Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

FreeBSD 5.3 Released

Posted by michael on from the only-mostly-dead dept.

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."

21 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. *BSD is dying, et al... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Let's take a cue from Groklaw -- all posts about *BSD dying, Netcraft, and similar predictions under this thread, please.

  2. FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    1. Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by docbrazen · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:FreeBSD uses gcc 2.4.2? by shlong · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

      --
      Cat, the other, tastier white meat.
  3. Excellent OS by Ambient_Developer · · Score: 4, Interesting

    BSD is an excellent operating system if your trying to lock down a network, or some other coperate enviroment.. Just look at their history with security, which is pretty convincing. So I say kudos to milestone release 5.3, I know I will be trying it. ~matt

    1. Re:Excellent OS by setagllib · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Well, as far as everyone who knows is concerned, no even hardened Linux has ever competed against any BSD in security. It's just impossible with Linux' development model, and the services in userland (as opposed to the mature services that the BSDs have kept for decades and hardened) are often dirty hacks that haven't had proper auditing, if indeed any.

      But if you want security, go OpenBSD, it's the world leader. A close second is NetBSD, which right now is much faster and more stable than FreeBSD 5 (even in many SMP cases, too). FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too. It's a shame to see such a great system degenerate, but it happened.

      In my opinion, NetBSD is a good half-way between Linux and OpenBSD. It has a lot of Linux-like performance (sometimes better, sometimes worse) and design, but security isn't far behind OpenBSD in practice. It doesn't have anywhere near as many randomization-of-kernel-data features though, which you might find handy. You can still use cgd for any storage including swap, if you're really paranoid :)

      --
      Sam ty sig.
    2. Re:Excellent OS by HenryKoren · · Score: 5, Insightful
      FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too
      Regretfully admitting that FreeBSD 5.3 is crap

      You my friend, are a Troll. As an avid user of FreeBSD 4,5, 4.10, 5.1, 5.2.1, and now 5.3RC2, I can personally guarantee that you have no fucking Idea what you are talking about. Lost cleanliness, my ass! The improvements in 5.3 are awesome. The integration of BIND 9 into the base inside a chroot jail is excellent. The separation of Perl from the base also helped to clean it up. The user experience is awesome in 5.3... My Ghz athlon server has 500+ ports installed, every service you could imagine, and runs X.org with OpenGL flawlessly. I notice a distinct increase in performance and functionality after CVSUPing from 5.2.1 to 5.3 RC2. With a streamlined kernel and good old SCHED_4BSD what exactly is so "unclean"? Have you had a personal experience with 5.3 or are you just spouting mindless zealotry? Why are you on a personal quest for schism in the BSD community?

      Calling anything so massively successful "crap" is just pure ignorance. Are Linux and Windows, or anything that's not NetBSD also crap? Please share.... The /. mods obviously can't get enough of your idiotic pontification.

      --
      To blog is sublime
  4. Re:The torrent link is not working by cpugeniusmv · · Score: 5, Informative

    Torrent Mirror

  5. FreeBSD on Compaqs by Black+Acid · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Recent Compaq/HP laptop users can't run FreeBSD. This problem has been known since July and still not fixed in this release. FreeBSD 5.3 (all betas, RCs, and the release itself), 5.2, 5.1, 5.0, all versions of FreeBSD 4 and 3 cannot run on Compaq Presario R3000Z and similar laptops, in either i386 or AMD64 mode. When is this going to be fixed? How come the patch exists.... works perfectly.... and isn't being commited?

    --
    Tired of free ipod spam sigs? Opt ou
  6. Re:Doesn't Matter by mkro · · Score: 5, Funny
    In five years, either FreeBSD will have adopted DragonflyBSD's model, or nobody will be using FreeBSD.
    Matt? Is that you?
    --
    I shall go and tell the indestructible man that someone plans to murder him.
  7. Re:great news! by cperciva · · Score: 4, Informative

    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
  8. FreeBSD 5.0 for Alpha? by cyberkahn · · Score: 4, Interesting

    "FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now."

    I thought they were going to relegate Alpha to Tier 2, but I see ISO images on the servers? Thank you FreeBSD team!!!!!

  9. Try out FreeBSD on a live CD by cquark · · Score: 4, Informative

    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.

  10. Re:upgrade 4.10 to 5.3 stable by Bodhammer · · Score: 5, Informative
    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

    --
    "I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
  11. Ever since I fell from "Sun God" by YetAnotherName · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From 1988 to 1993 I was a "Sun God," meaning I adminisrated a university's computer lab and network of mostly SunOS (680x0 & SPARC) 4.0 systems, all based on BSD. Root access, god-like powers, you get the drift. About this time, Linux was just a posting in a newsgroup.

    After leaving the university environment and getting a real job, I wanted to re-live the Sun environment at home, but goodness, were Sun systems ever pricy. Linux looked like a viable alternative, but FreeBSD had just released 2.0 at the time.

    I went with FreeBSD.

    It was a pretty easy decision: FreeBSD was the more Sun-like of the two PC Unix-like systems. Specifically, Linux used the System V style of runlevels, and Sun had jaded me against System V ever since they stopped bundling the compiler and called their OS "Solaris."

    That was awhile back. Today, I've got rackmount hardware at home running a variety of operating systems. I get most of my stuff done on Linux. But FreeBSD has run, now runs, and will most likely continue to run my firewall and NAT. It doesn't do much else; but what it does, it does with efficiency and grace.

    Cheers, Chuckie.

  12. Re:Future FreeBSD releases by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Informative

    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?

  13. Re:A few questions... by molnarcs · · Score: 4, Informative
    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
  14. Re:been a while by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny
    okay...

    #define BROKE 1
    this of course, is not GNU/Broke, because if it was it could also read email.
  15. Crazy period?! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

    My teacher was right. The world collapsed the moment the Rex Sox Won.

    Look at everything that's happening since.
    - New releases of *BSD variants.
    - Bush re-elected
    - /. robot topics scaring the shit outta us
    - Half life 2 released in about a week.

    What next? Flying pigs? (Name that Simpson episode!)

  16. Re:Upgrading from RC2? by drmerope · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  17. NetBSD faster than FreeBSD??? by Phatmanotoo · · Score: 4, Interesting

    A close second is NetBSD, which right now is much faster and more stable than FreeBSD 5 (even in many SMP cases, too). FreeBSD is okay for many users but it has slowed down tremendously, lost a lot of cleanliness too. It's a shame to see such a great system degenerate, but it happened.

    Traditional folklore said OpenBSD is focused on security, NetBSD on portability, and FreeBSD on performance (on x86). How can NetBSD be faster than FreeBSD now? Heck, if NetBSD is about correctness and portability, and on top of that they manage to beat FreeBSD in terms of speed, then there's something really really wrong with FreeBSD.

    So I guess my real question is, is it really true that NetBSD is surpassing FreeBSD at heir own game?