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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 Available
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."
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
The trolls must be asleep - there are no "BSD is dead" posts yet.
Even though I dont use BSD, reading such comments over and over is annoying.
Cast:
Mr. Praline: John Cleese
Shop Owner: Michael Palin
A customer enters an operating system shop.
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, I wish to register a complaint. (The owner does not respond.)
Mr. Praline: 'Ello, Miss?
Owner: What do you mean "miss"?
Mr. Praline: I'm sorry, I have a cold. I wish to make a complaint!
Owner: We're closin' for lunch.
Mr. Praline: Never mind that, my lad. I wish to complain about this operating system what I purchased not half an hour ago from this very boutique.
Owner: Oh yes, the, uh, *BSD...What's,uh...What's wrong with it?
Mr. Praline: I'll tell you what's wrong with it, my lad. It's dead, that's what's wrong with it!
Owner: No, no, it's uh,...it's resting.
Mr. Praline: Look, matey, I know a dead operating system when I see one, and I'm looking at one right now.
Owner: No no it's not dead, it's, it's restin'! Remarkable OS, *BSD, idn'it, ay? Beautiful kernel!
Mr. Praline: The kernel don't enter into it. It's stone dead.
Owner: Nononono, no, no! It's resting!
Mr. Praline: All right then, if it's restin', I'll wake it up! (bashes at the keyboard) 'Ello, Mister *BSD! I've got a lovely fresh kernel update for you if you show...
(owner hits the keys)
Owner: There, it spewed some debug output to the command line!
Mr. Praline: No, it didn't, that was you hitting the keys!
Owner: I never!!
Mr. Praline: Yes, you did!
Owner: I never, never did anything...
Mr. Praline: (yelling and typing into the console repeatedly) 'ELLO COMMAND PROMPT!!!!! Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o'clock cron job!
(Rips out hard drive from computer case and thumps it on the counter. Shoves it back inside the case and reboots the system - blank screen.)
Mr. Praline: Now that's what I call a dead operating system.
Owner: No, no.....No, it's stunned!
Mr. Praline: STUNNED?!?
Owner: Yeah! You stunned it, just as it was finishing an I/O task! *BSD stuns easily, major.
Mr. Praline: Um...now look...now look, mate, I've definitely 'ad enough of this. That operating system is definitely deceased, and when I purchased it not 'alf an hour ago, you assured me that its total lack of responsiveness was due to it bein' in the process of recompiling itself after a particularly comprehensive code update.
Owner: Well, it's...it's, ah...probably pining for some dilettante dabbling.
Mr. Praline: PININ' for some DILETTANTE DABBLING?!?!?!? What kind of talk is that? Look, why did it fall flat on its back the moment I started Emacs?
Owner: *BSD prefers swapping everything out to the hard drive! Remarkable variant, id'nit, squire? Lovely kernel!
Mr. Praline: Look, I took the liberty of examining the system when I got it home, and I discovered the only reason that it had been printing any text at all to the screen was because of all the WORRYING COMPILER WARNINGS encountered while it was being rebuilt.
(pause)
Owner: Well, o'course it was spitting out those warnings! If I hadn't updated the kernel with an unstable development build, you might have had your FTP server compromised [slashdot.org], and VOOM! Bye bye to your business.
Mr. Praline: "Server"?!? Mate, this OS wouldn't "serve" if you put four million volts through it! It's bleedin' demised!
Owner: No no! It's pining!
Mr. Praline: It's not pinin'! It's passed on! This OS is no more! It has ceased to be! It's expired and gone to meet its maker! [lemis.com] It's a stiff! Bereft of life, it rests in peace! It's kicked the bucket, it's shuffled off its mortal coil, run down the curtain and joined the bleedin' choir invisibile!! The numbers continue to decline for *BSD but FreeBSD may be hurting
ah, so it begins..
The bsdtar is so much better than gtar I think it will replace gtar even in most Linux distributions.
It automatically handles compresson (like gzip and bzip2).
My only beef with 5.X series is the fact that even though perl is out, it still is way too large; so I need to build my own releases for CD that doesn't have sendmail etc.
