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FreeBSD 5.3 Released
cpugeniusmv writes "FreeBSD 5.3 has been released! This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
release notes and
errata list. Bittorrent Download."
That's pretty ancient.
I know, it's a mistake. 3.4.3, or 3.4.2?
Anyway, FreeBSD rules. I'm glad they waited to make 5.3 great.
Torrent Mirror
The announcement should be up there by now, but it was delayed slightly because nobody knew how to start a rebuild (outside of the usual fixed schedule) of the web site.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I mainly like it for the ports system. The only things I know of that can compare with it would be Debian's apt-get and Gentoo's portage. However, I was never able to get a Debian or Gentoo system to install. YMMV
Have you encountered many problems with hardware compatibility, particularly USB, RAID, and audio?
I tried to get USB to work in 4.x, and failed, but USB support is supposed to be much better in 5.x. Audio has worked fine for me.
Have you had difficulty finding applications that will run on it?
That's the best thing about it: the ports system.
In general, will software written for Linux compile and run on FreeBSD without too much difficulty?
Well, first check if it's in the ports system. If it's well-known software, it probably is, so you're all set. Otherwise, it really depends on the software. If it's small and simple, and wasn't written with lots of Linuxisms, then it should be no problem. If it's 10^7 lines of code, and was written by people who assumed it would only be used on Linux, then you may have a long, hard road ahead.
Find free books.
If you aren't ready to install FreeBSD on your hard disk, you can try out FreeBSD 5 with the live FreeSBIE CD. It's currently based on FreeBSD 5.2.1.
2) read http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/h andbook/current-stable.html
3) and this: http://home.nyc.rr.com/computertaijutsu/FreeBSD53. html
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
Here's the un-edited email:
/ cu rrent/2004-11/0446.html
http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD
You'll notice an extra sentence in the above post that doesn't seem to belong.. Rather hypocritical attacking post editing with post editing - maybe they need to look down and see what shoe's on their foot?
Software: most software written for linux would compile without much change on FreeBSD. In fact, that's how the ports system work. Check out freshports to see if your favourite app is included or not. You can also have binary packages, which can be installed similarly to debian packages (pkg_add -r blah is ~ apt-get install blah). If you put linux_enable="YES" into your rc.conf, you'll have linux 'emulation.' Don't worry, it's not really an emulation, linux-apps run with native speed on FreeBSD. Really. (you can try it yourself if you don't believe me, for sometimes there exists both a native freebsd and a linux version of the same program). Finding an app is as simple as cding into /usr/ports and typing "make search name=[progname]" if you know the name of the application you need or "make search key=[whatever]" to search in the short descriptions of each port. Installing that app is as simple as entering it's directory, and typing make install clean (or if you have portupgrade tool installed, you can simply say: portinstall mplayer. Details in the handbook :)
I also have slack on my puter btw (with kernel 2.6.7), and now that ULE is turned off, slack seems to be slightly faster on the desktop (KDE on both), but only if the system is heavily loaded. I think, even for someone who is new to FreeBSD, tracking -STABLE (look up what that means in the handbook is pretty safe, and hopefully they will reenable the new ULE constant time scheduler (whatever that means, I just read this fancy description on OSNEWS :o)) soon.
Hardware compatibility: FreeBSD supports standard pc hardware. There are accelerated binary native nvidia drivers for freebsd. USB support is excellent (my USB mouse worked out of the box, just read the installation messages carefully - you have to say no to mouse configuration if you have an usb mouse) ... except for USB 2.0. So USB 2.0 devices work in 1.1 compatibility mode. Discussion, however, is already started for fixing USB 2.0 support (EHCI driver), and I'm sure it will be ready soon. I also have a tv card (PlayTV MPEG2, an el cheapo card) which works nicely under FreeBSD and with mencoder (and FreeBSD's own native tv app, fxtv). In fact, I have much clearer picture than on windows, thanks to better filters in mplayer I think. This is the command I use to get the best quality btw:
Best approach is to upgrade via source.
/usr/src/UPDATING, slightly abridged because this is will be a small upgrade):
pkg_add -r cvsup-without-gui
edit the example cvsup file:
so that:
*default release=cvs tag=.
becomes
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_3
Then, do the following (quoted from
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
make installkernel KERNCONF=YOUR_KERNEL_HERE
make installworld
You can omit the KERNCONF business if you just want to use the GENERIC kernel.
wait... only *NetBSD* changed logos. FreeBSD is still Lassiter's "Beastie" (yes, John Lassiter of Pixar fame designed "Beastie")
"Evil will always triumph because good is dumb." -- Dark Helmet
The FreeBSD handbook on htp://www.freebsd.org/ is excellent. It walks you through the steps to do a binary upgrade, or a source upgrade of your OS. Personaly, the way I find easiest is to just drop in the install CD, run sysinstall, and choose "upgrade". I always have a current CD anyways, so I don't mind burning a copy of the release when it comes out. Cheers.
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.