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

Offtopic

[anandpur]

Pamela Jones (PJ) of GROKLAW posted her response on her weblog.
Printable Version.

Sniff, sniff

[Anonymous Coward]

What's that smell?

Re:Sniff, sniff

[Anonymous Coward]

"it was you" -- Peter Griffin.

Sorry guys

[DarkHelmet]

I'm not dead.

I'm really sorry everyone, but a story like this is just begging for it.

http://www.mwscomp.com/movies/grail/grail-02.htm

FreeBSD:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
What?
CUSTOMER:
Nothing. Here's your ninepence.
FreeBSD:
I'm not dead!
CART MASTER:
'Ere. He says he's not dead!
CUSTOMER:
Yes, he is.
FreeBSD:
I'm not!
CART MASTER:
He isn't?
CUSTOMER:
Well, he will be soon. Netcraft confirms it.
FreeBSD:
I'm getting better!

Re:Sorry guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, a holy grail joke. Now that's original.

Re:Sorry guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't FreeBSD the distro that thought it was dying, but it turns out it was just a pussy?

Re:Sorry guys

[Anonymous Coward]

*sarcasm detector explodes*

Re:Sorry guys

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't FreeBSD the distro that thought it was dying, but it turns out it was just a pussy?

So you're saying it just smelled that way?

how...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ok...So how much is FreeBSD 5.4 going to cost me?

Re:how...

[Anonymous Coward]

Free.

Re:how...

[Anonymous Coward]

You too can own a copy of Free BSD! Just Paypal get_freebsd352@hotmail.com from a bank account (sorry, no credit cards accepted)!

Re:how...

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a little contract called the BSD license, which transfers your soul over to a dameon by the name of 'chuck' for unlimited free use of the operating system and source code. So 1 soul == unlimited license on the system. I believe microsoft used the soul of founder bill gates, while apple, used the soul of someone from the marketing dept.

Re:how...

[rubycodez]

Outpacing the even the steep markups on Microsoft office products in the last 3 years, 5.4 will cost you 150% as much as 5.3 did ! ! ! !

Re:how...

[td]

5.4 times as much as 1.0.

Re:how...

[gareth6889]

FLAMEBAIT??? uhhh... how?

Re:how...

[Anonymous Coward]

Huh ? Nothing, buddy. But beware of OPENBSD, cause this one costs you your anal virginity.

Alive

[p0]

Good to see it is still alive and very kicking.

Re:Alive

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah. FreeBSD and your mom have a lot in common. Except that FreeBSD isn't bound and gagged and stored in my closet.

Hmmm

[Anonymous Coward]

This brings a certain scene from Kill Bill Volume 2 to mind.

It's not dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

It's just pining for the fjords.

I mean, why do you think Linux was started in Finland?

Re:It's not dead...

[AussieVamp2]

are you sure they put fjords on Finland as well? :)

Re:It's not dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey! No fjords here! If you want them, they will be in Norway.

Re:It's not dead...

[Anonymous Coward]

What if it was pining for the thousand lakes?

Re:It's not dead...

[BSDFreak]

It's just pining for the fjords.

Shouldn't it be pinging for the fjords?

LINUX WOMEN ARE UGLY OLD HAGS

[Anonymous Coward]

Who Is Pamela Jones?
By Maureen O'Gara

Friday May 6, 2005 - A few weeks ago I went looking for the elusive harridan who supposedly writes the Groklaw blog about the SCO v IBM suit.

The now-famous opinion-shaping open source leader Pamela Jones, aka PJ, doesn't give conventional face-to-face interviews. Never has, near as anyone knows. All communication is virtual. Only one person in the world has ever claimed to have met her - in the pressroom at LinuxWorld in Boston complete with a Pamela Jones badge - and described her as a fortyish reddish-blonde who giggled a lot.

Oh yeah? Wonder what cold crème she uses.

Pamela Jones is a 61-year-old Jehovah's Witness who lives in a shabby genteel garden apartment in desperate need of an interior decorator on a heavily trafficked commercial road at 304 North Central Avenue in Hartsdale, New York. Hartsdale is in Westchester and Westchester is IBM territory.

See, even though Groklaw treats cell phones like they were Kleenex and changes its unpublished numbers regularly, one number it left with a journalist led to this flat and - wouldn't you know it but - some calls from there had been placed to the courts in Utah and to the Canopy Group so obviously this just isn't any Pamela Jones.

Pamela has lived in apartment 1A for 10 years at least, according to the super, who says he's watched people move in, have children, and the children marry and move away.

Now, this isn't your usual anonymous New York apartment. It's practically a self-contained village where the super goes for the old ladies' groceries when there's snow on the ground and people know each other's business.

But the super didn't know much about Pamela except that she had a computer, worked at home (maybe sometimes) for a lawyer, was "paranoid" - his word - and "sensitive to smells."

He remembered how he was cleaning paintbrushes one day and she came running down the stairs screaming "Fire."

She was also missing and had been for weeks.

Nobody there knew where she was.

She had up and disappeared one day, and the super was worried about her. He said her son had dropped by and he didn't know where she was, and that some strange man that "nobody knew," as the super described him, had tried to get into her apartment while she was gone - the Medeco lock she had had installed on her door - something nobody else in the complex seemed to feel a need for - was more expensive than the door. But, as it happened, the super said, she had just sent in her rent in an envelope postmarked Connecticut.

Like an episode out of "Where in the World is Carmen San Diego," the trail led to 10 Bittersweet Trail in Norwalk, Connecticut, 24 miles away. Sure enough, parked in the driveway was Pamela's car, just as the super had described it, a dark gray '90s Japanese number with a bunch of Jehovah Witness pamphlets tossed on the backseat.

The woman at the house, Barbara Sharnik, told a disjointed story. She didn't know Pamela, Pamela hated her, Pamela wasn't there, Pamela left her car there because it got bumped, Pamela left her car there because she left town, and so on.

Afterwards Barbara called the cops, and then the cops called the number we left with her and the cops said that she was Pamela's mother and that Pamela was on the run and had shacked up with her mother because she had gotten "threatening mail" weeks before and that she had just gotten spooked again because "people were getting hurt around [my] stories" and had lighted out for Canada.

Odd, the subject of my stories - or any stories - never came up during our brief interview. I was just looking for Pamela.

That left Pamela's son, Nicolas Richards, who, as it happens, had been in the software business in Manhattan until - why, my goodness - things seem to have come a cropper right around the time Groklaw came into existence.

Nick and his ma were apparently involved together in Medabiliti Inc, an ISV, because one Pamela Jones with a Westches

Re:LINUX WOMEN ARE UGLY OLD HAGS

[the Howard Dean Camp]

Wow, this PJ is one wacked out freakazoid... And I thought _I_ was paranoid.

Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I hope so. SMP + MYSQL performance is horrible with the *BSD's across the board. :(

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

[Anonymous Coward]

Generally the mailing list comes out with patches much quicker than other flavors of *nix. 24 hour turn around times with patches is not uncommon for FreeBSD (They pride themselves with security)

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

[jwthompson2]

As fast as they are fixed, which in reality ends up being comparable to Linux, just listen on the appropriate mailing lists and follow the step-by step instructions. There are also some automated utilities in the ports collection that ease security updates. The BSD ports system will take care of most of your packaging concerns as well since it is an actively updated collection, although most require compilation from source there is the binary alternative, package, which should be easy enough for most RPM folk I would imagine.

Check out this link regarding packages and ports.

Re:congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

Couldn't you always measure it in hours?

Re:congrats

[Triumph The Insult C]

"a matter of a few hours" is what i meant, but didn't type. sorry

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.

Re:congrats

[drmerope]

Let me fill in some holes others left out. New releases are announced as having fixed security problems, but that is a comparison against the previous version's original ISO image only.

Security fixes are backported to earlier versions. Those versions still officially maintained have fixes backported by the security officers. Older versions tend to also get fixes but merely by the work of interested committers. Thus it isn't usual to see fixes being backported to releases as far back as 4.3.

What do I mean by backported? Users can update their /usr/src directory and rebuild. More recently a binary update service has been available.

Thus there is for example 5.3-RELEASE, and 5.3-p5.

Generally speaking, there is no need to wait for new releases to get fixes. Fixes are painlessly and automatically available almost overnight.

All of this applies to the software officially maintained by the FreeBSD system--i.e., anything in the "base system" Other software generally gets fixes in ports soon after the upstream version has a fix... but backing this is the port-audit database. port-audit is maintained by the security team and lists all the known vulnerabilities against third-party software. A cron job mails you warnings about vulnerable third-party software. The ports system warns you about vulnerable software and libraries when you attempt to install (even when a new install depends on an already installed but vulernable library.

Re:congrats

[cperciva]

24 hour turn around times with patches is not uncommon for FreeBSD

In all honesty... 24 hours is very unusual for us. I can think of one case where it happened recently, but that was when we rushed an advisory out in order to fit into the 5.4 release schedule.

A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.

Re:congrats

[irc.goatse.cx troll]

OpenBSD is a common fallacy. Its security through elitism and egotism; people blindly follow theo with the assumption that if he says its secure, it might actually be secure. Theo has a habbit of never admitting to any exploit he doesnt have to, even if it means leaving everyone vuln. You can either grab a patch off an obsd mailing list for an exploit Theo denies, Or wait those "few months" for it to be silently rolled in to the main branch without theo ever mentioning a word about how everyone who doesnt upgrade to it is still vulnerable, or how long people had to remain vulnerable so he could keep his ego happy.
It's been like this since the original "no exploits"(or whatever it was) days, back when he'd hide the ntalkd bug. Then as time went on and the exploits piled on, he had to slowly twist his words around like the marketing speak it is; adding clauses about only root exploits counting, only remote exploits, only in services enabled by default (Hello? Why claim to have audited the entire software tree if you'll disown _ANY_ fault for its insecurities?), etc. Luckily gobbles set him in his place with the ssh
utup-theo exploit.
If you won't accept blind marketing speak and denied insecurity from Microsoft, Why accept it from The
o?

Re:congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

I meant "OpenBSD security is a common fallacy". I had to retype that message 3 times due to browser crashes. Why is lynx/links the only browsers to realise that their crappy textarea's are bad input device and shell to $EDITOR?

