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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.
but one thing that open source people haven't learned that MS and Apple and such have learned are to answer the following questions:
1. is it faster?
2. does it do more/kewler stuff?
3. will it crash less frequently?
4. will it boot faster?
5. will i still have to spend hours trying to install new programs and hardware?
6. does it come with new/more/kewl goodies like MS Office (or equivalent), a dictionary and thesaurus, 100 free hours of internet access, etc.?
only when an open source OS states these things in their press release will the general public listen.
1. cvsup r00lz for updating the OS
2. ports collection
3. single file (/etc/make.conf) for managing compile-time options and a master ftp server
4. VM
5. ports collection
6. no rpm or deb files
7. ports collection
8. linux binary compatibility
9. ports collection
10. softupdates
11. securelevel
12. make world
I converted all my computers from linux to FreeBSD about six months ago and never looked back. I find FreeBSD much simpler to manage, automate, and secure than any other *NIX (I haven't given OpenBSD a try yet).
There is no "journaled" filesystem since softupdates does a really good job and imporves the fs performance.
Oh, BTW, did I mention the ports collection?
'nuff said
You don't need the ISO or a CD. You can download two floppy images, reboot your computer and install from the network via the ftp install option. It takes a while over a 56K modem but it does work.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
You're contradicting yourself. In the original post, you said you wanted to send a blank cd to the FreeBSD people so they could burn it for you, now you won't let other people do it cos you're a "burn it myself" kind of guy. Either you're confused or just trolling.
If it ain't broke, you need more software.
They should either offer: a free cd burn (either they provide the cd, or you send them one of yours), or put it in stores and have them give the email of people who want their software ( these people have pre-signed up on their site and they submit it to the store along with a shipment). I'd prefer the first one myself, of sending them a cd.
Hey, cool. A volunteer! You forgot to provide your address so we can start mailing our CDs to you. I'm sure your followup will remedy that!
Note for the clueless: Free software is about DIY (do it yourself) not about whining that something hasn't been hand-delivered and auto-installed on you machine.
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.
- better responsiveness under heavy load - Linux 2.4.x with its VM problems is particularly bad in comparison
- smaller base software/dependencies; BSD libc is much smaller than glibc;
/bin/sh points to ash, so all shell and system scripts are ash processes (and not bloated bash processes); classic Unix tools are less heavyweight than GNU tools (Remember: you can use GNU tools, bash etc., but they're not a dependency) - mature device file system
- Clear separation of what belongs to the core OS & third party software (=ports system)
- Best package management for installing/compiling from source (Debian's apt-get src isn't there yet)
- Kernel features are fewer, but proven & tested (as opposed to many experimental or not-yet-mature drivers/subsystems/filesystems in Linux)
- standard file system is 64 bit, allowing big single files
- Package selections show that FreeBSD maintainers are real Unix afficionados (vim 6.0 available etc.)
- the whole system is/feels very solid and mature
What I dislike:- distribution/ports mixes free and non-free software (Motif etc.) without prompting the user what is free and not; bad not only for Free Software zealots, but also for people who want to make sure they can use software without limitations in their environment (FreeBSD looks as it is made by people for whom software freedom is a secondary concern)
- available for a smaller no. of hardware architectures than Linux (or use NetBSD on non-x86 platforms, but that's already a different OS)
- no journalling filesystems (no ReiserFS, no XFS), a very small number of filesystems supported
- no
/proc, no framebuffer device, no ALSA sound drivers, no hardware accelerated graphics in the kernel - much worse SMP support than current Linux kernels
. GNU/Linux feels more "modern" than FreeBSD, while FreeBSD is comparatively "conservative", but also more solid. Draw your own conclusions.gopher://cramer.plaintext.cc http://cramer.plaintext.cc:70
I was skimming over the Handbook and I noticed something about an option to install Linux compatibility binaries. Question for BSD users: how good is this compatibility? Perfect, so-so, or somewhere in the middle?
Uh...isn't the idea of an ISO to be able to obtain the image of a CD-ROM (650MB) so you can burn the CD yourself?
So why on earth would you want them small? Yeah...there are like 5 CD's worth there to burn, but what you seem to be suggesting is that you have to burn 500 10MB CD's or something???
As for the "you wrote big software, you must burn it for me" argument, what about the time to process the cd's, to perform the actual burn, the equipment needed to do so? There is probably a reason that people charge $20...it's isn't free.
Find a friend with high-speed access, learn to use reget or something, or buy the CD's from someplace selling them.
As a rather novice Linux user, I've been curious as the differences between it and BSD. Can somebody point to a link that goes into some rather sophisticated detail between the two? (More than "Supports themes, is cool, etc.")
