New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD 149
tearmeapart writes "The teams at FreeBSD have reached another great achievement with FreeBSD 9.1, with improvements to the already fantastic zfs features, more VM improvements (helping bringing FreeBSD to the next generation of VMs), and improvements in speed to many parts of the network system. Support FreeBSD via the FreeBSD mall or download/upgrade FreeBSD from a mirror. Unfortunately, the torrent server is still down due to the previous security incident."
And new submitter northar writes "The other day the NetBSD project released their first update to the 6.x series, 6.0.1. They also (rather discreetly) announced a fund drive targeting 60.000 USD before the end of 2012 in the release notes. They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."
60 dollars? (Score:5, Funny)
Now that is cost efficiency!
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What is it with programmers and measuring money to more than two decimal places?
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Copper wire was invented by two Checkpoint* developers fighting over a penny.
The CEO of a company at which I worked, who had a Dutch last name (I don't know how many generations back his Dutch ancestors arrived in the US) told the same joke, but it was "two Dutchmen..." Googling also finds "Scotsmen" and "lawyers" used.
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What is it with programmers and measuring money to more than two decimal places?
FWIW there used to be a plastic coin called a mill worth 0.1 cent. You still see millage in taxes.
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Sixty thousand may be written as 60,000 or 60.000 depending on your locale. Some countries use ',' as a decimal seperator instead of the '.' you are no doubt used to.
You don't have to tell me it's stupid and confusing and the world should standardize. I totally agree.
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Is it too much to ask that when writing english people follow the conventions used in english rather than borrowing stuff from their own language that has a different meaning in english leaving us to guess whether they meant the meaning from their own language or the meaning from english? (yes in this case it was easy to guess)
Is it too much to ask that when someone is too clueless/lazy to do that the editors fix it?
I guess the answer here at /. is yes :(
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$60 dollars is a lot of money in netbsd land!
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It's a hardware drive. They want to buy an Arduino [high-end model] to port FreeBSD to it.
No need to hurry (Score:3)
"They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."
Well, since the date on the image is Dec 30, 2009, I don't think you need to be in any sort of hurry.
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You use the conventions of a host site. A US site might be exposed to an international audience but they remain guests. It is no different than coming to the US and opening a restaurant and not following US conventions on the menu pricing.
Nobody is stopping you from doing it. But if you do it, bitching about it is fair game.
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First the value was given in dollars. Second, he posted to a US website and should use the conventions of the host country, not those of his locale.
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Just to make sure I got it right, it is 0.6 Lakh right? Not 0,6 Lakh?
More on-topic, great work from the *BSD guy's! And on a less serious note; I hope that 2013 will finally be the year of the *BSD desktop!
Happy 2013 for all of you
Comment removed (Score:4, Funny)
hobby fox (Score:2)
I'd rather have a foxhole hobby than be foxy humble.
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I work at a multinational corporation with 30,000 employees worldwide.
Accessing netbsd.org [netbsd.org] from our corporate network gives permission denied
The explaination for the site access ban is netbsd=hobby site by the ranking of the net filtering service my company uses
Your net filtering service is broken. I suggest you complain to them.
Do you really need a net filtering service anyway?
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Your company has 30,000 employees, does netfiltering, and doesn't use Bluecoat? Didn't even know there was a competing product worth noting that someone would consider on a large installation.
Lots of good fixes (Score:3, Informative)
It should be an easy upgrade for anyone running 9.0, and it does add some neat stuff. These dot releases are usually logical improvements and fixes, but important new features do get introduced with regularity when they've been tested extensively in the the development branches.
9.1 is adding KMS for intel (Unless that was already MFC'd back to 9), I think the new code for LSI cards including IBM M1015, support for newer Ralink wireless cards, lots of bug fixes and improvements.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/relnotes.html
FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:5, Insightful)
I've got FreeBSD 9.1 running on my machine now and it is absolute Unix heaven.
