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

freebsd is good

[Anonymous Coward]

I've tried FreeBSD 4.4 and since then, it hasn't left my laptop and my desktop.
I like the fact that it is coherent and most of all, the stability missing from most linux distribution is amazing.

Good job!

Re:freebsd is good

[essdodson]

I can't remember the last time that I've heard a BSD person of any status directly attack Linux. Linux is decent software, the problem lies with the licensing schemes. Have you actually tried it? Perhaps you'd understand why most BSD users rave about BSD and rarely mention Linux.

Cool topic

[jrz]

Don't you just love the DEL/BS thing?

Why call it XP?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you call it XP? Anyway, I recently tried to install 4.4 on my Windows XP laptop. I used Partition Magic to shrink the NTFS partition, added a couple logical partitions, and when it came time to install, found out that BSD doesn't even recognize the logical partitions. Something about "slices". Settled for SuSE (which ain't all that, IMHO) Should I reconsider FreeBSD now? I run RedHat 7.2 on my desktop. (RedHat 7.2 and Mandrake 8.1 weren't easy to set up on the laptop either)

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

I think you should try to install the FreeBSD-partition slice onto a primary partition. The partition contains all subslices, which the system is installed onto (/, /usr, /var etc.). I have absolutely no experiences (XP :) with FreeBSD on laptops - the hardware acceleration for for instance X might be a problem (console should run fine).

Regards

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.

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

Yes, Microsoft really rapes the harddrives of your computer with these incompatible solutions and filesystem standards. But as usual, it's a very common Microsoft-stratetegy - unfortunately.

Apropos Solaris ...
I have a copy of Intel Solaris 8 (acquired at CeBIT 2001) at home. I've tried to install it onto my AMD K6-II machine, but the kernel "crashes" during my installation tries. That really disappointed me! Are there any sites on the internet or books, which can help me solve this problem?

Re:Why call it XP?

[Mister Snee]

I feel your pain. :P Just about all the nightmares I've had with Solaris 8 were in installation. In some ways it can be as much of a partition nazi as any Microsoft OS (which made setting up the Win2k/Solaris multi-boot machines for a college lab a real joy...) and even with the filesystem aside it seems to try to foil you in every way possible.

The Intel Solaris installation process is one of those things that can just go wrong in so many different ways that I'd be remiss to even wager a guess of what could be causing the crash. ;) I guess it's a misnomer for your AMD, but there's a pretty decent Solaris on Intel FAQ out there. I don't know if it'll directly solve your problem but it's helped me out a bit in the past so it's probably worth a look.

Re:Why call it XP?

[dohcvtec]

You're on the right track resizing your NTFS partition, but you need to simply leave empty space on the disk for FreeBSD. That will make it happy (same for you :)

Re:Why call it XP?

[Ded Bob]

I believe FreeBSD does not do logical partitions--features sneak past me all the time. :) Read this section in the handbook: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/install-steps.html

Basically, what most OS's refer to as a partition is a BSD slice. A BSD partition is just a sub-slice.

Here is a clip of it:

Each partition-that-contains-a-filesystem is stored in what FreeBSD calls a slice. Slice is FreeBSD's term for what were earlier called partitions, and again, this is because of FreeBSD's Unix background. Slices are numbered, starting at 1, through to 4.

Slice numbers follow the device name, prefixed with an s, starting at 1. So ``da0s1'' is the first slice on the first SCSI drive. There can only be four physical slices on a disk, but you can have logical slices inside physical slices of the appropriate type. These extended slices are numbered starting at 5, so ``ad0s5'' is the first extended slice on a disk. These devices are used by file systems that expect to occupy a slice.

Re:Why call it XP?

[aje]

It it possible with a Duron-based system instead? I know, K6 is a very old and slow processor-design, but anyway it is 100% Intel-compatible... maybe it could be my motherboard or disk-subsystem? (IDE, onboard)

Thanks for the urls ... I'll look at it!

Regards

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.

Re:Why call it XP?

[jo42]

Noop. You got it all wrong.

XP stands for eXtreme Poop.

This is a very lame joke.

[Eskimo Bob]

Did you know that a simple name change could get more people to try FreeBSD, or at least get 'em interested in it.

FreeBDSM... Sure, they'd all be perferts, but hell... a user's a user.

Lame joke, I know. but I warned you.

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Basje]

Gives a whole new meaning to the term 'power user'. Lame again, I admit

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Max von H.]

Did you know that a simple name change could get more people to try FreeBSD, or at least get 'em interested in it.

Do OS X, Apple or Mac ring a bell?

/max

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[stevey]

Not to mention (re)booting, powering down, and hot-mounting USB toys ..

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[yobbo]

hot (partner) swapping

okay that one sucked :(

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[Eskimo Bob]

Sorry, I don't know what a "Mac" is. Unless you mean the trucks.

And an Apple is something you eat, right? or is it a record company?

OS X? Not sure what that is, but I do know a guy named Oz X. Dongswiller. The X stands for Ignacious. He's odd.

I read slashdot using an Etch-a-sketch, the original laptop, that I managed to install the Amiga OS on. Hooray for me!

Re:This is a very lame joke.

[c_g_hills]

I really hope they will port it to the PC platform. It will bring together the user-friendliness of windows along with the stability of Unix :o)

Where's the DVD

[satanami69]

I thought they were making this on a bootable DVD? Isn't that the point of having access to the company's DVD burner. Daily archives be damned, I wanna play with a new OS on a single disk!

Oh well, I guess I'll just erase some Corel Linux CD-RW's.

Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.

Re:Where's the DVD

[gladbach]

interesting question. I wonder if they would make a dvd size iso... probably not, but maybe. I am willing to bet you have to buy it to get the dvd.

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!

Re:Where's the DVD

[DrSkwid]

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

Re:Where's the DVD

[essdodson]

FreeBSD is still available on one CD. You don't need all the discs in order to use FreeBSD. They even have a sub 200mb lite disc available.

Re:Where's the DVD

[Metrol]

There's no escaping the simple truth: FreeBSD is a failure.

Ahh man. I got mod'd down as a troll for agreeing with the fella that said you'd be around. Keep up the good work! A FreeBSD article just isn't a FreeBSD article without the "FreeBSD is Dead" guy.

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:Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[The_Rift]

I was going on the principle that people who are allready running FreeBSD would know about CVSup and linked to the mirrors for the newbies.

Re:Check you local mirrors for the ISOs?

[The_Rift]

Is it even possible to do an install from CVS? I think it's fairly obvious the original poster was talking about upgrading.

Cute topic...

[Agent Green]

Though, I personally would have saved the XP comment for when FreeBSD 5.0 gets released sometime during Q4 this year.

If it weren't for the uptime on my server, (64 days...upgraded the mobo again), I'd be working on this one right now!

syncookies? only now?

[chrysalis]

I'm surprised to see that a new feature of that release is... syncookies. Doesn't Linux (and probably a lot of other OS) have that for years? Syn floods is a very old attack, and I can't understand why FreeBSD only implements syncookies now.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Pengo]

A) if you where to really setup a firewall to battle attacks/dos, etc, I would recomend OpenBSD. Second, you can compile into the kernel IPFilter which does support a stateful firewall configuration as well as acception and denyal of TCP packets based on the flag (SYN/ACK/FYN) etc. Once the rule has been accepted, the end packet stream is accepted into the state. I believe this is the same thing as syn-cookie, only better.) I hope someone reading this will give a bit more insight into the issue, because IANAFE (firewall expert).

In my experience the IPF and PF firewall configurations are the most simple, flexible and powerful to use, and can be found on freebsd and openbsd and probably the others.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[helixblue]

Yes, in fact, I remember quite clearly when Linux 2.0 got syncookies. I'd wager 2.0.27 or 2.0.28. The syncookies implementation was totally awful. I was a pretty newbie sysadmin at the time, and whenever someone checked POP3 mail on our mailserver.. it'd warn us about sending syn cookies, and that all the students were attacking the mailserver whenever they loaded Microsoft Internet Mail.

I didn't quite know what syncookies were. I just knew I didn't want them anymore after that. If it was an option in FreeBSD at that time, I would have laughed at the option, and subsequently turned it off. After other issues in 2.0.28 (was Linus drunk?), I tried FreeBSD by suggestion of my brother. Been pretty happy since.

