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First Official CD Release of FreeBSD
Chris Coleman writes: "Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for
FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD. We will
be using the official FreeBSD 4.5 ISOs created by the FreeBSD project.
The expected release date for FreeBSD 4.5 is January 20th. We expect to have CDs available two weeks after that.
We are taking pre-orders at this time to help gauge the number of CDs we will need to produce.
You can pre-order CDs here.
CD subscriptions are available here.
Vendor pricing will be handled through cylogistics.com."
I normally don't respond to trolls, but what the hell.
I believe the story is supposed to be "First official FreeBSD 4.5 CDs." Walnut Creek had been supporting FreeBSD development and creating CDs forever. I think FreeBSD CDs may even predate Windows CDs.
is that this is the First Official CD Release of FreeBSD by the DaemonNews Crew. FreeBSD by itself has been available on CD for as long as i can remember .... (at least back to the 2.2.x days).
If you know you want is ASAP, pre-ordering saves you some hassle, and you might get it significantly earlier in cases where the supply is scarce and pre-orders are served first. Additionally, pre-orders often get a discount. Finally, some special-interest products get made at all only after a large enough number of pre-orders guarantees that it will be profitable.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
My understanding is this will be the first official release with native Java2 binaries (if the Java compatibility tests from Sun are successfully completed in time).
Native JDK1.1.8 has been available for as long as I have used FreeBSD. I have used the native 1.2.2 and 1.3.1 jdk's, but you have to build them from source and accept Sun's licensing agreement.
I've have enormous trouble installing 4.3 and 4.4 (and I'm not the only one). The base install goes fine as always, but when installing additional packages, the problems start. The first packages are installed at normal speed, but after a few minutes, it takes about 2 minutes/package, no matter how big or small it is. I've tried the cd, ftp install, it doesn't matter. Does anyone know whether or not that problem is fixed ?
Marko No. 5
BSDi is no more. When Wind River bought them they took the embedded stuff that BSDi was working on and hired a few FreeBSD programmers. Since the economy in the US has turned to crap, they fired all of the FreeBSD programmers.
I have been a FreeBSD CD purchaser for a long time, since the Walnut Creek FreeBSD 2.1 days. At that time part of the money for the CD's went back into the project. Since the Wind River take over, they have stopped putting money back in.
The guys over at Deamonnews have started publishing a magazine and started doing the CD subscriptions. They have said that they will put money back into the project. So I dropped by Wind River subscription and decided to put my money with these guys. I'm also a subscriber to the magazine and have been very happy with it also.
I just got this from the Free BSD site:
http://www.freebsd.org
Even if you're not a programmer, there are other ways to contribute to FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit organization for which direct contributions are fully tax deductible. Please contact bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org for more information or write to: The FreeBSD Foundation, 7321 Brockway Dr. Boulder, CO. 80303. USA
You are correct, Java support has been incorporated into the FreeBSD-STABLE source tree since briefly before the 4.5-PRERELEASE code freeze, and has been in testing since then. As far as I know it's working fine, and should be in 4.5-RELEASE without any worries. The FreeBSD Foundation worked with Sun to get this licensing taken care of.
"Official" FreeBSD CDs have been available for years and years, at least as far as 2.1.X (as that's the earliest I've seen) and probably earlier.
.iso's available have been for CD #1 of the 4 CD Set. Now there's an .iso for all 4 CDs.
This announcement marks the first CD published by Daemon News, which took over the CD distribution after Wind River (who did 4.4 after inheriting it from BSDi (who did 4.3 and 4.2 as well I think after inheriting it from Walnut Creek CDROM (who did all of them up to 4.2))) stopped.
The CDs have always been "Official"ly mastered by Jordan Hubbard as the Release Manager. The only difference is that the only
Hopefully the majority of people know this (at least the first part), but the story title could be confusing to those who don't, or those who have limited memory capacity.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.
I'm sure that being first or official isn't what Chris meant to imply and is as distressed by the heading of "BSD: First Official CD Release of FreeBSD" as everyone else is.
:)
Just to clarify this for everyone else, there is no longer any "official" CD publisher of FreeBSD in the sense that they're somehow blessed or endorsed by the FreeBSD project. The project releases all the ISO images one would need to build a full 4-CD boxed set, that being the benchmark product standard established by Walnut Creek CDROM, and simply leaves it up for grabs as to who publishes them in whatever packaged form.
The ISO images themselves are called "official" simply to denote the fact that they're the authoritative reference for FreeBSD release bits. Anyone who publishes something which doesn't deviate too much from this standard is more than free to call the resulting product "FreeBSD" and sell it/give it away/rub it on their bodies/whatever as such.
Needless to say, there also are and have been multiple publishers of FreeBSD CDROM products, so this isn't exactly the "first" such distribution of FreeBSD on CD. But hey, this is Slashdot so two errors in one sentence is actually a fairly high standard when taken in context.
- Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
It will work fine and you will be happy with it. I've been running smb, ssh, smtp, pop, nfs, dns, dhcp, ldp, ipfw and natd services on a 486/133 with 64MB RAM for about 5 years now. I upgrade the machine to STABLE at 18-month intervals and watch the security notices closely.
I've been subscribed to the company formerly known as Walnut Creek's FreeBSD subscription service since somewhere in the early 2.2.x's. Although I only used about every fourth release of the CDs I received, the money was going where I wanted it, when I wanted it.
If you haven't been beyond Linux, FreeBSD has a lot to teach you. It is a strong server OS.
Maw! Fire up the karma burner!
Previous distributions have included image files for the boot floppies; I assume that this one will, as well. Most modern PCs can boot directly from the CD-ROM, however.
Technical editing and writing, programming, and web development
One of the great things about FreeBSD is the ability to upgrade to -STABLE, ie new releases via the CVSup utility. The software goes out and finds the source needed to be updated. Then you give the commands "make buildworld", compile a new kernel, and then in single user mode "make installworld". (/etc gets merged seperately)
It can take less than an hour on a fast computer with SCSI drive.
Right here jackass
Of course I have to put anonymous coward now so the fucking Linux fags don't ruin my karma for defending myself.
You also get FreeBSD 5-CURRENT and the whole cvs repository.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.