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FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE Review

Posted by Hemos on from the read-more-about-it dept.

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."

6 of 196 comments (clear)

  1. Uh.... by DashEvil · · Score: 4, Interesting

    dhclient is broken in 5.2?

    Odd, because it's clearly working on the box I have beside me.

    *shrugs* 5.2 seems to be a very solid release, I have no issues with it. I think that DevFS is something that should be more mainstream, it makes a lot more sense than the traditional method.

    --
    -If God wanted people to be better than me, he would have made them that way.
    1. Re:Uh.... by Shurhaian · · Score: 5, Interesting

      My computer is a semi-old and quite unreliable pile o' junk. That Windows hates it is no surprise(though Windows actually does support my nVidia GeForce card's 3D acceleration). I've tried Red Hat, two versions of Mandrake, and Debian.

      FreeBSD is the only thing I've tried that'd keep running if I didn't poke at it. And when I did choose to poke at it, it was most tolerant of it, and - thanks in large part to the devfs system - it's FAR easier to tell what I should be poking AT. Especially for my USB card reader - attach the device, and there it is, a brand new entry, /dev/ums0. Much easier than muddling through a whole tangle of device nodes and hoping that one of them is what I'm looking for.

      And for all the extra time it takes, I'm very fond of the ports tree's default-ish approach of "compile from source to suit the system". My Linux experience was fraught with library conflicts in binary packages; in FreeBSD I've hit a few snags, but they were much more easily resolved - although the process was time-consuming, it was not terribly attention-consuming.

      For a supposedly dead OS, FreeBSD lives quite well indeed on my system, when the Linux distros I've tried all died in short order. If only I had the space to compile OpenOffice, I'd be set.

      Now I just hope the review hasn't been /.'d by the time I get home from work(.com is blocked by the firewall, .org is not. Maybe there's a /.er on my IT staff?).

      --
      NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
  2. MacOS X by rsidd · · Score: 4, Interesting
    From the article:
    "It is questionable whether any significant portion of the old FreeBSD-specific code remains in present-day OS X Panther. So to sum up, the new release of FreeBSD means absolutely nothing to OS X development."
    Apple seems to disagree:
    Panther integrates features from state-of-the-art FreeBSD 5 into Darwin, the Open Source base of Mac OS X, to provide enhanced performance, compatibility and usability.
  3. The beer-ware license :) by pointwood · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Quote: You'd be hard pressed to find a license less restrictive than the BSD License.

    Well, the beerware license as taken from Poul-Henning Kamp's website is nice and short:

    "THE BEER-WARE LICENSE" (Revision 42):
    <phk@FreeBSD.ORG> wrote this file. As long as you retain this notice you can do whatever you want with this stuff. If we meet some day, and you think this stuff is worth it, you can buy me a beer in return Poul-Henning Kamp

  4. Is it dead yet? Guess not. by bsd_usr · · Score: 4, Interesting

    [4:41pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) # uname -a
    FreeBSD bsd.ircla.intexcorp.com 5.0-RELEASE FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE #0: Thu Jan 16 22:16:53 GMT 2003 root@hollin.btc.adaptec.com:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/G ENERIC i386
    [4:48pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) # uptime
    4:49PM up 112 days, 1:57, 2 users, load averages: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
    [4:49pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) #

    Hmmm, is it dead yet? It's been over 100 days and all. Guess not.

    Yeah, this is a box that I mess around with at work. I don't run anything serious on it, but I do have a few userull utilities to help me diagnose network problems.

    This machine, as you can see, is 5.0-RELEASE and it's like the Energizer Bunny. I goes on, and on, and on, and on, and on...

    My uptime is actually kinda small due to a power outage some one hundred and twelve days ago. I think the longest uptime I've had on a FreeBSD box was over 200 days and I accidentally unplugged it.

    Yeah, I know uptime doesn't mean much but it's nice to know it's been that stable and the hardware has been stable too. It's running on an old Compaq Prosignia 200 box. Runs great.

    I don't know if I ever plan to upgrade this box since it's not externally accessible on the Internet and I really don't use it for production use. Besides, if it ain't broke why fix it. Right?

  5. Oh, Ye of Little Faith by vga_init · · Score: 4, Interesting
    This post attempts to discuss the stability issues of the FreeBSD New Technology release and make some sense out of the situation as there seems to be varied opinions flying around.

    I have used the New Technology release extensively and also have a good deal of experience with Ye Olde Technology release. ;) The reason for this is because, at the time I adopted FreeBSD as my main OS 5.1 had just barely been released (I was a bit hesistant to try 5.0, but the extra .1 gave me added confidence). I had been using older versions prior to that, but only casually, and I never really hunkered down with them.

    There are different criteria for what is stable. Being a home user, I consider 5.x to be "stable" in the relative sense that I've never observed a system crash or failure of any kind after successful installation. I concede that I have experienced some issues with some pieces of hardware which proceeded to run 4.x just fine, but once the system is installed and configured satisfactorily there have been no problems. So, in other words, "it's good enough for me." Technically it's "unstable," but I guess I enjoy living life on the edge (or not).

    People must understand that criteria for stability in the *BSD crowd is top notch. Harboring claims of being some of the most stable systems of their kind, the BSDs have an aweful lot to live up to, and are usually very good about not dissapointing their users. When a BSD system is certified as "stable", is it ever! What the BSD crowd considers "unstable" some other software communities might think just the opposite. I suspect the cause of this is that BSD finds a happy home on server systems, and even the slightest possibility of something going wrong can cost somebody big. So, even the most miniscule amount of instability is instability none the less, and the BSD communities are modest enough not to try to claim anything different.

    I personally have a sever of sorts running at school that is loaded with an installation of 5.1-RELEASE. It's a modest machine--one of the school's low-end desktops with no more than a Pentium III and less than 100mb of memory--but it get's it's fair share of work; it works as a local file server (simple ftpd configuration), a web server (apache 2.something), and a vnc server (this is because I encourage the kids to play with the machine and get friendly with a *nix system since all they've ever known is Windows). The load is never too bad, even when three kids are running three vnc sessions, each with xfce4, firebird, and usually gaim running (and, you must understand, for a machine of its calibur this is a lot to handle). What I'm trying to say is that the machine does have it's fair share of work. Granted, it doesn't do nearly as much as a proper server should, but it also does a bit more than what I normally would do on my machine at home all by myself. Point in case is that the system has never done wrong, and though I can't keep it up as much as I'd like (staff shuts all machines off during the weekends), it runs for about a good week at a time--maybe two if I get lucky.

    I'm guessing that won't impress many people, but I sure think it's lovely (guess I'm easy to please). For me 5.1 is getting the job done, and though I wouldn't encourage it for large-scale corporate use to do mission-critical work (who would?), I encourage home users not to be shy and give it a go! Oftentimes I think that people get turned off by instability claims, which are, just for the intents and purposes of a hobbyist user such as myself, a tad exaggerated, and miss out.

    To me 5.2 can only be a step forward; if 5.1 was good for me then a good bet stands that 5.2 will be just as good, if not better. There are no gaurentees that this newer release will actually be more stable (there is always the posibility of new bugs being introduced), but known bugs discovered in the previous version are certainly going to be address. Also, I remember reading that hardware support has been expand