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FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Status Update
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product."
The engineering team supports themselves? Slashdot editors support them? All slashdot readers support them?
DID I GET THE 1ST POSTTTTT Music!
So will this be the last non-merged release?
Schrödinger's cat is not amused—maybe.
BSD is dead, right?
When's the RTG? (RTG = Release To Grave)
Who gives a crap about BSD? I'm more concerned with the fact that Cmdr Taco keeps trying to stick his little dick up my poop chute. I don't understand it because I'm white and he usually likes the dark meat.
But does it run Linux?
Is that they can't seem to find the right voltage to pump into the bolts in its neck.
-----Buy the ticket, take the ride.-----
this will probably be the last release as bsd is dying like a crack whore from aids...slowly & painfully....
I do promise to come back if the trollpocalypse occurs - the Return of the Katz!
... that this is the one that didn't suck.
It seems that since April 1st the news has been going down hill. First Microsoft vs Google and now a pushed back release date for FreeBSD?
What's the point of linking to Bruce Mah's email in the article?? It doesn't give any information about him, so it's pointless. And I'd be very surprised if it doesn't have the effect of filling his inbox with both spam and other random mail he doesn't want to see. Please, this is not a troll. I've seen this done a few times, and I can't imagine why. Anyone?
I kinda like this. Basically, the release is held up because the needed files don't fit on a floppy.
Rather than just reformat the floppy as a 1.722MB, they'd rather just get everything fitting onto a 1.44MB. Kudos to you, FreeBSD team!
There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
:wq
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. Our take: we fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product. Thanks mezz, our forums moderator for the newstip.
[Read full announcement]
Date: Wed, 2 Apr 2003 16:23:25 -0800
From: "Bruce A. Mah"
To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org
Subject: 4.8-RELEASE status
Hi--
A number of you have been (rightfully) wondering what's up with
the i386 4.8-RELEASE. Here's the current state:
The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE
can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes
on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk.
This bug was masked by another problem that happened to be present on
the machines used by the RE team to build releases...namely, that they
didn't have the cvsroot-all collection in their local repositories.
To make a long story short, the $FreeBSD$ tags didn't get expanded in
the source files, thus (I am not making this up) causing the MFSROOT
kernel to be just a *little* bit smaller so that it could fit on a
floppy. I think this was the world's April Fool's joke to the RE
team.
We're currently trying to fix this by finding some other driver we can
move to a module on the mfsroot.flp image (or maybe just eliminate).
After we finish some tests, we'll need to commit whatever change is
required, re-tag the affected files, and then rebuild the base system.
I'm not in a position to comment on a timeline for these happenings.
Thanks for your continued patience!
Bruce.
PS. This may sound rude, for which I apologize in advance: The less
time that the RE team has to spend replying to various emails
(particularly those that are not relevant to the immediate goal of
shipping 4.8-RELEASE), the faster the release is probably going to be
finished.
Does FreeBSD support multiple processors?
Flamebait! You Bastard.
-----Buy the ticket, take the ride.-----
Uber-troll 'neal n bob' was found dead in his Florida home, at the age of 51. Although you may not have always agreed with him, his works have definately left an impact on polular culture. He will sorely be missed!
And for his 21 bum salute... !BANG! !BOOM! !BANG! !Boom! !BANG! !BoOm! !BANG!
!BOoM! !BANG! !bOOm! !BANG! !BoOM! !BANG! !BooM!
!BANG! !booM! !BANG! !Boom! !BANG! !BOOM! !BANG!
to sleep, perchance to dream...
You think that I'm crazy, you should see this guy!
I won't quote it here, but Slappy and Skinny had something to say about it.
My neighbor's
LOL Absolutely brilliant :)
It is also reported that in some situations, Linux binaries perform better on FreeBSD than they do under Linux.
No references to the "evil bit" yet? amazing
PS. This may sound rude, for which I apologize in advance: The less time that the RE team has to spend replying to various emails (particularly those that are not relevant to the immediate goal of shipping 4.8-RELEASE), the faster the release is probably going to be finished.
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
your unwavering committment to the truth, even in the face of Linux faggotry, will sorely be missed!
~YourMissionForToday
post the guy's email on the front page of slashdot. gee, i wonder how much crap he'll get now.
"The files that are as of this moment tagged as RELENG_4_8_0_RELEASE can't be used to build a release because the MFSROOT kernel (that goes on the kern.flp) overflows a the size of a 1440K floppy disk."
It's 2003 and a sparkling new Unix OS is being held up by... a floppy?
I remember floppies... I used them back in the 80's and very early 90's.
I'm glad that they are sticking by their principles on this. I just wonder if they are principles worth sticking to.
--Richard
Download or Buy a cd for Newbies ?
BSD is getting closer to a 5.0 release!
That's great, means they are getting closer to winxp (which is windowsNT 5.1)
GoatPigSheep, the 3 most important food groups
This is good slashdot fodder, but the issue has been resolved. The awi driver (wireless prism card) is being removed from the floppy and the space problem is solved. Move along nothing to see here...
