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FreeBSD 6.2 Released To Mirrors
AlanS2002 writes "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development."
The release announcement will not be available for a couple of hours. Slashdot jumped the gun as usual.
Torrents are available.
A script for upgrading FreeBSD 6.1 systems is available.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
If you're refering to the AT&T vs BSDi lawsuit, you're 10 years late :-)
bash$
Oh crap! What am I going to do with my cluster of 4Mhz XT machines now!?
I was waiting, and waiting, and waiting for this release.
So last night I downloaded 6.1 and installed it.
Voila! 6.2 out today.
Wanna see it rain? I'm going to go wash my car.
If moderation could change anything, it would be illegal.
From RELNOTES.TXT:
/usr/include/g++ directory will cause C++ programs
3 Upgrading from previous releases of FreeBSD
Source upgrades to FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE are only supported from
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE or later. Users of older systems wanting to
upgrade 6.2-RELEASE will need to update to FreeBSD 5.3 or newer
first, then to FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE.
And from INSTALL.TXT:
Warning: Binary upgrades to FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE from FreeBSD
4-STABLE are not supported at this time. There are some files
present in a FreeBSD 4-STABLE whose presence can be disruptive,
but are not removed by a binary upgrade. One notable example is
that an old
to compile incorrectly (or not at all).
FreeBSD is actually a good OS.
Yes, it's very nice
Mac users use it,
No they don't, they use Mach with a BSD api wrapper
Solaris is based around it,
No it's not, Solaris was on the SysV side of the SysV/BSD Unix wars (not a bad thing, Solaris is nice too)
and most of Linux is a cheap ripoff of it.
No, Linux is a school project based loosely off SunOS & Minix
..does it run linux?*runs* You probably weren't expecting a serious reply but... yes, it does. Note that this isn't running some kind of virtual machine emulation -- it's running Linux binaries natively on the processor and doing some kind of magical remapping of kernel and library calls that, to be honest, I don't understand that well. More details in this article.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
I downloaded the netboot version of 6.2RC2 some days back and was pleasantly surprised to find that almost all the hardware was correctly recognized. This is a 2 year old compaq laptop with an Ralink PCMCIA wireless card. Not even the latest Linux distros can detect this card but OpenBSD and FreeBSD have the excellent ral driver in the kernel. Moreover the configuration is so simple when compared to the mess in Linux (iwconfig,iwpriv,ifconfig??) not to mention the troubles I had with ndiswrapper
All the BSD's use X.org anyway nowadays, so the folks who are looking for a good GUI environment won't be disappointed. Again, the laptop display settings were correctly detected and I didn't have to touch xorg.conf at all
Give OpenBSD and FreeBSD a try - you won't regret it. Having said that, prepare to actually RTFM in case you run into problems. 99% of the time the answers are in the fine integrated documentation that comes along with your OS install.
Some differences between GNU/Linux and *BSD from the top of my head:
/dev/hda, OpenBSD and NetBSD call /dev/wd0, and FreeBSD calls it /dev/ad0, I believe.
/dev/hda1 under Linux, it would be /dev/wd0a in OpenBSD. FreeBSD also supports DOS partitions, but calls them "slices". Linux's /dev/hda1 would be /dev/ad0s1 under FreeBSD, IIRC.
1. Device names are different. What Linux calls
2. Partition maps are different. Linux uses DOS (or BIOS, I'm not sure where they originate from) partition tables on the PC, and Apple partition tables on Power Macs. I don't know about other architectures. The BSDs use BSD disklabels, where each partition gets a letter (from a to z), with some letters having special meanings (e.g. a is the root device, c is the whole device). For example, if your root partition in
3. The BSDs do not implement a lot of GNU extensions. This includes library functions (e.g. there's no strndup on OpenBSD), command line switches, and makefile directives. Of course, a lot of software is shared among BSD and GNU systems, but the differences will bite you sometimes. GNU usually implements BSD extensions.
4. GNU make is usually available on BSD systems, but under the name gmake. make is BSD make, which has a different set of extensions to basic make.
5. BSD systems provide third-party software primarily through the ports system (called pkgsrc on NetBSD), although binary packages may also be available. This is not common in Linux distributions, although Gentoo mimics the BSDs in this.
6. There is generally a higher focus on source code. For example, upgrades are typically performed by first getting the latest version of the source code through CVS, and then running "make world".
7. The BSD startup scripts are usually much simpler than those found on Linux distributions, which typically use SysV style init scripts.
8. The BSDs consist of a complete operating system that is maintained as a single unit, whereas, with Linux distros, the kernel, libc, core utilities, etc. are usually maintained and upgraded independently.
9. The BSDs pride themselves on technical quality and good documentation, whereas GNU/Linux is heavier on features and making things work _today_. Complaining about missing features, or asking questions without having read the documentation is likely to rub BSD people the wrong way. Be especially careful with OpenBSD developers.
10. The BSDs have traditional, monolithic kernels. All have some features available as loadable modules, but the modularization is definitely not strong as in Linux. Stability is considered more important.
11. The choice of filesystems is more limited on the BSDs than it is on Linux. All support Berkely FFS, as well as some variations on it, fat, and ext2, but there's no ReiserFS, JFFS2, QNX fs, etc.
12. Among the BSDs, NetBSD focuses on clean code and portability, OpenBSD focuses on security, and FreeBSD is the most featureful. Dragonfly BSD is a fork of FreeBSD that aims to provide a more modern architecture with a microkernel and without the Big Kernel Lock. There are some others, too, but I don't know what they're about.
Just to put this information in perspective: I've used GNU/Linux since 1996, and OpenBSD for about 5 years. My experience with NetBSD and FreeBSD is only sporadic. I've also created ports for OpenBSD and NetBSD, as well as developed quite some new software for them. If you count Mac OS X as a BSD, I've got about 2 years of experience with it, including the creation of pkgsrc ports for it.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.