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FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review
MRE writes "Well it's been out for a week an a half, but here's the first review of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. Or if you want to download the new release and try it for yourself, it's only one ISO image away."
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Too bad you can't mod the article down. This guy was testing primarily on the amd64. Gimme a break. Of course it's gonna have major bug issues. It's not even fully supported (and has major bugs) in any of the Linux distros (yes, even my beloved Gentoo). Had he used the i386 on a stock x86 processor I might give him some credibility.
I've tried Red Hat, two versions of Mandrake, and Debian ...
My Linux experience was fraught with library conflicts in binary packages
You're lying, Shurhaian.
Looking at FreeBSD's CVS site, it looks like the patch has just been commited. My thanks again to Jung-uk and the rest of the FreeBSD team!
Carousel is a lie!
Binary packages are readily available from any of the package sources. It's as simple as typing
pkg_add -r kde
and you're ready to go.
Apple used FreeBSD as a reference system. They claim that recent versions are pretty much feature compatible with FreBSD 4.8 with some stuff from 5.x thrown in.
s /darwin/ faq.html
BTW MacOSX is not based on Opendarwin, it is based on Darwin.
To Jem Matzan
Read the FAQ, that usually helps.
http://developer.apple.com/darwin/project
There is a [...] utility to perform binary security updates, but it does not yet work with 5.2-RELEASE.
FreeBSD Update works with i386 FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. There haven't been any security fixes yet, so it doesn't do very much, but it does work.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
yes, the CHANGES file talks about this. but not enough:
you want to make buildworld FIRST!!
THEN make the kernel.
or, at the very least, cd /usr/src and make make
or you'll get makefile parsing errors and it will seem like the /usr/src/ tree is broken. its not. its just that they use more new features of bsd MAKE and you need the new version. old make can 'make' the new make, but you NEED the new make (nb: not gmake) to build 5.2
fyi
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
I ran into a mysterious bug with KUser which deleted my root password... the only solution to this problem was to reinstall the base system from the CD.
/usr, then type passwd root, and you can change your password.
Why not just reboot the system with ctrl+alt+del and boot -s at the prompt you get if you press any key before it loads the kernel? After that just mount the root filesystem r/w with mount / -o rw and mount
This will work if you don't have single user password protection on, or have ctrl+alt+del disabled in the kernel. Or if you have encrypted your hard drive using GEOM.
The way to corrupt a youth is to teach him to hold in higher value them who think alike than those who think differently
The writer argues that the BSDL "doesn't protect the rights of end-users the way the GPL does because it does not require the publisher to make the source code available". I don't get this. Unless one would s/end-users/the-code. And I have never understood what giving freedoms to a work means.
...)" or "freedom from (other entity doing...)".
In other words, the writer is suggesting something to distract from the real point which is at the heart of the controversy BSDL vs GPL: whose freedom and freedom in the sense of "freedom to (do
To argue that the fact that BSDL code can be incorperated into a proprietary product is somehow an attack on the rights of the end user of *that* BSDL code certainly doesn't stand if one thinks about it for five seconds.
So it's the freedom of "the code" itself then? Please. Don't even *try* to make that argument.
Or the freedom to give something away with strings attached. There's nothing wrong with that, but then one shouldnt represent it as if it has any other meaning. Giving something away with no strings attached would somehow inherently be less of a contribution to society?
I have nothing against GPL personally but I do take offense at the ways its implications are time and time again used to discredit the BSDL with a completely reversed reasoning.
I think GPL is great for some things, linux kernel, gcc, and many more. BSD/MIT alike is more appropriate for other projects like apache, *BSD, and many more.
Look at GUI toolkits or the layers between toolkits and real focussed middleware. GPL does hamper the adoption of open source solutions (let alone development) there. Finance software for instance. So this is where (in terms of layers and libraries), BSD/MIT, or LGPL but thats a slippery one, makes sense. This is one (possibly not the most important, but it does count) reason for there being so much abandonware on sourceforge. People tend to slap a GPL license onto their work "because then it's free and not for MS".
