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FreeBSD 4.0 Code Freeze
MagusX writes "FreeBSD 4.0 has just gone into a 30 day code freeze leading up to release." This is as good an opportunity as any to mention that our earlier "code freeze" story in fact turned out to be a feature freeze in the run up to the release, and not a code freeze. The 30-day freeze is longer than average for FreeBSD, but as this will be a .0 release, it was felt necessary to spend as much time as possible making sure it's as stable as possible.
My desktop machine is COL 2.2, I needed the IPX support and it was convenient to do. Also the COL installer configured X more or less automagically.
But I've put up two FreeBSD machines as Apache and Postfix servers. These were older machines that didn't have CDROM drives, and I was too lazy to fiddle with NFS. So I installed FreeBSD from the net -- a pretty easy thing to get going. And the FreeBSD "ports collection" makes it absurdly simple to install just the features you want on your machine. My servers have no X, no KDE, no Ghostscript, no games, no nothing except what I want. And it took very little effort to do this.
The ports collection isn't on the bleeding edge though, and if you want the very latest version of a particular piece of software you may well have to install it yourself.
FreeBSD has a reputation for robustness and a fast IP stack -- some very high profile sites run FreeBSD. OpenBSD emphasizes good security. It seems to me that you'd want to look at one of the BSDs if you have a server requirement.
For the desktop, I'd probably go with one of the Linux distributions. They come loaded with a bunch of applications, the installation procedures are becoming pretty simple, and everybody and his brother releases RPMs and DEBs for Linux. If you're into non-free software, there's any number of vendors out there whose binaries are ONLY supported -say- on RH6.0 or some such. I don't think you can get WebJetAdmin to run on BSD, for example.
(And since you mentioned MS-Windows... you should consider switching to one of the Unix variants if you want your machine to run for months at a time without rebooting. You should not be afraid of tinkering with the operating system to get it right -- Linux/BSD printing is not idiot simple. And finally, if you must keep MS-Windows around, consider VMWare... which allows you to run a real no fooling copy of MS-Windows in a virtual machine under Linux, allowing you to switch back and forth effortlessly. VMWare is non-free, but a clever hack, and it allows you to test other things without trashing your system (Hurd, Netware, BSD, what-have-you).
Go directly to jail() /var/go
Do not pass
Do not bind to 200.*.*.* IP addresses
Can anybody explain to me why I would want to use FreeBSD instead of Windows or Linux? Are there any features my two OS's don't have? Is ther any software available on FreeBSD that i can't get for linux or Windows? I'm just looking for practical reasons, not flames, thanks.
there's a perl script that I use for that called pkg_version.
a simple pkg_version -v | grep "<" gives me a list of everything that's definitely outdated, and then pkg_version -v | grep "?" gives me the ones that it's not sure about (multiple versions in the index or installed on the system, e.g. bash, gcc, acroread, etc)
the only issue is occasionally a package changes names and thus pkg_version dies.
as for those who want a make upgrade, do a make, then a pkg_delete then a make install (having backed up any config files). and that's as close as you can come for the moment, i believe.
DrWiggy,
So you know you're probably basing your arguments against Linux on version 1.2 or something.
I've worked on large networks of both (admin of a large linux network, and designing software for a large mostly FreeBSD network) and the fact of the matter is that the technical reasons such as 'stability, security, speed' are there in both the OS's.
If you need SMP, you use Linux. FreeBSD's SMP support is horrid versus a 2.2 Linux box.
FreeBSD tends to handle massive swapping conditions better than Linux, this is true, but when you are deploying machines that are properly spec'd they don't swap at all anyway.
Security is better in FreeBSD? I'd like to know how this conclusion has been drawn. The fact of the matter is that in most situations the deployed servers in large networks tend to be running very customized setups. If you haven't taken the time to set them up properly, they'll be insecure, if you have, they won't be. That's an admin thing, after all, we don't see very many kernel level attacks these days, and we all know that we tend to run the *exact* same software on *BSD or Linux machines.
I use FreeBSD, OpenBSD and Linux all on a regular basis. They all have their strong points and weak points, but truly, I think most unbiased comparisons of Linux and FreeBSD show that they are very competitive operating systems with very similar features.
