New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD

tearmeapart writes "The teams at FreeBSD have reached another great achievement with FreeBSD 9.1, with improvements to the already fantastic zfs features, more VM improvements (helping bringing FreeBSD to the next generation of VMs), and improvements in speed to many parts of the network system. Support FreeBSD via the FreeBSD mall or download/upgrade FreeBSD from a mirror. Unfortunately, the torrent server is still down due to the previous security incident." And new submitter northar writes "The other day the NetBSD project released their first update to the 6.x series, 6.0.1. They also (rather discreetly) announced a fund drive targeting 60.000 USD before the end of 2012 in the release notes. They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

Submitter could be from any of these countries.... Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use elsewhere), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kirgistan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Portuguese text), Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa (officially[15]), Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark [wikipedia.org]

Lots of good fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be an easy upgrade for anyone running 9.0, and it does add some neat stuff. These dot releases are usually logical improvements and fixes, but important new features do get introduced with regularity when they've been tested extensively in the the development branches.

9.1 is adding KMS for intel (Unless that was already MFC'd back to 9), I think the new code for LSI cards including IBM M1015, support for newer Ralink wireless cards, lots of bug fixes and improvements.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/relnotes.html

BSD loses support from Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just reading an article on LWN.net

http://lwn.net/Articles/524606/

Where it's claimed that BSD is losing a lot of support due to Linux related tools and development processes only cares for Linux and not BSD.

So basicly because of GNOME adopting things like PulseAudio, systemd and so on makes this desktop to disappear from BSD one day because these underlaying technologies doesn't exist on their systems.

The BSD developers are certainly concerned about this issue.

Please read above article for further informations.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Lord_Naikon]

Yes, that is exactly the way to enjoy FreeBSD - use it for what it's good at. FreeBSD + nVidia is awesome. State of the art compilers, every port installs its development headers, knowing that _you_ are in complete control of the system instead of the other way around. Outstanding development platform. I love it!

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never used FreeBSD or a traditional UNIX. I get it.

OS X is neat, but entirely 100% different. Please don't bring up the UNIX trademark.

I used OS X before FreeBSD (FreeBSD was not evening running on PowerPC at the time) and MacBSD before there was an OS X.

OS X is much more similar to NeXT/OpenStep than it is to FreeBSD.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[ottdmk]

I have to respectfully disagree. While it takes some getting used to, the FreeBSD ports system is, imo, absolutely awesome. Running into conflicts is extremely rare. I ran into a software conflict two months ago. It was the first time in probably five years. (I've been using FreeBSD as my main home system since 2002.)

Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.

I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.

If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)

Working Great

[Sadsfae]

I've been using 9.1-RELEASE since SVN was tagged 2012-12-04 on both my home and work desktop. ZFS root is awesome, and userland is pretty much the latest bleeding edge upstream, I've had absolutely no issues running a full-fledged XFCE-4.10, Firefox ESR 10.x with Flash, 3D accel, everything desktop.

I've used freebsd-update to go from both 9.1-RC3 and 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE also switching to pkgng.
I'd recommend folks to look at the following guides if they want to use ZFS root or create a nice, full-featured desktop OS.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 [freebsd.org] (ZFS ROOT)
https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to [cooltrainer.org] (good desktop guide)

Great job BSD devs, keep it up.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[siDDis]

There are many reasons!

Jails
ZFS
GEOM Framework
Ports
PF
Carp
Hast
The FreeBSD Handbook / Documentation with consistency

However FreeBSD doesn't excell for everything, for example Java support is far away from production ready. And another thing I ran into recently was that monitoring a lot of files for changes was slow/not scalable at all because kqueue uses file descriptors for monitoring changes in your filesystem. Linux, OS X or even Windows have scalable and working solutions for this.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

"crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros"

Speaking of FUD..

The OP should have clarified it.

1) The 'can't have separate /usr partition' was annoying (Fedora). No, putting parts of usr onto the boot image and overmounting it from network isn't a clean solution.
2) Switching libc because we don't like the old maintainer (Debian) led to different groups for users on remote vs local login.
3) Referencing your home folder for configuration files as a package maintainer is a no go.
4) Why can't nfsv4 on linux use 'advanced' crypto for crypto.

There is a list of minor things which all relate to remote mounts and weird fs location choices which don't affect solitary desktops.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.

I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.

The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.