permission. The sort of thing they don't want to divulge is trade secrets, which you meantioned -- not patents, which you also mentioned. For some reason, though, some hardware vendors seem inclined to use patents as an excuse for keeping secrets, which never made much sense to me. IANAL, though I read about the law from time to time. Market share increases by making your product more accessible and usable by a larger group of users. If FBSD wants to remain a 'niche' product with limited support for third party products, then the question of why FBSD is not more popular with hardware vendors has been answered. That's exactly what some people want -- though it's not a universal FreeBSD goal, obviously. -- Quoth Reginald Braithwaite: Nor is it as easy as piling more features on regardless of how well they fit or whether people will actually use them. Otherwise Windows would have 97% of the market and OS X 3%. (Oh wait.) pgpoPJt7c9GiO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 08:00:45AM +, Glyn Millington wrote: Jerry McAllister jerr...@msu.edu writes: But, we can _gently_ (it hasn't always been so gentle) teach newbies that the list is meant for something higher than just repeatedly ragging on why isn't FreeBSD more like MS or RHEL or whatever. Or even why isn't FreeBSD more like FreeBSD used to be back in the day? As a newcomer to FreeBSD (who will never be a programmer or serious sysadmin) I'm grateful for the firm but fair approach taken here by most people, for the toleration of my occasional inanities, and for helpful answers. I'm also grateful to Chad for helping me look at again at Compiz-fusion - I prefer fvwm myself, but CF IS gorgeous, no doubt about it, and my eleven year old thinks its cool :-) Thanks for expressing your appreciation. I don't have any interest in using Compiz Fusion in my day to day life, either, but it sure is an eye opener and fun to look at every once in a while. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth James Madison: If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. pgp8Rsd8YE1Is.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:22:15AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: There is _nothing_ that is inherently server oriented about the main FreeBSD tree, and it hasn't split to anything of the sort. exactly! FreeBSD is unix oriented! everything else depends on what you install. that's why it would be good to finally introduce moderation on that list - to cut off 95% of traffic that is not about FreeBSD. Moderation, like all bureaucracy and oversight, a chainsaw -- not a scalpel. One should always be wary of its use where even the slightest error might result in significant loss of value. Interestingly, my random signature generator seems to have something to say about this topic as well. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Jon Postel, RFC 761: [B]e conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. pgpWR0TVKtkqX.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ad
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 04:15:02PM -0500, michael wrote: after reading all these posts, i've still come up with this answer after looking .. freebsd - the power to serve the motto isn't the power to serve and run Far Cry That's about the weakest damned argument I've seen in a long time. Also . . . it appears that, after reading all these posts, you've forgotten how to crop quotes. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Power corrupts. The command line corrupts absolutely. pgp6bDvxFTlAz.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: ad
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:35:33PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: because linux got exactly that way and it sucks now. That's not what I'd call a productive response, nor is it well supported. what kind of productivity to you request from such topic. it doesn't have to be productive. it's just fact. Saying it doesn't make it so. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] O'Rourke's Circumcision Precept: You can take 10 percent off the top of anything. pgpSWZXz0mfFZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 01:26:36PM -0800, Brian Whalen wrote: michael wrote: has anyone stopped at all during this discussion and considered what you're arguing about? you're all complaining about a SERVER os that doesn't have an nvidia driver for its 64bit implementation and Wojciech. I mean seriously, has this helped anything at all? is ranting on here about those two things going to change 8.0 to be the next best gaming console? no. if you want to use freebsd on your desktop with 3D you can. just run i386. but this entire thread has gone down hill from the OP, and it is nonsense. you get a few more registers with 64bit and some more ram, big deal. show me a gaming console that needs more than four gigs of ram. its not a priority and it shouldn't be. this is a server class operating system that you CAN use on your desk if wanted. even linux in all its glory with an nvidia 64bit driver isn't all that great at gaming, i'm sorry its just not. its not that great with 3D modeling either(in house and proprietary software like maya do not count). It is a great server OS. Perhaps some would like it to be a better desktop OS? PC BSD not good enough for some I suppose? You could always get a Mac and run the NIX underneath it when needed. I like FreeBSD more than PC-BSD as a desktop OS, personally. I don't like the do it our way mentality of these user friendly desktop oriented OSes. What I want more of is functionality -- not featuritis. So, no . . . PC-BSD isn't good enough for my purposes, because it's serving someone else's purposes entirely. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Henry Spencer: Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. pgpjUWMicCiuq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 10:46:03PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: I mean seriously, has this helped anything at all? no. all i want is to stop all stupid topics about: - KDE/Gnome/other crap (or great things for somebody) BECAUSE IT'S NOT PART OF FREEBSD. FreeBSD has nothing to this, except KDE/Gnome/whatever can be run on it Isn't discussion of getting KDE/GNOME/whatever working *with* FreeBSD a FreeBSD topic? - support of flash in Opera/Firefox/Whatever again BECAUSE WWW BROWSER ARE NOT PART OF FREEBSD. Isn't getting Flash working *with* FreeBSD (and browser of choice) a FreeBSD topic? - support of new/hot (literally)/super/extra graphics cards from NVidia. BECAUSE Xorg IS NOT PART OF FREEBSD. Isn't getting X.org working *with* FreeBSD (with a particular graphics adapter) a FreeBSD topic? While IMHO full graphics support (graphics support, not GUI) should be part of kernel as driver, it isn't. Isn't that, too, a FreeBSD topic -- whether graphics support should be addressed as part of the FreeBSD base system's scope? As NVidia card Xorg module does need some kernel wrapper (no idea why) - then there is nothing wrong for interested people to write it as ADD ON/PORT. - asking about bloat level, visual apperance comparision etc. between FreeBSD with KDE and Windoze. because KDE ARE NOT PART OF FREEBSD, and FreeBSD on it's own doesn't have (fortunately) any desktop environment so it can't be compared. Isn't FreeBSD + $foo a FreeBSD topic? if someone like to compare KDE with windoze - OK but NOT THIS GROUP! KDE is not an operating system and -- despite jokes to the contrary -- installing MS Windows on a computer does indeed give one an operating system. It takes something like FreeBSD, in addition to KDE, to have a valid OS+GUI comparison with MS Windows. SO - please just stop ALL NTG topics here. this group really lacks moderator. not someone that will remove posts he considers lame but all that is off topic. Off topic=not about FreeBSD OS. I'm amazed that you seem to think that making FreeBSD do what one wants it to do isn't a FreeBSD topic. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Paul Graham: Real ugliness is not harsh-looking syntax, but having to build programs out of the wrong concepts. pgpd2poBdaNfb.