FreeBSD 4.X Lives On 72
An anonymous reader writes "In spite of FreeBSD 5.3 going to "production" status, FreeBSD is still planning at least one more full release of the mature production 4.x series. FreeBSD 4.11 Release Candidate 1 has been announced. The complete 4.11 release schedule is here. This is good news for those who can't or don't want to migrate to FreeBSD 5 yet."
Nice.. (Score:1)
Re:Here comes the "BSD is Dead" comments (Score:2, Funny)
just one extra letter & an inadvertant 'enter' will mess this preemptive comment up.
here come the pedants
Won't affect me much, but... (Score:3, Interesting)
Thanks for the nice work!
Re:Won't affect me much, but... (Score:2)
There is a nasty bug that caused the server I installed FreeBSD 5.3 on (which ran FreeBSD 4.x for years, and currently runs FreeBSD 4.10 problem-free) take 2-3 hours to reboot under FreeBSD 5.3. The part where it fails is after the system is already offline, so that's 2-3 hours of solid downtime until the OS gets around to figuring out it should continue rebooting.
I checked the mailing lists, and apparently that was an improvement, as it used to panic on reb
Re:Won't affect me much, but... (Score:1)
If you think DragonFly is going to be God's perfection on Earth, you're nuts.
Re:Won't affect me much, but... (Score:2)
There are several bugs with hardware and i/o issues. It works beautifully or very badly unlike 4.x
You may want to read the flame war with some benchmarks stressing the new threading model int he link above?
Not to sound trollish of course but I have been pretty disapointed in the direction of 5.x. NetBSD might be a better option in my opinion for servers.
I wonder how the DragonFLY project is going? I am not a kernel expert or qualified to
I hope Bluetooth gets backported (Score:2)
Last time I tried I could either have WiFi in 4.x or Bluetooth in 5.x but never the twain.
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
Troll :-P (only joking)
Is there any reason not to "stay with" FreeBSD 4? If it's getting the job done, then security updates are all you really need. If it's not getting the job done, then you should be questioning why you were using it in the first place.
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd probably still be running it if it didn't find some way to make my Realtek 8139 unstable... everything else was 'good enough' to run as a gateway, because FreeBSD has brilliant secu
Re:Actually... (Score:3, Interesting)
My production stuff will remain on FBSD 4 until it gets to the point where a) I need new hardware for those particular machines, or b) I need to run new applications that refuse to work on 4.
New stuff going in is NetBSD, or Debian where NetBSD doesn't work (like on a machine of mine where 2.0 mysteriously crashes on heavy I/O....it's fine under Lin
Re:Actually... (Score:4, Interesting)
File systems, I wouldn't say FFS is so bad. It's very balanced; its performance is good enough in the real world, it takes very little processor and memory overhead (compared to the journalling file systems...), it survives even during sectors being mangled (ReiserFS dies because it has no superblock backups, and some others too). I wouldn't mind seeing a journalling FS in a BSD (well, there's LFS in NetBSD, which is log-structured and hence even more complete journalling), and in fact dillon has laid the foundations for such a system in DragonFly.
I think the perfect operating system in the world would be the cleanliness of NetBSD, the security of OpenBSD, the support of Linux, the extensive functionality of FreeBSD 5 (including its devfs, hot damn), the package management system of Gentoo Portage but with less kitschy colouring, and some really cool name nobody has yet thought of. The shortcomings of any given system are small (FreeBSD lacks portability and, in 5, cleanliness; NetBSD lacks corporate support and a responsive scheduler; Linux lacks cleanliness and security and a good network stack; DragonFly lacks support and portability) and would be easy enough to fix just by convincing enough people it's worth doing. Perfect systems are within our reach, but the universe won't let it happen.
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
LFS looks intriguing, and I think actually OSX uses LFS for its version of UFS. Still, it's not mainline for any of the BSD's. I've used XFS with Linux for awhile now, as well as with Irix, a
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
No, OS X's UFS isn't LFS-based, it's just regular boring old FFS.
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
D. J. Bernstein, is that you?
http://cr.yp.to/ [cr.yp.to]
Re:Actually... (Score:1)
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
Linux doesn't have that great of support, it has some companies with for-fee support, but it doesn't have the support of hardware manufacturers. I'd rather have Windows level of support, you know, where drivers are just there.
DragonFlyBSD actually has a company called FireFlyBSD that supports DragonFlyBSD commercially (which Matt Dillion is advisor to) and NetBSD has Wasabi.
I don't really see any ma
Re:Actually... (Score:1)
Rubbish. Linux & BSDs offer true plug and play, for the most part if a piece of hardware is supported its auto-detected during boot with no driver required.
An interesting case in point is Knoppix and Thinstation both of these distributions auto-detect really well and Thinsta
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
It's not like it's overly difficult to give a driver to more than one system, the makers just don't care about the other systems.
