FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE

Triumph The Insult C writes "FreeBSD 4.7 is out. Here is the announcement. New items include an option for IPFW2, a number of disk controller updates, security updates, and some changes to userland. Remember, please use a mirror." Among other things, the release announcement says: "FreeBSD 4.7 also incorporates all of the security and bug fixes from 4.6.2 (released in August 2002), including several ATA-related bugfixes, updates for OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and fixes to address several security advisories." And here are the release notes.

Comments

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[albat0r]

Yes, very good idea! And after that, we can take the best every Desktop and window manager and do a "single best-of-breed" Free Desktop Environment. But don't forget to also take the best from every good free Office Suite, so wea can have the "The-Only-Free-Good-Secure-Godlike Office Suite(tm)" to put into your distribution!

And why stop now? Merge Mozilla/Konqueror/Opera to create the "Super-Duper-Magical Internet & File browser(tm)" too!

Damn, I think we have a winner in that product! Maybe we should call it Windows XP?


Really, I often read on /. about how great it could be if we stopped competion in open source and instead do a "only one" great app that take the best of all that currently exist. The problem here is that the idea you have about the "great one" isn't the same that I have or that everybody else has.

I don't want a "single best-of-breed Free Unix distribution" just because such a thing isn't possible. So instead of having only one distribution "to bind them all", I prefer having the choice between a lot of good and different ones.

no java? who cares

[Anonymous Coward]

I love FreeBSD b/c of it's security and it's great ports system. I wish there was a linux distro on par with those two aspects of FreeBSD. But the one problem with FreeBSD for me?

No native JDK 1.4.

It's on linux, windows and solaris. The announcment of the license thingy with Sun came out 12/01 and I haven't heard anything yet.

Still no CARDBUS support yet?

[fialar]

How come FreeBSD has no cardbus support?
That's the only thing keeping me from running it on my laptop.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[CoolVibe]

You forgot one:

• The ability to make your own custom releases

Seriously. I have several custom ISO's I made for myself for easy deployment of boxes. They all cvsup after install, and then install a ream of ports suited to the purpose of the machine. Like a webserver, database server etc. Complete with a scripted sysinstall! It's very easy to do. "make release" is my bitch :)

Boot from the CD, partition/label, go have coffee and return to a machine ready to deploy. I love it.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[Sivar]

That is what I did. That is what happened to me. In the end, there are advantages and disadvantages to both. Ultimately, I tried Gentoo Linux and found the best of both worlds (intelligent source-based install, centralized compiler flag config files, easy application and system upgrade...) though FreeBSD is still preferable for boring servers that absolutely must not crash, ever.