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FreeBSD 5.2 Released
James writes "Freebsd 5.2 is released. FTP mirrors. Release notes
This is another step towards 5-STABLE. Many improvements in this release, including ATA and networking enhancements." Patrick Jensen also points out that this is the first stable release with AMD64 support. You can also see the official announcement if you so desire.
Although they advise against using the FreeBSD 5 line in production servers, our company went ahead & did it anyway because we needed a gigabit ethernet driver that was only in FreeBSD 5 not 4.
Our site gets a million hits a day on a completely db-driven website. Both the Apache webserver and the two replicated MySQL servers on the backend are all running FreeBSD 5, and have been for months now.
No problems at all. Rock-solid. Good ol' FreeBSD.
Nothing is stopping you from installing 5.8 and making all other applcaitions use it with a simple "use.perl port". That wasn't too hard now was it?
Ever hear of the ports collection? The reason perl was moved out of the base install (aside from the fact that it's pretty big nowdays) and into ports is because some people didn't like having an older version of perl around. Now you can keep perl up to date as you want it
/usr/ports/lang/perl5.8
cd
make install clean
tada, you now have perl 5.8
As of 8:53 AM EST, the annoucement page does not have it listed and the
freebsd-announce mailing list has not mentioned it.
This means that it is not yet released.
Dinivin
Well, according to this, they didn't start BUILDING RC2 until 2003/12/21. Two months ago, you probably would have built some seriously unstable code. This isn't -STABLE, it's -CURRENT. And if you'd done a upgrade from 4.x to 5.x without an intervening format, you'd have been in for some fun as well. If you'll look at the release notes, you'll also see that statfs(2) got a tweak that probably caused all sorts of problems for you if you weren't paying attention to the freeber-current list. Perhaps next time, you'll have better luck with something that's not in the MIDDLE of a development cycle?
My company uses FreeBSD 5 on half of our desktop machines in the office. All the PCs for customer service and general-purpose use are all running:
The fonts are anti-aliased and beautiful. I find it easier on the eyes than Windows or OS X.
It only takes us about an hour to set up a whole new ready-to-go office desktop PC for the office, using FreeBSD ports. And we LOVE that all boxes' apps are kept automatically updated every night using the portupgrade scripts.
If you're thinking of dabbling with FreeBSD as a desktop I can highly recommend it.
In fact I'm typing this on my Gateway laptop with FreeBSD 4.9 right now. Here are some FreeBSD laptop compatibility lists if you want to see if yours will work.
try this link
Finding a 64 bit SuSE is easy. This is not the Enterprise Edition, but if you want Enteprise, you will have to pay first.
Can I get an eye poke?
Dog House Forum
Folks,
/. has once again jumped the gun.
/. has pre-announced the release and people got bad code.
The mirrors are still updating. While 5.X is imminent,
In the past, we of the FreeBSD Project have started distributing an image to our mirrors and then recalled it when a last-minute bug is discovered. IIRC, at least once
Please do not grab this image thinking that it's FreeBSD 5.2! It won't be out until Scott Long says that it ready and available, and he has the right to nix this image up until the time he makes that announcement.
mwlucas at the obvious domain name
The world doesn't need two sets of free *nix clones. The world needs ONE great *nix clone.
No, the world needs many *nix clones. It helps move things and sometimes things move in the wrong direction (i.e. IBM/DEC's answer to SysV). OpenBSD pushes the security in ways that the bloatware distros can't but the bloatware helps get more people comfortable with the *nix systems.
I would like to see a distory using the Linux kernel and most of the BSD tools just to see how it would evlolve.
It "feels" right. I grew up on BSD systems (okay, sunOS 4 wasn't exactly BSD, but it was closer to that than system V), so BSD feels right. I like the way it works.
The differences are subtile though. I can use either linux or BSD systems without problem, and if I don't do anything to find out which I'm using it can take a long time before I find a difference.
Traditionaly linux has supported more hardware, but sometimes that hardware wasn't so good. FreeBSD traditionally has better (faster) networking, and better support for server class hardware. (Years ago this ment if you went with SCSI you used FreeBSD, IDE you used Linux, but that was years ago) In these modern times both have good support for most hardware you are likely to find in the real world, or neither has support.
OpenBSD and NetBSD are not the same as FreeBSD. FreeBSD is faster and better suited to the desktop, though if the desktop is your goal, a lot of what you want on the desktop gets into linux first. OpenBSD is more secure, at least in their (extreemly limited) default install, I wouldn't run a firewall with anything else. Otherwise I'm not sure I'd bother with openBSD. NetBSD runs everything you are likely to care about, and it is supported. Linux may have had prots to more systems, but half those ports are broken is seems. So if you want to run that Vax in the corner, or some other strange macine netBSD is your only reasonable option. Once you run it one place it may be easier to run it everywhere. (Yes there are good reasons to run old hardware even though a typical desktop today is faster. Those who have good reason know who they are)
In summery: FreeBSD and Linux are mostly an issue of Ford vs Chevy. Some people prefer one over the other, but in reality the differences are not significant. NetBSD and OpenBSD are for specialized uses, but still worth useing for a lot of people.
How exactly is it licensed It is licensed under a BSD license.
Should I consider Running it? Short answer: Yes (but I am biased)
Long Answer: It depends on your applications. FreeBSD is a rock solid Operating System, also it is distributed as an entire operating system, as opposed to GNU/Linux where you have the Linux Kernel and then what ever utils/programs $VENDOR has built around it. We run it on 20+ servers here and have been really happy with it. I run it on Multiple boxes at home also. Then again the 2 of us here are kinda FreeBSD bigots. Here is my leg to prove it so my opinion might be biased.
Depending on your application, you really should run the best Operating System for the Job. I haven't found the one perfect OS yet. For instance if you are running Java app servers you might want to look at Linux for that as it's java implementation seems to be better( but FreeBSD's is getting there quickly). The nice part is it free and you can just grab The ISO's and try it out on a spare machine.
To E-mail me, replace the first period in my domain with an @
1. You can not play games on it.
You can play Linux games on it (ok, no games)
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
If your grandma is able to use Gnome or KDE, she can use FreeBSD.
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
see above.
4. There is no support available for it.
There are a lot of places on the net were you can get help from the community. And some companies provide commercial support for FreeBSD.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
FreeBSD is a complete OS by itself, it's an evolution of 4.4BSD.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
Of course it runs on x86.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
Thanks to the ports collection, you just have to type "make" to get something compiled for you.
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
Support for the latest hardware is sometimes poor indeed.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
FreeBSD has a complete Linux compatibility layer which allows to run Linux binaries.
10. It is dying.
Well, some people like to repeat that every month since 1993!
Stephane
------
Life isn't fair, but the root password helps.
>I think the BSDs are great for internet servers, though I don't see how they're any more secure than a properly set up Mandrake system.
You couldn't be more right. The difference, at least to me, is that FreeBSD is much easier to configure properly because the documentation and ports system are so good.
With regard to OpenBSD however, there are many security enhancements that put its security far ahead of the rest. But it is rather paranoid for simple applications, and probably not worth the performance/ease of use hit.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
As a UCB EECS graduate, I can truly appreciate FreeBSD.
As a hardware nerd, though, I was a little disappointed at the empirical results the OS turned in for my disk array (RAID5, 4x200GB, 16kB block size, 8:16:32:256K stripe size) - burst and sustained transfer is much faster under Windows. Have a look at the results: IDE Hardware Raid On FreeBSD
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org
No, the ports tree is source based. To fetch and install a binary package (with dependencies automatically fetched too), simply type "pkg_add -r xmms" but binary packages may not be as up-to-date as ports.