The article is published in issue 22 of the Free Software Magazine

Update:

OSNews has picked up the article

For those wondering on the tense, the article was written based off the RC releases and when FreeBSD still had a chance of hitting its December release — which it missed by a wide mark.

Check out the OS News comments here, which includes link to my article.

OSNews Preview of FreeBSD 7

Quick summary we’re shooting for getting 7.0-RC2 done Real Soon Now
(originally targetted this weekend but three things came up through the
past day or two that will delay it to Monday-ish) and we hope that’s the
last of the RCs

(sic)

This is really exciting. Also remember ULE is still not the default scheduler and must be enabled via a custom kernel and a kernel recompile.

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/amd64/ISO-IMAGES/7.0/

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/7.0/

NetBSD 4.0 is dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro “itojun” Hagino, a well known IPv6 hacker who died in October 2007.

Read the release announcement here:http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-announce/2007/12/19/0000.html

I’ll be writing a review next week when I get back to San Francisco from visiting family in Texas.

The project page is here: http://sourceforge.net/projects/finstall/

Needless to say, this would be much easier if the FreeBSD project would just get off its perforce repository for “pre-production” development (or whatever that means). I’ve complained enough about FreeBSD’s use of perforce in my post called: FreeBSD and Perforce? Just Say No!

In any case, back to the finstall project. There are two mailing lists: finstall-developers@lists.sourceforge.net for discussion and development and finstall-svn@lists.sourceforge.net which will just track commits to the sourceforge SVN repository.

Web access to the projects SVN repository is here: http://finstall.svn.sourceforge.net/viewvc/finstall/

I highly recommend people keep an eye on this, as this will eventually become the de-facto FreeBSD installer. In the coming weekend I’ll expand on the finstall architecture and current progress so stay tuned.

If you are already running FreeBSD 7 Beta1, the proper way to upgrade to beta2 is by checking out the RELENG_7 tag using a tool like CVSUP.

Announcement: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2007-November/037966.html

I’ll update this post in several hours and comment on what issues (if any) are fixed in this build that were broken for me in Beta1.

Poul-Henning Kamp’s main concerns revolved around his opinion that C++ made it very easy to write poor code, and also limiting the choice of compilers by “raising the bar significantly on any non GPLv3 we might consider”.

Ivan Voras, author of the pending (and currently alpha) FreeBSD installer: “finstall” — chimed in mentioning that perhaps PHK had: “A bit of the NIH syndrome here?”, continuing to say: “The less people know the language, the less it will be used. A one-off language (like “K”) applicable only for FreeBSD is not exactly doomed to popularity.”

Poul-Henning Kamp retorts with the following: “Not really. I’ve personally bugged Bjarne about making C++ usable or systems programming ever since 1987 or so, but to no avail.” … “So what I’ve been tinkering with, is not a new language, but a dialect enhanced to make kernel programming simpler.”

I encourage members of the community to read the entire thread so they can come to their own conclusions. The thread starts here in FreeBSD-Arch mailing list: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2007-October/006969.html

Resources:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/K

http://netlab.ru.is/exception/LinuxCXX.shtml

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2007-October/006969.html

Jonathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems has announced on his blog that Sun will be counter sueing Network Appliance over their initial (troll like) litigation against Sun.

Jonathan goes on to mention the FreeBSD port of ZFS: The port is done to FreeBSD, the OS on which Net App’s filers are built. They could use it without owing us a dime, and they’d be protected from our portfolio. (The quid pro quo? They’d have to agree to offer reciprocal protection to Sun.)

You know it’s funny, I was anti-sun for a very long time — but it seems they have really come around on the whole open source thing — and my next server purchase will probably be a sun box.

After doing a cvsup on RELENG_7 and rebuilding world and the kernel, things seem to have cleared up — but the state of the install from the CD seems dubious at best.

After reading about the FreeBSD Graphical Installer here I was immediately tempted by the inclusion of the recently ported ZFS. I quickly decided I would give the experimental package a whirl, and decided I would document and chronicle my adventures so others could try it out as well.

Background / First Steps

Initially I assumed the new graphical installer was included in the “FreeBSD-Current” nightly build — so I browsed the FreeBSD snapshot site: here and downloaded the most recent build for my architecture which ended up being “7.0-CURRENT-200710-i386-disc1.iso”.

This assumption turned out to be incorrect, the FreeBSD Graphical Installer (finstall) has not yet been merged in to the main CVS repository, and much to my dismay it is in the “experimental” perforce repository here. I’ve already written on why I think FreeBSD is making a bad choice using a proprietary version control package in the article: “Feebsd and perforce? Just say no!” My initial suspicion was confirmed, since there is no anonymous access to the perforce repository I was forced to download the “finistall” project file by file through the web interface. I can understand the need to have a separate “unstable” repository, but there is no good reason I can think of that it should be managed by perforce, thus excluding the weekend tinkerer like me.