Getting back to the GPL vs BSDL argument made, it's pretty clear that if you're feeling that someone else does something better you'd pour some moralism into your version of the difference in order to spin it your way. People should understand that if SCO is smart enough to understand how that works then RMS and his church certainly also are.
It's a delusion and yes it does prey on (often young) idealists providing them a world view just like any religion. There, I said it. Now, where's my protective suit.
Luckily many happy Linux users and developers realize this. But mod me down anyway.
I can agree with saying it's not "FreeBSD-specific" but he says more than that. The statement I took issue with was "the new release of FreeBSD means absolutely nothing to OS X development." Not true: Apple themselves say FreeBSD 5 already means something to Panther.
Meanwhile he makes enough other errors. OS X isn't derived from OpenDarwin; Darwin (not OpenDarwin) is the "core" of OS X, also distributed separately by Apple, while OpenDarwin is a sort of community project to further develop Darwin. It's not "also called" DarwinBSD anywhere I've heard of (indeed, a google search turns up barely 55 hits). Its description (OpenStep+4.4-BSD) applies to Rhapsody, but Darwin (and thus MacOS X) pulls in significant contributions from the FreeBSD userland, though perhaps not so much in the kernel.
It comes with screen savers and sound drivers. Did you bother to look in the /modules directory to see all the kernel modules and drivers that you can play with??
It never ceases to amaze me how people who use Linux and kernel modules all the time never bother to look / think about kernel modules when they move to FreeBSD. With *very few* exceptions, if it isn't explicitly listed in the kernel config IT'S BUILT AS A KERNEL MODULE.
Well, if you don't run away screaming at the presence of an ncurses/dialog based installer, and follow through to the configuration section of the install, you're going to end up with an extremely usable system afterwards.
But it's still not really done yet. That's because FreeBSD does not presume to know what you want. It's not going to install a desktop until you tell it to, for example. In fact, it's not going to install anything outside of the base system unless you specifically tell it to. You are in full control. For some users this will be a breath of fresh air. But for others it will be a horrifying discovery that they're not as l33t as they thought they were.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
> Overall 5.2-RELEASE is disappointing from a
> desktop perspective, but it's still more
> advanced than any community GNU/Linux
> distribution that you'll find, especially in the > area of AMD64 support.
say what? they *just* started working on using fine-grained locking in kernelspace. i cant grasp how people could claim it works well for servers when you cant run it on smp boxen without handicapping them to death.
suse has good amd64 support. gentoo is decent as well.
fbsd is not more advanced. in fact, it lacks quite a few features i cant live without in kernelspace. the code *is* cleaner and better engineered than linux, but that helps me zilch if i cant run it in production on my dual xeon boxes.
make no mistake, i like fbsd. i wish i could use it on my servers. alas, that is not possible right now. if you want to toot the fbsd horn, point out the areas it is strong in, dont make things up!
paul
XFree86 under FreeBSD absolutely identical to XFree86 under Linux. Well, not quite. It does support the FreeBSD sysmouse device (think gpm).
On the other hand, you DO NOT get a distro-supplied front end tool like YaST. If you're used to configuring XFree86 the XFree86 way, you're home free. Otherwise...
My advice is to get a basic configuration using "XFree86 -configure", and see if that works. It will do all the detecting and decide stuff for you. Unfortunately, it tends to give you as high of a resolution as possible, which typically is not what you want. But it will tell you what your hardware is. After that you can use "xf86config" and answer the questions manually.
If you're using an NVidia card, and want the proprietary NVidia driver, you'll have to install it manually from the ports system. There's instructions there on how to do it, but it's not necessarily the easiest thing in the world, since you're dealing with kernel. But you can put that off for a while, since the "nv" driver that comes with XFree86 works great if you don't need hardware accelerated 3D.
FreeBSD also won't automatically add fonts to your XFree86 configuration. It's an unwritten law that no third party package or port can alter any system wide configuration file (a good thing if you think about it). But if you read the messages after installing them from packages/ports, they'll tell you what to do.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Why would I give up the rock solid stability of 4.9 for an unknown?
