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FreeBSD 5.1 Released
LogicX writes "FreeBSD 5.1 is now available. Mirrors and press release are at FreeBSD.org. Enjoy." Here are the release notes for this new version. Update: 06/09 18:15 GMT by S : Here's a BitTorrent link at scarywater.net, and another BitTorrent link from the original poster.
. . .to get a subscription to one or more of the BSD's at www.bsdmall.com.
Particularly in the face of 5.x being ready for production, and OpenBSD losing DARPA funding.
Not that I'm against Java, but if you want Java included "out of the box" I'm afraid you understand neither FreeBSD's design or the fundamental issues of working with Java (on any platform).
Arguably Perl has a stronger basis for being in the base system, and even it was been taken out now.
My
The release notes for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE contain a summary of recent changes made to the FreeBSD base system on the 5-CURRENT development branch. This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the FreeBSD kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented.
Table of Contents
1 Introduction
2 What's New
2.1 Security Advisories
2.2 Kernel Changes
2.2.1 Processor/Motherboard Support
2.2.2 Boot Loader Changes
2.2.3 Network Interface Support
2.2.4 Network Protocols
2.2.5 Disks and Storage
2.2.6 File Systems
2.2.7 PCCARD Support
2.2.8 Multimedia Support
2.3 Userland Changes
2.4 Contributed Software
2.5 Ports/Packages Collection Infrastructure
2.6 Release Engineering and Integration
2.7 Documentation
3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD
1 Introduction
This document contains the release notes for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE on the i386 hardware platform. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of FreeBSD. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of FreeBSD.
This distribution of FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE is a release distribution. It can be found at ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/ or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) release distributions of FreeBSD can be found in the ``Obtaining FreeBSD'' appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook.
Users who are new to the 5-CURRENT series of FreeBSD releases should also read the ``Early Adopters Guide to FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE''. This document can generally be found in the same location as the release notes (either as a part of a FreeBSD distribution or on the FreeBSD Web site). It contains important information regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE, as opposed to releases based on the FreeBSD 4-STABLE development branch.
All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing FreeBSD. The errata document is updated with ``late-breaking'' information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE can be found on the FreeBSD Web site.
2 What's New
This section describes many of the user-visible new or changed features in FreeBSD since 5.0-RELEASE. It includes items that are unique to the 5-CURRENT branch, as well as some features that may have been recently merged to other branches (after FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE). The latter items are marked as [MERGED].
Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 5.0-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements.
2.1 Security Advisories
A remotely exploitable vulnerability in CVS has been corrected with the import of version 1.11.5. More details can be found in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:01. [MERGED]
A timing-based attack on OpenSSL, which could allow a very powerful attacker access to plaintext under certain circumstances, has been prevented via an upgrade to OpenSSL 0.9.7. See security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:02 for more details. [MERGED]
The security and performance of the ``syncookies'' feature has been improved to decrease the chance of an attacker being able to spoof connections. More details are given in security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:03. [MERGED]
Remotely-exploitable buffer overflow vulnerabilities in sendmail have been fixed by updating sendmail. For more details, see security advisory FreeBSD-SA-03:04 and FreeBSD-SA-03:07. [MERGED]
A bounds-
HERE
Actually if you go to the link off my name in the post
I setup a Bittorrent server with links to the ISO Image before the FTP permissions were released.
If anyone cares to try out bittorrent for this one -- go for it!
May this post be indexed by spiders, and archived for all to see as my Internet epitaph.
If you are interested in the respective merits of FreeBSD 5.1 over 4.x and are unsure which one to install, you might want to see the Early Adopter's Guide for FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE
4 VTYs out of the box? You must have used FreeBSD during the early 3.x cycle. The installer is pretty much the same, but a lot of the support stuff is better now. FreeBSD still defaults to a fairly conservative interface, without excess services or many userland apps to install. The ports tree is even better now, with the advent of portupgrade and other sophisticated port tracking mechanisms. It still blows RPMs out of the water (at least compared to RH9's RPM system). There are options to install a desktop (Gnome or KDE) from the installer, which makes the whole experiance a bit more Linux-like.
