Today I received the latest c’t magazine. It featured a two pages article about FreeBSD 5.3 by Bj�rn K�nig. Unfortunately the article is very bad. Even myself as a developer had problems understanding what the author was talking about. The content of the article is basically a mixture of BSD History, excerpts from the official press release and some passages from the handbook plus a wrong BSD Family tree and the standard daemon image. Although the author posts to BSD Newgroups and Mailinglist frequently, he didn’t wrote anything about his personal experience with FreeBSD, did he even tried to install version 5.x? As a FreeBSD Newbie I am missing information about the installation (screenshots :-), as a FreeBSD 4.x user I am missing information about the differences between 4.x and 5.x. And as a hacker i am missing information about new features in the kernel.
I tried to find a better article on the web, but unfortunately the press section of the FreeBSD website is two months out of date. And the articles on news.google.com were all not more than excerpts from the press release.
Same with the blogosphere. Some FreeBSD users saying “Cool!” and “Finally!”, but nothing substantial.
Can any of my readers point me to a good professional neutral review of FreeBSD 5.3? Or is FreeBSD really dying?
Author: arved
Pumpkin
Via tbfg:
You talk fast, you think fast, you act fast. Stop. Calm Down. Drink some decaf and go back to hitting up liquor stores.
Take the What Pulp Fiction Character Are You? quiz.
EuroBSDCon reprise II
There is now another article on ONLamp about EuroBSDCon, Inside EuroBSDCon by Federico Biancuzzi.
Since writing comments to the article seems to be broken, he gets a Trackback.
Federico, I think at the moment the target audience is quite clear, people that care enough about BSD to spend at least 600 Euro to attend a BSD conference. This includes developers and interested users and companies. And I prefer to listen to talks of developers like rwatson at EuroBSDCon.
But I agree, that there are possibilities to save money. E.g. IMHO there is no need for the conference to take place in a 4+ stars hotel. For most people a three stars hotel is enough. And the conference rooms could as well be in a university, school or education company.
Of course EuroBSDCon should not replace local conferences targeting newtobsd users.
Why “computer science” is a bad term
I just orderd the book “Hackers and Painters” by Paul Graham after reading this article
In the example chapter is my quote of the day:
If what [hackers] are doing is called science, it makes them feel they ought to be acting scientific. So instead of doing what they really want to do, which is to design beautiful software, hackers in universities and research labs feel they ought to be writing research papers.
Luckily in German it is called “Informatik”, so there are people at our university, that still write real software 🙂
Snow
I spent the weekend in Salzburg. They have real snow and not only storms and rain like here in Vienna.
My girlfriend’s brother fell from the roof while fixing rooftiles. Luckily he survived falling down ca. seven meter onto the concrete courtyard without major injuries. He is now in hospital; the emergency physician diagnosed internal bleedings, a strained hamstring and a twisted thig. (hm, my anatomy vocabulary is really bad).
Dports Bugreport closed
Today I noticed that my Darwinbugreport has been fixed two months ago. Only 10 months after i submitted it. Neither did the committer close the Bug report nor did he credit me in the commit log.
Who said that bugzilla would be a solution to fighting FreeBSD Bug reports?
Darwinports are a lot smaller, they use a proclaimed better tool and they still can’t handle their bug reports. Long live GNATS!
Multipurpose Fiber
The Picture of the week shows the main antenna mast of Funkfeuer, the free viennese WLAN community. After last weeks storm someone secured the mast with a fiber cable.
Annamirl reloaded
More than one year ago, my old Laptop had an accident which resulted in a broken pccard slot. Just when i bought USB NICs it stopped booting at all.
Last week a PR about FreeBSD’s broken USB support for this laptop was closed. So I decided to do a last attempt to rescue annamirl from the dead.
I removed all remaining pieces of the PC-Card slot and it now boots again. Unfortunately I had to remove the keyboard ribbon cable from the mainboard and I haven’t figured out how to reconnect it. So I am now updating it with an external keyboard.
I will try to upload pictures later.
routed on amd64
Today i sent my patch against routed, that fixed tracing on amd64, to the upstream author and Vernon Schryver released routed 2.31.
Now I just have to prepare a diff against FreeBSD and find an interested src-committer for review.
Local BSD conference
Next to the three large BSDcon in Europe, US and Asia, many countries have local BSD conferences, e.g. Italy, Canada and of course Japan.
On #bsdaustria, Aleksander Fafula just pointed me to MeetBSD, Krak�w on November 27.
Unfortunately I don’t speak polish :-(.
But why is there nothing similar in Austria or even Germany? I know it is a lot of work, so are we just too lazy?
BTW, would you buy an Operating System from these guys?