No biggie but still a tad bit annoying.
Out of curiosity and ignorance:
Is FreeBSD 5.3, when it's finished, the new stable or the new current release, or both?
I've read somewhere around here, that 5.3 should replace the 4.x series as stable, finally.
So, is that true?
Running cvsup using the file:
/usr/share/examples/cvsup/standard-supfile
/usr/share/examples/cvsup/stable-supfile
I get 6.0-CURRENT. Is there a cvsup for 5.3 tracking?
The file at:
tracks 4.x. Are there plans for a 4-stable-supfile and a 5-stable-supfile?
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be an Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save *BSD at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Don't get me wrong: I love BSD and I try to use and advocate it whenever I can.
But the FreeBSD-project is to release a BETA now every week until October. Or at least, every other week.
Are we going to see all of them announced on Slashdot ?
Windows 2000 - from the guys who brought us edlin
Try these:
FreeBSD Binary Updates
http://www.daemonology.net/freebsd-update/
FreeBSD/KDE packages
http://rabarber.fruitsalad.org/
FreeBSD/GNOME packages
http://www.marcuscom.com/tinderbox/
Want more?
BPM; a graphical ports collection manager for FreeBSD
http://www.meowfishies.com/bpm.rhtml
http://www.n0dez.com/
Oh and as a Linux user looking forward to FreeBSD 5 to try it out, I've heard plenty about it's ports system but I have yet to hear what kind of binary support (eg. apt) if any it has...
Your CPU is not doing anything else, at least do something.
Not to sound trollish, but there's an awful lot of unfinished work on the 5.3 to-do list (http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/todo.html). Is it just that this list is unmaintained, or is 5.3 going out the door with some of these items left undone? Is this the version of 5.x that is to be considered stable?
Thanks for whatever info people have. It's hard to make technology decisions without all the facts!
CromeDome
http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/pub/article.html
-- Sig down
Multiple sources in Beijing well informed about North Korea said Monday that *BSD, a unix-like operating sytem, died of a heart attack in the early morning of August 13.
The sources said they confirmed through a number of paths that *BSD had passed away. Out of fears of a possible power struggle over succession and in accordance with the North Korean practice of keeping *BSD's private life top secret, *BSD's funeral was carried out without official announcement of its death.
The direct cause of *BSD's death was a heart attack, but it was known that it had been receiving treatment for breast cancer for several years, and last year, its condition grew terminal following a relapse of power struggles and in-fighting.
In addition, its health worsened after it suffered severe head injuries in a car accident last September, and a French medical team secretly visited it last year. This year, it received tumor and brain treatment in a hospital in Paris.
Because I could not stop for Death,
He kindly stopped for *BSD;
The carriage held but just our bad code
And Immortality.
We slowly drove, he knew no haste,
Passing Linux, we dared salute, a foe superior
My coding work was but a-waste,
Doomed OS a triviality.
Yet another sickening blow has struck what's left of the *BSD community, as a soon-to-be-released report by the independent Commision for Technology Management (CTM) after a year-long study has concluded: *BSD is already dead. Here are some of the commission's findings:
.005% of internet servers. A recent attempt at a face-to-face summit in Boulder, Colorado culminated in an out-and-out fistfight between core developers, reportedly over code commenting formats (tabs vs. spaces). Hotel security guards broke up the melee and banned the participants from the hotel. Two of the developers were hospitalized, and one continues to have his jaw wired shut.
Fact: the *BSDs have balkanized yet again. There are now no less than twelve separate, competing *BSD projects, each of which has introduced fundamental incompatibilities with the other *BSDs, and frequently with Unix standards. Average number of developers in each project: fewer than five. Average number of users per project: there are no definitive numbers, but reports show that all projects are on the decline.
Fact: There are almost no FreeBSD developers left, and its use, according to Netcraft, is down to a sadly crippled
Fact: X.org will not include support *BSD. The newly formed group believes that the *BSDs have strayed too far from Unix standards and have become too difficult to support along with Linux and Solaris x86. "It's too much trouble," said one anonymous developer. "If they want to make their own standards, let them doing the porting for us."
