FreeBSD 4.8 Released

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."

Comments

Running it already.

[geniusj]

Just upgraded a few boxes to RELENG_4_8 a few minutes ago. One of the boxes has 2x2.4ghz xeon, and now HT is supported. Yay!

Re:Running it already.

[rf0]

As said elsewhere I've just put this into production and it is really sweet. BSD is dying? I think not :)

As for HT which I had some Xeons

Rus

Re:Running it already.

[Xsh-II]

Lovely, I have a dual 2.4GHz Xeon sat here, I think I might try 4.8 on it. Does it have the 30% performance increase that the Linux patch made? The faster (and newer) P4s also have hyperthreading so its not totally out of everyones price range.

Re:Running it already.

[b0r1s]

The HT support in 4.8 is actually pretty preliminary. The real development is going on in the 5-CURRENT branch, and although some of the changes are being MFC'd, most of them are not.

You may see a performance jump, but the real jump will be in 5.1.

What about..

[Gortbusters.org]

gnome2 and kde3? Does it support those... didn't see it in the release notes. Would use it as a workstation if it did.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

The release notes clearly state that FreeBSD 4.8 now includes Gnome 2.2 and KDE 3 along with XFree86 4.3.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

As the other comment said, the release notes covered that. If you keep your ports tree updated, kde 3.1 was included a day after it's release and X 4.3 did pretty much the same.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

Its suported those for a long time via the ports.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

> gnome2 and kde3?

Not trying to troll but my response is, who
cares? I really wish these mostly broken
dekstops would just go away for the following
reasons.

1) They are based on the GPL and yes, that
matters becuase one of the goals of the
various BSD projects is to provide an OS and
supporting software that are release under a BSD
style license.

2) Kde and Gnome, at this point in time don't
really work that well and offer little more
in the way of an integrated desktop experience
that any window manager of your choosing.

3) I hotly detest both of these GUI toolkits
because neither of them where designed as a
"native" X11 widget tookit. To me, this is a
*very* bad thing. The only toolkit thatI know of
that was designed to work within the X framework
as intended by the developers of X is Motif.
Now, I don't mention this to say that Motif
should be the future toolkit for BSD systems
(then again it may well be), but it is at this
time, in my opinion the only reasonable one.
Am I the only one who has these view towards
Qt and Gtk?

Re:What about..

[gamakitty]

Care to explain why you prefer Motif more thoroughly? I'm not attempting to dispute you in any way. I just dont actually know many people on Motif. Thanks :)

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

KDE 3.1.1 I believe is the current version in the ports tree, as well ask mozilla 1.3

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not Motif a expert but here are a few things
which it has going for it.

1) Built using the Xt framework.

2) Uses X resources for controlling customization
of widgets, i.e. color, pixmaps, special widget
styles, and many other things.

3) Because of 2 it is easier to customze apps
than Qt or Gtk and Motif is more flexible in
*what* it can customize. Also, apps get
customized in the same way that an app written
using Xlib or the Xaw would.

4) Good support for non-english languages.

5) Motif has been around a long time and is very
mature and stable.

6) In addition Motif tends to be much better at
drawing widgets than Qt and especially Gtk.

7) Motif is faster and produce smaller binaries
than Qt and Gtk. Qt seems especially bad about
inefficiency. Try running kde3 on older
hardware and you'll soon see how "bloated"
it really is.

Well, I have to dash out the door. I'm sure some
Motif experts could provide better reasons than
I have.

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

A telling example of the other story about too much free software

AND you only got a zero score, seems to me you scored 7 points!

Re:What about..

[MrChuck]

When I first got a Motif "hello world" program (open a window with hello world in it), I was stunned.
about 3 pages of muck.

Motif failed. It never caught on. Dare I say it helped windows get the desktops.

I view KDE (based on QT which has both GPL or "pay us" licenses if you want proprietary) and Gnome as the answer by kids who grew up with GUIs (I grew up with vt52s and vt100s) who perhaps thought: Hey, unix doesn't have to suck to use.

I've run huge networks on Motif desktops and it was a bitch. Tools weren't there, programs were impossible to write. Hell, TK (with tcl or perl) were a godsend to slap up a quick X gui thing at t he time.

OSF gave us the now dominant (*cough*) counter to Sun+ATT's SysVr4 and Motif. And few higher end widgets and no design dictates such as "Every App Shall Have a File Menu Item and Open/Save/Save as/Quit as Options".

No, in this program, you type q in the window, in that one you hit something else. It's like DOS 3.3 (Lotus 123: "/qyy", WordPerf: "[F7]y", dbase: .quity"

That motif came up as (1) proprietary (open motif is too little too late) and (2) during the Lotus/Apple look and feel lawsuits to make up for their lack of innovation make them an interesting footnote in the history of Unix.

Perhaps the X developers (1987 or so) made MISTAKES and KDE and GNOME manage to recover from them nicely. QT is both programmable, usable and popular. Motif was close to unprogrammable, could be usable if you did lots of work - hardly innate, and was popular as the only thing out there.

The replacement of CDE (Commitee designed environment) with GNOME by vendors is just another brad in the coffin of motif and XWindows-classic. For FreeBSD users, KDE/Gnome are not part of the OS. They are a port that lives on TOP of the OS. In BSD, we don't shove every damn addon into /usr/bin/. We do generally have a man page for about every file on the system. (openbsd is anal about it, netbsd is pretty good, freebsd is good; but I use redhat and find something like 5 man pages and 40,000 files :).

Oh, and I can build from source! remember source? Yeah, I don't trust joe-random "I have an RPM for you" builder on my own.

Re:What about..

[Istealmymusic]

Can't you use ^C or ^Break to exit?

Re:What about..

[Anonymous Coward]

> When I first got a Motif "hello world" program
> (open a window with hello world in it), I was
> stunned. about 3 pages of muck.

Okay, so it takes 2.5 pages in Gtk and you get
all the instability of Gtk as a "bonus".

> Motif failed. It never caught on.

Which is why people who could choose Qt, or Gtk
for serious GUI development choose Motif. More
people who do professional Unix GUI apps choose
Motif than Qt or Gtk combined.

> Dare I say it helped windows get the desktops.

You could say, but you would be wrong. Windows
got the desktop because of Marketing and ignorant
"power-users" and managers who saw MS-DOS as
better than Unix. Kinda like a lot of ignorant
open-source people who see Qt/Gtk as superior to
Motif. Usually the same people who rant about how
bad X is. And that the "window" server should be
in the kernel.

> I view KDE (based on QT which has both GPL
> or "pay us" licenses if you want proprietary)
> and Gnome as the answer by kids who grew up
> with GUIs (I grew up with vt52s and vt100s) who
> perhaps thought: Hey, unix doesn't have to suck
> to use.
>

I view Qt as a really bad attemp at cross-
platform non-sense and Gtk as a attempt at
reinventing the wheel.

> I've run huge networks on Motif desktops and it
> was a bitch. Tools weren't there, programs were
> impossible to write. Hell, TK (with tcl or
> perl) were a godsend to slap up a quick X gui
> thing at t he time.

Huh? Aside from making resource files visible to
the Motif app, what does running your network
have to do with Motif? There are currently more
professional Motif development tools available
than Qt and Gtk combiined. What are you talking
about?

The rest of your post makes absolutely NO sense
what-so-ever. Seriously, it's absolutely
incoherent.

STOP!!

[AntEater]

I was about 12% into my download of the iso files when this showed up on the front page. Everyone please wait until I'm finished. Thanks.

Re:STOP!!

[jhines]

That is silly, all you need is the floppy image, and MFS disk image, and then it will fetch the rest over the net.

Why DL an ISO image, when you can be up and running in the time that takes?

Re:STOP!!

[Daimaou]

Because I, for one, do not have any floppy drives in my machines.

Re:STOP!!

[AntEater]

I d/l the iso images because I'm going to install on multiple machines and I'll want to experiment extensively with the installtion and configuration before putting the system into production use. I'd rather not waste their bandwidth as well as my own needlessly.

Slackware 9.0 and FreeBSD 4.8 released within a few weeks of each other?! Whee!

