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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."
Anyone know if there's a torrent available?
Yes. The official release announcement (which for some reason wasn't linked in the story) has a link to the torrent files.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
The 6-STABLE branch starts with 6.0-RELEASE. The 5-STABLE branch started with 5.3-RELEASE.
From what I've seen, 6.0-RELEASE is more stable than 5.3 or 5.4.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
6 just came out, [so] how can one possibly proclaim that the newer release is even more stable? Enough time hasnt passed yet.
Not at all. I (and many other people) have been running 6.0-BETAs since mid-July, and 6.0-RC1 since early October. This isn't just a random snapshot of HEAD; the code which became 6.0-RELEASE was frozen apart from patches approved by the release engineering team for months leading up to the release.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
Actually, userland for OS X is primarily netbsd derived, not freebsd.
Wrong. The page you linked to mentions all 3 BSDs exactly once, never specifying which one in particular the userland was primarily derived from.
I'm more inclined to believe the following, straight from news articles and Apple's own documentation:
"Going forward, [Darwin] will track a stable version of FreeBSD, which is the more popular and traditionally x86-only version that claims about a million users worldwide..." (source)
"The Darwin kernel is based on FreeBSD and Mach 3.0 technologies..." (source)
"...the BSD portion of Mac OS X is primarily derived from FreeBSD..." source)
"Above the Mach layer, the BSD layer provides "OS personality" APIs and services. The BSD layer is based on the BSD kernel, primarily FreeBSD." (source)
"We should note, however, that apart from a few architectural differences (such as our use of the Mach kernel), we try to keep Darwin as compatible as possible with FreeBSD (our BSD reference platform)." (source)
"Integrated with Mach is a customized version of the BSD operating system (currently FreeBSD 5)." (source)
In fact, practically the only references I can find to NetBSD in Apple's Developer Connection are to the HISTORY sections in some of the man pages. Apple may have borrowed some from NetBSD, but the main BSD player in OS X is clearly FreeBSD.
What do you think you are going to learn from a Live CD of FreeBSD? Whether or not it supports your hardware? I assume you've run Linux or some kind of unix variant. It'll have a shell and maybe a desktop like KDE or GNOME. What's to see? You can get that on just about any Unixy system. IMO, you don't really know what an OS or distribution is like until you have to actually manage a box.
Unless, of course, you've never run a unix-like system before. Then by all means, try Freesbie.
-matthew
"THERE IS NO JUSTICE, THERE IS ONLY ME." -Death