I'm sure the issues I had have been long fixed in the Linux tree, and should be in the new FreeBSD implementation, I hope. :)

I'd check the CVS commits on the Linux kernel to give more precise info of the syncookies, but I can't seem to find them linked from http://www.linux.org/

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:syncookies? only now?

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

I'm not sure how you went from syncookies to OpenBSD, but you did mention stateful inspection, so flame on!

Stateful Inspection(tm), stateful inspection, and TCP flag checks are not all the same thing. The INSPECT engine included in FireWall-1 is a dynamically-programmable state machine, capable of semi-complicated connection state tracking over a variety of connection-oriented (e.g. TCP) and connectionless (e.g. UDP) protocols. INSPECT is, in some form or another, patented. IPFILTER 's keep state clause (and IPFW's dynamic rules using the keep-state clause and the check state rule) also tracks connection state, but only for ICMP, UDP, and TCP, and it can only be changed by re-compiling the appropriate C code.

Here's the rant part: SIMPLY CHECKING TCP FLAGS IS NOT STATEFUL INSPECTION!! It's sometimes called stateless inspection and it means that a decision to pass or block a packet is decided on the characteristics of that packet alone. Allowing J. Random TCP packet to go through the firewall with a cursory check of the headers means I can do FIN or ACK scans through your firewall, and if you've got it set up to only log connection attempts, the scans won't even be logged. Suck!

As for stop denial of service attacks (aside: I hope to God I'm not the only person who has to figure out whether a person means the operating system or the network attack every time he sees those three letters), the only way to do that is to implement proper ingress AND egress filters on the gateway firewall or router. Needless to say, this is complicated, so most people don't bother.

Only you can prevent forest fires and improperly configured firewalls.

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Pengo]

No flaming, just would like to know more..

SIMPLY CHECKING TCP FLAGS IS NOT STATEFUL INSPECTION!! It's sometimes called stateless inspection and it means that a decision to pass or block a packet is decided on the characteristics of that packet alone.

Well, based on what you just said.. I still am ok. My rules basically states, only allow the packet into the state if it a) meets the port/proto requirements, b) meets the TCP Flags (S/SA). You seem to know what your talking about , so I am asking.. wouldn't that block a FIN/ACK scan through the firewall, being that the state wouldn't be established unless you met the criteria?

Cheers

Re:syncookies? only now?

[Xenophon Fenderson,]

The rule you describe (only allow S/SA and keep state) would indeed block a FIN or ACK scan.

For example, I have the following IPFILTER rule installed on my firewall:

pass in log first quick on fxp0 proto tcp from any to 10.63.1.1 port = 3389 flags S keep state keep frags group 132 # wtsrv

This allows the initial SYN packet in, and tracks state from there on out. The next packet it allows through the firewall must be a SYNACK, and the packets following that must be ACKs, RSTs, or FINs. Once it sees the terminating FIN or RST, it removes the connection from the dynamic state. If it doesn't complete the handshake (SYN, SYNACK, ACK), the dynamic rule times out pretty quickly. If it does complete the handshake, I think the default timeout is on the order of a few days.

Sorry about the flame bit. It's just that so many people mis-understand stateful firewall rules that I try to explain it to avoid people getting confused.

FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[AntipodesTroll]

It turns out it is a good thing that 5.0-CURRENT was frozen, and they concentrated on 4.X STABLE. It means I dont have to worry about changing to a new 5.X branch.

It was kinda annoying that the FreeBSD guys obsoleted 3.X so quickly, they had only really just fixed the glaring issues with the ATA driver corruption problem and other important issues (that affected my use of FreeBSD 3.4 for fileserving) and then they went and obsoleted it.

If 4.X stays as the most current tree in STABLE for another year, hell, another 2 years, I for one will be happy. I dont see the 1-year cycle for major number increments as much really other than ticking over the most siginificant version-numbers. Stuff that gets MFC'd from CURRENT is usually good enough for STABLE, Look at Linus, he dosent feel a need to tick over the major version numbers for Linux. I'd stay with FreeBSD 4.x if it goes all the way to (say) 4.7 or 4.8.

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[neroz]

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.

Re:FreeBSD 4.x STABLE branch.

[essdodson]

5.0-CURRENT was never frozen.

Time to give it a try?

[John Betonschaar]

Maybe I should really check out the FreeBSD FAQ & site & stuff, but hey, there's a lot of experts around here who can help me out, so I'll throw it in anyways:

Is it worthwhile for me to try FreeBSD now? I've already installed Win 95/98/2000, RedHat, Slackware,Suse,Debian & BeOS before and I still have an unfinished Linux from scratch install lurking around, but until now only Debian, Slack & Win 2000 stayed on long enough to make real use of them. ATM I'm running Debian w/KDE2.2 and I'm really happy with it, but hey, I still have a free 2Gig partition.

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?

The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion ;-)

Re:Time to give it a try?

[CatherineCornelius]

If you've delved as far as Linux-from-scratch and are happy with Debian and Slackware, you might like to have a look at the Debian-BSD mailing list. There was an article here about it around a week ago. Most of the work going on is around a NetBSD port, but others are working on a FreeBSD port. It's at a very early stage where they're still debating what to do about libc (BSD) versus libc6 (GNU) dependencies in packages.

The list archives are here.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[jquirke]

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).

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 :-P).

--jquirke

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:Time to give it a try?

[rho]

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.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[hawk]

>Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes

SMP is not lacking, at least for x86.

>I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.

yes, and FreeBSD's loader can handle linux partitions.

hawk

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Quill_28]

I am not an Unix expert, nor a programming one. I played around with Linux for a couple years on a casual basis. I have been working with FreeBSD for about 6 months. I like FreeBSD much better,nothing against Linux glad it's doing well, I just prefer FreeBSD. Some reasons: I got frustrated in all the different flavors of Linux. Do I use RPM or .deb's. Red Hat seems to have their own way of doing things. Along with this the documentation on Linux is harder to follow because of this. Again, if I wasn't a newbie it might not be a big deal. Also, the installation(at least using broadband) it much easier than Linux. I have found ports very easy to use, much easier than Linux, where there always seemed to be a dependency issue. Again, my inexperience may play a role in this opinion. FreeBSD seems to be better server OS than Linux. Linux seems to be a better workstation OS than FreeBSD. My Linux friends tell there are much more end-user apps available but I really just want X-Windows, web browser, e-mail, and a development envirnoment. I am not interested in doing cd-burning, mp3 players, graphic design, and the like. Sorry for the random thoughts, in all I just really like FreeBSD. Take it for what it's worth.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Ded Bob]

> > Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes

> SMP is not lacking, at least for x86.

He was asking about extra performance of FreeBSD over Linux. I wanted him to know that SMP is not quite up to par. As he did not mention SMP, I believe he will see very nice performance. I just didn't want others to assume SMP was stellar. When 5.0 comes out, I will have to consider getting me an SMP box.

> > I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.

> yes, and FreeBSD's loader can handle linux partitions.

Well, he did ask if LILO worked with FreeBSD. Personally, I use FreeBSD's loader.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[essdodson]

I've never seen a situation where FreeBSD's bootloader has failed anyone using multiple OS's, it's very easy to install and 90% of the time needs no configuration.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[__past__]

Of course, you actually can run Java on FreeBSD - either in the Linuxulator, or even a native one. (Compiled on your machine! With your optimizations! Yay!)

The sad point is that it's a pain to install, due to licensing problems. To have native Java, you have to install the linux compat libs (basically a mini-RedHat), a linux-JDK, accept a NDA from Sun and download the JDK source, download a patch, and finally compile it. Of course, the last two parts aren't scriptable.

<flaimbait>Hopefully this problems go away when this propriatary Java shit is replaced by an open standard like C# and .NET</flaimbait>

Re:Time to give it a try?

[scrytch]

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?

Yes, yes, no, yes, yes, sorta. Most apps for linux compile for freebsd out of the box, and if they don't, you just type 'linux bash' at a shell and install a redhat rpm. nVidia is never going to release a driver for freebsd, closed or otherwise (don't start with OSX, it's not even close to the same thing at that level), or sufficient specs to write one. There's native Java now, but I doubt they'll port a retrograde version -- it should be backward compatible anyway.

