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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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Well, it's been two and a half hours, with no comments on this story.
BSD is dying...?
Got it and just finished with the install - everything you'd expect and more!
Eat recycled food - it's good for the environment, and OK for you.
I was just going to reinstall FreeBSD tonight after work. Perfect timing for a review of the new release.
Dead OS, indeed.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
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.
This is a rather amusing e-mail signature I saw recently:
Microsoft: Where do you want to go today?
Linux: Where do you want to go tomorrow?
FreeBSD: Are you guys coming or what?
how can anyone claim an OS is dieing right after a new release?
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
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 got it running under VMWare 4 on a Linux host recently. Largely uneventful except that I needed to use the Safe Mode kernel and add the following entry to the .vmx file:
monitor_control.disable_apic="TRUE"
It took a few hours to run updates and rebuild the kernel but is functional now. It seemed to take a lot longer this time than normal, but this may be because of the new GCC. Not sure.
My experience was pleasent, and I am very happy. I have noticed a speed enchangement over 5.1. But I did have a problem with the update. I blew my whole system to pot when I did not uninstall the NVIDIA drivers. Other than that I have noticed that the ports collection is working very nicely, with a few new toys, and that the system is very stable. In fact, I must say that I like the new version much better.
Not much of a review if you ask me. The reviewer did not address anything other than the install. I did not HAVE ANY trouble with the dhclient. In fact I had quite a bit of fun with it and MAC spoofing.
The views expressed are mine own and do not express the views of my employer.
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
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!
A lot of people pick FreeBSD 5.* as their introduction to the OS. These same people also choose apache 2.x.
As a FreeBSD user who still has 3.x machines in production, I am hesitant to deploy 5.x. Why would I give up the rock solid stability of 4.9 for an unknown?
I also run 4.x as a desktop. Opera, firebird, mplayer, gaim, xpdf, blah blah all work just fine from ports.
I tried to install mrtg in a jail from the tarball last night until i saw the dependency list. Thank jeebus for ports.
Oh yea, speaking of FreeBSD's killer app, jail. Thanks Poul-Henning Kamp.
I could go on and on. Asterix might be the only reason i would run linux right now.
l8r
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.
I love & use both Linux and BSD, but yeah it is harder to do BSD install (or most commerical Unix for that matter) than the more polished Linux distributions (like Mandrake, RedHat or SuSE) Maybe someday...
After installing/configuration of Xfree86 (which itself comes with very lightweight twm), there is menu to pick one of the major window managers, whether GNOME, KDE, Afterstep, Windowmaker, or fvwm. Or you can go to ports collection where there are a couple dozen more window managers.
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
[4:41pm] blah@bsd (/usr/ports) # uname -aG ENERIC i386
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/
[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?
This is A Simple Installer (tm)
1) icon to click that beckons me to "install",
2) window that opens, giving me a readme and links to further information and of course a button to go on or cancel.
3) choose volume to install on, automatic check for available space and compatibility of formatting.
4) option button that when clicked gives me an INTERFACE to tweak some options, choose between clean install (with or without zero level format) and update, choose which optional packages not to install etc etc
5) install now button or bail out button
6) progress bar and some feedback (like eg this could take half an hour)
That is how an installer should be.
With an option maybe of bypassing all this and type every install instruction yourself?
I think, therefore I am...I think.
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
See how much smaller your distro is when you don't include the SCO code?
[/ducks]
Upgrade to windows xp so you are completely dependent upon poking the screen with a mouse.
When I was young, I had to rub sticks together to compute.
I started out on FreeBSD 2.2.8 when I was 12 years old. I then started running Linux with RedHat 5.0 when it was brand new, went to Slackware, to RedHat 5.2, then to Slackware and FreeBSD 3.0 dualboot. At FreeBSD 3.3 I went fully to FreeBSD and kept on using it (with upgrading) until i bought the new iBook G4 when it came out this past fall.
Honestly, while I sometimes still pine (no pun intended) for the days when I had 15 Eterms running and all kinds of Vim and BitchX windows open. Hell, I ran EVERYTHING in terminals -- honestly, I didn't even need to run X. I love OS X 10.3.2 so much, I wouldn't even concider running a PC ever again. Hell, no other OS can even come close to the usability and functionality, atleast for me.
I don't know where to begin with this. He installed on an AMD64 and complains that Linux binary support didn't work. However, there's trouble finding ANY binaries for AMD64. Java doesn't work? That's binaries. If he did Java from source, I bet that'd work.
/. would realize these people have no idea what they're talking about and stop linking the stories.
He complains about the license. I am so sick of people crapping on anything that isn't GPL. "in fact Microsoft at one point took a great deal of BSD code relating to networking to include in early versions of Windows NT." - alot of people got the stack from BSD. Why? It's good code.
Lastly, if he had read the main FreeBSD page, he would see that 5.x isn't production quality. Why did he use this version? He doesn't even mention that it's the "New Technology" release and doesn't highlight the fact that he's using a new CPU type.
