Remove stale os-comparison web page
Craig Rodrigues
rodrigc at crodrigues.org
Sat Sep 3 20:45:28 UTC 2011
Hi,
I would like to suggest we remove this from the web site.
Oliver has pointed out that this information is stale.
--
Craig Rodrigues
rodrigc at crodrigues.org
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diff -u -r1.11 index.sgml
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@@ -36,9 +36,6 @@
<li><a href="&url.articles;/explaining-bsd/article.html">Explaining BSD</a></li>
- <li><a href="os-comparison.html">FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows
- 2000</a> : How does your OS compare? (outdated)</li>
-
<li><a href="&url.articles;/casestudy-argentina.com/article.html">Argentina.com : A Case Study</a></li>
<li><a href="&url.articles;/wp-toolbox/article.html">Creating a Software Testing Environment Using FreeBSD</a></li>
Index: os-comparison.sgml
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RCS file: os-comparison.sgml
diff -N os-comparison.sgml
--- os-comparison.sgml 27 Nov 2009 19:00:00 -0000 1.12
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@@ -1,552 +0,0 @@
-<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional-Based Extension//EN" [
-<!ENTITY base CDATA "..">
-<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD: www/en/marketing/os-comparison.sgml,v 1.12 2009/11/27 19:00:00 brd Exp $">
-<!ENTITY email 'marketing'>
-<!ENTITY title "FreeBSD vs. Linux vs. Windows 2000">
-<!ENTITY % navinclude.about "INCLUDE">
-<!ENTITY % developers SYSTEM "../developers.sgml"> %developers;
-]>
-
-<html>
-&header;
-
-<p><b>Note:</b> This article was written back in the year 2000 and <b>is very
- outdated</b>.</p>
-
-<h1>How does your OS compare?</h1>
-
-<table class="tblbasic">
-<thead>
- <tr>
- <th> </th>
- <th> FreeBSD </th>
- <th> Linux </th>
- <th> Windows 2000 </th>
- </tr>
-</thead>
-<tbody>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Reliability</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD is extremely robust.
- There are numerous testimonials of active servers with uptimes
- measured in years. The new <strong>Soft
- Updates</strong><sup><small><a href="#1">1</a></small></sup>
- file system optimizes disk I/O for high performance, yet still
- ensures reliability for transaction based applications, such as
- databases.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">
- Linux is well known for its reliability. Servers often stay
- up for years. However, disk I/O is non-synchronous by default,
- which is less reliable for transaction based operations, and can
- produce a corrupted filesystem after a system crash or power
- failure. But for the average user, Linux is a very dependable
- OS.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">
- All Windows users are familiar with the "Blue Screen of
- Death". Poor reliability is one of the major drawbacks of
- Windows. Some of the major issues have been fixed in Windows
- XP, but "code bloat" has introduced many more reliability
- problems. Windows XP uses a lot of system resources and it is
- very difficult to keep the system up for more than a couple of
- months without it reverting to a crawl as memory gets corrupted
- and filesystems fragmented.</td>
- </tr>
-
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Performance</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">
- FreeBSD is the system of choice for high performance network
- applications. FreeBSD will outperform other systems when
- running on equivalent hardware. The largest and busiest public
- server on the Internet at ftp.freesoftware.com, uses FreeBSD to
- serve more than 1.2 terabyte/day of downloads. FreeBSD is used
- by Yahoo!, Qwest, and many others as their main server OS
- because of its ability to handle heavy network traffic with high
- performance and rock stable reliability.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">
- Linux performs well for most applications, however the
- performance is not so optimal under heavy network load. The
- network performance of Linux is 20-30% below the capability of
- FreeBSD running on the same hardware. The situation has
- improved somewhat recently and the 2.4 release of the Linux
- kernel introduced a new virtual memory system based on the same
- concepts as the FreeBSD VM system. Since both operating systems
- are open source, beneficial technologies are shared and for this
- reason the performance of Linux and FreeBSD is rapidly
- converging.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">
- Windows is adequate for routine desktop applications, but it
- is unable to handle heavy network loads. A few organizations
- try to make it work as an Internet server. For instance,
- barnesandnoble.com uses Windows NT, as can be verified by the
- error messages that their webserver produces, such as this
- recent example <strong><tt>Error Message: [Microsoft][ODBC SQL
- Server Driver][SQL Server] Can't allocate space for object
- 'queryHistory' in database 'web' because the 'default' segment
- is full.</tt></strong>. For their own "Hotmail" Internet
- servers, Microsoft used FreeBSD for many years.</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Security</td>
-
- <td><p><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD has been the subject
- of a massive auditing project for several years. All of the
- critical system components have been checked and rechecked for
- security-related errors. The entire system is open source so
- the security of the system can and has been verified by third
- parties. A default FreeBSD installation has yet to be affected
- by a single CERT advisory in 2000<small><sup><a