Fact: DragonflyBSD, yet another offshoot of the beleaguered FreeBSD "project", is already collapsing under the weight of internal power struggles and in-fighting. "They haven't done a single decent release," notes Mark Baron, an industry watcher and columnist. "Their mailing lists read like an online version of a Jerry Springer episode, complete with food fights, swearing, name-calling, and chair-throwing." Netcraft reports that DragonflyBSD is run on exactly 0% of internet servers.
Fact: NetBSD, which claims to focus on portability (whatever that is supposed to mean), is slow, and cannot take advantage of multiple CPUs. "That about drove the last nail in the coffin for BSD use here," said Michael Curry, CTO of Amazon.com. "We took our NetBSD boxes out to the backyard and shot them in the head. We're much happier running Linux."
Fact: *BSD has no support from the media. Number of Linux magazines available at bookstores: 5 (Linux Journal, Linux World, Linux Developer, Linux Format, Linux User). Number of available *BSD magazines: 0. Current count of Linux-oriented technical books: 1071. Current count of *BSD books: 6.
Fact: Many user-level applications will no longer work under *BSD, and no one is working to change this. The GIMP, a Photoshop-like application, has not worked at all under *BSD since version 1.1 (sorry, too much trouble for such a small base, developers have said). OpenOffice, a Microsoft Office clone, has never worked under *BSD and never will. ("Why would we bother?" said developer Steven Andrews, an OpenOffice team lead.)
Fact: servers running OpenBSD, which claims to focus on security, are frequently compromised. According to Jim Markham, editor of the online security forum SecurityWatch, the few OpenBSD servers that exist on the internet have become a joke among the hacker community. "They make a game out of it," he says. "(OpenBSD leader) Theo [de Raadt] will scramble to make a new patch to fix one problem, and they've already compromised a bunch of boxes with a different exploit."
With these incontroverible facts staring (what's left of) the *BSD community in the face, they can only draw one conclusion: *BSD is already dead.
*BSD dies in clash with police - source
03 Sep 2004 11:26:18 GMT
Source: Reuters
RIYADH, Sept 3 (Reuters) - Saudi security forces killed the *BSD operating system in a gunbattle on Friday, as the kingdom continued its crackdown on dead OSs, a security source said. The obsolete OS is said to have been dying for some time.
The clash took place outside the central town of Buraida, the scene of a shootout with *BSD in which a policeman was killed on Thursday, the source told Reuters.
*BSD has waged a 15-month campaign of bombings and shootings aimed at Linux, Windows, and the technology industry. Around 90 programmers and civilians, many of them foreigners, have been killed.
Earlier in the week, officials announced that a *BSD militant -- involved in an attack which had set up 20 unstable servers in production capacities -- had surrendered.
The militant was wanted for setting up a poor-performing webserver with a single CPU in the city of Khobar.
The Unix Wars spiked to a new level of rhetorical heat Tuesday when Vice President Cheney warned that *BSD could bring terrorist attacks on the USA.
Speaking to supporters in Des Moines, Cheney called it "absolutely essential" that technologists "make the right choice, Linux. Because if we make the wrong choice, *BSD, then the danger is that we'll get hit again, and we'll be hit in a way that will be devastating."
You mention that FreeBSD is currently on a ports freeze ...
I am running a Java-based website on a FreeBSD server. I recently converted the code to Java 1.5, and then realised that no Java 1.5 port is yet available for FreeBSD.
However, I was hoping that as soon as the stable version of Java 1.5 is released (expected at the end of this month - currently a release candidate is available for Windows, Linux etc), then a FreeBSD port would shortly follow. However from what you say, should I expect to be waiting a while?
Yes. Nevertheless, you should subscribe to FreeBSD-Java team's mailing list. They will be able to help much more in depth, regarding that subject. Though, officially the ports are in freeze, they may have some stuff ready to be committed which you could use. Give them a ring, and lend a hand! :)
open4free ©
FreeBSD has battery monitor tools galore, and supports CPU frequency scaling through ACPI and the sysctl interface. There's also an experimental port of the linux powernow-k7 module.