The whole FreeBSD approach does appeal to me, so I'm definitely interested in trying, but only if it has a real chance becoming my primary LILO partion ;-)

We may yet see the death of LILO and it won't be too soon. FreeBSD's bootloader is comparable to GRUB and then some. It'll load Linux just fine as well.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Arandir]

they're still debating what to do about libc (BSD) versus libc6 (GNU) dependencies in packages.

Why don't they just get a big stick and beat anyone over the head who doesn't code to the standards? That why you never need to worry about which brand of libc you're using. Frankly, everything in the FreeBSD ports tree that I've tried compiles just fine under libc. Even the GNU stuff.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[dcs]

Not sure if it would be worth your time trying FreeBSD. But if you do, PLEASE get rid of LILO! :-)

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

Your /. ID isn't terribly high, so I assume you've been here for a while. How is it that after dozens and dozens of BSD stories that people still don't know a damned thing about it? Unix, for the most part, is Unix. There's nothing Linux about KDE, XMMS, etc. Linux and "Open Source" are used together in sentences all the time by people who never give a moment's thought to ./configure && make install and frankly it scares me.

And now you ask if LaTeX! of all things is on FreeBSD? Dude, TeX (and friends) are OLDER than Linux! So is the X Window System!

The answer to your question "is it worthwile to try FreeBSD now?" can be found by asking YOURSELF that question. Is it worthwile? Would you gain anything? Not just in performance or stability, but would you maybe learn anything in the process? Would you maybe even find that you just 'like it' better and switch completely? Is spending the time learning another OS (course, it's still Unix so as long as you don't go into it with preconceptions it'll be easy) worth any rewards you may gain?

This goes for anything, and not just FreeBSD, and not just Operating Systems and computers.

Tis better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

"my Linux friends tell me there are much more end-user apps available [for Linux]"

That's an ignorant myth. A most there are (_literally_) a *few* more apps because of commercial software companies that sell closed source applications.

Thankfully, FreeBSD can run these as well under it's Linux ABI compatibility.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

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.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Lazaru5]

Most apps for Linux ARE NOT "Apps for Linux". That's why they'll compile. And nVidia OpenGL support is working (though not in the install yet.) See other comments under this story for details and link.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[CatherineCornelius]

Why don't they just get a big stick and beat anyone over the head who doesn't code to the standards? That why you never need to worry about which brand of libc you're using.

Perhaps I should clarify: the question at hand is mainly about dynamic linking dependencies in .deb binary packages. You're right to state that properly written C source code doesn't cause any problems with either libc. It's also the case that the NetBSD libc contains several libraries that are normally packaged outside libc6 in GNU userlands.

Some of the source packages also have dependencies on, say, libc6-dev, and this has to be rethought where the package will compile perfectly well in the BSD environment with no GNU libc at all.

Re:Time to give it a try?

[Quill_28]

It really dosn't matter to me, because I don't own a burner. Play mp3 off my win box, and suck at graphics :/

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Metrol]

Hey now, you forgot all about the "Slashdot isn't Freshmeat" bitcher.

Not to fear I suppose, the clown and the bitcher will be around eventually. Death, taxes, and trolls.

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

[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. ;-)

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!

Re:Native JAVA

[infinii]

I recently upgraded to 4.5-RC. When installing the /usr/ports/java/jdk13 port, it forced me to install linux-jdk13 first.

With this native JAVA, does it mean we don't need linux-jdk anymore? Should I cvsup and reinstall my port?

Re:Native JAVA

[DrSkwid]

y the troll thing got me wondering too

I've had two in two days that patently aren't

must've pissed someone off

I don't care though, I'm in the 45-50 cap zone anyway.

Sure Debian might have the upgrading problem sorted out
(but actually I doubt it's as good tbh but that's pure speculation)
but the other distro's don't.

The java thing is annoying for me as I've got a project waiting for a java applet and I can't get konq to use java.

For me FreeBSD brings me consistency and ease of use. Linux has the light but so what, strength to your Penguin. I moved from slackware to FreeBSD (sadly via NT 3.5-4!). I tried Debian but didn't get along with it. My real OS of choice is plan9 but I won't go on.

Re:Native JAVA

[drachen]

Yes, that's exactly what you should do.

Just cvsup then:
cd /usr/ports/java/jdk && make all install clean

and then to get JFC (Swing):
cd /usr/ports/java/jfc && make all install clean

Source of these instructions.

More info on Java for FreeBSD.

Re:Native JAVA

[drachen]

While my other comment regarding the jdk was correct, in regards to your question "does it mean we don't need the linux-jdk anymore?" which I neglected to answer. Yes it still depends on linux-jdk for compilation purposes as evidenced by the port's Makefile.

cvsup!

[mat.h]

Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.

Or save some bandwidth and point cvsup to the RELENG_4_5 branch on your local cvsup mirror.

Something the release notes don't mention: Could someone please clue me in on the state of native Java on FreeBSD? There was an announcement in late December but I haven't heard from it since then. Having to install the Linux JDK to build a FreeBSD JDK can't be the last word.

Re:cvsup!

[Bender Unit 22]

Yes, good idea.
I just wish I could get it to work. I tried to follow the instructions in the handbook, It was clearly written by someone who knew a lot about how it worked, but, at least for me, the entire message did not come across. I guess if you already into it, the manual is pretty clear.

Re:cvsup!

[lertl]

Concerning native Java: According to this interview with Robert Watson it will be available shortly ofter 4.5-RELEASE. He says "it's in final conformance testing". HTH.

Re:cvsup!

[bmoyles]

This is a decent explanation:
http://www.freebsddiary.org/current.php
Check out
http://www.freebsddiary.org/makeworld-script.php
for a nice makefile that pretty much does everything you need to upgrade too.

Re:cvsup!

[Bender Unit 22]

Hmm thanks,
I have just made a backup of my least important box. And it's now working on it.
I just had to update cvsup first, due to that "CVSup 1000000000 Second Bug". D'oh.

Can't wait to see if it will boot. :)

Re:cvsup!

[__past__]

Not that I really know what I'm talking about (hey - this is slashdot!), but I would guess that you will at least still need a binary JDK to actually build your native one. Quite a lot of important JDK tools are themselves written in Java (even Javac, IIRC), so you need some JDK to bootstrap.

You probably won't need Linux emulation any more, though. pkg_add -r name_of_native_jdk should suffice.

Re:Firewall?

[Pengo]

try open bsd. I am running it on my nat firewall (cable) and it runs in very modest settings. (I am running on a p100 w/32 megs ram and base install was 60 megs). You can install it from floppy disk over ISDN in an afternoon. (Look at the web site www.openbsd.org for install howto).

Insulting title

[Anonymous Coward]

One would think that after they entirely fucked up the first story, they could treat the second one with a bit of respect. But no, Nik had to go and give it that insulting article title.

Re:Insulting title

[Nik]

http://www.earthstation1.com/pgs/wbcartoons/des-it s_a_jo.wav.html

Re:Here's the text before it got slashdotted...

[Metrol]

FreeBSD get Slashdotted? What, you think they're hosting on Windows or something?

Move along unfunny troll, move along.

4.4 installer

[boltar]

I love FreeBSD and wish I'd discovered it years ago instead of messing around with Linux worrying
about distribution problems but.... frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.
I hope they've fixed it for 4.5. It was the only thing that cast a cloud on the 4.4 release.

Re:4.4 installer

[gladbach]

4.5 sysinstall is still the same it seems to me. I just threw it on a dual box with an onboard intel nic, and a 3com gigabit fiber card, and the networking interfaces configuration just didnt want to work (as i wanted them to). I ended up having to edit the rc.conf myself to get networking to work correctly. dealing with that is the only problem ive ever had with it, (had same problem in 4.4 also)

Re:4.4 installer

[parc]

Have you mentioned your problems to freebsd-config? I'm sure they'd love to know about your problems, since they're responsible for writing and maintaining the installation system.

Re:4.4 installer

[Metrol]

frankly the installer on 4.4 was buggy to say the least.

It's not so much buggy as it is non-intuitive. Unlike the Linux installers I've seen, it doesn't provide a good step by step wizard for what things you do next. I guess you could call that buggy, but it's not like it doesn't work.

Robert Watson recently commented on this in an interview on OS News. There's apparently work being done now to get a more straight forward, and quite possibly pertier, installer up and ready for FreeBSD 5.0.

It's actually a great interview, worthy of it's own thread.