After the hack job done on FreeBSD and on Sun's Blade 1500, I wish
What about MEEPT?!?!
Umm, no. SuSE has the best AMD64 support and I dare say Gentoo has second or third best. And in my own experience with FreeBSD 5.2, I find that linux is a much more viable desktop/server OS than freebsd.
Going from what I use now to XP wouldn't exactly be an upgrade.
It's not really a dependency issue btw, it's about opening up an OS to others than programmers, technicians and hobbyists. Clearly not important though...
I think, therefore I am...I think.
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.
Sorry, I forgot to mention this. Credit where credit is due.
I tried 5.1 right after RedHat announced no more Linux just enterprise or Fedora.
I liked it real well except for the fact it was missing more than a RedHat or Fedora release.
No screensavers and no sound drivers.This is something that might have been fixed but it was the end of a long day and I was through. I put Slack 9.1 back on that box.
Other than that is was a nice quite desktop setup.
I am sure that the BSDs make very good server's but Joe SixPack (Me) it is not the best OS to use.
I like sound and multi media apps.
Of course I am typing this from my Fedora Core setup.With lots of add ons. Mp3 Ogle etc..
I liked RedHat 9 better(7.3 was even better)and still have it on my other Harddrive but this 8mb cache really flys compared to the 2mb on my RH 9 HardDrive.
Bsd is not dead it is just that servers don't really get folks excited the way a desktop distro does.
Hmmm, NVIDIA's driver didn't like my system, either - to the point that when X tried to start with it, my system would totally lock up. The open-source driver works much better for me.
And the logs didn't show any sort of error - everything just kinda stopped - so there wasn't much for me to submit for a bug report. Ah well, if it happens again I'll just try to be less apathetic.
NB: YMMV. IANAL. Take the above with a grain of salt.
I've never installed any *bsd before. How does this release compare overall with, say, Redhat 9?
I mean in terms of its general usability immediately after install, general performance, available software, etc.
Is it friendly for use as a desktop/development workstation?
Amazing magic tricks
I downloaded 5.2 the day of its release and so far I concur with the author's opinion that it's not quite as robust as 5.1... I have an nvidia fx5700 ultra card and freebsd is giving me fits with X. I tried using the nv driver without any acceleration (using the same settings in xf86config as I have on my working X installation under linux). It seems to be messing up the refresh rate (the picture is skewed) - I tried pkg_add the nvidia drivers, but it asks for a kernel .config file (admittedly not knowing how to deal with this is more likely due to my ignorance of freebsd but the nv driver should have worked without the nvidia drivers). I had high hopes for 5.2 - 5.1 performed much better on my dual xeon/scsi based system than linux - but it seems like there's still a few bugs to work out first...
I recently began using 5.x on a workstation in preperation for upgrading my router/doesitall server from 4.9 to 5.x. Overall it seems very stable, all the apps I've installed have gone in without a hitch. This includes many apps from the ports collection, some added via 'pkg_add -vr (pkgname)', and some handbuilt from source. The new DevFS setup is amazing and the new /etc/rc.d setup is just as killer as NetBSD's setup.
.tbz packages), cups, and a slew of other apps.
The only issue I've manage to run into, is that CPU Usage is not reported in top, systat, vmstat, GKRellm, or anywhere! This could be because its a SMP machine, but I'm not sure why that would make a difference unless theres still a few lumps in the SMPng code.
Still, it runs amazingly well. Currently using Enlightenment DR16/Gnome Desktop, Mozilla 1.6, OpenOffice (check the OpenOffice downloads page if you don't have enough room to build, they have
So, until NetBSD gets its SMP code to a releaseable point, it appears this is the BSD for me!
PS: Any takers on the CPU Usage reporting issue?
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
> 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
user@bsdbox:/usr/ports/sysutils:$grep ports */pkg-descr | grep frontend
barry/pkg-descr:A nice KDE frontend to the ports system.
Haven't used it, but it looks intruiging
When encryption is outlawed, ou++1!@(93j++js-d9298yIUH(*Y24JKB!~
On the otherhand, Unix was designed by programmers for programmers.....
Of course. Point taken. And Linux was designed by programmers for programmers.
But you know, lately people have been talking sooooo much about desktop linux, I've started to give my opinion on things like installers, updaters, gui's, what usability means etc etc.
Sometimes maybe not to the right crowd or in the right forum, but hey.
Ever found yourself in the middle of a conversation, realizing that everybody is staring at you? After a few seconds too many of awkward silence, someone finally says, "Well, anyway..." and takes the conversation elsewhere.
