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."

Release Notes

[Squeezer]

If you want to see what is new in FreeBSD 5.0 then click to view the release notes.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/relnotes.html [freebsd.org]

Re:Oh, hooray

[Fulkkari]

which would mean it hasn't reached the mirrors yet

No. There were already copies of the release, on the mirrors I checked.

A few mirros

[KAMiKAZOW]

The ISOs are not yet on all mirrors, but at least on the following servers:
ftp://ftp.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO -IMAGES-i3 86/5.0/
ftp://ftp2.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO -IMAGES-i 386/5.0/
ftp://ftp5.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/IS O-IMAGES-i 386/5.0/
ftp://ftp6.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-I MAGES-i386 /5.0/
ftp://ftp14.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMA GES-i38 6/5.0/

Please look also if the files appeared on the other mirrors.

Mirrors

[hashinclude]

Can't /. editors *PLEASE* *PLEASE* list mirrors rather than freebsd ftp directly??

Anyway .. here is a list of mirrors [freebsdmirrors.org] of FreeBSD [freebsd.org]. Don't know which works though. A mirror of the mirrors is available here [virtualave.net] Its *very* badly formatted though. Oh.. and suppress popups, will you please?

The stupid /. "postercomment" compression filter won;t let me post a list of mirrors ...

And to pre-empt stupid /. comments about Mirrors and Soviet Russia --

In Soviet Russia, FreeBSD Mirrors YOU

Re:My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[Anonymous Coward]

YHBT Fucktard

RC3 was a good experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to hear the final 5.0 release is out. I installed FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 on my Pentium 100MHz with 32MB of RAM and I must say I'm really impressed how well the system performs. I'm a console freak so I try to do everything I need to do using console programs. It's been a really great thing to notice all of the utilities I have needed are also available as console programs.
I use "slrn" to read the Usenet news, "lynx"/"links" to surf the web, "mutt" to read/send e-mail, "mpg123" to listen to music/internet radiostations. Truly great experience and imagine it works _really_ smoothly and fast on computer which was bought in 1995. I am impressed and a happy FreeBSD user!

Re:From the BSD 5.0 Bugs Page

[caino59]

SCSI is sorta dead if you are looking a win9x point of view....you will get faster performance from an IDE drive there.

But for a server (and I hope you aren't using BSD to play games on) SCSI is where it's at (although SATA shows promise, the tech still has a little maturing to do)

SCSI sub-systems handle loads much better and are much better at dishing out data.

Re:Free BSD for ALPHA anyone?

[lunenburg]

I'm running RELENG_4 on my AlphaStation at home, so there's at least SOME support with current releases.

Re:Free BSD for ALPHA anyone?

[ppetrakis]

It works pretty well. I know quite a few former redhat users who have switched to free/net BSD on Alpha. I've run it myself on EV6 hardware, They've done some good work. If you'
re concerned about linux/alpha support check out debian. well supported and stable.

Peter

Mirror

[huhmz]

Has been available for a couple of days now, since the mirrors are gonna get hit bad now i figure i could contribute with my unofficial 100Mbit mirror.
ISOs for i386 here:
mirror [130.237.77.139]

Dont forget to check the md5sums, I could be an evil blackhat after all. Enjoy.

Re:Oh, hooray

[krismon]

Actually I believe the mirrors grab from a non-public ftp server.

Re:great...

[TheRaven64]

Your download should work fine if you use one of the mirrors. I'm getting 350KB/s from ftp://ftp5.uk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/...

Re:Hurrah for the BSD Team

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, actually, FreeBSD 4.x can have threads managed by the kernel, it is just not many programmers can be bothered to code for them because there is no nice wrapper library.

Check out "man rfork_thread" which provides the same level of threading as Linux does (and Linux threading is not that great - far too heavyweight IMHO).

But, you are right, hopefully KSE in 5.0 should place FreeBSD at the forefront.