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 09:35:59PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: NVidia MUST INCLUDE full documentation of their hardware. this is normal - hardware manufacturer produces hardware, programmers do make support for it. what is common today isn't normal. I honestly have no idea what you are trying to communicate here. exactly what i wrote. the problem is that people like You (and millions others) are willing to buy product without any documentation. You may find this surprising, but sometimes circumstances lead people to make purchases of total package products rather than building something piecemeal or being able to specify what goes into a purchase at a very fine-grained level. Laptop purchases in particular suffer the problem of tending to be preconfigured package deals -- and sometimes you have to compromise on getting fully documented hardware with open specs in order to meet other requirements that are more critical to your immediate needs. This may especially be a problem for people who need a known-good physical interface to stave off repetitive stress injury (for example). Then again, judging by some of your statements, you probably feel that laptops should never be used with FreeBSD unless they've been repurposed as file servers. if you think they do this to hide their hardware secrets you are wrong. See x86 instruction set - does it reveal how Intel or Amd made their processor so fast? no! They do this to hide their hardware faults that way - that's the true reason they do this. With new hardware produced every year it MUST be buggy and certainly there are thousands of hardware bugs. with secret drivers - they can easily hide them. AFAIK at least half of their driver code are to do workaround of their hardware bugs. I rather suspect that a much stronger, and more common, reason for obstinate refusal to open specs is the short-sightedness and general ignorance of daycoders and pointy-haired bosses -- all of whom think Java is the best programming language around because that's what most programmers use and have some vague, unsupported (but stubborn) notion that secrets are good for business. At least it *seems* they all think so. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] A: It reverses the normal flow of conversation. Q: What's wrong with top-posting? pgpDfzZYrLeoO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 10:33:40AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: that's why it would be good to finally introduce moderation on that list - to cut off 95% of traffic that is not about FreeBSD. Moderation, like all bureaucracy and oversight, a chainsaw -- not a scalpel. One should always be wary of its use where even the slightest error might result in significant loss of value. you may be right. moderation (censorship) on country or so level is just bad (TM). No -- at *any* level: Moderation is, like all bureaucracy and oversight, a chainsaw -- not a scalpel. One should always be wary of its use where even the slightest error might result in significant loss of value. I'm not saying moderation is always bad. I'm saying one should always be wary of it were error can result in damage to overall value. I'll provide a technical example, as opposed to a social example, so maybe you'll be able to understand my point. When creating firewall rules, the logical and safe way to do it is to first deny all traffic, then create rules to specificallfy allow only the traffic you want -- in the general case, at least. If and when you run across need for something else to be allowed through, add it to the exceptions to the default deny policy. False positives (i.e., things that are denied entry or exit through the firewall) are generally not a big problem, because you can just change the ruleset and try again. When creating spam filter rules, priorities are a little different. In the general case, if you have a default deny policy with exception-based rulesets, you will suffer significant problems. This is because false positives can be much more damaging to your priorities, since receiving an email is not something you can just try again in many cases. Important emails may be sent unsolicited, and you may never know they were sent if you don't receive them because your spam filter was overzealous in its identification of emails. It is because of this elevated level of damage caused by false positives in spam filtering that third-party blacklists and strict heuristic spam identification can prove quite suboptimal. Introducing a heuristic filter to a mailing list -- and human moderation is exactly that: a heuristic filter -- can cause the same kind of problem with false positives as a heuristic filter for personal email spam management. and what i ask is not to just dump out people asking about what's program like photoshop for FreeBSD, but creating list group for that (freebsd-softw...@... or freebsd-progr...@...) and redirecting them there! Actually, my take on the list name freebsd-questions is that it's for howto questions related to FreeBSD -- not that it's specifically, and only, for questions about the FreeBSD Base System. In much the same manner that there are a lot of mailing lists for questions about Linux that deal with much more than just the Linux kernel, I don't think anyone in a position to make such demands of the community has clarified questions about FreeBSD to be limited, in intent, to questions about the FreeBSD Base System. I look at the freebsd-questions information page: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions . . . and I don't see anything saying If your question does not pertain directly, and solely, to the Base System, you should not ask it on this list. In fact, if that *was* the rule, this list would probably only get something like two questions in a five month period on average. Most of them would just be repeats, probably mostly related to how to use csup. Is that what you want -- a list so restrictive and low-traffic as to be almost pointless? and leave freebsd-questions for QUESTIONS ABOUT FREEBSD As far as I can tell, that's *exactly* what this list is -- if you assume FreeBSD is more than the Base System, and includes things like the peripheral projects associated with it, and its users. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Naguib Mahfouz: You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. pgpCNvTivB7gH.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 01:48:02PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-questions To unsubscribe, send any mail to freebsd-questions-unsubscr...@freebsd.org I think too much of this discussion is OT, maybe it's time to go in freebsd-c...@? indeed. with this and other non-freebsd topics You, yourself, spawn this kind of digression into off-topicness every now and then. Perhaps *you* should reserve some of *your* comments for freebsd-chat, too. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Mike Maples, as quoted by James Gleick: My job is to get a fair share of the software applications market, and to me that's 100 percent. pgpHgDE3lWFMC.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 10:46:55AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: I honestly have no idea what you are trying to communicate here. exactly what i wrote. the problem is that people like You (and millions others) are willing to buy product without any documentation. You may find this surprising, but sometimes circumstances lead people to make purchases of total package products rather than building something there are products for them. In other words, your answer seems to be: We don't want users who like FreeBSD, but want to use it on a laptop. FreeBSD should never be used on a laptop. I'd say I can safely ignore you, knowing that's your attitude, if it weren't for the fact that a lot of other people won't know that down the line, and you may permanently damage the FreeBSD project by chasing off potential contributors. Is there any way I can get you to stop being such a contentious trojan horse of an enemy to the FreeBSD project? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] They always say that when life gives you lemons you should make lemonade. I always wonder -- isn't the lemonade going to suck if life doesn't give you any sugar? pgps0kWIWROek.