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FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding

Posted by timothy on from the final-seems-an-odd-word dept.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely has announced the availability of RC4 - the final Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.9. He says that RC4 includes SATA, DRM and other bugfixes; he is requesting everyone for help with testing. He says that if all goes well, they will be able to release Monday."

9 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Making choices... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Currently run 5.1 on all my machines, but 4.x series was marvelous as well.
    With DragonflyBSD rolling its release sometime around 5-STABLE branch I think people will have a hard time making a choice of what to run.
    5-STABLE branch releases or DragonflyBSD, it will be interesting times ahead.
    I will probably run FreeBSD on most my servers and put DragonflyBSD on my laptop, as 4.x series worked better on crappy hardware; I needed more advanced features that 5.x offered that DragonflyBSD will too.

  2. What a coincidence! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding

    I issued a similar press release shortly after breaking up with my girlfriend!

    PS: FreeBSD rulez!

    1. Re:What a coincidence! by trompete · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yeah, thanks for the heads-up! I even wrote a test plan and everything. >:)

      --
      More than enough BS
  3. Re:Color me thoroughly confused... by __past__ · · Score: 2, Informative
    It's a little like the odd/even minor number branches of the Linux kernel being developed in parallel. FreeBSD 5 is the development branch. While more stable than many other OSes, it is not recommended for production use yet - there is a lot of new functionality that has to thoroughly tested, and some things still change. AFAIK, the current plans are to declare the 5.x series the "stable" one is with the release of 5.3, ealier plans had 5.2 in that role (the current release is 5.1).

    While FreeBSD 5.x is still maturing, the stable 4.x series continues to be actively developed (not only bugfixed). Hence the new 4.9 release. It's successor was released after 5.0 came out as well.

    --
    Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
  4. Troll Fodder by glenstar · · Score: 3, Funny
    Could you possibly come up with a title more likely to feed the "*BSD is Dying/*BSD Sux0rs" trolls?

    Long live the *BSDs!

  5. better than 4.8 by endx7 · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can tell already 4.9 is gonna be better than 4.8 was. I had a machine running 4.8 that would panic and reboot under heavy load (problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card). Since I really had nothing to lose, I decided to go up to the release canidate of whatever version was available.

    This was friday morning, and the newest version of stable was RC3. I downloaded it, ...and it didn't work (and checksum mismatch, which might explain it just -slightly-).

    I looked back at the server, and RC4 had been put on the server while I was downloading RC3. Okay! Download, and before too much time passed, 4.9-RC4 was running.

    I pushed and pulled some large files off and on it (100 mbit, which in 4.8 it wasn't lasting longer than a few minutes on that card), and this time it stayed up (and it's still up).

    1. Re:better than 4.8 by sirket · · Score: 2, Interesting

      (problem was apparently in the driver for the ethernet card)

      What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).

      I did get some panics when running -CURRENT with a Via Rhine on a high throughput firewall, but when I returned to 4.8, everything was fine. Serves me right for running -CURRENT on a production box.

      -sirket

    2. Re:better than 4.8 by endx7 · · Score: 2, Interesting

      What ethernet card was this? I have seen issues with RealTek and Via Rhine ethernet chipsets, mostly because they are awful chipsets. (Not trying to make excuses for FreeBSD. Though I have never seen problems with an ethernet card under FreeBSD except under -CURRENT).

      I don't remember what card exactly it was, but it used the xl driver. I had also tried an SMC? that used the dc driver, and it seemed bpf breaking then (but I'm not expert at debugging the kernel). But it appears to be fixed in 4.9, so I'm happy.

  6. Works For Me by devphaeton · · Score: 2, Interesting

    I've been running it since Saturday, and so far so good. I had to download and install the ports separately because they weren't on the mirror yet, but that's no biggie.

    Everything seems to go well, the usual fit-n-finish is superb, no complaints or warnings from any packages or utilities. Just what you'd expect from the FreeBSD team ;)

    Of course, i have `boring' hardware- nothing special:

    Athlon 1533Mhz
    512M Kingston
    30G WD IDE
    nvidia TNT1 (eek!)
    SbLive! (haven't built a kernel for support yet)
    Netgear FA312TX (natsemi chipset)
    IBM CDRW (haven't configged yet)

    But hey.... I just may make FreeBSD my primary desktop OS instead of Debian :-/

    --


    do() || do_not(); // try();