A small RMS on my shoulder, complete with smell.

[reddragdiva]

Has anyone here actually tried using Debian GNU/kFreeBSD for anything?

I started using FreeBSD in 2002 and found the ease of administration amazing. I'd always hated the Linux kernel and this showed what was wrong with it.

Software was a problem. The ports system is a nice idea and a pain in reality. Most of the software that actually worked was Linux binaries under compat.

I tried Ubuntu 5.04 in 2005 and was blown away by the apt system. This was clearly how to do it.

I still miss the ease of administering FreeBSD. I do not miss the ports system.

I have not tried Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, but I fully expect it to combine the worst of both sides, and be as smooth to use as it is to pronounce.

Comments

[pndc]

I haven't given Debian GNU/kFreeBSD ("bless you!") a spin, but I did beat upon Nexenta, which is a Solaris kernel that used a Debian-ish userspace, and it was a steaming pile of shit. Mostly because they'd built exactly enough packages to build their ZFS toaster and didn't care about whether they were new or reliable.

I'd expect it to mostly just work with a few odd things breaking because of developers assuming all the world is Linux. But I also don't quite see what switching to a FreeBSD kernel buys you. (The answer doesn't seem to be ZFS: you may as well go OpenIndiana and get all of the features and not just those the FreeBSD developers could be arsed to port.)

[reddragdiva]

Yeah. If you want ZFS (which is actually all that), use Solaris or an open descendant and don't fuck around with FreeBSD or FUSE.

[eagle]

I dunno, not having to deal with the pathologically corrupt zombie corpse-fucker that is Oracle is a pretty major feature. ZFS on Debian/kFreeBSD is by accounts pretty usable.

[hennes]

ZFS is one reason. Jails are another reason. (I use neither atm).

[reddragdiva]

Zones in Solaris are great stuff, we use them at work all the time. Sadly, I think Solaris and its open-source descendants are destined for a slow decay.

[hennes]

Good point. I vaguely know about zones, but I never used them and they completely slipped my mind.


My own unix experience is based on:
* Linux slackware (Just worked and no fancy shit)
* Tried deadrat. Hated it
* Tried debian. Broke package system within 15 minutes.
* Tried deadrat 5. Hated it even more. Esp. the need to enable swap (which I did to a floppy drive just to pass that part of the installer.)
* Tried debian a year later. Installed many programs from tarballs (programs not available from the package system yet. Broke down within a week.
* Tried some sort of (open?) solaris on X86. It crawled.
* Tried the same on a 50Mhz sparc. It was way faster than the 1333Mhz intel.
* Went back to linux slackware
-- wait 3-4 years --
* Tried FreeBSD. Used it ever since. I loved the port system.

This is as a server though. No need for flash or other fancy stuff to be installed. Just things like screen, a webserver, PHP, database tools, tinyfugue mudclient, irssi IRC client, ... I guess it is different when you try to use it as a desktop with a graphical front, with flash, with audio etc etc.

[hirez]

The thing we (institutionally) Learned The Hard Way is that if you let $admin (or $app-dev) go "Oh it's simple just unpack this tarball and go ./configure && make && make install" then that box will be a tissue of local hacks run by $admin, and if they go under a bus then your life will be interesting.

Now we have wiki cribsheets for brewing packages for $distro and machine config is trivially repeatable.

(Yes, we rather like the flavour of the Puppet kool-aid.)

http://hennes.dreamwidth.org/icons

[hennes]

In a coorperate setting: agreed. (also, at work I was the person who complained the loudest about lack of documentation)

But this a private server, with just me as admin.

Re: http://hennes.dreamwidth.org/icons

[hirez]

I generally blame the fact that I'm one of the older admins and I really can't remember how some random webserver was put together. Especially at 4am when the thing's collapsed like a pile of wet tea leaves.

My home box is BSD-ports all the way down. It's just simpler that way.

[reddragdiva]

We do stuff from tarballs a lot, but document the installation process.

(In particular, our new Ubuntu VMs will have Apache from source, not Debian's fucked-up idea of Apache.)

