FreeBSD 4.2 Is Out

Quite a number of people have e-mailed in the last bit about the release of FreeBSD 4.2. This is the release - you should try it out today, because CowboyNeal sez so, and he's currently updating it on his Vaio.

Comments

Quick link to the release notes / changelog

[StandardDeviant]

For those of you who might be curious and lazy, here's a quick link to the RELNOTE S.T XT for this release (i.e. the changelog/release notes).

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Re:Why not use Solaris instead?

[StandardDeviant]

Well, Solaris isn't exactly iron-clad in the security dept. by default. For that, it's OpenBSD hands down. If you need big iron, well, then you're probably running a proprietary Unix anyway (like irix for some huge SGI-based vis lab, AIX on some huge S/80 ibm db2 box, Solaris on some huge Sun Oracle box, etc.). Free unixen are IMHO best suited to the problem space addressed by bunches of ``little'' boxes (best hardware support there, anyway, and similar price structure), by little I mean <= 4 cpus and <= 2gb of ram... (i.e. web farms, render farms, distributed DB serving, workstations, etc)

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Re:BSD vs. Solaris - No, sun forked

[bluGill]

No, you have that wrong. Sun forked sunOS versions 1.0-4.x from BSD. BSD always was BSD, sunOS was the fork by sun. Suns lawyers never sued BSD. Currently sunOS is at version 5.x (I think they call it vesion 8 now, but it is still version 5) which is NOT based on the forked BSD code but rather based on the orginial AT&T code.

There were legal problems in the early battles, but they were caused by whoever owned unix at that time (AT&T yet? I'm not sure) BSD got around them by re-writing the code in question, and setteling. since BSD never has had (much) money the settelment wasn't a big deal.

Do yourself a favor: Try it

[f5426]

FreeBSD rocks. I used linux for 3 years. I tried FreeBSD 6 months ago, and felt in love with it.

The very very best thing about FreeBSD is the coherence of the whole. For instance, all the sources in /usr/src

/usr/src/sys: the kernel
/usr/src/bin: /bin directory
/usr/src/sbin: /sbin
/usr/src/usr.bin: /usr/bin
/usr/src/usr.sbin /usr/sbin
etc, etc

The sources of ls are in /usr/src/bin/ls
Wanna change and recompile ls ? Change /usr/bin/ls/ls., cd /usr/bin/ls and make install.

Wanna recompile the whole thing ?

cd /usr/src
make buildworld
make installworld
mergemaster (if config files have changed)
reboot

All the system is maintained under CVS. Want to upgrade the *whole* system to current version ?

cvsup -L 2 stable-supfile

Then make buildworld & installworld.

Almost all of the configuration is made in /etc/rc.conf

And there is the very clean port tree. About 4500 programs in /usr/ports, present in the form of patches to the original versions. For instance:

cd /usr/ports/graphics/gimp1
make install
[Downloads source of the gimp]
[Patches sources]
[Compile]
[Install]

Of course all needed libraries will be fetched/patched/compiled in the way.

And all the ports are in CVS too, so

cvsup -L 2 ports-supfile

will keep you up-to-date with latest ports

Everything in the system is very very nicely engineered. There is a vision here, not a collection of hacks.

Cheers,

--fred

Java 2 for FreeBSD

[dglo]

Hey, where's that Java 2 I was promised?

For the Linux port

cd /usr/ports/java/linux-jdk && make install

For the native port,

cd /usr/ports/java/jdk12-beta && make install

Note that the native port is built from scratch due to licensing restrictions.