FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 Available

hugo_pt writes "FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 has just hit the ftp/cvsup servers. This new beta aims at correcting some known bugs from BETA2, mainly on ACPI and the schedules. It also improves several system utilities, such as bsdtar. More details available here FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE is expected October 3rd."

Trying out FreeBSD

[AresTheImpaler]

Ok, I want to try one of the BSD's. Which one should I get? this FreeBSD? Or Which one would you recommend? Also, whre can I find some good documentation with the linux compatibility mode of the BSD's? I tried google, but I get too much crap in the first 20-30 results..

Thanks

Re:bsdtar

[Korpo]

Well, I don't think quite so. Not because I think bsdtar has no technological merit. I've got good reason to believe so, because gtar is known to be not very good.

The crdrecord guy rewrote gtar, because it is in a state where it is almost no longer maintainable. He committed his version. Maintainers were happy. But Stallman said: We've already got a working gtar and basta!

At least that's what I've heard.

Given that most distributors stick with the whole GNU package, bsdtar, whatever its merits are, is more likely to be an addon package, and not the default tar on any Linux distribution.

It surely would make a nice /etc/alternatives option in Debian for tar, where it would integrate nicely! But Debian is always more flexible and open in a lot of respects (Debian GNU/BSD anyone? ;) ) than other distribs.

5.3 question

[Korpo]

Out of curiosity and ignorance:

Is FreeBSD 5.3, when it's finished, the new stable or the new current release, or both?

I've read somewhere around here, that 5.3 should replace the 4.x series as stable, finally.

So, is that true?

Re:Trying out FreeBSD

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

Try FreeBSD out first. It has the nicest installer. Then take a spin through NetBSD and OpenBSD. The installers aren't as pretty, but the rest of the operating system is configured and operated pretty much the same across all of the BSDs. In general, I am very impressed with the state of documentation. There are numerous resources on the web (e.g. the FreeBSD handbook and documentation project), and the manual pages are unusually complete compared to your typical Linux distribution.

You should probably dedicate a disk to this procedure, as configuring dual boot (duel boot?) can require some wizardry. They all run very nicely under VMware.

Where BSD falls down is on the availability of current binary updates. On FreeBSD 5.x, incremental security updates must be applied to the source code, then the O/S is re-compiled. The whole procedure is easy, in the sense that you type about five short commands to execute the whole update and build procedure, but it is very time consuming, especially on older hardware. Ports are even "worse": If you want to be current, you will most likely be building ports from scratch (also very time consuming when they upgraded to X.org, heh).

Re:bsdtar

[Anonymous Coward]

The whole point of Stallman was that Schily as German didn't want to hand over the copyright because he's legally not allowed so.

Well that's a completely different issue to "we already have a working tar". GNU requires copyright assignment for all its projects; I can't believe no German has ever contributed to a GNU project before - how have they dealt with this in the past?

Also GNU Tar is not stable. It is incompatible with almost any other tar on the world.

That's not the meaning of the word "stable". GNU tar is definitely stable. As for compatibility, have you not heard of the --posix flag?

Heck, the code is not only ugly, it is full of bugs.

That's directly contradicting studies done in the past, and you haven't backed it up with anything other than your opinion. Hell, you haven't even given a concrete example.

Re:Binary updates

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

Thanks for the links. Unfortunately, while Colin Percival recently began providing updates for FreeBSD 5.x, he only builds updates for X86 architectures. The KDE and GNOME binary packages are likewise X86-only. But none of this matters even on X86, because if you are regularly cvsupping ports, up-to-date binary packages are not usually available. For example, the latest www/apache2 binary for FreeBSD 5.2.1 is Apache 2.0.48, which is vulnerable to denial of service attacks, yet 2.0.50 is in the current version of ports. Not that "portupgrade -a" is difficult to use, just time consuming and occasionally broken.

By the way, have you ever run into problems where portinstall doesn't install or mis-calculates dependencies (even when compiling from source)? If I install lang/cmucl, misc/compat4x won't get installed, even though it is a dependency. Subsequent portupgrade commands complain about misc/compat4x missing, even though (strangely enough) cmucl has no problems. I don't know if it is a problem with portutils, pkgtools, ports, or the cmucl package itself. I'm open to any suggestions. I've also seen portupgrade complain about dependencies when required packages rev, e.g. portupgrade complaining about missing wget 1.9 for Nessus, when wget 1.8 was installed but not yet updated.