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BSD Operating Systems

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 available 100

Posted by CmdrTaco from the stuff-to-play-with dept.
Nirbo writes "One week after FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1, FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2, is now available to those wishing to update to the most current FreeBSD on the 5.x branch. It's available from the Main FTP servers, and probably a few more places by this point. BETA-3 is due out September 3rd, but for those who don't want to go a single day without updating, you can find snapshots (and the ISO images) here."
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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 available More

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 available

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  • *BSD will live forever! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Nirbo ( 781868 ) <nirbokirbinov@gmail.com> on Sunday August 29, 2004 @12:33PM (#10103136) Homepage
    Just because the *BSD's explosive growth is minscule compared to Linux's explosive growth, that hardly means it's dying...

    For every 10 Linux users, every 1 has enough sense to fall through the cracks in the Linux Kernel and land in BSD-country (See, we can troll too :D)

    Rather, the boom of Linux in recent history has sparked a lot of BSD numebrs to jump too :D... now if only we could get off such dependancies as Linux Compatibility for out Flash plugins, we'd be set as both a Linux-ally, and a Linux competitor...

    With 2.5 Million active sites according to Netcraft (Who also run BSD... coincidence? Not really.), *BSD is hardly dead... just too busy disputing the death rumours to really make a show of it's vast and productive life :D

  • Definately a beta (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just like 5.3 BETA1, BETA2 does not detect my network card automatically, and nothing I do makes any difference (it's always been found by every Linux distribution and all other BSDs, including all previous releases of FreeBSD since 4.7).

    I can only hope that someone fixes this before it's released, because I've long been waiting to try a truely modern version of FreeBSD (with KSE, ULE and now X.org all as defaults).

    I guess it makes little difference in the long run, as I've mostly switched over to the (ad

    • Re:Definately a beta (Score:2, Insightful)

      by BSDimwit ( 583028 )
      Guess I don't understand why you think that your NIC being detected is the the end all be all for an OS. If you have been around a the BSD circles for a while you should know that it does not support as much hardware as Linux. However, what it does support is usually supported quite well. Instead of complaining about it, go to the store and buy one it does support, it's not like they are expensive...at the very least, see what you can do to get support for the NIC you are talking about. Open Source oper
    • Just like 5.3 BETA1, BETA2 does not detect my network card automatically, and nothing I do makes any difference (it's always been found by every Linux distribution and all other BSDs, including all previous releases of FreeBSD since 4.7).

      Similar problem with my testing of 5.3 BETA1 : A wireless NIC that worked in current (when I tried it earlier this spring) is now not detected. Hope that is fixed with BETA2.

    • Have you posted a bug report with your NIC, etc? It's unlikely to be fixed unless they know about it.

      Regressions happen regrettably, and no one has a large enough range of hardwre available to do all the testing themselves.

    • Re:Definately a beta (Score:2, Informative)

      by MavEtJu ( 241979 )
      Just like 5.3 BETA1, BETA2 does not detect my network card automatically.

      You won't get much help if you don't give a little bit more information like which brand and which type.

      because I've long been waiting to try a truely modern version of FreeBSD

      If so, you would have known that you always had the possibility of running 5.2.1 and to keep current with the latests patches. Cvsup is your friend.

      by Anonymous Coward

      That's what I thought.
      • Forget it. This guy posts the same rant on every forum, but never provides the information necessary to actually help someone solve his problem. This is a troll.
    • Hmm, it would be interesting to know what network card you are having trouble with. This quite sounds like a bug to me.

      With regards to your comments about FreeBSD 5.x and Dragonfly, I'd like to mention a few things..

      - It is very easy to have a high speed of development in a new project. People are focussed on the project goals and there is little 'distraction' in the form of people actually using the project. It is about as difficult to keep an old project making progress because of the opposite condition

  • Fast... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by JamesTRexx ( 675890 ) on Sunday August 29, 2004 @12:53PM (#10103265) Journal
    I'm quite impressed how quickly the beta's follow eachother. Even if changes between 5.2 and 5.3 aren't major. (haven't read the changelog though)
    It makes me wonder why it takes so much longer for Microsoft with all its resources to go from one beta to the next, even with all the software that has to be tested.