Re:STOP!!

[shamilton]

No, no, please don't do this! I probably do 100 installs per CD. The ISO is 700 megs, so, 7mb of traffic per install. Then again, I work at an ISP, so most people will probably do fewer.

Compare with a network install at around 200mb per download. The advantage is obvious. Keep in mind, traffic isn't free, and the money you save the project by keeping their traffic bill at a minimum can instead go to things like buying technical documents for that snazzy new piece of hardware.

Re:Look it moved

[moderators_are_w*nke]

If you define the merits of an OS by its popularity, then Windows 98 must be one of the finest operating systems on the planet.

FreeBSD, Operating System, dead at 4.8

[TeknoHog]

Truly an American icon.

Re:FreeBSD, Operating System, dead at 4.8

[Microsofts slave]

Why must it always be an American icon, why can it not just be the perfect operating systerm, one that in my opinion is mature enough to take on M$ and kick windows out. Freebsd, cobined with KDE 3.1 on hardware even remotely resembling modern hardware will run like a dream, un-like windows, glitch, error, crash, and repeat.

Re:this is a dupe

[SILIZIUMM]

Not a dupe, this one says "yay it's released" while the other says "yay it's about to be released".

Newbie question

[ichthus]

I just decided to try FreeBSD a few days ago. I downloaded it, and the name of the file is 5.0-RELEASE-i386-disc1.iso. I thought (from the file name) that this was v5.0. Am I wrong? Is 4.8 really the latest?

Re:Newbie question

[DJPenguin]

5.0 is full of loads of features, and is considered "cutting edge".

4.x are "stable" and mature. Think of it like the difference between Linux kernels 2.4.x (stable) vs 2.5.x (current). Not quite a true analogy but you get the idea.

Re:Newbie question

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, you are both right and wrong. :) There are two "latest" releases. 5.0 and 4.8. 5.0 is a mostly-stable-but-not-quite-ready-for-production product. 4.8 is very stable and suitable for production servers.

Since you are a newbie, it probably doesn't matter which one you start with. 5.0 will be fine for your purposes unless you are running into any major issues with it (and please report them to the FreeBSD team if you do).

Re:Newbie question

[palfreman]

4.8 is the latest to be released. 5.0 is branched from the 5-CURRENT development tree in cvs, 4.8 is branched from the 4-STABLE cvs tree. If you are a beginner you will probably prefer to use -STABLE releases rather than -CURRENT ones.

Re:Newbie question

[Ded Bob]

There are several branches of FreeBSD. The two active ones are v4 and v5. v5 is new and not ready for production as stated by FreeBSD. Somewhere they warn not to use it for production at this time. v4 is much more stable. If you are learning FreeBSD, it will not hurt to try out either of them.

Personally, I am updating my boxes to 4.8--cvsup is a wonderful tool--as we speak. It may be safer for you to start there on solid ground.

Re:Newbie question

[frekio]

I think a slightly closer comparison would be.

4.X-RELEASE / 4.X-STABLE -> 2.4.x (stable)
The most stable and not a new major version.

5.0-RELEASE -> 2.4.0 / 2.2.0,
Any new release that is not tested and is a major version jump.

5.0-CURRENT -> 2.5.x (current)
Cutting edge, unstable.

Re:Newbie question

[Anonymous Coward]

"There are several branches of FreeBSD."

Each as dead as the next one. =)

FreeBSD

[elemur]

To those who run linux (or other OSs) exclusively, you really should give FreeBSD a try.

I started using it around 8 years ago for some core services.. DNS.. SMTP.. etc. It proved to be fast and reliable even then, and those were on old PII machines.

Since then, its gotten tremendously better.. the security subsystems are great, from ip firewalling to kernel and system level protections. (The jail environment is very interesting..) I currently have DNS and mail services running on it, with a vinum disk mirror (Vinum is a logical volume manager for FreeBSD) and have basically no maintenance.

If you wanted to experiment with a BSD machine, I know that http://www.johncompanies.com/ provides virtualized FreeBSD machines pretty cheaply, or just install it on a spare partition somewhere.

My only gripe is that it tends to trail linux on user interface/user focused device drivers, and in the Java space. Otherwise, it works great for me!

(I haven't tried 4.8 yet, since I don't have any need to upgrade my servers right now, but when I get a spare test box, I'll probably give it a spin..)

Re:FreeBSD

[4of12]

So has anyone done exhaustive performance comparisons of all the x86 OS under different kinds of loads (network connections, processes, I/O, multiple processors)?

In the days of yore FreeBSD was highly regarded for its performance in some areas and I'm wondering if that's still an accurate assessment compared to Linux, Win2K/XP, other BSDs.

Re:FreeBSD

[b0r1s]

The problem with exhaustive testing of OSs is that to get the best performance out of most of them, they require someone relatively knowledgable.

For instance, there was a large comparison of Windows v. FreeBSD v. Linux, and FreeBSD came in dead last. Those who know realize that the FreeBSD box wasn't tuned (at all), and that any competant sysadmin would have made 10-20 substantial changes to the system before running that benchmark. Similarly, the Windows and Linux boxes could have probably been tuned better (the benchmark claimed that miminal changes were made, but they were important changes).

There seems to have been much more research into specifically network related code under FreeBSD, but FreeBSD 5 also has UFS2, which is also apparently a nice performance increase.

I'm of the opinion that FreeBSD is still the fastest of the major OSs (Windows, FreeBSD, Linux) for most services, although the preemptive kernel patches for linux may make linux nicer for desktop use. NetBSD is close, OpenBSD still doesn't support SMP, so you can pretty much kiss off OpenBSD on large SMP hardware.

Re:FreeBSD

[repetty]

"It proved to be fast and reliable even then, and those were on old PII machines."

Ouch! Now that just hurts.

My Linux workstation is a PII/266 (dual CPU, though).

--Richard

Re:FreeBSD

[knowledgepeacewi]

I'm curious.
are Apple OSes considered major OSes?

Nevermind, I thought of an answer.

Apple hasn't been on x86 very long.
Neither has Sun Solaris.

So neither would make it into the survey.

Thanks.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

How old are you?

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

When I tested FreeBSD 4.4 vs RedHat 7.2 for myself as a apache/postgres server, freebsd was 190% faster (std install) and 200% faster after build world. Now if only vinum had the features soft-RAID does on redhat (booting from a RAID1) Granted you can use hardware RAID on freebsd but it then defeats the "google model"

Re:FreeBSD

[Pharmboy]

Would be nice to see competetion like this, where each 'team' used the exact same hardware, all parts out 1 year or more. Something like a dual xeon and/or p3 1.3 with 1 gig of ram. Let some Windows vendor, RedHat, One of BSD's (they are all the same, right :) hehe) and anyone else enter. each team tunes their own system.

This would be nice to see. mulitiple setups over multiple days. A pop3/smtp box. A dns box. A simple HTTPD server. File server, and maybe a 'little of everything' box, and compare them side by side in each role. But that would be too cool, so it won't happen. Oh yea, and the info gathered would be useful, so it wont happen either.

Re:FreeBSD

[knowledgepeacewi]

Whats the age requirement?

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD would win, hands down.

It wouldn't even be close.

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Dude, you don't shit, OpenBSD kicks FreeBSD's insecure ass. A server is no good if its hacked.

(really, I dont care, just wanted to start a new troll)

Re:FreeBSD

[mi]

FreeBSD 5 also has UFS2, which is also apparently a nice performance increase.

No... I asked this when UFS2 was checked in and the developer responded, that the original UFS was/is already almost as good as it is going to get, providing "almost" the speed of the raw diks. UFS2 provides new features -- the the extended attribute support, better ACL handling, etc.

BSD Ports

[vcbumg2]

I use linux for dev and the bsd's for everything else. If you are sick of rpm HELL give freebsd a try and see what a OSS OS that is managed from the ground up looks like not just the kernel. Redhat might come with bells and whistles but with a little more time I can make FBSD sing and dance with half the bloat!!! Codeman

Re:BSD Ports

[stevey]

OT I know .. but I could say exactly the same thing about Debian.

