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Operating Systems Software Upgrades BSD

FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available 100

Posted by ScuttleMonkey from the put-the-daemon-back-in-the-box dept.
cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
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FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available More

FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available

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  • Wait, what? (Score:2, Funny)

    by Seumas ( 6865 )
    I thought BSD was dying? I've been on Slashdot for a decade and I precisely recall hearing that BSD was dying a few hundred thousand times.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by mdenham ( 747985 )
      It still is. In the same fashion any of the rest of us without a terminal illness are.

    • Re:Wait, what? (Score:5, Funny)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:38PM (#22104426) Homepage Journal
      You see, if it dies more than 32767 times, you get an overflow, the sign bit flips and it becomes alive again. This is the problem with using fixed-length integers. If computers were using variable-length precision, you wouldn't get this problem.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by LighterShadeOfBlack ( 1011407 )

      I thought BSD was dying?
      It is dying. Just like this is the 10th consecutive Year of Linux.
    • I have never really liked the name, it sound like a STD

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bcat24 ( 914105 )
      No, no, no! You see, in Korea only old people use BSD!

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by hey! ( 33014 )
      Well, the most likely explanation woudl seem to be that BSD has joined the ranks of undead operating systems.

      So while it cannot be said in strict truth to be "alive and kicking", it nonetheless is still "kicking", and will continue to do so until somebody can devise the operating system equivalent of a wooden stake through the heart.

      That'd be something involving unresolved intellectual property rights, I suppose, although there is little chance at this late date that might happen. If vampires could only be
    • Yeah BSD is dying just like $YEAR is the year of linux on the desktop
    • "I thought BSD was dying? I've been on Slashdot for a decade and I precisely recall hearing that BSD was dying a few hundred thousand times."

      And yes, it is.

      It's only it's diying *very* slow motion. Just like Sean Connery on The Untouchables don't you remember it? Ratatatatatatttt Weahuheawhagghhh!

  • Yes sirree... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by dosius ( 230542 ) <bridget@buric.co> on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:14PM (#22104216) Journal
    BSD is alive and well!

    -uso.
  • Thanks guys! I will be sticking this on my laptop!

    My desktop requires 7.0, though; I am currently running Beta 2, and I will binary upgrade when that is released. 6.3 does not support my SATA controller, and I want to mess around with ZFS as well.

    Keep up the good work!

  • Dedicated to Itojun (Score:5, Informative)

    by gertam ( 1019200 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:15PM (#22104222)
    The release is dedicated to Dr. Jun-ichiro Hagino, known throughout the Internet community as itojun. He did lots of important work on the IPv6 protocol through the KAME project, and made many other contributions to the Internet and BSD communities.

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      is he dead?

  • A very niche OS (Score:3, Insightful)

    by slashuzer ( 580287 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:15PM (#22104230) Homepage
    It is good to see FreeBSD keep on going, but I cannot help but feel that all BSDs, to some extent, have become a very niche, and bit of a dead-end OS. Today if someone wants to move away from windows, they can go to Linux (free) or Mac (not-free). Aside from server space, what does BSD bring to the average desktop user? Let's just say I want to move to a free OS, what exactly does FreeBSD offer that is not already available with any number of Linux distributions? And what purpose do two similar OS (Linux, BSD) serve when they pretty much appeal to the same segment of computer users. Truly, sometimes I wonder if it might not be better to have *one* OSS alternative to Windows instead of having the developer resources working on two, parallel, different-under-the-surface-but-similar-in-usage operating systems .

    • Re:A very niche OS (Score:5, Informative)

      by 0x000000 ( 841725 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:22PM (#22104296)
      FreeBSD brings a stable OS to the desktop user. Since both userland and kernel are in the same source tree, and are developed concurrently, any changes in the kernel will be immediately reflected in the userland utilities. What does this mean? Well, if I upgrade my kernel and my world, I will know that I always have a perfectly functioning system. It takes the guess work out of upgrades.

      Besides that? I find that it is more consistent. If you move from one Linux distribution to another, you need to go hunting for the configuration files, they are not in a set location as specified by man hier. I know that when I install something from the ports tree, the configuration files can always be found in /usr/local/etc/, which is a nice change from having to hunt in /var/www/httpd for Apache's configuration file and /opt/etc/ for the dhcp servers config file.
      • I tried freeBSD 6.(2?) about a month ago and found myself spending a lot of time getting the system configured (upgrading xorg was fun). I'm curious if once you get it initially set up does it become more easy to maintain? I enjoy using the *nix type of system but don't want to spend most of my time configuring stuff (I'm currently on Fedora 8). Maybe I'll give freeBSD a go again in the future if it's easy to maintain.
        • It is very much like Slackware or Arch. (Actually closer to Arch). You get a basic bare bones system, and Xorg is installed on top of that. I have never had any problems upgrading Xorg, even when it moved from /usr/X11R6 to /usr/local.