The NVidia drivers work perfectly with my 580 card. The rest of my hardware was recognized and works properly.
All my gaming is done on my PS3 and Wii and a little bit on my Android devices. So my FreeBSD is primarily used for development and some webbrowsing. Working on a system that is stable and free from the crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros is wonderful. The only negative I've found so far is the desktop's ports aren't as fully setup as you get as with something like Ubunut or Mint since the major focus of most of the FreeBSD devs is on server use.
I would like to thank all the lame people who have so diligently been posting their lame 'is dying' posts. I would never have checked out BSD if it wasn't for them. And it looks like the latest attempt at BSD FUD about funding massively backfired and led to a huge surge in project donations.
I usually hate these type of cute little sayings but after having switched from Linux to FreeBSD it really rings true:
Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
BSD is for people who love Unix
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FreeBSD kernel: perhaps. It's userland, though... What I remember about IRIX was nicer to use than current BSD, and that was aeons ago. I have no need for BSD at the moment, but if I did, it'd be a toss-up between Debian/kFreeBSD and unstable hacks [zfsonlinux.org].
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Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:4, Insightful)
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Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, that is exactly the way to enjoy FreeBSD - use it for what it's good at. FreeBSD + nVidia is awesome. State of the art compilers, every port installs its development headers, knowing that _you_ are in complete control of the system instead of the other way around. Outstanding development platform. I love it!
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"crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros"
Speaking of FUD..
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You can (and, on a long-enough timeline, will) unwittingly destroy a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint system, leaving it unbootable, simply by selecting a wrong package in Synaptic. Package installer also enables and launches daemons without asking you, which is a huge security problem. That's never the case on any BSD's. The base system is kept separate, and screwing up with packages never screws up your whole system.
Linux distros also tend to be desktop-oriented and bloated. (For example, can you name one Linux
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Have already posted in this thread, so can't mod you up, but someone should. I hope you don't get hammered by the zealots, who mistake objective criticism for trolling.
To be fair, many of the problems stem from a desire to make Linux desktops with great functionality, and of course it's perfectly possible to make enterprise-quality stable and robust server and desktop platforms using Linux...
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:5, Informative)
I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.
I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.
The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.
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"A base system should not have somebody's favorite scripting language just because they couldn't write their components in C, like real system programmers should."
This is just an old school mentality and I say that as someone who hates the quick adoption of bloat used by today's programmers in their 40 layers of abstraction, object oriented code that by nature reduces your familiarity with the function of underlying components, and adoption of not reinvent to the wheel to the point where everyone assumes th
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Another way I look at it is the Linux community has this like of "evolutionary" feel to it instead of "engineer
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Done right in the sense that it is stable but quite frankly a Linux system is pretty rock solid as well. Systems suffer no bitrot, don't crash, don't need rebooted and are easily secured. I generally find that the increased development effort on Linux has resulted in serious speed improvements relative to BSD as well. The "features" missing in BSD land are now old tested technology. CLI utilities are missing basic functionality. Old vi vs vim? What possible justification can there be for this? It saves a fe
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Yes because perl is such hardcore bloat. I mean it's like 6mb on disk and about the same in ram but only if you use it... which you will be since perl is fast, easy to develop on, powerful, and used by everything and it's dog. FreeBSD may not require perl but you are going to need perl for something if you actually USE FreeBSD. Also, what does perl have to do with being desktop oriented? You use more perl in serverland where it is worth spending the time to craft up perl solutions.
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Yeah, this is why Linux users does not like BSD users, since you are purposefully lying about your "facts":
http://wiki.linux-nfs.org/wiki/index.php/Nfsv4_configuration#Common_NFS4_misunderstandings
I'm not going to bother responding to your other points, but if the BSD people cannot fathom why they are pushing large amounts of people from the FLOSS community away from them, then fuck'em. They're getting pushed further and further into the server room, and they seem pretty happy to gobble down on Apple cock.
