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FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 / i386 Now Available
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386, he says that the alpha build is in progress. You can download 4.8 RC2 mini iso, install iso's, etc. from FreeBSD ftp site or from one of the mirror sites."
Just to explain, for any who aren't familiar with the FreeBSD release process:
FreeBSD 4.8 will be the latest release from the FreeBSD 4-STABLE branch. This could also be thought of for the time being as the -STABLE branch, as there is not yet a 5-STABLE. A lot of the goodies from 5.0 (5-CURRENT) have been merged-from-current (MFC'd) into 4.8, including Firewire and bugfixes. It's GCC2-based, and I run it on my laptop with much luck, though it lacks a lot of the ACPI goodness in 5.
5.0 is a release from 5-CURRENT. Just as they did with 4.0 before, it is released before there is a formal -STABLE branch, which is expected to appear somewhere around 5.1 or 5.2. I use it on all my workstations, and it flies -- GCC3-based, with new kernel magic that has (at least for me) dramatically improved responsiveness.
Which is no small feat, since my FreeBSD/KDE desktops consistently outperform my equivalent Linux machines in terms of, say, running two makes while playing a song over NFS with no skips. (These are k6-2 machines, one with FreeBSD5, one with Gentoo.)
The 4.0 branch will continue to be developed well into the lifetime of 5, just as 3.0 was before it. (Development on 3-STABLE only recently slowed down; it benefited from most of the bugfixes in 4 that didn't break compatibility.)
My suggestions to someone wanting to run FreeBSD right now? If it's a production machine, I'd stick to 4.7 or 4.8, simply because the ability to track the -STABLE branch with cvsup is really nice. Also, if you're not comfortable with updating your sources and recompiling your world periodically, stick to 4.x; since 5.0 doesn't yet have a controlled -STABLE branch, it will occasionally have broken features, though this has only happened to me once.
On the other hand, if you have a recent machine, need good ACPI support, or want to see what all the fuss is about, try 5.0. I use it with great success -- just be warned, you may have to recompile things every so often until it goes -STABLE.
Happy BSDing!
Like NT ACL support?
"The purpose of argument is to change the nature of truth." -- Bene Gesserit Precept
Hmmmm...
l ?tid=108
http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/03/03/07/1458220.shtm
1.4 is in beta right now, and 1.3 has been available for some time. In short, yes you are a troll and it is only the moderators who don't see otherwise.