NetBSD 4.0 Has Been Released

ci4 writes to tell us that NetBSD 4.0 has been released and has been dedicated to the memory of Jun-Ichiro "itojun" Hagino. "Itojun was a member of the KAME project, which provided IPv6 and IPsec support; he was also a member of the NetBSD core team (the technical management for the project), and one of the Security Officers. Due to Itojun's efforts, NetBSD was the first open source operating system with a production ready IPv6 networking stack, which was included in the base system before many people knew what IPv6 was. We are grateful to have known and worked with Itojun, and we know that he will be missed. This release is therefore dedicated, with thanks, to his memory."

Comments

Yes!

[angryfirelord]

Time to upgrade my toaster!

Re:Yes!

[TheRaven64]

FreeBSD lost 93% of its core developers Do you have any kind of source for that? The FreeBSD core team consists of 9 people, so losing 92% of them would mean losing 8.37 of them, which doesn't really make sense.

Re:Yes!

[ByOhTek]

I was nervous to - I had so many Linux users tell me how bad it was, that it was harder to use and learn than Linux, etc.

I found it wasn't the case. The more you have experience coding and building from source in Linux, the better off you'll be, but here goes:

(1) I didn't buy any books or anything, I had a friend who was into FreeBSD tell me about it. She gave me a few hints and tips on how to start and what to avoid. She said I should try it since I'd rather use Windows than Linux, and it'd be nicer for me to use a FOSS OS if I could. I listened, and tried, and was hooked on the OS within a day of installing it.

So the best resource you can have is a friend who knows what he or she is doing (or at least has a bit more of a clue than you).

(2) The handbook is your friend. under /usr/share/doc/en/books/handbook/index.html is the system documentation. You can look at it on the freebsd website under the handbook section. It is actually EXTREMELY useful, and fairly well written/comprehensive. Unless you are looking for VPN stuff, they you're sporked.

(3) The Mailing list and it's archives are invaluable. Don't worry, the people there don't eat babies or penguins (if they did, I wouldn't use the OS, I have a friend who I love to hang out with who'd never speak to me again if I talked to people who ate penguins!). Actually they are a friendly and easy going bunch. They don't like people picking on them for their OS choice, but they don't mind people preferring different OSes. If you have a question, let them know your background when you ask, so they can better tailor the advice. You'll be asked to read some stuff, but they'll tell you what you need to read, and not just give you a blind RTFM. Heck, one user recently said he wanted to migrate to Linux, and asked which distro would be easiest for a FreeBSD user, no flames came.

(4) The errors are typically useful, and if you read them, they'll point you to a file or directory that's a problem. Using that you can figure out if something needs to be edited, deleted, etc. When making packages, if something is described as "marked" (ex. "Marked as broken on AMD64", or described as "conflicts", it is the packages make file, and you may need to modify that (or find another package that does the same thing, usually there are hints, but not always). You can sometimes find documentation related to these files either in the man pages for the program that uses them, or with the file name itself. Sometimes the error messages will actually tell you what to type or give you options on what to do to fix the problem - they don't fix it automatically because they'd assume you'd rather chose the fix option rather than have the choice made for you.

More practical (basically the advice my friend gave me, aside from the location of the handbook):

1. Until you are confident in your ability to get your system up to the poing of getting a web browser out to the internet from a fresh install (read: have done it at least once), only install freebsd if you have a system you can access the internet from, preferrably while running freebsd (i.e. install FreeBSD to a virtual machine, or on a spare computer).

2. I've found that the non-minimal installs tend to be a bit confused in their setup. I just do a minimal install, and install everything else manually. Read up on the section about partitioning your disk, FreeBSD does this in an odd manner, and you'll want to be familiar with it.
2.1. Ports - Compiling your own stuff
2.1.1. Familiarize with "csup", under /usr/share/examples you'll not run this often, but it updates your ports tree. typically you just type "csup -g -L 2 [path to supfile]", there's a sample supfile in the /usr/doc/examples directory somewhere, probably in a csup or cvsup directory, and the man page is fairly useful. In fact, most BSD man pages are (weird). They usually have good examples.
2.1.2. to build a package, go to /usr/ports, find the pac

Re:Yes!

[coryking]

You'll love it here. We are chill.

The folk behind FreeBSD are all just professional people trying to get real work done. You will not find your next religion when you use FreeBSD. Nor will you find saints who preach to you about how you should and should not use your computer. Nor will you find people telling you how you should and should not value your labor.