Re:congrats

[archen]

How "fast" a security fix gets out is a bit more complicated then "here is the fix". With FreeBSD the base system gets fixes out very fast, within a day or two. With Linux the fix comes out in just as fast, but how fast YOU get the fix varies a lot depending upon your distro. With FreeBSD ports (aka the third party software collection on Linux) it varies depending upon who is the port maintainer and how much testing they feel should be done - that goes for Linux too however.

Re:congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why someone with a clue, like Brett Glass, should be the new security officer.

Re:congrats

[Anonymous Coward]

weak sauce moderation, he brings up a valid point. hardly trolling. whoever did that should be chastised severely!

Re:congrats

[jusdisgi]

A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.

Am I the only guy that finds that really scary? I mean, I agree, we need to be pretty sure that a security fix isn't going to break other things....but my stress level on day 2 of knowing that my sshd has a remote-root-exploit would be pretty damned high. I would hope that my distro could check for breakage during the first day, before I start sucking down antacids to deal with my ulcer.

Re:congrats

[cperciva]

my stress level on day 2 of knowing that my sshd has a remote-root-exploit would be pretty damned high

This is why security issues are usually not publicly disclosed immediately. A window of a few days between informing vendors and public disclosure allows vendors to prepare and test their patches.

Obviously, if there is a publicly disclosed remote root vulnerability in sshd, FreeBSD would fix it as soon as possible.

FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD = Satan

Re:FreeBSD

[whiteranger99x]

actually, that's a Daemon :P

Re:FreeBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

And as we all know Damon is Jesus.

Remember, cvsup is your friend!

[nubbie]

Using CVSup and then Rebuilding "world"

BSD is dying 5.3 released

[skingers6894]

BSD is dying 5.3 fixes the following issues:

BSD is dying 5.2 didn't work.

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[skingers6894]

Overrated, troll.

Geez guys I was only joking.

I like BSD.

Touchy.

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[Anonymous Coward]

I would've modded you redundant, assface.

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[skingers6894]

Maybe, but anonymous cowards don't get to mod at all. Get an account, make some contributions and then you'll get some mod points and be able to mod me "redundant" later.

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. Get some throw-away e-mail accounts and register some slashdot accounts with them. Then make a bunch of posts pandering to whatever views are the most popular, thus building up your mod points. Note that you don't have to really mean what you write, you're just trying to build up points. Be sure to spread your points out among your various accounts. Kind of like building up a nuclear stockpile or patent portfolio, you can then use these points to blast anyone you later disagree with or just don't like don't like. Its great fun, but AC's aren't allowed to play!

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[skingers6894]

You're a funny lad.

I don't think Mod points are as powerful as a "nuclear stockpile" but you may have a point in terms of the "patent portfolio"

I'd mod you up to "amusing" if I could...

Re:BSD is dying 5.3 released

[Anonymous Coward]

Your kidding, right? I have excellent karma and haven't seen mod points in years. So, now all I can do is meta-moderate regularly, just to fuck with the system.

The end is near.

[Eric(b0mb)Dennis]

Sarge was frozen.

FreeBSD has risen from the grave.

It's hailing here in northern California in may.

The end is near, put on your glasses and anti-radiation suits boys, we're in for a ride.

Re:The end is near.

[grolschie]

Does this mean Duke Nukem Forever is about to be released too?

Re:The end is near.

[Anonymous Coward]

That means I'll be able to run it on my Longhorn box!

Re:The end is near.

[PakProtector]

I would, but everything is so black, I just can't seem to locate my Peril Sensitive Sunglasses.

Re:The end is near.

[Anonymous Coward]

The release date for DNF is one day AFTER the end of the universe. So yeah, if you can hold out until after the destruction of the dark universe, then you'll be good to go.

Re:The end is near.

[i.r.id10t]

That's OK. It is somebody else's problem.

Re:The end is near.

[bubkus_jones]

The glasses, they do nothing!

Re:The end is near.

[Zan Lynx]

According to this month's PC Gamer, yes.

Re:The end is near.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not so fast.... "Prey" != "DNF"

Re:The end is near.

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hailing here in northern California in may.

I saw that too. I was even wondering if some flying pig was dropping that ice to freeze over hell in conjunction to the Debian freeze.

Re:The end is near.

[Anonymous Coward]

California is hell? Makes sense, I guess.

Re:Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a few things from the release notes that might help with MySQL and/or SMP: A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE scheduler. A bug in Inter-Processor Interrupt (IPI) handling, which could cause SMP systems to crash under heavy load, has been fixed. More details are contained in errata note A number of bugfixes for libpthread have been merged from HEAD. Anyone from FreeBSD know for sure if the fixes above will help bring FreeBSD up to par with Linux as far as MySQL performance on SMP machines go?

I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried installing 5.3 back when that was released but all I got was a boot prompt and a solid tone/beep.

I had followed the standard basic install, using the whole disk, etc. Obviously something was wrong with the bootloader. I did some searching but didn't really find anything. Some stuff seemed like a hell of a lot of work just to fix the issue so I gave up.

(note that I have been using BSD systems for some 8 years but it's been about a year or two since I had to install one from scratch; I just remember that the install worked a lot better back then)

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

You may want to check your hardware.. Install works fine on everything I've used it on.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[bcrowell]

I was running FreeBSD as my desktop OS for quite a while (from the 4.x through the beginning of 5.x), and am still running it on my server. Recently I've switched my desktop machines to plain Debian and Ubuntu. At the risk of being too factual and objective :-), here's what I see as the pros and cons:

Good things about FreeBSD:

1. Variety is good. If we wanted a monoculture, we'd be running Windows. It's cool that we have an OS that's under a non-viral license, as well as one that's GPL'd.
2. It's a single, consistent system. You can get a book (or actually, several books) describing FreeBSD, and get a description of exactly the system you're using. With Linux, you have, e.g., O'Reilly's Running Linux, which says, "If you're running Red Hat, then..., but if you're running Debian, ... etc."
3. If you want something rock-solid to run a server on, and you don't need support for the latest hardware, FreeBSD is great.

Reasons to prefer Linux:

1. If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.
2. The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking. The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[menkhaura]

FreeBSD 5 is now the stable branch, and 4.x became legacy.

Please enlighten me, how is FreeBSD 5.x flaky?

The ports system works almost perfectly for me (FreeBSD is my main desktop and it is on one of my test servers). Keeping curent is simply a matter of make update && portupgrade -a every morning (I don't even run cvsup manually), with the occasional hiccup that is easily solvable by yourself or with a little help from TFM, freebsd-questions@lists.freebsd.org, or freebsd-ports@lists.freebsd.org.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[saleenS281]

I have a feeling you haven't touched 5.x since it's first iterations. Granted, the VERY FIRST 5.x releases were QUITE flaky. But since 5.3 was released it's been nothing but stable for me.

As a desktop O/S, I'm sure you did have issues, but then, that was never it's intention.

What exactly have you had portupgrade break? I've never had a single problem with it. If nothing else it's helped to take care of my dependency woe's.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[sp0rk173]

If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.

Not true. Device drivers are usually backported unless they depend on some system difference between 4.x and 5.x. I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.

The next one is a doosy...

The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.

I honestly have not encounted a break in any major apps in ports in the past 3 years. It's evolved a lot since you last used it, i guess.

The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.

No, no no. Not true. I had a production system with apache, php, postgresql, gnome, KDE, etc installed (it was a workstation/light-use webserver for a lab i was working in). I installed it at 4.5, last time i touched it it was at 4.11, all ports upgraded (using cvsup and portupgrade), only one install point. After being a FreeBSD user for about a year. If I can do it, in a production environment, without any break in's or security issues, anyone can. My webserver here at home has been running 5 since 5.2.1, same deal - all things installed from ports, only one point of install, all upgraded by cvsup and portupgrade. No problems. Then there's my workstation, it runs Gentoo, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD 5.3. FBSD has been installed since 5.3 first made -RELEASE, runs gnome 2.10 (which hit ports before it hit portage, ~1 week after official release). Only one install point, constantly updated using cvsup and portupgrade. Gentoo? Great little distro, but i've installed it at least 3 or 4 separate times due to major breakages or just aggrivation with portage. I don't hold it against portage, it's just still maturing.

Your report couldn't be further from my experience. Ever since i started running freebsd back four years ago i've been able to keep an up-to-date, stable system without much difficulty.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[jadavis]

I am about to make my first attempt at a preliminary freebsd box that will turn production eventually (webserver).

Can someone please set me in the right direction with some basic guidelines like:

(1) What version should I use? I assume 5.4 is too new, but 4.x is too old, right?

(2) Are the defaults too conservative? If so, how should I tune it for webserving (i.e. what are some sane settings)?

(3) How well does SMP work? Is it pretty much out-of-the-box, or do I need to mess around with it?

(4) Are there any linux -> freebsd gotchas?

(5) Is there a linux -> freebsd guide?

(6) One of the primary reasons I'm trying to run the webserver on freebsd is security. Linux is fine, so long as you upgrade the kernel every release (which seems stupid to me), but I'm looking for an OS that I can forget about for a while longer. Can I expect to see some improvement in this area?

I can find stuff like "how to use ports" and all that, and I've run a basic freebsd os before with all the software installed. I just need something in between to tell me what to do to make a webserver (a real one with real settings).

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[evilviper]

If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.

FreeBSD 5.x is a bit flakey compared to v4.x, but plenty stable when compared with Linux. Not trying to flame Linux users out there, but modern releases of Linux (ie. not Debian-stable) are far more unstable than FreeBSD 5.x.

The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.

This is really ridiculous. I've practically never heard anyone say that ports has broken on them. I get the feeling you're just subtly trolling.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[bark]

I can answer a few of those questions. I've been using freebsd in a production webserver / mysql server environment since 4.9

1) Use 5.4. The 5.x tree is stable now, to use anything older than 5.3 is to invite yourself to mysterious flakeness, as other posters have said, earlier releases of 5.x such as 5.1 and 5.2 are not really rock solid. But 5.4 is pure gold.

2) The defaults are not too conservative, because the system self tunes itself according to the usage of the machine. Beware of tuning the system yourself through the sysctl's. The same with Linux, you wouldn't want to tweak the system until you are comfortable with it enough to know what to tweak.

