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FreeBSD 4.5 NOT Released (Updated)

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

38 of 173 comments (clear)

  1. Arrggg! by chrysalis · · Score: 2

    I just submitted a pr for an update of pure-ftpd to 1.0.8, in hope that would be merged before 4.5 was released.
    Too late :(

    --
    {{.sig}}
  2. FreeBSD 4.5 RC3 came out last night by Eugenia+Loli · · Score: 5, Informative

    Are you sure 4.5-FINAL was released? The RC3 came out just last night and the group was scheduling about RC4 next week. And now Slashdot is reporting on 4.5-Final? I am not sure if this is a fake or not... The FreeBSD web site has not been updated yet. Waiting...

    1. Re:FreeBSD 4.5 RC3 came out last night by XBL · · Score: 2

      In the meantime, go download Dano...right Eugenia? ;-)

  3. release notes by Phexro · · Score: 4, Insightful

    looks like the links on that page are broken, and it seems that 4.5-release hasn't made it's way out to all the ftp sites yet.

    in the mean time, here are the relnotes for 4.5-rc3 i386 alpha

  4. Hold your horses. by bwulf · · Score: 5, Informative

    Official release-date is Jan 26th, as can be seen here.

    Slashdot jumped the gun, again.

    You could try watching newvers.sh in CVS for a 4.5-RELEASE tag, or at least check the FTP sites.

    4.5 is still in Release Candidate 3, as far as I know.

    Keep an eye on the freebsd-announce list or the news page.

  5. Release: Jan 26th! by OctaneZ · · Score: 4, Informative

    Found this so amusing that it had to be posted in main thread:
    Jan 25, 2002
    Warn hubs@FreeBSD.org
    Heads up email to hubs@FreeBSD.org to give admins time to prepare for the load spike to come.

    /. ought to bring the spike in a little early. Also not that the packages aren't going to the ftp masters until tomorrow, the 25th, and the announcment and mirroring will occur on the 26th. Just a couple more days to wait for the next step in this great OS.

  6. Twelve Days of Codefreeze by kenneth_martens · · Score: 5, Funny
    On the very bottom of the FreeBSD 4.5 Release page, there the following: "It's been pointed out that this table is rather boring. Bruce Mah gave a slightly more interesting rendition of the 12 days of Code- Freeze. ".

    An excerpt from that poem:

    > As promised we've now entered the code freeze for RELENG_4. Please
    > submit all MFC requests to re@FreeBSD.org before committing to this
    > branch.

    For your hacking and/or holiday pleasure, I give you: "The Twelve Days of Code-Freeze"

    Sung to the tune of:"The Twelve Days of Christmas"
    Words by:bmah@freebsd.org

    On the first day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    A bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the second day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the third day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Three bikesheds,
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    On the fourth day of code-freeze, my -hackers gave to me:
    Four broken worlds,
    Three bikesheds,
    Two flamewars,
    And a bad patch in the src/ tree.

    Check this page for the rest.
  7. I'm pretty sure this is NOT TRUE! by eparusel · · Score: 4, Informative

    Here's a post by Murray Stokely on the FreeBSD-Stable list, at 2:07AM today:

    ==========
    Our third 4.5 release candidate is now available :

    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ 4. 5-RC3
    ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMAGES-i38 6/ 4.5-RC3-install.iso

    This release candidate fixes a number of issues that were reported
    with RC2. Installations from aic(4)-based PCMCIA devices should now
    be possible. For this RC, bge(4) was added to the GENERIC kernel and the
    txp(4) device was moved over to the MFSROOT as a module. This should
    allow network installations with Broadcom gigabit Ethernet
    adapters.[1] A number of suggestions about the package set were
    addressed with this RC, but unfortunately sawfish-gnome, fvwm2, and
    xfmail are still unavailable. There will be one final release
    candidate (RC4) before the final release is made available.

    The testing guide and release notes have been updated with a few new
    items :

    http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/qa.html
    http://www.freebsd.org/~bmah/relnotes

    Thanks,

    The FreeBSD 4.5 Release Engineering Team.

    [1] This functionality has not been committed to -STABLE yet, a small
    patch was patched to the build with "make release LOCAL_PATCHES=..".
    The patch is available at
    http://www.freebsd.org/~murray/patches/drivers.d if f, and simply turns
    on a new device for the boot floppy.
    ==========

    This seems a little fast, don't you think?
    Without 4.5-RC4 being released, and without an announcement on FreeBSD-Announce?