I've used FreeBSD a little, but not enough to appreciate it's strengths I guess.

(My initial impressions were raised by the firey screensaver upon the console, and the way it printed your uptime when you rebooted it!)

Re:BSD Ports

[mosch]

If you'd say the same thing about debian, then you either haven't used debian long enough, or you haven't used freebsd long enough.

If you don't mind running the extremely old debian stable branch, debian works pretty well, but as soon as you need a new version of something, then you enter into a minor hell of incompatible required versions, and instead of just knowing how to use the basic apt-get commands, you're suddenly forced to fix all sorts of shit with dpkg.

FreeBSD doesn't have the equivalent to the debian stable branch for the ports collection, it's always new, and most of the software always works. That being said, if you're interested in running gnome and kde, you should try to install these off of a release tagged ports collection, as both of them have a tendancy to only FULLY compile out of ports about 90% of the time, which can be wickedly frustrating. So with FreeBSD, you might have to learn how to use the date tag, or the release tags in cvsup, to move backwards to a point in time where the whole ports collection worked (the whole thing is generally very solid right at a release).

On the whole, the FreeBSD system is probably your preferred choice if you cannot make do with 2 year old software, but if the older software is adaquate for your needs, debian's stable branch is probably your best bet.

Re:BSD Ports

[ShecoDu]

RedHat is not the only linux distro around.

for one, debian is really good, provides lots of precompiled packages,
and a set of options, whether you want to go for stable (AKA old), development or bleeding edge software. I use the bleeding edge branch and it's not unstable at all, it's pretty good, it does automatic dependency checks to install packages and downloads/installs the needed packages.

On the other hand, there is gentoo, which is basically the same in terms of ease of installing new apps/stuff but with the added value that it compiles everything from source, I bet you'd like that.

Don't trash linux, just looking at redhat, linux is not redhat.

Re:BSD Ports

[/dev/trash]

You do realize that there is more to Linux than just Redhat?

Re:BSD Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, dude. RedHat owns Linux. If you use another distribution you are not really using Linux. For example, debian is an GPL version of Linux written by communists in Afganistan and available on the QVC shopping network for $19.95. Next time, think before you post.

Re:BSD Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

What? What about testing or unstable? apt-get works with both braches, so nothing of dpkg is needed to be done manually when installing packages from either branches ..... And both braches have faily new package versions, and in unsable VERY recent and new.

Re:BSD Ports

[vcbumg2]

I know many many linux distros buy non with the org of the bsd's

Re:BSD Ports

[Anonymous Coward]

For XFree86, Gnome and KDE, you might want to use the package that was built with the release, rather than the port, which as you mention is a moving target.

trouble

[Anonymous Coward]

i downloaded the mini iso yesterday.. trying to install it on a p133/30/1.5gb, but it is a bitch... it hangs when trying to mount the fs... heh.. but it probably because of the sucky ibm aptiva special hardware... sucks great..

think i'll try it on another computer later

Re:trouble

[GnuPengwyn]

I have it running on a generic (leftover pieces of junk) 486/66 with only 16MB ram. As a joke I decided to try to run X on it, guess what, it has X now. Now I have these "bad memory" chips, one that makes the box think it has 27MB ram, and yeah, when you try to mount the fs it dies a horrible death. Make sure the memory is good - my advice

Hotswap IDE

[DJPenguin]

Anyone doing this in FreeBSD? I have it (kind of) working, using atacontrol detach / attach before removing or inserting a drive. Works with regular filesystems, but I want to use vinum - the logical volume manager. As soon as vinum touches the replaced drive, it panics.

What are people using for volume management on FreeBSD anyway? I really wish a Linux-like LVM was available.

Re:Hotswap IDE

[mosch]

It sounds to me like you aren't initting the plex or something.

Whether you're making a mistake or not, you should post to -stable explaining precisely how you can make your system panic, and it'll get fixed pretty quickly.

Re:Hotswap IDE

[b0r1s]

Send it to questions@freebsd.org (make sure vinum is in the title, you're guaranteed to get a response from Greg).

Re:Hotswap IDE

[DJPenguin]

Actually, I'm already talking to Greg about it for the last week, just wondered if anyone else had any success stories.

Cheers

Confusing

[Anonymous Coward]

You go to the freeBSD site, and click on the doc for newbies link, right, so you can see why you would use BSD over linux.

Then, you get told that you should use the latest mainstream release, which happens to be 5.0

If 5.0 is out, why the heck would you be excited about 4.8? That's a puzzle.

Re:Confusing

[dynamicexpression]

Because the 4.x branch is what a lot of people use on their production servers, and in mission critical situations. So it excited us that we get a new production ready release. When FreeBSD 5.2 comes out, I will make the swap from the 4.x branch for my production servers. Not until then. As for my development box I have both 4.x and 5.0 on it as it is not used for any production services.

A Matter of Time

[Spencerian]

It's only a matter of time until some wacko Mac OS X users asks "when will this latest BSD update become part of the BSD subsystem of Mac OS X?"

I'm not one of those people.

Nope. No way. Uh-uh. No sirree.

Re:A Matter of Time

[repetty]

" It proved to be fast and reliable even then, and those were on old PII machines."

Well?.......

Re:A Matter of Time

[be-fan]

Heh. The BSD subsystem in OS X is actually still largely based on 4.4 BSD (yes the old one). Modern BSDs (Free and Net) are used mainly in userspace, and in the filesystem and networking subsystems.

Re:A Matter of Time

[Anonymous Coward]

no, ur wrong, check the OSX site, its based on FreeBSD 4.4.

"Jaguar integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 4.4 and GCC 3.1 into Darwin, the Open Source base of Mac OS X, to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability."

http://www.apple.com/macosx/jaguar/unix.html

-Chris

Re:A Matter of Time

[CoolVibe]

No _you_ are wrong. The grandparent poster is right.

Instead of reading the necktie induced marketing blurb, try reading the Darwin FAQ which states the following:

Q. Why is Darwin based on BSD UNIX?

A. There are several reasons for this. The first one is historical. Mac OS X draws a lot of its code base from a system called OPENSTEP, created by NeXT Software, which Apple bought in 1997. OPENSTEP and its predecessor, NEXTSTEP, were based on 4.3 BSD. BSD has always had a rich academic developer community behind it, and while much of the original BSD UNIX was not free, its source code was available to anyone who obtained a license for it. The wide development community that arose to support BSD contributed to many of the ideas that drive today's open source community. That community also facilitated a great deal of research, including work to put BSD on Mach at Carnegie Mellon University-code that eventually found its way to NeXT and now to Apple.

Mac OS X (well, Darwin actually) derives from a 4.4BSD-Lite kernel. 4.4BSD is not to be confused with FreeBSD 4.4. 4.4BSD has been around for much longer. I run 4.4BSD on one of my VAX emulators. Since when did FreeBSD do a VAX port?

For the "is dying" trolls

[stud9920]

for the "is dying" trolls : be sure to visit the two links in my sig...

Re:For the "is dying" trolls

[KillerHamster]

Fact : *Bush is dying It is official; CNN confirms: *Bush is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *Bush community when IDC confirmed that *Bush 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 CNN survey which plainly states that *Bush has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *Bush 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 Aaron Brown to predict *Bush's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *Bush faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *Bush because *Bush is dying. Things are looking very bad for *Bush. As many of us are already aware, *Bush continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood. George W Bush is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time George W Bush developers Dick Cheney and Colin Powell only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: George W Bush is dying. Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers. Iraq leader Saddam Hussein states that there are 7000 users of Iraq. How many users of Dubya are there? Let's see. The number of Iraq versus Dubya posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Dubya users. North Korea posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Dubya posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of North Korea. A recent article put George W Bush at about 80 percent of the *Bush market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 George W Bush users. This is consistent with the number of George W Bush Usenet posts. Due to the troubles of Washington, abysmal sales and so on, George W Bush went out of business and was taken over by Iraq who sell another troubled OS. Now Iraq is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house. All major surveys show that *Bush has steadily declined in market share. *Bush is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *Bush is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *Bush continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *Bush is dead. Fact: *Bush is dying

Re:For the "is dying" trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

stud9920, poster, dead at 143

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - Slashdot Poster stud9920 was found dead in his cardboard box this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to nothing much. Truly an Polish icon.

