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Operating Systems Software BSD

FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding 39

Posted by timothy from the final-seems-an-odd-word dept.
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely has announced the availability of RC4 - the final Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.9. He says that RC4 includes SATA, DRM and other bugfixes; he is requesting everyone for help with testing. He says that if all goes well, they will be able to release Monday."
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FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding More

FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding

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  • Making choices... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Currently run 5.1 on all my machines, but 4.x series was marvelous as well.
    With DragonflyBSD rolling its release sometime around 5-STABLE branch I think people will have a hard time making a choice of what to run.
    5-STABLE branch releases or DragonflyBSD, it will be interesting times ahead.
    I will probably run FreeBSD on most my servers and put DragonflyBSD on my laptop, as 4.x series worked better on crappy hardware; I needed more advanced features that 5.x offered that DragonflyBSD will too.

  • What a coincidence! (Score:5, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday October 25, 2003 @11:44AM (#7308337)

    FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding

    I issued a similar press release shortly after breaking up with my girlfriend!

    PS: FreeBSD rulez!

    • Yeah, thanks for the heads-up! I even wrote a test plan and everything. >:)

      • Re:What a coincidence! (Score:1, Funny)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Watch out though! System is very unstable and requires frequent reboots.

        And the firewall is useless, you close off ports to untrusted outsiders and after you check the logs, turns out they got in anyway.

        And there's some bug in the console code. You type a command and the system claims it ran, but it turns out it didn't.

        Basically 2.0 is a lot better, and that's what I'm running now. Larger mbufs too. :-)
    • At least timothy had an excuse (the devil made him do it). What's yours ? ;-)

  • I only wish I had a machine that I could use for testing purposes. As it stands I am only able to install releases on this one.
    That said, I am even more excited for the upcoming stable version of 5.x
    • I'm using CURRENT since 5.1 on a regular basis, and I had very few problems with it. As far as I'm concerned, CURRENT is kind of semi-stable at the moment. Of course, every cvsup can break this, but this is not really new :) P.S.: 5.1 is really cool, esp. on an SMP motherboard.
  • ... 'cos I just installed Panther [apple.com] on my Mac [apple.com], and it was making noises about FreeBSD *5*.
    • It's a little like the odd/even minor number branches of the Linux kernel being developed in parallel. FreeBSD 5 is the development branch. While more stable than many other OSes, it is not recommended for production use yet - there is a lot of new functionality that has to thoroughly tested, and some things still change. AFAIK, the current plans are to declare the 5.x series the "stable" one is with the release of 5.3, ealier plans had 5.2 in that role (the current release is 5.1).

      While FreeBSD 5.x is st

    • Panther(Darwin) has its own *kernel* derived from the Mach. It only uses the FreeBSD userland. They usually try to keep the userland in synch with FreeBSD periodically and this version is going to have some of the bits from freebsd 5. I am sure Panther is going to kick ass. I only wish I could justify buying a Mac for myself ....

  • Troll Fodder (Score:4, Funny)

    by glenstar ( 569572 ) on Saturday October 25, 2003 @01:06PM (#7308786)
    Could you possibly come up with a title more likely to feed the "*BSD is Dying/*BSD Sux0rs" trolls?

    Long live the *BSDs!

  • better than 4.8 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by endx7 ( 706884 ) on Saturday October 25, 2003 @02:56PM (#7309430) Homepage Journal
    I can tell already 4.9 is gonna be better than 4.8 was. I had a machine running 4.8 that would panic and reboot under heavy load (problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card). Since I really had nothing to lose, I decided to go up to the release canidate of whatever version was available.

    This was friday morning, and the newest version of stable was RC3. I downloaded it, ...and it didn't work (and checksum mismatch, which might explain it just -slightly-).

    I looked back at the server, and RC4 had been put on the server while I was downloading RC3. Okay! Download, and before too much time passed, 4.9-RC4 was running.

    I pushed and pulled some large files off and on it (100 mbit, which in 4.8 it wasn't lasting longer than a few minutes on that card), and this time it stayed up (and it's still up).

    • Re:better than 4.8 (Score:3, Interesting)

      by sirket ( 60694 )
      (problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card)

      What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).

      I did get some panics when running -CURRENT with a Via Rhine on a high throughput firewall, but when I returned to 4.8, everything was fine. Serves me right for running -CURRENT on

      • Re:better than 4.8 (Score:2, Interesting)

        by endx7 ( 706884 )

        What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).

        I don't remember what card exactly it was, but it used the xl driver. I had also tried an SMC? that used the dc driver, and it seemed bpf breaking then (but I'm not expert at debugging the kernel). But it appears to be fixed in 4.9, so I'

        • Hrm, xl would likely make it a 3com of some sort. I've had the same issues with the panic/reboot under heavy load on 4.8 as well. None of the 4.9RCs have had this issues as of yet. Happy happy joy joy!

  • Works For Me (Score:2, Interesting)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 )
    I've been running it since Saturday, and so far so good. I had to download and install the ports separately because they weren't on the mirror yet, but that's no biggie.

    Everything seems to go well, the usual fit-n-finish is superb, no complaints or warnings from any packages or utilities. Just what you'd expect from the FreeBSD team ;)

    Of course, i have `boring' hardware- nothing special:

    Athlon 1533Mhz
    512M Kingston
    30G WD IDE
    nvidia TNT1 (eek!)
    SbLive! (haven't built a kernel for support yet)
    Netgear FA312

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