  8. Lower-profile changes that made it in by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative
    I administer a large cluster (please no jokes) of FreeBSD systems at work, and I was pleased to see that several changes that I had been tracking in the -STABLE branch finally made it into a release. Among them:
    • Code path optimizations. One particularly interesting change was that data destined for loopback interfaces (e.g. 127.0.0.1) bypass congestion control and the TCP sequencing code. Likewise for UDP - ICMP port unreachable messages and the like are actually determined within the syscall now, rather than being discrete messages that are bounced around in the kernel.
    • Filesystem fixes. We had been having some trouble with devfs and freevxfs on several machines, and the fixes that were checked into CVS a few weeks back fixed them. It is with pleasure that I note that those changes made it into 4.5-RELEASE.
    • Stability fixes. There were some minor issues with the use of -llinfo and the route syscall that would sometimes cause kernel panics. Since we use shell scripts to update routing tables many times an hour, we ran into this from time to time, and it is fixed now.
    • Usability improvements. The core team has emphasized the need to provide a more useful /proc filesystem, so that it can contain many discrete pieces of valuable system information like it does in Linux. Thus, new handlers for registering and unregistering nodes under /proc have been implemented (although they are not used yet).
    This is definitely the time to open your mind if you haven't already, and try using FreeBSD. It is stable, secure, reliable, and robust; it has grown into quite an excellent OS since the dog days of 3.0. Visit the mirrors and download an ISO today!

    </evangelism>

    freebsd guy

  9. Ummm.... by Flower · · Score: 2
    Checked the ftp site and I don't see it. RC3 is the most recent. The release schedule doesn't have it out until tomorrow and even then it isn't announced until the 26th after the mirrors have been updated.

    That information was on the very pages this story linked to. Can anybody link to something I ain't seeing 'cause right now this seems a little premature.

    --
    I don't want knowledge. I want certainty. - Law, David Bowie
  10. Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by jkh · · Score: 5, Informative

    First off, I didn't announce anything concerning 4.5 so it's a little odd to see "Jordon Hubbard writes..." [sic] when I did nothing of the kind. 4.5-RELEASE has NOT yet happened and all that Murray Stokely, the primary release engineer, has announced is the availability of release candidate image #3. As we go along the FreeBSD release process, it's customary for the project to release release candidate images for pre-testing so that the final version will be as bug-free as possible and hopefully without any of the sort of brain-os which get caught in the first few hours of testing.

    Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax. :)

    --
    - Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
    1. Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by selectspec · · Score: 4, Troll

      What's bizarre is not so much that this is hoax, but that a website managed by such incompetent idiots can be so successful.

      --

      Someone you trust is one of us.

    2. Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      Why's everbody always picking on you?

      I remember one day at Fry's there was a sign saying "Linux Day! Guest speaker Jordan Hubbard!"

      I just wanted to curl up and die after that. So I attended the Video Conference, and some dumb lady kept bugging you abou getting her Epson printer working in Linux. I was about ready to tell her to shut the "F" up.

      FreeBSD is a great OS, and I wish OSX the best of luck in bettering the computer world.

    3. Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by Anonymous+DWord · · Score: 4, Funny

      Finally, my first name is spelled "Jordan", like the river. A sure sign that this was a hoax. :)

      Well, I don't know. That's what gave it validity, I thought. If it had been spelt correctly, on the other hand, there's no way I'd believe it!

      --
      "If he thinks he can hide and run from the United States and our allies, he's sorely mistaken." Bush on bin Laden
    4. Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by Forkenhoppen · · Score: 2

      I don't know about the idiot part, but I concur with the incompetent accusation.

      Someone mod this guy up.

    5. Re:Erm, OK, this is bizarre... by krappie · · Score: 4, Insightful
      What's bizarre is not so much that this is hoax, but that a website managed by such incompetent idiots can be so successful.

      What's bizarre is not so much that this website is so successful, but that idiots who frequent it and post can complain about how successful it is.

  11. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by XBL · · Score: 2

    Mac OS X is based off of FreeBSD 3.5, if I remember correctly. Maybe eventually they will move to the 4.x series for Mac OS X, but they apparently wanted to use something time-tested (aka old).

  12. It's not dead! by La1d · · Score: 4, Funny

    It is now official - Slashdot has confirmed: *BSD is alive and thriving

    Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered AC crowd when Slashdot reported that FreeBSD has released a new version. This comes right on the heels of freeBSD going home, when Wind River and FreeBSD Mall Inc. published a joint press-release today announcing the sale of Wind River's FreeBSD assets to Bob Bruce, founder of Walnut Creek CDROM--the company that in 1993 first published FreeBSD. This was the company that almost a decade ago declared to the world that *BSD is alive and thriving!