It's dead, remember?
i thought bsd was dead. wow, what a resurrection.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
Could it be problems with its merger with NetBSD & GNU/OpenBSD? I imagine that would take some time. Or are they going to have a few more releases separately?
The opinons expressed are those of the voices in the author's head and are not necessarily those of the author.
I don't even have a floppy disk drive in my computers anymore. Why is making the file fit a floppy that important? They are pretty much obsolete at this point.
It seems to me that this problem could be solved with better data compression on the floppy. Right now, they're using gzip, which is many, many years old. Perhaps if they moved to something modern (and non-GPLed, in keeping with the BSD philosophy) such as bzip, it'd fit.
I thought freeBSD had joined forces with netBSD and openBSD....
ah my dreams are foiled.. pf in a bsd distro that people "support"
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product.
I mean, like, aren't you going on a limb there expressing your opinion?
You're just not afraid of controversy!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
If you're installing the same OS on several machines, it might be better to burn a whole CD of the OS. But it's kind of pointless to do for one machine, if you can do it directly over the net.
The floppy may be obsolete for YOU, but for many others it's still quite useful. Many arguments against floppies are only about file transfer, they often forget the ability to boot. E.g. USB keychains are not so universally bootable.
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
This despite that 4.8 is available on ftp.freebsd.org??
/ 4. 8-RELEASE
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386
I just installed 4.7 using a couple floppies and NFS.
I often download the 2.88mb image and burn it to a CD. You don't have to burn the "whole" OS to make a bootable CD. I use both methods depending on the machine and what is handy.
Wait a second.... I'm confused. Didn't they just release 5.0 a few months ago?
--
Does anyone remember
Sysinstall is functional, but it's kind of creaky as an installer IMHO. There's a bunch of functionality that seems to belong more inside of an installed and running system (such as a lot of the configuration bits) than in an installer.
If you're going to require all your installation tools to fit on a floppy, then an installer should have just the tools necessary to get the install files onto a system such that the system can be booted and then used. While it might be nice to have a bunch of post-install configuration options available, the technical constraints of boot media make this kind of prohibitive.
Perhaps one idea might be a meta-installer that installs the installation files onto the computer, and then reboots into a bigger environment where you can do more extensive system configuration and package management as well as providing a richer, more user-friendly tool. I hate to say this, but as annoyingly slow as Win2k's installer is, they use a very similar kind of bootstrap installation.
The other idea is to merge the two-stage install with a single stage install on a CD and just give up on the floppy.
I'm sure none of these ideas are terribly original, but they seem that way relative to sysinstall. I've only used FreeBSD over the past 3 years, so I have no idea what the Linux distros do. Do they do anything interesting with multistage installations?
The release is delayed because it is just not gay enough. They are adding more comments about "man love" and "felching" so reaches the MGT (minimum gayness threshold). RELEASE-4.8-FUDGEPACKING will be out real soon now!
You shouldn't be using 5.0 in serious production systems. It works well, but it is more or less a pre-release version.
But is it still dead?
That is all.
CVSup is Heaven, portupgrade is Nirvana....."Luke, the Source is with you!"
Can ya play quake 3 for example?
What's up with posting FreeBSD committer's email addresses on the front page of /. ?
What do you prefer for desktop (and server) and why?
RedHat vs Slackware vs FreeBSD only
Many sites such as www.n0dez.com seems to prefer Red Hat Linux 8.0 for both servers and desktop OSes.
Hi, I'm a newbie and I would like to know if FreeBSD is like Debian (volunteer org, no business behind). I'm using Slackware and like it a lot. I prefer Slack to Mandrake and Debian. RedHat is OK. Thanx.
[ed. note: in the following text, former FreeBSD developer Mike Smith gives his reasons for abandoning FreeBSD]
When I stood for election to the FreeBSD core team nearly two years ago, many of you will recall that it was after a long series of debates during which I maintained that too much organisation, too many rules and too much formality would be a bad thing for the project.
Today, as I read the latest discussions on the future of the FreeBSD project, I see the same problem; a few new faces and many of the old going over the same tired arguments and suggesting variations on the same worthless schemes. Frankly I'm sick of it.
FreeBSD used to be fun. It used to be about doing things the right way. It used to be something that you could sink your teeth into when the mundane chores of programming for a living got you down. It was something cool and exciting; a way to spend your spare time on an endeavour you loved that was at the same time wholesome and worthwhile.
It's not anymore. It's about bylaws and committees and reports and milestones, telling others what to do and doing what you're told. It's about who can rant the longest or shout the loudest or mislead the most people into a bloc in order to legitimise doing what they think is best. Individuals notwithstanding, the project as a whole has lost track of where it's going, and has instead become obsessed with process and mechanics.
So I'm leaving core. I don't want to feel like I should be "doing something" about a project that has lost interest in having something done for it. I don't have the energy to fight what has clearly become a losing battle; I have a life to live and a job to keep, and I won't achieve any of the goals I personally consider worthwhile if I remain obligated to care for the project.
