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

upgrade

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been waiting for an upgrade.

Re:upgrade

[discogravy]

Speaking of upgrading FreeBSD...you might be interested this recent experiment too.

What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[pieterh]

Just a question, I'm not knocking FreeBSD.

But I'm seeing Linux coming up so fast... Is there a likelyhood of putting the best of FreeBSD into Linux and getting a single best-of-breed Free Unix distribution?

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[Moridineas]

The best of FreeBSD? Well some would say the best of FreeBSD is the BSD part (license and architecture). Another advantage (and what I like a lot) is the ability to keep track of the CVS tree and "make world" any time you want and have a completely upgraded core system. The ports system is also in my mind infinitely preferable to binary package hell. Ports has been tried in some linux distributions I believe (Gentoo? not sure). So in a way, some of the best parts of the BSD's are going into linux

On the other hand, linux because of it's size and diversity will never have the core development group, and central design that the BSD's have.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[MadFarmAnimalz]

That is, I suspect, a little like thinking that it might be nice to affix Pamela Anderson's knockers to Natalie Portman's front side.

Nice idea, in other words, but perhaps not something modern medicine is up to just yet.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[aridhol]

Depending on your viewpoint, one of my "major advantages" to the BSD system may be a disadvantage to you. And it wouldn't translate well to Linux.

If you get FreeBSD 4.7, it is exactly the same as anybody else's FreeBSD 4.7 in terms of included software. There's no RedHat FreeBSD, SuSE FreeBSD, Debian FreeBSD, etc. It's just FreeBSD.

Now if only they could get that NVidia driver working, it would be perfect.

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.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[b0r1s]

Many will argue that FreeBSD is still more stable than linux. That is debateable, but I think a case could be made either way. Much of the difference is due to preference (some of it is due to the dislike of the GPL by many, many people).

The advantages of FreeBSD over Linux is:

• Complete control of ENTIRE operating system. With a few exceptions, tools in the base systems are BSD derived rather than GNU tools. This prevents the FSF people from calling it "GNU/FreeBSD", and allows the contributors to the operating system the ability to modify userland tools to better integrate with the kernel.
  
• Incredibly well developed updating system. The CVSup setup employed by FreeBSD is simply unmatched by anything linux has. Yes, Redhat allows you to grab new kernel RPMs, and debian allows you to apt-get kernels, but FreeBSD is designed to be updated often ('updated' means the entire source heirarchy, if need by), and the system in place makes this possible. When you also consider that a single 'make buildworld' followed by an NFS mount, and multiple 'make installworld's on other machines can update an entire server farm to a custom built OS, you'll realize that linux can not compete with the level of customization that to which FreeBSD administrators have become acustomed.
  
• Make tools that make developing nice. Things like <bsd.port.mk> et. al. have no rivals in the linux world. Creating kernel makefiles becomes trivial; a simple include statement handles 90% of the grunt work involved in writing makefiles.
  
• Freedom from the GPL. Like it or not, most corporations do not want to give away all of their work to their competitors if they ever decide to release a product that required modification to the OS.
  

Yes, linux is nice ... for the desktop. But I'd still prefer FreeBSD in the rack, or in any corporate situation.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah! Imagine if some wackos came out with other versions of BSD, they might name them openBSD, NetBSD, NotLinuxBSD, OS X, etc.

Good thing there's just one BSD. Imagine if they followed Linux's bad example!

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[dsb3]

> There's no RedHat FreeBSD, SuSE FreeBSD, Debian FreeBSD, etc. It's just FreeBSD.

Um. Actually there *is* Debian/FreeBSD. You can find more details here: http://www.debian.org/ports/freebsd/

That said, I do agree with your original point.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[Gendou]

That is, I suspect, a little like thinking that it might be nice to affix Pamela Anderson's knockers to Natalie Portman's front side.

Blasphemy. This outrage will not go unanswered. Have you no concept of balance, symmetry, proportion, applied aesthetics, and physical/spiritual curvature??

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?

[aridhol]

Less users spurring development I suppose.

I think that's exactly it. NVidia has released binary-only drivers for Linux and Windows, but not for any other OS. They claim that they can't release the source because part of it is licenced from another source (can't remember who), and that they aren't licenced to release it.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[Moridineas]

Well you can build only portions if you want--the kernel for instance, that's pretty easy. Another option is if you have multiple systems just build on one and then install on all your others from that system (assuming they are the same arch etc...cross-compiling doesn't always work I think). Also, buildworld USED to be an extremely time consuming thing, but now it's not so bad.

Wasting bandwidth? How do you figure? I imagine that downloading text diffs (cvs) to keep your soruce tree in line is quite a bit less impressive that downloading large binary packages for every update?

You have SOMEWHAT of a point with space, but otoh I don't know too many servers anymore that don't have 1GB to spare (for source and compiling--and that is more than needed!)