There are three directories in the perforce repository: 1) “installer/” which contains the PyGTK graphical component, this is what end users will interact with directly, 2) “pybackend/” this contains the supporting code for the graphical component, this what actually performs the configurations selected by the user via the graphical user interface, and finally 3) “makeimage/” which contains the python scripts used to generate live cd iso’s with the finstall enabled. This last directory is what we are looking for, specifically the “makeimage.py” script.

Building the Live CD

The script requires an existing system to bootstrap into the live CD — I used the FreeBSD Current ISO listed above in the first section. The install went smoothly, as usual, which is a promising sign for the pending 7.0 release.

Initially I only downloaded revision 12 of the makeimage.py script here and a copy of maptree.py here — however I realized I needed the whole tree, and since it is in the qusi-exlusive perforce tree I was forced to download the files one by one through the web interface. See tarball of “finstall perforce directory” in the resources section for the same files I’ve used in this document.

A quick glance through makeimage.py tells me I’ll need to install python (since it is a python script) and cdrtools to create the image. I’ll also need to run the script at root at certain points, so be prepared and double check you have root access on your machine.

I first used portsnap to update my ports tree, with the following two commands for my freshly installed system:

portsnap fetch

portsnap extract

cd /usr/ports/lang/python; make install && make clean

(I accepted the default configuration options)

cd /usr/ports/sysutils/cdrtools; make install && make clean

(Again, I accepted the default configuration options)

cd /usr/ports/ftp/wget; make install && make clean

mkdir /usr/local/finstall

chmod -R a+x *.py

cvsup -g -L 2 standard-supfile

cd /usr/src

time make buildworld (Took 80min for me)

make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC

pkg_add -r xorgpkg_add -r xfce

pkg_add -r vim

pkg_add -r py-gtk

pkg_add -r firefox

pkg_add -r thunderbird

pkg_add -r strace

pkg_add -r unixbench

pkg_add -r bonnie++

Now that we have all the packages we need on our system we can run the makeimage script that will actually generate the FreeBSD finstall LiveCD.

./makeimage.py -d /usr/local/finstall -i FREEBSD7-FINSTALL.iso -f -p pkglist

After makeimage.py finishes the console is a little “wacky” (yes, that is a technical term). Just type exit, and re-login and you should be fine.

Running finstall

Unfortunately the finstall livecd I built my self doesn’t exactly work (yet…) . It boots, but moused sort of half freezes at one point during the boot — though hitting enter seems to refresh the screen and I’m able to login as the “install” user the paths to the startxfce start script are different on my livecd and the one Ivan produced, thus causing it to fail. If I correct this manually, and then run startx, the desktops are not configured the same. Basically mine doesn’t work.

But I’m willing to believe it is something I have done incorrectly during my tweaking, and will re-visit this in a couple of days.

Resources:

Finstall wiki

Finstall Architecture Notes

Ivan Voras finstall presentation (PDF)

Portsnap Documentation (FreeBSD.org)

Tar ball of finstall perforce directory (Tarball)

The apparent logic being that there needs to be a separate repository for “experimental” (and corporate) projects that are not ready to be merged into CVS (from this Perforce primer: http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/p4-primer.txt ). What is particularly worrisome is that Scott mentions that the p4 binary is “freely” available for download on UNIX systems including FreeBSD. Freely available, but is it free as in freedom. No.

I find this whole argument a bit concerning for two reasons: 1) You could just have an experimental directory / module in CVS where all this stuff went without affecting the release process 2) Having experimental code in a separate repository managed by proprietary creates an unnecessary barrier to entry.

I think its about time FreeBSD ditches Perforce.

Resources:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/p4-primer/article.html#SYNCING

http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/p4-primer.txt

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2004-August/035476.html

I must admit I started installing the software with low expectations, I was expecting a slightly tweaked KDE theme at best once the installer was finished.

What I discovered was nothing short of the Ubuntu of the FreeBSD world — a highly polished distribution built on a rock solid foundation.

I was going to do a more in-depth review, but so much time has passed I’m not sure I remember everything that is relevant, so for now I’m just going to throw up the screens shots I have and hopefully that will convince you to take the dive yourself!

Find out about how I went from the system installer to World of Warcraft, Java and Eclipse on a FreeBSD system in under 30 minutes.

I’m planning a few reviews over the next couple of weeks including NetBSD 4.0, FreeBSD 7, PC-BSD 1.4, and OpenBSD 4.2

Check back soon.

I attended his “Narrative History of BSD” yesterday, which was fun and informative.

If anyone is interested and in the Bay Area, I recommend trying to sign up for the course, it starts this Saturday (09/29/2007).