Monthly Archive for May, 2007

BSDStats numbers (May 2007)

Published on May 31, 2007 in BSD Stats, DesktopBSD, FreeBSD and PC-BSD. 0 Comments

BSDStats.org is a website that records the numbers of PCs/servers running a particular BSD system. This is broken down per country, releases, drivers/HW stats, CPU stats, and port stats.

Though these figures are interesting enough, they cannot be used for any benchmarking or market analysis or so, since the software that anonymously updates (pings) the bsdstats server is not (yet) installed on a lot of/most servers (e.g. FreeBSD) or it’s not mandatory to use when pre-installed (e.g. PC-BSD). The numbers are likely to be much higher. The counters reset at the first day of each month (servers that are on 24/7/365) or when the computer is first switched on.

The numbers, that we’re interested in as far as this blog is concerned, for May 2007 are:

  • FreeBSD - 5,131 systems - 53.0 %
  • PC-BSD - 4,265 systems - 44.1 %
  • DesktopBSD - 28 systems - 0.3 %

Please note, that the number for DesktopBSD (28) is not correct this month. There are likely to be many more users but the update script contacted the BSDStats server on 1 May at half 5 in the morning only. All PCs that were off at that time aren’t included in this number. This problem will be fixed in the upcoming RC3.

BSDCan - BSD Conference

Published on May 30, 2007 in FreeBSD Conferences. 0 Comments

bsdcan2007.pngBSDCan, a BSD conference held in Ottawa (Canada), is a yearly 2-day FreeBSD developers summit. In just three short years, BSDCan, has quickly established itself as the technical conference for people working on and with 4.4BSD based operating systems and related projects.

This year BSDCan 2007 was on 18-19 May 2007. Over 60 FreeBSD developers attended the summit, along with representatives from large BSD-friendly corporations such as Apple, Yahoo, Nokia, Juniper, NetApp and Ironport. A variety of topics were discussed, such as ZFS, the BLUFFS file system, SMP scalability improvements and the new virtualized network stack.

Here are some links to pages with photos taken during BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa:

Comparing GNU/Linux and FreeBSD

Published on May 30, 2007 in FreeBSD and FreeBSD vs Linux. 0 Comments

The Free Software Magazine has published today an article explaining the main differences between FreeBSD and GNU/Linux. This article is especially interesting for those who are (fairly) new to BSD and/or Linux.

GNU/Linux is the most popular operating system built with free/open source software. However, it is not the only one: FreeBSD is also becoming popular for its stability, robustness and security. (bold by me)

freebsd_logo.jpgFreeBSD is an operating system based on the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), which itself is a modification of AT&T’s UNIX, and was created by the University of California. During the development of FreeBSD, to avoid any legal problems with the owners of the source code, the developers decided to re-engineer the original BSD, rather than copy the source code.
In contrast with GNU/Linux, where all the pieces are developed separately and brought together in distributions, FreeBSD has been developed as a complete operating system: the kernel, device drivers, sysadmin’s tools and all the other pieces of software are held in the same revision control system.

tux.jpgInitial development of Linux was started in 1991 by Linus Torvalds who used Minix—an operating system developed by Andrew Tanenbaum for teaching purposes—as the basis for his system. By 1990 the GNU project, which had been started in 1983 by Richard Stallman, had produced and collected all the libraries, compilers, text editors, shells and other software necessary to make a free operating system—except a kernel. The Linux kernel developers decided to adapt their kernel to work with the GNU software to make a complete operating system: GNU/Linux was born.

The kernel and the majority of the code in FreeBSD has been released and distributed under the BSD license although some components use other open licenses like the GPL, the LGPL or the ISC. The Linux kernel, and most of the software in the GNU project, has been licensed under the GNU GPL which was created by the Free Software Foundation.

After this introduction the article deals further with the technical differences and similarities:

1) Naming of devices, 2) runlevels and startup scripts, 3) the kernel, 4) software installation, and 5) the actual installation of GNU/Linux and FreeBSD.

The article concludes with:

FreeBSD and GNU/Linux are two great options: choosing one or the other depends on many factors. Usually FreeBSD is used as a web server: companies like Yahoo! or Sony Japan trust FreeBSD to run their internet portals; on the desktop GNU/Linux wins this battle, but GNU/Linux is used on many web servers as well. Users will find if they are familiar with traditional UNIX systems they can use either without many problems. FreeBSD and Linux: a gift of quality, robustness, security and stability from the free software community to the world of operating systems.