Discussion
I'm sure that I've offended some people already; I'm sure that by the time I'm done here, I'll have offended more. If you feel a need to play to the crowd in your replies rather than make a sincere effort to address the problems I'm discussing here, please do us the courtesy of playing your politics openly.
From a technical perspective, the project faces a set of challenges that significantly outstrips our ability to deliver. Some of the resources that we need to address these challenges are tied up in the fruitless metadiscussions that have raged since we made the mistake of electing officers. Others have left in disgust, or been driven out by the culture of abuse and distraction that has grown up since then. More may well remain available to recruitment, but while the project is busy infighting our chances for successful outreach are sorely diminished.
There's no simple solution to this. For the project to move forward, one or the other of the warring philosophies must win out; either the project returns to its laid-back roots and gets on with the work, or it transforms into a super-organised engineering project and executes a brilliant plan to deliver what, ultimately, we all know we want.
Whatever path is chosen, whatever balance is struck, the choosing and the striking are the important parts. The current indecision and endless conflict are incompatible with any sort of progress.
Trying to dissect the above is far beyond the scope of any parting shot, no matter how distended. All I can really ask of you all is to let go of the minutiae for a moment and take a look at the big picture. What is the ultimate goal here? How can we get there with as little overhead as possible? How would you like to be treated by your fellow travellers?
Shouts
To the Slashdot "BSD is dying" crowd - big deal. Death is part of the cycle; take a look at your soft, pallid bodies and consider that right this very moment, parts of you are dying. See? It's not so bad.
To the bulk of the FreeBSD committerbase and the developer community at large - keep your eyes on the real goals. It
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a mere fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I always wondered, but what is the difference between FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD? What are the pros/cons? What are the strengths/weaknesses of each distribution?
Anyone care to take a stab at this?
these are 1.44 meg floppies formatted with 21 sectors per track instead of 18. the gap between sectors is smaller, and the sector interleave is usually different -- no other differences. just as reliable as 1.44 meg floppies, in my experience.
except for the first disk, the Win95 install floppies were 1.68 meg floppies ("DMF" disks)
you can use 'superformat' to make these disks under Linux
NetBSD = Hummer, goes anywhere
FreeBSD = Muscle Car, hauls ass
OpenBSD = Tank, I'd feel safe in one
Really, FreeBSD has the fastest TCP/IP protocol stack in any non-embedded operating system. OpenBSD is still very fast, and the most frickin secure OS on the entire planet--even default installs. They have had only one remote root exploit flaw in the OS in the past seven years, and it's an OS frequently used for firewalling. It's packet filter, pf, now supports round-robin load balancing. It kicks ass. NetBSD will run on almost any platform you can think of, but no real highlights. My fav: OpenBSD. A 3.3 release is scheduled for May 1.
Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 21:43:09 -0800
L q+ xZkCupqQCgvjFp
- ----END PGP SIGNATURE-----_ _____________r eebsd- announce
From: Murray Stokely
To: announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: [FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 4.8 Now Available
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE, the
latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since
FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE in October 2002, we have made conservative updates
to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known
security issues, and added initial support for Firewire,
HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies.
[...]
Enjoy!
Murray Stokely
(For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
iD8DBQE+jRqatNcQog5FH30RAuLUAKCxKfoRyBbqwm4QYIk
aLZzPDweEFXkcoVMgviWcU8=
=Jw+z
_________________________________
freebsd-announce@freebsd.org mailing list
http://lists.freebsd.org/mailman/listinfo/f
To unsubscribe, send any mail to "freebsd-announce-unsubscribe@freebsd.org"
bash$
The record is clear on one thing: no operating system has ever come back from the grave. Efforts to resuscitate *BSD are one step away from spiritualists wishing to communicate with the dead. As the situation grows more desperate for the adherents of this doomed OS, the sorrow takes hold. An unremitting gloom hangs like a death shroud over a once hopeful *BSD community. The hope is gone; a mournful nostalgia has settled in. Now is the end time for *BSD.
It's a few hours later. Well, maybe more like ten to twelve. FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE is official.
Much ado about nothing.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
There are a lot of everything in this world, surprise surprise. Like headless 'nix based gateway boxes around without floppy
I love the "bloat/cripple OSses and other software because someone somewhere might need the features" attitude you have.
Me, I'm waiting for the day freeBSD either succesfully detects and configures X automagically for my videocard (radeon8500) or dies. Mandrake does it, RedHat does it but freeBSD won't, why?
Preserve old classics: copy your collection onto all hard drives.
YOU MITE WANNA CHEK YUR FACTS HUH!?!? OR HAVE YOU BIN HANGNIG ROUND THAT THEO DUMRAAT AGAIN?!?!?
Reason:Don't use so many caps. It's like YELLING.
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ou8p7987 987 aswe 8676 23 Zdjfiuwe KJIOPU 89067