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!)

Re:Release Notes

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Some companies are already well aware of the benefits of the BSD license. The net result? One company is now the largest single producer of UNIX operating systems in the world, measured in terms of number of units shipped per year.

The BSD license is a beautiful thing. Software that carries the BSD license can really, seriously, no-shit change the world for the better.

Re:Release Notes

[eparusel]

It wasn't a huge thing, but I do recall a little while back a few FreeBSD->Apple people were sporting an NFS torture test tool.

Apparently it helped them squash a few hard to find bugs in NFS on FreeBSD....

Re:Release Notes

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Your dumb conclusion is almost as dumb as your main facts

Wow. With that kind of wit and charisma, how can I hope to win an argument against you?

Good thing I've got a soft spot for lost causes.

Apple could have easily, (and legaly) built OS X on Linux, and simply kept aqua back, closed source, just like they did with BSD.

Maybe, if they'd been extremely careful to do everything just right. They still would have had to use the FreeBSD user environment, because the GNU one is just too restrictive (refer to the infamouse OpenSSL/GNU conflict).

But the most important point is one that you made in passing: "The only thing they wouldn't be able to do was release Darwin under a the APL [sic]." Apple released Darwin and other open source components under the APSL for a reason. Had they thrown their lot in with any GPL component or library, it would have "infected" the entire kernel or userland or whatever, making it impossible for Apple to retain ownership and control of their code.

And apple isn't the biggest Unix software company in the world

No? Computerworld, August 30, 2002: "Rendezvous isn't Apple's first foray into the open-source community. With the release of Mac OS X, Apple became the largest vendor of Unix in the world."

they're merely the largest growing due entirely to dumb looking computers (iMac, etc.)

Wow. You really got me there. We'd better not give Apple any credit for their accomplishments, because their computers look "dumb." You are absolutely right.

Pfff.

Oh, hooray

[RPoet]

The release hasn't been announced, which would mean it hasn't reached the mirrors yet, which would mean they need the master FTP server to be up and running. How very convenient of Slashdot to link directly to the master FTP server before this has happened! This is sabotage.

Re:Oh, hooray

[Fulkkari]

which would mean it hasn't reached the mirrors yet

No. There were already copies of the release, on the mirrors I checked.

Re:Oh, hooray

[krismon]

Actually I believe the mirrors grab from a non-public ftp server.

Re:Oh, hooray

[schulte]

The master server is actually called ftp-master.freebsd.org, which is only accessible by the official mirror sites. You can read about the FreeBSD distribution system at: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/article s/releng/distribution.html.

Nice linking

[Openadvocate]

Now why would you link directly to a FTP server? We all know that a lot of people will begin to download a +600MB ISO file and that no single FTP server would be able to handle the Slashdot crowd. Now I hope that the people here that wants to download FreeBSD has the brain power to check the mirror list first, if they not already has a favorite mirror. Still the proper thing to do, would be to link to the mirror list directly.
Also by using the mirror list, our US friends wouldn't have to download from a server in Denmark, but maybe a local one instead. Oh, well I guess that's just me, but I really think that in the lengthly, time consuming screening process of each article, someone would show a bit of responibility, knowing the effects, posting a article with links have.

Re:Nice linking

[mikerod]

I guess since *BSD is dying the /. editors saw no harm in linking :-))

Re:Nice linking

[b0r1s]

Now why would you link directly to a FTP server? We all know that a lot of people will begin to download a +600MB ISO file and that no single FTP server would be able to handle the Slashdot crowd..

Correction: No single Linux server would be able to handle the Slashdot crowd. A single FreeBSD server can do it easily.

http://www.bsdtoday.com/2000/October/News296.html.

This is from 2 years ago, many advancements have been made, particularly to the hardware and network stack, so assume that these numbers are on the very low end of estimates.

"We're very pleased to have servers that we built, running the FreeBSD operating system, set new milestones like this. It really shows just how well our large servers can perform in real-world situations using freely available software", Greenman said. "Equally impressive is the server's stability. It was pumping out upwards of 300 million bits per second to over 3000 users at a time for the past several days without a glitch and has been operating crash-free under similarly high loads for nearly two months now."

Re:Nice linking

[SonOfSengaya]

Yeah, because they just updated to 5.0...