Honestly, if you're happy with your current OS, there's not a lot of reason to bother switching. The differences are mostly minor, even if they are in FreeBSD's favor. Linux still has better hardware support, but it's mostly in oddball hardware that only has vendor-supplied binary only driver support in Linux.
I read the internet for the articles.
Err, no. You go through the annoying fetch/"I accept" process once, "make package" on one machine, put the resulting files in a ftp or web server, and then pkg_add from each machine.
(8-DCS)
whouldn't FBSD have a better chance of wide adoption if there was at least one other distro that was based on efficiency rather than politics?
Perl wasn't removed from the base system for political reasons, but for technical ones. Keeping the included Perl in sync with the official releases was a pain in the arse, and few things if anythiing depended on it. Frankly, there is already a good scripting tool in FreeBSD, and that's the Bourne shell.
Chris
Man, does anyone who criticizes FreeBSD ever use it? Because I use it and like it quite a bit, and everyone I know who uses it likes it.
/usr/bin to /usr/local/bin (they even put symlinks for you in /usr/bin) So as far as I can tell, FreeBSD 5.1 comes with perl 5.6.1 in the "default install." The only ramification is simply this. If you for some reason want to upgrade perl, you use ports and you don't have to wait for the FreeBSD team to update it, because rightly so, they see no reason to do it. Also note that why would you want perl scripts in an OS? Shell is perfectly adequate for the scripting needs of the base system, perl is something users use.
On Perl: Perl is not in the base install, it's a port installed by default, So What! It was moved to ports because people want to have a lot of flexibility when it comes to what version of perl they run. The FreeBSD team was doing just what the users wanted. And I would like to know how to install FreeBSD without that Perl port installed. You would have to go out of your way in every install method to take it out. Big deal it moved from
On Java: Sun is being an idiot with regards to Sun on anything but Solaris, Windows and Linux. They make it very hard to include the JVM in binary form in a "default install." They have a ridiculous license on they source code that makes it hard for FreeBSD to do much of anything about this. By they way, if you use ports the JVM 1.4 builds nicely and works rather well. I have personally written to Sun complaining about this - as have others, but they aren't willing to focus on FreeBSD. BTW, FreeBSD runs linux binaries and the Linux JVM works on that compatibility layer.
NVIDIA: Nvidia builds binary drivers for FreeBSD. Hardly 'niche.'
SMP, scheduler: SMP is vastly improved, scheduler and VM is very very good. This OS is very competitive with Linux, and despite what you may have heard, it is capable of outperforming it without sacrificing quality.
Matched c-library, GCC, userland and kernel: One must appreciate that the FreeBSD team is a very thorough. They are obsessively concerned with coherency and quality. This is not some slapped together random miasma in every incarnation, this is a well thought out combination of the vital system components. It works. Trust me, it works. If you want military grade, use 4.8+, if you want rock solid, use 5.1. Frankly, where FreeBSD-current is, is where most linuxes start in terms stability/coherency/usability. It is quite useable in its "unstable" form.
Polling Support: One of FreeBSD's best features is polling on networking devices to prevent interrupt driven livelock.
Proof in Pudding: Think of heavy iron appliances with various free operating systems in it. I can think of two for FreeBSD. The godly Juniper routers and the F5 BigIP. These are serious pieces of networking equipment and they chose FreeBSD for a reason - its far more pleasant to deal with commercially, its fast stable and coherent and the license permits modifications without divulging them to the world.
One project, one c compiler, one c library, one coherent userland, 5 different architectures, great portability, stability and commercial viability.
Legalize the constitution. Think for yourself question authority.
sh(1) is Bourne shell. We call it "Bourne" shell because it was originally written by Steve Bourne. As it was originally named simply "sh", when distinguishing between sh(1) and the other shell (csh(1)) was necessary, one referred to sh(1) as being "Bourne Shell". Things got complicated with Korn Shell, then Bourne Again Shell, etc, etc.
FreeBSD's sh(1) is compatible with the original Bourne shell, but has many features of korn shell. It is not a ksh because it doesn't have the features that make ksh _incompatible_ with sh(1).