This article might be a good read for you:
http://www.daemonnews.org/199907/d-advocate.html
Unfortunatly, finding such hard data is almost imposible. I've been searching for years for data to back up claims of networking superiority from one camp or the other.
:-) There are a lot of differences at the syscall level, but most people don't see that. There are also significant differences in the boot procedure (one of the things that I prefer about SysV). BSD has one file (script) per runlevel. SysV has one script per service, organized in 1 directory per runlevel. Want to stop a service in sysv? '<service script> stop'.
To give a short answer, *BSD's are all offshots of the historical 4.4BSDLite code, the final inheritance of Berkeley's system distribution. This is different from the SysV distribution, who's roots lie within ATT. Linux's philosophy has always been "That's a nifty idea... how can we do it?" so it is a hybred of BSD and SysV. (Free|Open|Net)BSD are 'true' BSD. Something like Solaris2 is going to be a more 'true' SysV. Some linux distributions are more BSD (like slackware) and some are more SysV (like Redhat and Debian).
The main, user visable, differences between SysV and BSD are in the flags that 'ps' takes.
The best thing you can do to learn more about it is to download it and give it a try yourself.
Zapman
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
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
You should also run mergemaster after make installworld, or else you'll get weird errors (like the PAM errors from 4.2->4.3)
I can give you a quick run down of the basic differences, at least wrt to Linux vs. FreeBSD - the other BSD's have a slightly different set of pros and cons but are largely similar to FreeBSD:
Well, that's just a quick list off the top of my head, anyone care to add more?
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.
From the Readme, slightly reformatted:
Previous to this, you had two options:
Now you can just burn and go. This is excellent for anyone who wants to install on a lot of machines at once.
Also, the mini ISO gives some access for dialup users who don't want to leave their modems on all night ;)
Maybe with 5.0 they will give us UDF images. :)
my old sig used to be funny, but then slashcode ate it and now it's not funny anymore
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
OK, I'll flame. Actually, I just want to pick a nit: how can an ISO be 1 gigabyte when one can't fit a gigabyte on a CD? I don't think ISO images get bigger than 650 MB.
(Now of course someone will come along and prove me wrong, but that's ok.)
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
FYI, NetBSD has the script per-service (incl ' stop', and ' status') scheme. FreeBSD is experimenting with it as well (but have not decided for sure if they should adopt it). There is a Usenix paper about it, try the 2001 procedings.
Neither has the concept of runlevels though, other then single-user and multi-user that is.
beastie$ df
Filesystem Size Used Avail Capacity Mounted on
...
procfs 4.1K 4.1K 0B 100%
linprocfs 4.1K 4.1K 0B 100%
Of course there are no "Advanced Linux Sound Architecture" drivers, since they are rather Linux-specific and FreeBSD has its own sound driver implementations.
Granted, but this issue is complicated by non-disclosure agreements on code from NVidia which has turned out to be less portable than claimed.
All of the work on FreeBSD's SMPng is being done in 5.0-CURRENT, and has inherited a lot of code from BSD/OS's widely-renowned SMP.
Brand new final release of FreeBSD 4.4
Update to KDE 2.2.1
New even more stable Mozilla release
cvsup cvsup cvsup make install!!!
Tasty!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Your information about the rc scripts is wrong. Generic BSD doesn't have run levels at all. FreeBSD, for example, has a main rc script (/etc/rc) and a bunch of subsidiary scripts: rc.network, rc.firewall, rc.sysctl, etc. These don't correspond to runlevels but rather to general areas of functionality.
NetBSD and Darwin, like SysV-derived systems, have one script per service, but instead of encoding dependency information in the filenames, they put it in the files themselves. Each comes with a program that examines the files and determines what their order should be, based on the dependency information. This is a lot more flexible and intuitive than the SysV method, in my humble opinion.
FreeBSD developers have begun the work of converting FreeBSD to the NetBSD system, by the way.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Why do BSD articles always attract trolls like dung beetles to crap?
I read the internet for the articles.
Let's look at the logistics more closely. If people mail you their own CD-R's with return postage, your only expeses are your time and the electricity to run your computer (Assuming that your PC and burner are paid for, and you aren't planning to do anything else with them while you are doing this). A 16x burner will do a 650mb CD-R in about 5 minutes. Add one more minute to change CD's and stick them back in the envelopes, and you could do roughly 10 an hour. If you charge $1.00 each, you can make a whopping $10 an hour. Whoo hoo. You'll be rubbing shoulders with the Rockefellers in no time. Of course, now you'll have to listen to people bitch about how you are exploiting them by asking for a whole dollar to do somthing so easy -- don't you know that information wants to be FREE, you capitalist pig! Gimme, Gimme, Gimme!