    • Re:Fast... (Score:3, Insightful)

      by x3ro ( 628101 )

      It makes me wonder why it takes so much longer for Microsoft with all its resources to go from one beta to the next, even with all the software that has to be tested.

      I assume you're referring to beta versions of Windows? If so, remember that Windows is a kernel, window manager, desktop environment, set of APIs, blah blah blah, all in one. Imagine trying to change versions of not just FreeBSD itself, but also X.org, KDE/Gnome, and probably quite a few apps that aren't part of the OS but come bundled with i

      • Exactly what I was thinking of, if I think of all the components together as X and KDE/Gnome, etc., it still feels like it's going much faster than the complete package of Windows. The FreeBSD itself is smaller, but even then, a few weeks seems very short.

  • Example "direct link" to 5.3-BETA2 .iso (Score:5, Informative)

    by Helevius ( 456392 ) on Sunday August 29, 2004 @12:54PM (#10103273) Homepage
    For the install CD, use:

    ftp://ftpX.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i3 86 /5.3/5.3-BETA2-i386-disc1.iso

    Replace "X" with 1 to 14 to use the US mirrors.

    For a "live CD" to test hardware compatibility, use disc2:

    ftp://ftpX.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i3 86 /5.3/5.3-BETA2-i386-disc2.iso

    Helevius

  • good sources for BSD newbs OTHER than Handbook? (Score:5, Informative)

    by discogravy ( 455376 ) on Sunday August 29, 2004 @10:13PM (#10106224) Homepage
    I'm looking for lots of short how-tos and best-practices stuff (security, notably,) and not just "do this to that file and killall -HUP the service to affect changes" -- I'd like some theory behind some of it so that I can understand the whys and hows a BSD system is different from a Linux or Solaris box.

    There's BSDWiki [tehinterweb.net], which I contribute to now and again, but it's still early in that project's development and although I know a lot of linux stuff, I am not nearly as conversant in the differences between FreeBSD and Linux, and quite frankly, the handbook makes my eyes gloss over.

    • The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD OS (Score:5, Informative)

      by ubiquitin ( 28396 ) * on Monday August 30, 2004 @12:35AM (#10106795) Homepage Journal
      www.mckusick.com/FreeBSDbook.html [mckusick.com]

      The book is divided into five parts, organized as follows:

      Part I, Overview

      Three introductory chapters provide the context for the complete operating system and for the rest of the book.

      History and Goals, sketches the historical development of the system, emphasizing the system's research orientation.

      Design Overview of FreeBSD, describes the services offered by the system, and outlines the internal organization of the kernel. It also discusses the design decisions that were made as the system was developed.

      Kernel Services, explains how system calls are done, and describes in detail several of the basic services of the kernel.

      Part II, Processes

      Process Management, lays the foundation for later chapters by describing the structure of a process, the algorithms used for scheduling the execution of the threads that make up a process, and the synchronization mechanisms used by the system to ensure consistent access to kernel-resident data structures.

      Memory Management, the virtual-memory-management system is discussed in detail.

      Part III, I/O System

      I/O System Overview, explains the system interface to I/O and describes the structure of the facilities that support this interface.

      Following this introduction are four chapters that give the details of the main parts of the I/O system.

      Devices, gives a description of the I/O architecture of the PC, describes how the I/O subsystem is managed, and how the kernel initially maps out and later manages the arrival and departure of connected devices.

      Local Filesystems, details the data structures and algorithms that implement filesystems as seen by application programs as well as how local filesystems are interfaced with the device interface described earlier.

      The Network Filesystem, explains the network filesystem from both the server and client perspectives.

      Terminal Handling, discusses support for character terminals, and provides a description of the pseudo-terminal device driver.

      Part IV, Interprocess Communication

      Interprocess Communication, describes the mechanism for providing communication between related or unrelated processes.

      Network Communication and Network Protocols, are closely related, as the facilities explained in the former are implemented by specific protocols, such as the TCP/IP protocol suite, explained in the latter.

