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FreeBSD XP^H^H 4.5 available now
The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.
Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.
The FreeBSD folks have already done this, in very plain language.
For myself, I'm doing a cvsup now as I write this. Make world gonna start to cooking tomorrow night. I'm probably about 2 weeks behind the release as I try to update fairly regularly with the latest stuff.
The really good part about this is that all that stuff that's been held back for release is now gonna start flowing back into the ports tree and src directories. Yummy!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.
you need two floppies
kern.flp and mfsroot.flp
boot with them and choose a few menu items and it's off
all detailed at the freeBSD homepages of course
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
at last!!!1
now no fucking about with linux emulated Java
maybe now I can get java in Konqueror to work
and I know it's not new but maybe you linux heads might've missed it.
FreeBSD now has a third party script that will auto-update any ports you've installed.
cvs update to the lates ports list and run portupgrade -ra and ALL of your port instaleld software will be updated to the latest version and dependencies resolved and reset (and a tool pkgdb will do some pre upgrade checks)
It's great. I'm going on about it because I'm so impressed with it.
FreeBSD rocks
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
There will be a 4.6, and *possibly* a 4.7, but 5.0 will be -released before then. See this interview with one of the TrustedBSD developers for a good read on the status of 5.0. It also covers the fixes to 4.5.
I have been running an ISDN gateway with FreeBSD 4.2 on an AMD 5x86-133 which is roughly comparable to your Pentium 90 for some time. It works perfectly well. Compiling the operating system takes a bit long, but that's not much of a surprise.
ISDN support under FreeBSD is very convenient. It uses the isdn4bsd system, which is integrated into recent versions of FreeBSD. In my opinion, it's superior to Linux, partly because configuration is easier and partly because ituses user-mode ppp by default instead of kernel-based systems which are usually more difficult to configure and maintain. You have to see if your ISDN card is supported. Most passive cards are. Check the ISDN section of the FreeBSD handbook.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
Not all of the sites have the full set of files (yet), I had to hunt around a bit to find the '4.5-install.iso'.
Don't trust my math on transfer speeds?
(Yes, that transfer went via a proxy firewall)I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Part of 'secure by default' is that the base install omits a lot of fluff- this makes for quicker installs, and a smaller footprint.
One nice option for a firewall, there are plenty of cheap 64MB 'IDE FLASH ATA' devices showing up on Ebay, etc. These look like a laptop drive, work with any IDE controller, have no moving parts.Compared to FreeBSD, there are drawbacks, the most glaring being the lack of SMP support.
Also, OpenBSD's installation process can be intimidating the first few times through. Where Free makes it easy, Open makes you think about disk partitioning and other low-level issues.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
Using FreeBSD after experience with Linux is actually a good idea. You will find it a bit more challenging than Linux, but the rewards will be *improved* stability and performance in general. (From my experience in various situations, especially under heavy load).
:-P).
I know KDE2.2, XMMMS, and the MSN client will run fine. I also know most source-code apps will compile in general. Also, FreeBSD does have Linux binary compatibility (to an extent). However, if you don't thrash your machine much, you will probably prefer Linux.
In short, put some time into learning about it and FreeBSD really is a fantastic OS. I would recommend it to tech-savvy people anyday. And it's constantly getting better (not dying
--jquirke
This interview with Robert Watson describes many of the new 4.5-RELEASE features, and talks about how they relate to the much more advanced work in 5.0. He also talks about how the Linux development targets relate to those in FreeBSD, and says he reads linux-kernel regularly. It
sounds like 5.0 should be incredible.
FreeBSD has had a syncache for quite some time now; it has never been clear which of the two is technically superior.
Now FreeBSD implements both commonly accepted solutions; I haven't looked at the code enough to say for certain, but I'd assume that syn cookies would be used in order to avoid connection loss only during *very* high packet rates (10^5+ SYN packets/second) since the syn cache works fine up to those levels.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?
