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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1 74

Posted by michael from the early-adopter dept.
Tezkah writes "From the announcement: 'The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1. This is the first BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs. The 5.3 release cycle will continue with weekly BETA builds while bugs are being fixed and features finalized. The schedule is at www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html . Be sure to check the "Known issues" below, there are known problems still being worked on at this time.' New features include fully threaded and multi-processor safe network stack, X.org instead of XFree86, many ACPI enhancements, GCC updated to 3.4.2, gdb updated to 6.1.1, binutils updated, and much more. Expect 5.3 to be released in full on October 3rd, if everything goes according to schedule!"
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FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1 More

FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1

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  • Last Disk (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "Last Disk" [to the tune of Last Kiss by pearl jam]

    Oh where, oh where is my BSD?
    I just loaded Beta 5.3
    It's gone to heaven, so I've got to be good,
    So I can see the OS when I leave this world.

    I'd started to load it in my roommate's Dell,
    the hard drive was taking it pretty well.
    During the load, it crashed the heads,
    the distro was stalled, *BSD was dead.
    I couldn't stop, so I yanked the cord.
    I'll never forget, the sound , oh Lord--
    the screamin' drives, the speaker's blast,
    the painful scr

  • For those of you running 5.2.1 and planning on doing a source upgrade, make sure you check the /usr/src/etc/group and /usr/src/etc/master.passwd files and add the new groups and users into your own, otherwise your buildworld will fail about half way through.

    As well, you can't build a new kernel until the userland is upgraded, the "config" program and kernel options have been upgraded.

    Otherwise, the upgrade went well, and it does seem faster than the previous releases.

  • # expect -v
    expect version 5.38.0

    That's funny, I'm already up to 5.38! Damn consequences of time travel.

  • Hey linux trolls! Brand new linux distro is out (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Watch out for our brand new Linux distro: LinSux! (by FreeBSDrules productions)

    Our brand new distro is based on every existing Linux distribution. Indeed, as the name suggests, it's based on the very common denominator of all of them.

    Since we felt than the other Linux OSs weren't patchworked enough, we decided to assemble an OS out of pieces coming from every possible Linux distribution. Why? Well, cos we totally *love* chaos & anarchy. To tell you the truth, it's because in a chaotic environment our

  • Supported hardware list? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does anybody know if there's already a supported hardware list available for FreeBSD 5.3? I'd be happy to switch to FreeBSD 5.3 as soon as my Conceptronic 54g Wireless PCI Card is supported :)

  • Looks like there's still a lot to do. (Score:5, Informative)

    by Agent Green ( 231202 ) * on Thursday August 26, 2004 @11:43AM (#10079641)
    Based on their todo list [freebsd.org], it looks like there's still a lot that needs to be done before 5.3 is even close to out-the-door.

    • Re:Looks like there's still a lot to do. (Score:5, Informative)

      by jaredmauch ( 633928 ) <jared@puck.nether.net> on Thursday August 26, 2004 @01:15PM (#10080743) Homepage
      Yeah, there is still a lot to be done. I think they're going to miss the release date somewhat but the wins that will be seen by 5.3 will be excellent for the FreeBSD release.

      The finer grained locking in the subsystems, and all the great work being done by Robert Watson [watson.org] in the NetPerf [watson.org] area is showing up in the stock kernel. I did a half-upgrade (upgrading select packages) to get the 5.3-beta1 kernel to compile on one of my development hosts, and have begun disabling the Giant lock where it's not really needed. This will mean improved disk and network I/O to anyone that has a HTT or SMP system.

      FreeBSD has been lagging somewhat in the threads/smp area for some time, and this is helping bring the kernel closer in line to the performance that is seen by other OSes. I'm very exicted and will be looking forward to upgrading my 4.10-REL host to 5.3 as it will do a lot better job with my hardware (2x2.8Xeon 4g dram, em ether, asr0 scsi) and hopefully help solve some of my database performance issues.

  • Installer (Score:2, Insightful)

    by JAD lifter ( 778578 )
    I wish that the installer was a little bit better. Just about every Linux distro that I installed found my video card and set up X perfectly. For some reason FreeBSD never could seem to automatically configure my video card corectly. It was a while ago and I cannot even remember what kind of card that it was but I do remember at the time having a total nightmare trying to get it installed. Going to FreeBSD newsgroups and IRC channels to get help but I never did get it to work right.