Re:4.4 installer

[Lazaru5]

The installer has always gone through a step-by-step installation as long as you choose the basic (or beginner, or whatever it is. I make world to upgrade and infrequently do a fresh install.)

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.

Re:Firewall?

[Anonymous Coward]

An OpenBSD example can help you how FreeBSD scales for your biz.
A Pentium 120 with 48 MB RAM and a total 62 MB installation. 3 legged bastion host, making NAT for 130 WEB and ICQ maniac clients, protecting the DMZ with a heavy loaded Web server inside (2 requests per second). Making stateful inspection for the DMZ.

The only part expensive is the ethernet cards used in this box. Intel Pro100S, 51$ +VAT each (here in Turkiye).

ISDN support for {Free|Net|Open}BSD is really sophisticated. It's hard to experience problems.

Regards...

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?

[BiggyP]

well, if you like the sound of it then try it, you'll never know if you should unless you do, I personally still prefer GNU/Linux, but BSD if fine for those who want it and prefer it for whatever reason, many companies produce partial binary kernel modules (with sources to compile loader against kernel) for devices such as modems and nVidia with their Graphics cards, i'm pretty sure things such as these and the GLX modules would not work with *BSD, i may well be wrong as i have not tried FBSD on a machine with such devices. Debian is the best option, especially with the pre-emptive multitasking patch.

Re:Should I triy it?

[mxmasster]

Of course you should try it, you just might like it.

images01-la1# uname -a
FreeBSD images01-la1 4.2-RELEASE FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE #0: Tue Dec 19 11:36:03 PST 2000 root@images01-la1.ussearch.com:/usr/src/sys/compil e/images1219 i386
images01-la1# uptime
11:26AM up 407 days, 51 mins, 1 user, load averages: 0.01, 0.21, 0.27

Re:Should I triy it?

[cboscari]

You have my permission :)

Seriously, If you know your way around Linux (command line), you will have no problems with FreeBSD. I personaly prefer FreeBSD to Linux, mostly because "make world" is just plain fun to run. You synch to the current CVS tree, and away you go. Like most BSD based systems, Kernel configuration is done via a text file, which I prefer to the Linux way. I like that too.

The only big disadvantage I know of is lack of Accelerated Graphics for Nvidia chipsets, but others like Voodoo chips are supported. I ran Unreal Tournement (for Linux) in Linux emulation mode with one a few years back. I think the Nvidia support is being worked on, but in the meantime, 3d games are out. Almost everything else is the same. Gnome, KDE, gimp, samba, blah blah blah are avail, and can be compiled from source via the ports collection and installed. All in all, a good system. I like it.

Chris (FreeBSD since '97)

Re:Should I triy it?

[Arandir]

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.

Re:Should I triy it?

[Melantha_Bacchae]

Yet another AC writes:

> *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at
> this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.

The same AC also says that there are "36400 FreeBSD users", "7000 users of OpenBSD", "1400 NetBSD users", and "700 users of BSD/OS", for a total of 45,500. Of course the *BSD_is_dead'ers have been saying that for a while. Hm, no mention of OS X, which is based on FreeBSD, and therefore is a *BSD.

In the last three weeks alone, the number of OS X users has shot up by 150,000! That's the number of new iMacs preordered, the first computers to be shipped from the factory with OS X (*BSD) as the default OS. They (and the new OS X running G4's) began shipping this past Monday. Check it out: http://maccentral.macworld.com/news/0201/28.imac.p hp.

The ongoing success of OS X, coupled with the frequent upgrades to the other BSD versions I've seen posted on Slashdot (including the one that started this thread), conclusively proves that *BSD is *NOT* dead, far from it. *BSD is alive, growing, thriving, full of vitality and hope for a bright future! Thanks in large part to Apple, *BSD can be enjoyed, not only by hobbyists, but by schoolchildren, scientists, parents, professionals in graphics, 3D, and film. Even by lawyers! ;)

Beyond time, beyond terror, beyond death, Mothra:
Your heart can reach...Life!

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:Linux is a better tinker-toy

[Arandir]

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.

Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[antoniol]

I'm planning to build a new box, and would like to run FreeBSD on it. I've been searching for resources for hardware compatibility/recommendations on the 'net, but haven't found much. Nor do the Release Notes say much about that; nothing about MoBo/CPU, for instance. I'm considering the EPoX EP-8KHA+, but I'm not sure about a graphics card. AFAIK there are no nvidia drivers for FreeBSD. Not that I'll be playing any games, though. Any suggestions/pointers?

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[diamondc]

I have one of these SiS 630 motherboards with an integrated NIC and FreeBSD saw the NIC but could never give it an IP address. So I disabled the onboard NIC and put in an realtek 8139 in my computer, and FreeBSD didnt recognize the 8139 either. Also tried OpenBSD with no go. With Linux and Window the onboard NIC shows up just right. It helps with the SiS motherboard maker writes the drivers, though . I dont blame the BSD developers though, just shoddy motherboard makers

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[jandrese]

Hmm, that's odd. Did you try sending your problem to the FreeBSD-questions mailing list? This sort of hardware problem might be the symptom of something else you didn't notice (broken MII bus?). FreeBSD has support for the SIS 900 and SiS 7016 fast ethernet chipsets. FreeBSD also support the ReakTek 8139, even though it's a festering pile of crap. Either way, the 8139 should have worked (even if the onboard NIC is nonstandard). A quick mail to the list might have saved you a bad experiance here.

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[Ded Bob]

nVidia support is being worked on: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[hawk]

if you grub around at www.freebsd.org,there's a list of known supported hardware. Realistically, "most" mainstream hardware will work.

hawk

Re:Recommended hardware for a new FreeBSD box?

[hearingaid]

There's a hardware compatibility list in the ISO. HARDWARE.TXT in the root directory gives it to you. Or: Here's the link.

Recently, they've started producing an HTML version of HARDWARE.TXT as well. Look for HARDWARE.HTM on the ISO.

Mirror site speed... no complaints!

[Nonesuch]

One benefit of being up early (not by choice) is that I'm getting some damn good download speeds from the official FreeBSD mirror sites, as in 773KB/s... that's over 6 megabits!

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?

local: 4.5-disc2.iso remote: 4.5-disc2.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192.168.1.1,162,179)
150 Opening BINARY mode data connection for '4.5-disc2.iso' (631341056 bytes).
602 MB 00:00 ETA
226 Transfer complete.
631341056 bytes received in 796.65 seconds (773.92 KB/s)

(Yes, that transfer went via a proxy firewall)

Re:Firewall?

[Nonesuch]

I agree. OpenBSD makes for good firewalls, right out of the box. I'm even starting to like 'pf'.

Part of 'secure by default' is that the base install omits a lot of fluff- this makes for quicker installs, and a smaller footprint.

...base install was 60 megs

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.

Damnit..

[Night0wl]

I had just finished the first ISO.
I was about the finish the second ISO (96%)
and I had 3-5% on each of the third and fourth ISO's

and then they release 4.5... damnit...

*deletes 1+ gb of data, and begins again*

And this is all at a top of 15KB/s. And I can assure you it never got that high.

Re:Damnit..

[zaffir]

Heh, well i just spent 4 days getting FreeBSD up and running on my box (still can't get XF86 to work right) and then they release 4.5. I'm a newb to *nix in general, so upgrading is gonna be FUN. I'd like to get X going first though. Anybody know how to use XDM? :)

Re:Damnit..

[The_Rift]

If you already have the previous release up and running I would strongly advise you to read up on CVSup and upgrade that way.

The handbook has all the information you should need and if you're serious about using FreeBSD it's something you need to learn how to do anyway.

Re:Damnit..

[benedict]

You could just download the small (~200 MB)
install ISO and then get anything else you need
once the system is up.

Re:Damnit..

[Arandir]

The Handbook and FAQ have a section on setting up XDM. In a nutshell, there ain't no separate runlevel for a GUI login (why should there be?). Just edit your /etc/ttys file to turn it on, or shove a script in /usr/X11R6/etc/rc.d.

Re:Firewall?

[Pengo]

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.

Without sounding like an elitist, (which I am clearly or qualified to be), though the instalation was a bit awkward, it was direct and forward. After getting it installed, it was VERY easy to setup the configuration. All you really have to do is follow the instructions on the website. I had a machine setup in 2 hours (downloads and all w/floppy based install), after never touching the distro before thats not bad. Within 3 hours (and another helpful howto) I had the box hardened. Before the end of a long working day I had a VERY impressive set of rules setup to block various types of traffic, I understdood the difference between a stateless and statefull firewall and most importantly I understand why all the rules in my PF config where there.

