(Despite the title, this is a technical screed, not a religious one.  You have been warned.)

I started using FreeBSD about ten years ago.  A new client had it on his web servers, and I was impressed enough by it to start running it on my own machines, including my desktop.  In the late 1990s, the various Linux distributions were like fraternities making floats for a Homecoming parade: they turned out some impressive work, but you had to put up with a lot of drunken brawling to get there.  I bounced from one Linux distro to another, never really satisfied with any of them.  The BSD community seemed more mature (I saw a poll once that said FreeBSD developers were ten years older on average than Linux developers)  and it showed in the software.  I liked the stability of the software and the release process and the way it was all designed.  It just seemed like the free Unix operating system (OS) for grown-ups.

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The other day I considered switching my desktop to Linux for a minute or two.  It didn’t last long, and it would probably have been half an excuse not to work on something else, but I wavered for a moment.  I was looking at some new applications that looked interesting, but then I saw they require Adobe Air, which is apparently their new Flash platform.  It’s just recently been released for Linux, and considering they only recently finally released a Flash 9 that works on FreeBSD, I don’t suppose this new system Air thing will be coming any time soon.  Not long after that, Firefox crashed on me, complaining as it does every few days about either the Flash plugin or the Java one.  That’s when I started wondering how much trouble it’d be to switch to Ubuntu.

photo from flickr.com

I’ve been using FreeBSD for probably ten years now, since discovering it on a client’s servers and deciding I liked it.  We hardly ever need to compile a custom kernel now, but back then we did it a lot, and it was much simpler on FreeBSD.  The ports system was also far better than RPM, the most common software distribution system on Linux at the time, which would gradually develop dependency issues after you’d used it a while.  So I liked FreeBSD better at the software level.

The FreeBSD philosophy also seemed more professional and yet freer than the Linux community.  The FreeBSD license is basically, “Here, take this and do whatever you like with it (including making money); just give the person who created it credit.”  That’s much simpler and more open than the GPL.  There’s an “Information wants to be free!” attitude in a lot of the GNU/Linux camp that I guess I got too old for.

Thanks to the FreeBSD philosophy and design and a lot of hard work by serious people, it’s a rock-solid server platform.  It makes a wonderful web server, and the new stuff you can do with jails means even shared servers can let webmasters run insecure junk PHP scripts without any risk that they’ll hurt each other or the system.  It also works very well with qmail and the whole suite of DJB tools for DNS and other server purposes.

As a desktop, though, it’s still a bit of a struggle sometimes.  Market-share-wise, FreeBSD is kinda where Linux was a decade ago: used by a small, dedicated group of people who have to port programs written for other platforms before they can use them.  Now Linux is mainstream enough that big companies like Adobe develop for it, and it’s the FreeBSDers who have to do the porting of the Linux versions.  I guess I don’t mind too much because I still enjoy computers in and of themselves, so it’s okay if I have to tinker a little to get things working the way I want them.  I suppose I’d miss it if my system came ready to use out of the box.

I do wish Flash would just work, though, and not kill my browser once or twice a week.

By the way, I just didn’t have time to get a Latin lesson out last week, so I apologize to anyone who’s using them.  There will be a new one this Friday, and back to the regular weekly schedule after that.

Latin Lesson 8 is posted, covering the use of the dative case for indirect objects, and adjectives ending in -er.  When I get time, I think I’m going to start doing podcasts to go with the lessons, so I can explain things a bit more and give more examples.

Photo from Flickr.com

It’s 65 degrees out today—very hard to stay sitting here working and not go wandering outside to start planning the garden or just sit outside in the sun.  Can’t wait for spring.

There was no blog post last night because I ended up doing some unexpected system triage.  I upgraded some software, and that upgraded a low-level library which a whole bunch of other programs depended on, so I ended up needing to rebuild a whole bunch of stuff.  As long as I was at it, I thought I’d go ahead and upgrade FreeBSD from 7.0 to 7.1.  That went fine, but when it booted, it froze when it tried to bring up the onboard network card (which 7.0 had happily ignored because it didn’t support it).  Turning the card off in the BIOS got things back to normal so I could continue on with my upgrades.  (Like I need gigabit speed on my home network anyway.)  So instead of a quick blog post and an early bedtime I was up late getting all that done, but it’s all shiny and new now. Read more »

It’s time to use the awesome marketing power of my blog to plug one of my other web sites: FreeBSD Ports Review.  This is an idea I came up with over a year ago, but it’s been percolating around in my head for a while, and I finally decided how I wanted to do it.  But first, some technical background that 99% of my readers won’t care about:

My operating system (OS) of choice is FreeBSD.  For those who have heard of Linux, FreeBSD is another Unix-like OS, but with a more structured development process and design than Linux.  (Or to put it another way, Linux is like FreeBSD for hippies.  Which is funny, since the B in BSD stands for Berkeley, the center of the hippie universe.  But I digress.)  FreeBSD is particularly excellent for servers, but I run it on my desktop workstation, and the only thing I’m missing is Flash 9 capability, which is probably just as well.

One of the best features of FreeBSD is its ports tree.  A ‘port’ is simply a few small files that automate the process of getting and installing a particular program.  There are currently over 19,000 ports in the FreeBSD ports tree, arranged in a simple two-level directory.  For example, there is a ‘games’ directory, and in that you’ll find about a thousand games.  You can simply go into a port’s directory and type “make install,” and that program will be built to match your system, installed, and made ready to use.  Just “cd games/xlogical; make install” and in a few minutes you can be playing XLogical (a solid clone of a great old C64 game) without any need to go track down the game, download it, run some installer wizard, figure out what other programs you need to install first, or any of that mess.  Any dependencies are handled automatically, and the entire thing is slick as can be.

The good news is there are 19,000 ports, ready to be installed as easy as you please.  The down side is….there are 19,000 ports.  If you know what program you want to install—no problem.  But if you don’t already have a program in mind, it can be hard to find what you need.  Anyone willing to learn the ports system can submit a port (I created games/xlogical, thank you very much) so there can be some pretty obscure stuff in there.  If you just want to install a game, how do you figure out which of the 1000+ games would be most fun?  If you need to install an MySQL database, which of the six versions in the ports tree works best on FreeBSD?

FreeBSD Ports Review was created to solve this problem.  It provides a searchable database of all the ports, but there are lots of sites that already do that.  What’s new here is that it lets people write reviews.  Soon it will also collect ratings, probably on a five-star system.  With time, I hope it will collect enough reviews and ratings that FreeBSD users can quickly see which ports are recommended by their fellow users, and read about the experiences others have had with them.

Even more technical jargon:  I created this site with HTML::Mason, an extremely cool perl module that works with mod_perl to allow you to embed perl code in your web pages, but in much more powerful ways than PHP scripting, and with none of the evil you get with PHP.  I’ve wanted to do something in Mason for a long time, but never got around to it.  There are turnkey programs for so many things nowadays that it rarely makes sense to write your own for anything; but in this case, I wanted to interface directly to the ports tree, and none of the usual content management systems would have done that easily.  It came together very quickly in Mason, considering I was learning how to use it as I wrote the program.  It looks like it’s going to be very easy to extend it to add more features.

I plan to add a ‘featured port’ section, a 5-star rating system like I mentioned, and other new features.  I’ll also be improving the style, adding a real logo and things like that, as quickly as I can squeeze that much artistry out of my brain.  Please comment if you think of anything else it should do, or should do better.