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FreeBSD 5.3 Beta1
Tezkah writes "From the announcement: 'The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1. This is the first BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs. The 5.3 release cycle will continue with weekly BETA builds while bugs are being fixed and features finalized. The schedule is at www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/schedule.html . Be sure to check the "Known issues" below, there are known problems still being worked on at this time.' New features include fully threaded and multi-processor safe network stack, X.org instead of XFree86, many ACPI enhancements, GCC updated to 3.4.2, gdb updated to 6.1.1, binutils updated, and much more. Expect 5.3 to be released in full on October 3rd, if everything goes according to schedule!"
For those of you running 5.2.1 and planning on doing a source upgrade, make sure you check the /usr/src/etc/group and /usr/src/etc/master.passwd files and add the new groups and users into your own, otherwise your buildworld will fail about half way through.
As well, you can't build a new kernel until the userland is upgraded, the "config" program and kernel options have been upgraded.
Otherwise, the upgrade went well, and it does seem faster than the previous releases.
Success is as dangerous as failure, hope as hollow as fear.
# expect -v
expect version 5.38.0
That's funny, I'm already up to 5.38! Damn consequences of time travel.
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
source http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=mergemas
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
why does the handbook tell you to run mergemaster -p after buildworld? I thought mergemaster was supposed to prepare your system for installworld, and that buildworld was just for compiling the system (not installing it).
I used to be intimidated by installing freebsd by source, but after having gone through the buildworld process, I find it's really easy to keep freebsd updated. Just cvsup one server and rsync the rest. While I've always done installs and upgrades by CD, I think I'll be doing 5.3 from source. Then again if I'm going to have issues, maybe I'll stick to CD's anyway.
Based on their todo list, it looks like there's still a lot that needs to be done before 5.3 is even close to out-the-door.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
I'd be happy to switch to FreeBSD 5.3 as soon as my Conceptronic 54g Wireless PCI Card is supported :)
freebsd has support for windows driver via ndis (aka project evil) if native ones are unavailable
just read up on 'ndis' and 'ndiscvt' man pages
Marge, get me your address book, 4 beers, and my conversation hat.
You should only need to run mergemaster -p before the installworld stage (despite the description of the option in mergemaster). Doing a buildworld should not require any special users or groups.
/usr/src/UPDATING) is:
The official procedure (from
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster
I wish that the installer was a little bit better. Just about every Linux distro that I installed found my video card and set up X perfectly. For some reason FreeBSD never could seem to automatically configure my video card corectly. It was a while ago and I cannot even remember what kind of card that it was but I do remember at the time having a total nightmare trying to get it installed. Going to FreeBSD newsgroups and IRC channels to get help but I never did get it to work right.
A few weeks ago I upgraded my 5.2.1 laptop to 5-CURRENT, and the build stopped with a message about mergemaster right at the very beginning. No need to wait around an hour to discover your mistake...
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Good News Everyone!
Turns out that *BSD is stronger than ever!
According to an Inernetnews article, Netcraft has confirmed that *BSD has "dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
There has been a steady increase in *BSD developers over the past decade.
There are currently 307 FreeBSD developers as of the 2004 core team election.
You can read more about FreeBSD here
If you would like to try out a BSD, you can download: FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, or DragonflyBSD
Enjoy!
I've never checked what final size I get with an initial install, as I usually go install lot of stuff on top of it immediately afterwards. But I can give you some hints. I don't know if these will work for you are not, but give it a shot.
Don't install the source code if you don't need it, or remove it afterwards if you do. Don't include Linux compatibility. Don't install games, profiled libraries, pre-catted man pages. The 3.x and 4.x compat libs are pretty small, but leave them out anyway if you don't need them.
Don't install the X.org/XFree86 metapackage but use the individual component packages instead, so you won't be sucking down a lot of stuff you won't need, like docs and cyrillic fonts.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Are there any tricks to installing just the very basics?
...) and install onto a clean filesystem.
/usr/bin/{c++ g++ CC gcc cc yacc byacc f77 addr2line ar as gasp gdb gdbreplay ld nm objcopy objdump ranlib readelf size strip}, /usr/lib/*.a, /usr/libexec/cc1*, and /usr/libexec/f771, you'll save 45MB (at the expense of being unable to build anything, but you're going to be using binary security updates and building packages on a different machine, right?)
That depends upon how minimal an install you want to get. If you avoid installing man pages, cat pages, profiled libraries, compat libraries, and the src/ and ports/ trees, you'll get down to around 100MB. If you want to get the system smaller than that, you have two options: Perform surgery (ie, run around with rm -f) on a binary installation, or build with custom make flags (eg, NO_CVS, NO_CXX, NO_BIND, NO_FORTRAN
Personally, I prefer to do a complete install and then remove unwanted files; if you remove
I also have an experimental patch which "packages" the base system, making it simpler to remove components (eg, Sendmail), but I wouldn't recommend this for anyone unfamiliar with FreeBSD.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I tried to get this card running on Linux, but the madwifi-drivers where in beta and unstable. I found that FreeBSD 5.2.1 detected my Conceptronic without a problem. Just do ifconfig ath0 up and the card is detected.
BSD has probably started to find its nitch. As Linux grows in popularity, so will the ammounts of refugees burned by linux who flee to the BSD banners.