The whole article can be read here.

iXsystems acquires BSD Mall

Published on May 29, 2007 in FreeBSD and iXsystems. 0 Comments

ixsystemslogo.jpgiXsystems, the company that sponsors the PC-BSD Project, announced today its acquisition of BSD Mall, a division of cyLogistics, that offers BSD-based CDs and DVDs for the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly and Darwin communities, as well as clothing, hats and other promotional items.

freebsdmall.jpgiXsystems intends to merge BSD Mall into FreeBSD Mall in order to provide a centralized location for BSD users to purchase BSD-based CDs and DVDs and support the BSD project of their choice. FreeBSD Mall, formerly Walnut Creek CD-Rom, is a subsidiary of iXsystems, Inc. FreeBSD Mal was acquired by iXsystems on 26 February 2007.

iXsystems’ goal is to increase visibility and support of the BSD projects and to consolidate BSD distribution under one roof. The best way to accomplish this is through our acquisition of BSD Mall, a primary source of BSD CDs and DVDs, as well as other BSD-themed promotional items

said Michael Lauth, CEO of iXsystems.

Over the next month the BSDMall.com website will be transitioned to FreeBSDMall.com, after which time FreeBSD Mall will take over order fulfillment for all products. Don Witt, CEO of BSD Mall and founder of cyLogistics, will be stepping down from his position at BSD Mall and accepting a position on the iXsystems Advisory Board.

Not since Walnut Creek CD-Rom has there been such a single large corporate sponsor of BSD

says Witt.

By merging FreeBSD Mall with BSD Mall, we will be able to better serve the entire BSD Community with a complete selection of CDs, DVDs, training,support and promotional items

said Theresa Garner, General Manager of FreeBSD Mall.

About iXsystems
iXsystems, Inc. is a leading provider of high-performance computing clusters, blade servers, rackmount servers and storage solutions to the global marketplace. iXsystems supplies FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Linux servers to a wide cross-section of industries. iXsystems also supports and maintains the PC-BSD project. The company is headquartered in San Jose, CA.

About BSD Mall
bsdmall.jpgBSD Mall provides software subscription services for the BSD distributions and is dedicated to the support and expansion of the BSD communities including FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Dragonfly and Darwin.

FreeBSD Summer of Code 2007

Published on May 29, 2007 in FreeBSD and Google. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Project will be taking part in the Google Summer of Code 2007 (SoC). This is a program set up by Google to fund students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break. This year the FreeBSD Project has received quite a number of high quality applications, out of which 25 have been selected for funding by Google. For more detailed information about the plans for each FreeBSD project, please visit the Google SoC FreeBSD page or the FreeBSD Summer of Code 2007 wiki.

Differentiating Among BSD flavours

Published on May 26, 2007 in DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD. 0 Comments

This website deals mostly with FreeBSD and systems derived from or based on this superb operating system. However it’s also good to be aware of other BSD systems that are around and the reason why they exist or why have been developed: OpenBSD (secure by default - the world’s most secure OS), NetBSD (runs on nearly every platform imaginable, including a bread toaster! and in some sense Apple’s MacOS X. (See Unix family tree here)

There’s a good article on Serverwatch.com explaining the history, the differences between and common features of the 4 main BSD systems.

Organizations that want to use a public Unix variant have two solutions from which to chose: Linux and BSD. The much talked about Linux camp contains a variety of distributions that include different utilities and tool sets. The same is true of the less frequently covered BSD camp. This article compares and contrasts the four main BSD variants and offers recommendations for both server- and desktop-based solutions.

There are four main BSD variants. Three of these (FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD) are totally free; the fourth (Mac OS X) is technically the core part of an operating system that most wouldn’t even consider a BSD variant. To understand the differences between the various versions, let’s briefly recap the history of BSD to understand how the different versions have developed.

Read the whole article here.

What is FreeBSD?

Published on May 25, 2007 in DesktopBSD, FreeBSD, FreeNAS, FreeSBIE, Frenzy, M0n0wall, PC-BSD, RoFreeSBIE and pfSense. 2 Comments

This website deals with the FreeBSD Operating System, but what is FreeBSD?

FreeBSD (FBSD) is an advanced Unix-like operating system developed by the FreeBSD Project. FBSD is one of the most reliable, robust and secure operating systems in the world. It is free, open source and powers some of the internet’s largest web servers, including Yahoo’s and Sony’s (more companies). Rock-solid stability and the ability to perform extremely well under heavy workloads makes this operating system a popular choice among Internet Service Providers and Web hosting companies. A cohesive userland and kernel, the ports system and regular OS upgrades are the strengths of this OS.

