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FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available
cperciva writes "FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE, the fourth release from the highly successful 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, has been released. In addition to being available from many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."
I thought BSD was dying? I've been on Slashdot for a decade and I precisely recall hearing that BSD was dying a few hundred thousand times.
BSD is alive and well!
-uso.
What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
Thanks guys! I will be sticking this on my laptop!
My desktop requires 7.0, though; I am currently running Beta 2, and I will binary upgrade when that is released. 6.3 does not support my SATA controller, and I want to mess around with ZFS as well.
Keep up the good work!
The release is dedicated to Dr. Jun-ichiro Hagino, known throughout the Internet community as itojun. He did lots of important work on the IPv6 protocol through the KAME project, and made many other contributions to the Internet and BSD communities.
It is good to see FreeBSD keep on going, but I cannot help but feel that all BSDs, to some extent, have become a very niche, and bit of a dead-end OS. Today if someone wants to move away from windows, they can go to Linux (free) or Mac (not-free). Aside from server space, what does BSD bring to the average desktop user? Let's just say I want to move to a free OS, what exactly does FreeBSD offer that is not already available with any number of Linux distributions? And what purpose do two similar OS (Linux, BSD) serve when they pretty much appeal to the same segment of computer users. Truly, sometimes I wonder if it might not be better to have *one* OSS alternative to Windows instead of having the developer resources working on two, parallel, different-under-the-surface-but-similar-in-usage operating systems .
I didn't actually know there's a BSD section of /., so I'm gonna post as AC as to not look a fool.
I am personally looking forward to 7.0 as it will bring many speed improvements and enhancements. There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.
FreeBSD 6.3 for me and my servers will be the last update to the series before switching over to the new hopefully soon to be released 7.0. My suggestion for anyone planning on trying FreeBSD out after having heard about this new release, grab whatever the latest RC disc is of 7.0 and play with that. There is practically no difference between the two, when it comes to userland and will make it easier to stay up to date by already being being on the right branch.
I definitely need to check out freebsd-update. See if it can be used in our systems to keep them up to date, with less down time than using the rebuild world and kernel steps that we take currently.
cat
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
All joking aside, FreeBSD really is "dying" in a certain sense. After Jordan and Mike left, the project has been a shambles. The best way to describe FreeBSD kernel code now is "shabby". Matt is a brilliant perfectionist who wants to do the right thing. The current state of FreeBSD kept him from pursuing excellence.
Unfortunately the FreeBSD core has come to be dominated by political types who are short on engineering skills. They gave Matt the air and locked him out of CVS. The FreeBSD kernel is currently full of ugly expedient hacks *and* several intractable bugs.
Of all the BSD kernels, FreeBSD can now be considered the most hackish and ill conceived. It wasn't always this way, of course. But presently the FreeBSD development environment continues to favor the political solution over the technically correct one. OpenBSD and NetBSD both do much better on quality issues. I suspect that DragonFly will come to be highly regarded as the latter two as well.
So I take it that 2008 will be the Year of the BSD Desktop?
What you've just described is exactly what any modern distro worth its salt does.
/var/www/httpd is a bit disingenuous -- or at least, I've never used a good distro that had Apache's configuration anywhere other than /etc/httpd or /etc/apache, or some variant thereof (like /etc/apache2) -- in any case, easily something I'd expect to find with tab-completion. Same with dhcp servers -- unless I installed a really strange one, it's going to be somewhere in /etc/dhcpd, or it's going to be named after the particular dhcp server (like /etc/dnsmasq).
Any changes in kernel are immediately reflected in userland utilities -- check. Not "immediately" as in "the day they're released" -- more like, by the time they hit your distro's repository, they generally work together. Any "guesswork" at that point is a bug.
Consistency is also a feature of the distribution, not the OS. Gentoo might have stuff in a different place than Ubuntu, but Ubuntu has everything in the same place as Ubuntu. Your comment would mean more if you said that FreeBSD had everything the same as OpenBSD and NetBSD, but in any case, I find any BSD (including OS X) to have a number of quirks in the commandline utilities that are unique to *BSD, and do not show up on Linux.
So, another way of looking at it is that FreeBSD is as consistent as, say, Ubuntu, with regards to itself. But Ubuntu is more consistent with the majority of *nix distros, by user or by kind, mostly because Linux has more users and distros than anything else.
Your example of having to hunt for config files in
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
If you can call this a feature, then sure. (Be sure to read the alternate text, too.)
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
...where's my goddamn 7.0-RELEASE? It was due on the 9th.
If BSD is better engineered than Linux because it comes from a single consistent source, I guess Windows is better than either because they don't risk bad code leaking in from the outside. BS- use the code you want to use, and don't whine when the systems you have taken responsibility for fail.
I fear however that most of the apps like those in the LAMP stack are being optimized for Linux. The threading situation on BSD used to be a nightmare. I agree 7.0 looks awesome. I'm amazed and grateful for all the developers that kept hope alive. I'll find a use for it somewhere.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
If you want a ready-to-run BSD-based OS, try DesktopBSD. :) Its GUI is just about on a level with Kubuntu; at least there's nothing I miss.
"Good news, everyone!"
Application and administration style; for a VM image or flash fs on an embedded device, it doesn't necessarily hold.
What stops *BSD users from compiling httpd for installation under /var ? Besides, now it's --prefix=/srv/www and I can live with that. I also serve weekly regenerated static content from var; it's where variable data belongs.
I don't care that J. random 12 year old doesn't care; the world doesn't revolve around the x86 in his bedroom.
What does this even mean?
Only when stability and security are the primary goals. See also 3.
OSX!
This isn't a troll, it's an actual real question.
I've been using FreeBSD since 3-point-*mumble*. I'm running 6-STABLE on my home server, but since about 5-point-something (maybe zero) I've noticed an irritating trend in the install process... The packages seem to be placed on the cds... oddly. When I try to install the OS, I get a message that bash3 requires some library on disc 2 so switch discs... then chugs along until something on disc 2 requires a package on disc 1... Back and forth half a dozen times or more?
I'd almost talked my boss into moving our new servers to freebsd as they come up, but the install just takes so blasted long because of all this disc-swapping. Anyone know of a fix?
1) Use a bootonly install disc and download the packages from ports or simply stick your necessary packages onto a CD/DVD and have sysinstall point to that medium.
2) Take the two iso images and create a DVD image. http://www.pa.msu.edu/~tigner/bsddvd.html