    The FreeBSD Mall web site has been redesigned, with many new products, including FreeBSD CDs, books, polo shirts, microfiber jackets, boxer shorts, bumper stickers, lapel pins, several different styles of t-shirts, mouse pads, travel mugs, buttons, sticker sheets, plate logos, denim shirts, CD cases, and paid support options.

    FreeBSD and its close relatives NetBSD and OpenBSD all are open-source projects, meaning that anyone can see, change and distribute the underlying source code.

    With the main FreeBSD distribution back in the hands of the record holding Free Software distributor Bob Bruce, trolls posting that *BSD is dead had better keep the "anonymous" in "anonymous coward."

    --
    -- La1d, killed by a newt, while helpless.
  13. Re:Release Notes Missing by mr · · Score: 2, Informative
    Is it me, or do you have to be a bit brave or stupid to run an operating system that can't even provide working links to it's release notes?


    Is it me, or do you believe anything that is printed on /. as true?


    It could be worse, it could be RedHat. Where you get experimental C compilers shipped with the OS, or have a NEW filesystem (extfs3) then not update the file systems man page (fs). And, provide no man pages or documentation in the .pdf's on how to make an extfs3 file system after you have made the system.


    I'll take FreeBSD, and look to www.freebsd.org for any release info, not /.

    --
    If it was said on slashdot, it MUST be true!
  14. Re:Release Notes Missing by mosch · · Score: 2

    Are you suggesting that slashdot posted misinformation, when they made an article titled 'FreeBSD 4.5 Released'? Come on, we all know that web journalism and the slashdot editorial team make for higher quality reporting than traditional media. That must be true, i read it on slashdot!

  15. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by jkh · · Score: 5, Informative

    A number of the ongoing improvements in FreeBSD-stable (from which 4.5 will come) have indeed been making it into Mac OS X.

    Apple is also not syncronizing its Darwin releases with those of FreeBSD from a timing perspective, but technologies are certainly being shared between them. Apple has also been providing stuff back, with the recent filesystem exerciser utility that Apple provided being used to find a number of bugs in FreeBSD's NFS and softupdates code. It's all good, man!

    --
    - Jordan Hubbard co-founder, the FreeBSD Project. Director, UNIX Technology. Apple Computer
  16. Re:What is a "bikeshed"? by warlock · · Score: 4, Informative

    It's in the FAQ. do check it out!

  17. Re:What is a "bikeshed"? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Insightful

    The color of a bikeshed is what 99% of all Linux developers spend their time worrying about.

  18. Don't you mean... by sulli · · Score: 4, Funny

    from the yhbt-yhl-hand dept. ?

    --

    sulli
    RTFJ.
  19. Re:FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE is NOW Self Powered !! by imp · · Score: 2
    Keeping up with rescent trends in technology and always not to be outdone, FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE now comes with the 'Self-Power' option.

    ...

    All that is needed is a 9V battery to kick start the system into effect

    Actually, you misunderstand. The Self-Power option is so that FreeBSD can be the first OS to ship in the "potateo powered web server" configuration out of the box, rather than needing patches to the base OS to do that.

    :-)

  20. Journalistic Accuracy by Cato+the+Elder · · Score: 4, Insightful

    So, which is worse:

    Making a few errors and not featuring corrections so prominently

    Making so many errors that are so basic that people find out within minutes, but at least you post corrections fast too.

    Just a thought, vis a vis michaels article yesterday.

  21. I just killed my 4.4 download, you bastards! by warpSpeed · · Score: 2, Funny

    I was half way done with a 4.4 ISO download. Saw this, said "whoohoo", clicked cancel. Then I read it was a fake.... yeah real funny.

    1. Re:I just killed my 4.4 download, you bastards! by Fweeky · · Score: 2

      rsync is good for updating iso's; grab the 4.4 and when it's done and you really want a 4.5 iso, rsync your 4.4 one and just get the changes.

      Not that there's much point; the first thing most people (well, me, anyway :) do when their system's up and running is cvsup /usr/src and /usr/ports and rebuild everything to the latest -STABLE. Checking out like that ensures you only get the diffs, too, so the latest iso release isn't that useful..

      While we're on the subject; don't even think about putting cvsup on a cron, at least not on one that runs a lot. cvsup is very I/O intensive, so hammering the servers constantly with no real reason to do so doesn't help anyone.

      http://freshports.org/ is a nice way to keep track of when to bother updating /usr/ports.

