Debian’s GNU/kFreeBSD Installer will support ZFS

“While Debian GNU/kFreeBSD has supported the ZFS file-system with its FreeBSD-8 kernel, support for installing the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD distribution to a root ZFS file-system will now be possible with the Debian 6.0 “Squeeze” release.

For those unfamiliar with Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, it takes the GNU user-land but runs it atop the FreeBSD kernel rather than Debian GNU/Linux with the Linux kernel. You can still use apt-get and do most anything you would with the Linux-based Debian distribution (aside from different hardware compatibility and other support differences), but instead you’re running the FreeBSD kernel.

While the upstream FreeBSD project doesn’t have an easy root ZFS file-system installation option within FreeBSD 8.0/8.1, this isn’t particularly ground-breaking, as the FreeBSD-based PC-BSD already has ZFS installation support that is quite easy to work.”

Full post on Phoronix: Debian’s GNU/kFreeBSD Installer Will Support ZFS

Review of Running Bordeaux on PC-BSD

Jesse Smith of Distrowatch has used Bordeaux for a week and written up his (mostly positive) experience (feature story):

“The Bordeaux Technology Group is a company specializing in compatibility software. Specifically, they work at making it as easy as possible to run Windows programs on the UNIX family of operating systems. Their Bordeaux tool is built to run on Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, OpenIndiana and Mac OS X. Bordeaux is, at its heart, a customized build of Wine. They take a recent version of Wine, add some special tools and test their build for compatibility against a group of popular Windows software. They then sell this bundle (along with support) for about US$20 – 25, much less than the typical cost of a Windows license. A few weeks ago I had a chance to chat with Tom, a member of the Bordeaux Technology Group, and he was kind enough to give me a copy of Bordeaux (PC-BSD edition) to test-drive.

The provided PBI package was about 44 MB and it installed without any problems. With the install completed, two icons were added to my desktop and application menu. These new icons were labelled “Bordeaux” and “Cellar Manager”. I launched Bordeaux first and was presented with a new window featuring three tabs along the top. These three tabs are called “Install Applications”, “Manage Wine” and “Unsupported Packages”. At the bottom of the window, regardless of which tab is selected, are two buttons called “Help” and “Install”. Clicking the Help button always opens a browser window to the Bordeaux documentation website. The Install button actually performs different functions depending on which tab is selected.”

Read on for the remainder of the story, and the conclusion: Test-driving Bordeaux 2.0.8

NB, Bordeaux Group has a 50% offer going: Bordeaux 50% off recession busting sale

New benchmarks of OpenSolaris, BSD & Linux

Phoronix has benchmarked the latest OpenSolaris-based distributions (OpenSolaris, OpenIndiana, and Augustiner-Schweinshaxe), compared to PC-BSD, Fedora, and Ubuntu. The Phoronix review concludes:

There you have it, the performance of the latest OpenSolaris distributions against PC-BSD/FreeBSD and two of the most popular Linux distributions. The Fedora and Ubuntu operating systems won most of the tests, but there were a few leads for PC-BSD while the OpenSolaris operating systems just one won test (Local Adaptive Thresholding via GraphicsMagick) at least for our benchmarking selection and workload. If you are using an OpenSolaris-based operating system hopefully you are not using it for a performance critical environment but rather to take advantage of its technical features like DTrace, ZFS (though that is becoming moot with its availability on PC-BSD/FreeBSD and even Linux), etc.

Check out the article for the graphs, benchmark details and hardware used: New benchmarks of Opensolaris, BSD and Linux

Build your own Router (pfSense)

Martin Diers set up pfSense for a new warehouse.

My company is expanding into a warehouse, and so for the first time, I have to setup a WAN. That’s a Wide Area Network, which basically means joining together two or more LANs so everyone can see each other, even if you are across the country.

…

At my company, I have our local internet router running pfSense on a traditional PC with two network cards. It works just like your home linksys or netgear router. It’s just faster and can handle a lot more traffic. It is also extremely stable. I never have to reboot the thing. You configure it just like your home router: through a web interface

He finishes the article by saying how easy setting up a wlan with pfsense (and cheap), compared to the 90’s:

pfSense has been the best router software I have ever used. It is as capable as anything put out by Cisco or HP, and it is open source. For the cost of the bare hardware, you can have a world-class router that supports many other services such as local DNS resolution, content filtering, bandwidth monitoring, Quality of Service controlls, the list goes on, and you can even have it in an little fanless package.

Read the whole post: Build your own router (trojanbadger.com)

“pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution.”