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

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

[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!