If you could change one thing in FreeBSD...

O

Orum

Let's admit it. Despite our love for FreeBSD, there's always some new feature we want, some bug fixed, or some annoyance removed. So I'm curious, what would be #1 on your list of changes you'd like to see--and I mean only your top choice. It can be anything as grand as "ARM as 'Tier 1' platform" to something as mundane as "Changes to the default motd", as long as it's honest.

I'll go first. There's lots of things I'd like, but my top choice would have to be the addition of block pointer rewrite for ZFS. A lot of things I'd like in ZFS, such as changing number of devices in a vdev, and defragmentation, depend on it.

Your turn.
 
Other than what break19 has mentioned, I wish that encryption could be integrated with the ZFS command set.
 
I wish

I wish that my love sitting beside me right now, and we both enjoy FreeBSD :(.

Even if that span for 10 min, I would trade it for the rest of my life.
 
I wish the current version of FreeBSD worked with all my hardware so I could run it on a physical machine and not just in a virtual environment.
 
What about flowcharts prior to major/minor changes? gcc > clang; csup > svn; /var/db/pkg >> ... pkg; /dev/ad0 > /dev/ada0; (serial port...) ( etc...). Perhaps all that is needed is some nice flowchart from some other Unix or dos or ... as an
example of a standard upon which to standardize. Then it could be
referenced in UPDATING, at http://www.freebsd.org; in the Release Notes...
.....
Even an install flowchart. "can't init getty"? Find it in one
of the forty or so boxes and follow the arrows to a solution...
labels? this method, that method...
...
Zfs? destinations on the right, origins on the left, easier to
work from (maybe in most instances...) than posts and a wiki...
 
There is almost nothing that bothers me with FreeBSD. In whole Unix worn, I wish I could make Lennart be more poetic, or artist, or whatever, but not the code guy.


Offtop part goes from here.
I wish that my love sitting beside me right now, and we both enjoy FreeBSD .
Click to expand...
I wish I still had noone I loved.
Kinda sorta f*cks up my new relationship with a very good mathematic girl, who is better in everything except two things -- age (she's 19, while my love was about 30) and mindset (well.. she's 19 while my love was about 30 again :) )


Also, put a most of your love on yourself and leave some to FreeBSD. Power up your PC. Sit like that for 10 minutes.
Kinda problem solved.
 
darkshadow said:
I wish that my love sitting beside me right now, and we both enjoy FreeBSD :(.

Even if that span for 10 min, I would trade it for the rest of my life.
Click to expand...

I fear I know what makes you say this. All I can offer is a good hug, tough.


And I also wish that those who do not get it should pray to whatever god is willing to listen to them that they never have to find out.
 
I wish there was an option you could enable or disable that when you least expected it would throw up a random BSOD with something funny on it, like a Windows based fortune, for entertainment purposes only.

Maybe somebody could make a port like that. Other than that I couldn't be happier with FreeBSD as it is now.
 
Netflix. I understand they use FreeBSD servers and contribute back to the community. They already have an android app. An andoid emulator that would run the netflix app would be sufficient or perhaps they could let us know what is needed to make their app work. I doubt they'd release the code so we could make it work and that's fine.

Of course, I want this for selfish reasons. :p
 
I would like a Ncurses/GUI wireless network manager. I find it a bit tedious every time I open my laptop to type in the commands manually.

If not then I'm sure I'll get around to scripting it.
 
break19 said:
I wish our installer had built-in support for installing to a ZFS pool.
Click to expand...

Oh, good one. Me too. Though, to be fair, it's not that difficult to do manually.

Lorem-Ipsum said:
I would like a Ncurses/GUI wireless network manager.
Click to expand...

Can't you do this with sysinstall? At least, in 8.x, not sure if it's still there and working in 9.

Edit: Ah, wait, that might only be for wired interfaces.
 
I wish FreeBSD and the ports could be fully and automatically updated on workstations/laptops that are frequently rebooted. This would allow me to install and configure FreeBSD to relatives' laptops without worrying about updates. I use Ubuntu now to do this.