    • Re:Installer (Score:4, Informative)

      by rycamor ( 194164 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @03:41PM (#10082209)
      Well, FreeBSD is really not "about" the desktop yet. But, it's worth noting that in the past when I just ran "Xfree86 -Configure", my video card was detected 99% of the time. This is a feature of XFree86, not the OS. So I pretty much religiously ignore the X configuration tools in the installer and just stick with that simple method. Now, given that FreeBSD has switched to X.org, I don't know how this sort of thing works, but I'm willing to bet there is a similar command.
      • Because of my bad luck and the fact that my family was cursed some generations ago, I work as a windows sysadmin. Therefore the only usage that I get out of *BSD, Linux and Solaris is playing around with systems at home and with a couple of internal FTP servers running Redhat here at work. So I have never heard of this whole Xfree86 -Configure thing. Sounds pretty cool though. I am very surprised that nobody told me about that earlier when I was having so much trouble with X.

        • Re:Installer (Score:3, Interesting)

          by rycamor ( 194164 )
          Oops, I'm sorry. It's "XFree86 -Configure" (notice the capital F).

          Yes, it is unfortunate that all the cool shortcuts in Linux/Unix tend to take years to discover. I really didn't know about it until I had been using FreeBSD for 3 years. Of course, reading the XFree86 manual would have helped ... ;-)
      • With X.org: Xorg -configure

    • Personally, I never install X during the initial install. Typically, I install everything but X, then cvsup the src and ports trees, and then build world. I then install X from the ports tree.

  • I'm on a slow connection, so I'll give this beta a try sometime this weekend, but I have tried 5.2 current and had some problems trying to do a truly minimal install. (Note: I've been mostly a Debian user).

    Are there any tricks to installing just the very basics? I have two needs for two seperate machines, actually. I would like one such install to have just enough to serve as my gateway, dns, and web server (but not mail). I would like another very simple install to run just X and Mozilla-Browser (the brow

    • Re:Minimal Install Size? (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brandybuck ( 704397 ) on Thursday August 26, 2004 @06:56PM (#10083676) Homepage Journal
      I've never checked what final size I get with an initial install, as I usually go install lot of stuff on top of it immediately afterwards. But I can give you some hints. I don't know if these will work for you are not, but give it a shot.

      Don't install the source code if you don't need it, or remove it afterwards if you do. Don't include Linux compatibility. Don't install games, profiled libraries, pre-catted man pages. The 3.x and 4.x compat libs are pretty small, but leave them out anyway if you don't need them.

      Don't install the X.org/XFree86 metapackage but use the individual component packages instead, so you won't be sucking down a lot of stuff you won't need, like docs and cyrillic fonts.
    • Are there any tricks to installing just the very basics?

      That depends upon how minimal an install you want to get. If you avoid installing man pages, cat pages, profiled libraries, compat libraries, and the src/ and ports/ trees, you'll get down to around 100MB. If you want to get the system smaller than that, you have two options: Perform surgery (ie, run around with rm -f) on a binary installation, or build with custom make flags (eg, NO_CVS, NO_CXX, NO_BIND, NO_FORTRAN ...) and install onto a clean fi
    • FreeBSD has a large base install so nobody needs to fuck with it. Fucking with it negates many of the advantages of using FreeBSD. There are very few cases where fucking with it is worth the effort. In the vast majority of cases where something smaller is needed, something like Slackware is appropriate. In fact, Slackware has zipslack, a distribution optimized for what you're trying to do. Why ignore a ready made solution?

      Learning the FreeBSD way includes just installing more than you need and forgetting a
    • You'll find some tips on a small install of FreeBSD here [neon1.net] (and something packaged here [m0n0.ch]). It's mostly aimed at embedded router-type systems, so as-is it would probably suit your gateway/dns/web box quite well. You should be able to easily fit that into a 16mb flashcard, the smaller systems would have it running in 5-6. Expect to have more work to do for a desktop system.

      You might also find it interesting to read about other efforts for making small systems on other OS, amongst others flashboot, flashdist, M

  • Hmm, looks like I'll have to skip beta 1 for my smp machine.

    Built and installed it earlier this week, and it crashes under heavy load.

    The problem is documented and should be fixed in the next beta, so guess I'll have to wait for a bit there.

    Just thought I should post this in case others want to try.. be sure to build yourself a non-smp kernel just in case..

    Except for this specific issue, it seems to work quite nicely.

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