“Any systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection.” Read it here.
FreeBSD Remote Install
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSAlert.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Can the editors, please do not post articles which themselves are nothing more than flamebait, or at least omit the flame portions, this would have been far better worded as:
“Read the following article for information on how to install FreeBSD on a Linux system remotely.”
Instead of leaving tons of flame war worthy statements with very little factual basis such as “upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x”.
I understand the whole concept of Journalistic Integrity, etc. But aren’t we trying to avoid flamewars on this site?
Behold the power of Depenguinator!! Ha ha! All your base… No, really that’s a good laugh and if somebody doesn’t get it, well then he’s SCREWED I tell you!
I encountered accusations of “flamebait” on slashdot as well; it seems that British humour is as unappreciated in North America as reputed.
The whole “exorcize these evil spirits” bit is a dig at people who don’t understand the difference between a demon and a daemon.
The whole “exorcize these evil spirits” bit is a dig at people who don’t understand the difference between a demon and a daemon.
Aren’t daemon’s a sort of gnostic angel or something like that ?
I really wish the editor wouldn’t add his own ‘wayward’ opinions about linux in favor of bsd… seeing that they’re both open source and are fighting the same fight. You don’t ever see `knock down’ fights between bsd and linux because they both have their place in the OSS market and both share the relatively same software. It’s fine if you want to promote BSD over linux… that’s alright with everybody, but don’t make linux look horrible because YOU don’t like it… be more factual… it makes you look smarter and less inmature.
I have serious trouble taking Americans seriously when their three most powerful men go by the names “Dick,” “Bush,” and Colin…”
Now that’s Canadian humor for you ;P
I encountered accusations of “flamebait” on slashdot as well; it seems that British humour is as unappreciated in North America as reputed.
I think this also shows the age and literacy level of the average Slashdot member
Most modern American humor doesn’t place much value on wordplay, unfortunately; it’s all about sight gags or outrageous behavior. But, there are plenty of us somewhat older “mericans” who love British humour (rather than humor). My wife and I would stay up late watching Monty Python or Red Dwarf any day, rather than Saturday Night Live.
Although, maybe I am disqualified by being half Canadian: Kids in the Hall rule ;-).
<…..back on topic/>
This is a pretty cool idea, even for hosting companies who offer FreeBSD servers, because they are rarely configured right, and rarely have a recent version of FreeBSD installed. Last time I leased a FreeBSD server from a hosting firm, I ended up with a completely unusable setup, including a whopping 20 MB /var partition (yes, it’s true). I had to complain and threaten until they finally let me visit the server room and install FreeBSD right. Next time I will just use the Depenguinator, thanks.
I have been remotely installing FreeBSD for years. It is quite easy – just install a minimal OS to a hard disk locally (use FreeBSD’s dedicated disk mode to avoid problems with disk geometory later). Make sure you configure the NIC’s and IP settings etc. as if they were for the target machine. Get a ‘dd’ image of it, copy it up to your Linux server. Uunmount the swap and boot partition. Blast the image back with ‘dd’ over /dev/hda or whatever. Issue a fast reboot command in Linux and wait till FreeBSD comes back up in its place. You can then sort the partitions out better.
I encountered accusations of “flamebait” on slashdot as well; it seems that British humour is as unappreciated in North America as reputed.
The whole “exorcize these evil spirits” bit is a dig at people who don’t understand the difference between a demon and a daemon.
There’s a fine line between being a comedian and a zealot.
Instead of leaving tons of flame war worthy statements with very little factual basis such as “upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x
In regards to the majority of existing Linux systems, which are running Linux 2.4 and no not utilize the NPTL, FreeBSD 5.x is an upgrade (as can be evidenced by the now infamous http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/) Certainly there are other ways to upgrade that system without removing Linux, namely upgrading to the Linux 2.6 kernel and/or recompiling the Linux 2.4 kernel with the backported NPTL patches, and then rebuilding/reinstalling glibc with NPTL support instead of LinuxThreads.
While the Linux 2.6/NPTL solution might be slightly faster than the FreeBSD 5.x solution, the FreeBSD 5.x/KSE solution will certainly be a better performer than a Linux 2.4/LinuxThreads one.
In terms of stability though, there will be problems along the way, especially with the ports tree as the transition to libkse begins (i.e. packages that do not detect the presence of pthreads correctly or pass the proper flags to gcc, and pass alternatives such as -lc_r) and some stability hiccups with the ULE scheduler much like Linux 2.6 and 2.4 experienced with stalling when the O(1) scheduler was first implemented.
However, even with the cross-ported LinuxThreads implementation, FreeBSD 5.x will still be the scalability winner over 2.4, especially when applications have been kqueue optimized (such as ircd).
Generally, the FreeBSD advocates don’t do stuff like this… Zealotry is not BSD’s strong side, which most are thankful for.
Is this the first sign of an OS War? Is it so that BSD users is tired of Linux users bashing their favourite OS and start fighting back?
One thing I hope is wherever a war like this takes place, please not on OSAlert….
Anyway… without ranting about war or anything, I think it’s great that BSD make a tool such as the mentioned one that will ease the transition to BSD..
It’s funny, yet I think a WindowWiper would be much more effective than bashing the “good guys on our side”…