Re:Nice linking

[wass]

That said, can someone knowledgeable offer some sort of explanation for why FreeBSD is able to support a higher network load than linux? Is the above link a real unbiased comparison?Does it have anything to do with linux being monolithic kernel? I thought Linux used the FreeBSD TCP/IP stack too, so wouldn't this seem to put them on roughly equal par? Are there any technical reasons the Linux kernel hackers haven't been able to catch up to FreeBSD's abilities?

Sorry to open the door for scores of both Linux and *BSD trolls to jump in with stupid responses like "myOS rox, yourOS sux", but hopefully there will be at least one level-headed response. Thx.

Re:Nice linking

[Beetjebrak]

From my experience (FreeBSD fileservers under pretty heavy punishment from a publishing house internally) I can say RAID works like a charm using vinum. Of course it supports hardware RAID controllers, but those should perform roughly equally under every OS.

Journaling, well, I don't think one could call SoftUpdates actual journalling.. but it works like a charm really. It's fast, reliable and there are no lenghty fsck's for when the server ever needs to reboot (security patches).

The servers I speak of have been running steadily for well over a year without any unplanned reboots. Of course I reboot them when security patches demand it, but those are few and many don't even require rebooting. I also had a disk blow up on me some months ago. Vinum did what it had to do and the box just kept on running. (Whose slogan is that again?? I never had this kind of 'luck' with NT-servers. RAID would work, but the box would go south together with a disk fairly soon)

As for the single CPU-bit: I don't have any first-hand experience with SMP-systems but I hear 5.0 has some really great support for SMP in its kernel quite on par with Solaris. Fileserving witn Samba, Netatalk and NFS isn't exactly taxing on the CPU, so I'd like to hear some experiences from people who do run renderfarms on FreeBSD.

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:Nice linking

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Does it have anything to do with linux being monolithic kernel?

FreeBSD is also built on a monolithic kernel. Monolithic kernels tend to be as fast or (usually) faster than MicroKernels - no message passing, everything is essentially 'global' and readily accessed. As far as monolithic goes, you might be having a brainfart about MacOS X, which is a MicroKernel (Mach) with a kernel level BSD blob (a mix of Free and NetBSD).

FreeBSD has always been able to withstand higher loads than Linux. Just been around longer. It has a more mature VM that can take the load, and has a more mature TCP/IP stack.

Not a troll, I just FreeBSD has stability advantages over Linux under high load. Linux has a lot of other advantages, take your pick. I don't know why folks get into religious arguments and start yelling over what free UNIX you should use. "You know if you use THIS free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're real cool, but if you use THAT free, stable, x86 UNIX-like system with a lot of application support, you're a total asshole man." I must be clueless; I just don't get it.

Re:Nice linking

[b0r1s]

Linux have much more than BSD ways for scaling up. BSD was designed to work as a single server (with single CPU). Besides, I wanna ask: how is BSD good with journalling and RAIDs on that sinlge server?

Journalling is a hack to an already poor filesystem. Well designed filesystems, such as UFS, support other means to ensure correctness. UFS and UFS2 support softupdates, which ensure consistency. Journalling, such as that in ext3, are hacks added to fix design problems.

As for scaling: the single advantage of linux over bsd in scaling is the introduction of Mosix clustering for Linux, and the newer SMP code brought by IBM to the Linux project. The fact that BSD was used by projects such as Yahoo and Hotmail should suggest that it does scale quite well.

Re:Nice linking

[ejungle]

Holy fucking shit.

According to freesoftware.com, the server runs FreeBSD on a one 550MHz Intel Pentium-III Xeon CPU-based machine with 4GB of memory, a gigabit ethernet adapter and two 200GB TeraSolutions TSR-2200 RAID-5 storage systems.

Sure, pushing bits isn't that hard. But this is a tiny box, especially when you've got 3000 different connections asking for various bits of data from a RAID 5 array (the slowest of raid configurations, great economy though...) That's where things get impressive. Sure most of the files are cached in the 4GB of memory, but to my knowledge any filesystem navigation requires real disk reads. To do that and maintain responsiveness while pushing 300Mbps is pretty impressive. I would have liked to see how fast FTP 'ls' commands returned results.