-href="#3">3</a></sup></small>.</p>
-
- <p>FreeBSD also has a notion of kernel security levels, virtual
- server jails, capabilities, ACLs, a very robust packet filtering
- firewall system, and intrusion detection tools.</p></td>
-
- <td><p><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The open source nature of
- Linux allows anyone to inspect the security of the code and make
- changes, but in reality the Linux codebase is modified too
- rapidly by inexperienced programmers. There is no formal code
- review policy and for this reason Linux has been susceptible to
- nearly every Unix-based CERT advisory of the year. This problem
- is compounded by the fact that distributions like Red Hat tend
- to turn on notoriously insecure services by default.</p>
-
- <p>However, Linux does include a very robust packet filtering
- firewall system and a competent administrator can remove unsafe
- services.</p></td>
-
- <td><p><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">Microsoft claims that their
- products are secure, but they offer no guarantee, and their
- software is not available for inspection or peer review. Since
- Windows is <em>closed source</em> there is no way for users to
- fix or diagnose any of the security compromises that are regularly
- published about Microsoft systems.</p>
-
- <p>Microsoft Windows has been affected by a very large number of
- known security holes that have cost companies millions of
- dollars.</p></td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Filesystem</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD uses the Berkeley Fast
- Filesystem, which is a little more complex than Linux's ext2.
- It offers a better way to ensure filesystem data integrity,
- mainly with the "softupdates" option. This option decreases
- synchronous I/O and increases asynchronous I/O because writes to
- an FFS filesystem aren't synced on a sector basis but according
- to the filesystem structure. This ensures that the filesystem
- is always coherent between two updates. The FreeBSD filesystem
- also supports file flags, which can stop a would-be intruder
- dead in his tracks. There are several flags that you can add to
- a file such as the immutable flag. The immutable (schg) flag
- won't allow any alteration to the file or directory unless you
- remove it. Other very handy flags are append only (sappnd),
- cannot delete (sunlnk), and archive (arch). When you combine
- these with the kernel security level option, you have a nearly
- impenetrable system.</td>
-
- <td><p><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The Linux ext2 filesystem gets
- its performance from having an asynchronous mount. You can
- mount FreeBSD FFS filesystems as asynchronous but this is very
- dangerous and no seasoned Unix administrator would do this. It
- is amazing that Linux is designed this way by default. Often a
- hard crash permanently damages a mount. FreeBSD or Solaris can
- sustain a very hard crash with only minor data loss, and the
- filesystem will be remountable with few problems.</p>
-
- <p>There are several new journalling filesystems for Linux that
- fix some of these issues.</p></td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The Microsoft FAT filesystem and
- the newer NTFS are both plagued by over 20 years of backwards
- compatibility with the earliest of PC-based filesystems. These
- filesystems were not designed for today's demanding server
- applications, they weren't even designed with a multi-user OS or
- networking in mind!</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Device Drivers</td>
-
- <td><p><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">The FreeBSD bootloader can load
- binary drivers at boot-time. This allows third-party driver
- manufacturers to distribute binary-only driver modules that can
- be loaded into any FreeBSD system. Due to the open-source
- nature of FreeBSD, it is very easy to develop device drivers for
- new hardware. Unfortunately, most device manufacturers will
- only release binaries for Microsoft operating systems. This
- means that it can take several months after a hardware device
- hits the market until a native device driver is available.</p>
-
- <p>Fortunately, FreeBSD also includes full NDIS API compatibility,
- so that binary Windows network device drivers can be loaded into
- the FreeBSD kernel directly.</p>
- </td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The Linux community intentionally
- makes it difficult for hardware manufacturers to release
- binary-only drivers. This is meant to encourage hardware
- manufacturers to develop open-source device drivers.
- Unfortunately most vendors have been unwilling to release the
- source for their drivers so it is very difficult for Linux users
- to use vendor supplied drivers at all.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">Microsoft has excellent
- relationships with hardware vendors. There are often conflicts
- when using device drivers on different versions of Microsoft
- Windows, but overall Windows users have excellent access to
- third party device drivers.</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Commercial Applications</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">The number of commercial
- applications for FreeBSD is growing rapidly, but is still below
- what is available for Windows. In addition to native
- applications, FreeBSD can also run programs compiled for Linux,
- SCO Unix, and BSD/OS.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">Many new commercial applications
- are available for Linux, and more are being developed.
