Geek Style

A FreeBSD Bugathon event scheduled for November 4-5 2006. Many port Committers and contributors will be online on #freebsd-bugbusters channel on EFnet to close as much PRs as they can.

Despite being a FreeBSD and Solaris advocate, I always give a shot to major Linux distros. My friends will be also surprised to know that I have a secret Linux server, running Ubuntu Server to test Linux specific applications. I always enjoy using apt-get and aptitude for package management and the way it handles dependencies. In fact, the way Debian/Ubuntu handles packages is putting RPM far behind.

I was loving Ubuntu until someone asked my to setup Tomcat which was a complete failure.
I did a simple sudo aptitude install tomcat5 and everything installed and Tomcat started momentarily. While testing the server, I realized it is taking too long to run application. Using top I figured out Java process was taking 100% of my CPU. I did everything I know and I couldn’t fix the issue. So I decided to give it a try on my FreeBSD dev box and see if it shows the same behavior.
Installing on FreeBSD was as easy as running portupgrade -r tomcat. Everything went smoothly (except manually downloading Java binaries which is always a PITA). Then I started tomcat server and put applications in appropriate directories and “that’s all folks”. You can guess everything worked just fine without any glitches.
So I decided to stay with FreeBSD for server stuff and keep the Ubuntu to play and see what Linux people are doing.

update 1: I did not provide enough information about my setup. I was running Dapper Drake + Kaffe. To me, it is highly unlikely that Java is totally broken in this stable release. So perhaps there was something wrong with my setup. But “Kafe” is what aptitude suggested when I was installing “Tomcat”. So I thought this setup should be fine.

update 2: My blog commenting system was totally messed up. It should be working now. Thanks to Masoud for pointing this out.

Don’t forget to BCC when forwarding to a group of people or …

It’s ports freeze time for FreeBSD and everyone is getting ready for 6.2-RELEASE.
Porters are happily taking care of their personal life while the freeze is in effect. They also have some time to blog and chat.
Kris Kennaway is advising porters to take care of broken ports in order to avoid getting bored.