When you actually look at it in a rational manner and look at the costs involved. you'll see that $20 is actually a very reasonable price to ask for a CD.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?
FreeBSD 5.0's SMP has borrowed ideas, but not code, from BSD/OS.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
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.
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.
There seem to be a lot of issues with glibc, including simple code bloat and a nasty loader bug. Is moving to another code base something Linux people can/should think about? In theory it shouldn't be that hard -- it's all just Posix. Of course, theory and practice are two different things.
Sorry guys, but this one really is a troll. We've never even heard of this guy nor is there even any such position as "core consultant developer." Nobody has petitioned the core team for a code removal action, either, so it would difficult for us to be "pious and insufferable" in response to a non-event. In short, this guy's posting is a complete fabrication.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
Afraid you're wrong. It's a troll from end to end, and not even a very good one...
As a core consultant developer for the *BSD kernel for 6 months last year
No one by this name is involved in any BSD, certainly not at the core level. Also, there are no core team members in common between Free, Net and OpenBSD.
There are many issues which have not been resolved and are not being publicized to the public.
The FreeBSD project does all of it's development in public mailing lists...
1) The implementation of threads still uses fine grain kernel level locking
The 4.x kernel does not have fine grained locking, this is being developed in 5.x.
which does not adhere to POSIXX IEEE 811.2b level requirements
POSIX is an IEEE OS standard.
IEEE 801.11b is an IEEE wireless networking standard.
A seasoned kernel hacker would know the difference...
certified for level 4 security.
There is no such things. Secure systems conform to data books such as the 'orange book'.
The hash implementation which was used for prior backdoor's still exists and the modules which access it have not been auditied by third party engineers. This is a serious security violation which the dev team refuses to address. In fact they are doing all they can to sweep it underground, hoping people will just forget about it.
4.4 uses a IETF standard algorithm for sequence number generation (hash algorithms cant be backdoored), and this replaces the algorithm in 4.3 and earlier versions which did have a problem with sequence number guessing.
There is still no credible evidence that the new implementation of the TCP/IP stack is an improvement over the broken one they are trying to replace from the 4.3.xx series.
The TCP/IP stack in 4.4 is the same as in 4.3 (there was no 4.3.xx) and is the best performing TCP/IP stack around (even compared to the new Linux stack).
and the potential for data loss was rated as QQQ on the topenhiemer algorithm.
The stack does not loose data, and there is no such thing as a topenhiemer algorithm to rate it as a QQQ.
I am currently petitioning the core dev team to remove my code from the project due to my differences with them
No one is currently petitioning the FreeBSD core team to remove any code.
For some reason all sorts of people crawl out of the woodwork, and begin trolling on FreeBSD stories. Normally, like this post, they've read the last few news items from the FreeBSD web site, managed to store a few terms, and then try to put them into some or other attack on FreeBSD...
Regards,
-Jeremy
Since I almost never use my Linux box I can't give you a good comparison. But just try it out; it's free after all! But basically you can do anything on BSD that you can do on Linux, it's just how you get it done that differs. You might find that you prefer the BSD style if you try it.
IMHO a strength of FreeBSD is that there is JUST ONE of them. No distro wars. I realize that distros are an advantage themselves for some folks, but especially when I was a BSD newbie I really appreciated how easy it was to get answers to my questions. One OS, one core team, one great product.
Where are moderation points when you need them?
:)
While I've got your ear Jordan, not that I have, I thought we might be looking at XFree4 in this release? Is the support still not really there?
Sorry to hear about the delays on SMPng. If I could help I would, but as you are aware this is kinda specialist work.
Hope you're enjoying Apple.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Quick note: ISO9660 doesn't handle FSes of that size very well. UDF is the standard for DVD-ROMs, and I've seen CDs that use it as well.
-- Veni, vidi, dormivi
If you really want a CD, go to BSD Mall and buy a cd there. You may pay a little extra, but you are supporting the development. Of course, if you just want to try it for the first time and don't want pyhsical media or upgrade, then cheapbytes is a good choice.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
- make buildworld
- make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
- make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
- reboot (preferably to single user)
- make installworld
- mergemaster
- reboot
Please read theAlso, please remember that the whole point in selling the CD's is to give the CODERS money to live on. If a hacker spends 8 hours burning cd's (a job that could be done by a trained monkey), that's 8 hours he isn't making the software better.
Anyhow, if you really believe that you can make $200 an hour burning CD's, I say quit your day job and go for it.
Why is it that the proponents of "one nation under God" are so eager to get rid of "liberty and justice for all"?