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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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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.
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!
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?
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 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?!?!
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.
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!
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
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!
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.