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FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #1 Released

Posted by timothy on from the excellent-smithers dept.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "The FreeBSD developers just announced the release of an official snapshot of the upcoming FreeBSD 5.0 which should be expected in November. Time to try out amazing new feature like background fsck, FFS snapshots, KSC, devfs, SMPng and many more. Check the Release Notes for detailed information." Read on for a list of ISO mirrors, too.

Thanks to AEtherSPOON, you can spare the main servers and use one of these FTP mirrors to grab the ISO:

11 of 109 comments (clear)

  1. This is shamelssly offtopic, but.... by fm6 · · Score: 0, Troll
    Somebody want to explain the FreeBSD versus OpenBSD soap opera to me? I missed a lot of the early episodes. Is Theo a total jerk or an unfairly maligned software visionary? Are the FreeBSD guys arbitrary fascists or hardworking freeware volunteers just trying to keep things sane?

    Also, are they really gonna kill of Tara? No, wait, different show. Sorry!

    1. Re:This is shamelssly offtopic, but.... by Theo+DeRaadt · · Score: -1, Troll

      I don't really have a problem with the FreeBSD team. They produce excellent, high performance code for the x86 platform. As for their developers, I haven't really communicated with them, so I couldn't really say one way or the other.

      --

      --
      Theo DeRaadt
      Founder, OpenBSD project.
    2. Re:This is shamelssly offtopic, but.... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

      The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing t communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, thesorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

  2. Re:Trollbot? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    fm6 is dying

  3. A last gasp, to be sure by Theo+DeRaadt · · Score: -1, Troll
    I hear all these great things about the upcoming FreeBSD "release", but I never see any of these features touched by the light of day, so to speak. Why? Because, quite simply, all these warm, fuzzy feelings about FreeBSD are just that. Feelings. I have not yet seen a single feature mentioned here actually work effectively on a production machine. Not to mention that many people here are most likely foolish enough to run a release on production hardware just because it has some shiny new features like "SMP support".

    Fine, they can do that, but when their boot partition gets corrupted by bad code, they'll be left wishing that they used something more reliable, like OpenBSD. Or even, and I say this reluctantly, the antiquated and arcane NetBSD. No one really needs these silly features, and they can only lead to system instability and security holes.

    Thank you.

    --

    --
    Theo DeRaadt
    Founder, OpenBSD project.
    1. Re:A last gasp, to be sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Go smoke some crack like the real Theo-the-Rat

    2. Re:A last gasp, to be sure by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

      Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD is fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

      The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.

  4. Almost there, buddy by Theo+DeRaadt · · Score: -1, Troll

    Once and for all, my name is "Theo DeRaadt"

    --

    --
    Theo DeRaadt
    Founder, OpenBSD project.
  5. Question Theo... by thefatz · · Score: -1, Troll

    Where is your SMP at? Really, I like OpenBSD, and I use OpenBSD alot at work, great product. But where is the SMP? I got a bunch of Dual Processor machines running FreeBSD cause smp works on them. But no SMP with OpenBSD. Theo where is it? Oh Theo we ask again, enlighten us to where the SMP is. Also this is the same crew that shipped the broken lpr. Sigh.

    --
    http://www.freebsd.org
  6. *BSD is dying by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    It is official; Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying

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

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

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

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

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

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

    *BSD is dying

  7. Re:background fsck by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll
    Sure, we all know that *BSD is a failure, but why? Why did *BSD fail? Once you get past the fact that *BSD s fragmented between a myriad of incompatible kernels, there is the historical record of failure and of failed operating systems. *BSD experienced moderate success about 15 years ago in academic circles. Since then it has been in steady decline. We all knw *BSD keeps losing market share but why? Is it the problematic personalities of many of the key players? Or is it larger than their troubled personalities?

    The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting glom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.