This might constitute such a moment. Let me just drip right back to the punchbowl and see how much I can drink without choking on a piece of fruit.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
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
Once world is installed do a 'make upgrade' to unconditionally copy files that sysops are not supposed to modify, like /etc/rc* and /etc/rc.d/*. Do this before doing the mergemaster, it will make the remaining merge a lot easier and also get rid of a ton of 4.x junk files that are either no longer used or have been moved in DFly. Hmm, you might have to wipe (rm -rf ) your /usr/include
and 'make includes' to generate a new set to get rid of old 4.x junk files in the include dir too. You will want to install new boot blocks as well, though this is not required. DFly has backported 5.x's new boot loader which is a whole lot better then 4.x's, and you get some spiffy ascii art too.
Really the best thing to do is to download and burn the DragonFly Live CD ISO, boot your machine from the CD, and follow the README file to completely wipe and reload your box with DFly. Obviously make a backup of your old system first :-). If you just want to play with DFly without messing up your HD, you can boot the CD and play around a little from there (keeping in mind that /tmp and /var and /etc are MFS volumes). The CD boots into a fully operational environment.
DragonFly
-Matt
If he saw this article and the author mentioning several times that FreeBSD is "Free Software"? ;-)
;-)
Parts of FreeBSD are free software in that they are covered by the GPL and LGPL, but great huge chunks of it are under the BSD license which RMS has a serious problem with and most people would call an OpenSource license, not "Free Software".
Could be an interesting discussion
Both the Free Software Foundation and the Debian legal group agree that this is a valid FLOSS license.
--
Estampaciones Modernas
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
>There are two main editions of FreeBSD: the development edition (which includes STABLE and CURRENT), and the more stable version with more mature code, called RELEASE.
FreeBSD's development model is not that difficult to understand which this author is experiencing!
-CURRENT: bleeding edge development code
-STABLE: mature and stable code (duh!)
-RELEASE: a FROZEN point in TIME of -CURRENT or -STABLE
There IS a CVS tag used also to track security patches to the -RELEASE tag, but that's if you rebuild from sources yourself, and does miss new stable features added
For instance, everyone on here complains about cut-and-paste in X/Gtk/Qt apps. I can just highlight a section of text and drag it where I want it to go. I can drag it onto the desktop and it saves it as a text file. Same with images -- just drag them onto the desktop and it saves them. Or I can drag them into another application.
Expose is much nicer than virtual desktops -- much less frusterating, I think, although there is something to be said for virtual desktops when the varity of work one is doing is greater (one for coding, one for surfing, one for chatting, etc).
And everything seems to be much better integrated. The look and feel are uniform, although most 3rd-party and particularly free software are still more stuck on the original Aqua or even Jaguar look-and-feel. I wish that everything would just look the same (I do like the new brushed metal look, particularly with all the applications that come with Panther out-of-the-box, where there isn't even a distinction between the "title bar" (or whatever you call the widget with the resize/minimize/close buttons) and the rest of the window, particularly Safari, iTunes, iChat, et cetera -- all those iApps, though most of the "iLife" shit (iMovie, iPhoto, iEtc.) i uninstalled due to the fact that a) i use my digital cameras with my PC which I put Win2kPro on and gave to my parents, one uses floppy disks, and the other uses mini-cds, neither of which cooperate with a mac with no floppy drive and a pussy-slit combo drive. I suppose I could use them with USB. Then again, I distrust USB (but then one could say "well, why did you buy a mac?" answer: i am lazy these days. I don't code, just run a web page).
I am constantly discovering little features that I can't figure out how I ever lived with out. The only thing is they are expensive and endorsed by hippies (and as a non-Utopian, Scientific Republican Socialist, I am against expensive things, money in general, and hippies because they get high and don't do anything useful). Otherwise, I'd say go for it. It's the best computer I've ever owned (tho sometimes I do wish they had kept the Platinum look and feel over this "lickable" "aqualishouse" stuff).
meeeeeep, wrong. Let me guess, you're from the planet Zonk?
having a gui for an installer doesn't imply it cannot be remote-installed. Or on different clients at once.
it means you have a gui for
1) the technically challenged
2) those who think time-and-effort are not things you should put into an install if what you want is pretty basic.
But it's clear I'm preaching for the wrong crowd, never mind.
I think, therefore I am...I think.
I really should bookmark this:
The Free Software Foundation lists the BSDL as a
"GPL-Compatible, Free Software License". The BSDL grants all four of the software freedoms. To quote from the latter document:
And if you need for someone to draw you a picture, there is a very nice graphic showing the categories.
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 danger I've found in criticising stuff is you get volunteered to improve it. I'd love to see some reviews and just walk throughs. The fairly recent freebsd compared to Linux was a step in the right direction. I'd love to see more.
I remember when I was 16, I spent all of two days trying to figure out /etc/X11/XF86Config, and I knew NOTHING about *NIX, I was a 'mac boy', I didn't even know how to edit text before I read how to use vi on a web-connected Mac. Anyway, I spent two days getting X up and running, only to use it to have 10 terminals in plain view (and high-resolution). Ever since the I've been a CLI guy, people ask how I can work that way, and I ask how they can work with their mice.
"Sometimes, I think Trent just needs a cup of hot chocolate and a blankie." -Tori Amos on Nine Inch Nails