We dont give a shit if you like Vista. We dont care make FreeBSD work with your Windows Server. We dont care if you embed FreeBSD in your Tivo or Playstation. We are more than happy if you take our code and use it in your TCP/IP stack. Seriously. Take our code! No strings attached!

And hey, we all have to eat here in FreeBSD-land and so do you! We don't care if you make money from what comes out of your brain. Many of us are programmers whose livelihood depends on selling the value of our brain. We dont preach to you about the evils of intellectual property. If you sell software, the more power to you! If you become the next Microsoft, sweet!

And at the end of the day, FreeBSD works. It is the most boring OS you'll ever find. It is about as exciting as your water heater. And that is the best part about it.

Holy crap, they've removed Sendmail...

[Saint Aardvark]

...and replaced it with Postfix. Sendmail's still available from pkgsrc, but it's no longer the default. Man, never thought I'd see the day when one of the BSDs finally did this...

Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0

[NeoManyon]

Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, Bluetooth, many new device drivers and embedded platforms based on ARM, PowerPC and MIPS CPUs. New network services include iSCSI target (server) code and an implementation of the Common Address Redundancy Protocol. Also, system security was further enhanced with restrictions of mprotect(2) to enforce W^X policies, the Kernel Authorization framework, and improvements of the Veriexec file integrity subsystem, which can be used to harden the system against trojan horses and virus attacks. Please read below for a list of changes in NetBSD 4.0.

http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-4/NetBSD-4.0.html

Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES and CHANGES-4.0 files in the top level directory of the NetBSD 4.0 release tree. Some highlights include:
Networking

* agr(4): new pseudo-device driver for link level aggregation.
* IPv6 support was extended with an RFC 3542-compliant API and added for gre(4) tunnels and the tun(4) device.
* An NDIS-wrapper was added to use Windows binary drivers on the i386 platform, see ndiscvt(8).
* The IPv4 source-address selection policy can be set from a number of algorithms. See "IPSRCSEL" in options(4) and in_getifa(9).
* Imported wpa_supplicant(8) and wpa_cli(8). Utilities to connect and handle aspects of 802.11 WPA networks.
* Imported hostapd(8). An authenticator for IEEE 802.11 networks.
* carp(4): imported Common Address Redundancy Protocol to allow multiple hosts to share a set of IP addresses for high availability / redundancy, from OpenBSD.
* ALTQ support for the PF packet filter.
* etherip(4): new EtherIP tunneling device. It's able to tunnel Ethernet traffic over IPv4 and IPv6 using the EtherIP protocol specified in RFC 3378.
* ftpd(8) can now run in standalone mode, instead of from inetd(8).
* tftp(1) now has support for multicast TFTP operation in open-loop mode, server is in progress.
* tcp(4): added support for RFC 3465 Appropriate Byte Counting (ABC) and Explicit Congestion Notification as defined in RFC 3168.

File systems

* scan_ffs(8), scan_lfs(8): utilities to find FFSv1/v2 and LFS partitions to recover lost disklabels on disks and image files.
* tmpfs: added a new memory-based file system aimed at replacing mfs. Contrary to mfs, it is not based on a disk file system, so it is more efficient both in overall memory consumption and speed. See mount_tmpfs(8).
* Added UDF support for optical media and block devices, see mount_udf(8). Read-only for now.
* NFS export list handling was changed to be filesystem independent.
* LFS: lots of stability improvements and new cleaner daemon. It is now also possible to use LFS as root filesystem.
* vnd(4): the vnode disk driver can be used on filesystems such as smbfs and tmpfs.
* Support for System V Boot File System was added, see newfs_sysvbfs(8) and mount_sysvbfs(8).

Drivers

*

Audio:
o Support for new models on drivers such as Intel ICH8/6300ESB, NVIDIA nForce 3/4, etc.
o Added support for AC'97 modems.

Re:Major Changes Between 3.0 and 4.0

[Anonymous Coward]

Major achievements in NetBSD 4.0 include support for version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor...

Ah, so it does run Linux. I was going to ask.

Oh Boy!

[Anonymous Coward]

An OS that supports more platforms than it has users.

Since wide user base seems to be your preferred

[ByOhTek]

metric in OS worth...

How are you liking your Windows install? Just curious.