- Unfortunately, Linux can only run binaries that are specifically
- compiled for Linux. It is unable to run programs compiled for
- FreeBSD, SCO Unix, or other popular operating systems without
- significant effort.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">There are thousands of
- applications available for Windows, far more than for any other
- OS. Nearly all commercial desktop applications run on Windows,
- and many of them are only available for Windows. If you have an
- important application that only runs on Windows, then you may
- have no choice but to run Windows.</td>
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Free Applications</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">There are many, many gigabytes of
- free software applications available for FreeBSD. FreeBSD
- includes thousands of software packages and an extensive ports
- collection, all with complete source code. Many people consider
- the FreeBSD Ports Collection to be the most accessible and
- easiest to use library of free software packages available
- anywhere. In fact, Gentoo Linux, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and many
- other operating systems have borrowed and extended the famous
- FreeBSD Ports Collection.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">There are huge numbers of free
- programs available for Linux. All GNU software runs on both
- Linux and FreeBSD without modification. Some of the free
- programs for Linux differ between distributions, because Linux
- does not have a central ports collection.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The amount of free Windows
- software is much less than what is available for Unix. Many
- Windows applications are provided as "shareware", without
- source code, so the programs cannot be customized, debugged,
- improved, or extended by the user.</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Development Environment</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD includes an extensive
- collection of developer tools. You get a complete C/C++
- development system (editor, compiler, debugger, profiler, etc.)
- and powerful Unix development tools for Java, HTTP, Perl,
- Python, TCL/TK, Awk, Sed, etc. All of these are free, and are
- included in the basic FreeBSD installation. All come with full
- source code.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">Linux includes all the same
- development tools as FreeBSD, with compilers and interpreters
- for every common programming language, all the GNU programs,
- including the powerful GNU C/C++ Compiler, Emacs editor, and GDB
- debugger. Unfortunately, due to the very splintered nature of
- Linux, applications that you compile on one system (Red Hat) may
- not work on another Linux system (Slackware).</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">Very few development tools are
- included with Windows XP. Most need to be purchased separately,
- and are rarely compatible with each other.</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Development Infrastructure</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD is an advanced BSD Unix
- operating system. The source code for the entire system is
- available in a centralized source code repository running under
- CVS. A large team (300+) of senior developers has write access
- to this repository and they coordinate development by reviewing
- and committing the best changes of the development community at
- large. FreeBSD is engineered to find elegant solutions for
- overall goals, rather than quick hacks to add new functionality.
- Since FreeBSD is a complete open-source operating system, rather
- than just a kernel, you can recompile and reinstall the entire
- system by simply typing one command, "make world".</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">Linux is a Unix-like kernel that
- must be combined with the GNU system to make a complete
- operating system. Linux does not use any version control system
- so all bug-fixes and enhancements must be emailed back and forth
- on mailing lists and ultimately submitted to the one person
- (Linus) who has authority to commit the code to the tree. Due
- to the overwhelming amount of code that gets written, it is
- impossible for one person to adequately quality control all of
- the pending changes. For this reason there is a lot of code in
- Linux that was hastily written and would never have been
- accepted into a more conservative operating system.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">Microsoft Windows is a
- <em>closed-source</em> operating system driver by market demand
- rather than technical merit. New technologies are rushed into
- the product before they have been properly designed or fully
- implemented. Very little is known about the internal
- development infrastructure of Microsoft but the "blue-screen of
- death" speaks for itself.</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Support</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">Several organizations, including
- <a href="http://www.freebsdmall.com">FreeBSD Mall</a>, offer a
- wide range of support options for FreeBSD. In addition to 24x7
- professional support, there is a large amount of free, informal
- support available through Usenet newsgroups and mailing lists,
- such as questions at freebsd.org. Once a problem is found, source
- code patches are often available within a few hours.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">Many organizations provide
- professional support for Linux. All the major Linux vendors
- offer some level of support, and several offer full 24x7
- service. There are many forums where Linux questions are
- answered for free, such as newsgroups and mailing lists. As a
- last resort, you can always use the source to track down and fix
- a problem yourself.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]">Although support is available for
- Windows XP, you should be prepared to spend as long as an hour on
- hold, with no guarantee that your problem will be resolved.
