FreeBSD 4.8 Release Delayed Until Mar 24

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokley indicates in his email that the latest FreeBSD 4.8 release will need to be postponed until March 24 in order to include suggested fixes related to the XFree86 4.3.0 port. After a complete package rebuild, they plan to release FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 first. Murray requests everyone to continue testing the XFree86 4.3.0 port to ensure a quality release."

Comments

Excellent

[Anonymous Coward]

It's nice to see SOMEONE taking the time to do things right. SuSE could learn a thing or two from them. I'm starting to equate them with the American automotive manufacturers of the Linux world.

Re:Why so few posts

[Ded Bob]

I prefer to comment when I have something to say that I think would be useful. Most comments on SlashDot are what I would consider to be no-op's (repeats, trolls, yes-men, no-men, blah).

What could I actually say about the short delay in release: nothing. I understand why, so I am satisfied with the decision. I sent in two fixes just last week for FreeBSD. That is probably where you'll find me. :)

5.0

[Pierre]

I've been thinking of trying FBSD on an empty partition. I was going to install 5.0 but this mention of 4.8 has me a bit confused.

Is it 4.X the convservative path? Is 5.0 still to new?

Re:5.0

[Anonymous Coward]

"Is it 4.X the convservative path? Is 5.0 still to new?"

You've got the right idea. though it has a number of wonderful new features, 5.0 is still "half-baked". It isn't recomended for production use.

4.8 will be the most recent release of the "stable branch" of FreeBSD development, and will provide a nicer experience and better performance than will 5.0 at this time.

I'd give 5.x a year before it's as stable as 4.x, and by that time, life will be pretty sweet.

-Jeremy

Re:5.0

[bluGill]

Many FreeBSD folks remember the 3.0 release and don't want to repeat that. In short 3.0 had some serrious flaws that send people who needed the features it had to -current (the development kernels). I personaly installed 3.0, and it didn't last long, I found all the -current kernels (though I didn't install many) more stable than 3.0. 4.0 ended up rushing out the door because many of the fixes were designed with other features of 4.0 in mind and didn't backport easially.

Your other choice at the time was running 2.2.8, which was extreemly stable, but lacked some nice upgrades that 3.0 had. (USB for instance)

4.0 essentially became 3.0 stable. So now they are trying to do 5.0 right. 5.0 allows a release that is considered stable, and encourages people up use it, but by doing 4.8 they get some needed updates in the 4.0 series, and provide a reminder that 5.0 isn't stable yet.

Last, this is open source. If you are still using 2.2 and you feel a 2.2.9 is worth releaseing it might be done - if you can convince those involved that enough people are still using 2.2 to make it useful.

Re:5.0

[Beetjebrak]

FreeBSD has a very solid and well documented filesystem hierarchy. Also it has a very easy init sequence, which is also well documentented. FreeBSD installs without any bloat, if you want it to.. or it installs with a full working X desktop.. if you want that.

Another big plus for (Free)BSD is the ports collection. This is a collection of directories that contain scripts from which you can automatically download and compile thousands of applications. By setting options in make.conf you can optimize these ports-builds for your system's processor, making them highly efficient. Much like Gentoo's Portage system on the Linux side of the world.

For me, the mail "selling" point for FreeBSD is it's rock solid stability. I've had servers fry harddrives and _STILL_ continue to work while actual smoke was coming out of the case. I received an email from my server that there was a hardware failure and that it had stopped the failed drive. I simply swapped out the defective drive. Downtime: 10 minutes (since the drives weren't hot-swappable). In the course of over a year and a half there were probably 10 reboots due to security patches to the kernel and that was it. Before I ran FreeBSD I used SuSE Linux which crashed sometimes, and before that I evaluated Win2K Advanced Server but that had much too high a price tag for me.. and also caused data loss during the 120 days trial. (it was not a beta!)

Also, please DO read the handbook. It's a very good piece of documentation and gets you started much quicker than the community can. Also, the community will most likely not be very helpful in answering questions that are plain and easy to find in the handbook. The handbook covers everything from filesystem setup and user administration to setting up robust RAID arrays and secure VPN tunnels all using tools from the OS itself.

I can also reccommend the book "FreeBSD Unleashed" by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann. It's more or less an extended version of the handbook in printed form. When I bought it, it came with version 4.4 but that's easily upgraded.

FreeBSD would seem to me the best starting place to learn UNIX because of its very clearly defined procedures and its option to install just the bare-bones minimum, unlike RedHat (which is aimed to replace Win2K on corporate desktops mostly.. I think).

good luck!

This time around...

[cperciva]

Can we wait until *after* the release before announcing it?

Remember, that means wait until you get a PGP-signed email from Murray Stokely before you post a story.

Re:Why so few posts

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

A few reasons.

* Slashdot is a Lnux advocacy site. No problem there, but BSD advocates tend to congregate elsewhere. You want to ask questions to people who may know the answers, not Linux guys saying how it works in Linux.

* The trolls. Every BSD pot gets the TrollBots going. Kinda funny when the story is only related to BSD (like OpenSSH) but gets irritating.

* Personality. Though this is flamebait, but there is a fringe element of "Linux is Heaven on earth, all other OSes are blasphemy, BSD goes to Hell" that you tend to find here. Though it is a fringe element, and most BSDers ignore them, it's irritating. Best tool for the job, keep your religion for Sundays or the Sabbath or Ramadan please.

* Popularity. Just happens that there are more Linux users than FreeBSD. A lot of this was due to the Great Dark Lawsuit, essentially Novell suing FreeBSD for licensing issues. The suit was even though FreeBSD code contained very little AT&T code (3 files I think) it was "tainted" with UNIX ideas. This was Novell being kind of jerkish, because it ignored the whole boost that BSD gave to UNIX. Berkely showed how UNIX violated BSD licensing as well and more egregiously in fact. Eventually, BSD (and FreeBSD) was allowed to continue, they removed the 3 offending files, UNIX code now included the BSD license, and life goes on. But during this time, people didn't want to use FreeBSD because of the uncertainty, and they turned to Linux. In fact, Linux says in the famous Tannenbaum exchange/flamewar that he would have used FreeBSD (or the HURD) if it was available at the time, but it wasn't, so he made Linux, and the world is a better place.

Kind of ironic; there are a lot of parallels in the Novell/FreeBSD case vs. the SCO (Caldera)/IBM & Linux case. Possibly people will look at FreeBSD now since they're pretty much free and clear of SCO suing them because of outcome of the Great Dark Lawsuit. I think IBM wil prevail, but if people open their minds a bit and some more folks take a look at FreeBSD the world will be a better place.