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FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC2 Released
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Scott Long has announced the second release candidate of FreeBSD 5.2.1. The release is now available for downloading. Please test and provide feedback. Changes since the RC1 include more bug fixes for ATA, working kernel modules on the install floppies, and numerous security fixes to the src and XFree86 packages. Note that the sparc64 XFree86-4-Server package in this set does not have the latest updates, Scott says that this will be fixed in the final release."
That is because the average *BSD user is mature and thoughtful ;-)
The BSD kernels can and do automatically set up devices that are compiled into them. In my expreience though, OpenBSD has the greatest built-in support, including things like sound cards. If you recompile the FreeBSD kernel with 'device pcm' it will do so as well. Not that it's hard to 'kldload snd_pcm' either, but that goes agains what you really want here...
Basically, my experience with hardware and FreeBSD is that stuff either Just Works, or that it does not work at all, if it isn't supported. I never had the need to fiddle with arcane settings to make anything work (tuning aside, but then you obviously have to know your hardware pretty well anyway).
Programming can be fun again. Film at 11.
What a strange question. I guess I've been using FreeBSD too long that I take it for granted.
Just about everything you would ever need is in the default (GENERIC) kernel. It's excellent at detecting what you have. If you have old ISA hardware, you might have to fiddle with interrupts and stuff, but otherwise it's a piece of cake. Don't worry about it being too large though, because most of it is loadable modules. The only thing I have ever had to add was the sound driver (pcm). Under the old 4.x kernels, I had to also manually add the PCI serial driver (puc), but no longer.
It's really a good system. It's significantly easier to configure than Linux, despite its lack of a "user friendly" GUI.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
natd is userland, but You do have to re-compile the kernel to get divert sockets.
pf is not the default filter, but it is in the ports tree and only a pkg_add or make install away.
Running Apache and Postfix on 5.2-RC2, haven't had to reboot it yet.
Eng ineerin g
The GENERIC kernelk comes with support for virtually everything, except sound. However, any device driver that is not explicitly compiled into the kernel is available as a module (including sound). So, it's just a matter of browsing through /boot/kernel/*.ko or /modules/*.ko and loading the appropriate driver.
/boot/loader.conf to have the module loaded at boot time automatically, or you can compile a custom kernel with that driver built in.
Once you know which driver is needed, you can either edit
disable acpi before the system starts to boot the kernel and it'll probably work, same problem i had with a compaq armada, i cant remember the details how to do it but the handbook is your friend
I basically had to load drivers for my video card (Matrox G550 AGP) and my sound (Intel ICH5). This is two lines in loader.conf and how to do it is well documented.
The biggest irritation driver-wise is lack of ext2 support in the GENERIC kernel, but even that is minor because I had to recompile to get the ULE scheduler anyway. ULE will be the default in 5.3, and apparently ext2 will be there as well.
The real problem I have with it is that a few desktop-related things don't quite work, or take effort. Gotta set environment variables when you install to get kuickshow in KDE. Arts doesn't behave. You can't trivially install flash, and without flash, there is no homestar runner. Stuff like that. I wouldn't hesitate to use FreeBSD on a production server, but it's lacking for a desktop.
So I'm back on Gentoo, but I'm not happy about it. I can't go back to life with out a ports-like mechanism, but the "stable" portage tree can't always build stuff, and IMO a tree should not be called "stable" unless it can always compile. There are regularly problems that could never occur unless no one had even tried something before releasing it, and these can take days to fix.
sigh... I've said it before and I'll say it again. Everything except OpenBSD makes me angry.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
I am not sure what driver problems you have had because I either have seen driver problems or haven't depending upon how you mean the question.
Except for 5.2.1-RC, which seems to have a bug that caused problems with loading the NIC driver, I haven't had any problems with FreeBSD 5 recognising any of the drivers on my relatively simple Asus P2B and Dell OptiPlex systems. The only driver hassle at all could be in configuring X11. So, no, I haven't had any driver problems with a released version of FreeBSD.
I have been playing around with Fedora and I was REAL surprised when it identified and configured the drivers for my sound and video cards, and even properly identified the monitor on the Optiplex. BUT, Fedora misidentified the NEC Multisync LCD monitor on the Asus as being an NEC Multisync CRT monitor -- with really BAD results. So in this regard, I think that the sound and X11 configuration in FreeBSD is a bit behind Fedora in identifying cards and configuring drivers, and Fedora's X11 configuration is not perfect. Can you fault FreeBSD for not automating X11 configuration or can you fault Fedora for not having a really new model monitor in it's database?
Funny thing is, since this is FreeBSD, most folks are going to cvsup anyway, instead of downloading and install a whole disk. Nice touch, but hitting the direct ftp server is less of a problem for FreeBSD than other downloads.