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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.3 Released 328

Posted by michael from the only-mostly-dead dept.
cpugeniusmv writes "FreeBSD 5.3 has been released! This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list. Bittorrent Download."
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FreeBSD 5.3 Released More

FreeBSD 5.3 Released

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  • *BSD is dying, et al... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:07PM (#10744196)
    Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.

  • FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:08PM (#10744202)
    That's pretty ancient.
    I know, it's a mistake. 3.4.3, or 3.4.2?

    Anyway, FreeBSD rules. I'm glad they waited to make 5.3 great.

  • Excellent OS (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Ambient_Developer ( 825456 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:12PM (#10744225) Journal
    BSD is an excellent operating system if your trying to lock down a network, or some other coperate enviroment.. Just look at their history with security, which is pretty convincing. So I say kudos to milestone release 5.3, I know I will be trying it. ~matt

    • Re:Excellent OS (Score:3, Interesting)

      by molnarcs ( 675885 )
      Add performance and reliability to that and you get one of the best systems there is. FreeBSD is never missing from the top 10 most reliable sites on netcraft, usually taking more places than any other OS.

      In october, the 3 topmost reliable sites were all FreeBSD (4th was either Net~ or Open~ and 8th was again FreeBSD).Read More [netcraft.com]

      • In october, the 3 topmost reliable sites were all FreeBSD (4th was either Net~ or Open~ and 8th was again FreeBSD).Read More

        The number 4 (SecDog [secdog.com]) is most likely running OpenBSD as can be seen from the alliances [secdog.com] page. The SecDog ISP has been named many times as the most reliable host by Netcraft, and now all their infrastructure servers has moved to OpenBSD [undeadly.org].

  • been a while (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Pierre ( 6251 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:25PM (#10744286)
    Just blew away my testing partition (ubuntu) and installed it it's good to see you my old FreeBSD friend.

    ummm although it would have been nice to see a new installer ;)

    • ummm although it would have been nice to see a new installer ;)
      FWIW, of the three, FreeBSD is the easiest to install... Throw in a floppy disk and do a base ftp install including source code and ports tree. CVSup the ports tree and then install from there so you don't need to update any ports afterwards. I find fdisk to be a real pain if you've not used it much, so I find OpenBSD and NetBSD a bit more of a pain than FreeBSD...

  • A few questions... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by KillerHamster ( 645942 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:27PM (#10744295) Homepage
    I've been running FreeBSD on a couple servers for a while, and with this latest release, I've been thinking about trying it on a desktop. The particular computer I have in mind is currently running Slackware 10. I have a few questions for those of you using FreeBSD on a desktop system:

    Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
    Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
    Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
    In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?

    • Re:A few questions... (Score:4, Informative)

      by bcrowell ( 177657 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:38PM (#10744344) Homepage
      Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?
      I mainly like it for the ports system. The only things I know of that can compare with it would be Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's portage. However, I was never able to get a Debian or Gentoo system to install. YMMV :-)

      Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
      I tried to get USB to work in 4.x, and failed, but USB support is supposed to be much better in 5.x. Audio has worked fine for me.

      Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
      That's the best thing about it: the ports system.

      In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
      Well, first check if it's in the ports system. If it's well-known software, it probably is, so you're all set. Otherwise, it really depends on the software. If it's small and simple, and wasn't written with lots of Linuxisms, then it should be no problem. If it's 10^7 lines of code, and was written by people who assumed it would only be used on Linux, then you may have a long, hard road ahead.

      • The new beta Debian installer is miles ahead of the 'stable' version from my limited experience with the latter. Might be worth another try, love the 64-bit port running on my desktop. My first choice for an AMD64 notebook though was 64-bit port of FreeBSD but the installer didn't have a work-around for a BIOS bug and made it no further than infinitely rebooting. In fairness most OSS OSs bombed and it's running Gentoo right now. Anyone know if 5.3 has the (I believe) NForce3 fix?
      • I tried to get USB to work in 4.x, and failed, but USB support is supposed to be much better in 5.x. Audio has worked fine for me.

        USB support worked great for me in 4.10 as soon as I rebuilt the kernel with support for it. Then again, this was a much older machine, so it was obviously 1.1, not a newer version. Did you have problems with 2.0 or just USB in general?
      • If it's 10^7 lines of code, and was written by people who assumed it would only be used on Linux, then you may have a long, hard road ahead.

