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check out the handbook.. here's the LINK

There were a lot of problems in the early 5.x releases, which led to a lot of criticizm from everyone who was used to the rock solid 4.x versions. If you browse through the release engineering section on the FreeBSD website http://www.freebsd.org/releng/index.html, you will find some articles discussing changes to the release engineering process that occured in response to the problems experienced during 5.x.

Besides how difficult is this to find .. http://www.freebsd.org/java/. If you read closely, although the official release is at 1.3.1 , binaries for 1.5 are also available.

There is a native port of JDK 1.5.x. Even if it isn't listed as the current release, it still works very well.

http://www.freebsd.org/java/dists/15.html

http://www.freebsd.org/java/ !

There are several ports, one of them being native. Google! :o)

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/torrents/6.0-REL EASE/

i think someone fails the internet ;)

Anyone know if there's a torrent available?

Yes. The official release announcement (which for some reason wasn't linked in the story) has a link to the torrent files.

Anyone know if there's a torrent available?

Yes. The official release announcement (which for some reason wasn't linked in the story) has a link to the torrent files.

FreeBSD 6.0 was released on Nov. 1st, but there hasn't been much word of it. ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/IS O-IMAGES/6.0 Three big BSD releases in two days' time...I'm a happy man.

On the flip side, the old logo (though fun) was terribly amateurish, and impeded taking the OS seriously.

Actually, beastie is still the mascot, and this new thing is the logo.
From the competition home page:

Beastie will continue to represent the FreeBSD Project as our mascot. We won't kill Beastie. The closest logo-like thing that we have now is shown below, and we are looking for other options to be used like there. The new logo design may or may not include Beastie, or even a stylized representation. Again, Beastie is still alive!
(then it has http://www.freebsd.org/gifs/freebsd_1.gif beneath)

On the flip side, the old logo (though fun) was terribly amateurish, and impeded taking the OS seriously.

Actually, beastie is still the mascot, and this new thing is the logo.
From the competition home page:

Beastie will continue to represent the FreeBSD Project as our mascot. We won't kill Beastie. The closest logo-like thing that we have now is shown below, and we are looking for other options to be used like there. The new logo design may or may not include Beastie, or even a stylized representation. Again, Beastie is still alive!
(then it has http://www.freebsd.org/gifs/freebsd_1.gif beneath)

I certainly prefer this guy http://www.freebsd.org/layout/images/beastie.png

I was just going through the handbook myself. Just go to http://www.nl.freebsd.org/

See here!

http://logo-contest.freebsd.org/result/

BSD's are slick!

Your description of what you get to can be easily described as somewhere between rude and selfish. And despite your claim to be on the net since 1990 (whatever that means), your casually arrogant remarks indicate that it's unlikely you have participated in any meaningful discussion, or otherwise been subscribed to a mailing list (for example), where the content is more substantive than a typical IM conversation.

Top posting follows the natural flow of conversation. First, the question, then the answer. Rinse, cycle, repeat. Reading an answer without the necessary context of the preceding question is illogical at best. Top posting (and/or not trimming quoted text to the relevant bits) makes a mess of everything for everyone that is trying to follow the discussion in its entirety, or is reading it after the fact. The full text archive of the discussion (hopefully in logical form) remains for all to benefit from, irrespective of what any one individual's level of patience or interest is.

With respect to the OP's question, I believe the original quotation was excerpted from this page. The mailing list etiquette discussed on that page is hardly unique, and most certainly dates back well before 1990.

You'll note that this post (like all /. posts where the responder has taken the time to quote relevant text) are never top-posted. Contrast that, if you will, with the ms.public hierarchy which is littered with near unintelligible discussions from participants using a OE as their usenet/email client. The degree to which OE is borked and is non-standard has been discussed to death over the years, but the fact that the Microsoft folks invariably top-post while the rest of the world doesn't, speaks volumes, doncha think?

The new rc.d system is equally sysadmin-friendly as the SysV equivalent. FreeBSD adopted it as well.

For the record, the background fsck is mainly used to free resources that weren't cleanly deallocated before a crash. It doesn't actually repair the filesystem, per se.

Support for ext2 and ext3 (directly derived from Linux, that is) may have been made available by third parties, but they are not part of the FreeBSD kernel core.

Yes, ext2 is included with the kernel source. It's not linked into the kernel by default, but it is compiled as a module.

