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.

Comments

Re:Where's the DVD

[Metrol]

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!

Native JAVA

[DrSkwid]

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

Re:Native JAVA

[Metrol]

I normally don't comment on moderations, but what in the heck got the above message mod'd to a troll? Not only was nothing insulting in that post, he hit on some great points.

Having to deal with Linux emulated Java does suck. It doesn't integrate well with desktop apps that are compiled to run native on FreeBSD, like Konqueror or Mozilla. It's out of date, thus impacting stand alone apps like JEdit and server side apps as well. It'll be nice to see that Linux emulated Java yanked from the port tree. This is NOT about whether Linux is good or bad.

The "third-party" script being referred to is an implementation of even greater automation with installing and updating apps. The two key commands involved are "portupgrade" and "portinstall". For you Debian kinda folks this should look awful familiar...

portinstall gnome
portupgrade gimp

Essentially, an even smarter handling of apps building up from the infrastructure of the ports tree rather than trying to replace it. It works smooooooth too. apt-get, eat your heart out :)

Coupled with cvsup for keeping things all up to the minute, FreeBSD does rock!

Good experience with ISDN/FreeBSD

[absurd_spork]

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.

Robert Watson's interview about the release

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[cperciva]

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.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Ded Bob]

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.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Thornae]

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.