Jamie.

You don't need the 4 ISOs

[Draco_es]

If you have a good connection you can do an HTTP/FTP/NFS install . You'll save bandwitdth and CD's. Also, you can do a decent install with just one CD.

I've installed 5.0 this morning(GMT) with no problems (it performs as fine as 4.x!). I think is stable enough for a Workstation (remember, 3 RC's behind), so I recommend you to install this version. Remember that a 4.x-5.x transition will not be easy.

Re:Release Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

SMPng along with the TrustedBSD stuff are probably the most important changes, but I'm REALLY happy of the POSIX compliance changes.

When companies realize the benefits fo the BSD license this will takeover the world.

Re:Release Notes

[MsGeek]

From what I understand, all of the improvements Apple made to KHTML will be in KDE 3.2 when it comes out. Apple *IS* giving back to that project, who says they won't give back to FreeBSD? Considering that Jordan Hubbard is an Apple employee now, they will probably get a lot of pressure to do exactly that.

Early Adopter's Guide

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you want to read some thoughts on whether you should upgrade, then click to view the early adopter's guide.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/early-adopter .html [freebsd.org]

Summary:

"While FreeBSD 5.0 contains a number of new and exciting features, it may not be suitable for all users at this time. In this document, we presented some background on release engineering, some of the more notable new features of the 5.X series, and some drawbacks to early adoption. We also presented some future plans for the 4-STABLE development branch and some tips on upgrading for early adopters."

BitTorrent Links for 5.0 release

[mxs]

Since Slashdot had to link to the FTP, maybe this will help lighten the stress on the mirrors : http://tacos.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/BT_BSD5.0/ [mcgill.ca] has BitTorrent files for the i386 release ISOs.

BitTorrent is a peer to peer fileswarmer. It's Free and Open Source, and comes in flavors for *ix, win32, and MacOS X. Clients are avaiable @ http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ [bitconjurer.org] ...

Once you have finished the download, please keep the window open as long as possible so that others can get the file as well. Thanks !

The download might be a little slow at the beginning, but as more and more people hop on, it should get really fast. Just give it a couple of minutes.

Re:Nice linking

[Beetjebrak]

From my experience (FreeBSD fileservers under pretty heavy punishment from a publishing house internally) I can say RAID works like a charm using vinum. Of course it supports hardware RAID controllers, but those should perform roughly equally under every OS.

Journaling, well, I don't think one could call SoftUpdates actual journalling.. but it works like a charm really. It's fast, reliable and there are no lenghty fsck's for when the server ever needs to reboot (security patches).

The servers I speak of have been running steadily for well over a year without any unplanned reboots. Of course I reboot them when security patches demand it, but those are few and many don't even require rebooting. I also had a disk blow up on me some months ago. Vinum did what it had to do and the box just kept on running. (Whose slogan is that again?? I never had this kind of 'luck' with NT-servers. RAID would work, but the box would go south together with a disk fairly soon)

As for the single CPU-bit: I don't have any first-hand experience with SMP-systems but I hear 5.0 has some really great support for SMP in its kernel quite on par with Solaris. Fileserving witn Samba, Netatalk and NFS isn't exactly taxing on the CPU, so I'd like to hear some experiences from people who do run renderfarms on FreeBSD.

Re:Nice linking

[ianezz]

I thought Linux used the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack too

No, Linux has its own implementation of networking code rewritten from scratch.

This is why problems affecting the traditional *BSD implementation of TCP/IP (which is used pratically everywhere except for Linux) don't usually affect Linux. Of course, the opposite is also true.

That said, the FreeBSD kernel is known (or, at least, it has been known) for being able to handle high load/low resource conditions far more gracefully than Linux.

Re:Release Notes

[micsaund]

I am consistently impressed by the FreeBSD team's ability to document their products. Whenever I need info from RedHat, for example, it ranges from a hassle to a PITA. The FreeBSD team maintains an entire, several hundred page handbook as well as east-to-find release notes, descriptions of their processes, FAQs, and much more.