Re:For the "is dying" trolls

[AnonymousCowheart]

everything looks good, but you should include the to kreskin's site I'm sure he loves seeing all the referrers from slashdot in his log!

Re:For the "is dying" trolls

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey, I'm Hungaro-Belgian !

Re:this is a dupe

[Anonymous Coward]

No it's not a dupe. The first story noted
a humorous problem the releng team had in
fitting things onto a floppy, all because of
the size of the cvs tags. This release removes
some drivers from the floppy.

I realize it's a knee jerk reaction to say /. has posted a dupe, but in this case, they
did not. (Imagine that!)

Conservative updates...

[MosesJones]

The conservative updates to BSD now mean that several commands and C functions are not available because they offend conservative moral values these include, but are not limited to (a full list will not be produced for reasons of security)

finger, bash, free, enable, alias & break

Awk is no longer considered under protection and users may hunt it to extinction if they desire.

kill is of course still available to all users, with the added bonus that you may now kill other peoples processes that you believe are interfering with your own and stealing CPU time from your processes.

In addition 4.8 introduces the first stage of BSD NSA Security which ensures your security by logging everything you do with the goverment, this is an optional package at this stage but will be mandatory in 5.0.

Anyone who doesn't like these updates is a liberal communist who is undermining the American Way of Life

The BSD Conservative Coalition Commitee

Re:Conservative updates...

[Anonymous Coward]

"communist"?

You're living in the eighties mate. Get with the times. The correct term for those below Good American Values is "terrorist".

Re:Conservative updates...

[arvindn]

Full list of conservative changes has now been leaked.

1. "man" pages are now called "person" pages.
2. Similarly, "hangman" is now the "person_executed_by_an_oppressive_regime."
3. To avoid casting aspersions on our feline friends, the "cat" command is now merely "domestic_quadruped."
4. To date, there has only been a UNIX command for "yes" - reflecting the male belief that women always mean yes, even when they say no. To address this imbalance, System VI adds a "no" command, along with a "-f[orce]" option which will crash the entire system if the "no" is ignored.
5. The bias of the "mail" command is obvious, and it has been replaced by the more neutral "gendre" command.
6. The "touch" command has been removed from the standard distribution due to its inappropriate use by high-level managers.
7. "compress" has been replaced by the lightweight "feather" command. Thus, old information (such as that from Dead White European Males) should be archived via "tar" and "feather".
8. The "more" command reflects the materialistic philosophy of the Reagan era. System VI uses the environmentally preferable "less" command.
9. The biodegradable "KleeNeX" displaces the environmentally unfriendly "LaTeX".

1. SHELL COMMANDS To avoid unpleasant, medieval connotations, the "kill" command has been renamed "euthanise."
2. The "nice" command was historically used by privileged users to give themselves priority over unprivileged ones, by telling them to be "nice". In System VI, the "sue" command is used by unprivileged users to get for themselves the rights enjoyed by privileged ones.
3. "history" has been completely rewritten, and is now called "herstory."
4. "quota" can now specify minimum as well as maximum usage, and will be strictly enforced.
5. The "abort()" function is now called "choice()."

1. TERMINOLOGY From now on, "rich text" will be more accurately referred to as "exploitive capitalist text".
2. The term "daemons" is a Judeo-Christian pejorative. Such processes will now be known as "spiritual guides."
3. There will no longer be a invidious distinction between "dumb" and "smart" terminals. All terminals are equally valuable.
4. Traditionally, "normal video" (as opposed to "reverse video") was white on black. This implicitly condoned European colonialism, particularly with respect to people of African descent. UNIX System VI now uses "regressive video" to refer to white on black, while "progressive video" can be any color at all over a white background.
5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy. We have instituted a dictatorship of the users. All system administration functions will be handled by the People's Committee for Democratically Organizing the System (PC-DOS).
6. No longer will it be permissible for files and processes to be "owned" by users. All files and processes will own themselves, and decided how (or whether) to respond to requests from users.
7. The X Window System will henceforth be known as the NC-17 Window System.
8. And finally, UNIX itself will be renamed "PC" - for Procreatively Challenged.

Source: http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/computing/newunix.html - Policitally correct UNIX

Re:Conservative updates...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah but Communism was fun!

Terrorism doesnt sound as cool.

Examples:

Communism -> fun propaganda; Terrorism -> insane religous propaganda

Communism -> fashionable "leaders"; Terrorism -> lots of ugly dudes

Communism -> can openly, repectfully denounce political crap you don't like (arbitrarily) ; Terrorism -> noone listens to you cause you're ugly

Communism -> funky berets=sexy; Terrorism -> cloth head wraps=stupid

so anyway, behind the times or no, I'll stick to Communism, mainly because, well, it's sexy ;)

Re:Conservative updates...

[SecretAsianMan]

MosesJones wrote:

finger, bash, free, enable, alias & break

Bash is not part of FreeBSD. The default shell is tcsh, and a real sh is provided to run scripts. Bash is available as a port (i.e. third-party add-on ackage). It goes in /usr/local/bin/bash.

Re:Conservative updates...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

Conservatives use Jesux. Of course, it uses the Bo[u]rn[e]-Again SHell.

Re:Conservative updates...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

5. For far too long, power has been concentrated in the hands of "root" and his "wheel" oligarchy.

RMS doesn't like wheel all that much neither.

Re:Conservative updates...

[evilviper]

Yes, but the problem is that RMS always makes himself look like an idiot. For one thing, he acts like it's the right of users to become root if they can find the password... Secondly, all you need is a simple chmod 4550 su to have the same effect.

Yes, RMS is first a politician, second an organizer, and (only) third a programmer. I say this as someone who has gotten to know him fairly well. What makes this worse is that his views may take him far, but eventually his true opinions come out, and you can tell that his sense of reason exists in it's own little world.

A good example of that is his advocation of all developers being legally forced to use the GPL.

Re:Conservative updates...

[Arandir]

However, occasionally the rulers do tell someone. Under the usual su mechanism, once someone learns the root password who sympathizes with the ordinary users, he or she can tell the rest. The "wheel group" feature would make this impossible, and thus cement the power of the rulers.

I wonder if he wants to ban passkeys as well, lest hotel concierges cement their power of hotel guests...

Come one Richard! Enter the real world! If it's your system you can do whatever you want. But sometimes, just sometimes, the user of the system is not the owner of the system, and has no legal, moral or ethical rights to its administration.

Nitpick.

[Anonymous Coward]

I was running FreeBSD on a PPro 150MHz back in 1996. It was the main user's email and webspace server for Flashnet and served 3000+ accounts. Yup, I was a sysadmin for them.

Simple...

[sethadam1]

The same reason there's a 2.2 and 2.4 Linux kernel - because not everyone uses 2.5.

Not everyone uses XP, there're still updates to Windows 98, Me, and 2000 Workstation.

Just because the numbers are higher or the release is newer doesn't mean everyone flocked to it and upgraded immediately.

Most are predicting that 5.1 or even 5.2 will make 5.0 good to go for primetime. Until then, there are plenty still using the 4.x tree.

--
Adam

Re:Simple...

[mcdade]

Some of use are still using the 3.x tree.. though there are no updates for that, as long as the server isn't broken and I can recompile my busted apps (when updates are done) then i'm a happy camper..

going on 121 days of uptime..the machine only goes down to install new hardware (last time it was some fans cause the drives were overheating)

i don't have time to down it for an os change.. that will happen when the box is retired.

FreeBSD, the *BSDs, the *i*xes, etc

[ajs]

I just want to give a shout out (look at the older geek trying out the lingo...) to FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Darwin, Linux, and all of the other free OSen of lesser popularity and even completion (yay GNU/Hurd)!

It's not said often enough (and certainly not by OS bigots like me) that this phenomenon of open source / free software is one of the brigtest examples of the human drive to form communities based on respect and contribution.