Overall even given your valid points, I prefer compiling updates--I can tweak options, only compile what is need, compiler optimizations, etc.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[jared_earle]

..a single 'make buildworld'...

How does that differ from a single 'make bzImage' in Linux?

If you have to ask, you have obviously missed the point. "make buildworld" will compile userland. You know, all the stuff in /bin, /sbin /etc and all the rest?

Whereas a "make bzImage" will compile a kernel. Whoop. This is "make buildkernel" in FreeBSD.

[troll]The Linux equivalent of "make buildworld" is "make my mummy buy me a new distro CD"[/troll]

/me ducks

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.

Re:What is the relevance of FreeBSD today?

[benedict]

I don't think Linux qualifies as a System V,
though it has borrowed some concepts from System V.

There is a formal definition of what is and is not
a System V unix. Last I checked it was called the
SVID (System V Interface Definition), but that may
have changed by now.

My personal favorite addition...

[splume]

nice(1) now uses the -n option to specify the ``niceness'' of the utility being run.

Doesn't that just sound like a happy command?

Mirrors

[aridhol]

Instead of pointing to the front page, it may be more useful to point at the mirror list.

Heh jsut in time :)

[Richard_at_work]

I think its a good thing i didnt buy 4.6 from the London (UK) Linux Expo then isnt it :)

No, dont ask me why they were selling BSD (quite heavily actually) along side Linux on most stalls.

Oh, and a note to KDE and Gnome teams, having blank stalls with two spotty kids sitting at laptops, with no promotional items or banners or posters really isnt a good way to promote your product guys. (And believe it or not, they were sat next to each other, AND NOT FIGHTING ;) )

Re:Heh jsut in time :)

[DoctorPepper]

Why is that a good thing? Hell, once you install a FreeBSD distribution, you never have to install another one on the same computer again (assuming you don't mess it up :-). Just point your cvsfile at the branch you wish (RELENG_4 in this case) and do a buildworld, and voila! You will have FreeBSD 4.7.

Re:Heh jsut in time :)

[b0r1s]

While I agree with most of what you said, I dislike tracking -stable.

It's far better to track the latest release. Setting the tag to "RELENG_4_7_0" would allow you to grab the exact sources used to build the 4.7 cd, AND any security updates as they come out.

Stable is fine, for home users, but some of the patches MFC'd aren't quite as stable as they should be for production equipment.

Re:FreeBSD running behind linux?

[Hoxworth]

I suggest trying it out. If by support you are referring to hardware, it is true that FreeBSD is not as heavily advanced as Linux. FreeBSD is built more as a server operating system than a desktop operating system, and as such, the developers are more worried about producing a stable operating system and hardening the actual core than providing driver support for the latest and greatest soundcard. Don't get me wrong, they do have an excellent list of supported hardware. In my experience, FreeBSD has been able to utilize my system a heck of a lot better than Linux ever has. Large X processes seem to always have no problem running simultaneously with 3-4 builds taking place in the background. Even binaries built for Linux run at incredible speed; as stated on the FreeBSD website, Linux binaries can even run faster on a FreeBSD machine using Linux emulation than Linux itself can run it. I'm not going to get into a holy war over which operating system is better, because they both definitely have their ups and downs. I do suggest, however, to give FreeBSD a try if you are interested in seeing what it can do.

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:Still no CARDBUS support yet?

[CoolVibe]

FreeBSD has cardbus support, but you'd have to dare to run the CURRENT branch. CURRENT is now having a big overall nouw ith the recent additions of the new KSE threading and GEOM, so I'd just wait for a bit until everything in CURRENT dampens out a bit.

CURRENT is going to rock when it goes STABLE.

No thanks

[Anonymous Coward]

I get lots of free BSD's already with Windows

BSD ?

[AresTheImpaler]

I want to try BSD... but have some questions before doing so. My computer has both win xp and linux. I am going to buy another hard disk to put freebsd. Can I boot bsd with grub? also... Can anyone please tell me why some people prefer bsd from linux? doesn't linux have more support? does unreal tournament run under bsd(I don't thinks so)? I'm a bsd newbie but been using linux for about 2 years. What differences would I find? thanks

The only problem...

[Sp4c3 C4d3t]

I love FreeBSD. I would run it in place of Linux... but my Audigy doesn't work. And I don't have accelerated nvidia drivers (though I did read something about those coming to FreeBSD?). But the nvidia issue isn't important... I need sound, and that's all there is to it... and I refuse to use those payware drivers that apparently don't support the digital out on the card.

gcc 3?

[Ashish Kulkarni]

just a curiosity...what is the reason that all the *BSDs are sticking to gcc2.95.x? I know that Linux has been using gcc3.2 for quite a bit of time now, and it can be considered somewhat stable.

Re:gcc 3?