          Once you have it setup it's extremely easy to maintain. You still need to edit some configuration files here and there. If you don't want to do some very lightweight sysadmin duties, then it probably isn't for you. You may want to try PC-BSD or DesktopBSD instead.

          • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

            by dknj ( 441802 )
            FreeBSD is like solaris with better driver support and a robust third-party package library. If you know how to use it, its fucking solid. If you're new to the game, you will feel lost unless you pickup a good book

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by jonadab ( 583620 )
              Is there a specific book you would recommend? I've been using FreeBSD on my main workstation at home for a while (since a month or so after 6.0 was released IIRC), and while some things about it are comfortable, others still feel a bit alien. I'd be interested in wrapping my mind around FreeBSD's way of doing things a little better. (Just at a power-user level, not as a developer. I write bits of custom app-level code for this and that, mostly in Perl, but I'm not interested in being an OS developer.)

              If

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by dknj ( 441802 )
                FreeBSD Handbook [freebsd.org]
                The Complete FreeBSD [amazon.com]

                I used Linux back in the 90s, but it was such a toy OS it wasn't going to help my career at the time. FreeBSD, however, has been serving high profile sites such as ftp.cdrom.com from this time. This proves FreeBSD's maturity, unfortunately the lawsuit left a bad taste in everyone's mouth forever. If I had a choice between FreeBSD and Linux, i would go for FreeBSD (assuming hardware support and that there were no other versions of unix in the shop). Unfortunately, Free

                • Re: (Score:1)

                  by jonadab ( 583620 )
                  > I used Linux back in the 90s, but it was such a toy OS it wasn't going to help my career at the time.

                  I remember the first time I got a distro with the new kernel with the improved virtual memory system. (I want to say that was kernel 2.2 IIRC, but it could have been 2.0 or 2.4, I don't really remember for sure anymore.) Boy, was that a huge improvement. The vm handling in Linux now is better than what's in FreeBSD, but back in the bad old days, if you started running low on swap space, your system wo
          • Thanks for the tip, I may try one of those just to get my feet wet. Editing config files doesn't bother me, I do that anyways to customize how I want the system to run. It does sound like freeBSD does a good job of providing a upgrade path to the next version.

            I was using Ubuntu Dapper for the longest time but I found that the repositories didn't provide newer versions of certain software. Also since it was the long term support (LTS) version they didn't provide an upgrade path to the next one. It gets m
        • If you want a ready-to-run BSD-based OS, try DesktopBSD. :) Its GUI is just about on a level with Kubuntu; at least there's nothing I miss.
      • What you've just described is exactly what any modern distro worth its salt does.

        Any changes in kernel are immediately reflected in userland utilities -- check. Not "immediately" as in "the day they're released" -- more like, by the time they hit your distro's repository, they generally work together. Any "guesswork" at that point is a bug.

        Consistency is also a feature of the distribution, not the OS. Gentoo might have stuff in a different place than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu has everything in the same place as Ub
        • First let me echo the mantra that Linux and FreeBSD are not in a fight, we don't need to declare one or the other a winner. Having said that, let me turn around and now say that you yourself are practically presenting an argument for the (IMHO) superior consistency and sensibility of FreeBSD's configuration:

          I've never used a good distro that had Apache's configuration anywhere other than /etc/httpd or /etc/apache, or some variant thereof (like /etc/apache2)

          unless I installed a really strange [DHCP server]

          • All of your arguments are perfectly valid. The technical ones I can't confirm or deny, but I assume you're not making them up, so they're valid.

            But all of your remarks are still based on the assumption that FreeBSD is an OS -- an alternative to Linux. I see it as just another quirky L/Unix distro.