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 08:37:09AM -0800, Charlie Kester wrote: On Sat 13 Dec 2008 at 01:44:03 PST Chad Perrin wrote: I rather suspect that a much stronger, and more common, reason for obstinate refusal to open specs is the short-sightedness and general ignorance of daycoders and pointy-haired bosses -- all of whom think Java is the best programming language around because that's what most programmers use and have some vague, unsupported (but stubborn) notion that secrets are good for business. At least it *seems* they all think so. There's no need to impute any insidious or lazy motive to them. If they can sell their product without documenting any API's, they will tend to do so, as a way of cutting costs and thus increasing their profits. What about that isn't either insidious or lazy? As for their obstinate refusal, I think they often have a reasonable fear that if they do provide documentation, it will create an ongoing demand for support. No matter how much effort you put into documentation, there always seem to be some questions you haven't answered, and people will be pestering you for the answers. More costs! But once you've opened the door by publishing the documentation, it's hard to close it gracefully. So they probably figure it's better to just say no at the outset. I think that fear is, in fact, *unreasonable*. I also don't think it's the only unreasonable fear they have -- and that the bigger fear is probably that they would create competitors somehow, magically, without providing any information that directly encourages competition for their hardware. If they wanted to provide per-incident paid software support or simply charge people extra for drivers, *then* I could see this being a problem, but I haven't seen a whole lot of that kind of rent-seeking behavior from graphics adapter vendors. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Albert Camus: An intellectual is someone whose mind watches itself. pgp3HR6kYv0wc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Upgrade from FreeBsd 6.3 to 6.4 freebsd-update
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 03:47:15PM +0300, Renat wrote: Yes. I try . But not worked!! - webarchive# freebsd-update -r 6.4-RELEASE upgrade Looking up update1.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found. Fetching metadata signature for 6.3-RELEASE from update1.FreeBSD.org... done. Fetching metadata index... done. Fetching 1 metadata files... failed. I probe you solution change change server from update.freebsd.org to update1.freebsd.org Not worked((( What's is is the Bug on the FreeBSD servers? Did you try that before or after you overwrote the built-in freebsd-update with the add-on freebsd-update.sh? If you tried it only *after* you clobbered freebsd-update, your problem is that you're still trying to use the freebsd-update.sh. That being the case, you should restore the original freebsd-update before trying again. If you tried it *before* you moved freebsd-update.sh, I hope someone else can help you, because I don't know. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Alan Perlis: LISP programmers know the value of everything and the cost of nothing. pgpRkIss18XTN.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 11:39:26AM +1000, Da Rock wrote: Hence why I tend to send really green unix newbies to linux school than grind their teeth on FreeBSD straight up. Let em get their skills and experience in how *nix in general works on something a little easier (for MIB lovers: noisy cricket), then move up to the big guns. Why not send them to something like DesktopBSD or PC-BSD, or even FreeSBIE (if that project is still around)? If they go to some chintzy user-obsequious Linux distribution like PCLinuxOS first, they'll just have more stuff to unlearn *if* it ever occurs to them to give some BSD Unix variant a try -- and if they haven't been poisoned against BSD Unix systems by GNU/FSF propaganda in the meantime. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Edward Murphy, Jr. (Murphy's Law): If there's more than one way to do a job and one of those ways will end in disaster, then someone will do it that way. pgp5tBk9XsuQ7.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 08:57:28PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: bad (TM). No -- at *any* level: you are wrong. for example you WILL like to control what oficially your employees ktalk about your company. That's not censorship -- it's a nondisclosure agreement. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Thomas McCauley: The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. pgpeSrRuXHyYn.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 12:26:21PM -0800, prad wrote: On Sat, 13 Dec 2008 12:43:02 -0700 Chad Perrin per...@apotheon.com wrote: I'll provide a technical example, as opposed to a social example, so maybe you'll be able to understand my point ... good illustrative examples, chad! i think moderation has value if it is done reasonably. for instance, people who talk about foreign currency values on a freebsd list should be watched very closely. I think that can be handled quite easily by community social pressure, and moderation would just set a precedent for it's someone else's job. woj made a good point in another post i think in that he's happy helping beginners who really do wish to learn. i know i've come across some who think the world owes them everything and make ridiculous demands on a list (not to mention ot posts - and they aren't even trying to sell you anything!). however, in general i like giorgos' comment the best that he was helped a decade ago and he's returning that favor. so in that respect, i agree with your 'false positives' concern - innocent till proven guilty! Thank you. anyone know if there are moderators for this list? i know there are some very nice people who keep watch. once i messaged the test list with a ports question (i was having trouble emailing this one - so i was testing to see if there was some problem in general), and a very considerate person from freebsd.org, Remko Lodder, emailed me asking if i knew that i was emailing the test list. i found it really decent that people look out for others here! Me too -- and I'm glad you weren't told to go away and email a different list because ports questions are off topic for the test list. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Martin Luther: Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? pgp2GVQt5JEEZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 09:38:29PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: without moderation it's a mess. I've seen more mess in response to your entirely unwelcoming manner than ever in response to anything you call off topic in some of your examples. It's nice people like to help other people, but it's bad it helps them on that lists with OFF-TOPIC problems. That might be a valid concern if your notion of off topic didn't include things that pretty much everyone else seems to think is on topic enough to fit into this list. i don't mean moderation like removing one opinions and not others. But removing off-topic messages, that are 95% now or more. 1. When moderation is increased, so too are false positives -- like removing statements of opinion that shouldn't be removed. 2. Your idea of off topic seems to include stuff relevant to FreeBSD. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Bjarne Stroustrup: An ugly operation should have an ugly syntactic form. pgpAWYilAIkwq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 10:49:58PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: you're reply to another post: If you wish you can call me fuhrer ;) but iwth Gestapo you certainly got too far. :D good response to that unfortunate eruption of enthusiasm. i think it's a problem of fear about past consorship in many countries. But this is completely different things. Moderation is not censorship like that, as EVERYONE can create it's own mailing lists :) moderation would definitely not be a bad thing in some situations! and exactly is needed on that group. it would be enough that moderator's job will be just removing posts that classify to NTG. NOTHING else. As long as neither you, nor anyone that thinks like you, is in charge of moderation, it might not be a *complete* disaster. