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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 ports system is maintained seperately to the OS itself, and so you can generally install what ports you want. For popular software, the ports are normally updated within about one week of the release of a new version, although this varies heavily, epecially if the new version has some problems on FreeBSD.
For a lot of ports, you'll find that there are two versions in the ports tree, a "stable" version and a "devel" version. For example, the stable version of Apache is currently 1.3.20, and the devel version 2.0.16.
If your machine is slow, then you can install packages. These are built fairly frequently for the -STABLE branch, and can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/ports/. Or you can use 'pkg_add -r apache' (for example), which will fetch the latest stable package for apache and install it.
Hope this helps. If you have more questions, then try reading Chapter 4 of the FreeBSD Handbook (linked in the story above).
Regards,
-Jeremy
First off, this is not meant to be any kind of definitive list of items, nor a flame on any other OS. Nothing more than what has kept me using FreeBSD rather than Linux.
/etc/rc.1, I feel totally comfortable going in and working with FreeBSD's scripts and config files.
Not too long ago I decided to get NT off of a laptop I've got here and get a *nix on there. Although I'm far more familiar with FreeBSD I figured that a Linux distro would have a better chance of having hardware support. After reading many a glowing review of Mandrake, I decided to give it a try on here.
The Mandrake installer is every bit as nice as folks claim, and then some. Very professional layout, wicked easy drive partitioner, and all the rest of the steps that get you through the install. It picked up on the proper video settings, handled all the X, Gnome, and KDE installation without a hitch. It's pretty impressive stuff.
Then I got to mucking around with the software updating utility. Darn thing takes as long to load up as a full cvsup of the FreeBSD ports tree. It also didn't seem to store my settings when I didn't want to load software off a CD, constantly demanding for an install CD to be inserted before continuing. Aside from all that, even when I did manage to get it to pull from a network source, the packages seemed to not be updated very often. I guess I'm just spoiled by the constant, daily, hourly, updating of the FreeBSD ports tree.
All this I was willing to deal with to some extent, but then I ran into another small problem. I'll disclaimer this up front by saying that had I put the time into it I'm sure I could have fixed it. For some reason the fancy network config settings for Mandrake kept changing my IP address. It was about then that I decided to dig a bit into the actual config files to see about fixing this problem.
After a couple of hours staring at a large number of these files, in which each of them seemed way too complex for their own good I'd had enough. I just kept saying to myself, "This is nuts!" Even the Apache config got busted up into multiple files, adding complexity rather than removing it. This pretty much defined my next course of action.
FreeBSD boot floppies in, re-format to UFS, and a new OS on. The FreeBSD install is pretty straight forward for anyone to follow, but some of the hand holding isn't there. For instance, if you're looking to put a newer version of X on, you get to do a manual config. It does take longer to run through the install up front, but what I keep being reminded is that once it's all in there it's far faster and easier to tweak on things, and to keep them up to date.
In less time than it took to type this out this here laptop completed an update of the source files and ports tree. Later tonight I'll run the make world process and be up to date with the latest stuff. A new release is nearly a non-event for an already running system.
From a user's point of view, one of the biggest differences between FreeBSD and a Linux distro is that FreeBSD doesn't have any specific GUI tools for administration. There is no such thing as a "linuxconf" or "HardDrake" utility. This is offset by what I feel are far simpler and fewer config files that the user can edit directly. Where I feel lost even looking at some of the start up scripts in a Linux
I've heard a number of arguments stating the opposite of my view on this, but I'll leave those to the folks that hold that viewpoint. This is pretty much how I see it, if that perspective at all helps your understanding of some of the differences.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.