svn commit: r39033 - head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy
Isabell Long
issyl0 at FreeBSD.org
Tue Jun 12 17:11:46 UTC 2012
Author: issyl0
Date: Tue Jun 12 17:11:45 2012
New Revision: 39033
URL: http://svn.freebsd.org/changeset/doc/39033
Log:
- SGMLify the wiki's 'Why Use FreeBSD?' article into a new article in the
advocacy section of the website.
- Add the new article to the Makefile.
- Add a link to it and some description of it to the advocacy index.sgml.
Submitted by: users on -stable, via theraven
SGMLified by: issyl0
Reviewed by: gabor
Approved by: gabor (mentor)
Added:
head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/whyusefreebsd.sgml (contents, props changed)
Modified:
head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/Makefile
head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/index.sgml
Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/Makefile
==============================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/Makefile Tue Jun 12 13:31:13 2012 (r39032)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/Makefile Tue Jun 12 17:11:45 2012 (r39033)
@@ -11,5 +11,5 @@
DOCS= index.sgml
DOCS+= myths.sgml
-
+DOCS+= whyusefreebsd.sgml
.include "${DOC_PREFIX}/share/mk/web.site.mk"
Modified: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/index.sgml
==============================================================================
--- head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/index.sgml Tue Jun 12 13:31:13 2012 (r39032)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/index.sgml Tue Jun 12 17:11:45 2012 (r39033)
@@ -24,6 +24,12 @@
<h2>Web resources</h2>
<ul>
+ <li><p><a href="whyusefreebsd.html">Why Use FreeBSD?</a></p>
+
+ <p>Explanations given by existing users as to why FreeBSD should
+ be used.</p></li>
+ </ul>
+ <ul>
<li><p><a href="myths.html">*BSD Myths</a></p>
<p>Describes and debunks some of the myths that surround the *BSD
Added: head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/whyusefreebsd.sgml
==============================================================================
--- /dev/null 00:00:00 1970 (empty, because file is newly added)
+++ head/en_US.ISO8859-1/htdocs/advocacy/whyusefreebsd.sgml Tue Jun 12 17:11:45 2012 (r39033)
@@ -0,0 +1,207 @@
+<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//FreeBSD//DTD HTML 4.01 Transitional-Based
+Extension//EN" [
+<!ENTITY base CDATA "..">
+<!ENTITY date "$FreeBSD$">
+<!ENTITY title "FreeBSD Advocacy Project">
+<!ENTITY % navinclude.about "INCLUDE">
+<!ENTITY url.articles "../doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles">
+]>
+
+<html>
+ &header;
+
+ <h1>Why Choose &os;?</h1>
+
+ <p>Why would you consider using &os;? We think that there are
+ lots of reasons. Here is a selection of reasons that some of
+ our existing users gave for their choice of operating system.</p>
+
+ <h2>The Community</h2>
+
+ <p>&os; is a community-driven operating system despite it being
+ sponsored corporately. &os; has active mailing lists,
+ forums, and IRC channels where experienced users and
+ developers are always willing to help the less
+ experienced.</p>
+
+ <p>The community is largely driven by technology, not ideology,
+ and is focused on building the best possible system and making
+ &os; as widely used as possible, not on pushing any other
+ agendas.</p>
+
+ <p>There is no dictator—benevolent or
+ otherwise—for the project. The Core Team is elected and
+ is nominally responsible for overseeing the goals of the project,
+ but this is a very light touch. Core mediates disputes between
+ developers, but rarely needs to take an active role in
+ development, beyond their separate contributions as individual
+ developers.</p>
+
+ <h2>Stability</h2>
+
+ <p>Stability means many different things. &os; very rarely
+ crashes (and when it does it is usually due to hardware
+ faults), but while that was a great boast a decade ago, now it
+ is an expected feature for any operating system.</p>
+
+ <p>Stability in &os; means much more than that. It means that
+ upgrading the system doesn't require upgrading the user.
+ Configuration interfaces do change over time, but only when
+ there is a good reason. If you learned how to use &os; in
+ 2000, most of your knowledge would still be relevant.</p>
+
+ <p>Backwards compatibility is very important to the &os; team,
+ and any release in a major release series is expected to
+ be able to run any code—including kernel
+ modules—that ran on an earlier version. The entire base
+ system is developed together, including the kernel, the core
+ utilities, and the configuration system, so upgrades are
+ usually painless. Included tools like mergemaster help update
+ configuration files with little or no manual intervention.</p>
+
+ <h2>Early Adoption and Collaboration With Other Projects</h2>
+
+ <p>&os; has been one of the first adopters of the LLVM
+ infrastructure, including the clang compiler and the libc++
+ stack. The entire &os; 9.x system, including kernel and
+ userspace, can build with clang, and from &os; 9.1 both clang
+ and the permissively-licensed libc++ are included, giving a
+ modern, BSD-licensed C++ stack. Several &os; developers are
+ also active contributors to LLVM, ensuring that both projects
+ thrive together.</p>
+
+ <p>This same collaboration works downstream, with projects like
+ PC-BSD and pfSense building on top of the &os; base to provide
+ desktop and firewall oriented distributions, respectively.