            That batteries do not come included doesn't exclude it from being a distro; Gentoo, for the longest time, came with a tarball. That's it. Ok, yes, there was a livecd, but you could use any livecd to install that ta

      • Re:A very niche OS (Score:5, Interesting)

        by geek ( 5680 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @10:36PM (#22104820)
        I used to be a diehard FreeBSD fan. Used it on all my servers and my desktop. I'd still use it before Linux on a server but on the desktop there just is no comparison to something like Ubuntu. The last time I installed FreeBSD on my laptop I felt I had gone back in time 10 years to 1998. Everything I wanted seemed to be a linux emulation too. That's just how I felt anyway. I love FreeBSD and always will, but they don't seem to have the focus on usability for the desktop that distros like Ubuntu have.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by setagllib ( 753300 )
          That's what PC-BSD is for. All of the FreeBSD 6 foundation you love, but with Ubuntu-like usability layered on top with minimal fuss. I have not tried it myself, but all reviews I've read are highly positive. And it's not just an Ubuntu clone either, with some innovation in integrating a new packaging system into the OS.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by geek ( 5680 )
            Thanks for the tip. I'm going to give it a shot and see how it goes. Much appreciated.
            • Go ahead and try PC-BSD; but like anything else in this game, it's not the only one in town. If you don't like it, you might also want to try DesktopBSD.

              PC-BSD has these nice ready-built binaries for installing, where DesktopBSD relies more directly on the ports (through a nice gui, with portsnap).

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by hdon ( 1104251 )

        Besides that? I find that it is more consistent. If you move from one Linux distribution to another, you need to go hunting for the configuration files, they are not in a set location as specified by man hier. I know that when I install something from the ports tree, the configuration files can always be found in /usr/local/etc/, which is a nice change from having to hunt in /var/www/httpd for Apache's configuration file and /opt/etc/ for the dhcp servers config file.

        Not to knock FreeBSD or any *BSD for that matter, but this is kind of a poor comparison. You've just attributed FreeBSD with advantages over, it seems, GNU/Linux, because different GNU/Linux distributions do things differently from one another, whereas FreeBSD doesn't suffer from this problem.

        Well, just how many different FreeBSD distributions are there?

      • "FreeBSD brings a stable OS to the desktop user. Since both userland and kernel are in the same source tree, and are developed concurrently, any changes in the kernel will be immediately reflected in the userland utilities"

        Is it either KDE or Gnome on the main tree nowadays (or Enligthment or fluxbox, for that matter). If not, your argument is absolutly moot for any desktop user, you see.

        And even then, since the window/desktop manager is all a desktop user is going/wanting to see, there's no real differenc
    • I don't consider your post to be flamebait... it seems like an honest question.

      Aside from server space, what does BSD bring to the average desktop user?

      Personally, I don't consider BSD to be a desktop OS, although I have known people to use it. What it is, though, is a OS that gives you consistency across flavours and distributions. You can go from one BSD box to another and feel confident you know where config files are kept and how the filesystem is laid out. With Linux, there's some guesswork involved, a
    • I prefer FreeBSD as my everyday computing environment, last time I loaded up Linux I was infuriated by the spotty driver support and performance issues. To be fair, these days I've heard that most of those problems have been fixed, but I also prefer knowing that the code my computer is running doesn't contain hacks to make things work the way they should. I'm not sure that I'd be able to say that if I were running Linux.

      But beyond that there are viewpoints represented, is it more important to have support f
      • "The desktop support for at least FreeBSD, and I'm not familiar enough with the other ones to say"

        Your main point is fool then. You talk about consistency but then you say you talk about *exactly* FreeBSD and you can't talk about other flavours (because you *know* they are different enough not to be able to honestly talk about them). Well, then I have news for you: *any* Linux distribution is as consistent to itself from version to version as FreeBSD is to itself. And differences among Linux distribution
    • If you can call this [xkcd.com] a feature, then sure. (Be sure to read the alternate text, too.)

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by larry bagina ( 561269 )

      1) *BSD isn't encumbered by politics (or at leat the same set of politics). ZFS will be a part of FreeBSD while goldilocks and the 3 hippies argue over whether it's too FREE or not FREE enough.

      2) They don't appeal to the same segment of computer users. "Linux is for people that hate windows. BSD is for people that love UNIX". If you look at the commandline utilites, BSD distros maintain them, they're consistent, and the man pages are up to date. Linux distros are a hodgepodge from various sources.

      • ZFS ? I don't think it's stable on FreeBSD yet. It's just crashing and locking hard.

        Will it be stable by the time the hippies end arguing ?

        At which point everybody will realize ZFS will NEVER live up to the hype, and find something better to waste one's time with ;-)

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by RT Alec ( 608475 )

          I have been using FreeBSD 7 (started with the betas, now at RC1, using cvsup), with my entire music and photo collection on a set of drives mirrored with ZFS. I had to tweak samba slightly, but otherwise it has been smooth sailing. My server has less than the recommended ram for ZFS, but the box has been working just fine for months.

