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Announcements Operating Systems BSD

FreeBSD 4.5 NOT Released (Updated) 173

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.
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FreeBSD 4.5 NOT Released (Updated)

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  • Java (Score:1, Redundant)

    by XBL ( 305578 )
    I think this release also comes with an official Sun JDK. Is this correct?
  • FreeBSD Java (Score:1, Redundant)

    Did the FreeBSD port of the JDK make it into 4.5?
  • Will we see the improvements in FreeBSD 4.5 reflected in Darwin, the core of MacOS X?

    Is Apple syncing Darwin releases with FreeBSD releases?

    • Mac OS X is based off of FreeBSD 3.5, if I remember correctly. Maybe eventually they will move to the 4.x series for Mac OS X, but they apparently wanted to use something time-tested (aka old).
    • by jkh ( 3999 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:47PM (#2897048) Homepage
      A number of the ongoing improvements in FreeBSD-stable (from which 4.5 will come) have indeed been making it into Mac OS X.

      Apple is also not syncronizing its Darwin releases with those of FreeBSD from a timing perspective, but technologies are certainly being shared between them. Apple has also been providing stuff back, with the recent filesystem exerciser utility that Apple provided being used to find a number of bugs in FreeBSD's NFS and softupdates code. It's all good, man!
      • So are you happy at Apple? As a dedicated Mac OS X user, I am expecting big things from you! Let us know if you need a Jolt Cola, Nerf Gun or one of those desktop fridges to help you bust out more code during the day...
      • by Anonymous Coward
        Apple has also been providing stuff back, with the recent filesystem exerciser utility that Apple provided being used to find a number of bugs in FreeBSD's NFS and softupdates code. It's all good, man!

        That's good to hear. I'm looking at migrating from Win32 and Redhat to MacOSX, and one of the things I worry about is trusting big companies with my computing "life". Although I currently HAVE to use Windows for some tasks, I don't trust MS AT ALL. That's my main reason for wanting out. And I'm tired of dual booting. I want to stick with one Operating System, one that has all the features I'm looking for, and (unlike my first choice, BeOS), will stick around for the long haul. Hearing you honestly say good things about Apple is comforting to me as a prospective customer. I trust you, and if you think I should, I will learn to trust Apple.

        Not having full access to the source code is a bit of a downer, but Apple is about the only company I understand being closed-source, since (IMHO) if MacOSX was open (not necessarily under an open source license, just *viewable* by the user for security and bug tracking, etc.), it would quickly be ported to x86 and they'd go under just as quick, since their main bag seems to be cool hardware. I think Microsoft, however, just wants to cover their ass (and their many flaws). But that's just my opinion. How is it at Apple so far? Are they cool? I wanna know as much as possible about who I'm buying from. I also think a lot of normal PC users are in the same situation as I'm in, so anything you can say would be immensely helpful.

        Graham

      • Out of curiousity, do you run OS X or FreeBSD on your "main" workstation these days?
  • I just submitted a pr for an update of pure-ftpd to 1.0.8, in hope that would be merged before 4.5 was released.
    Too late :(

    • I think Slashdot got this story wrong. A couple of other posters are mentioning that RC3 was just released.


      BTW, I'm still using pure-ftpd. Last time I replied to a comment of yours I was just trying it out, but now its in production. Works great! With the vulnerabilities in wu-ftp and others, hopefully you have gotten a lot more users.(pure-ftp is written with security in mind for those reading this comment.)

  • by Eugenia Loli ( 250395 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:28PM (#2896903) Journal
    Are you sure 4.5-FINAL was released? The RC3 came out just last night and the group was scheduling about RC4 next week. And now Slashdot is reporting on 4.5-Final? I am not sure if this is a fake or not... The FreeBSD web site has not been updated yet. Waiting...
  • release notes (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Phexro ( 9814 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:29PM (#2896907)
    looks like the links on that page are broken, and it seems that 4.5-release hasn't made it's way out to all the ftp sites yet.

    in the mean time, here are the relnotes for 4.5-rc3 i386 [freebsd.org] alpha [freebsd.org]
  • The i386 [freebsd.org] Release notes give me a 404. Anyone know what's been updated (other than TCP and NFS)?
  • Hold your horses. (Score:5, Informative)

    by bwulf ( 325 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:30PM (#2896921)
    Official release-date is Jan 26th, as can be seen here [freebsd.org].