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Peter Norvig: Use the most natural notation available to solve the problem, and then worry about writing an interpreter for that notation. pgpCAvobQoWk7.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 08:04:18PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: than not you discourage beginners from getting interested in this i don't discourage beginners that want to learn. Most of them don't. Considering that, the moment someone shows up and says I'm a Windows user, but I'm thinking about trying out FreeBSD, you immediately assume the person doesn't want to learn without bothering to read any further, I don't think you actually have any way of knowing whether anyone wants to learn most of the time. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Colin McFadyen: Unix is not an 'a-ha' experience, it is more of a 'holy-shit' experience. pgp0ujXW5weRC.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 11:03:29AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: You remind me of a tech I once worked with who thought all customers were stupid. Maybe they were... the difference is that FreeBSD is free software. or is not? Perhaps you are not familiar with the term analogy. RTFD(ictionary). -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] John W. Russell: People point. Sometimes that's just easier. They also use words. Sometimes that's just easier. For the same reasons that pointing has not made words obsolete, there will always be command lines. pgp5dpV91VMEd.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 04:49:28PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Off topic=not about FreeBSD OS. I'm amazed that you seem to think that making FreeBSD do what one wants it to do isn't a FreeBSD topic. exactly... when is something part of FBSD and when not? what is base system ~ whatis 'base system' base system: nothing appropriate Maybe what we need isn't for you to keep complaining about 70% of the very helpful list traffic, thus producing another 5% of the list traffic yourself (directly, and indirectly through annoyed responses to you), but for someone to come up with a base-sys...@freebsd.org list where you can hang out and be happy. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Power corrupts. The command line corrupts absolutely. pgpkfKIy3jlMp.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sat, Dec 13, 2008 at 09:42:32PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: probably that they would create competitors somehow, magically, without providing any information that directly encourages competition for their hardware. If they wanted to provide per-incident paid software support or simply charge people extra for drivers, *then* I could see this being a problem, but I haven't seen a whole lot of that kind of rent-seeking behavior from graphics adapter vendors. i don't see any problem. There is a product - for example Nvidia powersuckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hfull 3D accellerators. Their can this, that, blah, blah and blah, they don't have FreeBSD support. There are other products, they can this that blah blah and have FreeBSD support. You need blah blah and blah under FreeBSD, you don't buy nvidia. end of topic. I've responded to this attitude of yours in another subthread. I don't remember exactly where, but I mentioned terms like laptop and package deal (or something to that effect) a bit. Please address that before you go bandying this weak argument around any more. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth William Gibson: The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. pgpoBR5HY02rZ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 02:31:17PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: What I can't equate with is why its acceptable for intel to do the same... check if_iwi and its firmware. No other wifi device (that I'm aware of- at least they'd be in the minority anyway) works this way. The excuse is fcc regs- I doubt that... Atheros drivers used closed firmware until very recently. Some of them still do. And before anyone defends intel: I've spent a lot of time wasted on making their stupid nics to work in windows, I usually just flick em and put in a rl nic. The cpus are shit as well- I've had no end of trouble with them, plus too hot, power hungry etc. Alas, finding a decent notebook with an alternative has been to no avail... Actually, Pentium M processors may well be the best x86-compatible CPUs of their generation -- low power consumption relative to the competition, and the best performance per dollar in their class. Pentium 4, though, certainly sucks. The first generation of Celeron processors were kick-ass x86-compatible CPUs for their time, too -- actually better than Intel intended them to be. Weird how that happens. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth William Gibson: The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. pgp3j5UI6c2Fo.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 02:50:00PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: On Fri, 2008-12-12 at 14:25 -0700, Chad Perrin wrote: I think he's trying to say that open source drivers would be preferable, and to develop them we'd need the hardware specs so we'd have a target toward which to develop drivers. Of course, preferable is my choice of term -- he seems to be more of the opinion that anything that isn't strictly open source should just be shunned, out of hand. While it would be nice if that was a practical option, it isn't really, at this point. Perhaps he'd be more at home in the Fedora community which are adamant about that too... :P Perhaps so. OpenBSD is pretty adamant about that, too -- more so than Fedora, I think. In fact, the OpenBSD project seems to be the most adamant open source OS project, about keeping everything open (except the format of the installer, for some inconsistent as hell damned reason), that I've seen. Actually, patents are publicly documented by definition -- we're just not *allowed* to use it, once it has been patented, without permission. The sort of thing they don't want to divulge is trade secrets, which you meantioned -- not patents, which you also mentioned. For some reason, though, some hardware vendors seem inclined to use patents as an excuse for keeping secrets, which never made much sense to me. IANAL, though I read about the law from time to time. Ok, so moving forward on this point: How exactly does this help in developing drivers for FreeBSD? Patents are ideas- right? So wouldn't this mean that it would still require guessing and estimation of what should happen and how to do it? The problem with open source driver development is lack of documented implementation details and the illegality of reproducing anything covered by patent -- not lack of patent documentation. You also mention that they're publicly accessible- how? Whats the portal and how would you search for required device? I don't do patent searches regularly, but I'd probably start with the US Patent Office site. Okay, I did a Google search for USPTO (United States Patent and Trademark Office), clicked the first link, clicked through a menu item, and found this page: http://patft.uspto.gov/ Unfortunately, anything covered by a patent, as I hinted above, is verboten. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Martin Luther: Do not suppose that abuses are eliminated by destroying the object which is abused. Men can go wrong with wine and women. Shall we then prohibit and abolish women? pgpbuS5vKSnXc.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: GPL version 4
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:12:40AM +1300, Mark Kirkwood wrote:
valdis.kletni...@vt.edu wrote:
On Thu, 17 Jul 2008 05:31:15 +0800, Morton Harrow said:
I see with pain in my heart that the GPLv3 doesn't actually give the
users of GPLv3 software the liberty and freedom the FSF has been
fighting for. Instead they are forced to play by the strict set of
terms the GPLv3 provides.