As for 100% reliability, I've seen the following operating systems turn to shit at some point in my life: Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Irix, HP-UX, OSF and of course win*. Nothing is 100%. 99.9999, maybe, but not 100.
Outside of Linux circles, "IP masquerading" is called NAT (network address translation). This is supported in FreeBSD in the form of natd, and more specific information on setting it up can be found in numerous places.
One place to get more informations, other than mailing list searching, is a great site called The FreeBSD Diary, where there's actually an entire section of the topics devoted to NAT :)
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Regarding AMD, FreeBSD 4.0-CURRENT has a much newer version of AMD; I am pretty certain the specific deficiency you mention has been fixed.
Thanks to work mostly done by Martin Blapp, mount now shows the mount parameters correctly in (what seems to be, I cannot speak in complete certainty due to that being impossible to assure) every case.
Have you reported how the package system "fails to register all the files"? I haven't seen this behavior. As far as ports not having to be built as root, if you set the make/environment variable "DISTDIR" to any accessible directory, and set "WRKDIRPREFIX" to an accessible directory, you will be able to make ports as a user.
--
Brian Fundakowski Feldman
Does anyone know if IP masquerading (or a workalike) is offered in FreeBSD? I'm going to need a IP masquerading box for next semester, and if FreeBSD does this I might try it just for fun. Linux is just getting too easy these days.. :^)
-- Does Rain Man use the Autistic License for his software?
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
Then again, the politics were part of what lead me away from debian, happily landing with FreeBSD.
Now I've got two solid reasons to think about FreeBSD as an alternative to Debian on new systems here.
Anyone in touch with linux-kernel know if there's been any interest expressed there in bringing anything like these two to Linux?
An AC wrote: ... a fast IP stack"
"FreeBSD has a reputation for
I've heard this for 4 years now, but I have NEVER seen numbers to back it up. I honestly don't know if *BSD's is faster than Linux 2.2., but I'd like to...
Zapman
The current "egcs version", for what it's worth, is called GCC 2.95.2. Does it say in the 2.95.2 distribution that 2.95.2 is considered experimental? This announcement for GCC 2.95 says:
Assuming the next major release is even called 3.0; this entry in the GCC FAQ says:Sorry, putting a quote from the 2.95 announcement just before a quote from the person to whom I'm responding makes the above, from my response, a bit confusing; the first of those two statements came from the 2.95 announcement, but the second was a quote from the person to whom I responded - it is not a statement from the GCC 2.95 announcement.
Because he may have other reasons to want to run Linux, and those may be legitimate reasons; if some particular OS comes up with a useful feature, I have no particular problem with other OSes adopting that feature, or a variant thereof.
(The answer to the implied question about 3.x appears to be "you'd have to bludgeon the kernel changes into compiling under 3.x"; I didn't put a lot of effort into trying to do that, so I don't know if it's doable.)
Next time think before you spit out this utter nonsense. Read the documentation again and mae sure you *understand* it. It says root can do rm -rf /* on a chroot'ed file system, and NOT the root file system of your drive.
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If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
I'm running 3.3-STABLE, and "make upgrade" in /usr/src fails miserably. It starts making make, and dies with
/usr/ports or debian's apt-get upgrade, where it would go out and grab the new version, compile, and install it. Am I way off here? I can live with a binary sysinstall upgrade IF I can find some way of upgrading /usr/src later on.
ld: scrt0.o: No such file or directory
sysinstall's upgrade feature gives me a list of FTP sites, none of which work, because it only wants to upgrade to another 3.3, which seems really quite pointless to me.
Can someone give me a URL I can feed to sysinstall or some pointer on getting "make upgrade" to actually work? I expected it to work sort of like
Just going out and getting the CD and wiping out my old install and restoring my home dir and configurations from backup is NOT an option I care to entertain...
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
I've done redhat installs with every version since 5.0, and I must say the new GUI install in 6.1 has some functionality I would like to see in the curses install: when doing a full custom install, it gives a description of packages; after you are done selecting packages and you have calculated missing dependencies, it does a much better job of handling changes (I remember foobaring things in the curses install and having to reselect all of the packages).