6) There is a binary upgrade tool for patching security errors, but as people mentioned before, the "cvsup", then "buildworld" process makes sliced butter of this aspect of upgrading to patch security errors. Basically, the source to every single binary in the base system is included in the release, and updated together, so you can rebuild your entire system with all the security fixes included whenever you want.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

It's a single, consistent system. You can get a book (or actually, several books) describing FreeBSD, and get a description of exactly the system you're using. With Linux, you have, e.g., O'Reilly's Running Linux, which says, "If you're running Red Hat, then..., but if you're running Debian, ... etc."

People always harp on about this, but it is a bit stupid. I mean FreeBSD is a BSD variant the same as Debian is I suppose a GNU/Linux variant.

So your book that tells you about FreeBSD only still won't tell you about NetBSD, OpenBSD, DragonflyBSD, TrustedBSD, Darwin (if you call that a BSD derivative), etc...

So with FreeBSD, you have as much a description of the system you're running on as you do when running Debian.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[DrSkwid]

I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.

Not extensively enough to try Bluetooth on 4.x

I had a horrible situation where I had to dual boot for my Wavelan (4.3) and my Bluetooth (5.1)

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[kan0r]

I recently installed 5.3-RELEASE. The *freshly* installed system didn't unmount filesystems (ext2 and ufs) when performing a shutdown or reboot. Fsck on every single startup until I worked around it: I unmount the filesystems now "by hand" in rc.shutdown. And also, portupgrade broke my X. I could of course fix it, but it was far from a clean upgrade. Since BSD is not a real desktop system, thats not too bad of course, but still...

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

1) 5.x is "new" but it's pretty well tested and rather stable. I haven't had any problems with it in production since I switched my servers over to 5.2.1 . Only testing will really tell the truth though.

2) Defaults are probably too conservative (esepecially for databases). You can easily find tuning hings via google, the project main site, or often documented somewhere in the port documents itself.

4-5) There really isn't any good shortcut either than reading the handbook and really learning the OS (which is true of switching any UNIX). Previous experience is a big help, but you need to reorient yourself and learn new methods and tools. Wheither you stick to FreeBSD or not, I think the approach of FreeBSD was a big help to me in Linux administration - so learning something new is a good thing.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

The 5 series uses background fsck, it does not run on startup, so you are making it up. Nice try. Thanks for playing.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Just Some Guy]

If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.

For the record, BSD supported USB before Linux did. While you're correct in that Linux is likely to have at least partial support for new or odd hardware before FreeBSD, it's certainly not always the case.

The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS).

Sorry, but I definitely can't agree with that point. I've been using FreeBSD as a desktop OS for years without significant differences from the equivalent Linux setup. It is, however, critically important to read the /usr/ports/UPDATING file and follow the directions in it before randomly upgrading stuff. The biggest problem with portupgrade seems to be that it works well enough that a lot of people expect it to perform miracles.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[jack_csk]

I like FreeBSD and I am using it, but I think some of the complains of some FreeBSD advocates regarding Linux are not fair.
Surely there are too many Linux distributions, yet they are just like the family of *BSDs (OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly, ...) to me. Since the source is open, we can't stop anybody from forking a distribution for what they want it to be.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[wirelessbuzzers]

I'm going to pitch in with GP on this one. I've been running FreeBSD 5.3 on a file/web/printserver for a while. I'll upgrade to 5.4 now, but this summer when I have more time, I'm going to switch to Linux (probably Debian or Ubuntu).

Why? Debian has a better package manager. I won't have to deal with portupgrade. I won't have to compile to get a package made this month; on a slow machine this is a big win. I won't have to wait 2 months for security fixes (cough MySQL). And FreeBSD has been stable, but not overwhelmingly so. The machine still crashes once a month or so, and half the time hangs during a reboot. Certain of the daemons die at random and thus have to be babysat by cronjobs or runscripts.

There are some things I'll miss though. For one, POSIX ACLs are built into FFS. For another, snapshots: FFS snapshots are much simpler and more efficient than LVM snapshots (any word on when someone's getting NetApp-style snapshots though?)

Simultaneously and independently, the Harvard Computer Society, of which I'm a member, is making a similar switch. They're switching to Debian for easier maintainability, and for grsec and/or systrace. HCS allows student groups to run scripts on their servers, which causes them to get hacked every once in a while (like when the phpbb exploits were 4ll t3h r4g3), and with grsec they should be better able to limit the damage. The main things they'll miss are pf (which they might get a hardware firewall to replace) and dump -L (much easier than LVM snapshots).

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[jack_csk]

You're sure that you only use portupgrade -a to upgrade your ports? Last time I haven't read /usr/ports/UPDATING and do portupgrade -a, my upgrade of Perl was a broken one.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Just because you and the admins at HCS don't know how to use the system doesn't mean it's at fault; it's perfectly possible to run systrace on FreeBSD. And we get binary patches for pkg's, it's just not in by default, use pkg_add -r to add it!

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[wirelessbuzzers]

Ah, didn't know about the systrace port, thanks.

As for binary packages, yes, I know that it's possible to patch them, but ports updates faster when there's say a PHP vuln, so we still have to compile it. We usually update due to security vulns and so time is important.

And while I'm not a ports expert, neither I nor the HCS admins install system stuff via make, and so fixing broken dependencies in the package database is pretty irritating. Maybe there's a way to avoid this problem, but it's not in the Handbook.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently you don't know how to use the ports system. Use portupgrade and you'll be fine. The main problem I see with Debian is that their social contract states that no software made after 1776 can be packaged in the stable releases, so when Sarge comes out it's already several centuries old.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

The binary update tool is nice, but it uses the proprietary perceval protocol and you need to subscribe in order to gain access for more than one host.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

There aren't 350 different versions of BSD. And most of those distros do a really piss poor QA work, i.e. if it works on an x86 box with IDE drivers then it's good to go.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

I tried 5.3 on my p133 too, and the thing hanged on boot. So I went back to 4.10 [they have 4.11 now] and everything was hunky dory just like in the good old days. The computer works, but I can't play with the new toys. I understand that is why they are still developing the 4.x branch: because they haven't got all the shiny new stuff working yet in 5.x, and they need something the stabilty-conscious crowd can continue to rely on.

That said, I am still hoping one of these days they will get a graphical installer to work, and get some kind of kde/ gnome/ whatever to install itself. Then we won't have to use that text-script kludge of an installer that hasn't seemingly been updated since the 2.x era. I really look forward to the day when both graphics AND audio can work on a FreeBSD system without a PhD/ guru being hired to set them up.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[M1FCJ]

I recently installed DragonFly on a laptop and a very old desktop. It had been some time since I attempted a BSD as a desktop and I was quite impressed with its speed (laptop had 48MB ram and Pentium 150 CPU and the desktop had 128MB ram and Pentium 200). None of the modern Linux distributions were as fast and responsive on these boxes as the DragonFly is.

Taking I've been using commercial Unix and Linux flavours for quite some time now, can you explain if I should ditch these two DragonFly's and switch to FreeBSD 5.4? I am seriously thinking of installing my home web server on a DragonFly machine because of its performance on old hardware and simplicity. What would be the pros and cons?

(Moderators: This is a serious question, not a troll so bugger off).

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[molnarcs]

If you read the ext2 notes, it is not supported very well. Nevertheless, I have never had any issues with it - except for dirty filesystems after boot. One of them devs sent a patch (Michael Nottebrock) - download it here. - that will unmount your ext2 filesystem before running the rest of shutdown procedure.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

If you want support for the latest hardware, you either need to run Linux, or FreeBSD 5.x, and FreeBSD 5.x is somewhat flaky.

Is "flaky" a technical term? Sounds like the kind of thing someone who just wants to mindlessly spread anti-FreeBSD FUD would say...

The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking. The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.

More ridiculous FUD. I use portupgrade -arR regularly without incident. In a production environment, you just set up one box as the build/test machine so you can be sure that everything will compile and run correctly. You can then distribute binary packages built on the build machine to your production servers. Did you ever consider the possibility that your problems might be due to your own stupidity or incompetence rather than any fault of FreeBSD or portupgrade? You should...

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Interesting seeing the ten or so responses saying that the ports system is perfect... I installed 5.3 a month ago, and ran CVSup on the ports collection, and it messed up dozens of ports. When I tried to compile them, I got messages about libraries already existing that were out of date, and that I should remove the old library and rebuild it and then try building the package again. So I try that, and then that library has 8 things that depend on it, ad nauseum.

Also, things like this indicate that in fact, there are many ports that are broken.

Note that I'm not trying to say anything bad about FBSD, I love the system and use it as my primary desktop OS. But the ports system most certainly is not perfect. It seems to be best when the release you're using is relatively new (e.g. right now), though.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Ratman96]

Then we won't have to use that text-script kludge of an installer that hasn't seemingly been updated since the 2.x era. I really look forward to the day when both graphics AND audio can work on a FreeBSD system without a PhD/ guru being hired to set them up. They already do work. At least for me with a cmipci-based soundcard and a nvidia geforce4 for graphics. It could be your hardware combination: some stuff will just not work. Same luck for Linux and Windows though. The installer is acknowledged as way too old even for the FreeBSD team, but it still works. OTOH i've never been able to install Debian, i just can't figure the installer. Now i use Gentoo, it didn't even have an installer, go figure. I remember when i first tried Linux, when the 2.4 kernel series began, getting sound out of it was a real mess. I didn't know if i had to get OSS or what! I managed to make it work after three weeks or so. Now, with kernel 2.6, it works like a charm! Perhaps it was just my ignorance back then... or bad luck, some hardware just won't work.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[evilviper]

I won't have to compile to get a package made this month; on a slow machine this is a big win.

Either you don't know what you're talking about, or this is a troll. FreeBSD has binary packages for almost all of it's ports available. The only exceptions being those that can't be distributed for legal reasons.

They're switching to Debian for easier maintainability, and for grsec and/or systrace.

Systrace support in Linux is considered unstable. If you wanted systrace (which is a very good program), you'd be switching to OpenBSD/NetBSD.

