Date: Sat, 12 Jul 1997 12:08:14 -0700 From: Amancio Hasty <hasty@rah.star-gate.com> To: freebsd-chat@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: freebsd-sf@arachna.com Subject: SFBAUG Notes Message-ID: <199707121908.MAA12381@rah.star-gate.com>
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The SF FreeBSD user's meeting was held last Thursday at the cool offices of Silicon Reef located in 3017 17th Street , San Francisco. At the start of the meeting , I told jkh that he should have a FreeBSD 3.0-current snapshot . He just responded by flinging a FreeBSD 3.0 -current CDROM snapshot 8) Later on that night , I installed that version on my FreeBSD test system and was pleasantly surprised at how fast the bits flew from the cdrom to my disk -- it took less than 5 minutes to drop in X and a base system with just the binaries 8) The complete install from start to finish took less than 30 minutes! So we can probably do a complete install in less than 10 minutes. Is just that setting up X and a couple of other user level packages slows me down ... The boot from the CDROM was very, very nice 8) My FreeBSD test machine is a P133, 32MB , with a IDE CDROM and a 2 gig ide disk drive so it is not a very speedy box. One of the hot topics in the meeting was FreeBSD 3.0 vs. FreeBSD 2.XX The reason why this is an issue at least for me is because frequently I get ask if a package or driver works on FreeBSD 2.X my typical response is that I don't run FreeBSD 2.X however people have reported that the package works or doesn't work on FreeBSD 2.x. On my part, I don't have the resources nor the time to maintain packages or drivers for both OS versions. When I ask people why they don't want to upgrade to FreeBSD 3.0? The usual response is that they are petrified to upgrade to FreeBSD 3.0 . Typically, I respond by saying that my main box rah.star-gate.com has been running FreeBSD 3.0-current for the last 6 months so it can't be that unstable. I use my box as a web server, ftp server, telephone answering machine, fax machine, e-mail, and hacking 8) Given that I am a consultant if I need to communicate with a customer I need my box up and running. --- threads, C++, Java A fellow from Netscape stated that one of the reasons that they didn't want to consider doing a port of FastTrack to FreeBSD is because the API and pthreads API was not stable. In the case of pthreads that it was buggy. This is not the only reason why netscape doesn't want to port to freebsd however I at least tried to respond to the technical side of the questions. It was a total surprise to me to find out that more than one person in the group thought that our threads implementation was buggy. I responded that one of my customers is using it in a mission critical application . jkh responded that John Birrell <jb@cimlogic.com.au>, the maintainer of the threads package, company uses threads for embedable systems. The other hot topic was better support for C++ and at the heart of that issue lies the ability to support elf. The issue was triggered by the fellow from Netscape that at least in his company all current development is in C++. jkh mention that we shouldn't move to elf just for better support of C++. This is an interesting dilemma given that if someone wants to develop C++ using templates they are better off going to some other OS. One counter argument to at least deflate the the issue of not going to elf is that some in the industry think that the future lies in java and that some are concentrating in the interpreter / compiler to improve java's performance. This is fine ;however, the question in my mind is how long do we have to wait till we see a cool java compiler of hopefully industrial strength. --- On the lighter side and happy side, jkh issue a strong request to FreeBSD activist to write articles . He also will match $ for $ whatever a publisher pays . I think that he will pay a minimum of $1000 and less than $10000 . A concern was raised that in Japan and in Germany people are writing articles about FreeBSD and in the case of Japan someone was thinking about starting a TV show about FreeBSD (not sure if this is true or not it just simply to wild for me to conceive). If memory does not fail me the last article published in the US about FreeBSD was in 1995. --- jkh also handed out his first copy of FreeeBSD News which has a nice article by David Filo, Co-founder of Yahoo!, as to why they chose FreeBSD for their web servers. It is nice reading so if you haven't received a copy of FreeBSD News get one ! To register: http://www.freebsd.org/register.html Enjoy, Amancio
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