You missed an important philosophical point. In Richard Stallman's world
view,
it isn't the user's freedoms that matter, it's the *software*s freedom.
I don't think it is that bad - the intent is for the software to be
freely available for *people* to use. It is actually about our freedom.
If so, it's a failure.
I think I still have a stack of Ubuntu CDs that I cannot legally
distribute because I don't have the source, and I don't know exactly
where to find it, either.
My freedom to use Kororaa Linux with all its multimedia support was
severely curtailed by GNU/FSF legal threats -- and, while I don't
actually care to use Kororaa personally, that doesn't change the fact
that my freedom to make that decision for myself has been somewhat
damaged.
The problem is that Stallman and friends have very strange notions about
what constitutes freedom -- strange, but all too common.
--
Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ]
print substr('Just another Perl hacker', 0, -2);
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Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 05:11:00PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: But if I remember my legal and ethics course correctly if you can arrive at a conclusion through your own research then your reasonably clear. For example, the drivers are closed source but the hardware itself is an entirely separate issue. So if you can create your own drivers by your own research into how the hardware is setup then the drivers created could licensed under your own terms- open source or otherwise. The drivers and hardware may operate together but are separate items of creativity, therefore do not operate under the same patent. Be very careful. Even in the US, where there's a presumption of innocence built into criminal law, the presumption of innocence doesn't apply in civil court. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Principle of Exclusion: The strength of any system is inversely proportional to the restrictions on the power of tools allowed to the general public by that system. pgp4Hm458TpGv.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:53:39PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: and exactly is needed on that group. it would be enough that moderator's job will be just removing posts that classify to NTG. NOTHING else. As long as neither you, nor anyone that thinks like you, is in charge of moderation, it might not be a *complete* disaster. of course it should be you to remove all my posts:) I wouldn't remove all your posts. You've said five or six things that were on-topic. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Friedrich Nietzche: Those who know that they are profound strive for clarity. Those who would like to seem profound to the crowd strive for obscurity. pgp9sKmaZB7sw.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 01:16:23PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: It's already happening on that group that's why i talk about starting moderation to remove all posts that are not about group topic! Group topic? As far as I can tell, the topic is user questions about FreeBSD Apparently you haven't noticed, but it doesn't say about the FreeBSD Base System. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth H. L. Mencken: In this world of sin and sorrow, there is always something to be thankful for; as for me, I rejoice that I am not a Republican. pgp7OFzacbQLw.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 08:14:10PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 19:21 -0700, Chad Perrin wrote: On Sun, Dec 14, 2008 at 11:39:26AM +1000, Da Rock wrote: Hence why I tend to send really green unix newbies to linux school than grind their teeth on FreeBSD straight up. Let em get their skills and experience in how *nix in general works on something a little easier (for MIB lovers: noisy cricket), then move up to the big guns. Why not send them to something like DesktopBSD or PC-BSD, or even FreeSBIE (if that project is still around)? If they go to some chintzy user-obsequious Linux distribution like PCLinuxOS first, they'll just have more stuff to unlearn *if* it ever occurs to them to give some BSD Unix variant a try -- and if they haven't been poisoned against BSD Unix systems by GNU/FSF propaganda in the meantime. I doubt it. Knowing how linux works, they'll get sick of its layout and config and appreciate the BSD way once they get the hang of handling *nix methods. The hardware issues are across all those BSD platforms, which makes it tougher for newbies coming from the handfed world. Unlearning is _real_ easy when the config and layout is shit. Tell that to the uncountable hordes of dedicated Linux users who don't know what they're missing and, as such, see no reason to even give FreeBSD a try. As for the GNU philosophy, consider Ubuntu popularity versus Fedora. Fedora takes the high road, and Ubuntu allows the users to subscribe to extra repositories of software- guess which users prefer? The threads for these arguments on the Fedora list exceed even this one in length! FreeBSD ports- you can install pretty much whatever license type in software you want, as long as someone has setup a port for it. Users consider THAT freedom. So, we end up splitting the potential FreeBSD users between Ubuntu and Fedora with more of them going to Ubuntu because not quite as many become faithful members of the GPL flock. Great. I take it you don't actually talk to Ubuntu users much, too. Lots of them are deeply invested in this copyleft thing. You don't have to use nonfree software to use Ubuntu, y'know. Plus, if you compile your own software there is a clear place to install it, not wandering in confusion between /usr, /opt, /usr/local, and any other variation of these (and maybe more...). I think freebsd is great, but if you haven't clue about *nix don't waste time- get some bearings first on a simple similar system which offers more user friendly features and all the cli stuff, then try the real thing. Don't worry- those worth their salt will return, the rest will stay where they're happy. That's why I'd recommend PC-BSD first, for most new Unix users. As an example contrary to your own, it took me *years* to get around to trying out FreeBSD once I got into Linux-land -- and someone only slightly less interested in getting out from under the GPL than I was, in the same circumstances, might *never* give it a try. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Marvin Minsky: . . . anyone could learn Lisp in 1 day, except that if they already knew Fortran, it would take 3 days. pgpgENzw5hLiB.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:13:03PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: That's THAT simple, unless you like it to be more complicated. No there isn't. The freebsd-newbies list has been merged with freebsd-questions for several years now. You could have easily verified this by following the link to: http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/freebsd-newbies sorry, i was sure it exist, but wasn't aware because i never wanted to subscribe to freebsd-newbies. Funny -- I read you suggesting that it might exist, and wanted to go sign up for it so I could help out. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Thomas McCauley: The measure of a man's real character is what he would do if he knew he would never be found out. pgpHEgtx8yA8g.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 12:53:01PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: That might be a valid concern if your notion of off topic didn't include things that pretty much everyone else seems to think is on topic enough to fit into this list. do we have to start deciding what's on-topic by voting? congratulations i don't mean moderation like removing one opinions and not others. But removing off-topic messages, that are 95% now or more. 1. When moderation is increased, so too are false positives -- like removing statements of opinion that shouldn't be removed. there are always false positives. but everything is better than democracy=what most say is right is considered right. I never said we should vote on everything -- you just decided to magic that up out of thin air. Have fun with that. 2. Your idea of off topic seems to include stuff relevant to FreeBSD. not revelant. will you start support my program just because it can be compiled on FreeBSD? it's nonsense. so stop supporting third party non-freebsd specific software just because it can be compiled under FreeBSD!! the point: you: \O/ | / \ -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: Just don't create a file called -rf. pgp2CdB7Ml0qs.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 01:44:41PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: moderation is needed. Things like community social pressure simply doesn't. Like with democracy - those who are more common and louder will takeover, no matter if it make sense or not. Yes, and you have gone a long way in proving just that point. Your narrow minded, inability to accept anyone else's opinions that are even slightly ajar of your own preconceived concepts are a perfect example of your inability to work and play well with others. just because my opinion is other than yours :) I think you have that backwards. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth James Madison: If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. pgpmiJ1zbRYfA.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 01:06:58PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: base system: nothing appropriate Maybe what we need isn't for you to keep complaining about 70% of the very helpful list traffic, helpful for whom? thus producing another 5% of the list traffic yourself (directly, and indirectly through annoyed responses to you), but for someone to come up with a base-sys...@freebsd.org list where you can hang out and be happy. seems you actively like this mailing list to become big shit. You WELL know what i am talking about, and you just play with words. Ah -- so now you accuse me of maliciousness. How much worse can your contributions to this list get? Because i AM very much feared about FreeBSD future not being like lots of other free software project, i will do everything to take all idiots, winusers, students that want comparision between different OS in few words (because they was required at school), questions about one of million of non-freebsd specific software, stupid discussion about windoze-like bloatware running under unix etc. etc. I really don't care about your opinion, just because it's THE ONLY GOOD UNIX LEFT IN THE WORLD now! There was linux many years ago, yes - less functional, but WELL DONE, they f...ked it up by quickly adding every stupid features requested. I still haven't figured out why you think that answering questions about DNS on FreeBSD or looking for ways to improve driver support would equate to adding every stupid features [sic] requested. Then i switched to NetBSD, that worked excellent up to 1.5, and then got f..ked up even more than linux when started to be sponsored by wasabisystems and possibly other funny companies. They even changed the way versions are numbered to get higher numbers faster ;) Did it really get screwed up, or did you just decide it *must* be getting screwed up because development was sponsored? Now i'm using FreeBSD and it got better each version. Really better, not better. A lot of people would disagree with you about the 5.x releases, judging by what I've read. By all accounts, though, it got back on track. I wonder if NetBSD got better again after you left, if it ever got worse in the first place. And i really want to keep it that way, because there is no alternative now! -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth William Gibson: The future is already here. It's just not very evenly distributed. pgpPqafQbetPq.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:16:34AM -0800, per...@pluto.rain.com wrote: Unfortunately, anything covered by a patent, as I hinted above, is verboten. Er, doesn't it depend on what is patented? If the h/w itself is patented, but its software-visible interface is not, there should be no problem writing a driver for that h/w. OTOH if the algorithms used in the driver are patented it would be an infringement to reproduce them. I said anything covered by patent. If the software is not covered by patent, you're fine to write software. Be aware, though, that a lot of patents are intentionally written in a somewhat vague way so they can be extended via case law at a later date. Nothing is legal under the current US system unless you can defend it in civil court. That's my general rule of thumb. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth markinct @techrepublic.com: Don't take anything you do on-line lightly. Caveat Clicker... pgpE84X3uWPcL.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 01:08:18PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: Actually, Pentium M processors may well be the best x86-compatible CPUs of their generation -- low power consumption relative to the competition, and the best performance per dollar in their class. Pentium 4, though, certainly sucks. as having pentium-M laptop and pentium-4 server i can only say - you are exactly right. in real load my 1200Mhz laptop isn't much slower than 3Ghz pentium-4 . . . and my 1.73GHz Pentium M is faster than a 3GHz P4. I was pretty happy when I heard rumors Pentium was going to start offering tower system motherboards that accept Pentium M processors in 2003, but alas, they were just rumors. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Mediocrity corrupts. Bureaucracy corrupts absolutely. pgphTQo4tYLod.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 10:27:30PM +1000, Da Rock wrote: If you have done your own research then the algorithms wouldn't necessarily be the same- they'd nearly certainly be different, wouldn't they? So isn't that the basis for the patent? A patent is a registration of an idea. Two different ideas can still arrive at the same conclusion. Patents are often about methods, not algorithms. In fact, there's supposedly a restriction against algorithms being patented -- though of course lawmakers and people working at the patent office don't seem to know what an algorithm is, so algorithms do get patented all the time. Anyway . . . as it happens, patenting a method provides far more broad power than patenting an algorithm, anyway, in practice. That's one of the reason (software) patents are so damaging. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Reginald Braithwaite: Nor is it as easy as piling more features on regardless of how well they fit or whether people will actually use them. Otherwise Windows would have 97% of the market and OS X 3%. (Oh wait.) pgpc6TXzxhIme.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: GPL version 4