My esteem for FreeBSD has always been high, but it just "took it up another notch."

Insert clip of BSD Daemon shouting, "BAM!"

Now, to install it on my scavenged Pentium 90... *sob*

Re:Nice linking

[axxackall]

if journalling is just a hack, why IBMuse it instead of UFS? I don't believe that journalling is just a hack. It's reliability has been proven by several new-designed open source and commercial filesystems: ReiserFS, XFS, JFS.

As for Ext3, it's been improved, not hacked. And counting its age it's already reliable. Compare to UFS back to the same age.

As for scaling, I doubt that IBM made a mistake choosing Linux as a replacement for AIX. Otherwise, why IBM did not do the same or similar step as Apple did? The answer is simple: IBM doesn't trust to non-scalable design of BSD.

Recent news from SGI (Linux on new SGI servers) just proves it.

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.

Re:A few mirros

[__past__]

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

No, please don't. Wait until it's released. The ISOs may still change without notice, destroy your computer and piss in your fish bowl. Say with me: These files do not contain a released FreeBSD version.

And, of course, instead of downloading ISO images, consider using CVSup to save time and bandwidth. Or at least don't download all ISOs - you don't need all packages, and installing the stuff you want from the network works without any problems.

My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[Stanley Feinbaum]

I managed to get a free copy of freebsd thanks to my status as a journalist, however I was sadly disappointed by this product.

I attempted to install freebsd on my IBM laptop, however I discovered my particular model was not compatible (which is odd, since it runs win2k just fine, which has many BSD elements in it). I decided to try it on my p4 system which I use for games occasionally. Unfortunately I discovered that BSD refused to be installed on my NTFS partition, and I was required to create a new partition! I have never had this problem with windows before and was baffled at the amount of work BSD forces one to take on just to get it installed! I decided to abort my attempt at reviewing BSD since it didn't seem to work on any of the systems I had! Furthermore I discovered that not only does Freebsd not run any new games, it doesn't even run Microsoft office, the standard office program! A truly terrible computer product!

I give FreeBSD 1/10

Re:My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[BusterB]

If you want NTFS support for FreeBSD, simply find a source of unencumbered documentation on that FS and let the developers know where you found it. Having trouble? I thought so!

NTFS is intentionally underdocumented, so most attempts to support it in other OS's have been mostly reverse-engineering attempts. You could sign an NDA, but probably wouldn't be able to write free code with that information. Do not blame FreeBSD for not supporting undocumented features of another OS.

If you have an example of any non-Microsoft OS that can install on NTFS, please prove me wrong!

Re:My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[Sycraft-fu]

Uhh first off, I think the parent post is joking, making fun of moronic journalists. Secondly, pages 700-777 of "Inside Microsoft Windows 2000" (an MS book) provide a very good starter NTFS reference. Also the MSDN section on NTFS (http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url =/library/en-us/fileio/base/ntfs.asp) is another place to look. Finally, NTFSDOS is a third party, commercial, tool that allows DOS to access NT drives.

Re:My review of FreeBSD 5.0

[debaere]

" ... it doesn't even run Microsoft office, the standard office program! A truly terrible computer product!"

You are right, MS Office is truly a terrible computer product :)

Hasnt this happened before

[Anonymous Coward]

Time and time again everyone says DO NOT LINK DIRECTLY to the main site, link to a mirror list. The fact that you still linked to the primary site and even said it has not been announced makes me wonder do you ever fucking read our comments. You guys need to develop a checklist before you post news items. 1. is it a dupe? 2. did i spell check this? 3. if there's a link to an product that was just released did i post the mirror link instead of the primary link? 4. And finally ask yourself this question, is this news the slashdot crowd really cares about? (*note this does not pertain to the current story)

Re:Hasnt this happened before

[shlong]

The FreeBSD project learned it's lesson on this long ago. ftp.freebsd.org is now just a tier-1 mirror, just like any other tier-1 mirror. However, the master site is not publically available.

Also, if you guys want the REAL release announcement, go here

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!

Re:RC3 was a good experience

[1nv4d3r]

I used to be the same way (only w/Linux). I thought there was a sort-of charm in it, I guess.

Then I realized that for $200 I could get a machine immensly faster than my $3000 1995 machine (a P120 w/32MB). And when I get the extra power and memory/HD space, I found ways to make good use of it pretty quick.

