FreeBSD 5.0 Available

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

Comments

Release Notes

[Squeezer]

If you want to see what is new in FreeBSD 5.0 then click to view the release notes.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/relnotes.html

Re:Release Notes

[Anonymous Coward]

SMPng along with the TrustedBSD stuff are probably the most important changes, but I'm REALLY happy of the POSIX compliance changes.

When companies realize the benefits fo the BSD license this will takeover the world.

Re:Release Notes

[MsGeek]

From what I understand, all of the improvements Apple made to KHTML will be in KDE 3.2 when it comes out. Apple *IS* giving back to that project, who says they won't give back to FreeBSD? Considering that Jordan Hubbard is an Apple employee now, they will probably get a lot of pressure to do exactly that.

Re:Release Notes

[micsaund]

I am consistently impressed by the FreeBSD team's ability to document their products. Whenever I need info from RedHat, for example, it ranges from a hassle to a PITA. The FreeBSD team maintains an entire, several hundred page handbook as well as east-to-find release notes, descriptions of their processes, FAQs, and much more.

I realize that many of the "hardcore haxx0rz" don't see the value in this documentation, but the fact that it exists and is maintained shows the professionalism and dedication the FreeBSD team has (which results in a damned fine OS!)

A few mirros

[KAMiKAZOW]

The ISOs are not yet on all mirrors, but at least on the following servers:
ftp://ftp.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO -IMAGES-i3 86/5.0/
ftp://ftp2.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO -IMAGES-i 386/5.0/
ftp://ftp5.uk.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/IS O-IMAGES-i 386/5.0/
ftp://ftp6.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-I MAGES-i386 /5.0/
ftp://ftp14.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ISO-IMA GES-i38 6/5.0/

Please look also if the files appeared on the other mirrors.

RC3 was a good experience

[Anonymous Coward]

Good to hear the final 5.0 release is out. I installed FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 on my Pentium 100MHz with 32MB of RAM and I must say I'm really impressed how well the system performs. I'm a console freak so I try to do everything I need to do using console programs. It's been a really great thing to notice all of the utilities I have needed are also available as console programs.
I use "slrn" to read the Usenet news, "lynx"/"links" to surf the web, "mutt" to read/send e-mail, "mpg123" to listen to music/internet radiostations. Truly great experience and imagine it works _really_ smoothly and fast on computer which was bought in 1995. I am impressed and a happy FreeBSD user!

Mirror

[huhmz]

Has been available for a couple of days now, since the mirrors are gonna get hit bad now i figure i could contribute with my unofficial 100Mbit mirror.
ISOs for i386 here:
mirror

Dont forget to check the md5sums, I could be an evil blackhat after all. Enjoy.

Early Adopter's Guide

[Anonymous Coward]

And if you want to read some thoughts on whether you should upgrade, then click to view the early adopter's guide.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.0R/early-adopter .html

Summary:

"While FreeBSD 5.0 contains a number of new and exciting features, it may not be suitable for all users at this time. In this document, we presented some background on release engineering, some of the more notable new features of the 5.X series, and some drawbacks to early adoption. We also presented some future plans for the 4-STABLE development branch and some tips on upgrading for early adopters."

BitTorrent Links for 5.0 release

[mxs]

Since Slashdot had to link to the FTP, maybe this will help lighten the stress on the mirrors : http://tacos.sus.mcgill.ca/~hperes/BT_BSD5.0/ has BitTorrent files for the i386 release ISOs.

BitTorrent is a peer to peer fileswarmer. It's Free and Open Source, and comes in flavors for *ix, win32, and MacOS X. Clients are avaiable @ http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/ ...

Once you have finished the download, please keep the window open as long as possible so that others can get the file as well. Thanks !

The download might be a little slow at the beginning, but as more and more people hop on, it should get really fast. Just give it a couple of minutes.

Re:Nice linking

[ianezz]

I thought Linux used the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack too

No, Linux has its own implementation of networking code rewritten from scratch.

This is why problems affecting the traditional *BSD implementation of TCP/IP (which is used pratically everywhere except for Linux) don't usually affect Linux. Of course, the opposite is also true.

That said, the FreeBSD kernel is known (or, at least, it has been known) for being able to handle high load/low resource conditions far more gracefully than Linux.

Re:Keeping it a secret.

[shlong]

As the release manager for FreeBSD 5.0, this situation was disappointing for me because:

1. I had formed an agreement with Hemos last week that Slashdot would only accept submissions from the release engineering team and/or PR team for this.
   
2. The story that did get posted was crap. It didn't have a link to an announcement, release notes, or anything.
   

On all, it was very unprofessional of the Slashdot editorial team.