- Because of the <em>closed source</em> nature of Windows, there
- is no informal, free support available, and bugs can only be
- fixed on Microsoft's schedule, not yours. Windows XP is
- not updated frequently, you may wait years for bugs to be
- fixed.</td>
-
- </tr>
- <tr>
- <td class="category">Price and Total Cost of Ownership</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">FreeBSD can be downloaded from
- the Internet for free. Or it can be purchased on a four CDROM
- set along with several gigabytes of applications for $40. All
- necessary documentation is included. Support is available for
- free or for very low cost. There is no user licensing, so you
- can quickly bring additional computers online. This all adds up
- to a very low total cost of ownership.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]">Linux is free. Several companies
- offer commercial aggregations at very low cost. Applications
- and documentation is available for little or no cost. There are
- no licensing restrictions, so Linux can be installed on as many
- systems as you like for no additional cost. Linux's total cost
- of ownership is very low.</td>
-
- <td><img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]">The server edition of Windows XP
- costs nearly $700. Even basic applications cost extra. Users
- often spend many thousands of dollars for programs that are
- included for free with Linux or FreeBSD. Documentation is
- expensive, and very little on-line documentation is provided. A
- license is required for every computer, which means delays and
- administrative overhead. The initial learning curve for simple
- administration tasks is smaller than with Unix, but it also
- requires a lot more work to keep the system running with any
- significant work load.</td>
- </tr>
-<tr>
-<th>Total</th>
-<td>
-<h2>FreeBSD</h2>
-<img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]"><b><big>= 8</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]"><b><big>= 2</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]"><b><big>= 0</big></b><br>
-</td>
-<td>
-<h2>Linux</h2>
-<img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]"><b><big>= 4</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]"><b><big>= 4</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]"><b><big>= 2</big></b><br>
-</td>
-<td>
-<h2>Windows 2000</h2>
-<img src="../gifs/smiley.png" alt="[Great]"><b><big>= 2</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/plain.png" alt="[OK]"><b><big>= 1</big></b><br>
-<img src="../gifs/frowny.png" alt="[Bad]"><b><big>= 7</big></b><br>
-</td>
-</tr>
-
-</tbody>
-</table>
-
-<h1>Footnotes</h1>
-
-<a name="1"></a>
-<h2>Filesystem</h2>
-
-<p>FreeBSD uses FFS, the Berkeley Fast File System, with the addition
- of "Soft Updates" for performance and consistency. FreeBSD
- 5.0-CURRENT (the development branch), gives user the ability to
- automatically snapshot file systems, as well as the ability to store
- extended attributes on files, in turn supporting other features such
- as Access Control Lists (ACLs). A paper title "Journaling Versus
- Soft Updates: Asynchronous Meta-data Protection in File Systems"
- presented at the USENIX 2000 Technical Conference discusses the
- performance and consistency differences between journaled and soft
- updates consistency mechanisms. This paper is available online from
- <a
- href="http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/usenix2000.ps">http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/usenix2000.ps</a>.
- This paper also discusses two different journaling implementations
- based on FFS and developed on FreeBSD. Clearly, FreeBSD is at the
- forefront of filesystem research and this is the source of many of
- its performance and reliability advantages.</p>
-
-<p>For more information about Soft Updates, please see:</p>
-
-<p>"Soft Updates: A Technique for Eliminating Most Synchronous Writes
- in the Fast Filesystem" by Marshall Kirk McKusick and Gregory
- R. Ganger.<br/> <a
- href="http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/mckusick99.ps">http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/papers/mckusick99.ps</a>.</p>
-
-<a name="2"></a>
-<h2>Performance Benchmarks</h2>
-
-<p>Numerous benchmarks have continued to show FreeBSD's clear
-advantage for network performance. Yahoo!, Xoom.com, Qwest, and some
-of our other largest customers have published results showing the
-clear case for using FreeBSD in the enterprise. It's important to
-understand that benchmarking is just a game, and that for real
-performance comparisons you need to perform real-world test. However,
-it's easy to find published benchmarks on the Internet which show
-FreeBSD with a commanding lead over the competition:</p>
-
-<ul>
- <li>Gartner Group Comparisons showing FreeBSD 20-30% faster than
- Linux on identical hardware: <a
- href="http://advisor.gartner.com/n_inbox/hotcontent/hc_2121999_3.html#h8">http://advisor.gartner.com/n_inbox/hotcontent/hc_2121999_3.html#h8</a>.</li>
