FreeBSD 4.10 Released

lorand writes "After some delay (initially scheduled to be released on May 5th) the long awaited 4.10 version of FreeBSD was released today. It features a large merge of the USB code from the -CURRENT development branch, some conservative updates to a number of programs in the base system and many bugfixes. The detailed release notes can be found here. Use one of the many mirrors if you need to get the ISOs." feargal adds "There are no sweeping changes from 4.9, mostly a consolidation of security and bug fixes. Looking forward, it is also the first in a new 'Errata Branch' which increases the scope of fixes applied. In the past only critical security fixes were applied to the release branch. The Errata branch will include local DoS fixes and well-tested non-security fixes."

Comments

Bsd is dying :P

[MrRuslan]

But the 4.X branch just won't die. Can't wait till 5.x gets ironed out.On a serious note it is good that they maintain the 4.x, It is good stuff.

Re:Bsd is dying :P

[molnarcs]

eermm... not insmod (and no modprobe).FreeBSD-Linux dictionary:)))

insmod = kldload - in his case, that would be kldload pcm or kldload snd_hissoundchipset - try ls /boot/kernel to see what's available
lsmod = kldstat
rmmod = kldunload

I like it

[molnarcs]

I like the way they package things - one cd full of goodies (KDE 3.2.2, GNOME 2.6) and one rescue (live) cd for all releases (since 4.8 at least).

BTW - FreeBSD seems to be included on distrowatch now (good thing!) and there is even a nice review there of the 5.x branch. There are even some nice tips included in the review :)

Re:Long awaited uh?

[Anonymous Coward]

Take a look here if you'd like a more detailed reason as to why someone might want to use BSD over Linux.

Re:For the *BSD nay sayers

[Ryan Huddleston]

I, too, was at first impressed when I saw that.

However, if you check out their FAQ here, you will see that the uptime cannot be measured that high for HP-UX, Linux or Solaris. Therefore, this really doesn't say much other than the fact that BSD's uptime counter is programmed better than other Unices.

Re:Wonky Version Numbering?

[smcv]

Version "numbers" aren't conventionally decimal numbers, at least in the Unix world; instead, you split the version up at the dots and compare succesive components, so 4.10 comes between 4.9 and 4.11, 4.100 is the version after 4.99, and so on. As a number, 4.10 would usually denote "four point one zero", but as a version number it's "four point ten" (or even "four dot ten", I suppose).

It looks less strange in a version numbering scheme with three or more components (Linux 2.4.26, Perl 5.8.1, Apache 1.3.20) where it's obvious that you're not dealing with decimal numbers. It's also consistent with the way sections are numbered in many textbooks, RFCs, W3C standards, etc. (chapter 1 section 2 would be headed "1.2", its subsection 20 would be headed "1.2.20".)

Most projects' second (minor) version number never reaches 10, since there's a new major release at least once every 10 minor releases (e.g. Apache 1.3 followed by 2.0, or Debian 2.2 followed by 3.0).

(A few projects do use decimal numbers: Perl used to, so the version before Perl 5.6.0 was something like Perl 5.00503, which would be Perl 5.5.3 in the new system.)

FreeBSD-laptop

[n0dez]

Wrong!

This is the most popular FreeBSD-Laptop site. gerda.univie.ac.at/freebsd-laptops/

This is a great resource if your laptop is old. www.cse.ucsc.edu/~dkulp/fbsd/laptop.html

Here you can read an article about FreeBSD on laptops. www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/lapto p/article.html

If you need more FreeBSD resources, then visit www.n0dez.com/freebsd/

If you've got a 32-bit PCMCIA card on your laptop, use FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. The 5.x branch supports 32-bit PCMCIA cards. In fact, I'm running FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE on an old laptop without a hitch.

Re:A reason to use FreeBSD

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD has binary packages. Every port is built into a package (you can do this yourself with make package, but they are also on the main ftp site and some mirrors). The packages are often a day or two behind the source releases (since it takes time to build them all), but they are there. If you use the portupgrade utility then specifying the -P option will instruct it to install from packages if they exist, or ports if they don't. -PP will instruct it to only use packages. If you are not, then you can use pkg_add to install packages.

I assume that you are not using portupgrade, since you say that FreeBSD doesn't have an automatic update system. Give it a look, it's well worth it.

I haven't used FreeBSD on a workstation since I got a Mac, but it's a great server OS.