[hirez]

EXPN 'fucked-up idea of apache'?

We used to do that. Once you get over the 'But apt is haaard' it's a lot easier to have a $distro build-box (as a VM-image so you don't contaminate it with previous build/test cycles) to generate packages. If for no other reason than the whole, utterly lovely, dependency-management that apt gives you.

(Which does all get a bit meta, but modern kit can easily cope with that sort of load. I think I have six or eight VMs running on my Mac-mini in various states of $doing-useful-thing)

I think there's a wierd admin-state which looks like idleness but is in fact the complete opposite. Where it appears that doing something trivial lots of times is easier than sitting down with the back of an envelope and a strong mug of tea and woking out how to automate the trivial-thing, or indeed how to avoid doing it altogether. It smells a bit like job security, or perhaps job-insecurity. I've watched other people go "Oh, I'll just do $blah, and..." when I've wanted to shout at them along the lines of "I don't want you do do $blah. $blah needs to happen automatically or there should be a web-form with a $blah button. Christ. It's not my job to make you feel wanted."

[reddragdiva]

There are some packages which the relevant Debian maintainer decides "The author's notions just aren't up to scratch. I know, I'll come up with something far better, matching my idea of what works!" MediaWiki is another one - Debian's MediaWiki is all but officially anti-endorsed by upstream and anyone coming to mediawiki-l with problems is advised to use a tarball installation instead.

Yeah, that may be a prospect for the near future. We're still small enough there's two sysadmins and the machines have names on a theme instead of numbers.

[hirez]

Ah. Yes. We have our own Postfix package for exactly that reason.

$mailname? What on earth's that about, you beardy bastards?

[hirez]

... As opposed to 'despondency-management' which is something else.

[ewx]

My interest in FreeBSD has (so far) been solely in the name of software compatibility. So what I really want is not Linux userland on FreeBSD kernel, but BSD userland on BSD kernel and with a decent packaging system. As far as I know, no such thing exists.

[reddragdiva]

A decent apt-like system would do the job. Or, really, any well-curated repository system. But it would have to be BSD-licensed, of course. And no doubt there's a string of reasons why it's absolutely the wrong thing for the BSD Way(tm), whatever those might be, and certainly not just NIH.

[ewx]

If you wanted it in proper FreeBSD the licencing would matter but if you just wanted some kind of BSD with a decent package system - which I do - then an ideologically impure fork would do fine. I’m happy enough with the “some kind of BSD with a decent UI and commercial software” that I’ve got here, for instance. (For that matter it runs dpkg just fine, albeit only in a separatist enclave rooted at /sw.)

[reddragdiva]

If I wanted to roll my own distro I'd punch myself in the face repeatedly until achieving unconsciousness I could theoretically do that, but the point of a distro is not having to do that.

[lproven.livejournal.com]

I would fully expect your worst expectation to be correct.

I am not sure what the future direction of xNix development will be. My idle pipe-dream is that Ubuntu will grow up to equal or outdo the polish of Mac OS X & the kernel will grow massive & stagnate. Shuttleworth then sponsors some L4-based whizzy microkernel (or possibly some exotic Plan 9 derivative) that finally moves us on from the fearsome UNIX monolith of ancient tradition.

Agreed about APT-GET, though.

Really don't like the traditional Unix filesystem layout, though. Had good solid reasons 30 years ago. Not now. Gobo has the right idea... Possibly. Well, *a* good idea, anyway. The OS X idea extended to its logical conclusion.

Am waffling. Will shut up.

[reddragdiva]

The future is Linux in all its joyous forms. Much of the open source world thinks of cross-platform as "works on Fedora and Ubuntu". Proprietary Unix is a zombie. Oracle fucked Solaris just by buying it - Solaris admins like me took that as the signal to get the hell off it.

I expect Red Hat to hold on, they seem to have learnt how to get sysadmins to accept them as a baseline. CentOS is their greatest market-share tool.

Canonical does user level, not kernel. I'm surprised Ubuntu is getting as much traction as it is in the server room, but then that's entirely because the sysadmins in question have Ubuntu on their desktops, and "Debian with up-to-date software" is an attractive proposition.

