FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 Now Ready 300
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!"
UDF Support (Score:3, Interesting)
Finally.
Now I don't have to copy my clients Adaptec DirectCD's to the network on a Windows machine before I can use them.
Why people mail me $3 CDRW's instead of $0.03 CDR's I'll never know.
Excellent System (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
My OS catagories -
Windows XX - For the clueless masses, and often a neccassary evil (esp. games)
Linux Mandrake - Good when it is good (i.e. installs without a problem and no strange configurations), but a hog to troubleshoot.
FreeBSD - The king of server OS's, and by the look of things a great Desktop system.
Re:Excellent System (Score:4, Interesting)
compared to Linux.
FreeBSD Install Process (Score:3, Interesting)
Java integration just rocks! (Score:5, Interesting)
And this is great because it's a start on making binary formats less of an issue. Sure, there's always going to be those who want the fastest versions of, say, "rm", but for the rest of us, being able to compile something on one system and then just move it across anywhere will help tremendously.
Does anyone know if the OpenBSD and NetBSD projects are doing anything similar?
Who says that? (Score:3, Interesting)
I hope you know that Mac OS-X is based on a modified FreeBSD kernel. I like FreeBSD and I am using it as a desktop system. I don't need Linux, because it's emulated here ("emulation" means "emulation which works", not like Wine or stuff like that)
been running it since last night (Score:4, Interesting)
Dave
RCs seem to be immune to slashdotting ! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:A more elegant means to acquire upgrades? (Score:2, Interesting)
I just set up a machine over the weekend, just installed enough from the slackware disc to get a command prompt, then compiled the latest kernel/mods, samba and squid on my 'compiling' linux machine, then copied over the binaries and configurated them.
I generally use linux in fileserver/router/firewall/proxy types of situations, and have never tried to run it on a desktop. Which would be a big hassle if I wanted to keep a myriad of little apps up to date.
I've no doubt the difficulties/inconsistancies of upgrading the various distributions is a big factor keeping the masses on windows.
Re:A more elegant means to acquire upgrades? (Score:3, Interesting)
Check the FreeBSD Handbook section 21 about how to keeping the system up-to-date (e.g. cvsup). The "make world"-approach works fine and resolves all troubles by merging your existing configuration files with new configuration files (mergemaster).
Many people write their own scripts to control the compilation/merging process.
Re:Excellent System (Score:5, Interesting)
This is what keeps Mandrake from being a great OS -- desktop, server, or otherwise. If something doesn't come out of the box from Mandrakesoft, you can pretty much forget about it. I have moved every machine that once had MDK to something more, er, alterable like Debian or FreeBSD (which really shines in the turning-old-machines-into-dedicated-servers department).
FreeBSD's threading and MySQL? (Score:2, Interesting)
5.0 Chicken or Egg Conundrum (Score:5, Interesting)
as ever seen in the *NIX world. Many new
features and core technologies are
incorporated in this release.
The main problems with this release will be
caused by the "Chicken or Egg Conundrum",
in that the release will spur many new 5.0
users, whose input will come "after" the
pre-release testing process, finding bugs
that are not apparent in the release candidate
series due to limited testing on the incredibly
varied hardware and software systems found
in the "wild".
This is not a FreeBSD specific problem, this is
a reflection of the reality of a volunteer based
project with limited resources.
The incredible speed that FreeBSD developers,
contributers, and users update and solve
problems is amazing. Just check the mail
list archives for *many* examples of this!
IMHO many of the best and brightest minds in
the *NIX world have gravitated to the BSD's
stability and more structured development
model. For younger readers a "structured"
development model may seem to be a turn off,
but a few years of real world experience
will certainly temper this argument.
Thanks and Best Wishes to the BSD community,
and when the dust settles FreeBSD 5.X will
be the standard others are compared to.
Upgrade path from 4.x-STABLE to 5.X-STABLE? (Score:4, Interesting)
There was from 3.x->4.x, although it may have stretched some people's idea of reasonable. I pulled it off without problems on two boxes, although both were soon replaced with new hardware and fresh installs of 4.x.
Re:Excellent System (Score:3, Interesting)
- Linux is a real nice OS;
- The *nix system is great (never used *nix before);
- I don't want to have any other MS product, thank you;
- RPMs are making me sick (deps);
- apt-get is really nice, but Debian packages are always outdated (no, I don't want to run Debian unstable..);
- A bit of standartization would be nice (install dirs, etc.). If you install something not for your distrib, it will more likely fail;
- Linux community is great;
- I want to get some latest packages (ie. KDE) instead of compiling them myself;
So my two choices are either
a) find the Linux distribution that meet my needs (Slack? Gentoo? others ? imputs welcome.);
b) try FreeBSD because it seems to fit my needs (it even has the nVidia drivers, hmmm:) ).
I'll wait until FreeBSD 5.0 Release will be out and I'll try it.
Any others comments on FreeBSD on desktop ?
Re:Excellent System (Score:3, Interesting)
OTOH, the other OS being used for similar boxen on the same project is Nutware 5.0 which has the uptime of a mayfly when groupwise is running on it.
Re:Excellent System (Score:2, Interesting)
Linux is very stable and clean compared to windows.
FreeBSD (and NetBSD too) is even more stable and clean than Linux (though maybe some distro's approach FreeBSD's level of 'cleanness')
And OpenBSD takes that cleanness and correctness even further, sometimes being paranoid about it, but I like that.
If you like FreeBSD, give OpenBSD a shot. I'm sure you'll like it.
