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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."
To rise up yet once again from the dead!
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
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?
No, 4.9 is the latest release from the -stable branch. The 5.0 and 5.1 releases were made from the -current development branch (actually the main trunk in CVS). Eventually, probably around 5.2 or 5.3, 5.x will be branched off as 5-STABLE and development will begin on 6.x.
Wow, Slashdot posting the story of a BSD release AFTER the official release announcement and the web page being updated? Must be a first.
> 1. You can not play games on it.
Wrong. There are plenty of games, and what is not supported by a native version may be playable under linux emulation and/or wine with a negligible performance impact.
> 2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
Then your grandma is dumb.
> 3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
Wrong. you can use XFree86 and any window manager or desktop environment you choose.
> 4. There is no support available for it.
Wrong. There are plenty of IRC channels, email lists and even commercial support providers.
> 5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
Wrong. Even if it were not wrong this does not compare to the staggering number of Linux distributions.
> 6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Wrong. FreeBSD was initially crafted directly from the 386BSD patchset in the early 90's. It has supported i386 from the very beginning.
> 7. You have to compile everything and know C.
Wrong. You can install packages just like linux. You can certainly compile everything if you want to, but this does not require even minimal knowledge of C.
> 8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
Wrong. It isn't always poor. Sometimes support lags behind a little, many times IHV's have poor or no FreeBSD drivers, but new hardware is certainly not ignored.
> 9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
Wrong. FreeBSD has an extensive Linux binary compatability system that allows most Linux binaries to run just fine. Word is, sometimes even faster.
> 10.It is dying.
And Wrong. FreeBSD has a large community of active developers and maintainers, along with a significant installed user base.
9 out of 10 ain't bad. Clearly a troll but I was feeling self important so I thought I'd whip it out.
This is good for BSD and good for all of us. For those you saying that BSD lost its vigor in 1990 (lawsuit) then i wonder how the current Linux fiasco is going to impact the penguin. We are all in this together really, a strong BSD means more security for all of us. Espescially with the SCO monster running around. Who know in 5 years maybe BSD will be growing at 17%/year and linux will be on life support. Remember fame is fickle.
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.
that the difference between a *BSD release and a Linux distro release is a night and day difference. When a linux distro is released everyone comes out of the wood-work, says it is the best thing since the 386 was released, praises Allah, and there would be few if any comments to the contrary. Yet, when a *BSD release comes out it becomes a religious war over which is better, and all the trolls come out of the wood-work?
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
Like I said before... you are a moron. You think the slashdot crowd knows anything? Most of them are a bunch of Linux Fanboyz who know nothing about how the os works.
With that out of the way, Several production shops use FreeBSD on their servers. Yahoo, Sony japan, Hotmail (yes, they still do, even if they won't admit it). And another thing, I was looking at linux's so-called SMP support the other day, (mainly because netstat was hanging for like 1.6 seconds on my 2.4 kernel 4 way smp machines) and the locking is horrible. Just running a netstat causes the rest of the TCP system to hang while the netstat completes. And it's noticable, The webserver latency goes from 5 ms to 1.9 seconds.
Things like this are why FreeBSD is still used anywhere that needs to support high traffic and high uptime.
Absolutely.
I have had FreeBSD on all my laptops for ages now--both as a workstation, and as a console/sniffer/debugging machine. The only weakness in this regard was the lack of MS Office support (no, I don't find Star/OpenOffice or KOffice or friends acceptable alternatives as of yet.) It's stable, fast, easy to upgrade and maintain, secure, and flexible.
My personal firwealls have also been FreeBSD since I started finding OpenBSD too archaic for quick changes (my last one started deciding that what I told it to do wasn't secure enough. Looking for solutions in newsgroups/mailing lists inevitably came up with "read through the source and quit bugging us you fucking idiot".) I don't want to use an OS maintained primarily by a psychopath.
My home fileserver, and AMD K6-2-400 has also been FreeBSD since about 3 years now--running 24x7 without a glitch.