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 08:38:35AM -0500, Richard M Stallman wrote: I don't think it is that bad - the intent is for the software to be freely available for *people* to use. It is actually about our freedom. You have it right. Copyleft licenses defend freedom for all users by stopping middlemen from stripping it away. Please don't spam the FreeBSD list with such propaganda. That's a personal request -- I don't pretend to speak for the entire list. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Naguib Mahfouz: You can tell whether a man is clever by his answers. You can tell whether a man is wise by his questions. pgpLtf1ZL6ztQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 11:13:38PM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: So, we end up splitting the potential FreeBSD users between Ubuntu and Fedora with more of them going to Ubuntu because not quite as many become very nice. after trying FreeBSD they WILL get back to linux (and then windows) quickly. Those who REALLY know they need something different, like high performance good plain unix, will move to FreeBSD sooner or later :) Uh -- what? We weren't talking about people who've tried FreeBSD first. We were talking about people who asked about FreeBSD and were told to f-off to Linux instead by people like you. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Principle of Inclusion: The strength of any system is directly proportional to the power of the tools it provides for the general public. pgpDNrLdxw9Ib.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:22:31PM -0800, Brian Whalen wrote: Chad Perrin wrote: Tell that to the uncountable hordes of dedicated Linux users who don't know what they're missing and, as such, see no reason to even give FreeBSD a try. Many Linux people I know still think FreeBSD SMP sucks, that combined with a lack of journaling filesystem on BSD gives the Linux folks a small edge. I know ZFS is out there, but nor for that long yet on FreeBSD. Many Linux people I know don't know about FreeBSD SMP and filesystem matters -- or much of anything else about it, for that matter. Some even think FreeBSD is a Linux distribution. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Jon Postel, RFC 761: [B]e conservative in what you do, be liberal in what you accept from others. pgpLtzV4ihR3w.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Why FreeBSD not popular on hardware vendors
On Tue, Dec 16, 2008 at 07:07:36AM +1000, Da Rock wrote: On Mon, 2008-12-15 at 13:43 -0700, Chad Perrin wrote: On Mon, Dec 15, 2008 at 02:16:34AM -0800, per...@pluto.rain.com wrote: Unfortunately, anything covered by a patent, as I hinted above, is verboten. Er, doesn't it depend on what is patented? If the h/w itself is patented, but its software-visible interface is not, there should be no problem writing a driver for that h/w. OTOH if the algorithms used in the driver are patented it would be an infringement to reproduce them. I said anything covered by patent. If the software is not covered by patent, you're fine to write software. Be aware, though, that a lot of patents are intentionally written in a somewhat vague way so they can be extended via case law at a later date. Nothing is legal under the current US system unless you can defend it in civil court. That's my general rule of thumb. That doesn't sound like a good system (US not yours) - how on earth did it get so screwed up? (Thats rhetorical btw, I don't mean to start a whole discussion on that topic on this list.) It's much the same everywhere, from what I've seen. The problems just arise in different guises. Usually, judging by my observations, they arise in large part because of the common notion that a problem can be fixed with more of the behavior that created the problem in the first place. . . . but beyond that, I'd probably start a flame war, so I don't think I want to get more specific on the list. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Reginald Braithwaite: Nor is it as easy as piling more features on regardless of how well they fit or whether people will actually use them. Otherwise Windows would have 97% of the market and OS X 3%. (Oh wait.) pgpCfeJkxD9NQ.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Suitability question
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 04:25:51PM -0500, Patrick Baldwin wrote: Usually I'm asking questions for work related things. This one is more personal. My father has this tendency to end up wrecking his computer if he uses the Internet much. Computers are basically magic boxes to him, so education is of limited usefulness here. I'm thinking I might be best of trying to built him a really locked-down, high security box, almost an Internet appliance. All he really does is use the Web, and a little light word processing. What do people think of FreeBSD as the base OS for this idea? In general, I think FreeBSD is an *excellent* choice for this. You should consider specifics of your particular case, of course, but based on what you said I see no reason that FreeBSD shouldn't meet your needs exceedingly well. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] print substr(Just another Perl hacker, 0, -2); pgpTaBYolUBZA.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Suitability question
On Thu, Dec 18, 2008 at 04:46:24PM -0500, Glen Barber wrote: Word processing won't be a problem, but internet 'toys' like Flash will be a problem, unless you use some wine+firefox workaround. What -- nspluginwrapper doesn't work any longer? -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Larry Wall: What is the sound of Perl? Is it not the sound of a wall that people have stopped banging their heads against? pgpMvvwb7Jxb9.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Suitability question
