LWN: Comments on "What's New in FreeBSD 5.3"

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

adamretter — Tue, 09 Nov 2004 16:55:33 +0000

I would be very interested in starting a project to create a desktop BSD. Probably based on FreeBSD, I have been giving this a lot of thought for a quite some time now. If anyone else would be interested in actually doing something - please contact me - adamretter`AT`hotmail.com

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

BackSeat — Sun, 31 Oct 2004 22:38:32 +0000

Despite this being "Linux Weekly News", I for one would wecome an article that, in the words of the old exam question, "compares and contrasts" Linux with FreeBSD.

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

pimlott — Fri, 29 Oct 2004 18:23:05 +0000

Keep in mind that people said this about Linux for a long time (probably since 97). It turned out there was a lot of work to do before anyone could just slap on some icing and have a usable end-user system. Think of all the infrastructure that's been developed for Debian, which made creating Ubuntu and Linspire so much easier. Contrast the meager success of Corel's old Debian derivative. Of course, application availability has a lot to do with it, but I suspect that FreeBSD needs a lot more groundwork before people can start giving it a beginner-friendly face.

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

lolando — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 08:37:46 +0000

> I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make a Desktop Friendly FreeBSD.

Well, I suppose the Debian-Desktop is trying to do exactly that. Their task is not specific to Linux. There's already a live CD of the "Debian GNU/kFreeBSD" port available, the new debian-installer is a work in progress for that port, and the rest is work already done in a generic manner for all ports Debian provides.

ULE

rsidd — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 04:32:36 +0000

It now looks increasingly likely that FreeBSD 5.3 will ship with ULE turned off.

ULE has recommended against for weeks (months?) and turned off in the default GENERIC kernel config. It has known problems and no active maintainer at present. Nothing new there. The problem is many people have their own custom kernel configs that they've been using since before ULE was deprecated. Now the ULE has actually been disabled in the build, i.e. if you enable it the build will error out.

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

ladislav — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 02:49:12 +0000

TrianceOS (made in Malaysia and partly financed by the Malaysian government, I believe) is attempting to create a more user-friendly, desktop FreeBSD. The project is in early beta and the installer is text mode, but they are trying to take the pain out of configuring a useable desktop (with KDE). You can download a beta release for free, after registering on their web site.

What's New in FreeBSD 5.3

elanthis — Thu, 28 Oct 2004 02:36:30 +0000

I wonder if anyone has ever tried to make a Desktop Friendly FreeBSD. (And no, OS X does not count, since all of the interesting desektop bits are proprietary Apple technologies, not native BSD stuff.) Ubuntu, Linspire, and so on all do it with Linux - why not with FreeBSD?

Really, all I'd imagine you'd need is a simplified (non-technical) installer and a decent default configuration.