So, next time your power supply or HD fizzles out, don't spend $40-60 dollars replacing them? Take the opportunity to upgrade. The console still works fine on these machines, I promise.

Re:From the BSD 5.0 Bugs Page

[caino59]

SCSI is sorta dead if you are looking a win9x point of view....you will get faster performance from an IDE drive there.

But for a server (and I hope you aren't using BSD to play games on) SCSI is where it's at (although SATA shows promise, the tech still has a little maturing to do)

SCSI sub-systems handle loads much better and are much better at dishing out data.

Announcement.

[saintlupus]

Although not yet officially announced

Uh, maybe there's a reason? Like they want to finish pushing everything out to the mirrors?

--saint

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.

FreeBSD 5.0 NOT released

[cperciva]

Quote from the 4.6 (non)release story:
Murray Stokely writes "We have gone over this for the past 2 releases now. I thought I had made it clear that you were not to publish information about FreeBSD being released until you saw a signed PGP message from one of the release engineers. Are you trying to help the spread of trojanned copies of FreeBSD? The release is not ready yet, and will not be until the front page of FreeBSD.org is updated and a PGP signed announcement message is posted to announce@FreeBSD.org."

Unless the rules have changed, slashdot screwed up again.

Re:FreeBSD 5.0 NOT released

[Simon (S2)]

from the freeBSD Mail archives about the 4.5 announcement:

On Thu, Jan 24, 2002 at 01:43:19PM -0800, Jordan Hubbard wrote:
> Not only am I quoted as somehow having announced it (EH?), but
> slashdot has just announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.5. I've
> already posted a correction as part of the ensuing thread, but just a
> heads-up in case you guys start getting questions about it. From
> everything I can see, somebody recycled my 4.4 announcement or
> something and the slashdot editors didn't even bother to verify it.

And this wonderful newsflash is brought to us only a few weeks after the FIRST "Official" CD release of FreeBSD was pre-announced[1]. I immediately followed that up with a story about the 47th "Official" CD release of FreeBSD to be released on January 26, but they never posted it. The editing at Slashdot has been a joke recently. It is very clear that the posters don't even follow the links in the submissions. I will send some pointers to the editors to make sure this never happens again, as I'm sure many readers have already done.
- Murray

i think he is gonna get very angry this time also :))

Re:FreeBSD 5.0 NOT released

[rsidd]

In that story, FreeBSD release engineer Bruce A. Mah comments:

This wouldn't be such a big deal except we had a very similar situation in 4.5 with someone posting a bogus release announcement to Slashdot (and having it slip past the editors). I really hope there isn't a third time.

Well, here's hoping there isn't a fourth, Bruce....

Early annoucements

[__past__]

I really wonder whether CmdrTaco is just too stupid to learn that a FreeBSD version is released when the release is announced by the release managment team and not when some files appear on some FTP sites, or if this has become some weird kind of personal vendetta or insider joke. Not only that he fucked up for every single release for some years now, they even started to announce release candidates early recently.

Despite being idiotic, this behaviour is really harmful. FreeBSD takes care to let their mirrors prepare for the traffic peak when a new version is released. The early "announcements" on slashdot of course mean that the people managing the mirrors - voluntarily, people not only FreeBSD but lots of free software projects depend on - don't have this time to prepare, and might get major problems, which in turn might mean that they decide not to support FreeBSD and other projects by providing bandwidth for free any more.

Unless this is some funky plan of VA Software or whatever their name is this week to push SourceForge, it would be really nice if slashdot could just stop damaging the Free Software infrastructure.

Keeping it a secret.

[vskjefst]

If you don't want the public to spot your releases until they are officially announced, then you should keep them hidden. Upload your files with restricted access to the master ftp and all mirrors, issue the press release, THEN make the files public.

Re:Keeping it a secret.

[Blkdeath]

If you don't want the public to spot your releases until they are officially announced, then you should keep them hidden. Upload your files with restricted access to the master ftp and all mirrors, issue the press release, THEN make the files public.

Thank you for that.

