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June 11, 2007
FreeBSD as a Desktop
FreeBSD is widely known as a server operating system. FreeBSD was one of the two original projects founded during the AT&T vs. California Berkeley suit in the early 1990??™s. BSD is a direct descendant of AT&T??™s System V Release 6 UNIX timesharing operating system. Sun Microsystems??™ SunOS platform was based on the original release of BSD back in 1982. Yahoo! Incorporated, EarthLink, and over six dozen other big companies, including banks and embedded router vendors use code derived from BSD. Apple Computer Inc.,??™s Mac OS X operating system is majority based on release 5 of FreeBSD. FreeBSD alone has never been highly regarded as desktop capable versus Microsoft Windows, Apple??™s Mac OS X, or the plethora of GNU/Linux distributions. Many people experience common desktop adoption problems when using FreeBSD, due to ignorance and licensing problems caused by big business attitude against the non-marketed operating system.
I would like to outline pitfalls and common misnomers of desktop application support which you may or may not be aware of. The four titles I would like to elaborate on are Sun Microsystems Inc.??™s Java Runtime Environment, Real Inc.??™s Realplayer, Adobe Systems??™ Acrobat Reader, and Macromedia??™s Flash. I will firstly start on the least supported solution on the BSD platform, which is Macromedia??™s Flash.
Flash is an interactive web-based technology developed by Macromedia Inc. in the early 1990??™s. It was unavailable for GNU/Linux until around 2002, and had limited support for Apple Macintosh until the release of OS X 10.0 in early 2000. Another title that will not be discussed is Macromedia Shockwave, which remains bias against all platforms except Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows. Many developers are adopting and developing using Flash on their web sites to create interactive communities and to deliver opinions, information, and advertisements to customers and casual browsers. Flash, although very capable as a light-weight game and advertisement technology, has time and time again tried to make up the bulks of web sites, which inevitably is causing quite a headache, even to the supported platforms. Because the Flash language is quite complex and hard to learn, the majority of sites using Flash technology cannot deliver a consistent feel. Flash on BSD is quite immature, because it depends on the Linux Plugin Wrapper to map Linux libraries to make it work. Flash on BSD is not native, and is for the most part emulated, and can be quite buggy at times. It is also stuck at version 6 when Linux, Macintosh, and Microsoft Windows are at release 7 and higher, due to some library bugs which crash the browser.
Realplayer and Acrobat reader fall into a similar boat to Flash, although are much more capable, and are more stable. They require a plethora of Linux emulation libraries, graphics libraries, and hacks to work. Because the BSD Linux emulation layer is quite mature and uses the same POSIX and ANSI libraries for the most part, it can run Linux binaries at native or better speed. Despite this advantage, the lack of being native makes the implementations broken at various unexpected times. One week it might work if install from ports, while one week it may not, may it be due to broken mirrors, broken libraries, or bad checksum values.
Sun Microsystems Inc.??™s Java implementation remains the most functional of the four titles discussed, due to actually being native. It however, requires users to download about five source and binary packages from their site and others independent of BSD ports in addition to using Linux procfs emulation, and some Linux libraries to compile. This is due to license restraints and pure laziness which tentatively target out the BSD platform for a non-distribution restraint, where you cannot host or download pre-compiled versions of the Java Runtime Environment, or JDK for BSD. The plugin and command-line binary which are generated however, have 100% compatibility with Java offerings, although some people question if 2.0GB of storage required to compile with only 50MB packaged merit the exorbitant CPU and time strain required for it to be made. Many attempts have been made to get Sun to allow the distribution of pre-built binaries independent of their official Java development for the BSD platform, and there is supposedly an agreement as of now that users can distribute and use JRE/JDK 1.5.0 for BSD. If you take a look at the official Java on FreeBSD page at http://www.freebsd.org/ however, the links remain broken, and I suspect Sun re-nigged on their deal.
Aside from the four somewhat limited titles discussed, I can play and author CD??™s, DVD??™s, and movies using GNU and BSD licensed titles just as the Linux counterparts can. NVidia also offers native accelerated drivers for their cards, which deliver the same performance as the Linux platform has. KDE, Gnome, Fluxbox, WindowMaker, and virtually all software titles which have source available have been ???ported??? to the BSD platform. Many proprietary titles, such as Opera, which is binary based, and QT dependent also work via Linux emulation which no performance regrets. FreeBSD has full system source available at all times, and due to its less restrictive license, allows you to modify any part of the system (Minus GNU Contributed Products) and not disclose changes. It??™s very stable, capable, and portable if you are willing to read documentation, get to know your hardware, and help the existing community in working bugs and common hardware adaptability problems. Any hardware that works on Linux will most likely work on FreeBSD, even NDIS Wifi and Fuse file systems do.