$ ls -l /boot/kernel/ext2*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 65894 Sep 29 14:08 /boot/kernel/ext2fs.ko

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Uh, check the attic. The src/lkm directory hasn't existed in about 6 years.

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

Here is what you're looking for:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/gnu/ fs/

Note however that ext2 isn't extremely well supported. It's good enough to occasionally read files off a linux partition, but has enough problems I wouldn't use it for anything important. The ext2 code plays some nasty tricks with the buffer cache that leads to being unable to flush all the dirty buffers on shutdown, so an fsck is always required unless you unmount it manually. It's been a known problem for a long time but nobody has bothered to fix it properly.

There is also some experimental read-only reiserfs code in the gnu directory too. Haven't played with it any yet.

Support for ext2 and ext3 (directly derived from Linux, that is) may have been made available by third parties, but they are not part of the FreeBSD kernel core.

Yes, ext2 is included with the kernel source. It's not linked into the kernel by default, but it is compiled as a module.

$ ls -l /boot/kernel/ext2*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 65894 Sep 29 14:08 /boot/kernel/ext2fs.ko

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Uh, check the attic. The src/lkm directory hasn't existed in about 6 years.

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

Here is what you're looking for:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/gnu/ fs/

Note however that ext2 isn't extremely well supported. It's good enough to occasionally read files off a linux partition, but has enough problems I wouldn't use it for anything important. The ext2 code plays some nasty tricks with the buffer cache that leads to being unable to flush all the dirty buffers on shutdown, so an fsck is always required unless you unmount it manually. It's been a known problem for a long time but nobody has bothered to fix it properly.

There is also some experimental read-only reiserfs code in the gnu directory too. Haven't played with it any yet.

Support for ext2 and ext3 (directly derived from Linux, that is) may have been made available by third parties, but they are not part of the FreeBSD kernel core.

Yes, ext2 is included with the kernel source. It's not linked into the kernel by default, but it is compiled as a module.

$ ls -l /boot/kernel/ext2*
-r-xr-xr-x 1 root wheel 65894 Sep 29 14:08 /boot/kernel/ext2fs.ko

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Uh, check the attic. The src/lkm directory hasn't existed in about 6 years.

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

Here is what you're looking for:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/gnu/ fs/

Note however that ext2 isn't extremely well supported. It's good enough to occasionally read files off a linux partition, but has enough problems I wouldn't use it for anything important. The ext2 code plays some nasty tricks with the buffer cache that leads to being unable to flush all the dirty buffers on shutdown, so an fsck is always required unless you unmount it manually. It's been a known problem for a long time but nobody has bothered to fix it properly.

There is also some experimental read-only reiserfs code in the gnu directory too. Haven't played with it any yet.

The degree of civilization in a society can be judged by entering its prisons.
-- Dostoyevski

So, it seem Fyodor was trying to get out of jail(2) ?

This is where you should take advantage of one of FreeBSD's greatest assets, it's documentation. The SMP Project has a lot of info...

http://www.freebsd.org/smp/

It would appear they have not, or if support is available they do not include it with the core FreeBSD code.

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

It would appear they have not, or if support is available they do not include it with the core FreeBSD code.

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

Support for ext2 and ext3 (directly derived from Linux, that is) may have been made available by third parties, but they are not part of the FreeBSD kernel core.

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

Support for ext2 and ext3 (directly derived from Linux, that is) may have been made available by third parties, but they are not part of the FreeBSD kernel core.

It's not in the kernel modules portion of the FreeBSD CVS repository:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/lkm/

Nor is such code with the other filesystem code:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/fs/

If you use Firefox, see View -> Text Size or View -> Page Style. There is always the possiblity to use multiple style sheets where the page doesn't have to do anything to switch them, the user does this in his browser.

If you use 1600x1200, the width is fixed to about 800 pixels. Well done. Perhaps they should've hired one that isn't stuck in 15" 800x600 stone age.

The most hilarious thing is this bug: http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-www/200 5-October/002938.html

I think the site is one half-assed wank.