Debian will keep going as long as there are beardy geeks.

Mac OS X may be trademark Unix, but is a weirder Unix than Linux. Approximately no-one cares about its Unix nature except as a substrate.

[hirez]

I fear so. Now we're in the shiny new universe of squitty wee boxes that scale rapidly when yr site gets Tweeted/Boinged [FX: Hollow laughter. We can build out the h/w within minutes. Does the site-code scale? Er...] it's all about the package-management, which means Beardian.

(We had an umbongo box that got left alone for a couple of months. In that time the OS code rotted sufficiently that it's actually impossible to manage the thing and the only useful thing to be done is blow it away and reinstall.)

The other thing is hardware support. If you're properly cloudy-cloudy, that's not an interesting problem for your Ruby-fondling hipster-fixie coders. Until your site vanishes and Amazon or the FBI go 'Oops'. Otherwise you end up fiddling with the Venn diagram of 'Manufacturers who understand datacentres and four-hour-response' and 'Machines from same with drive-controllers and NICs supported by Beardian'

Re: http://hennes.dreamwidth.org/icons

[reddragdiva]

That's why CentOS is so popular: RHEL has all those drivers.

[ideological_cuddle]

What exactly are you hoping to gain from a FreeBSD kernel with a Linux userland bolted on top? Kernel configuration is such a small part of typical systems management that unless there's some specific feature you need that's in the FreeBSD kernel but not in Linux you may as well just use Linux.

Now, a Linux-like userland on Solaris, that could be useful. But I haven't been keeping up with FreeBSD these past few years, so maybe they've added something really compelling.

[eagle]

Those specific features are ZFS and pf. There was just a very long thread on debian-devel about this.

[ideological_cuddle]

That may be why the people building it want it, but Diva has already said if he wanted ZFS he'd use something Solaris-descended.

[reddragdiva]

I was just curious as to whether it was any good, a clusterfuck or something in between.

[hellsop]

I won't be satisfied until I find a packaging/administration system that parses actual configuration files, and looks at the filesystem to learn what's installed, instead of depending on it's own imagination or internal database. Yet, that won't be likely to ever happen because that would require A Lot Of Work, spending large amounts of time adapting code from the utilities that actually USE those configuration files. In the meantime, I choose for preference stuff that has the absolute minimum of packaging, because odds are that I'm going to want something that the packaging system doesn't provide in short order anyway, and the subsequent yak-shaving is going to make the packager increasingly brittle as time goes on.

[oda]

What's sad is that I was so deep in the Stockholm syndrome from time building Solaris and Red Hat packages (the former, annoying but possible, the latter, one of the most vile and horrible things ever) that the ports system looked like heaven in comparison.

I played with Debian once around the time I was starting with FreeBSD, and it pulled crap like fifty million poorly named sub-packages, and doing things like using the network card to look at the package list and then informing me when it came time to actually install that it couldn't find the network card. I may have pitched the install CDs into the trash.

This was a while ago so they have probably gotten better now, but let us say that I received a less than favorable impression of Linux. This on top of things like Red Hat not supporting multi-volume writes to tape, plus kernel issues where it would randomly and silently decide to stop networking, made me convinced that it was a toy, not a tool.

I tried FreeBSD, it made me feel like I was home again, I wept with joy, and I used it from then on out unless I needed to use Solaris for something. Ports looks *really good* if you've just been trying to build packages in Red Hat. It even looks good next to Solaris' pkgadd system. Apt does sound cool, though. I would rather love to have a modern user space on top of FreeBSD.

[reddragdiva]

It was the modern user space, i.e. up to date applications, that did it for me. That and having network cards and laptop suspend/resume work reasonably reliably on a wide variety of hardware. All software sucks, but this is a slight local minimum of suck. The suck went up quite a bit with Ubuntu 11.04's wacky user interface innovations and instabilities.

[oda]

Given that I used to do user space on Solaris, I can definitely see the appeal of up to date applications. Also of having hardware compatibility.