-
- <li>Filesystem Benchmarking with PostMark from Network Appliance:
- <a
- href="http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/FreeBSD/postmark.html">http://www.shub-internet.org/brad/FreeBSD/postmark.html</a></li>
-
- <li>Is FreeBSD a Superior Server Platform to Linux? by Nathan
- Boeger:
- <a
- href="http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/01/infrrevu/">http://www.webtechniques.com/archives/2001/01/infrrevu/</a></li>
-
- <li><p>"Flexibility, in-house expertise, price/performance, and
- manageability," says Filo. "Those are just a few of the reasons why
- the Intel Architecture and FreeBSD appeal to use. By combining
- these platforms, we're able to deliver better, faster, and more
- innovative solutions than our competitors." - David Filo, Chief
- Yahoo<br/>
- <a
- href="http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/casestudies/yahoo/buscase.htm">http://www.intel.com/ebusiness/casestudies/yahoo/buscase.htm</a></p></li>
-</ul>
-
-<a name="3"></a>
-<h2>Security</h2>
-
-<p>The Computer Emergency Response Team, or CERT, studies Internet
-security vulnerabilities, provides incident response services to sites
-that have been victims of attack, publishes a variety of security
-alerts, does research in wide-networked computing, and develops
-information and training to help improve security at Internet
-sites.<p>
-
-<p><strong>CERT Advisories in 2000 that affected Linux:</strong></p>
-<ul>
- <li>CA-2000-22 - Input Validation Problems in LPRng</li>
- <li>CA-2000-21 - Denial-of-Service Vulnerability in TCP/IP
- Stacks</li>
- <li>CA-2000-20 - Multiple Denial-of-Service Problems in ISC BIND</li>
- <li>CA-2000-17 - Input Validation Problem in rpc.statd</li>
- <li>CA-2000-13 - Two Input Validation Problems in FTPD</li>
- <li>CA-2000-06 - Multiple Buffer Overflows in Kerberos Authenticated
- Services</li>
- <li>CA-2000-03 - Continuing Compromises of DNS servers</li>
-</ul>
-
-<p><strong>CERT Advisories in 2000 that affected Windows:</strong></p>
-<ul>
- <li>CA-2000-16 - Microsoft 'IE Script'/Access/OBJECT Tag
- Vulnerability</li>
- <li>CA-2000-14 - Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express Cache Bypass
- Vulnerability</li>
- <li>CA-2000-12 - HHCtrl ActiveX Control Allows Local Files to be
- Executed</li>
- <li>CA-2000-10 - Inconsistent Warning Messages in Internet
- Explorer</li>
- <li>CA-2000-07 - Microsoft Office 2000 UA ActiveX Control
- Incorrectly Marked "Safe for Scripting"</li>
- <li>CA-2000-04 - Love Letter Worm</li>
-</ul>
-
-<p>For more information about CERT and potential security exploits for
-your operating system, please see <a
-href="http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/">http://www.us-cert.gov/cas/techalerts/</a>.</p>
-
-<p>For more information about some of the enhanced security features
-of FreeBSD, please see <a
-href="http://www.trustedbsd.org">http://www.trustedbsd.org</a>.</p>
-
-<a name="4"></a>
-<h2>Ports Collection</h2>
-
-<p>Even with all the hyper about open standards, getting a program to
- compile on various Unix platforms can be a tricky task.
- Occasionally, you might be lucky enough to find that the program
- you want compiles cleanly on your system, install everything into
- all the right directories, and run flawlessly "out-of-the-box", but
- this behavior is somewhat rare. Most of the time, you find yourself
- needing to make modifications in order to get the program to work.
- This is where the FreeBSD Ports Collection comes to the rescue.</p>
-
-<p>The general idea behind the Ports Collection is to eliminate all of
- the messy steps involved with making things work properly so that
- the installation is simple and painless. With the Ports Collection,
- all of the hard work has already been done for you, and you are able
- to install any of the Ports Collection ports by simply typing 'make
- install'.</p>
-
-<!-- XXX use os.numports entity -->
-
-<p>The Ports Collection provides a makefile skeleton that describes
- where to download the software and how to compile and install it.
- There are currently over 11,500 applications in the FreeBSD
- Ports tree and with a single command the ports mechanism will
- automatically download the software source code, perform a checksum,
- uncompress the software, apply any FreeBSD-specific patches,
- configure the software, run the compilation, install the software,
- and clean up after itself! Ports can of course depend on other
- ports which are built automatically in the same fashion and binary
- packages can be used as well. The FreeBSD Ports Collection was
- recognized very early on as an elegant method to deal with a complex
- problem so it's functionality has been shared with the other BSD
- Unix systems and some Linux distributions as well.</p>
-
-<p>This document was prepared by Bob Bruce and Murray Stokely, with
- input from Matt Dillon, Nathan dude, and many others.</p>
-
-&footer;
-</body>
-</html>
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