Re:Actually... (Score:1)
Well regardless of if it's "more secure" or not, I'd say it really doesn't need to be there, and bind doesn't need to be either. Taking perl out of the base install was a win/win situation for those who didn't want it and for those who do (no more ancient perl version to contend with). FreeBSD still compels you to install Perl, but
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
By the same token we could strip anything that less than 50% of the population uses, since the majority benefits. It's not that simple: the minority might just be more important - developer
Re:Actually... (Score:1)
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
I've got twenty or so FBSD boxes on the net at various locations. The one 5.3 box I have requires more attention than all the rest of the 4.9/4.10 systems out there. I love FreeBSD but I pronounce 5.x 'NOT DONE'.
Re:Actually... (Score:2)
Fsck it, SLASHDOT IS DEAD.
Re:Actually... (Score:1)
I got modded too tellign the truth about optimizing software for the Itanium or pointing out any weakness under Linux or Unix.
This is slashdot and my guess is a BSD elitest modded you down since this kind of story would attract them.
Re:*BSD is dying (Score:2, Troll)
One more crippling foot kicked your dumb ass because you never learned to shut up around people stronger than you. Coming on the heels of a recent peer survey which plainly states that you are going blind from beating off to your mother too much, this news serves to reinforce what we've known along.
You don't have to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict your middle mouse button's future. The printoff is on the wall: Your button is worn out from too much
This is not a troll (Score:2)
It's mostly true. Some things are a bit pessimal (I personally HAVE booted a non-SMP kernel on a hyperthreading machine) but everything about AMD64, network cards, and dubious quality is true. If FreeBSD 5 manages to clean up and escape from the tangled web of crap it's in, it will be great, but so far 5.3-STABLE hasn't made as much progress as you would expect from the long time it's been out. A similar thing is STILL h
Re:This is not a troll (Score:2)
Re:This is not a troll (Score:2)
Re:This is not a troll (Score:2)
I can't really say much for/against the rest of it, without quoting lots of sources even on Slash itself... poke around.
A clean design doesn't have to lag behind. How long has Linux 2.6 been out? Over a year. They still haven't made respectable progress in bringing these 'lagging ports' up to date, even though the source itself can be worked over in one sitting by someone who knows what to do. Either they don't care or, as I suggested, their hack
Niche, which isn't a bad thing (Score:1)
It's good to see that this release is coming to be, and that support for FreeBSD 4
Re:Niche, which isn't a bad thing (Score:2)
Procrastination (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Procrastination (Score:2)
Re:Procrastination (Score:2)
Re:Procrastination (Score:2)
Re:Procrastination (Score:1)
It saddens me that I'm going to have to do a fresh install for 5.x due to the need to increase the size of / (originally 30 MB on a 4 gig disk). I've tried a 5.3-RELEASE install with the same slice sizes, it was not happy. It does give me a reason to upgrade the dr
Re:Procrastination (Score:2)
I've had no problems with the upgrade procedure. I did however have problems with one of the machines (5.2) crashing when it ran daily and weekly periodics.
I had to remove the execute bit on two scripts, iirc.
It can be done, just read the docs and perform a backup just in case.
If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Won't use a credit card, won't accept a free offer to send you a copy, don't appear to have any local friends with a burner and a high-speed connection. Ye gods, man, what do you want -- a blind-folded magic privacy fairy to drop it off with a five dollar sign taped to it for your trouble?
I suggest looking at buying a copy of a FreeBSD book that includes a CD at a local boo
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
The books are all out of date. I want a current release , not one from 12 months or more back. Plus you only ever get the base OS with the books, not all the extra stuff. Yes I'm making it hard for myself , but with good reason.
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
You should get the complete CD disk 1 that you would from anywhere, CD 2 is a live CD so thats not as important.
out of date
Its called ports, and CVSup
Yes I'm making it hard for myself , but with good reason
Not unless your on the run from the law, in which case I don't think too many people would be quick to help you at all.
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
I mean, really, you've already said you don't have the bandwidth to download it in the first place. It follows, then, that you don't have the bandwidth to track -stable or -current and keep properly up to date either.
That's how FreeBSD works: you CVSup the current source of the operating system itself as well as the ports tree. While individual changes are small, there's a *lot* of "churn" in (for the example) the ports tree. If you're concerned about staying up to date, you
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:1)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:1)
That aside, they had some sort of cool looking new covers for their media - one was a chess knight and one was a firehydrant (have no clue what that represents), but now it looks like it's changed back to the more boring white cover with the daemon. Anyone know what that's about?
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:1)
I downloaded 5.1 when I was on a 56K modem - hardly major, and then cvsupped to 5.2, 5.2.1, and 5.3 all via modem, keeping all 900odd ports uptodate too.
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
Re:If only BSD was easier to get hold of (Score:2)
DragonFlyBSD (Score:2)