Chasing Linux

FREEBSD HAS LONG been known for stability, security, and good performance, as well as for its strong developer community. But this open-source operating system has been dogged during the past few years by its inability to draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source applications available for Linux.

But businesses concerned with a lack of developer tools or end-user applications for FreeBSD needn’t worry. The FreeBSD Project has made good progress on porting both tools and apps, and its Ports Collection boasts nearly 7,000 different solutions for programmers and end-users.

In a recent look at FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview 1, we discovered that the OS itself is likewise benefiting from regular improvements. Scheduled for release in November, FreeBSD 5.0 promises a number of new additions and enhancements to existing functionality, and this early release provides developers with a free sandbox and plenty of tools to begin coding and testing applications.

Many of the improvements are in the areas of security, hardware support, and developer tools, but there are also some key upgrades to the kernel. The kernel support for devices now allows entries in the /dev directory to be built automatically and makes it much easier to attach devices to the system. Also in the kernel, a new LOMAC (Low-watermark Mandatory Access Control) facility has been added to protect processes and data from malicious code, intrusions, and other compromises. This drop-in security mechanism requires no administrative setup.

Tools and apps aplenty

Administrators will find several new hardware additions. For example, the Xircom 3201 and Conexant LANfinity RS7122 networking chip sets are now supported, as are SCSI drivers such as Adaptec’s AIC7902 Ultra 320. Moreover, support for SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) systems has been reworked in this release. And admins can run bundled VMWare on FreeBSD to host other operating systems and their applications.

On the software side, network file systems, such as NFS (Network File System) and Samba, can now be mounted during system startup. TCP/IP support has also been expanded to allow a greater number of concurrent outbound connections. Support for larger swap areas is another useful change, and one that will help speed up things on developer-class systems.

Developers have plenty of tools to choose from. Java programmers will find the latest JDKs, IDEs (integrated development environments) such as Forte, and the open-source JBoss application server. A number of editors are also available, such as emacs and vim, as well as databases such as MySQL and PostgreSQL.

Quite a few end-user applications are also included. Users running FreeBSD on the desktop can use OpenOffice to create and exchange documents with other users who may be running Microsoft Office on Windows platforms. End-users can also pick from a number of e-mail clients and Web browsers, such as Mozilla. The newly released GNOME 2 and KDE 3.0 graphical interfaces have been ported to FreeBSD and are available for this early preview.

Perhaps the area with the most changes and additions in FreeBSD 5.0 is security. FreeBSD’s developers have done quite a bit of work in this release to ensure that applications riding on the platform can execute securely. Some of the improvements include fixes for OpenSSH that prevent attacks. Bugs in TCP SYN cache and cookie implementations that could cause system crashes have also been fixed.

Programmers and administrators will want to inspect FreeBSD’s release documentation for additional information on security changes including new support for PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules), which supports the integration of various authentication schemes such as Kerberos and smart cards, with Linux entry services.

A few downsides

FreeBSD lacks the polish found in leading Linux distributions. That said, we found only two real negatives to this early preview release. First, the aging character-based installer, though utilitarian, will likely prove challenging to users who may be new to FreeBSD. The installer does a good job of auto-detection, but its menus can be tricky to navigate, and some entries, such as networking information, do not seem to get saved during the install process.

The second drawback is the need to manually configure many common tasks, such as X Windows setup and basic networking. We did try to use the built-in tools to set up these items in the installer, but our entries did not seem to take. Thus, we had to manually set up many common tasks.

Overall, there is a lot to like in this early preview of FreeBSD 5.0, and developers and administrators will find plenty of documentation to get going with the release. This is a good time for FreeBSD shops to start planning new applications or enhancements to existing ones, and for those considering the platform to discover how their organizations can benefit from FreeBSD.