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."

Comments

FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[docbrazen]

Ya, it's 3.4.2. GNU GCC has been updated from 3.3.3-prerelease as of 6 November 2003 to 3.4.2-prerelease as of 28 July 2004. -http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes-i38 6.html#NEW The release notes say the same thing for the other platforms as well.

Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2?

[shlong]

Yes, it's 3.4.2. While 3.4.3 was recently announced by the FSF, there certainly wasn't time to get it tested and properly integrated into 5.3. Anyways, it's one of a couple of typos in the announcement that I fixed in later emails.

Re:The torrent link is not working

[cpugeniusmv]

Torrent Mirror

Re:great news!

[cperciva]

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.

Try out FreeBSD on a live CD

[cquark]

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.

Re:upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable

[Bodhammer]

1) read /usr/src/UPDATING

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

Re:Future FreeBSD releases

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's the un-edited email:

http://unix.derkeiler.com/Mailing-Lists/FreeBSD/ cu rrent/2004-11/0446.html

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?

Re:A few questions...

[molnarcs]

If you like slack you will love FreeBSD (and this is true vice versa - most FreeBSD users prefer Slackware to any other distro). To me, it is easier to configure/maintain (thanks to its excellent documentation: the man pages - better than gnu man pages usually, /usr/share/examples, the handbook of course, the faq, and the very friendly community at bsdforums.org).

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:

mplayer tv:// -tv input=1:driver=bsdbt848:norm=palbg:audioid=2 \
-vf pp=hb/vb/dr/al/lb,hqdn3d -stop-xscreensaver

Re:Upgrading from RC2?

[drmerope]

Best approach is to upgrade via source.

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 /usr/src/UPDATING, slightly abridged because this is will be a small upgrade):
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.