        Actually, even then your road is not usually that hard. You can even run Linux native binaries, such as RedHat RPMs. Just install the Linux compatibility ports, read the basic documentation, and you will find it's not that hard to get a Linux binary running. For example, I use this to run certain proprietary CUPS printer drivers that were written only for RedHat. (Yes
        • Neverwinter Nights runs fine under Linux emu, fully accelerated with the Nvidia binary driver.

          Only time its been noticably slower than on windows was when I left a make buildworld running in the background.

    • Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?

      Ports would be the first and most important thing. It seems easier to administer than Linux: pf is a good firewall, and the startup scripts are very logically organized. Built-in ACLs have come in handy; soft-updates and filesystem snapshots are very nice too.

      Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?

      It auto-configured most stuff on my Mini-ITX box (small/low-power file/web/whatever server, and soo

    • Re:A few questions... (Score:5, Informative)

      by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar AT gmail DOT com> on Saturday November 06, 2004 @10:54PM (#10744593) Homepage Journal
      If you like slack you will love FreeBSD (and this is true vice versa - most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware to any other distro). To me, it is easier to configure/maintain (thanks to its excellent documentation: the man pages - better than gnu man pages usually, /usr/share/examples, the handbook of course, the faq, and the very friendly community at bsdforums.org).

      Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports [freshports.org] to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)

      I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook [freebsd.org] is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.

      Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:

      mplayer tv:// -tv input=1:driver=bsdbt848:norm=palbg:audioid=2 \
      -vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb,hqdn3d -stop-xscreensaver
    • The biggest thing to remember if you plan on playing any games is fuck ATI. Nvidia has is the only company with accelerated drivers for FreeBSD. I have had some problems getting the 5.3 branch to boot, but as for previous versions, everything has worked better than Linux ever thought of.
    • * Why do you prefer it over other Unix-like OS's?

      Because it works for everything I need to do and it does so predictably. I need to know very few things to just admin my desktop.

      * Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?

      No. generally hardware is very well behaved if you have normal mainstream or (in sectors) corporate hardware that "everyone has" it will work just fine in both those segments.

      * Have you had difficulty finding applications that wil

  • FreeBSD on Compaqs (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Black Acid ( 219707 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:30PM (#10744310)
    Recent Compaq/HP laptop users can't run FreeBSD [freebsd.org]. This problem has been known since July and still not fixed in this release. FreeBSD 5.3 (all betas, RCs, and the release itself), 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, all versions of FreeBSD 4 and 3 cannot run on Compaq Presario R3000Z and similar laptops, in either i386 or AMD64 mode. When is this going to be fixed? How come the patch exists.... works perfectly.... and isn't being commited?

  • So how is the PPC port coming along? I was hoping it would make it into 5.3.

    • It did [apple.com]

      Enjoy ;)
      • OS X is not FreeBSD, it is not even close. Unfortunately, since Slashdot is pro-crApple, this will be modded as a troll. But know ye: OS X is not FreeBSD... it is a Mach/NeXT derivative with some userland tools from the FreeBSD project.

        -Jem
        • You'll be modded -1 Troll because you lack a sense of humour.

          Most people know that MacOS X is not FreeBSD, and that it's based on NeXtStep, with the entire userland (almost) out of the FreeBSD 5.xx branch (10.4 anyways) (not just "some", a good bit)

          Lighten up, it's the weekend
        • The OSX kernel is a merge between Mach and FreeBSD. This is why Darwin 7.x has all the cool features that the FreeBSD 5.x kernel has but most other unixes lack, like kqueue. The OSX kernel includes lots and lots of FreeBSD kernel code. The shared code is not just limited to userland.

          Tangent-Rant: I am sad that Linux produces a new event waiting interface with every minor version but none of them come anywhere near being as complete as kqueue. In Linux, if you want to wait on file descriptors and signa

          • This is why Darwin 7.x has all the cool features that the FreeBSD 5.x kernel has but most other unixes lack, like...

            • jails?
            • a devfs that lets you specify, via a configuration file, what permissions are to be given to newly-created devices?
            • netgraph?
            • an NFSv4 client? (Well, OK, Linux already has that, and I think Solaris 10 will have it as well, so not as many UN*Xes lack it.)

