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."

Comments

The Sky is Falling!

[eviltypeguy]

The Sky is Falling, and our society's impending breakdown is near.

A slashdot contributor actually linked to the FTP mirror list instead of directly to ISOs or an FTP Site!

Run for your lives!

Re:The Sky is Falling!

[__past__]

They still have a chance to announce the final 5.2.1 release before releng@ does.

Re:The Sky is Falling!

[Homology]

A slashdot contributor actually linked to the FTP mirror list instead of directly to ISOs or an FTP Site!

That is because the average *BSD user is mature and thoughtful ;-)

Re:The Sky is Falling!

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

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.

Opinions on automatic hardware recognition?

[jbn-o]

I'm curious about FreeBSD (and the other BSDs too), but it has been a while since I've had the time to install and administrate a BSD-based system of my own (OpenBSD 3.0, which was a fine system).

One of the things I just don't have much interest in doing is figuring out which drivers I need and setting them up. Are BSD systems these days good at automatically picking the appropriate drivers?

Thanks.

Re:Opinions on automatic hardware recognition?

[__past__]

I didn't have much problems with figuring out which drivers I need yet - GENERIC always had all of them (well, except pcm, but its kldloadable these days), but then I don't use vary fancy hardware. If you worry about having only the drivers you need in your custom kernel, NetBSD has a nice port called "adjustkernel", basically a perl script that parses dmesg and comments out all drivers you don't need in a kernel config file. I don't know if anyone ported it to FreeBSD, it shouldn't be too hard in principle.

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).

Re:Opinions on automatic hardware recognition?

[Brandybuck]

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.

Re:Opinions on automatic hardware recognition?

[phoenix_rizzen]

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.

Once you know which driver is needed, you can either edit /boot/loader.conf to have the module loaded at boot time automatically, or you can compile a custom kernel with that driver built in.

Re:Opinions on automatic hardware recognition?

[Secrity]

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?

Re: automatic hardware recognition?

[Anonymous Coward]

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...

5.2.1 is much needed

[puzzled]

I do an ls in my home directory and everything is fine. I do an 'ls -l' and I see stuff I deleted a long, long time ago. Other than this very disqueting discovery earlier today 5.2 has been sweet, solid, & flexible - sort of like dating an aerobics instructor. Maybe my troubles stem from a binary upgrade from 4.9 on this laptop, but somehow I don't think so ...

I think I'll play with some of my newly functional USB devices and try to ignore the filesystem stuff ...

Re:Status of NAT, pf, &c?

[elbuddha]

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.

Re:Thoughts on the release

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmm, did RedHat's death cause so much harm
to people's minds??

It certainly did nothing to mine: I switched
to FreeBSD 5.1 the very next day after, and
here's what happened:

[root@mymach]# uptime
3:29?? up 80 days, 23:31, 26 users, load averages: 0.15, 0.06, 0.02
[root@mymach]#

Here's my favorite version of the Linux kernel:

[Anonymous Coward]

$ /usr/compat/linux/bin/bash

$ uname -a
Linux myhost 2.4.2 FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT #29: Sat Feb 14 02:40:58 EST 2004 i686 unknown