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OS X is for people who love Unix.
FreeBSD is for people who love Unix but too cheap to get a Mac.
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:4, Informative)
You have never used FreeBSD or a traditional UNIX. I get it.
OS X is neat, but entirely 100% different. Please don't bring up the UNIX trademark.
I used OS X before FreeBSD (FreeBSD was not evening running on PowerPC at the time) and MacBSD before there was an OS X.
OS X is much more similar to NeXT/OpenStep than it is to FreeBSD.
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Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:4, Insightful)
Why would I pay effectively double for a Mac that:
1. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive with
2. Apple's crap OpenGL drivers
Having had a tablet now for the past year and finding I spend most of my casual computing done with it and all my development work on my FreeBSD system.
Buying a Mac would be a waste of money. The only reason I would ever get a Mac desktop would be if for some reason I needed to work on a Mac desktop application. That is highly unlikely to ever happen.
BSD is for people who hate Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
Judging by your comments I would say that BSD is for people who hate Linux. :(
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Not true. See quotes by BSD fans like me. We're not trashing Linux at all - BSD has its good and bad points, so do the various flavours of Linux. This used to be a place where people could come for objective discussion and advice, (sometimes still is) as well as a good chuckle now and then.
Only by admitting that issues exist can we fix them. This is supposed to open software, remember?
Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux (Score:5, Insightful)
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Anytime Linux comes up on the FreeBSD forums it turns into a huge flame fest.
Maybe that wouldn't happen if you didn't keep trolling there with hostile claims about how awful FreeBSD is, and how unpleasant its users are.
Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Has it ever occurred to you that despite having done some things wrong the Linux world has developed some very solid technology and BSD might, just might, benefit from pulling it's head out of the sand adopting some of them.
You can't have rational conversations with people who think the word "bloat" belongs in a discussion where the difference is like a meg. Those conversations made sense back in the 90's. People in BSD land still seem to think that the question of whether EMACS is bloated relative to VI is a legitimate discussion rather than a tongue in cheek reference to the old days. Hell last I checked BSD's still come with vi and not vim out of the box.
Is there any legitimate justification for the fact I have a more capable tar out of the box on a Linux system than BSD? Surely nobody can say bloat with a straight face. I would hope nobody is saying security we aren't all plagued with tar worms. And as for stability, I've never had an issue with a lack of stability in any version of tar. I've never known anyone who has. I've never HEARD of anyone who has. Not even a legend of a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.
The Linux world has it's problems and if you use the cutting edge stuff you will have some glitches here and there. But at least it is doing SOMETHING. Those glitches will be worked out. Some things will be discarded in time others will stabilize into solid technology. BSDland is doing a whole lot of nothing and calling it a feature and most of the software running on BSD is developed in projects that are cross platform because it is easy to be but those projects exist and thrive because they run on Linux not because of BSD.
BSD has some nice technology but the only reason it continues to exist and talented people waste effort developing that technology there instead of on Linux (where more people will benefit from it) is because some people who felt l33t running a hard to use Linux in the 90's hated Linux going mainstream and because nostalgic old UNIX admins still perpetrate the myth that it is more stable/secure/somehow betterer because much of it originates from the old UNIX(TM) code base. Of course, thanks to SCO we all know that any of that code that was worth having migrated into Linux a long long time ago.
It's a shame. If there wasn't so much resentment and hate there could be more collaboration between two communities that really should be staunch allies.
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I've just noticed that whenever someone asks if FreeBSD has a feature that is already in Linux or if someone asks how they can do action ABC on FreeBSD that they do on Linux, the result is typically a flame fest. People in the FreeBSD community often use their hatred of Linux to defend their own lack of progress.
I haven't really seen that on the mailing lists and in IRC. Maybe what you observe is a problem with the forum, specifically.
Which you comment, appropriately enough, demonstrates.