          I have 4 workstations (WinXP, Win2000, Mac, Ubuntu) simultaneously connected, and I can make snapshots of the live file systems while in use (>1 second for 100GB). I can al

      • 1) You mean lawyers (or hippie-lawyers). The FREE vs. Absolutely FREE argument has been done to death, please don't try to troll people into a useless argument.

        2) I can't remember the last time I was at .. well, ANY box (Windows, Linux, *nix, OSX) and NOT had access to the greatness of our friend Google - chances are, if I don't know a command, I'll just Google it, and in the process learn more than any man page (which are sometimes clear as mud anyway) can tell me. Besides, have there really been any hug

    • Re:A very niche OS (Score:5, Funny)

      by jcgf ( 688310 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @10:42PM (#22104860)

      FreeBSD has the advantage of not being for bitches. [linuxisforbitches.com]

      That's the main reason I use it ;)

    • Why is there more than one OSS alternative to Windows? Probably for the same reason that we don't all drive Camry's. Choice is good, and some of us like to drive something cooler.

      More seriously, the BSD's have more users today than Linux did 8 years ago: would it have been reasonable to say that Linux was a dead-end OS in 2000? Of course not :)

  • Looking forward to 7.0 (Score:5, Informative)

    by 0x000000 ( 841725 ) on Friday January 18, 2008 @09:17PM (#22104254)
    I am personally looking forward to 7.0 as it will bring many speed improvements and enhancements. There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.

    FreeBSD 6.3 for me and my servers will be the last update to the series before switching over to the new hopefully soon to be released 7.0. My suggestion for anyone planning on trying FreeBSD out after having heard about this new release, grab whatever the latest RC disc is of 7.0 and play with that. There is practically no difference between the two, when it comes to userland and will make it easier to stay up to date by already being being on the right branch.

    I definitely need to check out freebsd-update. See if it can be used in our systems to keep them up to date, with less down time than using the rebuild world and kernel steps that we take currently.

    • Re:Looking forward to 7.0 (Score:5, Informative)

      by kace ( 557434 ) on Saturday January 19, 2008 @01:02AM (#22105738) Homepage
      There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.

      See these slides [freebsd.org] by Kris Kennaway for more details on that.

      • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        Wow, they're finally back and beating the crap out of Linux again. That's awesome!

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by baadger ( 764884 )
          While the results are great, and I love FreeBSD, it is important to put these results into perspective.

          If you look on pages 17 and 18 you can see Linux 2.6.22 compared very well to FreeBSD 7.0 on the PostgreSQL and MySQL transaction tests. In fact it says "2.6.22 is still 15% slower than FreeBSD 7.0".

          Personally I would like to see the results against 2.6.24 when it ships, now the new CFS scheduler has had a tiny bit more development.
    • I fear however that most of the apps like those in the LAMP stack are being optimized for Linux. The threading situation on BSD used to be a nightmare. I agree 7.0 looks awesome. I'm amazed and grateful for all the developers that kept hope alive. I'll find a use for it somewhere.
    • I'm using 7.0RC1 on my notebook. It's perfectly stable and works quite well.
  • So I take it that 2008 will be the Year of the BSD Desktop?

    • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

      by kace ( 557434 )
      So I take it that 2008 will be the Year of the BSD Desktop?

      I'm thinking yes and hell yes. PC-BSD is going to be carried in Fry's and Microcenter (for starters).

      And, whenever one is choosing an OS, even for the desktop, you've got consider what sort [pcbsdbabe.com] of crowd [pcbsdgirl.com] you'll be getting mixed up with.

      "Unleash your desktop with PC-BSD! [spreadbsd.org]"
  • If BSD is better engineered than Linux because it comes from a single consistent source, I guess Windows is better than either because they don't risk bad code leaking in from the outside. BS- use the code you want to use, and don't whine when the systems you have taken responsibility for fail.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by RLiegh ( 247921 )
      No...BSD is better engineered because it's .... (wait for it) .... engineered . Linux is just a kernel with a bunch of separately developed utilities strung together -no real coordination, no real direction.

      • Linux is just a kernel with a bunch of separately developed utilities strung together

        Welcome to open source. If you don't like having code from a lot of different places put together to give you the maximum possible feature set, my advice would be to just turn around now, because *no* open source project, BSD included, can provide all the functionality you are going to need by itself. To put it another way, used X lately? Then cut the crap about only using the best engineered, in-house code.