Three reasons I can think of:
1) 5.2 supports a lot more hardware than 4.9. Granted, some of the support has been backported, but a lot has not. 4.9 won't run on my current desktop or laptop. 5.2 will.
2) New features. Unlike above, very little has been backported. UFS2, devfs, rcNG, etc.
3) "-CURRENT" doesn't necessarily mean "will crash all the time". 5.0 was a bit flaky around the edges, but 5.1 and 5.2 are very robust.
I wouldn't run 5.2 on mission critical servers, but not everything is in that category. For you Linux people out there, it's sort of like Debian. You run Debian-stable on your servers, and Debian-testing on your desktop.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Why doesnt your FreeBSD support your nVidia GeForce card?
l
Download the official FreeBSD drivers from nVidia.com and it should work fine.
http://www.nvidia.com/object/freebsd_1.0-4365.htm
I'm thinking the same thing because if you have a common soundcard (and perhaps even not so common), it's pretty easy to get sound on FreeBSD. I have a ESS1868 on a P133 that I've always had a hard time with. Win95 could barely get it to work, Win98 it was a pain in the ass and sometimes just stopped working. Back when I could fit RedHat on it I couldn't get that to work. So I didn't have high expectations for FreeBSD either. It was a surprise to me that while reading the handbook it just took enabling something in /boot/loader.rc . I'm not saying it's simple, but it works great and is now my music player as well as other things.
/boot/defaults/loader.rc for your soundcard.
Just read the handbook and look in
I mention this for the benefit of anyone who might've been wondering if the FreeBSD folks just wake up some Tuesday, say "hey, this is pretty good!", and take a snapshot of the CVS tree.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
The default kernel is shipped with ancilliary features as modules, in order to save space and avoid conflicts. This includes sound. Go to /modules, type ls snd*, look at the modules that are there. Text mode screensavers are in there too; they're all of the type *_saver.ko. As long as you know what type of sound card you have, it should be supported either by default or via a patch. The FreeBSD modules commands are kldload, kldunload, kldstat; look at the man pages (in FreeBSD, the system man pages are actually useful, as is the module system). You can also configure modules to load on startup; edit the file /boot/modules.conf. I'm still using 4.x (about to set up 5.2 on my laptop), and you probably should be too; 5 is still very much developer's release territory, and will be until 5-STABLE is created.
Also, read the Handbook. Everything FreeBSD you ever wanted is in there. The appropriate section for sound is 16.2. It's a wonderful operating system - much more sensible and well-organised than any Linux distribution I've used, although admittedly not as newbie-impressing as something like Mandrake 9.2 - and its documentation is very high quality, so I suggest you do look at it.
The article states: "The FreeBSD bootloader, while simple and unable to be manually configured, is surprisingly useful."
Not true - FreeBSD has a swell little utility to configure the behavior of the boot loader, called boot0cfg.
> The FreeBSD NVidia driver has a fragile interface.
/bin/sh as a shell, just press enter to accept this.
/boot/loader.conf file, or rebuild and reinstall the nvidia driver or other kernel module that messed up.
Yep, it mostly sucks that a FBSD 5.x kernel install doesn't preserve modules that were added by the user. Not really an nvidia problem, more one of the kernel install.
The same thing will happen to your splash bmp and any other modules that were installed seperately.
> You change your kernel or XFree86, you have to rebuild it. I forget that I was automatically
> loading the NVidia driver in my loader.conf. So the first boot after the 5.2 build crashed hard.
> Nothing I tried got around it.
This is simple to fix, and the way this can be fixed is something you should keep in mind in general because it is helpfull in many similar situations.
- At the 'beastie' prompt (ie, the logo + prompt you get at the start of boot) choose the option to get a prompt.
- AT this prompt, type the following commands:
unload
load kernel
boot -s
- After a while, the system will ask if you want
- do a mount -t ufs -a
You now have a system in single user mode, with a kernel without any modules.
You can now either edit your