Slashdot Mirror
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
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 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
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!
So I take it that 2008 will be the Year of the BSD Desktop?
I'm thinking yes and hell yes. PC-BSD is going to be carried in Fry's and Microcenter (for starters).
And, whenever one is choosing an OS, even for the desktop, you've got consider what sort of crowd you'll be getting mixed up with.
"Unleash your desktop with PC-BSD!"
No...BSD is better engineered because it's .... (wait for it) .... engineered . Linux is just a kernel with a bunch of separately developed utilities strung together -no real coordination, no real direction.
You misunderstand engineering. Here's an example. How do you get the CPU speed from the kernel? In all of the BSD family there is a single sysctl that you call and it gives you the answer, irrespective of the architecture. On Linux, the answer is in /proc/cpuinfo. This is a plain-text file, so you need to read it and parse it. It gets better though; the format of this file is different on different architectures; write code to parse it on x86, and it won't work on PowerPC. The main job of the kernel is to present programmers with an abstraction so that they don't have to know about the underlying architecture, and Linux fails miserably at this.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News