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FreeBSD 4.6 Release Delayed
Dan writes "Bruce A. Mah from the FreeBSD Release Engineering team announced that due to some late-breaking issues, 4.6 will be released about a week later than originally planned."
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Haven't you editors heard yet? BSD is dying! Get with the program and post another Linux 2.5 patch level increment announcement. Thank you!
Why bother.
Wouldn't it be nice if all software releases were *only* a week late?
Click here or here.
A lot of companies prefer *BSD to avoid a lot of complications of the GPL.
He summed it up well.
Good to see how the quality of the release takes precedence over any deadlines. That's the way it should be. I'd rather have FreeBSD 4.6 a month late than have a buggy one now.
Granted, not all OS X users are hardcore UNIX hackers, but I think having Apple pushing a *BSD derivative is a great way to stir up some more interest in it.
________________________________________________
suwain_2
I'm sure that having a stable DHCP installation is going to be important to all the cable modem users out there running FreeBSD, so this is clearly A Good Thing.
Uhm, there's some little company, I think its called... Apple? :)
loply.com
Not exactly fair to claim this as embracing a free BSD base, as OSX is not free, portable, and open-source. This is like claiming MS-DOS is based on Unix because it has files and directories.
Click here or here.
Well, there goes my weekend. Leave it to Slashdot to be the bearer of bad news.
...oh wait...no FreeBSD? I thought they said no free LSD.
Yes, MacOSX is based in part on BSDLite 4.4. Some libraries come from NetBSD, while most of he utilities stem from FreeBSD. BSD's contribution to MacOSX But MacOSX/Darwin is also based on Mach. Cheerfully adding to the confusion are various projects such as Fink, which aims to port a good deal of linux software to MacOSX. Occasionally, dumb flamewars will sprout up, with one side advocating FreeBSD style ports, etc., and the other advocating a more linux-like style. I guess it depends on what systems you've used before.
Well, right off the top of my head I can think of three that havn't been mentioned: Niksun NetVCR (a really sweet piece of kit), Juniper routers, and the Cybernet NetMAX. LOTS of people with embedded solutions that require a bit more oomph than your normal embedded OS can provide use FreeBSD. From a corporate point of view, the FreeBSD has a very favorable license and a conservative release schedule that helps insure a stable OS for your embedded project. Also, it doesn't hurt that the FreeBSD source tree is in CVS, and you can maintain a branch relativly painlessly without having your proprietary changes merged back in the main branch (although some companies merge their changes anyway, look at vinum).
I read the internet for the articles.
It seems to me that what we have is a lack of nerds here. Everytime we see a FreeBSD topic, 50% of all posts are pure junk.
Now it seems to me that we mostly have wannabe nerds here. I'd say that if you truly are a geek, you would not be afraid to install another OS. In fact it would be something you would thing was fun. "Hey another OS/version, lets check it out just for the fun of it".
Personally I like to install all kind of OS, yes I even have tried to install M$ servers just to check them out, not that I would like to run one. Playing with all kinds of operating systems and making it run of strange hardware is fun to me.
But maybe the people truly into *BSD might not post here at all because all the responses to their posts most likely will be met with a useless reply.
It's not that I don't like Slashdot, but why are the view and posts so narrowminded? It seems to me that the topics that gets the most posts(besides from M$ bashing), are the ones where you can apply some kind of generic opinion and without any deep insight into the subject. But maybe this is how it always has been and it's just me who are wrong.
My question, again, is who?
Click here or here.
Suppose an operating system that isn't geek-chic announced that their OS was going to be a tiny bit late. Slash-dotters would be standing on their heads to be the first person that posts a "serves 'em right" message.
As much as I don't like M$ do you think that they delayed their OS's because they wanted to or that they didn't think they were stabel enough?
ports system hard to use?!
/usr/ports/type/program
... mind-bending work!
cd
make install
damn
shell choices? You have lost me there, since Linux and BSD use the same shells.
I honestly don't see how the installation program is difficult to use. I have heard many people complain about it, but it's not hard to use at all. Of course I haven't used any recent Linux installers (last Linux I used was Slackware 7) with all the dumbed-down GUI luvin', but I still fail to see how a straightforward ANSI menu system is confusing and difficult?!
Let's not even get into kernel compilations where FreeBSD wins hands down.
I mean, all you have to do is edit one single text file and then type "make buildkernel" and "make installkernel" and viola! No lilo or anything like that to deal with.