  22. speaking of freebsd... by siliconincdotnet · · Score: 4, Informative

    For those that havent already fixed it, a patch was just released for the race condition in 4.4. Get patch here:

    ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/CERT/patches/S A- 02:08/exec.patch

    --
    Insert witty .sig here
  23. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by toupsie · · Score: 2

    So are you happy at Apple? As a dedicated Mac OS X user, I am expecting big things from you! Let us know if you need a Jolt Cola, Nerf Gun or one of those desktop fridges to help you bust out more code during the day...

    --
    Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
  24. Comedy's on you, Hemos by innit · · Score: 3, Informative

    Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

    Yeah, like heaven forbid you should actually verify stories before you put them up ... to suggest such a thing would be pure heresy I'm sure.

    Stuii!

  25. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by 90XDoubleSide · · Score: 3
    Darwin 1.4.1 is based on BSD 4.4. NeXTSTEP was based on BSD 4.3, so I don't know how you could think Darwin was based on 3.5.From the latest Ask the Darwin Team:

    "Darwin is an open source, UNIX-based operating system built on BSD 4.4 and Mach 3.0 which forms the core of Mac OS X."

    --
    "Reality is just a convenient measure of complexity" -Alvy Ray Smith
  26. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by XBL · · Score: 3, Informative

    I am talking about the FreeBSD distribution... not the BSD 4.4 OS. There is a big difference there!

  27. Re:*Linux is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    BSD is dying! If you look at the number of curly braces in the code you'll see that linux and solaris have a lot more. Why? Because they make more code blocks. If FreeBSD has 2.03x10^5 '{' characters, and OpenBSD, because they're so anal, have twice as many, then that means that *BSD only has a few hundred thousand when you put them all together. This, coupled with the fact that the Taliban have collapsed and NATO is still together leads one to the unavoidable conclusion that Windows is dying!

    I mean, BSD.

  28. News verification team, come in please... by Vexler · · Score: 3, Funny

    So I guess the earlier /. news article about the Irishman solving the zero-point energy problem was actually true? *grin*

  29. Yeah. The oh well guy again. by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 3, Funny

    I'm running FreeBSD 6.8-RELEASE, and it's the greatest piece of software ever made. As an operating system, it's a lean, mean serving machine. For example, my 386 SX with 4 megs of RAM typically serves about 10,000 FTP users simultaneously. And X Window System, running KDE and GNOME simultaneously, along with about a thousand highly intensive applications, continue to run and function with perfect responsiveness. In fact, I could probably run twice the load, and it would make everything execute even faster.

    "This is because I'm from the future. I came here in a time machine that you invented. Now I need your help to get back to the year 1985."

    "Hmmm... Mr. Anderson. You disappoint me."

    "You can't scare me with this gestapo crap. I know my rights, I want my fluxcapacitor back."

    "Well, tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a fluxcapacitor, if you're, unable, to flux?"

    ***** OK! OK! JUST KIDDING! *****

    The release of FreeBSD 4.5 is just around the corner. The good folks in core are doing a marvelous job, and I am confident that this release will be the best yet, and that as always, the next one following this will be even better.

    As it is, amazing improvements have been made to the system since 4.4-RELEASE. I know because that's what my production servers are running right now, but for my desktop, I like to use -STABLE, which is pretty darn good.

    Oh well.

  30. VCD and DAO by Satai · · Score: 2, Interesting

    One of the things I was hoping was that the changes to the built-in CD burning utility would be fixed.

    FreeBSD evidently doesn't have a SCSI/IDE emulation layer, so applications like cdrdao don't work with any IDE burners. It does have a very nice and intuitive IDE burning utility, called burncd, that works for most things. I even set it up to burn dreamcast CDs.

    However, it lacks one thing I really want - the ability to burn VCDs. I wouldn't have asked for it, since I'm certainly not qualified to program it myself, but it was added to -CURRENT last December, along with disc-at-once capabilities.

    I was rather hoping it'd make it into 4.5, but I guess I'll just have to hope for it to hit 4.6. ;-) I'd use -CURRENT except that I don't feel comfortable with my skills quite yet.

  31. Re:FreeBSD and MacOS X? by sabi · · Score: 2, Informative

    FreeBSD 4.4 is currently being merged into OS X/Darwin, as you'd see if you kept up with the Darwin developer lists and/or the public Darwin bugs site (which is very interesting reading, for me at least). Here's a bug from yesterday, in fact, that mentions it.