But it comes down to this: you do an install (or upgrade) for a particular version on a machine but once. So who cares?
This sig is false.
That's crazy. Why would you ever want to do that? Now, I update my packages as needed, but that isn't anything but ./configure && make && make install.
This sig is false.
It does appear that RPM might have a couple of tiny bugs lurking in there somewhere. I did ran into some minor RPM database corruption once, rpm --rebuilddb cleared it up. Mind that this was on a machine that I use for development, where I install, upgrade, and remove RPMs constantly. Given the kind of beating it took, I consider rpm's reliability to be above average.
I couldn't keep track of what files where installed...
rpm -q -l -vv package tells you where package was installed. RPM takes some getting used to.
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to play would with 4.0, I've been toying with FBSD since 2.something and I really like it. I am disappointed in the people saying FreeBSD is dying and such things because they don't get the same publicity that Linux has been getting. Just because it isn't on ZD-TV every other day doesn't mean anything. It seems to me at least Linux gets the attention because it is invading the desktop which is traditionally Microsoft territory. FreeBSD chugs along on servers in the background doing what it does well. You can sell Linux to make a million dollars or you can USE FreeBSD to make a million dollars.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
I do think that FreeBSD is a good OS, althought it is slightly less friendly then Linux (IMHO) distributions Like RH and SuSE. I just tried the RH 6.1 GUI install and it was neat. If FreeBSD were to do a GUI install it would certainly make it an easier adjustment for Newbiews. Just my humble opinion.
send flames > /dev/null
Only 'flamers' flame!
I'm a one OS type of person. If there's a really cool game for Windows (Riven) or OS/2 (GalCiv), I'll slice out a little partition so I can run them. Otherwise I stick with just one OS. Even though I have two OS's installed, one will always get ignored.
Right now I have Slack and FreeBSD. I'm using mostly Slack right now, and fiddling with FreeBSD to learn it's quirks. Mostly they're identical in functionality. But one huge advantage FreeBSD has over Linux, is that it runs FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris, SCO and SVR4 binaries, while Linux only runs Linux binaries (at least I haven't gotten anything else to work). It suddenly occured to me that I don't have any need for Linux anymore. I can run CivCTP and RTII from FreeBSD.
So I'm afraid that the near future will see me dumping the Linux partitions in favor of FreeBSD. I really don't want to, but I'm just a one OS type of guy. I'll probably keep a small partition around to check out the latest distros.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
The battle is, who's weaker, the admin or the software? Yes, the software comes from anywhere and everywhere, but there are more eyes looking at it.
Code Freeze beats System Freeze anyday.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
How long does it take to fsck seven terabytes? Or are you using a journaling filesystem (which one)?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
Hi. Having worked with Linux for quite a awhile now, I've gotten dissatissfied in a few areas. My current peeves are the number of global kernel locks and the icky, yucky bdflush.
... etc. And, conveniently, there's a lock_kernel() and unlock_kernel() around the bdflush code. A performance killer, especially when writing filesystem code.
Linux has over 400 global kernel locks (calls to lock_kernel()). One even goes like this:
lock_kernel(); nfs_read(); unlock_kernel(); It's insane. It's also a preformance-killer. Some stuff actually runs slower on SMP system because of all the locking going on.
bdflush is also a little retarded -- it flushes metadata every 5 and data every 30 seconds. So you get idle disk -- activity storm -- idle disk -- activity storm
How does FreeBSD fare in these areas? Would it be a better choice than Linux for filesystem work? Esp. server-side?
Napster-to-go says "Fill and refill your compatible MP3 player", which is a lie. It's not MP3. It's WMA with DRM.
The command is make world. Read the handbook for more.
And it would also be good of me to inform you that the tree just underwent a series of rapid changes and may more may not build. It has been failing for a lot of people over here..
If it was ready for the user, it wouldn't be code frozen, it'd be RELEASE'd :P
Why do people think that "frozen" means "ready"? :)
-bugg
some people complain about no GUI and all that nonsense, but give me a break. is it really such an improvement to see gtk+ widgets as opposed to curses? besides, in my experience, GUI frontends tend to make things prettier at the cost of functionality.
Had the same problem. The 'install' program is broke, so you need to reinstall it before it works:
/usr/src/usr.bin/xinstall; make all install
cd
Good luck!