(And now a few dozen of linux users will start trolling that OpenBSD doesn't have . To them I say: You're just using Linux because it's 'l337', not because it's a good OS. Go and use windows, because that best fits your needs)
NVIDIA graphics card (Score:2, Interesting)
I have a graphics card that uses the NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4400 chipset. I gather that XFree86 doesn't support it. There's an official NVIDIA driver for FreeBSD 4.7. Will it work with 5.0? I don't care about 3D graphics.
Re:I love FreeBSD to death, but... (Score:4, Interesting)
a SPARC based system, a very small percentage
of the FreeBSD user base. This is not an i386
issue.
Nothing to see here, move along
Re:Excellent System (Score:4, Interesting)
Anyways, the base rate was to run two Ackerman's at once, thus causing 100% USER CPU usage on both CPUs. The base rate for FreeBSD 4.62 was 15.5 Ackerman's per time period, vs. Linux's v2.4.18 14.0 during the same time period. Now this isn't a smoking gun, but the hardware was identical, and they were both running on custom compiled thin as possible kernels under the same duress.
Why would anyone do this? Well, my goal was to eat up all USER CPU and see how much I could rob from user with system under severe network abuse. Needless to say, that both OS's did very poorly, with FreeBSD having a clear edge, when the interface was brought to promiscuous mode to listen to a packet flood. FreeBSD degraded less, but in both cases an almost useless amount of CPU was left over for USERland. FreeBSD with RX polling turned on - a feature that practically seems unique to FreeBSD, from the XORP router project [xorp.org]. I am aware of polling endeavors in Linux but was never able to get them working. As usual with FreeBSD, 'features' aren't creeping in, so they tend to work. I even changed the polling to work under SMP (it wasn't designed to) and it worked in a situation where it shouldn't have. The usefulness of RX polling cannot be stressed enough, its imperative to consider the live-locking of interrupt driven kernels when dealing with massive amounts of bandwidth. If interested, see: 'Eliminating Receive Livelock in an Interrupt-driven Kernel' [harvard.edu], USENIX 1996, its amazing to me livelock still happens over 5 years after stuff like this gets presented to the public.
So, how bad is FreeBSD SMP? As far as I was concerned in my test, 2.4 Linux SMP seemed inferior (in my case) to FreeBSD on identical hardware. Are people touting Linux's big bad SMP zealots. Most probably, most good kernel hackers think highly of FreeBSD, particularly the VM. I find it amusing that RedHat is not porting to SPARC or Alpha anymore, and yes FreeBSD 5 is planned stable on IA64, IA32, SPARC64, PowerPC [stable planned a bit later, probably when a real PPC gets offered by IBM - die Motorola PPC, die] and Alpha. Clean code and standards compliance begets portability.
As far as saying "SMP" is better. Linux may have a better approach, but like my example, and I am sure there are others, empirical tests say a whole lot more. It's important to keep the machinery well oiled and coherent, which is something I think FreeBSD does rather nicely. Empirical tests such as mine prove that approach and theory and real life are different.
FreeBSD - it's coherent, well documented, "thin," bloody fast, BSD licensed so call it your own. You can see that well written code goes across architectures; the FreeBSD discipline is allowing them to easily stay stable on several platforms. I have run several tests that suggest that even FreeBSD 4.X is 'better' than Linux at various things, let alone 5.0. The VM subsystem is superior [2.5 is catching up]. Most big companies provide virtual servers with FreeBSD, such as Verio. The biggest irony of all is how small the FreeBSD community is compared to legions of hackers and companies trying to improve Linux. Yet why is Linux fragmented so horribly? You will eventually come to understand why this is the only free and open commercial grade OS there is. You will know what you are missing when you finally get a coherent UNIX. GCC, the C library and the kernel are all a matched set, not of this he said she said GNU-of-the-day distribution crap or fake compilers from RedHat and frozen broken CVS snapshots of the C library [RedHat again, with a fake C-lib on RH8]. FreeBSD is used by Juniper as the core OS, with network processors instead of 'real' network cards. It's beautiful. A full version of FreeBSD, relabeled JuneOS, with an IOS-like CLI for those who need it and superior design and interfaces. The UFS2 filesystem is also incredible. I really, really like XFS for Linux, but the Linux kernel maintainers won't merge it in [to 2.4] but have a myriad of vastly inferior filesystems merged into Linux [ext3 fake journaling, Reiser fsck for fun FS, JFS which is robust but slow]. RedHat's refusal not to embrace XFS with open arms boggles my mind. UFS2 addresses this problem. A fast, robust logging filesystem that is stable and in the kernel. I think UFS2 is a far superior improvement to UFS than was ETX3 to EXT2.
Anyways, I don't think I'll wait for Linux kernel 2.6 or any of the flavors of Linux distributors to come out with something stable, well documented, coherent with UNIX as a standard and each other. Don't be fooled, LSB is a standards base, but you don't get decades of discipline, you get maybe a years worth of un-actualized planning. FreeBSD 5.0 is here. This project needs a better installer, and some 'for workstation use' cleanups, and probably a better package system, although, there are lots of people who like PKG and PORTS much, much better than RPM or DEB. Another annoying omission [and yet another Sun self-screwing maneuver] it that it is difficult to get a JRE/JDK to run natively [1.1, 1.2, 1.3 and 1.4 are available as ports] and Sun does not provide one [they are apparently planning one]. People have lots of luck though using the Linux binary emulator, FreeBSD can run everything Linux does in binary form and it's easier to port to. Another good reason to develop for FreeBSD is this: Linux has