I just have one thing to add here;

I've been reading all these comments from the BSD crowd here in awe. I mean, all this hostility over... what? An announcement that linked to a PGP-signed release announcement. The ISOs are on the servers. The time to rejoice is nigh! But no rejoicing from this crowd. No "Awesome new features ... I can't wait to test this on my home rig ... " postings; just adolescent whining.

Seriously folks; you respect the FreeBSD development team, right? You respect their programming talents and their combined decades of computer, operating system, and networking experience, right? Do you really take them to be this naive? Would you really have us believe that they would roll release-grade, Version 5.0 (no RC-*) CD images and make them public when they weren't ready? Do you really think they'll be at all SURPRISED when people start to notice, download, and tell all their friends about this release? Don't you think they have a solid, stable (FreeBSD) FTP server pumping out these requests, properly configured with reasonable user/transfer limits in place, and QoS on their upstream bandwidth? If you're that unsure of FreeBSD's ability to handle high loads - why are you downloading it?

It was inevietable that this would find its way to Slashdot. That's how Slashdot works. It's been seen time and time again. KDE, GNOME, Linux Kernel, XFree86, [Open|Star]Office, or any other project of significant magnitude (and interest) - the release files are made publically available, someone notices and the Slashdot editors respond to the influx of "It's here! It's here!" submissions. As a result, Slashdot is very often the first place to find out about new software updates. Is this really 'news' to anyone?

Sure, they could link to the mirrors, but not doing so isn't by any means a conspiracy, it may be poor taste, but it's the same taste that links directly to kernel.org when a new Linux kernel is released. It's been pointed out to me more times than I can count that Slashdot readers are "IT professionals" - so stop talking about being professional and act like it. Download reaponsibly; use a mirror.

I'll download a mini-ISO later, when the tide has ebbed, and install it at my leisure.

</RANT>

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.

FreeBSD Mirror sitres

[bihoy]

When FreeBSD 5.0 is officially released you should be able to get it from one of the FTP sites in the official list.

FTP Sites

Mirroring with peer2peer networks

[root 66]

Would be great if those who already completed their downloads of the iso files could share them using their favourite peer2peer program to take some load off of the FTP servers.

Re:Mirroring with peer2peer networks

[TheRaven64]

This is a good idea, and something I tend to do with everything I get from the 'net, from ISOs to drivers via Kazaa. I think quite a few other people do as well. When UT2003 demo was released, I saturated my cable modem getting it from Kazaa, but couldn't even connect to the 'official' download servers. Perhaps next time some numpty decides to slashdot an ftp server people should search p2p systems before clicking on the 'let's kill out favourite OS's ftp server' button...

Re:Hurrah for the BSD Team

[krismon]

SMP at its finest has yet to be seen, hopefully 5.0 will make your statement true, but with 4.x and below, we've had to switch to Linux for our databases because the threading wasn't managed by the kernel, and thus you can't have more than one thread from the same process on multiple processors at once. Pretty much useless for some applications, might as well just have 1 cpu.

Oh yeah !

[SILIZIUMM]

And I just downloaded the 4 ISOs of 4.7 yesterday !

But it's not a problem since many people said that it was better for me to stick with 4.7 and then switch to 5.1 or 5.2. Not a problem too since I'M on cable and I downloaded theses ISOs at 300+ kb/s :)

Re:Oh yeah !

[b0r1s]

But it's not a problem since many people said that it was better for me to stick with 4.7 and then switch to 5.1 or 5.2. Not a problem too since I'M on cable and I downloaded theses ISOs at 300+ kb/s :)

This is a valid point that I haven't yet seen addressed: which is better for the average user, 4.7 or 5.0?

There have been many, many changes to the code in 5.0, and there are bound to be more than a few bugs. If you're running a site that can have zero downtime, and you don't have redundant servers, don't bother switching to 5.0, it's simply not ready yet.

If you're a home user, don't mind a few make buildworld, make buildkernel, make installkernel, make installworld sequences, upgrade. There's enough new that you'll enjoy it, and there's enough stability that you probably won't notice the infrequent bugs.

If you're asking yourself "Why should I upgrade when everyone says there's going to be bugs?", the answer is simple: the bugs can't be found without testers, so everyone on the team needs your help to find them quickly. If you encounter a bug, file a PR, and maybe even try publicizing it on a mailing list. Letting the developers know that bugs exist is the first step in getting bug-free code.

