Slashdot Mirror
FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE Is Ready
ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.
The FreeBSD 4.4 news haven't been posted for more than a few minutes, there are (were when I started writing) 6 posts, and already people are following a very annoying thread. What I mean is the stupid (IMO) advice that *BSD (or Linux or any open source project) should do this and that, be like this and that in order to be more average user friendly and to gain more market share.
/., and most of all, don't complain so much about it. Instead, do something about it. Mail the developers this advice, or better yet, help code the OS, write the documentation, and in general, help improve it.
PEOPLE! Do you think that the people, or the companies developing with those OSes are not aware of those problems? That they have no clue whatsoever as to what the general public wants? That they simply refuze to make their OSes user friendly, just to spite the users, and stay in a tiny share of the market?
They want more users, and they're doing everything possible to make their experience as pain-free and easy as possible. That they haven't reached perfection is not a surprise. But don't give such stupid advice on
But even this is not very relevant, for I'm using Linux because it suits me, and I like it, no matter how small its market share. And no matter how user (un)friendly it is. I like it (and I've been running it for the past 4.5 years)
I know, I know. My complaining does not help either. But I'm not doing it every time such a story is posted (check my posts if you don't believe me). I'm just getting fed up with all this useless noise. I'd much rather hear about the technical issues with FreeBSD (I haven't tried it yet, I'm running Linux and OpenBSD), the user experience, the major apps that have been ported to it, etc. THAT would help me, and others.
In the ports directory you will find applications such as StarOffice (5.1 and 5.2), Netscape (linux version), linux version of Flash Plug-in and some more that work perfectly with Linux compat mode. What FreeBSD does is install a package (currently based on Redhat 6.1) and user a kernel module to provide binary compatibility, so it's no emulation. I've successfully ran Quake3 with h/w accel and all IPlanet products. Some other linux stuff you might run is e.g. acrored4 and the linux jvm. I'm posting this on a FreeBSD box using no other than Opera for linux.
FTP upgrade? Use cvsup, it fetches all the changed source files for you.
/usr/src/UPDATING file, which will describe the significant things that have changed.
When it's done, you'll want to take a look at your
After that, it's just a matter of doing a:
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whichever kernel you are building, if you have a custom one)
make installworld
make installkernel KERNCONF=GENERIC (or whatever)
reboot
BSD's FFS with softupdates could be considered to obviate the need for journalling.
Read Journalling Versus Soft Updates for a good Usenix 2000 paper comparing both approaches, which concludes that:
and that
Both methods achieve the same goals by different means.
My only gripe with FreeBSD is the amount of documentation available. You pretty much have to work out most things for yourself, there aren't the sheer number of different HOWTOs available like there are with Linux.
One thing you should remember is FreeBSD is better about keeping their manpages up to date and useful. One of the things that drove me nuts with RedHat was the sheer lack of manpages for many of the commands and almost all of the drivers (try running man 4 pcm in FreeBSD and it will tell you all about the sound driver). FreeBSD doesn't have as many HOWTOs because it doesn't need them, the manual has all the information you need in many cases.
I read the internet for the articles.