            You might or might not consider those "cool features", but they're features in FreeBSD 5.x that are not in Darwin. There are proba

          • In Linux, if you want to wait on file descriptors and signals at the same time without a race condition, your only option involves longjmp()ing out of signal handlers. ::shudder::

            Yup, longjmp()ing out of signal handlers sucks. We finally gave up on SIGALRM+longjmp() as a timeout mechanism for IP address to host name lookups in Ethereal, because, in additiona to not being able to use it on Windows (which is where the timeout problem is worst, thanks to inverse NetBIOS-over-TCP lookups), we also can't use i

  • FreeBSD 5.0 for Alpha? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cyberkahn ( 398201 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @09:38PM (#10744342) Homepage
    "FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now."

    I thought they were going to relegate Alpha to Tier 2, but I see ISO images on the servers? Thank you FreeBSD team!!!!!
    • What about PPC? I find it amazing that they don't have a stable PPC port. Just insane.
  • Yes... looking forward to being able to be lazy and using Windows network drivers when I cannot find a BSD driver. Damn generic chipsets with no indication of chipset.

  • Switch? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by czarangelus ( 805501 )
    I've been a linux user for over a year, and I currently have Mandrake 10.1 installed on a Compaq Presario 2100. It's for personal use, so there's no need for the machine to be particularly secure. Everything works. Is there any reason for me to use BSD rather than Mandrake?

    I'm also helping my girlfriend with Suse 9.1 on her Hewlett-Packard laptop. She has problems with ACPI, stability, and the linksys wireless card we bought for it. Is there any way she could benefit from a switch to this new BSD release?

    • Re:Switch? (Score:3, Informative)

      by brilinux ( 255400 )
      I would say, no, she would not benefit. I have been running FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 since before Slashdot said that it came out, and it is wonderful; my non-linux compatible WiFi card works fine with the NDIS Project Evil. But as far as I know, ACPI support still does not support CPU scaling, battery monitoring, or orher nice features, so I would recommend a recent Linux distro over FreeBSD (I was using Gentoo, but it was acting up, and I wanted to try 5.3. I have used SuSE on here as well, and it seemed okay).

    • Re:Switch? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by 0racle ( 667029 )
      There is always a need to be secure.

  • Try out FreeBSD on a live CD (Score:5, Informative)

    by cquark ( 246669 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @10:00PM (#10744418)
    If you aren't ready to install FreeBSD on your hard disk, you can try out FreeBSD 5 with the live FreeSBIE [freesbie.org] CD. It's currently based on FreeBSD 5.2.1.
  • wget "ftp://ftp3.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i38 6/5.3/5.3-RELEASE-i386-miniinst.iso" && echo "Wah Hoo!"

  • BT (Score:2, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Take that RIAA. There is a good use for BT. HA!
  • How do I upgrade my machine from 4.10 to 5.3 stable ? I mean is there an easy way using CVSup or sysinstall which will upgrade to 5.3 smoothly ? I am a novice to freeBSD world.

    Tejas Kokje

    • Re:upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable (Score:5, Informative)

      by Bodhammer ( 559311 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @10:27PM (#10744504)
      1) read /usr/src/UPDATING

      2) read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html

      3) and this: http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/FreeBSD53. html

      • oh yea, and this: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-i38 6 .html

        3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD Users with existing FreeBSD systems are highly encouraged to read the ``FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE Migration Guide''. This document generally has the filename MIGRATE5.TXT on the distribution media, or any other place that the release notes can be found. It offers some notes on migrating from FreeBSD 4.X, but more importantly, also discusses some of the relative merits of upgrading to FreeBSD

  • Ever since I fell from "Sun God" (Score:5, Interesting)

    by YetAnotherName ( 168064 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @10:33PM (#10744522) Homepage
    From 1988 to 1993 I was a "Sun God," meaning I adminisrated a university's computer lab and network of mostly SunOS (680x0 & SPARC) 4.0 systems, all based on BSD. Root access, god-like powers, you get the drift. About this time, Linux was just a posting in a newsgroup.

    After leaving the university environment and getting a real job, I wanted to re-live the Sun environment at home, but goodness, were Sun systems ever pricy. Linux looked like a viable alternative, but FreeBSD had just released 2.0 at the time.

    I went with FreeBSD.

