SGI: Discussion

Napoleon XIV, you could say the man blazed a trail that none have yet dared to follow, excellent sound quality in this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnzHtm1jhL4

How about "What the world... Needs now... Is another fractious BSD fork..." (Sung to the tune of "What the World Needs Now Is Love" by Hal David and Burt Bacharach, as sung by Jackie DeShannon, the song reached number 7 on the US charts in 1965 whereas in 1966 "They're Coming to Take Me Away" reached number 5)...

Well, thank you - I assume you've promoted me from basement dwelling Morlock to server admin...

BTW, I'm reading this rather pointless thread on a machine running PC-BSD. Installation was no worse than a recent Ubuntu - no, it was better, because it was easy to avoid GNOME 3. And guess what - PC-BSD seems to be using my nVIDIA GTX550 Ti just fine, and the controllers on my MSI 990FX motherboard seem well-supported...

And the important files are being served from a nice rackmount machine in another room - above ground - using FreeBSD and ZFS. A combination that makes efficient use of my drives and actively detects and reports any problems long before any data is at risk. And that all depends on good hardware support for the controllers interfacing those drives, so it's got that and "ZFS / containers / jails / VM / clustering whatever crap." All of which have been important features driving the use of Linux and (what's left of) commercial Unix for the past 10 years...


Those vendors got to choose a very small list of "video cards and other hardware" that they would support. And they were paid a lot of money to support that hardware and software, or to pay subcontractors/OEMs to do it. So yes, they supported the hardware they chose to ship reasonably well...

BSD worked as well as the underlying hardware would allow. If you had put BSD on a mid-range Alpha in the 90s, you got mid-range performance. If you put BSD on x86 hardware with shitty IDE controllers and lousy network interfaces in the 90s, you got shitty PC performance - same as Linux did, same as Solaris/x86 did. If you spent more on x86 hardware that didn't suck, you got a good system.

I can't speak to what window manager BSDi shipped, but I would hardly consider it a negative if it did not include CDE...

Uhm, didn't BSDi want $500-995 for a retail license for one machine? Granted we might've wound up with BSDi doing paid-support BSD on par with RedHat doing paid-support Linux, but would it have tempted DEC or IBM to embrace BSD instead of Linux - and thereby lend the significant credibility they did to Linux in the 90s?

Current BSDs don't have the wide range of hardware support or add-in native software readily available, but I find them to be much easier to make rock-solid-stable, which is of interest to server guys more than desktop guys but is still desirable on a deskop - isn't that one of the digs that Linux originally had against Windows?

In general I'd say that IBM, SGI and the like are being pretty good about following through on their licensing commitments to GPL. Linux has gotten a lot from those in return for providing the base OS for (some of, in the case of IBM) their machines. The problems have mainly been with embedded systems companies and internal-use companies (like Google).

Well, I'm assuming you must be an admin, because you don't seem like a Morlock....

Part of the issue I see, though, is the tendency to create a "desktop" distribution and a "server" distribution. FreeBSD, for example, practically advertises itself as a server OS. Meanwhile, PC-BSD is based on the end user experience and having a graphical desktop. If we look back to the commercial Unixes like AIX, HP-UX, Solaris, etc., though, they had no such clear distinction, except for the software sets that would be installed on each. And rather than having 30 different window managers available, and 3 different mammoth desktop environments, they basically focused on one standard desktop: CDE. The BSD's currently have no analogue to this, and the situation for Linux is not so much better. All the responsibilities of software management are dumped onto the end user, and at a time when software management is a serious matter due to software vulnerabilities.

There are currently too many complexities and choices, and the tools for managing software are typically not really sophisticated enough or high level enough to keep up with the massive pool of software available. For example, you should be able to install GNOME and KDE in a few short commands, as well as uninstall them in a few short commands, and expect to have a clean system. It should be possible to update the entire system, including the core operating system between major releases, and in a few short commands. I will say, though, that if pkgng becomes a common way to handle packages, then I think that will definitely be a big technical step.