The main things they'll miss are pf

Bingo, another reason to be switching to OpenBSD rather than Debian.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[menkhaura]

I've heard good things about DragonFly, but I've never used it, so I cannot compare it to vanilla FreeBSD. Maybe you can try it for yourself? All I can say is, I'm impressed with this new release of FreeBSD, they did an awesome job with the new scheduler (meaning, this baby is fast!); it is worth a try.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

So what you're saying is that you were wrong? Thought so.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

Background fsck does run on startup you stupid moron.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[kan0r]

Thanks alot for the information. My problem was not only related to ext2. The ufs partitions/slices didn't dismount clean either. I think I am just gonna upgrade to 5.4-RELEASE and see if that solves my problem.
<opinion>
I appriciate the hard work of the FreeBSD developers, but nevertheless I think for a -RELEASE version of FreeBSD, this is somewhat poor.
</opinion>

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

its performance on old hardware and simplicity.

Sounds like you want NetBSD.

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[Anonymous Coward]

That said, I am still hoping one of these days they will get a graphical installer to work

Graphical installer = X at install = less hardware support. The text installer works just fine - read the handbook!

and get some kind of kde/ gnome/ whatever to install itself.

FreeBSD is really not intended for "the masses", and I don't want to see it become that way.

Then we won't have to use that text-script kludge of an installer that hasn't seemingly been updated since the 2.x era.

It works just fine for me and plenty of other people.

I really look forward to the day when both graphics AND audio can work on a FreeBSD system without a PhD/ guru being hired to set them up.

Hmm. I'm a high school freshman and I have all of the above working just fine. The Handbook is your friend!

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[suitepotato]

(note that I have been using BSD systems for some 8 years but it's been about a year or two since I had to install one from scratch; I just remember that the install worked a lot better back then)

A lot of things worked better back then but Levitra doesn't do anything for ease of BSD installation and configuration.

It's like Hotel California sometimes. "You can ifconfig any time you like, but you get no ip..." (guitar solo)

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[demon]

Well, not that it's an _overwhelming_ thing, but the 2.6 kernel supports POSIX ACLs out of the box with XFS, JFS, ext2/3 and possibly ReiserFS (but I don't trust it further than I can throw it). Just 'apt-get install acl' for the ACL tools, and use POSIX ACLs to your heart's content. I have been using 2.6 kernels on every server I'm running Debian on now - I'm using Debian testing (sarge) on them, due to hardware support, and it's been quite stable. /me crosses his fingers for sarge going stable RSN...

Re:I hope it's better than 5.3

[niteice]

From a UI design standpoint, sysinstall is roughly on the level of Program Manager. It does its needed tasks, but not all that well.

BTW, I'm also a high school freshman, and I find that OpenBSD kicks FreeBSD's ass.

good stuff

[Herr_Nightingale]

I just wish Microsoft would pull an Apple and stick a GUI on top of it. Sigh. Longhorn would come a lot sooner (mid-2010?) if they took this route. Plus it might not suck hairy donkey balls then.

re: good stuff

[Tab is on Slashdot]

Have you SEEN Microsoft GUIs?!

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Why doesn't MS just steal the Mac OSX GUI recipe (without all the one mouse button crap), Windows-ify it, and bang it on x86 BSD?

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.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS a couple of years ago? Unthinkable.

Unthinkable indeed, just picture it: Unix with clippy... *shudder*

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Remember Zenix (Microsoft Unix)?

Re:good stuff

[menkhaura]

Done and done.

Re:good stuff

[pr0c]

Herr_Nightingale (556106): I just wish Microsoft would pull an Apple and stick a GUI on top of it. Sigh. Longhorn would come a lot sooner (mid-2010?) if they took this route. Plus it might not suck hairy donkey balls then.

I've always wanted the same thing, sadly however the majority of ./ would just call Microsoft theives, etc... but its okay for Apple to do it...

I'm also waiting to see how receptive ./ is of the [potentially] new Apache project.. an implimentation of Java. Lets see if they treat it the same as mono or again hipocrits.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Xenix.

Re:good stuff

[jbplou]

You think they could be in a stonger position then they are now. They own the desktop market, have a good position in the server market, own the office suite market, own a decent development and business integration and back end software market(think SQL Server, .NET...). How else could they improve in position in your eyes, no wait lets not worry about your eyes lets worry about reality. Microsoft is doing fantanstic business wise, sure IBM and HP rank higher on the fortune 500 but microsof doesn't do harware or consulting. For a software only company they have dominated there chosen markets for the most part. Going to an OS based on Free-BSD would make it much easier for their competitors to run software on different platforms, it would be stupid, they need product lock-in to maintain their advantage.

Re: good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you seen apple's? They'd be better of slapping "Windows" over all the "KDE" text and going from there.

Re:good stuff

[ValiantSoul]

"but its okay for Apple to do it..."

No, NeXT did it, and Apple was looking to buy either NeXT or BeOS to base OS X on. They bought NeXT which was based on BSD.

Also, anyone notice how Apple's two choices had their first third and fourth letters capital but not the second?

Re:good stuff

[IntlHarvester]

When Microsoft wrote their own kernel, *BSD was essentially obsolete, and System V UNIX was ridiclously expensive. FreeBSD is is just now adding features that were in the NT Kernel 10 years ago.

Now they've got decades worth of software designed for the very non-Unix NT kernel, so switching isn't much of an option, nor would it necessarily produce better peformance or stability.

had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS

Apple sells a fairly medicore Unix where all the value is proprietary API layers. I can imagine that if Microsoft had done this, they would have been tarred-and-feathered by the Unix world for Embrace-and-Extending Unix -- rather than accepted like Apple is. Lose-Lose situation.

And it wouldn't that much different either -- Windows users would still be running proprietary Win32 in orange windows and would be just as ignorant of any kernel-level features.

Re:good stuff

[netdur]

microsoft did release UNIX based OS years before they did release ms DOS, and they called it xenix, anyway... to have UNIX as OS doesn't help anything, I have IE6 running over wine on linux, lately when I start it (mainly I use IE to test my web site) IE display pop-ups with different ads every time! my homepage set to "about:blank" so the only thing I can think, I have malware running over wine on my linux box, installed trough some hole in IE, in other hand, surfing net via firefox is secure, whatever your OS is, firefox makes it secure, microsoft is in big trouble they have crapy softwares... "it just work" & "fix it later" wont work, end of microsoft has been start...
--
- ah! forgive my stupidness

Re:good stuff

[mrselfdestrukt]

User starts typing:
l
*pop*
Clippy on Unix:
It looks like you're trying to write a cross-platform, intelligent forking, self-sustained, multi-thread application. Do you need help with that?
User: Fuck off clippy. I just wanted ls!

Re:good stuff

[larry bagina]

Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS a couple of years ago? Unthinkable.

Xenix. SFU. Look into it.

Re:good stuff

[Herr_Nightingale]

Product lock-in can be done the same way Apple's managed it: proprietary GUI layer. Want to run UNIX stuff? It'll look like crap, and you have to jump through three flaming hoops to do it, install X.org, etc.
Of course Apple's got the hardware lock-in too..

Re:good stuff

[Mancat]

The NT kernel is pretty solid, and well-engineered. The problem is the crap that Microsoft likes to pile around it.

Though NT isn't very Unix in design, it's still possible for Microsoft to add a Unix sublayer, a-la Services for Unix, but more completely integrated into the OS. POSIX compliance is there, and you can run most well-written Unix software in SFU already.

If Windows has to go the Unix route, Microsoft is still capable of doing it while maintaining compatibility.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

You know the NT kernel scales up to at least 16-32 CPUs for most tasks, right?

So yeah, it would not suck hairy donkey balls but it would suck huge sloppy elephant turds.

Re:good stuff

[DrSkwid]

You should go find out the path from ATT - MS Xenix - SCO

Re:good stuff

[setagllib]

It would break the backwards compatibility users expect when upgrading to 'the next Windows', which Microsoft have managed to maintain since DOS days with surprising success (and resulting bloat). The NT kernelification made DOS direct hardware access fail and some other performance hacks, but what can you do?

While I'd love to see a highly usable layer on top of a highly usable base system, I'd rather see more sensible software come out for Windows. I have begun to admit that Windows is still ahead in a lot of usability aspects, at least for desktops, and as long as you're a creative administrator you can work around its security and flexibility shortcomings. On servers, run BSD or Linux. No problem.

If Longhorn was FreeBSD + GUI it would be pretty awesome but, unless they pull of something really spectacular, would no longer be Windows-like and hence drive away a lot of customers. This is a bad thing for them. How MacOSX manages to be so backward compatible boggles the mind. Microsoft can't match that.

Re:good stuff

[mattyrobinson69]

MacOSX is backwards compatible through a subsystem (just how XP is "compatible" with some dos programs).

Windows already has a POSIX layer, and the common unix utils (google for "microsoft services for unix"). its about 250mb but at first glance looks ok.

They could do the same for w32 apps.

Re:good stuff

[jbplou]

Of course Apple's got the hardware lock-in too

More like product lock out, nobody uses Apples. Let me rephrase, very few people and almost no businesses use Mac.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

MS won't do it for one reason save nothing else: interoperability. As long as MS technology is significantly different from Unix they can fight all other systems by "vendor lockin". Right now MS is doing quite well and most software is "stuck" in windows wheither they like it or not. All of their competition is Unix based, so why make it easier to switch?

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft used to make a system V "distro" called xenix. It was a port to other processors of the system V tree. It was something they did in the early 80s and used until NT4 was released internally.

Microsoft eventually sold it and we now call it SCO!

Re:good stuff

[lewiz]

Says on Wikipedia that Microsoft exchanged Xenix for a 25% share in SCO. Is this still the case?

Re:good stuff

[limon.verde]

The SCO Microsoft got shares in is now known as Tarantella, Inc. From the Wikipedia article on The Santa Cruz Operation:

SCO announced on August 2, 2000 that it would sell its Server Software and Services Divisions, as well as UnixWare and OpenServer technologies, to Caldera Systems, Inc. The purchase was completed in May 2001. At that time Caldera changed its name to "Caldera International", and the remaining part of SCO, the Tarantella Division, changed its name to "Tarantella, Inc."

