FreeBSD 8.4 Released 80
kthreadd writes "The FreeBSD project has released version 8.4 of the free operating system with the same name. Highlights of this version include GNOME 2.32.1, KDE 4.10.1. In this release, focus has been put on improving stability and storage capability. The ZFS filesystem has been updated to support feature flags for ZFS pools, asynchronous destruction of ZFS datasets, LZ4 compression and ZIO NOP-write optimization. Also, support has been added for all shipping LSI storage controllers."
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No, me!
More seriously, as a ZFS user (first on Solaris, now on Linux), I'm happy that ZFS outgrew Oracle and lives on as a community opensource project. I greatly prefer it to btrfs, if only on a management level. And ironically, ZFS is now completely free of Oracle influence, while btrfs isn't.
only recommended if you need to stay on 8.x (Score:5, Informative)
Most desktop users won't want to install this release. FreeBSD 9.1 was released in December 2012, and is the most recent stable release. This 8.4 release is a point release in the still-maintained 8.x series, intended for people currently running 8.3 who for one reason or another don't wish to upgrade to 9.x yet, but who do want an incremental upgrade.
Re:only recommended if you need to stay on 8.x (Score:4, Interesting)
Except 8.4 has:
Better hyperthreading support than 9.1
Newer ZFS features than 9.1
Better snd_uaudio and snd_hda audio drivers than 9.1
These things were MFC'd to 8-STABLE and 9-STABLE after 9.1-RELEASE, so 8.4 is really a better release an some aspects than 9.1 is.
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so basically you are saying I need to do a build world after I drop 9.1 on the new pc tomorrow, thanks.
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Except 8.4 has:
Better hyperthreading support than 9.1 Newer ZFS features than 9.1 Better snd_uaudio and snd_hda audio drivers than 9.1
These things were MFC'd to 8-STABLE and 9-STABLE after 9.1-RELEASE, so 8.4 is really a better release an some aspects than 9.1 is.
And an update to the 9.x branch bring up all those features will make 8.4 a wash for 9.x users. It's great news for 8.x branch users.
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I love the legacy support even for my home machine. I set up my server 2 years ago with the 8.x series, and their continued support makes it easier to maintain than if I had to upgrade to 9.x. For a new build, I'd definitely go with the 9.x series.
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Most desktop users won't want to install this release.
How many people run FreeBSD on their desktop? (No, I'm not counting OSX.) The big selling point of FreeBSD is its robust support for ZFS, which makes it great for a file storage server. But it's an extremely marginal and weird choice for a desktop environment.
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Both Linux and FreeBSD allow building exactly what you want from source if you want to. It's not quite right to say one gives more control over what goes into the system. FreeBSD has a different set of trade-offs in how things are packaged, and their default choices and packaging distribution choices are nice for some purposes. But ultimately there's nothing you can match in multiple Linux distributions if you feel like it. There's always Linux from Scratch if you're hardcore about controlling what goes
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The difference between Linux and *BSD has never been wider. I love BSD because of how /etc is configured. Linux made a mess of things and with massive scripts and subdirectories. Things have changed so much since the 2.0 kernel days its almost an entirely new OS.
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"How many people run FreeBSD on their desktop?"
No one really knows for sure. I count as 1.
If (and only if) your hardware can run it, you're better off running a FreeBSD desktop than Linux. If your hardware is incompatible with FreeBSD, then run Linux. If the hardware won't run Linux, then either run Windows or buy new hardware. (Don't run Windows). As long as you're buying new hardware make sure you can run FreeBSD on it.
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Call me crazy, dumb, or just stuck with the Linux way, but I think I'd have to re-learn a decent amount to be able to successfully run and maintain FreeBSD on my desktop. Sure, I learned many of the UNIX basics of the command line before switching from Windows, but I think there are a lot of things that would seriously stump me. For example, things like "mount -o loop" to mount an image file as a loop device and "free -m" to get a quick reading of memory usage are much different, and not exactly easier.
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I tried and failed yet again to get a full KDE desktop up and running. The directions I used--a page on the FreeBSD site found through a web search--simply said "pkg_add -r kde4". Nope, nothing. Did it actually install X.org? Didn't seem so, so I logged back in as root and did that. Logged back out and in again as my user, and entered startx: returned endless "failed to load module" warnings, no drivers available, no screens found, unable to connect/connection refused, blah blah blah. Before following
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ah me?
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Why are they doing 8.x? (Score:2)
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They typically keep putting out point releases in a series for about five years after the initial .0 release, so at any given time the current and previous one or two series are supported. But they eventually get phased out, e.g. the last 7.x release was 7.4, which came out in early 2011 and stopped being security-managed in early 2013. Wikipedia has a timeline showing the release/support history [wikipedia.org].
One of the reasons for maintaining the legacy branches for a few years is that, within each series, FreeBSD comm
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FreeBSD will have official branches as long as it has volunteers. There are companies who have products heavily invested in 6.x and 7.x and the answer has always been something like "you're more than welcome to resurrect those branches, become the official maintainer, and continue to backport improvements but we don't have time or resources"
So if someone in the community steps up, we could see newer 6.x and 7.x releases as long as people are OK with the ports tree ignoring their existence. The modern ports
Legacy Release (Score:4, Informative)
Yabut... (Score:2)
It took thirty years, but they finally came out with a system twice as good as the old original BSD 4.2 (no open/free/net) that I used back in '83!
Desktop environments (Score:1)
If memory serves OpenBSD 5.3 was released with GNOME 3 and KDE 3.5. Here we see FreeBSD 8.4 released with GNOME 2 and KDE 4. Can anyone shed some light on why one BSD operating system has a modern KDE and outdated GNOME desktop while the other has the reverse?