    Slashdot jumped the gun, again [slashdot.org].

    You could try watching newvers.sh [freebsd.org] in CVS for a 4.5-RELEASE tag, or at least check the FTP sites [freebsd.org].

    4.5 is still in Release Candidate 3, as far as I know.

    Keep an eye on the freebsd-announce list or the news page [freebsd.org].
  • Release: Jan 26th! (Score:4, Informative)

    by OctaneZ ( 73357 ) <ben-slashdot2 @ u m a . l i t e c h.org> on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:31PM (#2896924) Journal
    Found this so amusing that it had to be posted in main thread:
    Jan 25, 2002
    Warn hubs@FreeBSD.org
    Heads up email to hubs@FreeBSD.org to give admins time to prepare for the load spike to come.

    /. ought to bring the spike in a little early. Also not that the packages aren't going to the ftp masters until tomorrow, the 25th, and the announcment and mirroring will occur on the 26th. Just a couple more days to wait for the next step in this great OS.
  • by kenneth_martens ( 320269 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:31PM (#2896925)
    On the very bottom of the FreeBSD 4.5 Release page, there the following: "It's been pointed out that this table is rather boring. Bruce Mah gave a slightly more interesting rendition of the 12 days of Code- Freeze. [freebsd.org] ".

    An excerpt from that poem:

    > As promised we've now entered the code freeze for RELENG_4. Please
    > submit all MFC requests to re@FreeBSD.org before committing to this
    > branch.

    For your hacking and/or holiday pleasure, I give you: "The Twelve Days of Code-Freeze"

    Sung to the tune of:"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
    Words by:bmah@freebsd.org

    On the first day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    A bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the second day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the third day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Three bikesheds,
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the fourth day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Four broken worlds,
    Three bikesheds,
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    Check this [freebsd.org] page for the rest.
  • by eparusel ( 321350 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:33PM (#2896946)
    Here's a post by Murray Stokely on the FreeBSD-Stable list, at 2:07AM today:

    ==========
    Our third 4.5 release candidate is now available :

    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ 4. 5-RC3
    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i38 6/ 4.5-RC3-install.iso

    This release candidate fixes a number of issues that were reported
    with RC2. Installations from aic(4)-based PCMCIA devices should now
    be possible. For this RC, bge(4) was added to the GENERIC kernel and the
    txp(4) device was moved over to the MFSROOT as a module. This should
    allow network installations with Broadcom gigabit Ethernet
    adapters.[1] A number of suggestions about the package set were
    addressed with this RC, but unfortunately sawfish-gnome, fvwm2, and
    xfmail are still unavailable. There will be one final release
    candidate (RC4) before the final release is made available.

    The testing guide and release notes have been updated with a few new
    items :

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/qa.html
    http://www.freebsd.org/~bmah/relnotes

    Thanks,

    The FreeBSD 4.5 Release Engineering Team.

    [1] This functionality has not been committed to -STABLE yet, a small
    patch was patched to the build with "make release LOCAL_PATCHES=..".
    The patch is available at
    http://www.freebsd.org/~murray/patches/drivers.d if f, and simply turns
    on a new device for the boot floppy.
    ==========

    This seems a little fast, don't you think?
    Without 4.5-RC4 being released, and without an announcement on FreeBSD-Announce?
  • by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:34PM (#2896957)
    I administer a large cluster (please no jokes) of FreeBSD systems at work, and I was pleased to see that several changes that I had been tracking in the -STABLE branch finally made it into a release. Among them:
    • Code path optimizations. One particularly interesting change was that data destined for loopback interfaces (e.g. 127.0.0.1) bypass congestion control and the TCP sequencing code. Likewise for UDP - ICMP port unreachable messages and the like are actually determined within the syscall now, rather than being discrete messages that are bounced around in the kernel.
    • Filesystem fixes. We had been having some trouble with devfs and freevxfs on several machines, and the fixes that were checked into CVS a few weeks back fixed them. It is with pleasure that I note that those changes made it into 4.5-RELEASE.
    • Stability fixes. There were some minor issues with the use of -llinfo and the route syscall that would sometimes cause kernel panics. Since we use shell scripts to update routing tables many times an hour, we ran into this from time to time, and it is fixed now.
    • Usability improvements. The core team has emphasized the need to provide a more useful /proc filesystem, so that it can contain many discrete pieces of valuable system information like it does in Linux. Thus, new handlers for registering and unregistering nodes under /proc have been implemented (although they are not used yet).
    This is definitely the time to open your mind if you haven't already, and try using FreeBSD. It is stable, secure, reliable, and robust; it has grown into quite an excellent OS since the dog days of 3.0. Visit the mirrors [freebsdmirrors.org] and download an ISO today!

