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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 Available

Posted by timothy on from the you-may-avail-yourselves dept.

hugo_pt writes "FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 has just hit the ftp/cvsup servers. This new beta aims at correcting some known bugs from BETA2, mainly on ACPI and the schedules. It also improves several system utilities, such as bsdtar. More details available here FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE is expected October 3rd."

3 of 81 comments (clear)

  1. Trying out FreeBSD by AresTheImpaler · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Ok, I want to try one of the BSD's. Which one should I get? this FreeBSD? Or Which one would you recommend? Also, whre can I find some good documentation with the linux compatibility mode of the BSD's? I tried google, but I get too much crap in the first 20-30 results..

    Thanks

    1. Re:Trying out FreeBSD by Xenophon+Fenderson, · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Try FreeBSD out first. It has the nicest installer. Then take a spin through NetBSD and OpenBSD. The installers aren't as pretty, but the rest of the operating system is configured and operated pretty much the same across all of the BSDs. In general, I am very impressed with the state of documentation. There are numerous resources on the web (e.g. the FreeBSD handbook and documentation project), and the manual pages are unusually complete compared to your typical Linux distribution.

      You should probably dedicate a disk to this procedure, as configuring dual boot (duel boot?) can require some wizardry. They all run very nicely under VMware.

      Where BSD falls down is on the availability of current binary updates. On FreeBSD 5.x, incremental security updates must be applied to the source code, then the O/S is re-compiled. The whole procedure is easy, in the sense that you type about five short commands to execute the whole update and build procedure, but it is very time consuming, especially on older hardware. Ports are even "worse": If you want to be current, you will most likely be building ports from scratch (also very time consuming when they upgraded to X.org, heh).

      --
      I'm proud of my Northern Tibetian Heritage
  2. Re:bsdtar by Korpo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Well, I don't think quite so. Not because I think bsdtar has no technological merit. I've got good reason to believe so, because gtar is known to be not very good.

    The crdrecord guy rewrote gtar, because it is in a state where it is almost no longer maintainable. He committed his version. Maintainers were happy. But Stallman said: We've already got a working gtar and basta!

    At least that's what I've heard.

    Given that most distributors stick with the whole GNU package, bsdtar, whatever its merits are, is more likely to be an addon package, and not the default tar on any Linux distribution.

    It surely would make a nice /etc/alternatives option in Debian for tar, where it would integrate nicely! But Debian is always more flexible and open in a lot of respects (Debian GNU/BSD anyone? ;) ) than other distribs.