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FreeBSD 5.3 Release Candidate Released
Cronopios writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has just announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3, so please give it a try and report/fix any bug you find.
You can read the announcement, check the schedule and the 'Known Issues' (problems that
are still being worked on at this time)."
An important difference is that BIND 9.3.0 has replaced BIND 8.x as the default name server.
Windows users:
Internet Explorer is obsolete. Please upgrade to Google Chrome or Mozilla Firefox.
Basic binutils are upgraded too, but I find it particularly interesting that the Darwin msdosfs tools are getting incorporated into the BSD tree.
Cool.
My experiences with USB on FreeBSD is very positive. I tried three different digital cameras and two external disks, mouse etc. and everything was autodetected, although I never tried a USB 2.0 mass storage device. The best thing to do is try out it yourself.
5.X still has all of the debugging options on by default.
This can cut your performance by a good 50% or so.
Debugging gets turned off last thing before release. (I'm not sure if a RC has debugging or not, mind you, but the BETAs certainly do.)
If you've been tracking 5.3-Beta and want to switch to the RCs and eventual RELEASE, don't forget to change your cvsup tag to RELENG_5_3 else you will end up with 5.3-STABLE, which isn't.
Music is everybody's possession.
It's only publishers who think that people own it.
Fuck Beta
~John Lenno
If you have not already done so, TURN OFF the debugging switches in your kernel. Non -RELEASE versions of 5.x are going to have major performance issues simply because they've got so many debugging switches on. So turn them off, or wait for -RELEASE to appear in a couple of weeks.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Don't listen to this guy. He has been spamming every -bsd related announcment for weeks now. He is selling an os called HawkinsOS which is still beta. Trolled FreeBSD mailing lists as well, and when he was pointed out (politely I might add) that he might be violating some of the copyrights in the BSD os (not the BSD copyright, but other copyrights included in the base system) he went mad and started a crusade against FreeBSD developers. Began with PHK and DES, but by now, as you can see from the thread I linked to above, he has an issue with everyone, even documentation folks.
This is a hoax folks. He claims to have sold 2000 copies of HawkinsOS, which is basically FreeBSD beta!!! He claims to have developed patches making FreeBSD 'enterprise ready' (meaning: in his opinion, FreeBSD isn't. lol: tell it to yahoo, or netcraft, or even apache.org!), but if you check his site (the spelling mistakes, the prices) or any of the threads he started, you'll see how 'serious' he is.
Yes, it is:
5.3-STABLE FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE #0: Sun Oct 17 13:50:02 CDT 2004
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
That's just the BSD subsystem---i.e. userland. Memory and I/O in particular have almost nothing in common with BSD and so FreeBSD UP vs MP performance etc. are not going to have any effect on Darwin.
I'd be interested to know long it will be before the ports tree has reasonably complete support for 5.3.
Protoplasm. Quiet Protoplasm. I like quiet protoplasm.
Well, once you branch a release you cannot make radical changes, that's why 4.x still has gcc 2.95 and why it has that ancient copy of perl. Because 5.x will be the -STABLE branch for years they decided it would be more practical to wipe perl out of the base and let people install it from ports. This way you can install 5.6 or 5.8 or whatever version you need/want.
This wasn't done in 4.x because it would be against POLA (principle of least astonishment). A 4.10 system should work the same way 4.0 did unless a change is justified. You just cannot change the version of perl on a production system. Once all the perl scripts in base were replaced by sh+awk or C equivalents (so the system can work without perl), perl was taken out and the user is given the option to install a package during installation.
Jaysen
DragonFlyBSD
DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. These operating systems belong in the same class as Linux in that they are based on UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly is a fork in the path, so to speak, giving the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series.
Likewise. Works better for me than hotplugd Recently when helping out a friend with suse, I didn't know how to make a flashdrive work. Partly this is because of my negligence: I forgot a lot about how linux works. Hotplugd was running, yet the system didn't gave any indication of what happens when I plugged it in. On the other hand:
Plug in flash drive in freebsd (5.x) :
plug out flash driveplug out my usb mouse (samsung optical)plug mouse back in Note that even Z dir is detectedHopefully, as soon as the release process is over, they will switch back to ULE in -current (officially, that is. in every dmesg/kernel config file I have seen on current, most developers run ULE). And I hope 5.4 will be the ULE release!
So, to answer your question: yes, 5.3 will be STABLE (and not only in name. the whole 5.x series is fairly stable, at least beginning with 5.1, or at least as stable as your average linux distro). I think it will be out on my birthday :))) (nov 11). But I also think that 5.x will be really ready when they have ULE back as default (ditch preemption if it needs be, ULE is so much better in every other aspect).
Have you got plug-and-play-OS turned on in your motherboard BIOS? If you do, turn it off; FreeBSD 5.x (and some later 4.x) has problems with the option, and Windows doesn't need it anymore. I didn't have to turn off ACPI that way...
(This is occasionally listed as "Device Configuration" or whatever, like on my Toshiba laptop, in which case the right answer is "All Devices".)
The ndiscvt tools that allow you to convert your NDIS network drivers into kernel modules works really well (at least in BETA7). I'm very impressed. (My only gripe was that it had problems reading my .INF file because it was unicode; I converted to ANSI and all was well). I can now run a pretty good GNOME desktop on my Acer laptop with wireless access.
Actually they were removed on September 7th
Desktop sluggishness is something that gets complained about a lot, and I know I hate the feel we have on the desktop right now. Currently, scheduler work has been focused on 4BSD with server loads, notably mysql. SMP performance with supersmack (mysql test) has gone up something like 50% in the last few months, thanks to netperf and 4BSD scheduler improvements. What would be nice to see is somebody fixing ULE (the new scheduler) both in terms of server performance and fixing those remaining bugs, since it is known to be significantly better in terms of desktop interactivity. However, its author only has sporadic FreeBSD time and others find ULE to be very scary, so it's not getting fixed currently.
However, I do think that we'll see interactivity continually improve at this point, as Giant keeps getting pushed out of more subsystems.
R.I.P. ULE. For now at least.