I think this statement of yours demonstrates that you're just looking for reasons to hate FreeBSD users.
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"But keeping Linux up to date and still functional for the two media PCs at home was becoming a pain. With FreeBSD it's still a pain, but with one exception the stupidity has been my own (not making sure that xbmc 12rc1 actually compiled in poudriere is theirs. But with ports in subversion and a directory specific log... that's been reverted)."
If you are compiling all your packages keeping anything up-to-date is going to be a PITA.
"And then there is firewall maintenance and even Rusty Russell agrees that PF
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Honest question from a long time Linux user - what does FreeBSD give me that CentOS wont?
Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven (Score:4, Informative)
There are many reasons!
Jails
ZFS
GEOM Framework
Ports
PF
Carp
Hast
The FreeBSD Handbook / Documentation with consistency
However FreeBSD doesn't excell for everything, for example Java support is far away from production ready. And another thing I ran into recently was that monitoring a lot of files for changes was slow/not scalable at all because kqueue uses file descriptors for monitoring changes in your filesystem. Linux, OS X or even Windows have scalable and working solutions for this.
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"Java is dead" - FreeBSD
Rightly so too. Utter rubbish.
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I'm sure this was tongue in cheek but Java is rubbish. Unfortunately it is very popular rubbish.
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Java support is decent in FreeBSD provided OpenJDK will work for you. The only thing I can think of that doesn't work right is the Netbeans profiler and that's mostly their fault.
As for the file descriptor issue, that's quite true. In fact, I started to write an article for BSD magazine on the subject in relation to making decent file system search tools. I never got around to finishing it. The interface is cleaner for the programmer in BSD, but it's not scalable. It's quite common to have search inde
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ZFS is very, very nice if you have lots of disks. PF and carp are nice but you will get later versions and better security on OpenBSD.
The documentation does seem more consistent than any I've seen with any linux distribution.
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pfsense is nicer to work with than iptables. This is why many enterprise firewall solutions use BSD as the base. That won't impact you much because if you have a firewall that needs many adjustments you will likely be using one of those enterprise solutions with it's dedicated ASIC chips for performance reasons and which underlying system is present won't impact you much.
The other thing is ZFS. ZFS is a pretty nice filesystem if you need a distributed FS. Most people using it, don't need it, but it is quite
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You're already at 5, so I can't mod you up, so will just say "well said Sir!"
(Yeah, i know, I'm well known here as a BSD fanboy...but there's a reason for it!)
And yes everyone, I have tried the others - latest attempt being to get Mint to run on an old Eee PC last night...
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Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
BSD is for people who love Unix
I hate Microsoft and love Unix. I use both.
But if linux had stable ZFS I'd likely not run FreeBSD.
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>Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
People like you are what's wrong with open source.
Well if you like security holes, malware, downtime, and getting your data leaked you will no doubt love Microsoft.
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BSD loses support from Open Source (Score:3, Informative)
I'm just reading an article on LWN.net
http://lwn.net/Articles/524606/
Where it's claimed that BSD is losing a lot of support due to Linux related tools and development processes only cares for Linux and not BSD.
So basicly because of GNOME adopting things like PulseAudio, systemd and so on makes this desktop to disappear from BSD one day because these underlaying technologies doesn't exist on their systems.
The BSD developers are certainly concerned about this issue.
Please read above article for further informations.
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You know, part of the problem is that they have a crappy package management infrastructure, something I really find puzzling. Ports just does not scale, and things like a WM environment (kde, or xfce) are just hard to get working.
For example, if you start from a bare install, and build & install xfce (which will take a while) you will be surprised to find
Re:BSD loses support from Open Source (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.
I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.
If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD [pcbsd.org]. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)
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The ports system is an absolute nightmare. Sure you've got things like portmaster and portupgrade (the latter is currently broken with no fix in sight). I spend far more time mangling ports than I do dealing with package management on any Debian based system. It took over forty seconds(!!) on an otherwise idle system (Ivy Bridge i5 w/ SSD) to list all the installed ports and their versions (pkg_version). Using the ports system is akin to pulling teeth as far as I can tell.