On Fri, Dec 19, 2008 at 01:07:23PM +0200, Ott Köstner wrote: On Thursday 18 December 2008 11:25:51 pm Patrick Baldwin wrote: I'm thinking I might be best of trying to built him a really locked-down, high security box, almost an Internet appliance. All he really does is use the Web, and a little light word processing. What do people think of FreeBSD as the base OS for this idea? In this case, I would recommend to use PC-BSD. http://www.pcbsd.org/ PC-BSD is full FreeBSD 7.1, with nice grapical installer, pre-configured for desktop use. Xorg, KDE, Firefox, Thunderbird, Open Office, flash, etc. -- all will work out of the box... After installing PC-BSD, you can think of it as a standard FreeBSD -- Upgrade ports, build kernel, etc. I think PC-BSD is a great recommendation for someone who wants an easy introduction to FreeBSD on his/her own, but if you want to provide a locked down system for someone else and that person isn't expected to learn how to use FreeBSD (i.e., that person doesn't really know how to use MS Windows, and just clicks on the blue E for Internet access), you're better off using FreeBSD itself. PC-BSD installs a whole lot of stuff that it assumes everybody wants, whereas with FreeBSD you can pretty much install nothing but the base system then add exactly the software you want to be present. Thus, you can much more easily get the system to the point where everything you want is installed, and *only* what you want, and configure it all to precise specifications, with a minimum of effort -- using FreeBSD itself. With PC-BSD, on the other hand, you won't even know what all is installed, and will have to spend a lot of time crawling through the system figuring out what to uninstall. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Edmund Burke: Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinion. pgpjyFrhAF7CB.pgp Description: PGP signature
mplayer won't build
For some reason, on . . . My machine: FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE-p11 MPlayer refuses to build: N - O - T - E There are some knobs which *can* *not* be selected via the OPTIONS framework. You might want to check the Makefile in order to learn more about them. If you want to use the GUI, you can either install /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer-skins or download official skin collections from http://www.mplayerhq.hu/homepage/dload.html === mplayer-0.99.11_8 has known vulnerabilities: = mplayer -- twinvq processing buffer overflow vulnerability. Reference: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ports/portaudit/7c5bd5b8-d652-11dd-a765-0030843d3802.html = Please update your ports tree and try again. *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer. *** Error code 1 Stop in /usr/ports/multimedia/mplayer. Is the problem that there isn't a newer, fixed version of MPlayer in ports? If so -- why can't I override it using `portinstall -f`? Am I going to feel dumb when I realize what's stopping MPlayer from building? How long would it take to vacuum the entire state of Florida if it was carpeted? What is the average airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow in flight? Okay . . . feel free to ignore the last two or three questions. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Henry Spencer: Those who don't understand Unix are doomed to reinvent it, poorly. pgpIk3ARCYz5c.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: mplayer won't build
On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 07:48:28PM -0500, matt donovan wrote: you want soemthing like this make -DDISABLE_VULNERABILITIES install if you want to override portaudit. guess the port for mplayer needs to be updated. Thanks -- that's not just something like what I wanted: it's exactly what I wanted. It seems odd to me that there isn't an option for that in portinstall (ignoring -m for the moment). -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Anne McClintock, University of Wisconsin: The decisions that really matter are made outside the democratic process. pgpRPZcXMvarY.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Portuguese accents
On Sat, Jan 03, 2009 at 09:47:08PM +, Daniel Leal wrote: In most X apps these accents work well, but for example, in a xterm, with the ee editor, I can write the accented letter correctly. But when I use more to read the file I just created with ee I cant see these accented letters correctly! As already suggested, you might want to try using less(1) instead of more(1). With aterm, not even with ee this works it appears: ~a, 'e,`e, `i, etc etc etc... That's because aterm doesn't support unicode characters. Try a terminal emulator that does, such as rxvt-unicode instead. how can I solve this? Is it impossible to list and also name files with accented letter? I believe it is possible to name files with unicode characters, but in general I'd advise against it. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Robert Martin: Would you rather Test-First, or Debug-Later? pgppOVn0Q0P2r.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Foiling MITM attacks on source and ports trees
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 10:22:29AM +0100, Wojciech Puchar wrote: someone like the FreeBSD Foundation as an appropriate body to own the cert. OT I would actually trust a self-signed cert by the FreeBSD security officer, more then one by Verisign. of course. there is no need to have an authority to make key pairs, everybody do it alone. actually i would fear using such keys because i'm sure such companies do have a copy of both keys. Out-of-band corroboration of a certificate's authenticity is kind of necessary to the security model of SSL/TLS. A self-signed certificate, in and of itself, is not really sufficient to ensure the absence of a man in the middle attack or other compromise of the system. On the other hand, I don't trust Verisign, either. I believe some steps are being made by the Perpsectives [1] project that lead in the right direction [2]. Unfortunately, it's not available at present for FreeBSD, because the Firefox plugin depends on a binary executable compiled from C, and my (brief) discussion with one of the people involved in the project about the potential of porting it to FreeBSD didn't really bear fruit. NOTES: [1] http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~perspectives/index.html [2] http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/security/?p#571 -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Anonymous: Why do we never have time to do it right, but always have time to do it over? pgpdWFBWpraoO.pgp Description: PGP signature
Re: Foiling MITM attacks on source and ports trees
On Tue, Jan 06, 2009 at 11:11:52AM -0900, Mel wrote: On Tuesday 06 January 2009 10:31:26 Chad Perrin wrote: Out-of-band corroboration of a certificate's authenticity is kind of necessary to the security model of SSL/TLS. A self-signed certificate, in and of itself, is not really sufficient to ensure the absence of a man in the middle attack or other compromise of the system. On the other hand, I don't trust Verisign, either. In the less virtual world, we only trust governments to provide identity papers (manufactured by companies, but still the records are kept and verified by a government entity). Instead of trying to regulate the internet and provide a penal system, governments would do much better taking their responsibility on these issues. It shouldn't be so hard to give every citizen the option to get an online certificate corresponding with their passport and similarly for Chambers of Commerce to provide certificates for businesses. My distrust of of the certifying authority is not mitigated by replacing Verisign with FedCorp. Institutional incompetence is typically a result of bureaucracy -- and even major corporations don't get as mired in bureaucracy as government. -- Chad Perrin [ content licensed OWL: http://owl.apotheon.org ] Quoth Bill McKibben: The laws of Congress and the laws of physics have grown increasingly divergent, and the laws of physics are not likely to yield. pgp20VPV43pmz.pgp Description: PGP signature
