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January-February 2003 FreeBSD Status Report

Posted by timothy on from the truth-in-advertising dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Scott Long provides the Jan-Feb 2003 bi-monthly FreeBSD status report. Highlights include focus on making 5.0 faster via more fine-grained locking, adding high-end features like memort support for i386. FreeBSD 5.1 is expected to ship in late May, early June, with 5.2 following end of summer with significant speed and stability improvements over 5.0. FreeBSD 4.8 release due shortly adds XFree86 4.3.0 and intel hyperthreading support. Major FreeBSD project statuses are also provided in this report."

5 of 23 comments (clear)

  1. Looking forward to 4.8 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

    To put on my laptop. Great OS, fast and supremely stable.

    Come on, someone else must want to post a comment here!

    1. Re:Looking forward to 4.8 by Arandir · · Score: 1

      Let's see. It's extremely stable and robust. But more so than Debian? Hard to say. I would say "yes", but that's my opinion. So let's assume it's equally as stable as Debian. Let's move on to other stuff.

      FreeBSD has complete documentation. I've never seen any Linux distro even come close to FreeBSD in terms of documenation. FreeBSD doesn't believe in the GNU idea that man pages are bad. There are man pages for everything in the OS. And they're good man pages. Then you have an excellent handbook, faq, and miscellaneous books and articles. These are superb.

      Then there is "ease-of-use". Frankly, Debian is one of the harder Linux distros to use. Since you already know it, it may seem pretty easy, but you did have a very steep learning curve to get there. I've used both systems, so at least I can judge somewhat in their area. FreeBSD installation is much simpler than Debians. It's not as easy as, let's say, Lindows or Xandros, but it is very straight forward. Using packages/ports is as easy, if not easier than apt-get. In fact, building a CPU optimized package from source is just as easy as installing a prebuilt package.

      Finally, FreeBSD is more UNIX like than Debian. Is this a good thing? Yes! Why bother with a UNIX like operating system if it's not UNIX like. FreeBSD is real geniune UNIX in all but name (due to trademark issues). But at the same time, you can still run all your GNU's-not-unix software on it, because GNU wasn't designed to be for a single OS (even if it was orignally intended to be a single OS). You can even run all of your binary Linux software on it to, like Acroread, VMWare, etc.

      --
      A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
  2. FreeBSD by thanjee · · Score: 1

    I am just waiting patiently for FreeBSD 5.x to become the stable version.

    I am also waiting for MIDI to start working properly too. As soon as MIDI works there will be no need for me to use any other OS.

    Yes, I know the documentation states how to add MIDI to the kernel, but the code behind it just doesn't seem to be written yet, cos it does nothing.....oh well, also waiting patiently for that.

    --
    Saying your OS is the best because more people use it is like saying MacDonalds make the best food
  3. Re:In case of Slashdotting... by essdodson · · Score: 1

    I was playing with my USB mouse a good 6 months before my Linux zealot friends were franticly recompiling their kernels to checkout the long over due USB support.

    --
    scott
  4. January-February 2003 FreeBSD Status Report by MainframeKiller · · Score: 1


    I thought FreeBSD was dead?

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