FreeBSD 6.2 Released To Mirrors

AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."

Re:someday

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is still at 2.6. What timezone are you in?

Re:I noramlly check Distrowatch.com

[BrainInAJar]

FreeBSD is actually a good OS.
Yes, it's very nice

Mac users use it,
No they don't, they use Mach with a BSD api wrapper

Solaris is based around it,
No it's not, Solaris was on the SysV side of the SysV/BSD Unix wars (not a bad thing, Solaris is nice too)

and most of Linux is a cheap ripoff of it.
No, Linux is a school project based loosely off SunOS & Minix

Re:Availability

[Anonymous Coward]

"Slashdot jumped the gun as usual...."

Yeah, now we can't bitch that it's a dupe!!

Some people are never pleased.

Thank you captain pedantic

[Sycraft-fu]

However these days, x86 is taken to mean "Current CPUs based on the x86 ISA." If you mosey to nVidia's drive page you'll notice they talk about Vista x86 and Vista x64 drivers. What they mean are 32 and 64-bit drivers, of course, both x86 ISA. They don't mean that the x86 drivers will run on any platform, indeed Vista itself will run on nothing less than a Pentium 3 and thus it wouldn't be meaningful for the drivers to support less.

There's no point in breaking down support by specific chip level unless you just feel like being pedantic for no reason, thus people just say "x86" and use it to mean reasonably modern 32-bit x86 ISA chips.

If you really are concerned about compatibility with hardware that old, well, go get DOS and deal with the limitations.

If you haven't before...

[petrus4]

...this is as good an opportunity as any to discover FreeBSD for yourself. As I wrote in my journal, it's a fantastic OS...very much worth obtaining a copy of and investigating.

I've also noticed how much the comments attached to this article are riddled with trolls, flamebait, and assorted rubbish. Richard Stallman was the first to slander the BSD license and attempt to discourage its' use, and it is obvious that there are Linux users who seek to continue their master's work in that regard, and shame themselves in the process. They tell people a lot more about their own character (or lack thereof) than about that of what they are attacking.

Re:I noramlly check Distrowatch.com

[yorugua]

Hmm... Solaris 1 (aka SunOS 4.x) was BSD based. Solaris 2 ( SunOS 5.x) is SysV based.

Re:I noramlly check Distrowatch.com

[Anonymous Coward]

SunOS 1.x was BSD.
SunOS 2.x / Solaris is SysV.
And Solaris, like every other UNIX/UNIX-like system I've ever used has it's pros and cons.
Cons would be the really shitty user land, though it improved dramatically in Sol 9.
I also don't like pkg* much, and the installer just plain sucks in too many ways to mention.

Nice things...
Zones are very nice, lacking a few things, but still very handy.
Stability, Solaris on SPARC boxes is about as stable as it gets, save perhaps for mainframes.
Binary compatibility is also very nice, being able to just move an app from some old 2.6 box over to a Sol10 box will work most of the time, assuming you're not missing a lot of external libs and stuff.

And lots and lots of other little pros and cons, just like Linux, OpenBSD, and presumably FreeBSD(I haven't used it since 4.x).

Re:If you haven't before...

[rbanffy]

Licenses are just that: licenses.

BSD-like licenses do not prevent your competitors from taking your contributions, improving upon them and keeping the improvements for themselves, turning what you did as open-source into closed-source/proprietary stuff, even using it to compete against you. If you are bigger than other fish, investing in BSD makes more sense.

GPL-like licenses, on the other hand, would require your competitor to release its improvements keeping the field level. If you find the ideals behind GPL attractive, you will also feel more comfortable that improvements on your work will not become proprietary software. If you are smaller than most of the other fish, GPL makes more sense.

If we (as a company) were to invest a given amount of resources in an improvement we did wish to keep to ourselves and eventually sell, we could choose a project that had a BSD-like license. If, however, we wanted to use that improvements to foster an ecosystem where no one should gain much advantage over us, we would choose a GPL-licensed project.

They are tools. You pick the one that makes sense.

Re:x86 compatible?

[SleepyHappyDoc]

I believe his point was to call the other poster a pedantic douchebag. I could be wrong, though.

Re:Benefits of csup

[Just Some Guy]

It updates /usr/src at line speed, as did cvsup. It's not faster, just written in a vastly more common language. I don't think anything will beat portsnap for updating ports since it's downloading a small set of patch files and applying them. There's no filesystem walking required to compare the local and remove versions.

Smooth move!

[Anonymous Coward]

Good job slashdot - linking directly to the primary server instead of a list of mirrors. Surely it won't bother anyone!

Not that anyone here is concerned about the stability of other people's servers...