Cheers,
Sean
My personal favorite is the jail() call that creates a virtual server within your Unix box. It locks stuff down so tightly that even root doesn't have special privileges inside a jail(). Processes in the jail can only see other processes inside the same jail(), and can only bind to the IP address allowed for that jail(), and can only see the disk allowed for that jail(). Unlike chroot you cannot break out of a jail() if you are root. That's just my personal favorite. Lots more cool stuff in there.
That's why you Open Source nuts will never get anywhere... You want to freeze the code. Well, while you're freezing the code, and doing all that [pfeh]bug testing... What's that?!? If you'd only spend the proper time putting together GOOD code, then you wouldn't need to freeze it.
By the way, is this thing gonna be Windows compatible? I've got this great browser I want to seel them if it is...
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
(Score 5, Monopoly)
Have you tried my latest version of Windows? It's nice.
The main reason you would want to use FreeBSD would be self-pity. If you really hate yourself, and want to give up all technological conveniences for the sake of stability, then use FreeBSD.
After an independantly funded poll, I've concluded that most people using FreeBSD are on the rebound, or suffering long, painful divorces. Most tend to be suicidal. By using FreeBSD, it's an expression of their mood. They don't realize, that by always running, and being stable, they can lose their jobs, and it won't matter.
That's why Windows 2000 just makes more sense. You'll never have to fear that you'll be fired. Heck, your boss can't figure out what to do with a BSOD. They're there because of IT demand. Ensures job stability. Why would a FreeBSD shop keep around a sysadmin that didn't ever need to do anything???
Sincerely,
Bill Gates
(Score 5, Monopoly)
Have you tried my newest version of Windows? It's really nice.
For those of you that do not know what benefits are in FreeBSD 4.0, here are a list of new / improved features:
/var/log/security.
Some New Features include:
The VM system's anonymous storage subsystem (the swap pager) has been completely
revamped. It should be a little faster, with less glitches.
An emulator for SVR4 binaries has been added. [i386]
Driver support has been added for PCI fast ethernet cards based on the ADMtek Inc.
AL985 Centaur chipset.
Driver support has been added for SysKonnect SK-984x PCI gigabit ethernet adapters.
Driver support has been added for Adaptec Duralink PCI ethernet adapters based on the
Adaptec AIC-6915 fast ethernet controller.
Driver support has been added for PCI fast ethernet adapters based on the Sundance
Techno-logies ST201 controller, including the D-Link DFE-550TX.
Driver support has been added for PCI fast ethernet adapters based on the Silicon
Integrated Systems SiS 900 and SiS 7016 ethernet controllers.
Driver support has been added for PCI fast ethernet adapters based on the Davicom
DM9100 and DM9102 ethernet controllers, including the Jaton Corporation XpressNet.
The top-level category security has been added, and IPFW now uses syslog(3) to log all
messages to
A new jail(2) system call and admin command (jail(8)) have been added for additional
flexibility in creating secure process execution environments.
The base C/C++ compiler has been upgraded from GCC 2.7.2 to EGCS 1.1.2. This gives
users full ISO C++ support.
System Requirements: Standard ISA, EISA, VL, or PCI bus based PC (386sx to Pentium), 8MB
RAM, 100MB disk space for a binary-only system & 340MB for a full development system.
For more information, click here
Ben Brewer
brewer@nullified.org
I will take this opportunity to remind all fellow Daemons to register with Sun's Java Developer Connection and vote for the Java 2 SDK port to FreeBSD!
While there has been an official Linux port, there is no native Java 2 SDK for FreeBSD. Please, all members of JDC, go here and cast your votes to have Sun release this software. We are up to 2766 votes so far. It took 4551 votes before Sun released the Linux version, so we're almost there, right? ;-)
(However, I am well aware that the release of the Linux port was due in large part to the excellent folks from Blackdown.)
Here are a few of the tons of comments on the "bug report" page where you can vote for this RFE (request for enhancement).
You must be registered in the JDC (Java Developer Connection) to vote. Registration is free and quick, so if you're a Java developer or just have a general interest on FreeBSD or Java, please go sign up and vote!
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