FreeBSD 5.4 Released

FreeBSD 5.4 is out. Reader KFW excerpts from the announcement: "The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes." Here are the release notes.

Comments

congrats

[moz25]

Congrats to the freebsd team.

I have one (uneducated) question though: they mention a number of security fixes. How long does it generally take for a fix/patch to come out on freebsd compared to linux (or the other bsd variants)? I'm considering experimenting with it, but the relative comfort of packaging systems I'm familiar with makes it sort of hard.

Re:congrats

[Triumph The Insult C]

you can usually measure it in hours

openbsd ... it's probably already been fixed for a few months

Re:congrats

[saleenS281]

As fast if not faster than linux. Also, IIRC (don't flame me, correct me if I'm wrong) most linux variants of packaging systems were derived from BSD. As for worrying about about the packaging system... you only need two utilities, and two config files. cvsup-without-gui and portupgrade. It's literally as simple as portinstall *package you want*. And if you want it updated portupgrade *package to be updated*. You just have to keep your ports tree up to date and you'll have the most up to date versions available. It's probably one of the simplest systems I've ever seen. Also, there's portaudit which will automatically scan the security lists to see if any of your installed packages are vulnerable. And finally the "portupgrade -a" command which will update everything (although I can't say I recommend this one) but if that's your cup of tea, it makes it real simple.

VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[green pizza]

No mention of it in the release notes, I wonder if USB finally works properly on the VIA CLE266 / VT8235 chipset. That's the only thing that keeps me on Linux.

Free BSD

[a3217055]

Congrats Well awaited, will install and give it a try. Sorry not top of the line hardware... But then what about Debian, Debian is like dreamer in high school. J/K But BSD is well welcomed, I run BSD on my laptop but after some stand offs it is one of the most nicest systems I have used. But I always ask this to the Linux guys at my compnay ( ps I also run linux ) why did linux get the market it has now and not BSD ? Even thought BSD has a lot of cooler things . . . PS Apple OSX is not BSD, it is a lot like your lil'sister who gets involved with the wrong type of guy in the adult industry.

Re:good stuff

[dabigpaybackski]

I've thought the same thing on more than one occasion, but the time for MS to have made that decision was years ago, before they spent all that money on anti-Unix advertising.

It would be hard for them to talk their way out of the rhetorical position they're in, where (it is claimed) Unix is inferior/dead/too expensive.

It's too bad, because I think they would be in a stronger position had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS a couple of years ago? Unthinkable.

GUI to desktop

[guildsolutions]

I still contend that all BSD and linux developers need to work together on making a stable, solid, well functional GUI like OS X for the X86 arch, so that it can compete against windows on a larger scale for the desktop position. Without forcing microsofts hand with a good, stable well working GUI... Its never going to happen.

Re:So what's 5.4 like for 4.x users?

[setagllib]

With minimal/no tinkering I could get a full Apache2+MySQL+mod_php rig up from pkgsrc in DragonFly BSD. X is another matter, but it's been done.

There are worse problems than that though. I recall having mysterious behavior (also seen on mailing lists) when trying to forward things to a local FTP proxy, which is the only way to have transparent FTP NATting with PF (and IPFW/natd just didn't work at all, but I might have just missed something: it's been years since I last used it). So it has some caveats as a gateway, but if you're willing to work around them it's a great system.

Personally I'm waiting until all of the other important work is done first, finally revealing the power of their SMP and VFS implementations and so on. We could either have a strong contender for Linux' position of "does everything fast enough without being too complicated", or a depressing failure (which is more likely to be from lack of software support than any developer issues: there's little point running DFly if the package manager issue isn't resolved).

Miniinst iso

[eventhorizon5]

Is there a miniinst ISO image for release 5.4? (it's the network install image). 5.3 had one, but there doesn't seem to be one available.

-eventhorizon