FreeBSD 5.2-RC1 Released

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Please test this as much as possible so that the FreeBSD Team can release a good 5.2-RELEASE next week. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures."

Comments

Who need Release-Candidates?

[kwench]

Just get 4-LATEST or 5-CURRENT...

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[Anonymous Coward]

RC's aren't just -CURRENT, there goes more testing into an RC. RCs are stable, except for very special cases, -CURRENT often isn't.
For anyone familiar with FreeBSD's legendary stability this is minor and can in fact be ignored, but for new users RC's are far better than CVS co on -CURRENT.

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[nite_warrior]

developers, that's for sure

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[mbadolato]

Um, no DON'T get 5-CURRENT. That will likely have changes in it that will bork your system. That's for development and developers, not for end users

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[kace]

> no DON'T get 5-CURRENT. That will likely have changes in it that will bork your system. That's for development and developers, not for end users

A slight exagerration. 5.2-RC1 pretty much is CURRENT. As I understand it, release engineering (or somebody) would say "OK, that looks pretty good" and then take a snapshot of CURRENT and dub it 5.2-RC1. Whatever changes may have happened to CURRENT in the last couple of days would be minor, as CURRENT is still preening for 5.2-RELEASE, and major and/or risky new commits are discouraged in this phase.

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[Anne Thwacks]

In the long run, we are all dead.

Re:Who need Release-Candidates?

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

Exactly. Thats why you shouldn't jusy grab 5-CURRENT. At any time it could be completely broken, as it is the development branch. Sure its mostly safe near RC's, but any other time its a crapshoot.

On Bizarro World

[AtariAmarok]

On Bizarro World:

SCC makes you pay them $699 if you DON'T use Linux.

The recording industry sells all their material online, in a usable format, at a fair price

We don't, for one, welcome our new overlords.

Windows Security is not an oxymoron

All the trolls can't stop proclaiming how *BSD is so alive.

Just got this last night

[The Irish Jew]

Last night I was grabbing some 5.1 isos and happened to see 5.2 had just been updated to RC1 so I went ahead and grabbed them. As always another quality release from the FreeBSD team.

and use a mirror!

[samhalliday]

here

then go to releases/ARCH/ISO-IMAGES/5.2-RC1

Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[thefatz]

Going strong, in a mature way! You know, I stay impressed with the quality of FreeBSD. As a longtime UNIX user and Linux user, FreeBSD has the professional "sheen" that I would expect from Solaris or AIX. While I enjoyed using Linux, it was the small things in FreeBSD that made me happy. Complete man pages, vs. halfway done man pages and broken info pages, or ports, or how there was a new kernel of the week (eerie similar to Microsoft). I like the fact that FreeBSD was rather set it up, update it, build your software, and forget about it. It's hard to make the 4.x series die, and the 5.x series is looking close to or already is enterprise ready. Good Luck, God Bless, and keep up the good work FreeBSD Team.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[anthonyrcalgary]

eh-- they say 5.3 will be the first stable release on the 5.x line. I would tend to take their word for it. Given how utterly rock solid previous FreeBSD-stable releases have proven, their opinions count for a lot.

Unfortunately my spare box at the moment is garbage, otherwise I'd jump at this. I haven't been able to get anything other than Windows working on it.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[anthonyrcalgary]

lol apparently not

My limited experience has been with 4.x.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[archen]

they say 5.3 will be the first stable release on the 5.x line.

Depending on your definition of "stable". I didn't use 5.0 much so I can't say anything there, but I've already found 5.1 at least as stable as Linux, or at times more stable considering some problems I've had on Linux. I won't say that 5x doesn't have issues, but I haven't encountered any really.

If my inital tests of 5.2 pan out (which I have no doubt they will) then I will finally begin the migration from Redhat 7.3 to FreeBSD. If I have to reboot every 10 months or so (unlikely) I'll live. It's certainly better than the random 'inode pointers busy self destruct in 5 seconds' messeges I get on Linux every couple weeks.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[Billly Gates]

I have had nothing but problems with the 5.x series.

I use the ports to build everything and not pkg_add. The ports tree is quite broken in alot of area's.

No kernel panics I admit but it was almost as bad as Gentoo.

I switched back to 4.9 and I noticed the ports work and they are also more up to date.

Also I tried using just pkg_add under 5.1 and some of the apps were broken.

Still would not trust it yet.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[dinivin]

That's odd. I used 5.1 back when it was first released. I built, from the ports tree, well over 250 hundred packages, including KDE, gnome, mozilla, MozillaFirebird, mplayer, ffmpeg, quake2forge, videolan, jdk13, openoffice, abiword, and many others.

Care to tell us what you were unable to build from the ports tree?

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[Billly Gates]

I use the instant-workstation port, which includes over a gig of userfull apps like kde, acrobat, python, mozilla, and gnome. This port would not compile all the way through.

The other problem I had was with the nvidia driver.

However later on, I relized I was not supposed to use any -o settings, so I was at fault there since I modified /etc/defaults/make.conf to include -O3.