I wrote a couple articles for Dæmon News a while back on the topic of BSD and Linux, and they've grown dated. Perhaps it's time to write a Linux-free article about BSD. There's some interesting stuff that I see going on from angles like Perl and GNOME where these projects have become far more *BSD-aware in recent years (more so than just having a stable port to the platform), and I'm wondering if the future of free operating systems is beginning to shift back to the BSDs (as it was when I first started using UNIX and UNIX-like systems in the late 80s).

Good job on the release, folks!. May your bugs be few and your releases often.

PS: Hmmm, as I just said on the SpamAssassin mailing list, perhaps it's time I stop posting *right* after my first coffee of the morning ;-)

Just put into production

[rf0]

Just rolled a new server running 4.8 into production. Works like a dream and lastest CVS has security fixes as well so no patching necessary (well I guess for a few weeks :). The performance once again rocks.

Of course we have the ports tree which I think it the second best package managment, after apt on debian. Also I'm now running jails and they are stable and everything seems to just work. Which is nice.

Overall lets give a big hand to the FreeBSD team.

Rus

Firewire... New??

[TrollBridge]

"...and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies."

Umm... firewire isn't exactly new. What's taking them so long to get more than "initial" support? And what does THAT mean?

Re:Firewire... New??

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSd is not designed to be a desktop OS. What server needs firewire? I would rather choose correctnes, and stability, over some bleeding edge Linux kernel for my servers. And if i remember correctly, fbsd had USB2 support before Linux did.

Re:Firewire... New??

[anthony_dipierro]

Are you kidding me? Firewire is very useful in building a fast, cheap, reliable server with a whole lot of hard drive space.

Re:Firewire... New??

[strabo]

FreeBSd is not designed to be a desktop OS. What server needs firewire?

Using that logic, what server needs Gnome 2.2, or KDE 3.1, or XFree86 4.3.0 ? Where on freebsd.org does it say that FreeBSD is not designed to be a desktop OS ?

In fact, the FreeBSD FAQ has this to say:

The goal of the FreeBSD Project is to provide software that may be used for any purpose...

Oh, and this:

FreeBSD is designed to provide a robust and full-featured environment for applications. It supports a wide variety of web browsers, office suites, email readers, graphics programs, programming environments, network servers, and just about everything else you might want.

I'm curious, where on the freebsd.org site did you see that FreeBSD was not designed to be a desktop OS ?

Re:Firewire... New??

[Eraser_]

While I'm not sure about Gnome or KDE but if you are serving thin clients a graphical OS, then a FreeBSD X server would sure as hell need XF86-4.3.0. I have been at home moving towards getting some cheapy machines which boot into RAMdisks and then load like Mozilla over teh network in my house. X11 gives me a great protocol to do that with, coupled with passwordless ssh via rsa keys.

On the other hand, my primary workstation at home is running Windows XP, my ones at work run OS X, and FreeBSD (as a desktop). There is exactly one windows computer in the office, however thats just so we have a test bed for everyones half-sucking windows apps. While I run windows at home, my favoring of it as a primary machine fades as each registry corrupts or random file goes missing in NTFS.

Re:Firewire... New??

[Cirvam]

or just use IDE. Hell firewire drives are as expensive as SCSI in some cases. Plus there don't seem to be too many 1TB or more arrays of firewire drives out there for sale.

Re:Firewire... New??

[anthony_dipierro]

IDE is limited to 4 devices, and only 2 of those devices can act simultaneously. RAID-1 'em up, and you only get 2 devices, one acting at a time. With firewire you don't have these limitations, and IDE drives can be used with low cost firewire adapters.

Plus there don't seem to be too many 1TB or more arrays of firewire drives out there for sale.

No, but you can put lots of smaller drives instead.

Re:Firewire... New??

[Anonymous Coward]

Or use an IDE raid card or two, its not that hard to fit 8 or more IDE drives in a box each on their own channel. And if you were building a drive array wouldn't you want to use resonably priced drives of a decent size? Why use lots of smaller drives when you could just use lots of bigger drives?

Re:Firewire... New??

[anthony_dipierro]

A firewire card is much cheaper than an IDE raid card. And by smaller drives I meant 200 gigs as opposed to the 1 tb that the other poster was suggesting.

Re:Firewire... New??

[sullrich]

It's been in current for a bit. I believe it was just backported. Cheers!

Cutting edge??? Noooooo....

[twoslice]

We can't have newbies using the cutting edge stuff! The cutting edge stuff does not have the "evil bit" that detects whether a newbie is at the keyboard.

just to fuck them up and keep them in their place...

Firewire New?

[buffy]

Since when is Firewire a new hardware technology? It's been around for quite a while...

-buf

Re:Wondering about those P IIs

[Anonymous Coward]

"and those were on old PII machines."
^^^

Only new PII machines were available in 97, so it had to be even less than 6 years actually.

grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[Anonymous Coward]

I love freebsd, I've tried to make it my primary OS for a long time, but keep going back to linux because I can never get CUPS to work, never and its making me peeved now. Wh y why why?

Heh, I"ve read the docs and I've searched the web for that magic site that takes me by the hand and says "do this then this and then this, do you have this installed, good, now do this," and like magic my stupid epson stylus 640 prints. It works flawlessly in Mandrake 9.1 and all the other previous versions since I got the printer.

Does anyone have the URL to that magic site? Other than CUPS, freebsd is perfect and I wish I could use it exclusivly. (and yes I know its something that I'm doing wrong and not the fault of freebsd's, but then maybe its that little red daemon trying to peeve me off.)

Re:grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[Viol8]

If only there sites like that. I'm a unix fan but one thing that *really* p*sses me off about the
unix world is that your somehow just expected to *know* how to get something to work and if
you don't you just get the standard issue RTFM response when you seek advice. Of course that
would be great if the man and help pages weren't generally written in an obscure dialect of
Ancient Geek and only intelligable by their original authors and people whacked out on LSD.

Re:grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[kernel_panic]

CUPS has been working great for me ever since I moved my primary home workstation and Samba server over to FreeBSD around 4.4 or so. I like the fact that even after 149 days of uptime w/ Galeon and Evolution running for weeks at a time, it's just as responsive as it was at first boot. I'll send you my smb.conf and CUPS config files if that'll help. Just e-mail me.

Re:grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[Duck_Taffy]

Install Ghostscript and Gimp-Print, and you should be fine. My Stylus Color 760 works beautifully.

Re:grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[Arandir]

I'm a windows fan but one thing that *really* p*sses me off about the windwos world is your somehow just expected to *know* how to use it and if you don't you just get the standard issue to reinstall the software when you seek advice. Of course that would be great if it actually came with some documentation instead of shelling out yet more money for a video on how to use office and slim your thighs at the same time because only people whacked out on LSD use windows.

Re:grrrrrghhhhgha urgle urgle

[Viol8]

Thanks for the standard issue sarcastic response that just proves my point.

ships with sendmail hole?

[Anonymous Coward]

"A remotely-exploitable buffer overflow vulnerability in sendmail has been fixed by updating sendmail to version 8.12.8."

and of course, the newest sendmail version is 8.12.9 which addressed ANOTHER security hole.

i think it's time i switch my MTA...

Re:ships with sendmail hole?

[perl_scrip]

Actually, the errata section says this flaw was corrected before the release.

FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Errata

George W Bush, POTUSA, dead at 52

[Anonymous Coward]

I just heard some sad news on talk radio - president of the United States of America George W Bush was found dead in Camp David this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to world peace. Truly an American icon.

Ports one downside

[swb]

...is that you can get kind of dependent on them. I don't build anything that's not in ports anymore, and its eliminated my skill at building crap from .tgz files like I used to under Linux.

But it's not a skill that I miss terribly, actually, and hasn't been a problem.

Re:Ports one downside

[Anonymous Coward]

The point being? I would like a system that I can install and use. I don't care about package management, I don't care that I have to have a dependancy to run this application, I just want to run the damn application.

FreeBSD does this, very well. If you are a developer, sure you need to know this, but as a user I don't care.

