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Old 17th August 2008
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ninjatux ninjatux is offline
Real Name: Baqir Majlisi
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I wouldn't be so quick to say that "FreeBSD is a server operating system," but it has historically been predominantly used as such. The same is true for Linux; only recently has desktop Linux just taken off.

If you look at FreeBSD's userbase, then I'm willing to bet that the lack of a native Adobe Flash player doesn't matter to at least half of them. I've encountered complete indifference to Flash and sometimes outright hatred of it on the IRC channel and on here. Flash only matters to those who need it. I've been happily running swfdec for a while, and I appreciate that Flash content on a website doesn't load automatically. Flash is annoying; I use it only for Youtube and Google Video, which swfdec and Gnash handle very well.

What's wrong with open source drivers? There was an announcement on NVNews about a month ago that Nvidia would be releasing drivers for FreeBSD 64-bit in about six months. The git version of the radeon driver for Xorg supports upto and through X1000 series cards with accelerated graphics. That branch will be completing support for HD2000 series cards in about three months, as ATi will be releasing documents in about a week. I have not looked into the Intel driver, but I don't see too much of a problem. Maybe I'm not too picky.

I do agree with DrJ that the lack of quality virtual machine software is definitely hindering sometimes, especially considering that FreeBSD is still predominantly used in server environments where virtual machine software is often necessary. Progress in ongoing to port VirtualBox to FreeBSD, and I suppose the big thing would be to get Xen Dom0 support. DomU is a step forward, but Dom0 is the most important thing. It would give FreeBSD a good virtualization framework that it has lacked for quite a while. Xen and VirtualBox are the only options I see because VMWare remains woefully ignorant that we even exist, most understandably though.

As for suspend, here is the zzz manual page:

Code:
ZZZ(8)                  FreeBSD System Manager's Manual                 ZZZ(8)

NAME
     zzz -- suspend an ACPI or APM system

SYNOPSIS
     zzz

DESCRIPTION
     The zzz utility checks for ACPI or APM support and then suspends the sys-
     tem appropriately.  For APM,

           apm -z

     will be issued.  For ACPI, the configured suspend state will be looked
     up, checked to see if it is supported and,

           acpiconf -s <state>

     will be issued.

SEE ALSO
     acpi(4), apm(4), acpiconf(8), apm(8)

AUTHORS
     This manual page was written by Nate Lawson <njl@FreeBSD.org>.

FreeBSD 7.0                      July 13, 2003                     FreeBSD 7.0
I haven't looked into suspend, but it seems that the framework has been there for a while. It could be useful assuming you'd have acpi issues.

The last item in "Important" referring to "tv/video" is definitely only important to a select few, if that even, maybe only you.

As far as FreeBSD Foundation's role in getting a Flash player goes is that they could pay to have Adobe port it over. That's how Solaris has been supported because Sun initially paid them to port it over. However, I doubt the FreeBSD Foundation has those kinds of financial resources to make that possible, so that brings me to the most reasonable alternative, which is to use the Linux version via linuxulator (compatibility layer) with nspluginwrapper. The current version in the 7 branch is at 2.4.2, but the version in 8-CURRENT is 2.6.16, which apparently needs a bit of cleanup. According to the mailing lists, Flash 9 also works "rather well" in 8-CURRENT, so there's hope for it.

What's important and what's not important in an operating system is subjective upon the user. You can't generalize like this. Most of the things you listed I don't particularly care, and you'll find many more users like myself who barely give a hoot about Flash, suspend, or the media framework you suggest.
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Last edited by ninjatux; 17th August 2008 at 11:02 PM.
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