Right now automatic updates are not secure enough (if at all possible) with the packages and not possible with the ports. When using the packages, the latest security patches are not available, i.e. www/chromium version 20.0 is in the packages, latest version 22.0 is in the ports. When using the ports, /usr/ports/UPDATING has to be manually consulted with every upgrade.
 
Change about FreeBSD? Not much.
What II'd like to see is more people using the BSD family of operating systems.
 
I would like to see some kind of memory checkpointing which would allow for processes to be restarted when things like brown outs happen. This would support for processes to be reliable suspended to disk and restarting them later, it would also be really nice, freeing us from ACPI and others for suspend & resume.
 
One of the things I ran into recently, FreeBSD doesn't have an UEFI boot yet. I'd like to see that one. With a proper boot manager if possible. There's no need to stuff everything into 1KB so we have room to do nice things properly. Yes, most UEFI have a BIOS boot fallback but it's not the same. Best of all, the stuff we need is already BSD licensed :)

http://sourceforge.net/apps/mediawiki/tianocore/index.php?title=Welcome
 
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I would like the stable packages to be provided with the ports tree they were generated from.

That way if a package is missing I can build it from a port without worrying about version missmatch.

Currently I stick with release packages just for this reason.
 
Lorem-Ipsum said:
I would like a Ncurses/GUI wireless network manager. I find it a bit tedious every time I open my laptop to type in the commands manually.
Click to expand...

net-mgmt/wifimgr I've used this with openbsd and works good.


  • I like to see support from a company like in the WindRiver days.
  • Apple giving back more.
  • As mentioned, Netflix streams with FreeBSD so why can't Netflix streams be watched on FreeBSD

That's it, I guess.
 
Lorem-Ipsum said:
I would like a Ncurses/GUI wireless network manager. I find it a bit tedious every time I open my laptop to type in the commands manually. If not then I'm sure I'll get around to scripting it.
Click to expand...


Here's my extremely simple version. You just specify the SSID of the access point. You will, of course, have to modify things like the wireless card. It assumes you've seen the network before and have a an entry in /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf. So, there's a lot of room for improvement, but it does save me a lot of typing.

Code: 
/etc/rc.d/netif stop
ifconfig wlan0 create wlandev iwn0
ifconfig wlan0 ssid $1
wpa_supplicant -B -i wlan0 -c /etc/wpa_supplicant.conf
dhclient wlan0
 
sossego said:
Change about FreeBSD? Not much.
What II'd like to see is more people using the BSD family of operating systems.
Click to expand...

I'm under the impression that, the less people know about us, the better.


The only thing I'd like is more hardware support, but not at the cost of what I said above.
Oh and better ZFS (yes that's two things).
 
sossego said:
Maybe ExpensiveBSD or CostsTooDamnMuchBSD or even ThisShitAintCheapBSD?
Click to expand...

That's the part which was absorbed by the fruity company you are talking about.
Now let's return to topic. ;)
 
This wish list relates to two different laptops.

  • It'd be nice if my wireless card (iwn0: <Intel Centrino Advanced-N 6205>) worked a little better. Download speeds tail off to 0KB/s after some seemingly random interval.
  • My video card (ATI MOBILE RADEON 9600) doesn't work so stably with the ati/radeon driver, but this might be more of an Xorg issue. ...and it does seem to have improved in 9.x.
  • I wish I could resize ufs partitions within a slice. I used the whole disk for /, but now I would like to take back about 1GB for an encrypted partition. I'll try zfs after I wipe the drive anyway.
  • Working suspend/resume would be cool.
  • Power management isn't optimum. The screen brightness can't be adjusted.

Oh, you said "one" thing. :p
 
jrm said:
I wish I could resize ufs partitions within a slice. I used the whole disk for /, but now I would like to take back about 1GB for an encrypted partition. I'll try zfs after I wipe the drive anyway.
Click to expand...

The only thing missing for that is a user interface. Back up with dump(8), rework the slices/partitions with gpart(8), newfs(8) the new filesystem,restore(8). Probably would not take any longer than an in-place resize, maybe less, and less dangerous.
 
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