

FreeBSD 8 released - ptn
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.0R/relnotes.html

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pquerna
FreeBSD 7/8 are really starting to feel like the decisions made in 5.x are
starting the pay off. Between the ULE Scheduler, ZFS filesystem, DTrace (even
if not as good as on Solaris) and the new Jails, Its a pretty sweet technology
packed release.

Hopefully we will be upgrading some of the apache.org server soon :)

~~~
rbanffy
If you want ZFS and DTrace, is there a good reason to prefer FreeBSD to
OpenSolaris?

~~~
pquerna
Because the FreeBSD userland enviroment and ports collection are sane, and
there is a reasonable way to do upgrades, while with OpenSolaris you have...
what?

~~~
rbanffy
A Synaptic-like package manager? It's really easy to use and self-updates the
system every time there is something new without need to make the human
attached to the computer go and check.

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hello_moto
Sometime I wish FreeBSD and OpenBSD are more popular than Linux...

~~~
timdorr
Technically this is already true, since OS X is a FreeBSD variant and is more
popular than Linux (at least in the desktop world).

But I know what you mean. I actually host two development servers for FreeBSD
and employ one of the core devs (laszlof). I'm trying to help! :)

~~~
enneff
The kernel is different, and the userland is different. OS X may be FreeBSD-
derived, but it has moved a long way from its roots since then.

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antimora
FreeBSD 4.2 was my first copy. I had so much fun tinkering with it. It's still
my favorite unix os.

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enneff
Great! Just in time for me to build my new ZFS-based file server. =)

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rbanffy
Does FreeBSD have something like Synaptic?

~~~
mpakes
FreeBSD setups typically use the BSD Ports collection for package management,
which compiles from source + patches (vaguely similar to Gentoo Linux).

There doesn't appear to be a mainstream UI for BSD ports.

 _(Curiously, the Mac OS X equivalent, MacPorts, has at least two current UI
projects.)_

~~~
Dobbs
To append to what your are saying this is because ports is set up for unix
people to work it.

To search you use ls, cd, and find. To install you "cd <dir> && make install".

If you are installing freebsd you should already be comfortable enough to not
need a pretty gui hiding these very simple details.

~~~
Malus
You could use find, but it is easier to use the built in facilities to search
for ports. If you are in the ports directory you can:

make search name=name_of_port

to search for a port by name and:

make search key=key_to_search_for

to search by key. You can also use quicksearch instead of search to reduce the
verbosity of the results. If you read the ports man page, you will find a
bunch of other nifty things you can do with the ports system.

~~~
dazzawazza
I tend to just search at <http://www.freebsd.org/ports/>

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uggedal
I'll try to put it on my EEE 900 this weekend (which is running Arch at the
moment)

~~~
durin42
Post some recent instructions if you get it working? I had numerous problems
with networking (which I solved) and swap/RAM overhead (which I didn't) when I
tried installing to my Eee 900.

~~~
uggedal
According to this list it should work:
[http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head-6d00dcb960b731976447f25...](http://wiki.freebsd.org/AsusEee#head-6d00dcb960b731976447f2511654a0419ce7cc0f)

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tibbon
Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