    It was a pretty easy decision: FreeBSD was the more Sun-like of the two PC Unix-like systems. Specifically, Linux used the System V style of runlevels, and Sun had jaded me against System V ever since they stopped bundling the compiler and called their OS "Solaris."

    That was awhile back. Today, I've got rackmount hardware at home running a variety of operating systems. I get most of my stuff done on Linux. But FreeBSD has run, now runs, and will most likely continue to run my firewall and NAT. It doesn't do much else; but what it does, it does with efficiency and grace.

    Cheers, Chuckie.

  • Slackware junkies should give BSD a try.. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by SnowCrashed ( 778322 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @10:34PM (#10744523)
    I gave BSD a try for the first time a couple months ago, and as an intermediate Linux user who favors Slackware, I felt right at home with FreeBSD 4.9. I would definitely recommend anyone who is a *nix junkie to give it a try, you might be pleasantly suprised. I know that BSD typically isn't as good with compatibility as Linux, but I haven't had any issues. Long live BSD

    • I was in the same boat. I'd been running Slackware since 8.0 on a Pentium 133 home server, and recently switched to a BSD - NetBSD.

      Installation went smoothly. The installer rivaled Slackware's and was easier to tweak to minimize the amount of stuff being installed.

      The documentation is good, and I had a custom kernel built within an hour or two.

      I haven't used FreeBSD, but if it's anything like NetBSD it's a good alternative to Slackware.

  • Crazy period?! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 06, 2004 @11:01PM (#10744616)
    My teacher was right. The world collapsed the moment the Rex Sox Won.

    Look at everything that's happening since.
    - New releases of *BSD variants.
    - Bush re-elected
    - /. robot topics scaring the shit outta us
    - Half life 2 released in about a week.

    What next? Flying pigs? (Name that Simpson episode!)

  • Encrypted gbde swap! Finally! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scrod ( 136965 ) on Saturday November 06, 2004 @11:57PM (#10744808) Homepage
    The gbde_swap script, which supports gbde-enabled swap devices, has been added. When the
    gbde_swap_enable variable is specified in rc.conf(5), a swap device named /dev/foo.bde in fstab(5) is automatically attached at boot time with the device /dev/foo and a random key, which is generated by computing the MD5 checksum of 512 bytes read from /dev/random. Note that this prevents recovery of kernel dumps.

  • Now playing: (Score:2, Funny)

    by beaviz ( 314065 )
    FreeBSD 5.3: Resurrection

  • Upgrading from RC2? (Score:2, Insightful)

    by sejanus ( 18670 )
    Could anyone point me in the direction of showing how to upgrade 5.3-RC2 to 5.3-Stable?

    • Re:Upgrading from RC2? (Score:5, Informative)

      by drmerope ( 771119 ) on Sunday November 07, 2004 @01:58AM (#10745164)
      Best approach is to upgrade via source.

      pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui
      edit the example cvsup file:
      so that:
      *default release=cvs tag=.
      becomes
      *default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3

      Then, do the following (quoted from /usr/src/UPDATING, slightly abridged because this is will be a small upgrade):
      make buildworld
      make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
      make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE

      make installworld

      You can omit the KERNCONF business if you just want to use the GENERIC kernel.

      • A few things that might simplify life:

        -Use RELENG_5, not RELENG_5_3. The latter is just errata/security fixes, the former is the true 'stable' branch for 5.x. It is going to get a lot more attention and MFC's.

        -'make world kernel' works just as well, since you don't need to be paranoid about library changes this late in the release cycle.

        -You can set KERNCONF=foo in make.conf to never have to type it on the command line. Same goes for every make variable you find yourself passing - this especially appl

    • Re:Upgrading from RC2? (Score:3, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      The FreeBSD handbook on htp://www.freebsd.org/ is excellent. It walks you through the steps to do a binary upgrade, or a source upgrade of your OS. Personaly, the way I find easiest is to just drop in the install CD, run sysinstall, and choose "upgrade". I always have a current CD anyways, so I don't mind burning a copy of the release when it comes out. Cheers.

  • Trolltalk is trolltalk, facts are facts. :) (Score:3, Informative)

    by ulib ( 816651 ) on Sunday November 07, 2004 @04:05AM (#10745465) Homepage
    FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project [internetnews.com]
    Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD [netcraft.com]
    "FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."

    --
    Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

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