      Part V, System Operation

      Startup and Shutdown, discusses system startup and shutdown and explains system initialization at the process level, from kernel initialization to user login.

    • Here's a list of links that you might find useful:

      Interesting read's for all newbies to FreeBSD:
      http://www.freebsd.org/projects/newbies. html

      Some tutorials, very short list but interesting none the less:
      http://freebsdaddicts.org/

      Some outdated but still usefull articles here:
      http://www.freebsddiary.org/

      Excellent information on setting up a new FreeBSD host
      http://users.rcn.com/rneswold/fbsd-init.html
  • When I first used mergemaster I thought it was the greatest thing since before that I had to tediously hand-pick through /usr/src/etc on OpenBSD and NetBSD in order to keep /etc up-to-date.

    But now the luster has worn off and I'm seeing things a bit differently especially after using Gentoo's etc-update.

    So what about mergemaster?

    1) split screen mode - mergemaster splits your screen into a left and right half with no scrolling. You get a whopping 40 columns of truncated file to look at on an 80 column dis
    • This isn't really the fault of mergemaster as much as it is simply sdiff, which mergemaster calls to handle the the merging.

      I do know what you mean. It doesn't work very well when you're in the regular 80x24 mode on your console, but I usually just remember that the left version if the old copy, and the new version is on the right.
      • mergemaster is the most painful part of a FreeBSD upgrade. 20 minutes of paging through files that I've never touched and probably never will (with a couple of minor exceptions).

        I see its purpose, but it could be made much less painful by putting most of those files into /usr/defaults/ and then letting the user put his overrides into a file of the same name in /etc/. Just as we do with rc.conf. Throw in a switch to mean "update everything in /etc/defaults/ without asking me" and everyone should be happy.
        • Agreed, in fact the FreeBSD team should declare that they own the contents of the /etc/defaults directory.. All files within should be chflags schg so that you would have to utterly clueless to actually edit any of them. Finally the default action of make installworld should be to completely wipe new files in /etc/defaults with new stuff from source.

          --ecks
    • When I first used mergemaster I thought it was the greatest thing since before that I had to tediously hand-pick through /usr/src/etc on OpenBSD and NetBSD in order to keep /etc up-to-date.

      OpenBSD has mergemaster in ports, while NetBSD uses etcupdate.

  • ... strike back again. Get a life idiots

  • intel e1000 (Score:1, Interesting)

    by preposterity ( 756361 )
    let's hope they've fixed those buffer problems with the intel e1000 network cards. i'm tired of having to restrict my card to 100mbps
  • I have never used a BSD before, but I think I'll give it a try when this release hits stable, as I've read a lot of good stuff about FreeBSD. What will be the first differences I will encounter? Is it easy to set up a fully functioning GNOME environment on FreeBSD?
    Thanks in advance.
    • The first thing you will notice is that the documentation is actually both useful and readable. The second thing you will notice is that the community has no patience with people who haven't bothered to read it. Make sure you at least skim the FreeBSD handbook before you ask for help.

      The first thing I noticed is that sound actually worked sensibly. FreeBSD includes sound mixing in the kernel, presenting multiple /dev/dsps which can each be accessed independently by an application (e.g. the GNOME and KDE

  • Hi! :o)

    I'm trying out the BETA on my k6-II... I always want to have a FreeBSD box lying around. I like FreeBSD and its philosophy, but i'm not completely ready to make the jump from linux yet- there are certain things i'm accustomed to in the linux OS that are different or less-implemented in Fbsd.

    but anyways....

    Granted *this* is a beta and is full of debugging code and watchdogs and such, but even on official releases i've noticed that FreeBSD tends to have a much larger memory footprint than linux.

    Of
    • Answers to your questions:

      (A) That beta is still running with our debugging code enabled, which will slow you down a lot. That's done intentionally, as it helps us catch bugs. This is why it is slow.

      (B) That on-disk footprint sounds like you've added ports or src; that will take a lot of space, but the space does not increase based on the number of apps installed.

      (C) When you are looking at how much memory is free, free memory is wasted memory. FreeBSD use as much of your memory as it can. "Free"

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