In August 2002 Caldera International renamed itself "The SCO Group" since the SCO UNIX products were still a strong source of revenue mainly due to the huge installation base dating back to the 1990s. It is this SCO Group, formerly known as Caldera, and not the former Santa Cruz Operation now known as Tarantella, that sued IBM in 2003 for $1 billion for allegedly "devaluing" Unix by contributing to the Unix-like Linux operating system.

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

You say that but I don't think you've carefully thought about it. With their doctrine Microsoft gets to very usable very fast, across a spectacular array of devices to an equally impressive array of ends.

All platforms have their sacrifices. Microsoft sacrificed some stability and security to completely dominate the lowest common denominator (which unfortunately has a nasty negative feedback loop with stability and security).

Re:good stuff

[setagllib]

But it'd have to be the other way around. FreeBSD-like kernel with PECOFF and some brutal surgery to support Windows-like paths (conceivably like how WINE does it, only better, because Wine is a nightmare) and process management concepts. NTFS and FAT* would no longer be useful at all, so you'd have to either use UFS2 or develop another FS. UFS2 has ACLs which I imagine could be used to replace NTFS' admittedly useful ACL system. Sub-FS encryption and compression are ideas with little use but are still possible to replace.

But it would certainly be interesting to see anyway. A real 'BSD for WIMPs' would really be a sight. But if it doesn't match the corporate hardware support of Windows (including the native ability to use Windows drivers - but NDISulator/ProjectEvil is Good Enough For Now) it won't be useful to anyone.

Re:good stuff

[mattyrobinson69]

that was my point - they do it now with the POSIX subsystem, so they could (and bloody should) just use a freebsd kernel with a *high level* win32 subsystem, that way win32 could be phased out like msdos support was.

They dont need to port the 'drive' naming system (c:, d:, etc) as its retarded (maybe provide a *high level* emulation for it).

device drivers in win2k didn't work in xp, xp's wont work in longhorn so if they scapped blackcomb or whatever its called and replaced it with freebsd+somewin32stuff the drivers wouldn't have to be rewritten any more than they would anyway.

i believe reiser4 would be a good filesystem for microsoft to use (although i dont know anything about ufs). if they paid namesys to port reiser4 to freebsd (if its not there already)and stablise it. they would have a solid filesystem with plugin support (plus performance and reliability[atomic writes]). The plugins would be useful in reiser4 because it could then do the encryption, compression etc that NTFS supports. (reiser does support ACL's doesn't it?)

Re:good stuff

[setagllib]

Reiser4 goes against the grain of nix-centric file systems by fragmenting like NTFS and FAT* do. I don't know what solution has been developed for this but it definitely means there's a shortcoming in the design.

I respect UFS for being very well balanced: it scales okay, it is reliable even after crashes (with SoftUpdates anyway), it performs well on most tasks even without clever journalling, and the lack of journal means it is suitable for even very small volumes (whereas ReiserFS seems to carry a universal 50 meg journal, making it useless for smaller media). It also happens to be supported very well in every BSD and to a lesser extent in Linux, with a limited Windows driver available. Although I'm all for journalling file systems, I don't recommend relying on them like Linux often seems to do (this is a problem on lower-end systems which need reliable storage but can't afford the overhead of journalling).

Anyway, you present the points of high level emulation, but it's not really as easy as that: if people run in to performance troubles they'll think the new OS sucks, especially if they're gamesr. But WINE has been remarkably successful at preserving performance, so maybe it's still possible. It's cleanliness that should matter here, and stability - but if MS was to re-wrap their own layer around a BSD base there shouldn't be a problem. Heck, some of their own subsystems started out as BSD copy-n-hack jobs.

Re:good stuff

[losinggeneration]

QUOTE: have a good position in the server market

around 20% isn't too bad, but considering a few years ago they had almost 35% of the market they seem to be loosing their footing again for the server market. (I'm just going off of netcraft which like any statistic isn't perfect by any means.) Anyways, for them to improve to me is to not continually lose market-share and not make as buggy of products which they lock people into (a prett good market strategy. But only for so long until people get fed up with it.)

Re:good stuff

[jbplou]

Netcraft stats are meaningless, what percentage of servers are exposed to the Interent, not a very high number I don't know the percent but only web, dns, and mail servers are exposed for the most part. You need to look at sales numbers to find out, I don't have these but I imagine Netcraft numbers are high because Linux and BSD are good for web servers but not really used for alot of internal applications by companies

Re:good stuff

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get a few things straight here.

Reiser4 goes against the grain of nix-centric file systems by fragmenting like NTFS and FAT* do.

What's that mean? Link? Code? Or anecdotal evidence?

I don't know what solution has been developed for this but it definitely means there's a shortcoming in the design.

They have a runtime defragmenter is all I know. And no it isn't like running a windows defragmenter minimised.

I respect UFS for being very well balanced: it scales okay, it is reliable even after crashes (with SoftUpdates anyway),

Background fsck is pretty bad for even desktop systems, but basically a showstopper for anything with a few disks where availability is important (ie. servers).

it performs well on most tasks even without clever journalling,

Well, softupdates is probably as complex or more complex than journalling, and it appears from conversations I hear on the list that they've polluted generic VM/VFS code with it.

Journalling systems in Linux aren't simple, but they're pretty well self contained.

and the lack of journal means it is suitable for even very small volumes (whereas ReiserFS seems to carry a universal 50 meg journal, making it useless for smaller media).

I'd rather use a proper journalling flash filesystem like Linux has on small systems.

Or on systems with a very small HD (do any exist? I don't think so), ext3 would be a fine choice.

ext3 is basically exactly the same structure as UFS, with some shortcomings addressed. Journalling is far more robust and flexible than softupdates. For example you can do rollbacks, atomic operations, and even put transactional semantics into the unix filesystem (see Resier4). Journals can be put on an external device, for example journal to a battery backed DRAM disk if your main volume is on spindles for some real performance.

It also happens to be supported very well in every BSD and to a lesser extent in Linux, with a limited Windows driver available. Although I'm all for journalling file systems, I don't recommend relying on them like Linux often seems to do (this is a problem on lower-end systems which need reliable storage but can't afford the overhead of journalling).

Err, overhead of journalling? I don't know about others, but ext3 has a minimum journal size of 1MB. I think journalled flash filesystems are probably much less overhead. There is no overhead argument.

Re:good stuff

[losinggeneration]

Looking at sales is meaningless since if you have a talented admin they'll either make their own, or download one for customization ;-)

Re:good stuff

[jbplou]

The majority of businesses uses comercial OS's be it Windows, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, or one of the Linux's. Your crazy to think people roll thier own. I bet if you just add up Windows, Solaris, OS/400, and AIX you got over 60% of the servers out there.

Torrents are your friends:

[rkrabath]

##### Disk One #####

##### Disk Two #####

Of course, in their infinate wisdom, the coders of slashdot have decided to make my life difficult with their damn lameness filters

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[Anonymous Coward]

Wish they would make a DVD image with distfiles and more packages on it. =)

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[Anonymous Coward]

But only if you're doing a new install. If you have systems up and running, for God's sake, just use cvsup and rebuild the world and kernel image.

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish there was a torrent method for CVSUP !! ::seeding::

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[phpCypher]

I wish CVS could integrate with bittorrent somehow ... until then ::seeding::

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[acidos]

If you buy a set from BSD Mall they now come with both 2 CDs and a DVD that has all sorts of extra packages on it, for the same price that just the 2 CDs would cost you in the past.

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[smokeslikeapoet]

For those of us with AMD64 systems try this one:
http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/5. 4-RELEASE-amd64-all.torrent
I'm going to test it's stability against my gentoo and ubuntu amd64 solutions. I'm currently happy with neither. Not necessarily because of the distros themselves. But from the lack of 64-bit support from certain apps.

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[alexhs]

Huh ? But you don't dare to install FreeBSD from a CD set !

You network-install it, right from the three floppies

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[cerberusss]

If you buy a set from BSD Mall

While you're there, check out the plush daemon. Your girlfriends will love it :D

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[Anonymous Coward]

Assuming you have any floppy drives...

Re:Torrents are your friends:

[TCM]

While you're there, check out the plush daemon. Your girlfriends will love it :D

Do they make hand puppets now as well?

*runs*

Fifty Dollars.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll come over to your house and install it for free. If you want me to shower first, that costs extra.

Re:Fifty Dollars.

[kevcol]

RMS- is that you?

Re:Fifty Dollars.

[ModMeFlamebait]

I'll come over to your house and install it for free. If you want me to shower first, that costs extra.

In his house? Eww.

Re:Fifty Dollars.

[essdodson]

I'll come over to your house and install it for free. If you want me to shower first, that costs extra.

Must be a linux user, we freebsd users shower.

Re:Fifty Dollars.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are all you FreeBSD users stupid retarded morons? Or are you simply illiterate?

He said A, that he was a FreeBSD user; B, that he would take a shower.

Is your brain wired backwards or something? Stupid fuck.

Bloody Thieves!!!

[The Ancients]

Software is released that someone has obviously put a lot of time and effort into, and within five minutes of the story on /. someone's posted torrent links.

What is it with you people???

You make me sick.

Re:Bloody Thieves!!!

[discogravy]

oh, don't feel too bad -- the site that has the .torrents for download is slashdotted, so it's not like there are as many folks helping the download happen as there could be. :)

Re:Bloody Thieves!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Software is released that someone has obviously put a lot of time and effort into, and within five minutes of the story on /. someone's posted torrent links.

I agree with you. Buy the CDs/DVDs and support the project.

Re:Bloody Thieves!!!

[rkrabath]

I know you're modded funny, but I'm not sure you're actually kidding.

My view: They have released it for free, and provided links on their site to get it easily, again for free. I might as well encourage people to use BT so the fine developers don't have to pay as much for our free downloads.

Of course people should buy the CDs. But failing that, at least keep the bandwidth bills down.

Damn

[UN1XG0D]

And I just got through installing 5.3 on my work box. Guess I'll be cvsup'ing tonight.

Re:Damn

[n0dez]

It's worth upgrading to 5.4-RELEASE -- LINUX: Linux Is Not UniX

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.

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[Markos]

Forgive my ignorance but...

What exactly is the issue? Is it a lack of support, or existing bugs that make it unusable?

Situations like this make me think that it'd be nice if there was some sort of compatiblity goal so that drivers could be somewhat crossplatform, or at least easily ported acrosss the various unix's via some sort of shared api or something.