Re:Ports one downside

[phoenix_rizzen]

Read the Porter's Handbook and start creating your own custom ports, or editing the existing ones to work the way you want. Then you'll be proficient in both source compiles and port installs. :) And you'll get your name on the FreeBSD Contributors list if your new port gets accepted into the tree.

Pimping

[rf0]

Yeah I'll get modded down for this but we do virtual servers running FreeBSD as well. See my sig

Rus

Re:Pimping

[Anonymous Coward]

another example of someone who says "I'll get modded down but" and then they get modded up!

Who is saing use 5.0?

[nurb432]

Its clearly stated on the FBSD pages that 5.0 is not considered the 'stable' one, and the 4x series should be used instead.

True the numbering is a bit confusing, but it IS clearly spelled out by the team.

Yes!!

[bsd_usr]

Yes! It's time to cvsup again!

Yes!!

I've been waiting for this release for awhile now. Thanks to you guys for all your hard work!

Now I can finally upgrade my 4.6.2-RELEASE box to 4.8-RELEASE. Ugh...but my uptime. :( I have like over 180 days or so. Oh well, uptime isn't everything. Security is though.

Well, I wish you all a happy CVSup'ing, or whatever is you do to upgrade.

BitTorrent?

[Andy Dodd]

Anyone going to be "torrenting" this one?

I've been thinking of trying FreeBSD, and I definately will grab it if it's torrented. :)

Re:BitTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

One of the nice things about FreeBSD is that the ftp mirrors are generally very fast (I had to download RH ISO's recently, boy, what a miserable experience that was!). Whenever I download a FreeBSD ISO, the bottleneck is usually my connection. I mostly use ftp2.freebsd.org.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Istealmymusic]

Whenever I download a FreeBSD ISO, the bottleneck is usually my connection. I mostly use ftp2.freebsd.org.

Interestingly, ftpN.freebsd.org is aliased to the least-loaded mirror automatically, where N is low. This system works very well.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Istealmymusic]

I'm still waiting for the CVS to be torrented. Now that would be cool.

Re:BitTorrent?

[semanticgap]

Don't know where you got this from. Ftp2.freebsd.org resolves (and has for the past couple of years) to 130.94.149.162, which is located at Verio. It's got a GE connection to their backbone and its a beefy machine, which is why it is so fast.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sure it is fast. The difference being, of course, that everyone wants to download Red Hat 9, and at most about 30.000 people in the world care about a new FreeBSD.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Istealmymusic]

No, the DNS name resolves dynamically to the least loaded server. Since 130.94.149.162 has a direct connection to the backbone unlike other mirrors, it doesn't move down in the server rankings.

Re:BitTorrent?

[semanticgap]

Hmm.. Neat. Is this documented somewhere? I haven't been reading hubs list lately. I'm curious how it determines that a server is loaded, since aside from load, the network location of the client plays a significant role in how performance is perceived by the client.

Re:BitTorrent?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't think so, ftp5 always ends up at xyz.lcs.mit.edu.

Either the loading is incredibly uniform, or the load balancing, if any, is not working.

Re:Shame on USA - Shame on Britain

[Graspee_Leemoor]

"Saddam would only give chemical weapons to his most elite units...and we haven't seen them yet."

Yeah, you only get them on the later levels. It's the same mdl as the standard troop but has a funky new skin and is holding a new weapon mdl.

graspee

ftp2 server traffic graph

[semanticgap]

Check out the traffic graph for ftp2. Now slashdot that!

Hmmmm...

[meme_police]

..."Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies". That seems to imply that Firewire is a new technology? How long has Mac OS supported Firewire? 15 years or something like that?

Re:Hmmmm...

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

How long has Mac OS supported Firewire? 15 years or something like that?
Not 15 years, since the tech's not that old. Considering Apple invented the technology, it's reasonable that they had an implementation fairly quickly. FireWire is actually an Apple trademark, the generic term is IEEE1394.

Re:

[Anonymous Coward]

MFS isn't supported in FreeBSD 5.x anyway.

(I realize that this announcement is for 4.8, but best to be prepared.)

George Washington, Patriot, dead at 271

[RLiegh]

just heard some sad news on talk radio - Father of American Government George Washington was found dead in his Maine home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss him - even if you didn't enjoy his work, there's no denying his contributions to American Revolution. Truly an American icon.

(might as well burn some of that precious karma. ;))

FreeBSD PCMCIA Support

[emil]

I have an old 486 laptop that I would like to configure as my NAT gateway (I am currently running RedHat 6.2 on a p133, and I am looking forward to cutting my power consumption down to 27W).

I have two IBM Home & Away 14.4+Ethernet PCMCIA cards, plus an Accton EN2218.

How can I install FreeBSD on this system? I gather that support for my PCMCIA cards is nil, so I tried some others (3com, etc.), but the 5.0 installer said that "only a limited subset" of the supported PCMCIA cards are supported by the installer, but I cannot find a list of these installer-supported cards anywhere in the documentation (the installer actually said that the list is on the floppy, but I don't know how to mount it).

Red Hat 9 also has some major PCMCIA brain damage. Red Hat 6.2 was the last true Red Hat Linux - far superior to all preceding and following versions. It is with great sadness that I contemplate its removal.

Re:FreeBSD PCMCIA Support

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an annoying oversight, true. I'm have a similarly hard time trying to find an answer for you (I'd look at CVS, but I need to get in the shower!).

-You can boot the floppy in 'interactive' kernel configuration mode, and see what devices are in the list.

-You can look in CVS (FreeBSD.org hosts a CVSWeb server, which is quite handy for these moments) and find the kernel configuration file used for the floppy set(s).

-You should be able to use SLIP or PPP over a serial null-modem link, to bootstrap the system to usefulness. Does require an existing workstation that you're comfortable setting up a PPP/SLIP service on. (There do exist some very Plug'n'Play PPP servers for Windows; Mocha PPP is a popular shareware one, often used by palmtop users.)

Keep in mind that FreeBSD (or any *BSD) can be fairly compiling-intensive. If you intend the 486 as a router/firewall, I'd suggest OpenBSD - more for its size and base packages than anything else. FreeBSD shines surprisingly brightly on 'reasonably modern' hardware (e.g. my P-II 400, with 8gb of disk and 256MB RAM), but one of the many ultralight Linux distros might get you rolling faster. I find conventional Linux distros greedily disk-hungry by virtue of default packages, but there's a higher minimum limit to use a BSD properly, in that you're best off having room for the complete system sources and ports skeletons. You can live without those, but then you're missing much of the 'point' of BSD, and it makes for a suboptimal learning environment. (Says I, who got started by being 'stranded' with a similar 486 running OpenBSD for a year.)

Of course, there's at least one ultralight BSD, as well. ;)

Re:FreeBSD PCMCIA Support

[pboulang]

You can always do a manual install (of the three options at the very beginning, that is one of them) and it lists out drivers to load/unload so you can see which ones are supported..

Ok, a cheat, but effective that once in a blue moon when I needed to use it.

Re:Wondering about those P IIs

[elemur]

This probably falls into the "whatever" camp.. I don't keep that close of a watch on hardware, and don't remember what processor I have in the server beside my desk off hand... It may have been Pentium Pro's or Pentium I's for all I know off the top of my head.

The main point is that FreeBSD is stable and fast, and has been for quite a while.

Re:reading release notes

[Loki_1929]

"Initial firewire support, rudimental hyperthreading and SMP, sendmail and ftp updates. Where have you been people all these years?"

Not rebooting our servers every 2 weeks.

I'm ready

[Anonymous Coward]

I have a 1.4ghz tbird and 256mb ram running Win2kPro. I was scared to put FreeBSD on my comp so I installed v4.7 on a P120mhz, 16mb ram, 980MB laptop. That was about 4 months ago and now I feel comfortable using it. Now with FreeBSD 4.8 I shall dualboot FreeBSD and Win2kPro on my main comp!

Re:I'm ready

[Robowally]

4.7 installed beautifully on my box here. Even the bootloader is excellent and simple. Have not tried 4.8 yet.