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If memory serves OpenBSD 5.3 was released with GNOME 3 and KDE 3.5. Here we see FreeBSD 8.4 released with GNOME 2 and KDE 4. Can anyone shed some light on why one BSD operating system has a modern KDE and outdated GNOME desktop while the other has the reverse?
Because FreeBSD 8.4 is a historical maintenance release for the FreeBSD 8 series; FreeBSD Release is at 9.1-p3.
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openbsd is close to having kde 4.8
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that's amusing, to judge an OS mainly used for servers and appliances by what desktop version it has. If it's that important by all means choose your BSD by the desktop you like as long as the devices you want are supported. I myself prefer xfce4 which runs on them all
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could you please guys implement some anti exploitation technologies such as ASLR out of the box ? Or maybe dedicate a manpage explaining the dev team views over such matters.
I've been a long time user of FreeBSD and i can't help but to feel it keeps dragging behind in this field.
Or please someone explain me why i shouldn't be worrying about that.
Explanation: You're running BSD. What gains is ASLR supposed to provide you, the end user? Protecting you against a custom crafted process injection attack on your specific BSD distro written by someone who could have made more profit creating a bogus kickstarter campaign or by attempting to mine bitcoins?
(I kid... there's enough stuff running FreeBSD that no ASLR by default is a bit odd... but it sure makes debugging easier)
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ASLR [wikipedia.org] has been usefully complicating enough vulnerabilities to have proven it's worthwhile. At this point it's quite near being an industry standard for any system that follows good security practices. It's really not credible to reject it anymore as too complicated to risk bothering with. Yes, some of the issues can be addressed more deeply, too, but security should be layered and redundant.
A major cause for why there are less exploits on the *BSD kernels is that the rate of innovation is so low. New an
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If you read about ASLR and I recommend the OpenBSD paper on the topic (I think they implemented it 1st) the technique only makes it more difficult, it doesn't SOLVE the problem. If you benefit from ASLR, then you have a security problem already. I'm not sure I like the idea of losing entropy and slowing down malloc for something that does little to stop attacks from rogue processes (which can be compromised by other methods.)
Sure, I might prefer you DoS some process by crashing it repeatedly instead of tak
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Seems a stupid reason, because it takes all of 5 minutes to "fix."
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The ports tree has Bash 4.2.45, i'm not sure how up-to-date this is compared to linux.
As for a list of shells, the Ports tree reports 49 different shells, although some of them are just tools: http://www.freebsd.org/ports/shells.html [freebsd.org]
As for your question, FreeBSD does has KSH and ZSH.
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As an addition to my previous comment. Upon further investigation (by which I mean I discovered bash --version), I found that the version of Bash in the ports tree is indeed a GPL V3 version of Bash. I assume this means that whilst the FreeBSD project can not use any GPL V3 code in the operating system itself (I believe by FreeBSD 10 they want to have removed all GPL code full stop), there is no restriction on the licencing used by software in the ports tree (within reason).
Also, I quickly checked my Debian
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That is correct. They don't want GPLv3 in the operating system, but ports is OK. FreeBSD is very different from many Linux distributions in the sense that the operating system and most third party software is managed separate from each other. In Linux you often have a single package manager that handles both the operating system and all your software, with no clear distinction between them. In FreeBSD these are completely separate.
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I have not checked lately, but it used to be the case that a lot of things broke if you changed the root shell. Maybe they have fixed that.
I think the "fix" for that is toor. You can change its shell to whatever you like and use it instead of root. Although I've never tried it; I just have an alias that calls sudo -i exec zsh -l, which seems to work great.
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I don't believe you've checked... EVER. There's nothing TO break by changing the root user's login shell.
All the services that start up (eg. crond) are completely ignorant of what root's shell is set to. Services don't go through the process of logging-in as root and then spawning processes... They use the setting and environment they inherited from the rc* scripts, from start-up, while the syst
Re:tcsh (Score:5, Funny)
There's just nothing more frustrating then tcsh.
You have clearly never been forced to use Lotus Notes.
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I'm fucked. I use tcsh on my *nix boxes and now my employer is moving to Lotus Notes and I have to move all the Exchange shit over to Domino and join it to the French company that bought us.
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I'm fucked. I use tcsh on my *nix boxes and now my employer is moving to Lotus Notes and I have to move all the Exchange shit over to Domino and join it to the French company that bought us.
I am told by those who know more than me that Domino is actually pretty good, it's the client that sucks dead dingo kidneys. However, the Exchange to Domino migration has been known to trigger a wide variety of psychological and medical disorders.
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Huh. I change all my shells to tcsh. I set up my configuration the way I like it in 1996 or so, so it's the path of least resistance for me.
Should a *BSD newbie install this at home? (Score:3)
Myself am a windows user with a basic++ linux knowledge: I know how to install and update a distro(I prefer debian based but right now am wanting to test Fedora 18), compile some packages from source, has poked some kernel compilin', made some kde translation on the past, reported some bugs on FOSS software, etc. Now I have my Dell laptop with Windows 7 and I'm planning to back it up and format it and I'm thinking to put it up Fedora 18, but the BSD world has intrigue me and I've made some test on virtual machines.
BTW I'm primarly a Java developer how some times made some tiny personal project on my laptop and who enjoys a good Quake 3 match(for remembering my old days on the College fragging like there were no tomorrow) but who actually prefer to enjoy the time with my wife and the kids.
Could a user like me install some BSD distro and used it regularly to this basic things I've listed? if so, which BSD do you suggest?, bonus points if lastest KDE's it's available
Thanks for your suggestions!
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No, your wife deserves better, check out Linux Mint instead, the 13 edition with mate esp. Everything works out of the box, and it's supported to 2017.
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I'd go for 9.1 though - the 8.* series is basicly bug fixes for older applications.