I realize that many of the "hardcore haxx0rz" don't see the value in this documentation, but the fact that it exists and is maintained shows the professionalism and dedication the FreeBSD team has (which results in a damned fine OS!)

Re:Hasnt this happened before

[shlong]

The FreeBSD project learned it's lesson on this long ago. ftp.freebsd.org is now just a tier-1 mirror, just like any other tier-1 mirror. However, the master site is not publically available.

Also, if you guys want the REAL release announcement, go here [freebsd.org]

Re:Oh yeah !

[shlong]

This question has already been addressed in the Early Adopter's Guide [freebsd.org], which was referenced in the official release announcement.

Re:UFS1 vs UFS2

[Istealmymusic]

I'm installing 5.0 as I write this and here is what sysinstall says about UFS2: To make use of UFS2, press '2' on a UFS file system to toggle the on-disk format revision. UFS2 provides native support for extended attributes, larger disk sizes, and forward compatibility with new on-disk high performance directory layout and storage extents. However, UFS2 is unsupported on versions of FreeBSD prior to 5.0 so it is not recommended for environments requiring backward compatibility. Also, UFS2 is not currently recommended as a root file system format for non-64-bit platforms due to incrased size of the boot loader; special local configuration is required to boot UFS2 as a root file system on i386 and PC98. Looks pretty cool, I'm using UFS2 with softupdates on my /var, /tmp, and /usr filesystems.

Re:Release Notes

[eparusel]

It wasn't a huge thing, but I do recall a little while back a few FreeBSD->Apple people were sporting an NFS torture test tool.

Apparently it helped them squash a few hard to find bugs in NFS on FreeBSD....

Re:Oh, hooray

[schulte]

The master server is actually called ftp-master.freebsd.org, which is only accessible by the official mirror sites. You can read about the FreeBSD distribution system at: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/article s/releng/distribution.html [freebsd.org].

Just installed it, so far so good

[rinsoblue]

I just downloaded the mini disk and installed FreeBSD 5.0. I also installed KDE and several other applications.

All seems to be working quite well so far.

Congratulations to the Release Team.

Re:Keeping it a secret.

[shlong]

As the release manager for FreeBSD 5.0, this situation was disappointing for me because:

1. I had formed an agreement with Hemos last week that Slashdot would only accept submissions from the release engineering team and/or PR team for this.
   
2. The story that did get posted was crap. It didn't have a link to an announcement, release notes, or anything.
   

On all, it was very unprofessional of the Slashdot editorial team.

Re:Release Notes

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Your dumb conclusion is almost as dumb as your main facts

Wow. With that kind of wit and charisma, how can I hope to win an argument against you?

Good thing I've got a soft spot for lost causes.

Apple could have easily, (and legaly) built OS X on Linux, and simply kept aqua back, closed source, just like they did with BSD.

Maybe, if they'd been extremely careful to do everything just right. They still would have had to use the FreeBSD user environment, because the GNU one is just too restrictive (refer to the infamouse OpenSSL/GNU conflict).

But the most important point is one that you made in passing: "The only thing they wouldn't be able to do was release Darwin under a the APL [sic]." Apple released Darwin and other open source components under the APSL for a reason. Had they thrown their lot in with any GPL component or library, it would have "infected" the entire kernel or userland or whatever, making it impossible for Apple to retain ownership and control of their code.

And apple isn't the biggest Unix software company in the world

No? Computerworld, August 30, 2002: "Rendezvous isn't Apple's first foray into the open-source community. With the release of Mac OS X, Apple became the largest vendor of Unix in the world."

they're merely the largest growing due entirely to dumb looking computers (iMac, etc.)

Wow. You really got me there. We'd better not give Apple any credit for their accomplishments, because their computers look "dumb." You are absolutely right.

Pfff.