I've installed it at several client sites as firewalls, web servers, monitoring boxes, groupware and mail servers, and use it with no hitches _whatsoever_ for our company (DNS, mail, PHProjekt, www.)
Prime factors in terms of quality of an OS are
Ease of installation and upgrade
Support (I've always found the BSD mailing lists to be pretty friendly, and people to be fairly clueful
Good package management
Security
Well-thought out and common sense layout of the OS itself (file systems, config files, etc.
Yes, I have a good amount of unix experience, but I often just need something to work without too much knob-dicking around, period. This is the reason I have an XP box lying around at home (games, documents I get from clients, Windows software I sometimes use professionally, etc.). No, I don't think *BSD is ready for the desktop.
However, having worked with Unix variants, including various Linux incarnations, for more than 10 years now (holy shit! I'm old!) I can really recommend this as a reliable, and representative example of a good OS.
This is assuming, of course, that you're not just trolling.
Cole's Law: Thinly sliced cabbage
For desktop and servers, yes.
I tried linux, didn't like one distribution, changed, had to relearn EVERYTHING.
Tried Gentoo recently, looks good, but they think portage is go gracing earth when it still has some issues that need to be resolved.
Besides, nothing beats the stability of FreeBSD, even on 5.1 and 5.2 I've never had a crash on my desktop machine.
Be nice to the FreeBSD project. In the remote event SCO wins its lawsuits, FreeBSD, especially the 5.x series, would easily be able to replace Linux.
I think most FreeBSD folks (whether official project members or just us users) don't bother with torrents since the most popular way to upgrade a system is via cvsup (at least that's the perception). It took a long time before ISOs were even offered since it was believed most people wouldn't be using them. It would probably take an analysis of the FTP logs after a release, showing a lot of traffic on the ISOs, before torrents would show up often.
Why, yes. Yes it does.
See: /usr/ports/emulators/linux-base
or: FreeBSD Hypertext Man Pages: linux
There was something on this that was already on /.
You can find that here and also here
Granted it's the 5.x versions of FreeBSD but still got a good comparison.
Evolution or ID?
Let's ignore, for the moment, any bikeshedding over the name STABLE and the stability of the code.
The reason for the sentences in question (I had a small part in writing them) was simply this: PAE is a fairly young (in the 4.X series) feature that touches a lot of bits in the kernel (yes, even if it's not enabled). When it was first committed, it caused a number of problems (well-documented on the mailing lists), but they seem to have been fixed. If we thought there were any major problems remaining in this area, we wouldn't have released. However it's an undeniable fact that PAE in 4.X hasn't had a lot of testing time compared to most of the rest of the kernel, and this bears a bit of consideration.
I believe that for the vast majority of users (myself included) 4.9 works just fine. (I run a mix of 4.9-STABLE and 5.1-CURRENT on various laptops, desktops, and non-critical servers.) If you're really one of the most conservative users, you probably wouldn't jump on the new release bandwagon anyways, and would spend some time evaluating 4.9 (regardless of PAE, or what anyone on the release engineering team says) before deploying it in some mission-critical environment.
Actually, our company pays full time wages for at least two FreeBSD developers that I can think of, who's work goes straight to the project. Our products however we dont give away - they are a competetive advantage that we dont want to give up.
The person I originally responded to was claiming that the BSD licensed software frightened away commercial interested MORE than GPL'd software and my posting was to refute that false idea.
Just because YOU like the GPL and you like working on GPL'd products doesn't mean that that is the only valid way to do development.
Our business model works for us, and the FreeBSD community bennefits from our involvment. It really is a win-win situation for both FreeBSD and us.
If I were to release source code of any of my personal software projects, I'd do it under a BSD-style license. Software doesn't have to be business-related or business-useful, but for businesses using various types of 'free' software, BSD is certainly more attractive.
Oh, and you don't have to work on FreeBSD and do 'without-cost' development for corporations - my company PAYS me to develop BSD software. Just because you can't find paying work doesn't mean that the rest of us don't like having jobs.
Don't even get me started about all the BSD work that has found it's way into linux - the BSD license has made this possible, and easy.
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