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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 Available
Nirbo writes "FreeBSD 5.3-BETA5 is now available! Get it while it's hot! Here is the mailing list post. Remember folks, this is currently the last beta that will be released for 5.3, we're only a week from a Release Candidate, and two weeks from a release!"
"Remember folks, this is currently the last beta that will be released for 5.3" Not quite accurate "We will add at least one more beta (BETA6)to accomodate testing."
The vaulted FreeBSD stability is mostly a matter of conservativism rather than the long history of the OS. Certainly much of FreeBSD was slowly evolved--and I think that applies to the 4.x series, but 5.x contains many aggressive changes to the Kernel. Thus, the history argument does not hold so much water.
Really, though, there are two kinds of stability. The uptime kind (really not that amazing in a UNIX OS, period.) and the system kind. FreeBSD is loved by administrators for its very well enforced POLA (policy of least astonishment). Point releases of the OS almost never break existing setups. E.g., 5.x will use use Bind9 and GCC 3.4 for it's entire existence. Should the originators of those programs neglect them, the FreeBSD project will step in and merge in fixes themselves. That sort of consistency is valued by many in critical applications.
A FreeBSD Kernel is not much different from modern Linux Kernels.
One of the big differences between the BSDs and Linux Distributions, though, is that the different BSD projects tend be distinguished by disagreements over system architecture--major design decisions at the Kernel level. Moreover, BSD projects tend to be focused on providing a complete, integrated system. Userland development and Kernel development always go hand-in-hand.