Re:reading release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

You're practising for the Being-Wrong event at the next Olympics, aren't you?

First, bit of pedantry, I'm a Linux user and I didn't so much as smirk reading the release notes. Nope, no laughing.

Next, the SMP's hardly rudimentary. I've been using it for several years. It's the Hyperthreading support that is new. Which isn't unreasonable, given I believe the last -RELEASE of FreeBSD pre-dated availability of the Pentium IV 3.06GHz. In fact, I'm very sure Linux didn't have HTT support in the late 90's.

So, that just leaves firewire as being "somewhat older", though I believe that first showed up in 2000. Again, not the late 90's.

As for ftp and sendmail, why wouldn't you update them?

Yeah, yeah, I know, I shouldn't feed the trolls...

Fact : Underpants is dying

[Sevn]

It is official; My bitchy girlfriend confirms: Underpants is dying One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered Underpants community when IDC confirmed that Underpants 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 My bitchy girlfriend survey which plainly states that Underpants has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Underpants 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 cnn war analyst to predict Underpants's future. The hand writing is on the wall: Underpants faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for Underpants because Underpants is dying. Things are looking very bad for Underpants. As many of us are already aware, Underpants 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 The Jolly Green Giant and Lucky Leprachaun 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.

Brazierres leader Anna Nicole Smith states that there are 7000 users of Brazierres. How many users of Edible Underwear are there? Let's see. The number of Brazierres versus Edible Underwear posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 Edible Underwear users. Chin Dildoes posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of Edible Underwear posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of Chin Dildoes. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the Underpants 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 K-Mart, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by Sears and Roebuck who sell another troubled OS. Now Sears and Roebuck is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.

All major surveys show that Underpants has steadily declined in market share. Underpants is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If Underpants is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. Underpants continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, Underpants is dead.

Fact: Underpants is dying

Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[skaeight]

Ok, I'm not trying to start a flame war here, although it seem like one has already been started. I want pure facts (or at least as close as we can get). I've heard lots of talk about fbsd 5.0 vs linux 2.6 and even fbsd4.8 vs. linux 2.6. What about the current kernel? I want to know how does linux 2.4.20 plus the prememptive kernel and low latency patches compares to freebsd 4.8 on speed and desktop responsiveness. I know freebsd would kill linux as a server, but I dont care about that, I just want to run it as a desktop.

If anyone would have any benchmarks or something that would be great. If not people's own experience is good enought. I just really haven't seen any fair comparisons. I'm intrigued by this OS becuase I'm a computer science student and I want to run unix, I'm not just on the anti-microsoft train. I used to be, but after using linux for a while and having a unix class in school, i'm loving unix (well i do still hate microsoft;-) ). But I find my self using the command line to do things way more often then nautilus or anything like that. It just makes more sense to me for some reason than dealing with a mouse. Anyways sorry for the sidetrack, but i want to see what people think. Thanks.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sysadmin magazine ran some FreeBSD benchmarks. They are available HERE.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[the-dude-man]

Well that depends on wich distro of linux you are using, if your using redhat, it gets brutally slaughtered by freebsd, as do many of the other linux distros. However, there is a new linux distro out that really gives freebsd a run for its money. Gentoo linux is great.Its still realitivly new so there really arnt any gui tools like there are in red hat, so its not for beginners. But gentoo runs at about the speed of a freebsd 4.7 box. And about the same stability.

The really nice thing that comes with gentoo is an enhanced version of the ports collection. Literally, when i want to upgrade all the software on my machine to the latest version i type emerge rsync && emerge -u world, and then walk away. It literally does everything you want, and makes makes you a cup of coffie if you want :) not to mention that all the patches applied for you :)

so all in all, if your considering gentoo vs freebsd, flip a coin. Because gentooand freeBSD are breaking about even. I see both in a production enviornment and i still couldnt choose one over the other. But virtually all of the other linux distros get their asses kicked by freeBSD, so unless your looking at gentoo as your choice for linux, then freebsd is going to make the better desktop

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Robowally]

4.7 worked very well on the (KDE) desktop. Haven't tried 4.8 yet.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me or does FreeBSD compile applications a helluva lot faster than Gentoo Linux, though? On my AMD K6-III/450 with 256MB SDRAM compiling KDE takes over 24 hours. On FreeBSD, I think it took about one night or so. Everything just seems more uniform, speedy, and optimized in a FreeBSD environment. KDE performs much better, too, thanks to the FreeBSD kernel. I don't know the specifics but they just work together.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[jo42]

See for yourself:

1) Download the various distros.
2) install them on your machine one by one.
3) Write an article.
4) Profit!!!
5) Choose FreeBSD.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is perhaps ahead on the latency vs. throughput tunables and 500 schedulers available. However, part of the reason such patches exist was to correct what were seen as performance issues.

FreeBSD is starting to see 'play' in these areas, and improvements will no-doubt lead to an *even* faster, *even* more stable system. However, *without* any of this effort, it's still a stable, respectable desktop. (It should be noted that, until relatively recently, FreeBSD was much further ahead on VM. When you aren't paging/swapping unneeededly, you aren't hitting scenarios that stress the scheduler to the point of jerky-mouse.)

If you want extremely low latency, you should really be using something like QNX6. If you want something with a comfortable GUI, you should stick with Mandrake or RHAT. If you want better support for TV cards, and advanced features of soundcards, Linux is probably ahead (but only through sheer mass of interested developers).

The best thing would be to place a Linux and FreeBSD box side by side, so you can explore their various strengths and weaknesses. And toss NetBSD on a 486, so you can see what the 'experimental' BSD is up to. ;) [Every BSD has produced its own innovations, but NetBSD has played a major role in defining 'what BSD looks like' over the past few years. Remember, FreeBSD is intended to be NetBSD's 'conservative,' production-ready cousin, and OpenBSD just happens to have been a direct fork of NetBSD sources. ;)]

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[1s44c]

Personally I'd say FreeBSD is faster and a lot easier to get software for ( ports ).

But don't take my word for it, Why don't you try both of them on the same hardware and see what you think?

Don't come to slashdot for answers, we only do opinions.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Anonymous Coward]

I know freebsd would kill linux as a server

Clearly you haven't kept up with developments for oh, the last 4 years or so. It is common knowledge that Linux completely smokes FreeBSD in network and diskperformance, as well as in parallel tasking.

Re:Linux vs. Freebsd - Desktop?

[Arandir]

It's the desktop, you won't be able to tell any difference just because of the kernel. There may be some difference, but they will be because of other things, like libc vs glibc, or the build optimizations you use, etc.

In my experience, I can't tell the difference on the *desktop* between FreeBSD and Slackware, with both built from scratch with the same CFLAGs.

Re:reading release notes

[axxackall]

Not rebooting our servers every 2 weeks.

And you feel very proud of it, right? All last year you've been thinking that BSD is the only (at least from free ones) OS that has such a big uptime. Seems to me you should open your mind, read news and listen other people. Than you will be surprised that for year Linux has no worse uptime than BSD.

My linux workstations (!) are not rebooting for months. Even when load/unload all time various modules responsible for hot-plug devices.

I wonder where do BSD people get all those stories of the need to reboot Linux bi-weekly? Perhaps they mistake Linux with Windows, am I right?

Last time I remember any memory or hardware related crashy problems of Linux kernel that was when I've been playing with 0.95 kernel. Do you know how many years ago was that?

Re:reading release notes

[Loki_1929]

You've obviously never experienced the horrific pain-in-a-box that was Red Hat 5.3 :)

Re:reading release notes

[axxackall]

Nope. At the time of RH 5.x I was on Slackware and never had any crashy/instability problems with it.

You may try to speculate about distributions. Don't. There is always a wrong distro for a good OS. Like MacOSX for BSD :)

OS is first of all a kernel. Then those packages which are called "system" or "base". Finally it has packages usually called "world".

Linux OS is first of all a Linux kernel. The kernel you compile for your needs. Those guys who installed RH5.3 and didn't bother to recompile the kernel and configure their system diserve the crash.