The problems with X, for me, ha
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It took over forty seconds(!!) on an otherwise idle system (Ivy Bridge i5 w/ SSD) to list all the installed ports and their versions (pkg_version).
Regarding your only specific problem mention . . .
Do people still use pkg_version? Are you aware portversion is faster, and has been for a long time -- and pkg_* tools are reaching EOL?
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I am aware that portversion (part of the portupgrade suite) is much faster. I was using it until portupgrade broke. I did just check and it appears as if portupgrade is suddenly working again. Definitely not predictable enough for me to want to keep using.
I am/was using portmaster because portupgrade is broken on my system (it chokes on the pciids package). Portmaster is fast(er), but is unbelievably verbose, and its default settings are frustrating. Portupgrade defaults to saving old libraries, saving
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- a *lot* of times a software gets a new version and the ports skip it. So you install mediawiki 1.18.1 and then update to 1.18.4. (just an example).
That's not the fault of the ports system. That's the fault of the maintainer of that specific port.
- patch backport: I really hate backporting of patches. so sometimes you have version 1.1 of a software and then you get version 1.1_1 which is actually almost 1.2. never liked it, I prefer the vanilla software.
That's kind of a strange gripe. Are you really complaining about how version numbers are represented?
- there *are* software conflicts. Try to install a couple of things that requires icu and keep them up to date. most likely you will not be able to update une of the packages 'cause it doesn't work with the old/new version of icu. Avahi still requires icu 3.8, guess what, it's not in the ports anymore.
It was stated that software conflicts are rare -- not that they never happen. They happen for every software management system, including those used by popular Linux distributions and what we might, with a laugh, call a software management system on MS Windows. Such is life.
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There is always the new package manager if you don't need any special options and are fine with binaries:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/pkgng [freebsd.org]
https://mebsd.com/make-build-your-freebsd-word/pkgng-first-look-at-freebsds-new-package-manager.html [mebsd.com]
It easily rivals apt-get but I still stick with the regular ports system because I need to compile several packages (other than the dependancies) myself for the different options not available with binaries and I've never found compiling from source anywhere near as simple on l
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Working Great (Score:5, Informative)
I've been using 9.1-RELEASE since SVN was tagged 2012-12-04 on both my home and work desktop. ZFS root is awesome, and userland is pretty much the latest bleeding edge upstream, I've had absolutely no issues running a full-fledged XFCE-4.10, Firefox ESR 10.x with Flash, 3D accel, everything desktop.
I've used freebsd-update to go from both 9.1-RC3 and 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE also switching to pkgng.
I'd recommend folks to look at the following guides if they want to use ZFS root or create a nice, full-featured desktop OS.
http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 [freebsd.org] (ZFS ROOT)
https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to [cooltrainer.org] (good desktop guide)
Great job BSD devs, keep it up.
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Zombie process?
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FreeBSD works similar to Linux in that regard. Nvidia's driver is available if you want it, but you don't have to use it and the OS certainly doesn't include it by default.
The main difference is that when Nvidia came to FreeBSD the FreeBSD developers (unlike the Linux kernel counterpart) appreciated that a big hardware vendor wanted to support their OS.
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After entering protected mode and going to _main with the far jump simply return EOL; or something similar. That's all there is for a new BSD release. Nothing else.
alternative interpretation:
Woohoo! FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE comes with support for new Intel HD graphics. Hot damn. I finally get to get rid of the non-deterministic, obese, constantly agonizing experience of dicking around with half-baked bullshit in the Linux world on this laptop.
I mean, really . . . who wouldn't want to get out from under the horrid experiences Lennart Poettering, the GNU Project, and Canonical have foisted onto the Linux world in recent years?
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Most recent trends? A million new devices a day running Linux.