I'm sure there are 101 reasons why this isn't possible, but it's nice to dream :)

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[Zemplar]

"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."

Does any VIA chipset actually work properly?

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[Len]

Does any VIA chipset actually work properly?

I never had a problem with my KT333 board.

Of course, it was running Windows.

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[infiniti99]

I'm sure there are 101 reasons why this isn't possible

Well it shouldn't be impossible, just improbable. :) Considering the Linux kernel often breaks compatibility with its own drivers between minor versions, I don't think we have a prayer for cross-kernel driver compatibility.

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[arved]

I never noticed a problem with the CLE266 using ukbd(4) & ums(4). I tried umass(4) and axe(4) for a short time, and they seem to work too.

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

There was a commercial supported attempt at this, the Uniform Driver Interface project. It was an environment loaded into kernel space which provided APIs for memory management, interrupts, memory mapped I/O, and all of the normal stuff you'd expect for a driver. There were no synchronization primitives, your code segment was to be run until you yielded and would not be interrupted. as such you had responsibility to compartmentalize your code into smaller chunks, with the benefit of having someone else deal with all the synchronization stuff. It was somewhat message passing, a comparison to DragonFly BSD probably wouldn't be inappropriate.

Cool parts: device drivers are source code compatible on all platforms, no code changes at all. Binary compatible for platforms that share an ABI (Can compile adriver on Linux x86 and have it work for UnixWare x86).

But it never really went anywhere outside of Caldera. That website looks pretty much what it looked like in year 2000. Most of the issues we dealt with were non-technical. One big one being the implosion of Caldera (which became NewSCO). Caldera wanted this environment to make it easier for people to move device drivers from OpenServer (which had a lot of device drivers but was essentially a dead codebase) to UnixWare (which was newer, SVR4.2, then became SVR5).

There was/is a Linux environment, but RMS hates the fact that it's easy to have binary only drivers, making it less likely to release source. Obviously Microsoft wouldn't use it since everyone makes drivers for windows, and that's their competitive advantage. I forgot why the BSDs never used it. I don't think it was licensing, we used a BSD style license.

Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support

[Xophmeister]

Works for me... using umass and all uhci, ohci and ehci. I can probably remove some of those, but I don't really know what I'm doing ;) My thumbdrive clocks in at 40Mbps; seems a tad underpar, but before 5.4, it was 1Mbps, so I'm easy!

Let's just hope I can get X to work properly with the CLE266...

Help promote their new torrent option,

[Anonymous Coward]

Help promote their new torrent option, seed it for a bit me me and the 5 others doing it currently.

http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/

if you can, join the all seeds ; )

Re:Help promote their new torrent option,

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Where are the ones for Alpha, I wonder?

Mostly I want to see if 5.4 can disklabel my Alphaserver 1000A disks. 5.3, 5.2.1, 5.2 can't even boot, and 5.1 can't label the disks :-(

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:Free BSD

[dmaxwell]

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 ?

Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".

The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license. The trick here is that the GPL is picky about which businesses it is friends with. For strategic reasons, a company like IBM can open something up but place the contribution under the GPL. It is perfectly free from an end user point of view but will require re-implementation on the part of a competitor who wishes to use knowledge from the code in question. This takes nothing away from scenarios where the BSD license is more "business friendly". Personally, I find the "moral" arguments around all of this induce finger drumming. If the choices were BSD or nothing or GPL or nothing then I expect we'd see much less funding of interesting projects by business.

Re:Free BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

There was that minor AT&T vs. Berkely lawsuit going on just about the time Linus was releasing his kernel to the Internet.

Re:Free BSD

[menkhaura]

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.

I couldn't have said better! Mod me offtopic if you will, but please stop saying MacOS X == BSD!

Re:Free BSD

[vendull]

why did linux get the market it has now and not BSD ?

There are a number of reasons for this. In the beginning, Linux has better support for low end hardware (e.g.: 386's). FreeBSD was geared only towards the server market at that time. For example, FreeBSD only supported SCSI drives for a while while Linux supported IDE drives.

Another factor was that Linux development was happening in public, through Usenet, while FreeBSD development was happening on private mailing lists. This was before the web had really taken off, and Usenet was quite popular.

In addition, the USL lawsuit against BSDI and the Regeants of the University of California was in full swing when Linux was starting to gain momentum. Lots of folks were afraid that if the lawsuit went USL's way, that it would be very bad news for the BSD variants.

There is a paper that expands on some of these details here: http://www.freebsddiary.org/linux.php. I didn't write it, but it is an interesting read.

Re:Free BSD

[Brandybuck]

The other reason is that GPL can be more business friendly than the BSD license.

That doesn't explain the pre-commercialization days of Linux. Is the GPL really more business friendly than the BSD license for a one man firm ten years ago? Hardly! They weren't worried about proprietary companies "stealing" their shell scripts because too many other one-man Linux outfits were "stealing" it instead!

Instead Linux's popularity can be attributed to two other things, in my opinion. First, BSD got bushwhacked by AT&T/USL. Second, Linux required integrating hundreds of different "parts", which resulted in commercial and semi-commercial firms providing that service, which in turn resulted in *marketing*.

Re:Free BSD

[diegocgteleline.es]

Just plain marketing for one. *BSD can and probably is better by any number of measures. "Better" doesn't always equate to "sexier".

So, uh, do you have numbers around? AFAIK even some freebsd hackers admit that linux is kicking their asses in more than one field. It's not strange to see post from freebsd users benchmarking databases etc. against suse/redhat and getting better numbers with them. And let's not start talking about features.

So no, Freebsd is not "just better" and linux is not just about marketing. Sorry.

(It certainly is in some places like which fast forwading routing packets, but saying that freebsd is "probably better by any number of measures" and "linux is about marketing" having docens of paid IBM/SGI/redhat/suse programmers around making it fast and reliable...oh my)

Re:Free BSD

[dmaxwell]

I'm a Linux user myself; but let's give props where props are due. One measure in which most any BSD is better is integration. BSD has been maintained as a coherent system since before Linux has even existed. Their userland has a bit less evolution and tad more design in it. The init scripts are arguably better due to their relative simplicity. As for features that BSD lacks, that can be a feature as well. Simplicity often =='s robustness. The individual flavors also have their own merits. There is OpenBSD's well known penchant for correctness and security. NetBSD runs on even more arches than Debian.

I'll also point out that the BSD's tend to be more predictable in their quality from release to release. There have been some real brown paper bag kernel releases and distros like RedHat and Mandrake have pulled boners on their own.

I'll bet a real BSD fanboy could probably think of a few more.

Re:Free BSD

[Thunderbear]

I think it was because the Linux license was more attractive to the large number of coders who came online at that time. You were guaranteed that everybody benefitted from yours and others work.

The social implications of this are in my eyes very important.

Additionally Linus (IIRC) did a lot of work to get the user submitted patches in the kernel very quickly. This was an instant positive feedback, which also is very important for you to feel part of the developmental process, and to encourage you to do it again.

For some reason the BSD's did not get that synergic effect - perhaps because they had already demonstrated that they would fork and that work had to be replicated in 2-3 source trees.

Re:Free BSD

[MrHanky]

FreeBSD's base is well integrated, I'll give you that. But I've used several versions, and for some reason GDM never worked in a fresh install, no matter how I did it, from packages or ports. Some modifications would some times fix it, but once I would be logged in as root no matter which user's account and password I logged in with. I've never seen this level of brokenness in a common package in any of the Linux distros I've used since 1999.

Don't get me wrong. I like FreeBSD, and I've used it quite a bit. I just don't feel its integration is superior to Debian's when you consider other packages than what you find in base.

Re:Free BSD

[Trix]

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 ?

Probably, at least in part, because of the USL v. BSD lawsuit in the early nineties.

Most people don't seem to realize that the BSDs (NetBSD & FreeBSD, anyway) and the Linux kernel both got started at about the same time. (Yes, both are predated by the GNU project, but that's another posting entirely).

The net is rife with stories about the Berkeley folks getting sued by AT&T/UNIX System Laboratory. I think that did a lot to hamstring BSD in the eyes of the general public - - even though the products of the BSD team, like TCP/IP, have enjoyed widespread acceptance.

The lawsuit was kind of analagous to the way that SCO is trying frame its case against IBM; "You're using our code without our say so."

In the BSD case, it turned out that AT&T et al were using more BSD code than BSD had AT&T code.

Re:Free BSD

[top_down]

No, Linux attracted those companies because it was big and growing fast already. And the lawsuit is just a convenient story to blame someone else for the failure to win the battle for the user. It wasn't that important.

Imo the big problem of freebsd was (is?) that it is an OS by specialists for specialists (and specialist wanna bees). These people were not interested in marketing and helping out newbies they were focused on building the best OS available.

The early Linux community was very different in this respect. Many had only just switched from some commercial OS and were Unix newbies themselves. They were in a better position to recruit new users and did so enthusiastically, aiming for 'world domination' rather than technical excellence.

Re:Free BSD

[someonehasmyname]

I'd stop saying it if it were completely true.

While Apple's OS X has a very NextStepish Mach MicroKernel, the entire userland is from FreeBSD 5.

I'm sitting at a Tiger workstation right now, and if I open a terminal window and type "man ls" I will get the _exact_ same man page a FreeBSD 5 system shows. All the userland utils in OS X understand the same switches as the FreeBSD userland utils. They are the same.

It's like "GNU/Linux" really. Linux is Linux, but it heavily relies on GNU userland utils, so RMS wants it to be called "GNU/Linux".

At least the BSD developers aren't assholes, screaming about calling it "BSD/OS X".

Re:Free BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

I love gnome, but GDM is the worst piece of shit I've seen in ages, and has a horrible security track record. I won't touch it with a 10,000 foot pole. And FWIW, FreeBSD's gnome team has some of the most talented and nice people in the open source universe.

Re:Free BSD

[MrHanky]

Is that so? After googling around a bit and visiting sites like Secunia and Securityfocus, the most recently found vulnerability in GDM seemed to be fixed in October 2003. XFree86 and X.org have had loads of problems since then.

tail -f *log

[_Sharp'r_]

From the release notes:

"The -f option of tail(1) utility now supports more than one file at a time."

