FreeBSD 5.0 Available

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[Stanley Feinbaum]

I managed to get a free copy of freebsd thanks to my status as a journalist, however I was sadly disappointed by this product.

I attempted to install freebsd on my IBM laptop, however I discovered my particular model was not compatible (which is odd, since it runs win2k just fine, which has many BSD elements in it). I decided to try it on my p4 system which I use for games occasionally. Unfortunately I discovered that BSD refused to be installed on my NTFS partition, and I was required to create a new partition! I have never had this problem with windows before and was baffled at the amount of work BSD forces one to take on just to get it installed! I decided to abort my attempt at reviewing BSD since it didn't seem to work on any of the systems I had! Furthermore I discovered that not only does Freebsd not run any new games, it doesn't even run Microsoft office, the standard office program! A truly terrible computer product!

I give FreeBSD 1/10

great...

[Xpilot]

Slashdot jumps the gun yet again! And I was planning to sneak download FreeBSD 5.0 while nobody knows about it. Now my download is going to choke. My evil plans are foiled yet again! Curses Taco!

Re:Nice linking

[mikerod]

I guess since *BSD is dying the /. editors saw no harm in linking :-))

I believe,

[jcoy42]

Mr CmdrTaco, that you have just pee'd in their wheaties.

Re:Nice linking

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe it's the *BSD FTP server that's dying ?

Oh yeah !

[SILIZIUMM]

And I just downloaded the 4 ISOs of 4.7 yesterday !

But it's not a problem since many people said that it was better for me to stick with 4.7 and then switch to 5.1 or 5.2. Not a problem too since I'M on cable and I downloaded theses ISOs at 300+ kb/s :)

Its slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew this would happen, so i uploaded it to my oc-255 server, enjoy! [ottawa.on.ca]

Re:Nice linking

[b0r1s]

Now why would you link directly to a FTP server? We all know that a lot of people will begin to download a +600MB ISO file and that no single FTP server would be able to handle the Slashdot crowd..

Correction: No single Linux server would be able to handle the Slashdot crowd. A single FreeBSD server can do it easily.

http://www.bsdtoday.com/2000/October/News296.html [bsdtoday.com].

This is from 2 years ago, many advancements have been made, particularly to the hardware and network stack, so assume that these numbers are on the very low end of estimates.

"We're very pleased to have servers that we built, running the FreeBSD operating system, set new milestones like this. It really shows just how well our large servers can perform in real-world situations using freely available software", Greenman said. "Equally impressive is the server's stability. It was pumping out upwards of 300 million bits per second to over 3000 users at a time for the past several days without a glitch and has been operating crash-free under similarly high loads for nearly two months now."

Re:My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[debaere]

" ... it doesn't even run Microsoft office, the standard office program! A truly terrible computer product!"

You are right, MS Office is truly a terrible computer product :)

I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

...*BSD is dead? Oh wait, it's just their ftp server...

Re:RC3 was a good experience

[1nv4d3r]

I used to be the same way (only w/Linux). I thought there was a sort-of charm in it, I guess.

Then I realized that for $200 I could get a machine immensly faster than my $3000 1995 machine (a P120 w/32MB). And when I get the extra power and memory/HD space, I found ways to make good use of it pretty quick.

So, next time your power supply or HD fizzles out, don't spend $40-60 dollars replacing them? Take the opportunity to upgrade. The console still works fine on these machines, I promise.

Re:FreeBSD 5.0 NOT released

[rsidd]

In that story, FreeBSD release engineer Bruce A. Mah comments [slashdot.org]:

This wouldn't be such a big deal except we had a very similar situation in 4.5 with someone posting a bogus release announcement to Slashdot (and having it slip past the editors). I really hope there isn't a third time.

Well, here's hoping there isn't a fourth, Bruce....

I wonder if slashdot does this on purpose to FBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems something like this happens EVERY release of FreeBSD. While once or twice might be excuseable, *every time* HAS to make one wonder if Slashdot is doing this on purpose to harm FreeBSD.

Makes me also wonder if an undocumented "feature" of Slashdot is the posting of the FreeBSD is Dying post, as well.

What's the problem? That FreeBSD is a cometitor of Linux? Is that why Slashdot pulls this stunt time and time again? What other project does Slashdot do this to AT ALL, let alone every time.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but when something is done time and time again, anyone with a brain would find the "we made a mistake, sorry" line very unbelievable as the behavior is repeated time and time again.

Maybe we'll see another posting about a troll getting sued....and it will be Slashdot getting sued by FreeBSD!

Grow up and act responsibly, please. Don't do things that are harmful to others and their hard open source work, please. Thank you (I hope).

Re:Mirrors

[BitHive]

They'll never link to your mirrors list--and here's why:

You notice how with all this talk of the "slashdot effect", we're all still able to browse slashdot? Do you ever have problems loading slashdot and try a slashdot mirror? Of course not. This is because slashdot is cool and has "mad bandwidth". The attitude of the editors is simple: if FreeBSD was cool enough, they would have mad bandwidth too, and linking to their master FTP server wouldn't be a problem. Since they aren't, they don't, so hence we don't give a shit.

I hope this has been helpful.