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FreeBSD XP^H^H 4.5 available now
The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.
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.
Anyone who considers arithmetical methods of producing random numbers is, of course, in a state of sin.-John von Neumann
Someone tell me how to install this over a network, please.
The FreeBSD folks have already done this, in very plain language.
For myself, I'm doing a cvsup now as I write this. Make world gonna start to cooking tomorrow night. I'm probably about 2 weeks behind the release as I try to update fairly regularly with the latest stuff.
The really good part about this is that all that stuff that's been held back for release is now gonna start flowing back into the ports tree and src directories. Yummy!
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
at last!!!1
now no fucking about with linux emulated Java
maybe now I can get java in Konqueror to work
and I know it's not new but maybe you linux heads might've missed it.
FreeBSD now has a third party script that will auto-update any ports you've installed.
cvs update to the lates ports list and run portupgrade -ra and ALL of your port instaleld software will be updated to the latest version and dependencies resolved and reset (and a tool pkgdb will do some pre upgrade checks)
It's great. I'm going on about it because I'm so impressed with it.
FreeBSD rocks
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
I have been running an ISDN gateway with FreeBSD 4.2 on an AMD 5x86-133 which is roughly comparable to your Pentium 90 for some time. It works perfectly well. Compiling the operating system takes a bit long, but that's not much of a surprise.
ISDN support under FreeBSD is very convenient. It uses the isdn4bsd system, which is integrated into recent versions of FreeBSD. In my opinion, it's superior to Linux, partly because configuration is easier and partly because ituses user-mode ppp by default instead of kernel-based systems which are usually more difficult to configure and maintain. You have to see if your ISDN card is supported. Most passive cards are. Check the ISDN section of the FreeBSD handbook.
There is absolutely no reason to panic.
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.
This interview with Robert Watson describes many of the new 4.5-RELEASE features, and talks about how they relate to the much more advanced work in 5.0. He also talks about how the Linux development targets relate to those in FreeBSD, and says he reads linux-kernel regularly. It
sounds like 5.0 should be incredible.
FreeBSD has had a syncache for quite some time now; it has never been clear which of the two is technically superior.
Now FreeBSD implements both commonly accepted solutions; I haven't looked at the code enough to say for certain, but I'd assume that syn cookies would be used in order to avoid connection loss only during *very* high packet rates (10^5+ SYN packets/second) since the syn cache works fine up to those levels.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Can I run all apps/libs (or equivalents of the same quality) I use regularly now on FreeBSD? That would be KDE2.2, XMMS, OpenGL on GeForce2, MSN client, \LaTeX{}, Java1.2 a.o. Would It really bring me some extra performance/stability?
KDE2.2: yes
XMMS: yes
OpenGL: yes
GeForce2: yes, but not hardware accelerated. Fortunately, it is being worked on: http://nvidia.netexplorer.org/news.html
MSN client: ?, there are Jabber clients for instant messenging with MSN.
LaTeX: yes
Java: in a few days. It is standard with FreeBSD (they paid the licenses fees). It is v1.3.
Extra performance/stability: yes (SMP is lacking)/yes
I believe LILO can handle FreeBSD.
For those of you who missed the (as yet un-modded) AC above, this comment isn't the real Jordan Hubbard, and is thoroughly deserving of any Troll moderations it recieves.
It's a pretty damn good troll, though. Well crafted and subtle.
|>
Here be Dragons
> 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.