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FreeBSD LiveCD 1.1 Ready For Download
An anonymous reader writes "It's my pleasure to announce FreeSBIE 1.1, a LiveCD based on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE.
Some of the innovations since 1.0 include: A renewed series of scripts to support power users; An installer to let users install FreeSBIE 1.1 on their hard drives, thus having a powerful operating system such as FreeBSD, but with all the personalizations FreeSBIE 1.1 carries; and the presence of the best open source software, chosen and personalized, such as X.Org 6.7, XFCE 4.2RC1, Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 0.9.2. Moreover, many bugs were solved thanks also to the help of numerous beta testers which we are honoured to thank. For more information visit FreeSBIE.org"
LiveCDs are an easy way to "try out" an operating system without commiting to anything. You can pop one of these in the drive, play with a bit, and still have your regular operating system intact when you're done. The one I use the most, though, is the System Rescue CD. I used that with all of the Windows machines I unofficially support, and now whenever one of them goes bad I can stick that CD in and restore the drive image from the network in about 45 minutes. No more spending days getting everything reinstalled and tweaked just right.
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004)
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004)
"[FreeBSD] has a secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004)
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (30 Sep 2004)
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004)
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
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Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
The article poster might at least have mentioned that, but here it is, in a comment.
The DragonFly installer team really deserve kudos for this thing. Especially for making it so generic. I heard someone even made an OpenBSD installer from this. It really is that flexible and easy to muck with.
The first revisions of this relied on CAPS, which is the new IPC framework in DragonFly. Later on, other ways of IPC were added (sockets etc.) which makes this possible. Also, kudos to GeekGod of livebsd.com for sending the patches to the FreeSBIE team.
The cool thing about the bsdinstaller is that the interface is decoupled from the back end which does the actual partitioning/copying/etc. There is even a CGI front-end available. Do your installs from a web browser! :) Oh, and an X-based installer (both Qt and GTK) is in the works.
of course it's mounted read only when you boot single user 'rescue' mode. you have to mount it read/write after: /sbin/mount -u /
/sbin/swapon -a
/sbin/mount -a -t ufs
turning on swap is a good idea as well:
then you can try mounting all the other partitions:
Common sense is not so common.