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FreeBSD 4.9 Code Freeze
lewiz writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering have announced that the code freeze in preparation for 4.9-RELEASE (scheduled for 29th September) will begin on 25th August. Also 4.9-RC is tentatively scheduled for 12th September. A full list of dates can be found on the Release Process page."
Sure, no one seems to care now. However, wait until the SCO gestapo starts really trying to nail down their "licensing fees" from users. FreeBSD will see a huge influx of new users, migrating over from Linux.
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Most of us FreeBSD fans will be far more excited when FreeBSD 5.x becomes stable, and has things like KSE enabled by default. 4.x is a aging branch with only limited whiz-bang appeal.
Not nearly dying!
perl -e '$_="\007/4`\cp%2,".chr(127);s/./"\"\\c$&\""/gees
From what I saw, the big news will be PAE (> 4Gb on Intel boxes) support, which good for commercial uses (we have a bunch of 8Gb Linux boxes that use PAE) but not likely a lot of folks have it on the desktop.
Check the FreeBSD open issues list to get a snapshot.
My main interest in FreeBSD is rock hard stability.
There is nothing worse than your desktop crashing, it's horrible. This is why Linux is an unacceptable choice to me in terms of a *nix desktop. Even crashing at the end of a 13 day uptime is unacceptable because it points at flaws in the system that can manifest themself at a time of their choosing; I don't like that. Well, there are other reasons I choose FreeBSD over Linux, but those aren't important. My main point is that, I want a reliable desktop OS, and I'm going to trust the FreeBSD team on this. When they say 5.x is stable, then it's stable, and I'll use it. I'm actually waiting on it pretty hard too, I love DevFS, faster filesystem is great, etc, etc, but none of it is worth sacrificing stability for me. I mean, it'll all be there for me when 5.2 (which is the stable release, or close to it, no?) is out, and I'm looking forward to that. No reason to rush things when, like I said, there is nothing in 5.x that I NEED.
-If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
There is no Chinese equivalent that I've ever found and others have noted the same.
I'm interested in trying out FreeBSD or any of the other BSD operating systems. My one main concern is backups. There are a whole slew of backup solutions for Linux, mainly LVM and filesystem snapshots comes to mind. LVM also allows you take incremental snapshots which is a big plus for me. I heard in #freebsd on irc.freenode.net that FreeBSD 5 has filesystem snapshots but no incremental =(
And another thing. Are there any plans in the future of the FreeBSD project where binary updates will be officially supported instead of doing make world whenever security patches need to be applied? I've heard that the argument used against any binary updates is security and how trojans could be slipped in. Couldn't this be avoided if each binary update tarball was signed using the FreeBSD release engineer's gpg key?