I just find it nice knowing that there OBSD crew is working overtime to help me sleep better at night. At this stage in my career, if I am using and deploying open source solutions.. my judgment and credibility is on the line. I can't blame it on Scott or Bill if something goes wrong.

Cheers

Re:Firewall?

[markyd]

Am running FreeBSD 4.4 on 486-DX50 with 16Mb fine. Servers as an internet gateway for 4-5 users over a 56k dialup no problem.

Re:Where is the "BSD is dying" clown?

[Pengo]

Next -> OSX ;-)

Linus and vers. numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

Linus doesn't actually *DO* anything worth bumping up the numbers.

2.x aout
3.x elf
4.x cam
5.x new smp

Linux - 2.4 - the kernel of pain
What will 2.5 be? The kernel of torment?
Then 2.7 The kernel of icy death?
3.0 The Kernel of eternal buring flesh?
@.8 could just be the kernel of itchy rash.

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:Firewall?

[DreamerFi]

and for those of us without the geek knowledge, I've set a smaller distribution, based on NetBSD, up as a firewall at www.dubbele.com.

Laptop

[daserver]

How well is apm or acpi supported in freebsd?

I know this is probably a dumb question, since freebsd is used mostly for server. But I know that some of you bsd trolls out there is running it. :-)

Re:Laptop

[fyonn]

apm is supported reasonably well I think (I very rarely use apm myself) but acpi is not supported in STABLE or RELEASE. it's in 5-CURRENT at the mo and I don't know when it's likely to be MFC'd

dave

Re:Laptop

[Jordan Block]

apm works great, just add the device to the kernel
(device apm0) iirc, and enable it in rc.conf (apm_enable="YES") and away you go.

as for acpi, I have no clue on the support.

Logical partitions fictional

[k8to]

Yes, logical partitions are fictitional. So are all partitions. They're just conventions on how to share sections of the disk. Come to think of it -- files are fictitional, so are jpegs. etc.

Or did you just mean to suggest that the name logical partition is somehow less valid than logical drive.

Regardless of how problematic you view this system to be, it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks that can be shared among many operating systems on the x86 platform. You don't have to like it, but you'd think FreeBSD -- which is native to x86 -- would support it.

Re:Logical partitions fictional

[Arandir]

...it is the normal way of slicing the disk up into more than four chunks...

No, it is not the normal way. It is the DOS way. FreeBSD isn't DOS, so there is no compelling reason for it to abandon the BSD way in favor of the Bill Gates way.

Keep DOS logical drives inside of DOS partitions, and let FreeBSD have BSD slices inside of BSD partitions. That sounds fair to me.

Well, we already have Midori Linux

[kriegsman]

Well, we already have Transmeta calling their OS Midori Linux -- a blatant reference to Fetish Diva Midori.

Geeks? Perverts? Who'da thought!?!

-Mark

Very wrong on XP and primaries.

[NNKK]

Win2k and XP both have no problem with letting you create additional primaries, or for that matter any configuration of partitions that the OS can understand. NT4 may or may not, I don't know.

Link is bad

[Vladinator]

It takes you back to the earthstation1 homepage...

What about the new JDK

[thedarkstorm]

I had thought it was announced that the new Sun Authorized JDK was supposed to be in this release, but I find no information on the readme or the site?

Re:What about the new JDK

[ebcdic]

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.

Re:^H^H^H??

[Vladinator]

It means Backspace.

Anyone know...

[Vladinator]

A good way to get it to dual boot the same way Win2k / Linux does? Specifically, one installs Linux and then lilo to it's own partition, uses dd to copy the first 512 bytes off the linux partition (naming it something like linuxboot.bin) and then adds a line to boot.ini like C:\BOOTSECT.LIN="Slackware Linux 8.0". This will cause Win2k to boot Linux, and since I already have that setup that way, I'd like to do the same with FreeBSD - but FreeBSD doesn't use lilo of course... Anyone have any ideas?

Re:Anyone know...

[Vladinator]

Excellent. Where is this handbook?

Re:Anyone know...

[Anonymous DWord]

http://www.freebsd.org/handbook/index.html

Re:Anyone know...

[Arandir]

You can boot FreeBSD from the NT bootloader, but be careful. There's instructions in the FAQ how to do it. The way the FreeBSD bootloader works, that boot sector needs to be from the root partition, not the MBR. I goofed, didn't read closely enough, and hosed my system.

If you have a choice, just bypass the NT loader alltogether and use Grub, Lilo or the FreeBSD bootloader.

Native JDK

[ajcpi]

According to the release notes:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.5R/relnotes-i3 86 .html:


2.3.2 Ports/Packages Collection
Due to delays in the certification process, native JDK support for FreeBSD will be released shortly after 4.5-RELEASE. An announcement will be made on the FreeBSD Web site, as well as the FreeBSD announcements mailing list , when the distribution is available.

Re:Building a better BSD

[deep13]

Thanks for the facts Jordan!

Re:I don't get it....

[panthro]

Who ever said XP was the enemy? I don't like using it. I also don't like using the philips screwdriver on my Swiss Army knife. But if someone called my favorite OS a philips I don't think I'd have a cow.

Already running it...

[erat]

I was running 4.3 until last night, when for some odd reason I decided to upgrade to 4.4. I ran cvsup manually to make sure I had the latest sources, ran "make world", then this morning I compiled a new kernel and rebooted.

Whaddaya know, it booted up as "4.5-STABLE" instead of "4.4-STABLE". Talk about pleasant surprises... I guess if I read my email before rebooting I would have known.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Detritus]

YHBT. Idiot.

Re:Building a better BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

........the real Jordan Hubbard is user #3999, http://slashdot.org/~jkh/.

leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[hawk]

Some half-wit tags Jordan Hubbard with "troll" while explaining FreeBSD . . . next he can proceed to alt.folklore.computers and try to correct Dennis Ritchie on unix history (happened a week or two ago), accusePeter Seebach of not understanding basic C (happens fairly regularly).

At least there we get to have a little fun with it (find the Seebach/Crispin flamewar at dejanews [search for "popcorn" in title]), but not here.

Coldn't we add "funny" to fair and unfair for meta-moderation categories?

While we're add it, let's add "-1, twit" as a moderation option, as well as "-1, just plain wrong" . . .

hawk

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[Detritus]

Take the hook out of your mouth before you speak.

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[akharon]

I would have nailed him as a troll too. The real Jordan Hubbard is known as jkh, and has a uid of 3999. Anyone who impersonates someone else like this, whether they do it for good or bad, should be modded down.

Re:leading to new metamoderation categories . . .

[hawk]

oh :)
in that case . . .

Still, though, I've seen other moderations that were funny.

hawk

What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see in freeBSD...

1. Fast boot ups
2. Ease of use
3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)
4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, gnome, something standard)
5. One tool for window manager configuration
6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals
7. One tool for system administration (printers, servers, security, user administration, updates,etc)

I know we all want options. I believe if we have no standards for window managers and such it will hold freebsd from moving forward at the speed I would like it to.

In my option freeBSD is the best server OS out. I think taking these options into consideration would help move a lot of people to freebsd or at least give it a try.

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[jo42]

No! Not another forking Linux!!

If you want all of that cr*p, get RedHat, Mandrake or Windows XP, but leave FreeBSD alone. I prefer a nice, tight & neat core OS that I can then add to as I want. You ever try to install a minimal RedHat or Mandrake? If I'm running a web/e-mail server, what the fork do I need TeX, GNOME, KDE and close to a 1GB of cr*p on it for?

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Lazaru5]

1. Fast boot ups

Boots as fast as Linux and faster than Windows.

2. Ease of use

It's as easy to use as any Unix. Get over it.

3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)

I don't know what you're talking about here. The GENERIC kernel, which is the one installed has support for all network cards already. A modem is just a serial device and doesn't need 'drivers'. All your typical PC hardware is also supported in GENERIC. That's why it's called 'GENERIC'.

4. One standard/exclusive window manager

This isn't a FreeBSD issue but a Unix/X one. It's the same situation on Linux.