        • Re:better engineered? (Score:4, Informative)

          by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Saturday January 19, 2008 @01:55PM (#22110740) Journal
          You misunderstand engineering. Here's an example. How do you get the CPU speed from the kernel? In all of the BSD family there is a single sysctl that you call and it gives you the answer, irrespective of the architecture. On Linux, the answer is in /proc/cpuinfo. This is a plain-text file, so you need to read it and parse it. It gets better though; the format of this file is different on different architectures; write code to parse it on x86, and it won't work on PowerPC. The main job of the kernel is to present programmers with an abstraction so that they don't have to know about the underlying architecture, and Linux fails miserably at this.
          • My point is that well-engineered code can come from multiple sources as easily as one. The existence of such quirks (I admit I hadn't dealt with that, and that it is annoying- perhaps you could work up a patch for it?) in Linux (or BSD) does not prove either of our points.

            • The existence of such quirks (I admit I hadn't dealt with that, and that it is annoying- perhaps you could work up a patch for it?) in Linux (or BSD) does not prove either of our points.

              Working on a patch is impossible due to the development philosophy of Linux. In *BSD, there is one codebase. If you add a feature, it must be tested on all Teir-1 platforms and it must define an interface that is accessible on all others and any architecture-neutral code must be factored out and put where it can be shared by all of the others. In Linux, everyone maintains their own fork, and things are moved between them in a very haphazard way. Features in the PowerPC or SPARC or x86 tree might never

              • Alright, that's just BS. If you seriously think that it is impossible to patch the kernel to deal with bugs, then you just don't know what the hell you're talking about.
                • You can patch bugs, but you can't patch bad engineering. If you apply a patch which fixes this specific example - the different, incompatible, syntax of /proc/cpuinfo between platforms - then it won't fix the underlying cause, and the next time someone adds something to /proc/cpuinfo they will do it in the same haphazard fashion and you will be right back where you started.
                  • You'll forgive me if I find the idea that fixing mistakes inevitably leads to mistakes quite hard to swallow. If it bothers you, fix it; if you're resigned to accepting it as it is, then don't complain- but you're foregoing the biggest benefit of open source.
                    • You are missing the point. You can fix specific instances of a mistake trivially with open source. Hell, I could write you a patch for the PowerPC Linux kernel that would make the format of /proc/cpu compatible with the x86 version in about half an hour. Fixing this would not cause more mistakes, but it would also not fix the root cause of the original problem, which is the lack of overall design and direction in the Linux kernel.

                      The fix for this problem would be a better set of rules for inclusion of

                    • Maintain any kernel you want; that's your option. But if you have no desire to participate in the development process, then I'm just not going to take your point of view on how it should work very seriously. Demonstrate that you have an interest in fixing problems, then start telling others how they should do it- not the other way around.
  • This isn't a troll, it's an actual real question.

    I've been using FreeBSD since 3-point-*mumble*. I'm running 6-STABLE on my home server, but since about 5-point-something (maybe zero) I've noticed an irritating trend in the install process... The packages seem to be placed on the cds... oddly. When I try to install the OS, I get a message that bash3 requires some library on disc 2 so switch discs... then chugs along until something on disc 2 requires a package on disc 1... Back and forth half a dozen times
    • I would advise you to do a minimal install of the OS, forget about the optional CDs and install everything from ports or packages.
      • I thought about that. The only problem there is that building all the needed stuff from ports adds a significant amount of time overhead to provisioning a new server, which is already a little high with the need to make buildworld to -STABLE.

        I personally think it's worth it, but selling it to the boss is another matter...

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by neafevoc ( 93684 )

          I thought about that. The only problem there is that building all the needed stuff from ports adds a significant amount of time overhead to provisioning a new server, which is already a little high with the need to make buildworld to -STABLE.

          I personally think it's worth it, but selling it to the boss is another matter...

          You don't need to install everything from ports. You can also install them from packages by doing

          pkg_add -r bash

          If anything, check http://www.freshports.org/ [freshports.org] for what you want installed and it'll show you how to add it as a package (or install as a port).

          I usually just do a base install from the first CD and install from ports or packages. Shameless plug: http://notes.twinwork.net/freebsd/ [twinwork.net] It hasn't been updated since 6.1, but it still works.

    • 1) Use a bootonly install disc and download the packages from ports or simply stick your necessary packages onto a CD/DVD and have sysinstall point to that medium.
      2) Take the two iso images and create a DVD image. http://www.pa.msu.edu/~tigner/bsddvd.html [msu.edu]

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