I do admit that the whole slice/partition thing baffles me a little bit, as I don't understand why someone would want multiple slices? Partitions are good enough for me when it comes to organizing a disk. Does anybody out there actually use multiple slices? If so, why (I'd honestly like to know!)
Have you forgotten about Darwin? It's based on BSD. 4.4 BSD I beleive...
please moderate the parent down, a much better version of this, (which he is referring to the CIPA crap) is located here:A HREF="2 19.shtml ?tid=123"
http://yro.slashdot.org/yro/02/05/31/1423
a bit more about me http://www.advogato.org/person/trelane/ or my private page http://trelane.net
If BSD is dying, then XP and Mac OS X, both of which are either using parts, or mostly based on the BSD technology.
I can see Mr. Gates and Mr. Jobs quitely sobbing already.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
This is one of the many reasons why I prefer OpenBSD to FreeBSD. OpenBSD is ALWAYS due either December 1st or June 1st. Now, today would've been the official release date of OpenBSD 3.1, but it was officially released 2 weeks ago!! This is the only big project I can think of that does not delay its release. Linux 2.4 was late by a year, FreeBSD 4.5 was late by a couple of weeks, 4.6 will be late by at least one week, FreeBSD 5.0 was delayed by 14 months, etc. The thing with OpenBSD: they don't do revolutionnary released like Microsoft. Each new version contains many security and bug fuxes, new application, new hardwares code and a couple of new features (e.g: openssh, pf, pfauth). Maybe some other projects should take example, not only on OpenBSD's commitement for security, but also its commitement to respect release schedule.
Yeah, I read about that in the paper this morning (I had breakfast in Multnomah County, so it's sort of a local issue). I was quite surprised that it wasn't on Slashdot yet. Maybe I should submit it again, and see if they'll take mine?
Looks like the New York Times is blocking your redirect there. Here's The Oregonian's article.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
I used to work at VERITAS Software. They routinely delayed release dates on products if quality wasn't good enough.
There is a problem with this, though. Customers made business plans based upon planned release dates. When those release dates slipped, the customer's plans were upset. This could leave them in awkward situations because they couldn't do certain things without features present in newer versions of the software. As a consequence, we always dreaded a slipping of the release date because it would provoke great annoyance from the customers.
Customers want it right and on-time. If they have to pick between those two, they will select to have it right, but will not be happy about it!
OpenBSD has good commercial support, due to the support of the hardware crypto folks.
Of course, being security companies, they don't talk much about it.
A lot of the backbone routers are Junipers, which are based on FreeBSD. FreeBSD powers the internet.
both userland and kernel PPP caused kernel panics for me as soon as i tried to pass data. I don't know why, but I had to rebuild 4.5-RELEASE. I'm glad they're fixing some issues. I'm sure that's one of them. Everything else was working great though...atleast that i noticed.
Does anybody out there actually use multiple slices? If so, why (I'd honestly like to know!)
/, /usr (obvious), /var (to set a limit on ftp uploads and mail etc.), a swap patition and a second OS. Thats Five and could not be done without slices, this goes up to eight if you run -current as well (only one swap) and more still if you want to run Linux.
I use multiple (two) slices for running -Current and -Stable. N.B A normal IBM bios allows 4 partitions per disk, as I have a partition for
Hmmm, you mean like Linux being a year late with the 2.4 kernel? :P
I saw this the other day - and was about to submit it. But then I figured - who cares? It's just one week. This is a BSD section thing at best - certainly not front page.
espo
I believe the Nokia/Checkpoint platform is BSD based...
What is this "release" you refer to? I just make buildworld whenever I feel like it.
Compaq sells hardware to Yahoo, which is a
FreeBSD shop.
The Nokia Firewall-1 implementation is based on
a modified FreeBSD.
IBM's InterJet router-toaster is based on FreeBSD.
Ben "You have your mind on computers, it seems."
Was rated +4 for me... Then again, I set up slashdot to +2 upvotes but only -1 downvotes.
Apple has a BSD solution. It's called OS X.
There are a plethora of searches that yield perfectly acceptable results (if done right) that censoring software will filter. Search google for "breast cancer" with NetNanny or some other stupid filter, and it will block everything.
Get a clue. It's up to the people, even children, to decide what they do and do not want to look at. Parents should never bitch about kids looking at "objectional material". It's their own damn faults if they failed to instill their morals in their children.
Why bother.
Not that this changes the argument about commercial contributions back to the OS, but to provide a non-rhetorical answer to what I presume was a rhetorical question:
The kernel support for USB is typically in sys/dev/usb in the source tree. (That's where it is on my FreeBSD 3.4 system; no, that's not a typo for "FreeBSD 4.3".) There may also be user-mode daemons or library routines there as well.
