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From: michael@okjunc.junction.net (Michael Dillon)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc
Subject: Re: The Future of FreeBSD...
Date: 23 Jul 1995 06:51:01 GMT
Organization: Okanagan Internet Junction, Vernon B.C., Canada
Lines: 117
Message-ID: <3usrgl$9uk@felix.junction.net>
References: <3uktse$d9c@hal.nt.tuwien.ac.at> <3umkok$de2@nntpd.lkg.dec.com> <marcus.197.009F3034@ccelab.iastate.edu> <3us0rg$7ph@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>
NNTP-Posting-Host: okjunc.junction.net
In article <3us0rg$7ph@nntpd.lkg.dec.com>,
Jon Jenkins <jenkinsj@ozy.dec.com> wrote:
>Linux was never advertised and look at its poularity.
>In Europe its user base is 10x that of FreeBSD.
Wait a minute. Linux is advertised in Europe as it is advertised
elsewhere. I believe the first book published about Linux was in Germany.
It received a lot of positive magazine coverage in Europe.
Back when comp.os.linux was the only Linux newsgroup, there was an
extended flamefest regarding the meaning of FREE software and the GNU
licence. It dragged on and on as people posted misinformed flames and
others corrected them but the thing that got drilled into everybody's
head was that anyone was FREE to sell Linux and make money off of it.
Not long after that, Linux products started popping up all over ranging
from a guy who would charge you so much to coppy floppies to CD-ROM's to
companies like the ACC book http://www.acc-corp.com who also sell FreeBSD.
Now that Linux has a monthly glossy magazine (with more color pages every
issue) and has booths at all the major trade shows, there is certainly a
LOT of advertising going one.
There's no reason why FreeBSD couldn't do the same. In particular, if
someone were to publish a FreeBSD magazine, the popularity of the system
would grow faster than it already is. And make no mistake, FreeBSD's
popularity is growing. A lot of us who use Linux are evaluating FreeBSD
or have plans to do so. Many people use BOTH systems depending on the job
they need done. Sometimes Linux is better, sometimes FreeBSD is.
FreeBSD is better at NFS.
FreeBSD has faster networking code.
FreeBSD can be used as a WAN router using Enhanced Technologies 56K and T1
sync cards (email dennis@et.htp.com)
I believe FreeBSD has NIS and shadow passwords and quotas which are still
awkward patches for Linux.
There is no doubt in my mind that FreeBSD is a success and will continue
to be so. There is no doubt in my mind that the existence of TWO free
UNIX workalikes helps both of them. It legitimizes the whole idea of a
freely available O/S.
This thread started out with GUI as the topic. A lot of people believe
that FreeBSD has a GUI because it has X. This is not true. The term "GUI"
no longer refers to what X does. The term has changed its meaning to
include the typical things that people do with a GUI, the typical
programs they run, the typical ease (or expected ease) of getting things
done. The MacOS is the epitome of a GUI. FreeBSD is nowhere near this.
However, there is no reason why FreeBSD could not become something much
closer to the epitome of a GUI. Caldera (http://www.caldera.com) has the
right idea in building a network desktop based on a UNIX system under the
hood. They happened to choose Linux. In the past NeXT chose Mach as their
UNIX-like underpinning. Work with OS/2 for a while and you'll see that PM
and SOM are layered on top of a multitasking O/S that is powerful in its
own right.
What I'd like to see is a componentware approach to the GUI that builds
upon UNIX's strengths as a "toolbox" O/S with lots of filters and tools
that can be glued together in a myriad of ways the designer never thought
of. I don't believe that anybody has done this well, especially not
Microsoft with their OLE concept, but then I believe it's because few
people outside the UNIX world really understand the simplicity and power
of filters and pipes and scripts. I remember when Windows 3.0 started to
gain market acceptance and people talked about how you could buy a word
processor from one company and a spell checker from another and they
would all work together simply and easily. Instead we have bloated
do-everything applications that take 50 megs of hard drive to install,
are awkward to use, to learn, they crash too often, the design by
committee is inconsistent, the error messages are confusing or stupid....
Can't we do better?
>Windsock was trivial, perhaps a few minutes. /etc/hosts
>/etc/hosts.conf, bind, NIS, SLIP, PPP, routing, device
>slattach, etc etc .... There really is no comparison
I've just been evaluating Winsock's and I must say I've been through hell
trying to get them configured and working properly. This includes
commercial products like PC/TCP and PC/NFS
>efficiently via object based GUI builders. Lets say
>I want to change to look of the filemanager window
>in xfm without changing the functionality:
>I have get in the code and hack several
>thousand lines of code combined with an intricate
>knowledge of X intrinsics. If it was developed with a
>good object based GUI builder I wouold start that up
>and "drag n drop" a few components, point the
>event handlers at the backend functionality
>and recompile and exit.
No recompile. Just like using ResEdit on a Mac, you should be able to
change some stuff and it's done. The sophisticated end user should be
able to do it even if they don't know how to program or understand a
compiler error.
>built. With C++ and perhaps LessTif or the like there is
>no technical bar to something similar for UNIX/X. I know
>that SUN and perhaps SGI are already working on something
>similar based on Tcl/Tk if rumour is correct.
They are working on making TCL/Tk the GUI/scripting system by some small
redesign for portability and by releasing ports for UNIX, MacOS and
Windows. The TCL/Tk source code will be freely available, but their GUI
builder will be a commercial product. It's a start. A componentware
system needs a scripting language, but it is much more than just a GUI
with a scripting language. Check out comp.lang.tcl for more details or else
http://www.sunlabs.com:80/research/tcl/ will take you to dozens of WWW pages
telling you everything you want to know about TCL and Tk
--
Michael Dillon Voice: +1-604-546-8022
Memra Software Inc. Fax: +1-604-542-4130
http://www.memra.com E-mail: michael@memra.com