Seriously, that was not a troll. I just read GNAA web site, just like I read Slashdot, for occasional laughs. I'm not a member of either sorry organization. Compare: FreeBSD vs. GNA ("a" elided to avoid lame censorship) . Stunningly similar layout now.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. I downloaded Fedora Core 4 awhile ago, but I haven't installed it yet. Any suggestions for a Linux Disto/ripping program? Or even FreeBSD...how difficult is that to install compared to a Linux distro? Where do I get it and what ripping software do you use?

It seems like Mandriva have put out a fine operating system, but as an admin, it sucks to not have any kind of documentation or bug support. For example, both Debian and FreeBSD have extensive documentation easily accessable from their web sites. Where's the equivelant for Mandriva? Same goes with bug reporting; I'm not going to track down the links, but it's pretty trivial to submit bug reports for any of Ubuntu, Debian, FreeBSD, even RedHat, but I looked all up and down Mandriva's site and didn't see any kind of bug tracking system, not even a mailto: field.

So, like I said, as an IT admin, I'm not going to support an OS that isn't going to support me.

from http://logo-contest.freebsd.org/

The result will be announced via announce@ mailing list and on this page (planned before the end of October).

Chill, coming soon.

Without the GPL, there probably would not be the free and open Linux we see today.

Right, nobody could possibly maintain a free and open source OS using anything but the GPL.

Odd, I believe X to be one of the greatest strength of Unix ; yes, its used in other OSes besides Linux - does the presence of X in Solaris, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Irix, and so on make them impossible to use? Millions of X users beg to differ.

To fix something, you need to quantify its brokenness first, something you have not done well at:

X is not supposed to look good, nor is it supposed to be ugly, or have any sort of 'look' at all. Perhaps you are thinking of window managers, desktop environments or similar. Many of which are reasonably attractive, caveat emptor.

Nor do I believe X is slow. What are you comparing it to? I get superior OpenGL performance under X in linux compared to the same hardware running windows with the equivalent version video drivers. X must be doing something right, but it could well be the linux kernel doing a lot better than the windows one at managing the hardware, admittedly.

Complaints about compiling code, fighting with drivers, software dependancies, and so on are not really weakness in X, merely a lack of experience in handling code. But not to worry, most *nix distributions are nice enough to ship binary builds of X that are both fast and include all the nice font rendering and antialiasing you might ever care for. Of course, you have the freedom to compile the lot by hand if you really want to, but it is by no means necessary. If your distribution of choice is not being cooperative, then investigate better alternatives.

Granted, nothing is ever 100% easy, but you sound like you are picking the hardest way forward and hence getting unneccessarily frustrated. If X was broken, then like everything else under linux ( driver support, schedulers, scalability, journaled filesystems etc all of which are better now than they have ever been and are still improving ), it _would_ be fixed.

freebsd is superior and every respect. http://www.freebsd.org/

1 Secure mode - the system immutable and system append-only flags may
not be turned off; disks for mounted file systems, /dev/mem,
/dev/kmem and /dev/io (if your platform has it) may not be opened
for writing; kernel modules (see kld(4)) may not be loaded or
unloaded.

Am I missing something here? All of these concepts are old news. Microsoft still makes these mistakes because it's *not a priority* for them. It doesn't seem that they actually use safe string handling techniques (despite having a technote on the subject), and their solution to problems is to rewrite the whole thing! Forget about incremental fixes when you throw the whole thing away.

Yes, modern browsers *should* be security-conscious. Microsoft has the responsibility to write secure code because we pay them to give us software that they claim is secure. Likewise, the Firefox team claims that Firefox is more secure than IE, which means that they need to back that claim up.

But that's beside the point: writing code that handles I/O appropriately is a basic requirement these days. When you're talking about networking, where nearly any person, anywhere on the network, can talk to your machine, you want to make damn sure that you've covered the basics: buffer overflows and privilege escalation.

zlib isn't open source in the traditional sense.

zlib is simply released with no strings attached whatsoever. only catch is that the author's not responsible for anything that happens with it.

Er, that is "open source in the traditional sense".

zlib is released more or less without any license at all.

That's obviously not true. Licenses aren't ethereal things that can sort-of-but-not-really exist. They are either there or they aren't. zlib certainly has a license, and you must abide by it if you want permission to copy it.

It's a few lines that make it VERY VERY CLEAR that the authors don't care what the hell you do with it as long as they're not implicated

In other words, it's fundamentally the same as the BSD license. For example, FreeBSD:

For the simply curious, the license can be summarized like this.