That enhancement alone is worthy of upgrading!

Re:tail -f *log

[Anonymous Coward]

They already had ports that did this (xtail or ftail or something of that sort)

Re:tail -f *log

[Anonymous Coward]

That enhancement alone is worthy of upgrading!

Never heard of xtail? It was released in 1989 and does exactly that.

Re:tail -f *log

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool, thanks for the tip, very helpful!

Jnode Os is more secure than BSD. Prove me wrong.

[zymano]

Why does Jnode OS get no media attention on Slashdot ? The whole point BSD is that it's secure . Well this java os is more secure than BSD because it is programmed with the most secure language.

release, release but it still is dying...

[Anonymous Coward]

... the cancer is terminal. You cannot halt it. Dying it is. BSD is it. Farewell to thee.

Commercial flavours of unix maybe.

[Some Random Username]

Netbsd and openbsd are just as fast as freebsd with the fixes, and so are most linux distros. Its really only commercial unix vendors that are slow with the fixes.

Re:Commercial flavours of unix maybe.

[Anonymous Coward]

Netbsd and openbsd are just as fast as freebsd with the fixes

OpenBSD is just as fast as FreeBSD, but only if they accept that a problem falls into their (rather more limited) definition of "security issue".

NetBSD is considerably slower than FreeBSD.

Re:Commercial flavours of unix maybe.

[Some Random Username]

How about you give some evidence of either of your bullshit claims then?

I had this idea a long time ago

[Urusai]

...for a thin client type setup. Certainly not for server stuff, but for client farms. It's amazing how people steal my ideas when I take off the foil hat. I can only assume that a major theoretical discovery in CS will be announced shortly. Oh yeah, and someone else will win the lottery.

Re:I had this idea a long time ago

[zymano]

Haha. Well my post is now officially offtopic.

Should have patented your idea !

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:GUI to desktop

[LittleLebowskiUrbanA]

And that is why you fail.... Seriously, that's not the goal. OSS is your way, the way you want it. Not to replace some software company

Re:GUI to desktop

[rubycodez]

maybe that's what GNUStep will be, give it a couple more years

Re:GUI to desktop

[Aldric]

Not all programmers are good GUI programmers. I'd say leave it to those who are best at it.

Re:GUI to desktop

[mickyflynn]

Even Linus has stated numerous times, for instance, in his essay for "Open Sources" that taking on Microsoft was not the goal. Hell, Linux wasn't even meant to replace UNIX. It's all just a happy accident.

BSD wasn't meant to replace anything. It was a project by a school to do stuff which got turned into a personal project to replace that in order that it could continue unhindred.

I really dont understand what this obsession is with "replacing" microsoft. Most people really don't care. Nothing is stopping you from doing what you're doing. Why try and stop them?

I fear the "hacker spirit" of learning and invention has been replaced by a generation of people who use Linux just to be "l3t0 k3wl" and hate on Microsoft instead of trying to make the software better, do neat things, and learn how the computer works. Its sad really. It also show a lack of disconnect with the real world in which real work must be done. Not everyone can sit around and hack up their system and play on the computer all day. Most people dont care. Windows 2000 Pro is actually not that bad. I have no problems with it, myself. I can do my work and then have fun. In high school (graduated '02), I spent more time with my computer in parts and recompiling and tweeking shit than I did in a word processor and working. My grades suffered accordingly. Of course, AbiWord was nothing to write home about then, OO didn't exist and StarOffic wasn't "Free" as in no money unitl I was a senior, iirc.

But still, its a little irrational and vitriolic, all this "lets conqurer MS!!" not that I didn't engage in it myself when I was like, 14.

Might be a stupid question, but...

[stanthegoomba]

what is the easiest way to upgrade FreeBSD? I installed 5.3 a couple months ago and I want to know how to safely update to 5.4 without downloading and burning another CD.

Re:Might be a stupid question, but...

[menkhaura]

Create a standard-supfile with the following content:

*default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all

(I like to put it under /etc). Then you can run the following command:

cvsup -g -L 2 /path/to/your/standard-supfile
Go make some coffee while your sources are synchronized, then read the Handbook to learn how to build the beast.

Re:Might be a stupid question, but...

[sn00ker]

cvsup.
pkg_add -rv cvsup-without-gui, then take a look at the example supfiles in /usr/share/samples/cvsup
Once you've brought the system up-to-date (if you just want to go to 5.4, set the release tag to RELENG_5_4), follow the instructions in the Handbook on building the world.

That handbook section covers all the stuff I've mentioned above. The Handbook is your friend.

Re:Might be a stupid question, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you are not running a modified kernel whats wrong with:
read the UPDATE doc, while backing up,
download the ISO's burn em, boot up and choose binary upgrade. should take 30 minutes or so + download time of ISO.

Re:Might be a stupid question, but...

[SpinJaunt]

there is some interesting stuff in /usr/share/examples:

% ls /usr/share/examples
BSD_daemon bootforth drivers ipfw mdoc pf printing smbfs
FreeBSD_version cvs etc isdn meteor portal scsi_target startslip
IPv6 cvsup find_interface kld netgraph ppi ses sunrpc
atm dialog ibcs2 libdialog nwclient ppp slattach tcsh
bc diskless ipfilter libvgl perfmon pppd sliplogin worm

Look in /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ and there should be some "templates" or use as-is SUPfiles. Oh and watch stable-supfile, it's 5-STABLE, not 5.4-STABLE "Patch/Fix branch.

Re:Might be a stupid question, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or find the fastest ;)

http://fastest-cvsup.sourceforge.net/

5.4 Dedication

[Anonymous Coward]

The FreeBSD 5.4 Release is dedicated to the memory of Cameron Grant. Cameron was an active FreeBSD Developer and principal architect of the sound driver subsystem despite his physical handicap. His is a superb example of human spirit dominating over adversity. Cameron was an inspiration to those who met him; he will be fondly remembered and sorely missed.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/announce.html

Re:5.4 Dedication

[Anonymous Coward]

Thanks for posting the comment. I really miss
cameron and am happy that people are still thinking of him.
-gopi.

Re:5.4 Dedication

[KozmoStevnNaut]

Here's to you, Cameron. I didn't know you, but I'm sure you were a great guy.

I'm having a beer for all the people who have overcome their physical and mental handicaps and done everything they could to function normally in society, as hard as it might have been. And also for their families who helped them through everything and never stopped loving.

Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

... facts are facts. ;)

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 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, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004)
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004)
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004)

OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004)
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004)
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard.

*BSD in general:
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."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;)

--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.

Re:Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

It's funny, I didn't see anyone spreading FUD in the first place...

Re:Requiem for the FUD

[Anonymous Coward]

You forgot to wear your (very thick) glasses.

Re:Requiem for the FUD

[monkeyman_67156]

Mod grandparent down. This is the same guy that always posts in every BSD story.

stable development?

[jbellis]

which is it? :)

Re:Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance?

[mi]

Anyone from FreeBSD know for sure if the fixes above will help bring FreeBSD up to par with Linux as far as MySQL performance on SMP machines go?

Probably not, because certain very busy people have -- once again -- forgotten to turn off INVARIANTS in the threading libraries' Makefile :-(

I doubt, many benchmarkers will bother turning these off on their systems and recompiling libthr/libc_r ...

Alpha?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought they were dropping support for Alpha?

Re:Alpha?

[adiposity]

Not dropped, relegated to tier 2.

See here.

Ep!

[Anonymous Coward]

all; in order to go addresses will deVvelopment. BSD

Does SATA work right now? on SIS965L southbridge

[pkphilip]

Does anyone know / has anyone tested if FreeBSD 5.4 supports the SIS965L southbridge chipset ?

And also, how is the support for SIS190 Ethernet? Sorry about posting these questions here, but I haven't received much response in the kernel mailing lists (atleast not on Linux).

...which is...

[codergeek42]

(according to my TI-89) 5.4! ^_^

Re:Does SATA work right now? on SIS965L southbridg

[menkhaura]

I have no idea, but you may try FreeSBIE, a FreeBSD on a Live-CD.

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

[gkitty]

I'm running FreeBSD 4.11 on my servers and laptop. To this point I've avoided 5.x due to rumours of a performance downgrade for my single processor systems. (Well that & pragmatism, I am slow to change good systems.)

I have no great dissatisfactions with my 4.11 systems, but could make use of cardbus support on the laptop, and if 5.x's threading could improve the performance of samba, mySQL, postgreSQL, maybe java and apache (my primary server loads) that would be a win.

Is 5.4 ready for primetime for satisfied 4.x users? What are the real world performance implications at this time in terms of memory usage, I/O throughput, performance on my favorite server apps and as a GUI workstation? Is it as solid as 4.x has always been?

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

[kaiwai]

Personally, I'd wait till 6.0 comes out; they're moving to time based releases, and hopefully by then, they would have optimised it enough to provide a decent enough performance improvement over 4.x to make it a worthwhile move.

On the side issue, however, it would be nice if they actually updated their website, inreference to the smp, kse and busdma status; I mean, not to sound whiny and flamebaitish, but it'd be nice to see a status of how things are *ACTUALLY* progressing *NOW* rather than from up to 12months ago, in regards to the kse status page (since it was last updated).

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

[chrysalis]

If you like FreeBSD 4.x, there's a better upgrade path: DragonFlyBSD. You will probably get better performance out of it and as long as you stick with the RELEASE or PREVIEW tags, DragonFlyBSD is extremely stable.

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

[dinivin]

Yes, the DragonFly base system is extremely stable. Just don't try and build anything big from ports or pkgsrc, cause it'll probably fail.

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).

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

[Brandybuck]

I've had absolutely no problems with 5.2 and 5.3. 5.0 and 5.1 were a bit flaky, but that's long gone. There is no performance downgrade. Stop listening to the DragonFly fudsters, FreeBSD 5.x is fast and stable.

abit an7

[Anonymous Coward]

Is the Abit AN7, (nForce2 Ultra), supported? I use the onboard SATA, onboard NIC, and an Ati Radeon 9600.

Re:abit an7

[tsolsavax]

I think you can use the ABIT card if you load the dri module in your xorg.conf file...

You might have to load openGL or something like that too.

