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

Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Check your local mirrors for the ISOs

and waste a lot of bandwidth in the process. cvsup is your friend.

Re:Why call it XP?

[Mister Snee]

For the record, logical partitions are a fictional creation of Microsoft and are extremely scary, unnecessary things which you should probably avoid when using a sane operating system. You can have up to four primary partitions -- extended partitions and "logical drives" exist to expand that. The (sane) idea was that, if you used your first three partitions and expansion to more was imminent or necessary, you'd throw an extended partition in the fourth and put as many logical drives in it as you needed. You know, hda1-4 ... then your logical drives are hda5 and up.

It's a nice idea but since MS-DOS you've only been allowed to make one primary partition, and after that you're forced to put in an extended partition and logical drives. Most operating systems need to be installed on a primary, so your best bet would be using the operating system in question to set up the partition table. Last I checked even XP won't let you add more than one primary partition, but I could be wrong.

I've had the same problem with Intel Solaris. Bleh.

Should I triy it?

[XRayX]

Should I, as a pretty experienced (Kernel compiling, configuration /etc) Linux User, give it a try?
I heard a lots of good things about FreeBSD, but how big are the differences to Linux (installation)?
X

Re:Should I triy it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Netcraft has confirmed: *BSD is dying

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered *BSD community when recently IDC confirmed that *BSD accounts for lss than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as further exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers.

Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.

OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.

Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS hobbyist dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

Fact: *BSD is dead

Re:Native JAVA

[billhuey]

It's being worked on by me and a number of other folks.

Native threading is in alpha and I'm currently working on the HotSpot compiler. ;-)

Linux is a better tinker-toy

[Pengo]

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. The nice thing about playing with it, you get a feel of something different, which is a good thing. Linux ,, redhat, is not the end-all be-all of server configurations.

I had a freebsd box sitting my in closet for about 18 months, until I got bored with it and install openbsd. BUT, I don't really do any xwindows stuff on it.. basically web serving, outgoing email gatway, nat, proxy, and the place where I build my Python programs and scripts.

I guess to summarize my experience, *BSD is not a workstation supliment, but more a compliment. It will sit there and do it's job without much headache. Thats good enough for me ;-)

Re:Why call it XP?

[Sj0]

"... I have absolutely no experiences (XP :) ..."
XP stand for experimental.
as in Microsoft Windows eXPerimental.

You....don't get out much, do you?

Rule number 1: If you need to explain the joke, especially in this crowd, it's probably not nearly as funny as you think it is.

Rule number 2: If you feel the need to send us the same joke again, at least make it original!

bad example:

XP stands for unknown(as in X) Piracy.