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August 2002 Daemon News Ezine Published

Posted by michael on from the your-ideas-intrigue-me dept.

questionlp writes "The August 2002 Ezine has been published and is packed with articles and columns with topics ranging from behind-the-scenes look at VicFUG 2002, a report on the recent O'Reilly OSCON, one's adventure through Unix starting from Linux to FreeBSD, a HOWTO on backing up FreeBSD with tar and SMBFS, plus a look at some of the most popular web browsers (most of which are available in the BSD Ports collection)."

3 of 102 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Upgrading once a week? Is he serious? by parc · · Score: 3, Informative

    Updating packages and update the system are two different things. A weekly portupgrade -a is one thing. A cvsup and rebuild of world weekly would be overkill.
    However, it's so easy to do, I could see people doing it.

  2. Re:offtopic about your response to point 3 by Wdomburg · · Score: 4, Informative

    >FreeBSD is, in fact, THE free Unix. Linux is a
    >Unix clone. FreeBSD is based on Berkeley Unix, and
    >is thus, a direct decendant of the original Unix
    >source code, not a rewrite. Not that it matters
    >much.

    It doesn't matter, and it's not really accurate. FreeBSD is based on the 4.4-lite codebase, which is the version that removed the last vestiges of copyrighted USL (Unix Systems Lab) code from the Net/2 codebase released by Berkeley's CSRG (Computer Systems Research Group) as part of a settlement agreement in the lawsuit USL pressed against the BSDI and UCB. So yes, FreeBSD *is* a rewrite.

    And even that is somewhat irrelevent, since if you want to be pedantic about the term, UNIX is now a specification and operating systems which are certified to conform to that specification. None of the free Unixes have gone through the certification process, and thus are all "unix-like" and not UNIX.

    Matt

    (And just as one side note, even if none of the above was true, saying "FreeBSD is THE free Unix" doesn't make sense, since OpenBSD and NetBSD are also derived from the 386BSD codebase, and would therefore qualify under your definition.)

  3. Re:Upgrading once a week? Is he serious? by nutznboltz · · Score: 2, Informative

    It's really quite simple. You can lock into the RELEASE version of the OS and only get critical updates that way. If you edit your /etc/cvsupfile so that this this is set:

    *default tag=RELENG_4_6

    when you run "cvsup /etc/cvsupfile" you will pull down FreeBSD 4.6.1-RELEASE-p7 today not 4.6-STABLE.

    Most productions systems are safe to update once a week that way. You will eventually need to do a real update.