FreeBSD is derived from the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD), the version of UNIX developed at the University of California at Berkeley between 1975 and 1993. FreeBSD is not a UNIX clone. Historically and technically, it has greater rights than UNIX System V to be called UNIX. Legally, it may not be called UNIX, since UNIX is now a registered trade mark of The Open Group.

FreeBSD runs on Intel processors as well as on DEC Alpha, Sun UltraSPARC processors, Itanium (IA-64) and AMD64 processors and soon on Suns Niagara servers (FreeBSD 7).

FreeBSD is an operating system that is very flexible and can therefore be used for various purposes:

  • FreeBSD - (web)servers
  • FreeNAS - Network Attached Storage servers
  • DragonFly BSD - Powering cluster computing
  • PC-BSD and DesktopBSD - Desktop
  • M0n0wall and pfSense - Firewall
  • Frenzy - portable system administrator toolkit
  • FreeSBIE and RoFreeSBIE- Live CDs

Stability, flexibility and security are what is needed for a good operating system, and FreeBSD has them all, whether you use it on your desktop or as server. There’s an interesting article on IBM’s website “Why FreeBSD” dealing with the strong points of FreeBSD.

Free OCR Software

Published on May 25, 2007 in FreeBSD. 2 Comments

OCR (Optical Character Recognition software converts hard-copy documents into editable text in a word processor by using a scanner) is still an area where the open source world has a lot of catching up to do with commercially available applications (e.g. Nuance - Omnipage). Recently there have been some interesting developments with regards to open source OCR: HP has open sourced some OCR code they developed between 1985 and 1994 called Tesseract, which is now being further developed with help and funds from Google (Google releases opens source OCR).

Austin Acton has written an interesting review where he compares 6 (free) open source packages GOCR, ClaraOCR, Ocre, Ocrad, Tesseract, OCRopus, of wich ClaraOCR, Ocrad and GOCR are in the FreeBSD ports.

The conclusion of the article is:

“The good news is that there are solutions available on Linux right now which interpret documents at up to 99% accuracy. The bad news is that 99% is not 100%, and that anything other than a high quality 400-600 DPI scan of 12-14 point font drops off very quickly in accuracy. The combination of Tesseract and Ocropus is clearly the project we can most rely on to provide the missing elements of a full-featured Free OCR suite.”

The review is an interesting read and I’d recommend it, if you’re interested in OCR and don’t want to pay for expensive propriety software.

Unix and BSD Family Trees

Published on May 24, 2007 in DesktopBSD, DragonFlyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and PC-BSD. 0 Comments

Recently I came across two interesting websites that show an up-to-date family tree of Unix and BSD operating systems, and thought that those of you who are not too familiar with the different Unix and Unix-like systems might find these pages interesting.

Flash/Youtube videos on FreeBSD

Published on May 24, 2007 in DesktopBSD, FreeBSD, FreeSBIE and PC-BSD. 0 Comments

To be able to watch Adobe Flash animations and videos on BSD systems, has been not too easy so far. This is caused by Adobe not releasing a (Free)BSD version of Flash, but only a (closed source) version for Windows and Linux. In order to watch Flash content on BSD one has to install the Linux Flash version along with the Linux Compatibility layer and tweak the system (sym-links).

However, there’s a Flash PBI available for PC-BSD users that installs Flash with a few mouse-clicks. Installing this manually is not necessary anymore as version 1.4 will come with Flash pre-installed, thanks to a redistribution agreement between iXsystems, the company behind the PC-BSD project, and Adobe.

There are a few open-source Flash players in development currently, of which Gnash and swfdec are the most promising projects, but they’re not perfect yet. Gnash for example is quite good at playing Flash animations (though a bit “grainy”), but it can’t play YouTube videos, whereas swfdec is better at playing YouTube videos, but it’s not very good with animations.

Matteo from the FreeSBIE project has now found a way to watch YouTube videos with Gnash on FreeBSD, but without using the Linux compatibility layer. Please note, that the steps he’s taken are the same for PC-BSD and DesktopBSD. Matteo installed the following ports:

  • graphics/gnash
  • www/firefox (uncheck “GSTREAMER” on the ncurses window)
  • multimedia/mplayer [MAKE WITH_GUI]
  • www/mplayer-plugin

He then installed the Greasemonkey plugin for Firefox and this Greasemonkey script. Note: select the “mini” GUI for mplayer because it is needed for the plugin.

If you have followed these steps and installed the port successfully, surf now to YouTube.com and give it a whirl.