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FreeBSD 4.9 Released
Digital Dharma writes "Excellent! FreeBSD 4.9 has been released, and if it's anything like the RC series, this will be a release to remember. You can obtain it from the usual sources, or if you're feeling generous and supportive, you can buy the cd set. Support your local Daemon!" As Jani Laaksonen writes, the new release includes "numerous security advisory fixes, kernel changes and support for the Physical Address Extensions (PAE) capability on Intel Pentium Pro and higher processors (see page(4)). This release also adds support for a few more hardware NIC cards, ipfw network protocol enhancements, userland changes, and more. Check FreeBSD 4.9 Release Notes for more information."
Cheers,
Ian
FreeBSD Rocks!!! Linux Sucks :(
But... How does it compare to Linux 2.6.0-test9 performance wise?
There is a fairly significant amount of Christians in IT. Shouldn't open source be using something less offensive, like "services" instead of glorifying evil?
I thought FreeBSD was already on 5.x or something like that. Is that the development version? Does FreeBSD use a linux-like version numbering where odd numbers are development releases?
Who said Freedom was Fair?
The average all posts:non-0 rated post ratio on slashdot is around 1.3. On bsd.slashdot.org it's more like 3:1 to 5:1 (there's currently a story with 40:1). What is wrong with these people? Choice is good, mmm-kay.
You can not play games on it.
That's true. FreeBSD is not for people who want to play games. These people need to use a PlayStation, GameCube, or Xbox.
It cannot be used by my grandma.
That's true. FreeBSD is not meant to be used in that sense at all. It's a server operating system, designed to run unattended.
It lacks a GUI of any note.
That's true. The only graphical user interfaces for FreeBSD are those based on X11--including the atrocities KDE and Gnome. These are nothing more than curiosities.
There is no support available for it.
That's true. FreeBSD is not for people who want to buy a support contract. These people need to use Solaris or AIX or IRIX or Mac OS X Server instead.
It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
That's untrue. FreeBSD is just one operating system.
It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
That's untrue. The primary platform of FreeBSD is IA-32, which some silly people insist on calling "x86" for reasons that escape me.
You have to compile everything and know C.
That's half true. You do have to compile everything; that's what the "ports" system is. You do not have to know C, however; that's also part of the "ports" system.
Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
That's true. FreeBSD does not strive to be on the bleeding edge of anything.
It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
That's both true and untrue. FreeBSD can interoperate with Linux. FreeBSD can also run much of the same software as Linux. But unfortunately Linux developers decided to make some decisions in their design that could best be described as dubious, so certain incompatibilities arose over time. These incompatibilities come from the Linux side of things, not the FreeBSD side. Complain to your local Linux developer.
It is dying.
That's untrue. There were more shipments of FreeBSD last year than any other UNIX operating system. That's because Mac OS X is, for all intents and purposes, FreeBSD.
I'll bite on this one. I guess you've never heard of Yahoo or Hotmail. Both have used FreeBSD for web serving.
Obviously, you've been hiding behind OS/2 boxes all these years. It's a shame that you don't get out more.
But everyone's free to disagree for sure. The fact that there are satisfied folks using production FreeBSD deployments says a lot and probably does discount most of the trolling resulting from the main article.
Amen! Linux is still not stable like *BSD yet. I've ran into a few issues with a top of the line system running Red Hat 9 doing more then 4 compiles at once would cause the box to hang and have to be reset, but my Dinky P166, 64 meg FreeBSD box can handle like 10 compiles at once.