FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available

cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

Dedicated to Itojun

[gertam]

The release is dedicated to Dr. Jun-ichiro Hagino, known throughout the Internet community as itojun. He did lots of important work on the IPv6 protocol through the KAME project, and made many other contributions to the Internet and BSD communities.

Looking forward to 7.0

[0x000000]

I am personally looking forward to 7.0 as it will bring many speed improvements and enhancements. There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.

FreeBSD 6.3 for me and my servers will be the last update to the series before switching over to the new hopefully soon to be released 7.0. My suggestion for anyone planning on trying FreeBSD out after having heard about this new release, grab whatever the latest RC disc is of 7.0 and play with that. There is practically no difference between the two, when it comes to userland and will make it easier to stay up to date by already being being on the right branch.

I definitely need to check out freebsd-update. See if it can be used in our systems to keep them up to date, with less down time than using the rebuild world and kernel steps that we take currently.

Re:A very niche OS

[0x000000]

FreeBSD brings a stable OS to the desktop user. Since both userland and kernel are in the same source tree, and are developed concurrently, any changes in the kernel will be immediately reflected in the userland utilities. What does this mean? Well, if I upgrade my kernel and my world, I will know that I always have a perfectly functioning system. It takes the guess work out of upgrades.

Besides that? I find that it is more consistent. If you move from one Linux distribution to another, you need to go hunting for the configuration files, they are not in a set location as specified by man hier. I know that when I install something from the ports tree, the configuration files can always be found in /usr/local/etc/, which is a nice change from having to hunt in /var/www/httpd for Apache's configuration file and /opt/etc/ for the dhcp servers config file.

Re:A very niche OS

[setagllib]

That's what PC-BSD is for. All of the FreeBSD 6 foundation you love, but with Ubuntu-like usability layered on top with minimal fuss. I have not tried it myself, but all reviews I've read are highly positive. And it's not just an Ubuntu clone either, with some innovation in integrating a new packaging system into the OS.

Re:Looking forward to 7.0

[kace]

There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.

See these slides [freebsd.org] by Kris Kennaway for more details on that.

Re:better engineered?

[RLiegh]

No...BSD is better engineered because it's .... (wait for it) .... engineered . Linux is just a kernel with a bunch of separately developed utilities strung together -no real coordination, no real direction.

Re:better engineered?

[TheRaven64]

You misunderstand engineering. Here's an example. How do you get the CPU speed from the kernel? In all of the BSD family there is a single sysctl that you call and it gives you the answer, irrespective of the architecture. On Linux, the answer is in /proc/cpuinfo. This is a plain-text file, so you need to read it and parse it. It gets better though; the format of this file is different on different architectures; write code to parse it on x86, and it won't work on PowerPC. The main job of the kernel is to present programmers with an abstraction so that they don't have to know about the underlying architecture, and Linux fails miserably at this.