I still have no way of even installing it, I think

[Anonymous Coward]

FreeBSD 5.3 didn't like my hard disk (already reported by someone else as this bug), and it seems to still be open. :(

FreeBSD Installation

[alexhs]

I currently run FreeBSD 5.3 on the home server. "It just works".
I suppose you could go with 5.4. I will do, soon.
If you have broadband, just download 3 floppies, then install from the network. Quick'n'easy.

Firewall is disabled by default. To enable it, you will need to recompile a kernel (you need to install with sources). Note that you need a firewall if you intend to do some sort of NAT/masquerading/diverting.
Be warned that this isn't straightforward as in Linux : you need to manually change configuration files. Some "howtos" here and here

SMP works well (but wasn't tuned for SMT/HT not a long time ago). Don't know if it is working out-of-the-box, I don't need it on a pentium 166 MMMX, but as you're going to compile a kernel anyway...

Re:FreeBSD Installation

[jaseuk]

>Firewall is disabled by default. To enable it, you will need to recompile a kernel (you need to install with sources).

You don't need to recompile the kernel. pf & ipfw are available as modules.

I suggest you have a look at /boot/defaults/loader.conf.

ipfw_load="YES"
pf_load="YES" etc.

or

kldload pf
kldload ipfw

There are very few reasons why you'd need to build a new kernel in most situations.

Its a shame that this isn't made very clear in the handbook. The only situation where you might want to recompile a kernel is for SMP, but using freebsd-update you can just download a precompiled one.

Most of the docs tell you how to recompile the kernel to enable a feature and then as an after thought mention the kernel modules.

Really all those kernel compiles should be stripped from the handbook. As its completely unnessassary and scares off users.

Jason

Heh

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been running 5.4 since Friday, when the source was tagged. cvsup is wonderful. :)

Know your weather!

[LFS.Morpheus]

Please see hail versus sleet.

Quick summary:
* Hail is ice pellets produced by strong thunderstorms, and is most likely in the summer (as that's when strong thunderstorms are most likely to occur).
* Sleet is re-frozen precipitation, caused by snow that has been melted and re-frozen on its way down.

While it is quite likely you were indeed experiencing hail, not sleet, hail is not uncommon in May if a strong front passes through.

2/3 isn't bad though, I'd give a 70% forecast that the end is indeed near. In the meantime, be on the lookout for hail...

Re:Know your weather!

[Anonymous Coward]

I live here too, and it was indeed hail.

Yes, we had a thundercloud near mission peak in fremont; and no, we never get snow here in may, so it certainly isn't re-frozen precipitation.

However thunderstorms, or indeed any type of precipitation at all, is rare here in May - so hail at this time really is unusual.

What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Like I don't have been things to do that wander slashdot and troll for low UID's by posting self-depricating remarks as an AC? Oh Snap! How'd you know?

Re:What the hell?

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow-

What language did you plug in to Babelfish to get that mess in English?

Does it have decent ext2 support yet?

[Viol8]

I dual boot a 4.6 install with my linux install. My home dir is in ext2 format and I'm always worried when working under BSD that something in my home dir will corrupt (since the BSD developer(s) warn their ext2 driver is not 100% kosher) so I tend to do only small amounts of work in it. Does anyone know if the ext2/ext3 support is now rock solid or is that still on their to-do list?

Re:Does it have decent ext2 support yet?

[Brandybuck]

Nah, it's still meant for read-only use. Make a proper UFS2 partition for your home partition. This means you can't share one home between two operating systems though.

Re:Does SATA work right now? on SIS965L southbridg

[Anonymous Coward]

Except FreeSBIE is still on 5.3, for the moment.

Alpha Delayed

[Anonymous Coward]

In the Release Announcement, it mentioned the Alpha builds would be delayed a few days.

Re:Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance?

[Anonymous Coward]

I benchmarked the code from CVS about 2 weeks ago, and although the gap is narrower, its still much better to use linux for mysql.

MOD THE PARENT DOWN

[jack_csk]

What a terrible parent post! If you really can't download the ISO copy and burn it to CD by any mean, here is the place that you shop:
FreeBSD Mall
At least they DO support the FreeBSD development community financially.

Avoid CVSUP on a server

[Billly Gates]

Otherwise you are syncing FreeBSD to -current.

THere is a stable cvs tree but it does not include security fixes. At least thats what i saw. Also in the FBSD 4.x series I saw several ports downgraded for some bizaare reasons. Why I dont know

I broke my system several times from cvsing up

Re:Avoid CVSUP on a server

[kkenn]

Wrong on both counts:

1) The stable branch does include security fixes

2) The ports collection is not branched, so there's no possibility for "several ports downgraded" in the "4.x series". The only situation in which ports are downgraded is if there are serious problems with the newer version, and a reversion to the previous version is a net gain.

Re:Avoid CVSUP on a server

[Anonymous Coward]

Funny how the DF minions like to claim it's "probably faster" without supporting evidence, and when pressed on this point, the actual developers concede that it's not and you shouldn't expect it to be until they've finished their MP work.

Re:Avoid CVSUP on a server

[Anonymous Coward]

"Otherwise you are syncing FreeBSD to -current."

Doesn't happen to me.... Oh, that's because I know how to use cvsup.

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

Response to Portupgrade Bashing

[jack_csk]

Given the quality of Gentoo Portage System(Besides using FreeBSD, I have Gentoo installed on my laptop), I think portupgrade is way better.

admission of guilt?

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this finally admit that all the previous 5.X releases were, in fact, unreliable, unstable, badly performing, etc.?? And why should we believe the closed-door FreeBSD leadership now when they've been lying to us for so long?

Re:admission of guilt?

[Quill_28]

No it shows you are an idiot or a troll.

correction, 2.0, not 1.0!

[bluGill]

FreeBSD 1.0 cannot be run unless you have a Unix license. I'm not sure what this would cost you, but SCO is selling licenses to Linux users for $699.00, so my guess is about that. However you need to ask SCO, as they are the only ones legally selling such a license.

For Freebsd 2.0 the requirement of a Unix license was eliminated (there were only 7 files to re-implement).

Re:correction, 2.0, not 1.0!

[bovinewasteproduct]

FreeBSD 1.0 cannot be run unless you have a Unix license. I'm not sure what this would cost you, but SCO is selling licenses to Linux users for $699.00, so my guess is about that. However you need to ask SCO, as they are the only ones legally selling such a license.

For Freebsd 2.0 the requirement of a Unix license was eliminated (there were only 7 files to re-implement).

I belive that requirement is no longer valid. It was based on the licensing of V7/32V Unix which was released by Caldera in January 2002. A later release put it under the original BSD license. Here is a Groklaw article talking about the way SCO tried to later say it was on for the 16bit code and non-commericial.

Since the bits of 1.X that were tainted are now release under a BSD license, well..... Thats why you can once again get FreeBSD 1.X if you look around enough.

BWP

I just tried 5.4

[Anonymous Coward]

Same thing... Boot prompt, solid tone.

Meh...

nVidia drivers for FreeBSD on AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

Currently nVidia is developing drivers for 32 bit Linux and FreeBSD, as well as for 64 bit Linux (on amd64). They are not developing drivers for FreeBSD on amd64.

An nVidia representative has responded to queries on the NVIDIA Linux Forum in two places:

FreeBSD-amd64 driver ?
There are no plans to support FreeBSD amd64 at this point in time, but customer requests will certainly help prioritize future projects. (01-14-05)

Any ideas when FreeBSD AMD64 driver is out?
It seems that FreeBSD/amd64 doesn't currently support loadable kernel modules; there also doesn't seem to be FreeBSD/x86 (?), let alone Linux binary compatibility. (04-16-04)

If you are interested in having nVidia drivers for FreeBSD on amd64, then I would encourage you to request these drivers from nVidia. Perhaps if they receive enough requests they will develop the amd64 FreeBSD drivers.

Re:nVidia drivers for FreeBSD on AMD64

[Anonymous Coward]

This is why, from the first time I heard nVidia's binary only "support" of OSS, that I never buy thier cards and always recommend against them for OSS. Even if they supply the fastest and cheapest option, I continue to buy ATI.

If a company only supplies binary drivers, then they are not open and should never be considered for any open system or by anybody who cares about OSS.

Avoid them at all cost.

5.x/6.x Performance Problems

[Anonymous Coward]

With so many design flaws and performance problems (see posting by Scott Long) I am not sure why anyone in their right mind would consider using 5.x/6.x in a production application ?.
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/getmsg.cgi?fetch=14345 +0+current/freebsd-performance

as crappy as gentoo

[Anonymous Coward]

but with fewer users

making your own world

[n0dez]

If you already cvsup'ed your sources,
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
reboot

boot in single user mode, then
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot

Voila, you should be running 5.4-RELEASE at this point :)

faculties

[CarpetShark]

So how much is FreeBSD 5.4 going to cost me?

Depends. How much did your hardware cost, and how much do you value your sanity? ;)

No, actually, FreeBSD was pretty sweet last time I tried it. I'd be all in favour of it, if it was ported to more archs.

Re:Does SATA work right now? on SIS965L southbridg

[Anonymous Coward]

You can use Windows XP drivers under BSD if there isn't already a driver for your ethernet.

HTH.

FREEBSD TORRENTS

[Anonymous Coward]

http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/

Yes

[toadlife]

link

Download the 'bootonly' ISO image.

Installation Bug, Anyone Else Seen It?

[devphaeton]

Starting with (iirc 5.1.x) I began to see an issue when installing via FTP (using the floppies). While downloading 'base' it would get to about 46% and fail with an:

"Fatal error: Invalid realloc size of 0! - PRESS ANY KEY TO REBOOT"

message. There are a few google references (some people see it at 54%, some at 63%) and there was once a bug report on it. The bug report seems to have vanished, but when doing a test install on an unused computer, i saw the same thing. (I do the test install, because you are essentially left with an unuseable system when this fails).

I can download the full ISO and install it from that with no problems. I just prefer to do it the other way. (iirc the mini-inst iso fails with the above message as well).

Anyone else see this? It doesn't appear to be very common and i've not seen any conclusive reasoning as to what is causing it, just some random speculation from a few different google hits, some may be right, or may not.

thanks.

p.s.- top marks for the FreeBSD team though. This doesn't negate what a great achievement 5.x is turning out to be.