+ These projects are not forks, they base their work on the
+ latest version of &os; and customize the system for specific
+ uses.</p>
+
+ <h2>Simple Configuration</h2>
+
+ <p>&os; service initialization is very simple. Each service,
+ whether part of the base system or installed from a port, comes
+ with a script that is responsible for starting and stopping it
+ (and often some other options). The /etc/rc.conf file
+ contains a list of variables for enabling and configuring
+ services. Want to enable ssh? Just add sshd_enable="YES" to
+ your rc.conf file. This system makes it easy to see at a
+ glance everything that will be started when your system
+ boots.</p>
+
+ <p>The rc system that reads this file understands dependencies
+ between services and so can automatically launch them in
+ parallel, or wait until one is finished before starting the
+ things that it needs. You get all of the benefits of a modern
+ configuration system, without a complex interface.</p>
+
+ <h2>Ports</h2>
+
+ <p>The ports tree contains a large collection of third-party
+ software, including older versions of some things where the
+ userbase is divided about the benefits of upgrading, and a lot
+ of niche programs. The chances are that anything you want to
+ run which works on &os; will be there.</p>
+
+ <p>Unlike some other systems, &os; maintains a clean division
+ between the base system and third-party ports and packages.
+ All third-party software goes in /usr/local, so if you want to
+ repurpose a machine then it's trivial to simply delete all
+ installed packages and then start installing the ones that you
+ want.</p>
+
+ <p>The upcoming pkgng tool makes working with binary packages
+ even easier, although source installs are still supported for
+ people who want the level of configurability that this
+ implies.</p>
+
+ <h2>Security</h2>
+
+ <p>Security is vital in any network-connected machine. &os;
+ provides a number of tools for ensuring that you can maintain a
+ secure system, such as:</p>
+
+ <ul>
+ <li>Jails, allowing you to run applications or entire systems
+ in a sandbox that can't access the rest of the system. With
+ tools like ezjail and ZFS you can instantly create a new
+ jail with a clone of an existing system, using a tiny amount
+ of disk space, and run untrusted code inside it.</li>
+ <li>Mandatory Access Control, from the TrustedBSD project,
+ allowing you to configure access control policies for all
+ operating system resources.</li>
+ <li>Capsicum, from &os; 9 onwards, allows developers to easily
+ implement privilege separation, reducing the impact of
+ compromised code.</li>
+ <li>The VuXML system for publishing vulnerabilities in ports,
+ which integrates with tools such as portaudit, so that your
+ daily security email tells you about any known
+ vulnerabilities in ported software.</li>
+ <li>Security event auditing, using the BSM standard.</li>
+ </ul>
+
+ <p>And, of course, all of the standard features that you'd
+ expect from a modern &unix; system including IPSec, SSH, and so
+ on.</p>
+
+ <h2>ZFS</h2>
+
+ <p>Cheap snapshots, clones, end-to-end checksums, deduplication,
+ compression, and no need to decide partition sizes on install.
+ Using ZFS for a few days makes going back to a more
+ traditional volume manager painful. If you want to test
+ something with ZFS, then it's trivial to just create a
+ snapshot and roll back if it didn't work.</p>
+
+ <p>If you're using jails, then ZFS lets you clone an existing
+ jail in under a second, irrespective of how big the jail
+ itself is.</p>
+
+ <h2>GEOM</h2>
+
+ <p>Even without ZFS, &os; comes with a rich storage system.
+ GEOM layers providers and consumers in arbitrary ways,
+ allowing you to use two networked machines for
+ high-availability storage, use your choice of RAID level, or
+ add features like compression or encryption.</p>
+
+ <h2>Working Sound</h2>
+
+ <p>&os; 4.x introduced in-kernel sound mixing, so that multiple
+ applications could play sound at the same time even with cheap
+ sound cards with no hardware mixing support. &os; 5.x
+ automatically allocated new channels to applications, without
+ any configuration.</p>
+
+ <p>Now, &os; has low-latency sound mixing with per-application
+ volume controls and full support for the OSS 4 APIs out of the
+ box. There's no need to configure a userspace sound daemon.
+ The same audio APIs that were used a decade ago still work on
+ &os;, including some compatibility modes to allow
+ applications that try to manipulate the global volume to only
+ change their own. If you want to watch DVDs with 5.1 surround
+ sound, just install your favourite media player and press
+ play.</p>
+
+ <h2>My System, How I Want It</h2>
+
+ <p>&os; gives you an easy-to-use, working, &unix;-like system.
+ This base system can then be extended easily. If you want to
+ run KDE or GNOME, then just install the metapackage for the
+ version that you prefer. If you want a headless server, then
+ it's equally easy to install the server tools that you want.</p>
+
+ <p>It's easy to run the &os; installer via a serial port and to
+ configure the entire system from the terminal. It's also easy
+ to install and use an existing desktop environment. The
+ decisions about the kind of system you want to use are left to
+ you.</p>
+
+ <p>If you're deploying &os; in a corporate environment, then
+ it's very easy to customise both the base system and the set
+ of installed packages for your specific requirements. The
+ build system provides numerous tuneable variables allowing you
+ to build exactly the base system that meets your needs.</p>
+
+ &footer;
+</html>
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