FreeBSD 6.0 Released

Reyad Attiyat writes FreeBSD 6.0 is ready for release! New features, and there are lots, can be reviewed at the official site. One of the biggest and most anticipated features (mentioned before on Slashdot) is wireless support, which has been greatly improved upon. This includes support for a lot more cards, WAP support, and integration into the dhcpd client. This release comes only mere days off NetBSD's release and an OpenBSD release. Version 6.0 was intended to be released way back in August but due to a number of factors it had to be delayed till now. Aside from this major release the FreeBSD project has also had some major changes, including most recently a new logo and also a brand new website."

Comments

Re:Java on BSD

[frodo from middle ea]

Aren't the JVM specs free ? Write your own JVM for BSD, no one's stopping you.

Besides how difficult is this to find .. http://www.freebsd.org/java/. If you read closely, although the official release is at 1.3.1 , binaries for 1.5 are also available.

I am skeptical

[Billly Gates]

I used to be a FBSD fanatic until 5.x came out.

Lets hope this reverses the trend and the name that FBSD was known for. That is stability and reliability. I do not like linux and think it too has gone down hill from the golden 2.0 days of months of uptimes for the kernel.

I tried out NetBSD but my netgear nic and my wireless keyboard are not compatible. Not to mention the lack of 3d support sucks too. NetBSD is everything FBSD once was as in stable and small and fast.

I am going to try FBSD 6.x and thanks to the FBSD developers for improving it! I didn't mean to insult your work its just been fustrating and lets hope the performance improvements and stability are worth it.

Just installed .... my impressions

[Billly Gates]

The moderators wont like what I am about to type, but its my honest opinion and I really do like BSD. I used to be a FBSD fanatic for years.

GOod things

- My USB keyboard works again! I had problems with this on and off witht he 4.x versions during sysinstall and it didn't work at all during the 5.x versions.

- Java is progressing nicely since the last time I looked. Even version 5.0 is in beta. I remember 1.3x being the working version during 4.11 not too long ago.

- It seems snappier and less buggy then the previous 5.x versions during the install

Cons

- Its quite buggy still. Sysinstall will hang when a package fails to load during an ftp install. A reboot or a kill -9 is needed to restart it. After the installation its fine if a package fails to load. But you do need to resetup your ftp connections for adding packages when they fail after your installlation during sysinstall. Strange

- My usb mouse that worked under previous versions no longer works. Usm0 is reported in /dev but I can not link to it and I can not make any devices like I could under previous versions. I get a device busy error

- kldload umass.ko and camcontrol say umass is loaded for usb mass storage. I plugged my sans disk in and it was detected fine. But umass is not under /dev ?? A bug? Usb mass storage was designed to be plugable plugnplay feature according to the specs by Intel. No automount like under Linux or any otehr modern os. devfs should have reported it but a df shows that devfs only is mounting my keyboard.

Because I couldn't get X going due to the mouse issue I have not played with FreeBSD that much. Its pretty obvious what I think here and which os I am going to use. Its a shame really but I am a student and have no time to track these things down and search newsgroups for fixes. Its not the same as earlier releases but better then 5.x. Personally I would like NetBSD but it too does not like my hardware.... back to Linux. Sigh