5. One tool for window manager configuration.

If you mean to choose between wm's then this would seem to conflict with #4. If you mean to configure options for which ever wm you use, this already exists. GNOME and KDE (which are desktop environments more than window managers. GNOME runs on top of WindowMaker, Blackbox, Enlightenment, etc....), WindowMaker, etc all have their own window manager config tools.

And, like #4, this isn't a FreeBSD issue. Talk to your local window manager development team. Or hell, do it yourself.

6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals.

CVS baby (at least for the first part.) FreeBSD isn't a package based system so with the exception of 3rd party software (via Packages or the Ports Collection) What You See Is What You Get. You add and remove drivers by either recompiling your kernel or removing kernel modules that you've added. (In fact, build a very slim kernel and you can do nearly all via modules.)

As for 3rd party Packages that you've installed (Installed Ports essentially become registered Packages. In fact Packages are themselves made from Ports via 'make package' in /usr/ports/foo/bar.) You use the pkg_* tools. Ok, so it's not one single 'pkg_tool' command that does it all, but is it really that difficult to type 'pkg_delete' as opposed to 'pkg_add'?

7. One tool for system administration

Several such tools exist. Myself, I like vi(m).

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Lazaru5]

Certainly I could. There was nothing in my responses that was the least bit fanatical. I also wasn't defending anything or being apologetic in any way. Logic was present in every response.

#1. Sure, instant boot would be great.

#2. FreeBSD is as easy a Unix as any. This is not a biased or narrow view. I know full well that Unix isn't terribly user-friendly. I don't have to put a disclaimer in every single comment to cover my ass just so I don't offend ACs such as yourself.

#3. The question itself indicated an unfamiliarity with FreeBSD's support for hardware. Since no setup for specific hardware is actually required for installs. The context of the question implied this. This type of question often comes up when users do new installs because of the visual Kernel Config (boot -c followed by 'visual' at the config prompt will get you back into it on a running system) which would LOGICally fit within this context. The inexperienced new user is often confused by this screen and proceeds to deactivate every device they think they don't need. In fact, this screen can be skipped completely. The 'conflicts' indicated at the top are not real but only those that _could_ exist if you actually _had_ every device that was listed. If you skip it (I always do), the kernel automatically probes for everything (which I believe is what was asked for?). That (like I originally said) is what GENERIC is for. There's no chance that there'd be 'no drivers for hardware' because they already exist. Removing items from this 'setup interface' is actually the opposite of #3's request.

Of course LOGIC is not perfect. I could just have misunderstood #3, but that's only human, and not not a symptom of narrow visions or fanatiscism.

#4 and #5. Too obvious.

#6 also demonstrates some misunderstandings on the part of the poster. My answer is factual.

#7. There _ARE_ several such applications. There was a company with one at BSDCon 2000 but it's name escapes me. I suppose I could go out of my way and look it up (or find the sample CD I got) but then, so could you.

Of course, I don't know that it was you, but the tone of your response would indicate that it was. That, or you're just another fanatic with a narrow vision who sees evil and conspiracy where none exist. You have erred.

If I actually read comments on many Linux stories and saw an equally misinformed comment I would respond in kind in much the same way I did this one. My goal was only to inform the uninformed, nothing more. You should learn to relax.

Licences

[DrSpin]

On my very own license benchmark, written in a mixture of bwBasic and perl 3.2, I made the following measurements

---------------- Min --- Max --- Mean
BSD Licence ---- 29 --- 30 --- 29.5
GPL ------------ 2 --- 169 -- 15
MS EULA -------- 1 --- 3 --- 2

all meaurements in BogoMegaLops

I have no idea what this means, but I am sure its a good idea.

Realistically, Only the BSD licence allows you to kill babies and make money with software. (Or was that make babies and kill money?) The others require hardware.

install

[hawk]

You'd need at least the two floppies to bring the machine far enough to use tools like cvs.

I generally install from the three disks (there's an optional fixit.flp with lots of programs on it) by choosing an absolute minimal configuration, installing the cvsup package, then "make update" in /usr/src to get an up to the minute system.

hawk

better yet . . .

[hawk]

download the three floppies, boot, and download everythign . . .

hawk

What I would like to see in freeBSD�

[Anonymous Coward]

What I would like to see in freeBSD...

1. Fast boot ups
2. Ease of use
3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for hardware install modem or NIC and download drivers via cvsup and complete setup using xserver)
4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, gnome, something standard)
5. One tool for window manager configuration
6. One tool for driver/software tracking and installation/removals
7. One tool for system administration (printers, servers, security, user administration, updates,etc)

I know we all want options. I believe if we have no standards for window managers and such it will hold freebsd from moving forward at the speed I would like it to.

In my option freeBSD is the best server OS out. I think taking these options into consideration would help move a lot of people to freebsd or at least give it a try.

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.

Re:*BSD is dying

[someonehasmyname]

First of all, Netcraft and The Apache Project use FreeBSD as their os. Hell, /. even uses a FreeBSD firewall.

Secondly, take a look at Netcraft's longest uptimes. I counted 6 out of 50 that weren't FreeBSD.. The 6 Non-BSD machines run IRIX, btw.

Marketshare-wise, between Yahoo's 4000 FreeBSD boxes, and all of Hotmail's FreeBSD mail servers, I think it's doing quite well..

There may be more local ISP's with their 5 machines running linux than there are running FreeBSD, but so what?

How many times have I compiled a "stable" and had it not boot?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: lost count

How many times have I rebooted after new kernel, and corrupted all mounted filesystems?
FreeBSD: 0 Linux: 0, but I laughed like hell when it happend to you.

Even if FreeBSD did cease to exist, and develpoment stopped, I would still use it, because it is that damn good.

Oh, and considering DARPA is putting a bunch of money into furthering FreeBSD development, I don't see it going anywhere soon.

Even better TCP/IP performance?

[Sivar]

FreeBSD has long been one of the top performers--if not THE top performer--in TCP/IP. How they made a substantial improvement to code that has been maturing longer than the networking code for any other OS in common use today is amazing.
Can you imagine how skilled and bored the developers much be?

Unfortunately,it will take about 2 weeks for my 4.5CD to arrive, but all good things are worth the wait.

Speaking of Etch-a-Sketchs

[infinii]

About the time when Palm Pilots were taking off. Every manager and anyone important enough in our company started using them. Every meeting consisted of higher ups scribbling away on their Palms or reading email, avant-go, etc.

Well as a joke, I borrowed an etch-a-sketch and in the middle of a meeting. I pulled it out of my briefcase with the straightest face I could put on. Ignoring everyone, I started scribbling with it and the meeting just fell apart from there. The person speaking tried to ignore it and contine but the laughter from the rest was overwhelming.

Re:Speaking of Etch-a-Sketchs

[finity]

That's really funny! I did something similar involving a banana (instead of a cell phone) in the middle of a class one time.

Re:I don't get it....

[Juln]

Well, one similarity I see is FReBSD is where MS rips their TCP stack from and who knows what else. In fact, I bet huge chunks of the OS have been based on or ripped from FreeBSD - everytime MS starts a project, they look to buy something already in progress, or even better, base it on a free set of code they don't even have to pay for.
Yes, the tcp stack in Win 95, 98, 2000, and ME came from FreeBSD - Fyodor of nmap fame notes in http://www.insecure.org/nmap/nma
p-fingerprinting-article.html :
TCP Initial Window (... ) This test actually gives us a lot of information, since some operating systems can be uniquely identified by the window alone (for example, AIX is the only OS I have seen which uses 0x3F25). In their "completely rewritten" TCP stack for NT5 [Windows 2000], Microsoft uses 0x402E. Interestingly, that is exactly the number used by OpenBSD and FreeBSD."

So, not only are they using ther freebsd tcp stack (already no secret), but they didn't 'completely rewrite' it as claimed, of course.
And thats how FreeBSD is related to Win Xp, because WinXp probably includes a lot of it.
Incidentally, this is also why Bill Gates 'likes' the FreeBSD license... and doesn't like the GPL at all...

FreeBSD 5

[Fweeky]

I don't usually reply to trolls, but I haven't got anything better to do that I cba doing atm :P

> Well, what the hell do expect from an obsolete,
> ancient code base which is developed in a
> closed fashion?

Linus and friends approves patches to the kernel, does that make it's development model closed?

Having the core team approve commits to the base OS is no different to any other open source project, and just serves to keep the base system as high quality as possible.