Also I got Mozilla to build but javascript would not run by default making it almost useless. I observed the same problem with 4.8. It has been fixed in 4.9 though.

It was that as well as some general bugs I observed under Gnome. It just kept crashing with alot of core dumps.

Oh and I recieved an error when compiling sun's Java. I do not remember what it was though.

I do like the increased number of ports under 5.x and jail. I can not wait to switch as soon as its stable. Most of what I read have to deal with ports since alot of changes have been made to FreeBSD, all the makefiles are tailored towards 4.x which can introduce bugs or not compile.

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[sirket]

It wasn't the 3.x series so much as 3.0 and 3.1. Everyone, the FreeBSD folks included, admitted that they just weren't FreeBSD quality.

The result of those releases is that they don't let a release out anymore without even more stringent testing. 4.x is a testament to the improved release scrutiny.

-sirket

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[fbsd_ninja]

the ported software has nothing to do with the o/s release... if you cvsup'd your ports you'd realize that everything would be "up to date."

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[fbsd_ninja]

I remember the first time someone told me FreeBSD was dying... I was worried, now I just shake my head people have said it for years. BSD is like life... the day you're born is the day you start to die... yet you live a good 60-70+ years to live ;) so I guess FreeBSD is dying it'll just take a while =) (hopefully longer than I'll be using a computer) Linux is like the bible... when you ask a Linux user why they insist on creating 123123124 branches of something.. they reply "because they can" ... when you ask a christian why something is the way it is in the bible they reply "because God wanted it that way" they never have a reason ;) To BSD live long and prosperous \\// ^_^

Re:Dead Project release 5.2 RC1

[cookd]

I've always been a BSD fan, but mostly for server needs. I've never really tried it for desktop use. For server, 5.1 was plenty stable. However, several ports for more "desktop-ish" apps are still broken. Most of them aren't important, but there are a few that I am looking forward to having fixed (boehm-gc, mono, etc.).

Re:Good news for people sticking with it.

[bsd_usr]

No point in telling him about 4.x dude. He was a troll.

Either that or he's really stupid to be using something not production ready in a mission critical application.

Re:What does FreeBSD have over Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Is oen better then the other? depends on what you need.

FreeBSD is very good for offering practical solutions to real world problems, based on a solid foundation. Bleedign edge technology only comes second to that.

Linux tries to push the envelope of Unix like development very succesfully, but at times forgoes the practical solution.

In the end, it doesn't matter that much. Sometimes you have to wait a bit longer in Linux before you get a practical solution for a problem, soemtimes you have to wait soem longer for FreeBSD to support a specific feature or piece of hardware.

Practical solutions?
It is things like having had 'accept filters' for a long time, that make it possible to wait for a complete http request before spendign any timeslices on the http server that needs to handle it, and thus preventing many context switches for example.

It is being able to reliably verify which uid is generating an outgoing packet in the standard ip filtering software for example.

Are those hitech/bleedign edge solutions? no, but they are practical, and provide solutions to real problems that allow you to get a lot more out of your hardware with very little investment of time and efford.

Do you need them? I don't for my workstation (tho it rubns FreeBSD, but that is more due to it being simpler to maintain a few machines with the same OS.

I do want them for my webserver and mailserver and such tho, there they improve control, security and performance quite a bit.

Re:What does FreeBSD have over Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Red Hat offer 5

If you repeat a lie long enough do you hope to make it true?

Red Hat's policy for Red Hat Linux distributions is to provide maintenance for at least 12 months. No 5 year offer....just a 1 year offer.

well-designed and thoroughly tested distros like Debian and Slackware are totally rock-solid.

That would be the same 'totally rock-solid' Debian project which was rooted via do_bkr() - a result found in the 'thoroughly tested' Linux kernel?

FreeBSD must be good

[Anonymous Coward]

.... otherwise this mentally retarded deranged individual wouldn't be spending so much time trying to discredit it.

Seems like this nut runs a Windows or Linux business and feels threatened by FreeBSD!

Can't wait for FreeBSD 5.2 next week, this freak will go nuts!

Jails

[gtrubetskoy]

What I would really like to see is multiple IP's and private System V IPC in jails. It doesn't look like it made it into 5.2, unfortunately....

--
OpenHosting Virtual Servers for the geeks.

two items

[Anonymous Coward]

Two thoughts come to mind while reading this:

1) Haven't they asked you, repeatedly, (and besides that, isn't it better etiquette...) to point to a list of mirrors instead of directly to an FTP site?

2) Just saw an ad for Slashdot personals. Heh.

Me: So, you read slashdot?
Her: Yeah.
Me: I gotta get going now, nice meeting you.

WARNING: if upgrading via source

[gfim]

If you are upgrading to 5.2-RC1 (or -CURRENT) via cvsup/buildworld, make sure that you read UPDATING - just like I didn't :-). Of course, this applies to any time you build. However, it's especially important now or you will have a broken system.

Graham