Here's a FreeBSD FireWire implementation under development; the most recent tarball came out 2002-05-30. I don't know what projects, if any, exist for NetBSD or OpenBSD.
Don't know about FireWire, but I'd be surprised if its not there on the OS that is the basis of MacOS X. OTOH, I have no FireWire kit, and don't see any reason why I should in the forseable future.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
And how is this database maintained? A simple script that makes checksums nightly and compares them to the current files? (As stock FreeBSD does for setuid binaries.) Then if someone is determined, (s)he could just change the checksum as well. It sounds like you are depending on security through obscurity - no one knows your checksum system is there, so no one would do that.
In contrast, the RPM way includes a GPG signature with every package. The checksums are signed. If you make your own RPMs, you can do so on your testing system, with a private key not stored on the machine you are checking. Then you know the database is trustworthy.
Why would your way be superior? I've shown one way it might not even be as good. Even if you've avoided that pitfall (sending the checksums somewhere else, perhaps), there's the problem of knowing if the changes are authorized or not - with a RPM, updating the package and the checksum always happens at once. With something like TripWire, you have to remember and/or tell other admins you changed this package. There are surely other pitfalls I can't think of now.
Any lack pf super high-level automation is not a disadvantage, it's traditional systems administration.
It is indeed traditional systems administration. However, I find it to be a disadvantage compared to RPM. Rejecting things because they are not traditional is dumb. Please explain to me why your way is better, if you can.
There is also the need to operate on hardware that can't run Windows, and does not support DOS partitioning.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
By "ports" do you mean "stuff in the {Free,Net,Open}BSD ports collections"? If so, have you surveyed, for example, all ~7000 FreeBSD ports to see what licenses they have, and determined that most of them are not GPLed (much less that most of them use the BSDL)?
If by "fBSD" you mean "FreeBSD", it doesn't have its own C compiler - or linker, or assembler; it uses GCC, GLD, and GAS. Take a look at /usr/src/gnu.
The following is by !me:
There once was a troll found on slashdot
Whose posts made him seem like a crackpot
Something's wrong with his head
Screaming BSD's dead
Thanks to Darwin it's just hit the jackpot
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
In an article posted yesterday, it was covered.
If by that assertion you mean that the changes to the ported applications are BSD-licensed, then, even if true, it's not a very interesting assertion - the applications in question are still GPLed.
On BSD, cc is gcc:
Two names, same program.
So? That's make, not the compiler.
Which, as noted, is the GNU C Compiler, even if the command name used to invoke it is cc, not gcc.
As always there is a lot of speculation and very little knowledge in these posts.
BSD
Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD. The BSD component provides
file systems
networking (except for the hardware device level)
UNIX security model
syscall support
the BSD process model, including process IDs and signals
FreeBSD kernel APIs
many of the POSIX APIs
Pthreads (POSIX threads implementation)
The BSD component is described in more detail in the chapter BSD Overview".
So there pbtpbtpbtpbt.
I'm quite aware that there are plenty of BSDLed projects; I'm just noting that the C compiler that comes with BSD isn't one of them.
But if you weren't busy on Slashdot being yet another worthless stupid brainless monkey, and actually had a brain to use and bothered using it, you could have figured that out.
Correct. Just because BSD happens to have cc as one of the names for the GNU C Compiler doesn't mean that it's some compiler other than GCC. As you will discover if you actually bother looking at the source that generates the C compiler on BSD, it is GCC.
You are incorrect in your mistaken belief that I've been making some assumption that the C compiler on a system is called gcc; my makefiles use $(CC).
...regardless of who makes them or the software that makes them usable.
An OS simply enables you to do something with the computer... it is a means - not an end.
Obviously some OS's will be better suited for a particular task.
Rather than waste your time flaming someone because they use a BSD variant (or waste your time by responding to such a post) go out and get yourself a girlfriend or hit the damn gym once in a while.
I keep an open mind and followed my own advice, now I can install virtually any OS on any system, configure it correctly, and have a hottie rockin' chick that buys me "LinuxuniL" and little devil wearing sneakers kinds of shirts from ThinkGeek.
Yeah I work in a M$ shop now programming MFC and ATL... but so what? It is amazing what 90K a year will make one do... They could wip out DOS 4.0 and I'd say "yes sir, whatever you say!"
I am very small, utmostly microscopic.
Wasabi Systems has made a viable capitalist business out of supporting people who are using embedded NetBSD in various devices.