As for old, since when has maturity been a bad thing for Unix?

> (Yeah, it "supports" SMP. As in, when one CPU
> is running, the other is locked idle. And vice-
> versa.

FreeBSD's current SMP support scales poorly because the kernel is based around a "Giant" lock, which prevents multiple CPU's from entering most of the kernel at the same time. However, except on systems where the kernel itself is heavily loaded, and/or on systems with lots of CPU's (4 or more), it's not a major problem.

FreeBSD 5, due out at the end of the year, will have Giant mostly removed, as well as things like kernel preemption and advanced userland threading. It'll scale as well as if not better than Linux.

It'll also have a new startup system based on NetBSD's (have a look at it, it's pretty cool - http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/basesrc/etc/ ?cvsroot=netbsd), much improved random data generation, and a lot of other things that'll only really interest geeks.

yay bsd

[syrinx]

I bought a CD burner the other day (finally joining the modern computer era, I guess). First CD I burnt was a 4.4-RELEASE install disc. Wiped out my router/firewall/etc (which was running 4.3) and reinstalled 4.4 from scratch (needed to redo partitions).

Time to do some CVSupping now, I guess. :)

OT: Why the 'Intel Pro100S' NIC?

[Nonesuch]

May I ask why you selected the Intel Pro100S for the ethernet cards for your BSD firewall?

I've got a couple of them pulled from some old Dell servers, just wondering if they are anything special... TIA.

Re:OT: Why the 'Intel Pro100S' NIC?

[megabeck42]

In my humble quest to see why Realtek 8139C cards were $10ea, invididually, and some people still charge real money for Intel, 3Com, and Adaptec (starfire) boards, I found that some of the more quality boards had bigger buffers, and more features.

But, not meaning to knock cheap chipsets, the C-Media 8738, the heart of most $30 5.1 soundcards, has a better SPDIF implementation than the SB Live (the C-Media can generate different clock signals, rather than resampling all output to 48khz. This is a big deal, when most streams are 44.1khz) The Midiman 2448, a professional quality Coax and Optical SPDIF card - is just a C-Media 8738, with a $200 pricetag. The Midiman 2496, btw, is just a card with an Envy24 chipset.

So, yeah, I don't have the facts to back it up - but, I know that the 100 meg interfaces in the Cisco firewall products are Intel i82559s. (Open up a PIX 515 sometime - how's that for a $7,000 pent 200?)

Yeah, Intel Nics are better than realteks.

FreeBSD Ports

[Fweeky]

> Contrary to popular belief, the ports system is
> a steaming pile of horse crap. It offers little
> or no flexibility in regards to how packages
> are built,

Most ports include all the options you need as make defines. If you need more, you can copy the makefile and edit it to your hearts content, and maybe type "send-pr" and submit a patch. Or you can just compile from bog standard source and have the rest of the ports tree use it because they look for libs, binaries and executables, not packages.

> and has a nasty habit of installing
> unecassary dependencies.

Such as? It's certainly nowhere near as bad as Debian, where the entire packages system is so complex and interdependent that it needs to go through years of testing before a release is concidered stable.

> For an example, try compiling PostgreSQL on a
> non-XFree FreeBSD machine from the ports tree.
> Notice how it insists on installing XFree86.

It used to want TK, which would want the XFree libs. That's no longer the case.

> You can't pass it any configure script options > like --without-xfree or ---don't build-
> retarded-gui.

For most people flags like -DWITHOUT_X11 etc are good enough. Otherwise scratch your itch and send-pr.

> Even with RPMs I can do that. In the end, you
> usually just wind up downloading the tarball
> and compiling it yourself, which seems to
> defeat the purpouse of a Ports/ Package
> Managment system entierly.

Making your own ports is trivial, pr's usually get resolved in a couple of days, and installing from source interacts with the ports system far better than any RPM/DEB system I've seen.

Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while. Sure, it's nowhere near perfect, but what is? Certainly not a binary package system with fragile dep issues and completely unaudited sources.

Re:FreeBSD Ports

[Lazaru5]

"Frankly it sounds like you haven't tried it in a while."

Sounds more like he never really tried it in the first place. Being able to customize Ports behavior has been a feature for nearly as long as the system has existed.

He just never bothered to learn it. There's no harm there of course, but then he's not allowed to bitch and moan afterwards.

Re:FreeBSD Ports

[Lazaru5]

Are you referring to ./configure && make install? Wow, I never knew you could do that before. I wish I could change environment variables and install paths in the Makefiles myself.

Wait, or what if I could just type a 5 line gcc command?

I heard there's this low-level ASSembly thing-a-ma-jig so you wouldn't even have to do that.

What I _really_ wish for is a microscopic magnet so I could just twiddle the bits on the disk myself. That would rawk!.

You're so smart, I think you're really onto something here.

In other words, your sarcasm has not gone unnoticed. Of course you can customize software at compile time when building something manually. That, however, wasn't what the parent of my comment was talking about. They thought Ports were unflexible when the opposite is true.

improvements by Matt Dillon

[glwtta]

is there also hot Neve Campbell on Denise Richards TCP/IP action? then it really might be time to switch...

Delete the ports collection and reinstall it!

[MavEtJu]

From the release notes:

The directory layout preference algorithm for FFS (dirprefs) has been changed. Rather than scattering directory blocks across a disk, it attempts to group related directory blocks together. Operations traversing large directory hierarchies, such as the FreeBSD Ports tree, have shown marked speedups. This change is transparent and automatic for new directories.

Automaticly for new directories. Better delete the ports collection and reinstall it!

BY YOUR OLD BUDDY PACHELL!

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's have a close look at the costs involved when running a Linux system.

An important factor in Linux' cost is its maintenance. Linux requires a *lot* of maintenance, work doable only by the relatively few high-paid Linux administrators that put themselves - of course willingly - at a great place in the market. Linux seems to be needing maintenance continuously, to keep it from breaking down.

Add to this the cost of loss of data. Linux' native file system, EXT2FS, is known to lose data like a firehose spouts water when the file system isn't unmounted properly. Other unix file systems are much more tolerant towards unexpected crashes. An example is the FreeBSD file system, which with soft updates enabled, performance-wise blows EXT2FS out of the water, and doesn't have the negative drawback of extreme data loss in case of a system breakdown.

According to Linux advocates, an alternative to EXT2FS would be ReiserFS. Unfortunately, ReiserFS is still in beta stage. This means it is not intended for production use (although according to many Linux advocates this shouldn't be a problem, which makes me wonder how (little) valuable they find your data).

The other proposed 'solution', EXT3FS, is nothing more than an ugly hack to put journaling into the file system. All the drawbacks of the ancient EXT2FS file system remain in EXT3FS, for the sake of 'forward- and backward compatibility'. This is interesting, considering that the DOS heritage in the Windows 9x/ME series was considered a very bad thing by the Linux community, even though it provided what could be called one of the best examples of compatibility, ever. When it's about Linux, compatibility constraints don't seem to be that much of a problem for Linux advocates.

Back to Linux' cost. Factor in also the fact that crashes happen much more often on Linux than on other unices. On other unices, crashes usually are caused by external sources like power outages. Crashes in Linux are a regular thing, and nobody seems to know what causes them, internally. Linux advocates try to hide this fact by denying crashes ever happen. Instead, they have frequent "hardware problems".

The steep learning curve compared to about any other operating system out there is a major factor in Linux' cost. The system is a mix of features from all kinds of unices, but not one of them is implemented right. A Linux user has to live with badly coded tools which have low performance, mangle data seemingly at random and are not in line with their specification. On top of that a lot of them spit out the most childish and unprofessional messages, indicating that they were created by 14-year olds with too much time, no talent and a bad attitude.

I could go on and on and on, but the conclusion is clear. Linux is not an option for any one who seeks a professional OS with high performance, scalability, stability, adherence to standards, etc.

Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[ewhac]

I have FreeBSD 4.3 on a little x86 pizzabox that will eventually become my firewall and Web server. I'd like to upgrade to 4.5. Everyone I meet says, "just run cvsup and recompile the world."

Er, uh... Well, first of all, cvsup doesn't appear to be installed by default (why the heck not if it's so integral to keeping the system up to date?). Second, "recompiling the world" seems like a fairly drastic and space-hungry step, particularly since I installed binary packages in the first place (and presuming that actual recompilation is involved). And third, all the docs I could find on FreeBSD.org are rather thin (and even way out of date) on this process.