Re:Oh yeah !

[shlong]

This question has already been addressed in the Early Adopter's Guide, which was referenced in the official release announcement.

Its slashdotted

[Anonymous Coward]

I knew this would happen, so i uploaded it to my oc-255 server, enjoy!

You don't need the 4 ISOs

[Draco_es]

If you have a good connection you can do an HTTP/FTP/NFS install . You'll save bandwitdth and CD's. Also, you can do a decent install with just one CD.

I've installed 5.0 this morning(GMT) with no problems (it performs as fine as 4.x!). I think is stable enough for a Workstation (remember, 3 RC's behind), so I recommend you to install this version. Remember that a 4.x-5.x transition will not be easy.

I thought...

[Anonymous Coward]

...*BSD is dead? Oh wait, it's just their ftp server...

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."

I wonder if slashdot does this on purpose to FBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems something like this happens EVERY release of FreeBSD. While once or twice might be excuseable, *every time* HAS to make one wonder if Slashdot is doing this on purpose to harm FreeBSD.

Makes me also wonder if an undocumented "feature" of Slashdot is the posting of the FreeBSD is Dying post, as well.

What's the problem? That FreeBSD is a cometitor of Linux? Is that why Slashdot pulls this stunt time and time again? What other project does Slashdot do this to AT ALL, let alone every time.

I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but when something is done time and time again, anyone with a brain would find the "we made a mistake, sorry" line very unbelievable as the behavior is repeated time and time again.

Maybe we'll see another posting about a troll getting sued....and it will be Slashdot getting sued by FreeBSD!

Grow up and act responsibly, please. Don't do things that are harmful to others and their hard open source work, please. Thank you (I hope).

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.

MOD PARENT DOWN

[ChrisCampbell47]

Absolutely the only +5 comments on this thread should be people excoriating CmdrTaco for A) posting before PGP-signed announcement and B) linking directly to the master ftp site instead of the web page listing the mirrors.

I mean, I expect this from one of the junior "editors", but Cmdr Taco? Come on.

Re:Link to Freshmeat

[Twirlip of the Mists]

Open source software which is featured on a /. story should link to the Freshmeat entry for the program. This would allow folks to find out what a program is...

If you don't know what FreeBSD is by now, no amount of Freshmeating will help you.

This is, after all, bsd.slashdot.org.

Re:UFS1 vs UFS2

[Istealmymusic]

I'm installing 5.0 as I write this and here is what sysinstall says about UFS2: To make use of UFS2, press '2' on a UFS file system to toggle the on-disk format revision. UFS2 provides native support for extended attributes, larger disk sizes, and forward compatibility with new on-disk high performance directory layout and storage extents. However, UFS2 is unsupported on versions of FreeBSD prior to 5.0 so it is not recommended for environments requiring backward compatibility. Also, UFS2 is not currently recommended as a root file system format for non-64-bit platforms due to incrased size of the boot loader; special local configuration is required to boot UFS2 as a root file system on i386 and PC98. Looks pretty cool, I'm using UFS2 with softupdates on my /var, /tmp, and /usr filesystems.

Just installed it, so far so good

[rinsoblue]

I just downloaded the mini disk and installed FreeBSD 5.0. I also installed KDE and several other applications.

All seems to be working quite well so far.

Congratulations to the Release Team.

GEOM sounds interesting

[DrSkwid]

I hope one can run GEOM filters in userland. Sounds like a way to implement a totally soft file system.

I'll use the eponymous plan9 example of ftpfs

ftps -m /n/FreeBSD ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

This would mount the remote ftp site into your local namespace so that when you did ls /n/FreeBSD you got the directory listing of ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD

Shell programmers will instantly see the advantage of such a system over application level ftp clients.

You can use all the tools you presently use for files for manipulating the remote filesystem. None of your applications will have to understand ftp to operate and you can write new ones without even worrying about ftp libraries or whatever difficult protocol you can envisage.

plan9 achieves all this by employing a kind of universal protocol called 9p [now 9p2000]. It's quite a simple protocol and just does not much more than read, write, walk.

It sounds like the filtering system is a way to implement virtual file systems. I do hope so.

There are many interesting applications for such a concept. The list supplied with plan9 is here