Alas, with POSIX standard to guide one by, these days, maybe we are not actually 100% compatible with the original bourne shell, but...
If you doubt me, just google it.
(8-DCS)
This is an good request. Briefly:
Package philosophy
Most linux distributions seem to be leaning towards a complete desktop in a box approach. The BSDs lean more towards a minimal unix with everything else helpfully provided by packages and ports. (For example, bash is not installed by default, but adding it is trivial.)
Install
I found the default FreeBSD install to be a bit tricky. (Partly because I ran out of disk space and had to start again from scratch.) The FreeBSD install assumes that you know a bit about Unix and can read the instructions carefully. I'm told that Linux is an easier install.
Speed and power
YMMV. FreeBSD allegedly can take higher network loads. But, MySQL historically has not run as well under FreeBSD. (I've also ran into problems with threaded apache2.) Some anecdotal reports claim snappier desktop performance under FreeBSD.
Hardware support
Linux is ahead on new hardware. NetBSD runs on more platforms.
Community
Linux has a wider community. I've found support from FreeBSD groups to be pretty good.
My personal opinion is that I went with FreeBSD because of the better security record. With the exception of some minor glitches getting apache2 to run, I've been happy with it.
Allow me to (try to) redeem my fellow FreeBSD users in your eyes. The reason Java is not included in the base install is that the base install is intended to be just that; a minimal set of closely linked packages that are required to make the system work. This includes the kernel, a shell, things like ls, rm etc and a few other bits of userspace. Everything else is (or should be) in the ports / packages collection.
It is perfectly possible to run a system run a happy system without Java. In fact, I am firmly of the opinion that Java should never be compiled. Java source code (when well written) can be crystal clear to read and beautifully structured, however it has a tendency to be painfully slow when run, detracting from the attraction of the language - a problem easily solved by removing the compiler, and leaving users to gaze in awe at the code (no one actually uses software do they? Oh, they do? Hmmm. Never mind).
This minimalist philosophy allows for a very clean userspace (ever installed 5GB of Linux and then wondered if you can delete some of it?) and enables the external packages to be maintained externally of the development of the official releases. It also allows you to do a complete install of the system from
A few notes about the FreeBSD package management system:
FreeBSD allows you to install programs from source (ports) or binary (packages). The terms 'port' and 'package' are often used interchangably, and either is used as a generic term for both, which can be confusing. The two systems are very similat, and can be mixed (I install more or less everything from ports, but installed the binary package of OpenOffice, since I didn't want to wait 2 days before using it...). In fact, you can build the binary packages from the ports, if you so choose. The ports collection is basically a hierarchy of directorys containing Makefiles, which contain instructions about where to fetch the source from, how to modify it to work on FreeBSD (if required) and how to install it. The cvsup utililty can be used to keep your copy of the ports collection up to date, and an example cvsup file is provided for this purpose. I run cvsup in a cron job, which keeps me synchronised. The previous poster stated that you could install perl by doing
but this seems like effort to me. If you install the portupgrade package (which can be done as part of the system installation, or through the ports collection) then all you would have to do would be type and it will give you a list of ports with the name perl (I think this is perl 5.6.1 and perl 5.8 at the moment, but I tend to avoid perl like the plague, so I'm not sure) from which you can select the ones you want.The Java saga is a little longer, however. Sun have very strange license agreements for distribution of Java, which basically means that you have to download the source code yourself from sun, and then run the installer, which applies FreeBSD-specific patches to it and installs. Hopefully this will be sorted out soon.
Are all FreeBSD users elitist assholes? This cartoon (drawn, I must add by someone who has never met me) would indicate so in my case... I can't speak for the rest of the community, because I have had little contact with them. I am informed that they are more likely to tell you to RTFM than Linux people, but in my experience this is bacause you are far more likely to find the answer in FreeBSD documentation (there is a lot. No, really a lot. It's also very well written and concise) that you are with Linux. If you don't believe me read the handbook, which contains the answer to every question I've ever had about FreeBSD (which I now use as my main workstation and am far more comfortable with than Linux, despite less exposure).
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