KDE2.2: yes
XMMS: yes
OpenGL: yes
GeForce2: yes, but not hardware accelerated. Fortunately, it is being worked on: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html
MSN client: ?, there are Jabber clients for instant messenging with MSN.
LaTeX: yes
Java: in a few days. It is standard with FreeBSD (they paid the licenses fees). It is v1.3.
Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes
I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.
I'd recommend giving a few hundred megs to a partition for FreeBSD. Since you're using your computer as a workstation, you won't see that much of a difference. It's not noticeably faster or more stable.
KDE, et. al. are just Unix programs. They work fine on BSD. The real difference is how you install it. Wait until you give the /usr/ports tree a try. The coolest way ever to install software.
*BSD is somewhat different from the Linuxes, especially RedHat. My last experience with RH was back at 6.2, but I got frustrated with its habit of tossing thing hither and thither all over the filesystem, and after my RH server was comprimised (buggy wu-ftp), I switched all my machines to Free and OpenBSD.
I, personally, prefer the BSD way of configuration, and I've been very happy since.
Potato chips are a by-yourself food.
You could just download the small (~200 MB)
install ISO and then get anything else you need
once the system is up.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
........the real Jordan Hubbard is user #3999, http://slashdot.org/~jkh/.
For those of you who missed the (as yet un-modded) AC above, this comment isn't the real Jordan Hubbard, and is thoroughly deserving of any Troll moderations it recieves.
It's a pretty damn good troll, though. Well crafted and subtle.
|>
Here be Dragons
The FreeBSD Java people now have a licence from Sun, but they have to go through a testing process before they are allowed distribute the system. It wasn't ready in time for 4.5.
For now, you have to download the source from Sun, apply patches, and build it.
Yes, give FreeBSD a try. But don't go in expecting it to be just another Linux distro, because it's not. It's a real Unix in all but name. If you read the manual you shouldn't have too many problems.
What are the differences? Well that depends. What specific Linux distro are you comparing it to? All the Linux distros are different, so you can't really compare it to Linux as a whole, because that's just the kernel. Some distros don't even use glibc.
Installation is similar to Slackware and Debian. You won't get a fancy GUI that routinely misdetects your video card. It's very straight forward, sensible, and chock full of help.
Administration is uses sysinstall, which happens to lead a double life as the installer. No need to learn two programs when one will do. Similar to YaST in that regard. But you can also edit everything by hand in vi, and sysinstall won't undo you changes. You won't have a SysV style init scripts, but BSD (duh!) style scripts instead. I prefer the latter as it's easier to learn and understand. Everything in the base system is configured in one file, rc.conf. Apache, Sendmail, etc., still have their own configuration files though.
Installing software is similar to Debian and Gentoo. There are precompiled packages available, but the standard way is to use ports, which automatically fetches source, builds and installs. Using the cvsup and portupgrade utilities, keeping your system up to date is simplicity.
The GNU utilities aren't standard, so if you learned Unix the GNU way you may be thrown for a loop now and then. But if you learned Unix the Unix way, then you'll feel right at home. sh and tcsh are the standard shells, but just install bash if that's what you want. I prefer bash at the command prompt, but I write my scripts for plain vanilla sh.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
To be honest, if you are just using workstation apps, and not really using it for anything like a nat box, or the 'server in the closet tha never gets turned off' , it's probably not worth your time.
I have to respectfully disagree. There's nothing that Linux can do that FreeBSD can't. So why is there this perception that Linux is suitable for a workstation but FreeBSD isn't?
KDE, GNOME, Xmms, StarOffice, Java, Mozilla, Wine, etc., etc. I'm using FreeBSD as my desktop at home and my workstation at work. I couldn't be happier.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There is support for this in -CURRENT and people have successfully manually backported a patch to -STABLE. Then again, the burncd utility that's included in -STABLE works just fine for IDE burning.
--
My comments and opinions completely reflect those of anyone and anything I am remotely associated with.