FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Now Ready

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

Re:*BSD Vs. Linux

[Strog]

Gentoo looks good but still has a ways to go to catch up to FreeBSD. It will get better as more people work out their ports and the port system. There are more people all the time so maybe it won't be terribly long. I think they will suffer a bit like Mandrake if they stay too much on the bleeding edge of things with the main releases. Mandrake learned to back off a bit on releases and still keep bleeding edge going with Cooker. Gentoo will be good if they realize it and will avoid some of the black eyes Mandrake took before they did.

I feel like such an old fogey

[AssFace]

(however one spells "fogey")

I can recall my days in college where I would always install the newest, latest and greatest stuff on my pc and then learn it and think I was cool... well, I don't know if I ever thought I was cool.

but nowadays I'm constantly just thinking "why should I upgrade? this stuff works just fine for me the way it is now!"

I think it is because I'm more business minded now and the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mentality has an effect on costs in that world.

after reading through what is new in FreeBSD 5, I see no reason for me to change. it looks like things that I don't have much need for in my world.
4.whatever works just dandy for me.

Re:Java integration just rocks!

[stef0x77]

Ha ha! What's with the moderators today? Ummm, can you say "troll"?

Where are you getting your (dis)information? Provide links or don't start rumors.

Expecting the Weekly Linux-BSD Inquisition

[n9fzx]

Before posting yet another Linux-is-ghod rant, why not consider this: We are all so lucky to have more than one freeware Unix to choose from. That choice provides the needed competition to force both variants to improve in meaningful ways.

Without that competition, Unix would eventually stagnate. Or worse, innovation would be driven into the same kind of useless creeping featurism we've come to expect from the folks in Redmond.

Re:Excellent System

[IamTheRealMike]

I would now recommend FreeBSD as the unix of choice for any purpose, it may not have a fancy graphical install program, but you will really appreciate this simplicity when you come to make changes/ do something a little out of the ordinary.

Well no offence but I hope you don't recommend it to newbies. I've had friends tell me Linux was still in the dark ages because it lacked a friendly install program and they couldn't figure out how to configure it. It turned out some smartass had recommended Debian because "it's so cool, everyone uses Debian, and it's free", ignoring the fact that newbies want simplicity perhaps at the expense of reliability.

I think this can teach everyone a valuable lesson

[plazman30]

No open source project is dead as long as there is ONE hacker out there willing to hack on it. Everyone has been screaming FreeBSD is dead for a long time now and guess what? Here comes 5.0. The success of an open source project is not measure by it's use, but by whether or not someone is still willing to hack on it.

I love FreeBSD to death, but...

[Hu Phlung Pu]

...there is no way in hell I'm installing 5.0 on anything important, even though it's going to be a "production" release. 4.8, 4.9 all the way baby.

Why you ask? There's far too much new code for 5.0 to be stable yet. I was using 5.0-CURRENT SMP in November and December of 2001, and was very impressed. Alas, it was running on an IBM DeathStar 75GXP, which died (lol--like the name suggests)...

I unsubscribed from the -current list a month or so later because Matt Dillon (the real one) was being his usual dickheaded self and causing a massive flamewar.

Anyway, I resusbscribed to -current in October cause I knew they had slipped the release date to somewhere around November, January, etc. and I wanted to find out how things were going (i.e. is this good enough that I should install it and have more fun with it). Ooh boy. Since I left, we've added GEOM, GDBE, a new init script system, IPFW2, UFS2, etc. vn has been replaced by md, devfs hasn't gotten any better, and as far as I can tell, they still have background fsck turned on by default, which tends to hose you when the least thing goes wrong with your fs (background fsck was FreeBSD's bitter parting shot to me when my GXP died -- it murdered my filesystem before I had a chance to save my valuable data -- admittedly this was a "for fun" desktop system, but that's typically considered Naughty). On -current today we have a couple people posting about panics. I enjoy the response in this one:

From: [e-mail] (for those who don't know, Poul-Henning Kamp is one of the wisest, most respected, and ancient of all FreeBSD hackers)
Subject: Re: FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 now available

"Roderick van Domburg" writes:

I would like to point to a currently unresolved issue
[snip]
The thread is titled "panic: trap: fast data access mmu miss" and is about an error causing the sym SCSI controller to fail to mount root at best, and panic at worst.

Mr. Henning-Kamp's response:

Well, we all want our pet bug fixed before the release rolls, but at some point we simply have to call it quits and ship the release.
[snip]
In the meantime we _really_ have to ship 5.0-RELEASE, we keep slipping it.

Commentary: I agree, they really need to get 5.0 out the door, and I don't necessarily disagree with phk's opinion. But it does say massive Bad Things(tm) to me about the quality of this software that release engineering is leaving *known panics* in the software cause it is so late and over-schedule!!! Ah, and don't even get me started on not being able to install new boot blocks or run fdisk on a mounted filesystem, crashdumps overwriting people's disklabels, etc. etc.

Another one just came in: "PANIC in tcp_syncache.c sonewconn() line 562" about an easily-reproducible (from user mode) kernel panic. Come on people, this is worse than Windows NT ever was! (well, except the guy who could bluescreen it by printing tabs and backspaces).

So, no thanks to 5.x for me, for now.

Re:Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE?

[BasharTeg]

For the love of God, sir, how could you do this? I had finally forgotten the brutal turmoil that was 3.4 to 4.0. Some old wounds should simply not be reopened. As far as I am concerned, major version number upgrade program = newfs.

Re:Excellent System

[martinmcc]

Well I'm quite happy to spend four hours - The reason I moved from Mandrake was becuase I want to know exactly what is going on with the system - so I spend my 4 hours reading the docs and checking out the config files to make sure I know just that. My philosophy is spend the time when you have it (as I did) to save time when you don't (sooner or later I will need to do something out of the ordinary and be in a big rush), but yeah there is no reason why you can't get it all up much quicker if your not to fussed on what is going on (or already know).

Re:Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE?

[MattBurke]

except you spend hours in mergemaster... much easier and quicker to take tarballs of configs/etc and reinstall. saves outdated files being left around too