• Do not claim that you wrote this.
• Do not sue us if it breaks.

The idea that somehow the "right" or "traditional" form of open-source is the GPL is a myth propogated by some misinformed Slashdotters and bears no resemblance to the truth.

Couple this with the fact that 99% of all of the world's software is written for x86 and you have a very large inertia to overcome in order to change the ISA.

Really? Better tell the Debian guys then. They ship their distro for 10 platforms. Then there's the BSD's: NetBSD takes the cake with 49 platforms listed as stable. OpenBSD has 16 platforms and FreeBSD has 9 platforms.

I think you'll find that most software nowadays is written in a high-level language and not for a specific processor. If you have access to that source code and a compiler for your processor, then it doesn't really matter what it is. The big issue in porting is the operating system and GUI (and other) toolkits, not the CPU architecture.

Ugh. There's a lot to like about C#, but I would never call it beautiful. It's got more keywords than C++, it's chock full of silly features (did you know you can use a keyword as an identifier if you prefix it with @?), and, most egregiously, Microsoft commonly pollutes the language to make up for deficiencies in their toolset.

(Oh, and Spotlight is a lot deeper than just a nice interface on top of the existing search.)

You might also be surprised by what AppleScript is capable of. It has support for very modern features, including inheritance, exceptions, closures, eval... It's not meant to be the shell - that's why OS X ships with bash, tcsh, and zsh. It's more like VB Script, except vastly nicer and easier to write. (Your criticism of its syntax is dead on, but believe it or not, AppleScript really does have a syntax, which as far as I know has only been fully documented once.)

Apple definitely has the in-house people to write an OS. The guy who wrote Mach works at Apple. The author of one of the slickest filesystems ever works there too. Oh yeah, and remember this guy? Seriously, Apple has been out-delivering Microsoft since 2001; you can't pick on them for not knowing how to write an OS.

(And, just to be snarky, Microsoft got their kernel folks from somewhere else too.)

I'm glad my OS was designed by, err, designers, incidentally. Apple has some computer science folk, but a computer scientist designing an OS is like a physicist designing a car.

I'm eagerly awaiting Longhorn, incidentally.

Use it gbde

The talk manpage says that the talk command appeared in 4.2BSD, which was released in August, 1983, according to this history of BSD. Does Windows Messenger Service predate that?

You may find this interesting and useful: Argentina.com: A Case Study. They supposedly built a large-scale, low-cost email system with high reliability at a company with less than 15 employees.

So what about all those people running Gnome 2.12 on FreeBSD already?

The fact that it's not going to be in the ports tree until 6.0 comes out is more of a logistical thing... it's certainly ready to use and it only take a minor step to merge Marcus' "stable" ports into your own local ports tree:

http://www.freebsd.org/gnome/docs/develfaq.html

It amounts to all of one additional line in your ports-updating script, which I comment/uncomment as needed. From there on, everything is the same.

So you're switching the OS on multiple desktops for the sake of avoiding a single one-line command (marcusmerge)? Doesn't seem to make sense to me.

Gnome 2.12 is ready for FreeBSD, it will not be added to ports
until after 6.0 is released. Check out http://www.FreeBSD.org/gnome/docs/develfaq.html for info
about installing Gnome 2.12 now!

I bought an AMD64 cpu to run a 64bit operating system, namely FreeBSD. Had I chosen a NVidia card I'd be SOL, since their stupid proprietary driver isn't available for the FreeBSD/amd64 platform. No thanks, for my limited use a Radeon 9200 does fine. NVidia can take their proprietary hardware and shove it up their ass.

You should only use free software and avoid unfree software.

I think that they already did.

I finally got around to setting up a KDC for my domains. It's nice to run "kinit" once, and then have full access to every machine I'm supposed to have full access to. Implementing Kerberos for one service is massive overkill. Implementing it for IMAP, SMTP, LDAP, etc. at the same time is bliss.

The FreeBSD Handbook has a nice chapter on the subject. O'Reilly's "Kerberos: The Definitive Guide" is an excellent reference as well.

The FreeBSD team is looking at possibly making the functions faster, and also caching them by either using a daemon or by having it cached inside the process itself:

http://wikitest.freebsd.org/moin.cgi/NsswitchAndCa chingOriginalProposal

try these :

Free Linux

Open Linux

Net Linux