Same as with guys on FreeBSD. Don't tell me that you install FreeBSD (especially at time of RH 5.3) and it runs. I don't belive. I heard various stories from my friends, who recompiled the kernel to support some SCSI or reconfigure the system for specific firewall needs.

The difference between "scratch" type distro (Slackware, later Debian, recently Gentoo) and commercial ones is that in first case you have Linux, in second case you have a commercial distro. Untill you recompile/reconfigure it and then you don't have the original commercial distro - you have your own recompiled/reconfigured system.

Re:reading release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually I wouldn't mind using Linux if it weren't for the fact that every time I install a Linux distro it is so disorganized and slapped together that it makes me long for Windows!!! Yeah, I know if I don't like the bloat of Linux distributions I can use Gentoo, but to be quite honest I don't have enough time to sit around waiting for every program to compile. With FreeBSD I just install the software packages (I rarely use ports) and I get a whole operating system that doesn't feel like it was written by 500 people who have no communication with one another. The closest thing to FreeBSD in the Linux world is probably Debian, but Debian is so out of date it is a joke. And even if you do keep up to date with the testing branches of Debian you are still using an operating system put together by hand-wringing leftists and free software foundation goofballs. No thanks! I'll just stick with FreeBSD.

I'm throwing the BS flag on this...

[sean.peters]

You might know that Iran has also used chemical weapons against Iraq and that US generals have thratened to use chemical weapons against Iraq before the war.

1. Iran has NEVER used chemical weapons against anyone.

2. No US official has EVER threatened to use chemical weapons against Iraq or anyone else.

If you have any proof of these outlandish allegations, better ante up some links.

Sean

No faster way to get a new version released...

[tntguy]

...than when I just burned a copy of the previous release.

I'm so behind the times.

MD5's?

[1s44c]

Ok I can find the isos on ftp.freebsd.org,
but wheres CHECKSUM.MD5?

It seems a waste of time downloading these things if I don't even know if they are different to the iso's I downloaded three days ago.

Re:MD5's?

[Dark44]

You'll find the MD5's for the three ISO images in the Errate section of the release information for 4.8.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.8R/errata.html

Re:Please tell me you're fucking joking

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, the guy _was joking. It is quite unfortunate though that once a joke is told, it has to be repeated at least a billion times before it dies. Much like the "soviet russia" joke and references to "beowolf clusters." fark.com is plagued with references to Cliche Kitty and "I'd hit it", so this malady isn't confined to just slashdot.

But I agree with you, I think if you retell a joke that is already cliche, you should get an automatic -1, cliche.

Re:reading release notes

[Loki_1929]

"And you feel very proud of it, right?"

Not really; I hardly ever think about the FreeBSD servers here. That's my point.

"All last year you've been thinking that BSD is the only (at least from free ones) OS that has such a big uptime."

Not at all, any machine running any OS can have high amounts of uptime. It's a question of the amount of uptime of a high volume, high traffic machine that's actually doing things 24/7. I can run a DOS machine for months on end without a crash so long as I don't touch it. This doesn't make DOS my OS of choice.

"Seems to me you should open your mind, read news and listen other people. Than you will be surprised that for year Linux has no worse uptime than BSD."

Unfortunately, I do listen to people. What I hear is the Linux fanboy community well overshouting the respectable Linux community. The problem isn't with Linux itself, just the crowd it tends to attract. Much of the Linux community is made up of people who would use an abacus if it meant they could bash M$. That's not to say that Linux isn't any good or that it doesn't have a large number of very mature, intelligent users. My comment was in direct response to a post from someone of the fanboy mentality.

"My linux workstations (!) are not rebooting for months. Even when load/unload all time various modules responsible for hot-plug devices."

And I have a pair of IBM Netfinity servers running 2k server that haven't been rebooted since last summer. So what?

"I wonder where do BSD people get all those stories of the need to reboot Linux bi-weekly? Perhaps they mistake Linux with Windows, am I right?"

No, it's actually due to the fact that much of the Linux fanboy mentality is all about having the absolute latest features available, even if they don't work worth a damn. Hence all the recompiling and rebooting. Again, my comment was directed towards the fanboys, not the respectable users and not Linux itself.

"Last time I remember any memory or hardware related crashy problems of Linux kernel that was when I've been playing with 0.95 kernel."

With sufficient hardware issues, any OS will crash. The operating system depends on the accuracy of the math that the $1000 calculator is doing.

Once again, I was attacking the fanboy mentality that has striken much of the Linux community like a sort of plague. Linux's success depends in no small part on the elimination of the over-enthusiastic ranting of the immature fanboy crowd whose illogical and often hysterical ravings overshadow the many good things Linux has to offer. The Linux credibility issue is something only the Linux community itself can solve.

Besides, it was a joke, so chill out :)

nsswitch

[Door-opening Fascist]

When is nsswitch going to be added to FreeBSD? I've been wanting to get FreeBSD authenticating off LDAP for a while now, but there is no LDAP support in the hard-coded name switching service.

Re:nsswitch

[Anonymous Coward]

Look at PAM.

http://www.siriusit.co.uk/technical/howto/ldap_3 .h tml

Re:nsswitch

[Door-opening Fascist]

pam_ldap can do part of it, but it can't provide the UID/GID mappings that are required at the filesystem level.

have you used Debian?

[Trepidity]

There's absolutely no reason to stick with stable unless you want a 99.9999% proven to work and free of major problems system. It's somewhat akin to running the stable branch of FreeBSD, but probably even more conservative (Debian has a 2-year release cycle). For most systems, you should almost certainly run at least testing. It only has packages that have been tested for a few weeks (yes, despite its name, this is where packages go after they've already been tested for a bit) and pretty much always works. There hasn't been major breakage in testing for quite some time. For most home users, especially if you know what you're doing, you should run unstable. Despite the name again, it's really quite stable. If packages are broken in any significant way, bugs get filed and a fix is usually up within a day or two, sometimes within hours. I haven't had any major breakage in a few years of running it, despite a gnome1->gnome2 move and a gcc2.95->gcc3.2 move.

nethack?

[step]

You have acquired a scroll entitled 'irk gleknow mizk'(n).--More--

This is an IBM Manual scroll.--More--

You are permanently confused.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Rocks!

[Anonymous Coward]

In following the posts since the original proposed release date for 4.8 I was impressed with the professionalism and downright persistence of those on the RE team as they handled the inevitable last minute issues that come up in any software project. The experience served as another reason to stick with FreeBSD and expand its use wherever I can. At work we run a mix of Windows, Solaris, AIX and OS/390 -- but I keep a FreeBSD box under my desk as an admin console and platform for sysadmin development. Since the port for cvs is blocked, updating that system is a real pain. Now that 4.8 is out I'll be making some long needed updates. To the whole RE team: Thanks for all the hard work guys!

Re:*BSD is dying

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not a FreeBSD "advocate"...however I do use it for my desktop as well as servers.....

How current is this data you are presenting. The sysadmin article was dated 2001!!!

So we are (2) years past our death sentence?

Re:Fun fact about freebsd #34243

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong!
http://www.whitepowerhosting.com/

They prefer Linux.

Re:reading release notes

[Anonymous Coward]

You've obviously never experienced the horrific pain-in-a-box that was Red Hat 5.3 :)

There never was a version 5.3, you retard.

Saving FreeBSD Project resources.

[Anonymous Coward]

If you're downloading from the mirrors, you aren't directly impacting the project's costs.

Not that you should waste bandwidth gratuitously.

Besides I download from a mirror at my alma mater (ftp5.freebsd.org, if you're interested), which I donate to, so I feel like I'm paying my way.

FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE ROX!!

[horcy]

I've been using FreeBSD for a year now and i always
installed mandrake before on my router/gateway box.
But since my step to FreeBSD there is no way back.
And now 4.8 is released i tried to cvsup from
4.7 to 4.8 and it all worked out without too much hassle.
The only thing that i found quite complicated was the mergemaster part.
But after man mergemaster, the handbook, the mailinglist and
a handfull of newsgroup posts. I concluded that "mergemaster -ai" was the
only thing i needed to do. So that took 1 minute :)

Put your hands to gather for the FreeBSD team