[ozzmosis]

Just the "stable" branch is sticking around with gcc2.95 the newer more cutting edge "current" branch has gcc3.2. And the reason behind this is gcc 3.2 isn't stable yet and gcc2.95 is and has been stable for quite some time.

ahze@ahze(~) gcc --version
gcc (GCC) 3.2.1 [FreeBSD] 20020901 (prerelease)

ahze@ahze(~) uname -v
FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT #34: Sun Sep 22 20:30:11 EDT 2002

Re:gcc 3?

[Fweeky]

Generally large scale software upgrades are avoided in a -STABLE branch. That means prefering to backport patches than upgrade to the latest and greatest (OpenSSH was somewhat of an exception because patches were not available at the time). Those who need to version chase can use ports and have a much greater choice and level of control over how things are set up and which versions to go for (gcc3, 3.1, 3.2 and 3.3 are in ports, perl 5.6 and 5.8 too, as are latest OpenSSH, OpenSSH, sendmail, etc).

This keeps cvs deltas down as imports are much more rare (hence making updates smaller) and helps keep only well tested and well known code in base.

Re:gcc 3?

[Arandir]

gcc-3.2 was released less than two months ago. gcc-2.1 was released less than five months ago. And gcc-3.0 was released not much longer than one year ago.

How many -release- Linux distros can you name that were using gcc-3.2 even thirty days ago?

Face it, gcc-3.2 has not been around "for quite a bit of time now". It is in their -current (unstable) branches, and if you wish to live on the cutting edge, feel free to use them. But two months is nowhere near the amount of time required to properly test the inclusion of a new compiler in a system with a reputation for stability.

actually, since you mention it

[Anonymous Coward]

The various BSDs are not differet distributions of a single operating system. They originate from a single source code base, but are separate operating system.

Their kernels differ (often substantially), their filesystem layouts and utilities (to some degree) differ, their packaging systems differ, etc. There is cross pollination, and it's easier to adapt kernel features among the BSDs than between BSD and other *nix type operating systems, but they are not the same Beastie.

And while we're on the topic, OsX is not really a BSD operating system; it's a Mach microkernel with a BSD layer on top that provides some utiltiy functionality. It's not substantially BSDish.

Re:Sigh ....

[dinivin]

FreeBSD code cannot be "stolen"


Completely untrue... Taking the code and not adhering to the license is stealing. This is what happened when FreeBSD code made it into the linux ATA driver and the copyright was dropped from the source code.

Dinivin

Me hopes for support for my controller

[Openadvocate]

Ah, I hope it will support my promise Supertrak SX6000 RAID controller.
hmm:
The pst driver, for supporting Promise SuperTrak ATA RAID controllers, has been added.
Sweet. There is hope, thank you Søren Schmidt.

And ftp.freebsd.org is hosted by a local ISP, as well as the local mirror. Ah, I will have the disc in 40 minutes. yes.. Now if only I haven't drunk that bottle of wine for dinner, oh well. just makes installing that more fun.

FreeBSD rules!

[Petronius]

I started playing with it a week ago and now I'm thinking about abandonning RH for FreeBSD: so far, I've had nothing but good experiences with it:
- all the stuff I like (bash, Python, Java, PostGres, webmin) is there
- KDE is fast, very fast!
- boot time is amazingly fast
- the Ports system is *amazing*
what's not to like about it?

Re:FreeBSD rules!

[destiney]

I started using FreeBSD a few days ago myself. I've used Linux for several years previously.

The thing that amazed me most about FreeBSD was the speed and response time of the networking. FTP and Samba are near instantaneous in response time on my local network. I have all my mp3s and oggs on there and I play them in Winamp across the network. Previously it would take 5-7 seconds to start an mp3 up, but now since I switched to FreeBSD the startup time is 1-2 seconds.

I don't know about other OS's but I installed my FreeBSD satrting off with just two floppies, now that is cool! Two hours later I had a complete system and never burned the first CD.

Re:FreeBSD rules!

[Arandir]

more specifically, Gentoo

If I absolutely had to use Linux as my main system, I would probably use Gentoo. No doubt about it. But the mere word "linux" is not enough to make me switch back. FreeBSD does what I want it to do and does it well. It's not about being 1337, it's about using the system I want to use.

p.s. I bet both FreeBSD *and* Gentoo users are wondering what all those complaints of sluggish KDE coming from Redhat, Mandrake and Debian users are about...

Somewhat

[Multiple Sanchez]

"Your husband is somewhat dead."

"Sir -- I got your daughter somewhat pregnant."

I think you should reconsider your definition of "stable" somewhat.

Re:no java? who cares

[MobyTurbo]

No native JDK 1.4

Yes, their native JDK is still 1.3. You can run Linux 1.4 in emulation though if there's something in 1.4 you must have... I assume that there will eventually be a JDK 1.4 for FreeBSD.

Best Feature of FreeBSD...

[Anonymous Coward]

is the documentation. Yes there's some excellent linux docs on the ldp site but for FreeBSD you can just consult the Handbook for everthing.