Is there a HOWTO or a step-by-step tutorial for FreeBSD newbies to become conversant with cvsup, the ports tree, and upgrading packages?

Schwab

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[ctucker]

I'll take a crack at helping... First thing you want to do is install cvsup, so su to root, then cd /usr/ports/net/cvsup, then make install clean

Next, here's my cvsup script (which I have run via cron every Thursday):

su-2.05# more `which cvsupLatest`
#!/bin/sh
sed -e 's/CHANGE_THIS/cvsup9/g' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile > /tmp/stable-supfile && /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g /tmp/stable-supfile
rm /tmp/stable-supfile
#rm -rf /usr/ports/www/jakarta-tomcat/
sed -e 's/CHANGE_THIS/cvsup9/g' /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile > /tmp/ports-supfile && /usr/local/bin/cvsup -g /tmp/ports-supfile
rm /tmp/ports-supfile

Running this will update the sources and ports in one go. Finally, I usually use the following to do the whole build world mess in one quick script (change REDRACER to the name of your kernel configuration file):

su-2.05# more `which makeworld`
#!/usr/local/bin/bash
(cd /usr/src/ && make -Bj 4 world && cd /usr/src/ && make -Bj 4 buildkernel KERNCONF=REDRACER && make -Bj 4 installkernel KERNCONF=REDRACER) >& /usr/src/makeworld.log &

Unfortunately, I've only given you a fish, not taught you how to fish, but it really just takes a little poking around to figure out what you need to do. Look at the handbook, especially chapter 9. Rebuilding world and kernel is less space-hungry than you might think, it seems to take more time than anything. Another good source of advice is the newsgroup comp.unix.bsd.freebsd.misc

Re:Is there an Understanding Ports HOWTO?

[Lazaru5]

cvsup isn't installed by default because to build it from source requires Modula-3 and X libs, neither of which are part of FreeBSD and Modula-3 is fucking HUGE and would add upwards of 30 minutes to the world build time for Modula-3 and cvsup.

'make world' sounds scarier than it is, mostly for mythical religious reasons. It's not space hungry at all really. A full /usr/src is about 250M which you're likely to have anyway and /usr/obj (where the object files are during a make world) also gets to about 500M.

The fact that you installed binary packages is not relevant to building the world. FreeBSD is not a package based system (ala RPM, Deb, etc) and thus no portion of the OS itself is installed via a Package. 'make world' refers to rebuilding FreeBSD, not any 3rd party packages you installed so you wouldn't have to worry about them.

Freebsd.org/handbook is anything but thin on the process, and it's most CERTAINLY not out of date as it was updated to 4.4-RELEASE and 5.0-CURRENT for the recent 2nd Edition hardcopy publication (www.freebsdmall.com) handbook/makeworld.html has full step-by-step directions.

If you want to understand ports, the best source aside from the Handbook is 'man ports'. There's a man page for nearly everything in FreeBSD. You'd be surprised. Since Packages are just pre-compiled ports, they fall under the realm of the 'portupgrade' and pkg_* utilities. This is academic of course because there's no need to rebuild your packages after a make world unless you just happen to want newer versions of those packages (should new ones be available.)

Re:Huh?

[Jonathan the Nerd]

Control-H (written as ^H) is the backspace character. So, in the example "FreeBSD XP^H^H4.5", imagine the person typing it wrote "FreeBSD XP", then backspaced twice and typed 4.5. It's basically the ASCII equivalent of strikethrough.

Re:I disagree with the installation remark

[Nonesuch]

AC Writes:

Being a complete newbie to BSD (and linux too).. I installed OpenBSD 2.6 without a problem a couple years ago. Ofcourse I made good use of the resources available, I printed the entire FAQ [openbsd.org], read it for 2-3 days at work and when it came time to start installing, I made sure I had this [openbsd.org] handy.

The only way I think it can look intimidating is if you dive into it not knowing what to expect and not planning on doing any reading.

I had built many SVR4 systems and a half dozen NetBSD/FreeBSD servers before I tried my first OpenBSD installation, and the first time doing the hand-entry of filesystems/partitions to get OpenBSD up was not fun.

In fact, I'm spoilt after using the OpenBSD installer.. I wish FreeBSD had a text-only install too, navigating through sysinstall's menus can be a pain sometimes.

Agreed. I do a lot of installs of OpenBSD on Sparc with just a serial console, and not needing to worry about terminal types and cursor key settings or alternate keys is handy.

One thing I really like about the Solaris 8 installer is they've gone back to the pure command line, no more 'Press F1 to continue`.

Not only is a command line a lot faster at low baud rates than a full-screen TUI, but the scrollback history is of infinite value to figure out where you went wrong when things start to go all wahoonie-shaped.

Agree with your flamebait

[GCP]

I think C# takes the best of Java and adds a lot of goodies that many of us appreciate. Implementing C# for BSD or Linux is a matter of implementing an ECMA standard, just like ECMAScript (and unlike Java). I'd love to have a C# for GCC.

I'm not sure how much of .Net is going to be standardized, though, so it may have to be cloned. I hope that happens because I really like what I see of .Net and I REALLY don't want to use a Windows server.

Re:Agree with your flamebait

[__past__]

I'm not sure how much of .Net is going to be standardized

According to MS (grain of salt etc.), everything except WinForms and ADODB.NET.

Re:I don't get it....

[minus9]

My advice to anyone sick of bi-weekly kernel updates is don't update your kernel bi-weekly. The kernel police hardly ever come round to check you're using the latest verion.

Re:GNL Debian/NetBSD (GNU's Not Linux)

[someonehasmyname]

Exactly what I said to myself about a year ago.. I've been using BSD since, and haven't looked back!

Re:What I would like to see in freeBSD?

[space_dude]

>1. Fast boot ups

It allready boots up faster then either linux or windows

>2. Ease of use

It all depends on what you define as "Ease of Use" it's pretty easy to use for me.

>3. Better setup interface (auto probe of PC >hardware, setup hardware, if no drivers for
>hardware install modem or NIC and download

Well lets not turn it into another Windows or RedHat

>drivers via cvsup and complete setup using >xserver)

Well the purpose of the FreeBSD group is to make a good and stable OS, not to make it pretty

>4. One standard/exclusive window manager (kde, >gnome, something standard)

That's not FreeBSD's fault, yes X and window managers are bundled with FreeBSD but they are technically not part of the OS (FreeBSD team doesn't write/support X/KDE/etc.. code)

>6. One tool for driver/software tracking and >installation/removals
>7. One tool for system administration (printers, >servers, security, user administration, >updates,etc)

I'd rather see a 3rd party do that and let FreeBSD
programmers wory about more important things.

Use Linux

[Higher Authority]

There is no actual text in this response, it's all in the subject line. Ignore what's written here, unless you won't mark this as a flame.

<flame style="likely-offensive">

Let's analyze the facts.

1. Fast boot ups are already here. Oh, I'm sorry, is under 30s not fast enough for you?

2. Ease of use - c'mon. The interface is practically the same in all Unix operating systems, a command line and ... viola. What more could you want? (X, I know, that can be installed via *ding ding* the CLI!

3. There's not much wrong with the setup interface, except maybe it should spit out an estimated install size? That's about all I can think of right now. That and upgrading the X config stuff for 4.1, which is not really a big deal.

4. ONE EXCLUSIVE WM? Think about that one for a minute. That works completely against the point of alternative operating systems.

5. Okay, Linus.

6. Okay, Bill.

7. Okay, Gore.

Conclusion: You need help.

</flame>

"BSD is dying" is dying!

[Gordonjcp]

It is now official - Netcraft has confirmed: "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying.

Yet another crippling bombshell hit the beleaguered Slashdot community when recently IDC confirmed that "*BSD is dying" trolls account for less than a fraction of 1 percent of all posters. Coming on the heels of the latest Netcraft survey which plainly states that "*BSD is dying" trolls have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along.

You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict their future. The hand writing is on the wall: "*BSD is dying" trolls face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for them because "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad.

All major surveys show that "*BSD is dying" trolls have steadily declined in market share. They are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If they are to survive at all it will be among the "hot grits" dabblers. "*BSD is dying" trolling continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, it is dead.

Fact: "*BSD is dying" trolling is dead