    </evangelism>

    freebsd guy

  • Way to look before you leap. RELEASE is not out yet.
  • the reason the links are busted is because no one stopped to read them. 4.5 is not out until the 26th. everyone calm down, and wait.
  • Checked the ftp site and I don't see it. RC3 is the most recent. The release schedule doesn't have it out until tomorrow and even then it isn't announced until the 26th after the mirrors have been updated.

    That information was on the very pages this story linked to. Can anybody link to something I ain't seeing 'cause right now this seems a little premature.

  • by jkh ( 3999 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:40PM (#2896999) Homepage
    First off, I didn't announce anything concerning 4.5 so it's a little odd to see "Jordon Hubbard writes..." [sic] when I did nothing of the kind. 4.5-RELEASE has NOT yet happened and all that Murray Stokely, the primary release engineer, has announced is the availability of release candidate image #3. As we go along the FreeBSD release process, it's customary for the project to release release candidate images for pre-testing so that the final version will be as bug-free as possible and hopefully without any of the sort of brain-os which get caught in the first few hours of testing.

    Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax. :)
  • by Anonymous Coward
    It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

    Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

    You don't need to be a Kreskin [amdest.com] to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.

    Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

    OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

    Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

    Recently, Slashdot confirmed that FreeBSD has been bucked away by WindRiver to FreeBSD Mall, for a carton of Winston's and a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. This only serves to confirm the fact that FreeBSD is unwanted, doomed to be passed around like a harelipped orphan from one foster parent to another.

    All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

    Fact: *BSD is dead

  • by La1d ( 415132 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @05:45PM (#2897030)
    It is now official - Slashdot has confirmed: *BSD is alive and thriving

    Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered AC crowd when Slashdot reported that FreeBSD has released a new version. This comes right on the heels of freeBSD going home, when Wind River and FreeBSD Mall Inc. published a joint press-release today announcing the sale of Wind River's FreeBSD assets to Bob Bruce, founder of Walnut Creek CDROM--the company that in 1993 first published FreeBSD. This was the company that almost a decade ago declared to the world that *BSD is alive and thriving!

    The FreeBSD Mall web site has been redesigned, with many new products, including FreeBSD CDs, books, polo shirts, microfiber jackets, boxer shorts, bumper stickers, lapel pins, several different styles of t-shirts, mouse pads, travel mugs, buttons, sticker sheets, plate logos, denim shirts, CD cases, and paid support options.

    FreeBSD and its close relatives NetBSD and OpenBSD all are open-source projects, meaning that anyone can see, change and distribute the underlying source code.

    With the main FreeBSD distribution back in the hands of the record holding Free Software distributor Bob Bruce, trolls posting that *BSD is dead had better keep the "anonymous" in "anonymous coward."
  • Keeping up with rescent trends in technology and always not to be outdone, FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE now comes with the 'Self-Power' option.

    This new option allows the machine FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE is running on to be powered why the whirring sound of the hard drives alone !! All that is needed is a 9V battery to kick start the system into effect.

    Canadian inventors are credited with this discovery and were quoted as saying, "So like, uh, we just did what we know, eh ?"
    • Keeping up with rescent trends in technology and always not to be outdone, FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE now comes with the 'Self-Power' option.

      ...

      All that is needed is a 9V battery to kick start the system into effect

      Actually, you misunderstand. The Self-Power option is so that FreeBSD can be the first OS to ship in the "potateo powered web server" configuration out of the box, rather than needing patches to the base OS to do that.

      :-)

  • by sulli ( 195030 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @06:07PM (#2897276) Journal
    from the yhbt-yhl-hand dept. ?
  • by Cato the Elder ( 520133 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @06:10PM (#2897318) Homepage
    So, which is worse:

    Making a few errors and not featuring corrections so prominently

    Making so many errors that are so basic that people find out within minutes, but at least you post corrections fast too.

    Just a thought, vis a vis michaels article yesterday.
  • I was half way done with a 4.4 ISO download. Saw this, said "whoohoo", clicked cancel. Then I read it was a fake.... yeah real funny.
    • you should use a download manager!

      and why not just use CVSup and upgrade to 4.5 when it comes out? there's really no need for ISO images these days, they are out-dated as soon as they are burnt anyway. and they are expensive to download.

