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."

Comments

Re:this is nice

[Snowfox]

it's good to see bsd getting with the times and being released on cd. Although ms-windows has had a 6 year head start with the cd-format I'm sure bsd will be able to compete.

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.

What Timothy SHOULD have used as title ....

[Daeron]

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).

Sigh. This submission is almost completely wrong.

[Palin Majere]

FreeBSD has had "official" CD sellers for a damn long time. Just flip through freebsdmall's history list and see how long they've been selling them for. Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but FreeBSD's been sold in chain-stores like CompUSA for quite a while too.

Now, had anybody (the original submitter, or the Slashdot staff) actually bothered to read this, they would've noticed that it said that this is Daemon News' first time carrying official FreeBSD CDs. Which isn't true either, based on the Daemon News online store, but hey. This is Slashdot. What do we care about actual fact?

I mean, geez. Come on, Slashdot staff, can't you actually take 30 seconds and read the @#$#ing article you're posting?

Re:Sigh. This submission is almost completely wron

[SirSlud]

I think you're the one that read this wrong.

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.

our which means, their, which means Daemon News. So its Daemon News' first time offering 4.5 on CD. So yeah, it's not news, but the submission isn't wrong. What bothers me about the way things are going, submissions are turning more and more into (community-level, granted) ads.

Ah well.

Native Java ?

[FauxPasIII]

This release is supposed to be the first one to include out of the box, native support for Java, right ? Does anyone know if they are still on track with that ?

Re:Native Java ?

[Krellis]

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.

_NOT_ 1st CD. 1st CD from DN.

[Lazaru5]

"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.

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 .iso's available have been for CD #1 of the 4 CD Set. Now there's an .iso for all 4 CDs.

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.

Important clarification on the wording of this

[jkh]

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. :)

Re:just the cd?

[realdpk]

Daemonnews is not *directly* related to the FreeBSD project (I don't know how deep the ties are, if at all - please post if you know). I do believe some of the money does go on to the project, however.

Anyways, I'm a subscriber to the FreeBSD CD set, and I suggest that anyone else who has found FreeBSD useful in work or home should subscribe as well. FreeBSD has saved me unmeasurable time and aggravation that I would have experienced using other OSs, so it's worth well more than the $40 or so the subscription costs a couple of times a year.

I realize not all of the money goes directly to the project, but Daemonnews has good people and I'm proud to support them as well.