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FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE Now Available

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on from the put-the-daemon-back-in-the-box dept.

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."

10 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Yes sirree... by dosius · · Score: 4, Insightful

    BSD is alive and well!

    -uso.

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    What you hear in the ear, preach from the rooftop Matthew 10.27b
  2. Dedicated to Itojun by gertam · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. A very niche OS by slashuzer · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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 .

    1. Re:A very niche OS by 0x000000 · · Score: 5, Informative

      FreeBSD brings a stable OS to the desktop user. Since both userland and kernel are in the same source tree, and are developed concurrently, any changes in the kernel will be immediately reflected in the userland utilities. What does this mean? Well, if I upgrade my kernel and my world, I will know that I always have a perfectly functioning system. It takes the guess work out of upgrades.

      Besides that? I find that it is more consistent. If you move from one Linux distribution to another, you need to go hunting for the configuration files, they are not in a set location as specified by man hier. I know that when I install something from the ports tree, the configuration files can always be found in /usr/local/etc/, which is a nice change from having to hunt in /var/www/httpd for Apache's configuration file and /opt/etc/ for the dhcp servers config file.

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      cat /dev/null > .signature
    2. Re:A very niche OS by geek · · Score: 4, Interesting

      I used to be a diehard FreeBSD fan. Used it on all my servers and my desktop. I'd still use it before Linux on a server but on the desktop there just is no comparison to something like Ubuntu. The last time I installed FreeBSD on my laptop I felt I had gone back in time 10 years to 1998. Everything I wanted seemed to be a linux emulation too. That's just how I felt anyway. I love FreeBSD and always will, but they don't seem to have the focus on usability for the desktop that distros like Ubuntu have.

    3. Re:A very niche OS by jcgf · · Score: 4, Funny

      FreeBSD has the advantage of not being for bitches.

      That's the main reason I use it ;)

  4. Looking forward to 7.0 by 0x000000 · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

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    cat /dev/null > .signature
    1. Re:Looking forward to 7.0 by kace · · Score: 5, Informative

      There have been some tests done to compare FreeBSD 7 performance to FreeBSD 6, and the gains are impressive.

      See these slides by Kris Kennaway for more details on that.

  5. Re:Wait, what? by jd · · Score: 4, Funny

    You see, if it dies more than 32767 times, you get an overflow, the sign bit flips and it becomes alive again. This is the problem with using fixed-length integers. If computers were using variable-length precision, you wouldn't get this problem.

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    It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
  6. Re:better engineered? by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

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    I am TheRaven on Soylent News