    • rsync is good for updating iso's; grab the 4.4 and when it's done and you really want a 4.5 iso, rsync your 4.4 one and just get the changes.

      Not that there's much point; the first thing most people (well, me, anyway :) do when their system's up and running is cvsup /usr/src and /usr/ports and rebuild everything to the latest -STABLE. Checking out like that ensures you only get the diffs, too, so the latest iso release isn't that useful..

      While we're on the subject; don't even think about putting cvsup on a cron, at least not on one that runs a lot. cvsup is very I/O intensive, so hammering the servers constantly with no real reason to do so doesn't help anyone.

      http://freshports.org/ is a nice way to keep track of when to bother updating /usr/ports.
  • by siliconincdotnet ( 525118 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @06:28PM (#2897488) Homepage
    For those that havent already fixed it, a patch was just released for the race condition in 4.4. Get patch here:

    ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/patches/S A- 02:08/exec.patch
  • Read better. (Score:1, Informative)

    by coolcast ( 230847 )
    On the FreeBSD RELEASE page [freebsd.org], it says:

    The next scheduled release on the -stable branch will be FreeBSD 4.5 on January 26, 2002.

    It said the same two days ago.
  • I wish the Supertrak SX6000 / I2O would have made it to this release. A good thing to see that Søren [freebsd.org] is working on the case. I have such a controller waiting for a FreeBSD driver. :)
    I have had it running since October on RedHat 7.2 using the I2O drivers, but I'm not going to use the machine before I can use it with FreeBSD.
  • by innit ( 79854 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @07:03PM (#2897744) Homepage

    Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

    Yeah, like heaven forbid you should actually verify stories before you put them up ... to suggest such a thing would be pure heresy I'm sure.

    Stuii!

  • Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

    So why doesn't this story have the foot icon beside it? :)
  • by Vexler ( 127353 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @10:16PM (#2898607) Journal
    So I guess the earlier /. news article about the Irishman solving the zero-point energy problem was actually true? *grin*
  • by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Thursday January 24, 2002 @11:19PM (#2898858)

    I'm running FreeBSD 6.8-RELEASE, and it's the greatest piece of software ever made. As an operating system, it's a lean, mean serving machine. For example, my 386 SX with 4 megs of RAM typically serves about 10,000 FTP users simultaneously. And X Window System, running KDE and GNOME simultaneously, along with about a thousand highly intensive applications, continue to run and function with perfect responsiveness. In fact, I could probably run twice the load, and it would make everything execute even faster.

    "This is because I'm from the future. I came here in a time machine that you invented. Now I need your help to get back to the year 1985."

    "Hmmm... Mr. Anderson. You disappoint me."

    "You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights, I want my fluxcapacitor back."

    "Well, tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a fluxcapacitor, if you're, unable, to flux?"

    ***** OK! OK! JUST KIDDING! *****

    The release of FreeBSD 4.5 is just around the corner. The good folks in core are doing a marvelous job, and I am confident that this release will be the best yet, and that as always, the next one following this will be even better.

    As it is, amazing improvements have been made to the system since 4.4-RELEASE. I know because that's what my production servers are running right now, but for my desktop, I like to use -STABLE, which is pretty darn good.

    Oh well.

  • VCD and DAO (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Satai ( 111172 )
    One of the things I was hoping was that the changes to the built-in CD burning utility would be fixed.

    FreeBSD evidently doesn't have a SCSI/IDE emulation layer, so applications like cdrdao don't work with any IDE burners. It does have a very nice and intuitive IDE burning utility, called burncd, that works for most things. I even set it up to burn dreamcast CDs.

    However, it lacks one thing I really want - the ability to burn VCDs. I wouldn't have asked for it, since I'm certainly not qualified to program it myself, but it was added to -CURRENT last December, along with disc-at-once capabilities.

    I was rather hoping it'd make it into 4.5, but I guess I'll just have to hope for it to hit 4.6. ;-) I'd use -CURRENT except that I don't feel comfortable with my skills quite yet.

  • 4.5-RELEASE is now out on the mirrors. Where is the new /. posts? no where. I've got it running, and there isn't a single story about it yet (1/29/01 11:52:43 pm)

I have hardly ever known a mathematician who was capable of reasoning. -- Plato

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