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FreeBSD 6.4 Released
hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at 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 claim this first post in the name of bsd.
AND I'M A PC
Dr. Frederick Frankenstein: Alive! It's alive! It's alive!
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I can't remember (and am too lazy to look at the timestamps on the website), but the ISOs were out the day before or after Thanksgiving (US). Pretty sure it was the day before.
I think it's only a month or two behind schedule, that's not bad for the FreeBSD team. Then again, they make a good product, between their releases being on time, and their releases being their usual high quality, I'm glad to have the high quality instead.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
and keeps on ticking. It is a robust little devil. Of course, a few admins will be torn whether to give up a couple of years of uptime for the new patches.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
VMware is the one application I simply can not do without. Is there anything equivalent for FreeBSD?
I used to run BSD a bit back in the 90's and I have long wanted to run it as my workstation OS, especially now to get ZFS. However, without a good virtualization solution there is no way.
The ratio of people to cake is too big
It's true, qemu works excellently, the only reason that it is not as popular as VMWare, virtual box or virtual PC is because of the crappy mouse support. The choppy mouse can be annoying, but it's not a problem at all if you're not running X.
And the performance. QEmu is a lot slower than pretty much anything other than Bochs.
It may seem "good enough" if that's all you're used to and you have limited needs but if you run a lot of VM's and use them heavily then QEmu is just too slow.
It just serves a different market. Things like VMware are for professionals trying to get work done. QEmu is for people messing around on their computer in their spare time.
This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 1. Please install Disk 2 and select OK to continue.
This is Disk 2. Please install Disk 1 and select OK to continue.
* repeat 50+ more times *
QEmu is incredibly slow, if you don't use KQEmu. With KQEmu, as long as you aren't doing 3D, it's actually rather fast.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
I don't have any choppy mouse issues with KQEmu under X. QEmu (without the kernel mod) did, but it was incredibly slow.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Even with KQEmu "rather fast" is not the same as VMware's nearly native speed. Like I said, it's OK for the casual user but it's far behind the other solutions in terms of features and performance.
Running qemu without kqemu here on FreeBSD/amd64 7.1-PRERELEASE with XP as guest (kqemu caused some BSODs in XP, interestingly more in 64-bit mode than in 32-bit mode), and even on a modest 2 GHz Phenom 9350e, I didn't have the feeling that the emulation was extra slow. Actually, I'm quite satisfied with its performance. Maybe because I'm not doing anything CPU intensive on XP like games etc, and merely using Visual Studio C++ and similar apps?
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
2.4Ghz Optron (dual core) 185.
I mostly use it for VPN into work and Visual Studio. It's still fairly slow with out kqemu.
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
Kqemu seems to make more of a difference on Linux than any other platform, as far as I can tell. (not having performed benchmarks of any sort). Frankly, VirtualBox seems to be the best of the lot, at least as far as disk I/O is concerned (I'm basing this on how long it takes to boot pkgsrc using OpenBSD in a VM; in VirtualBox it's near native, VMWare it's quite sluggish and takes a long-ass time, I wouldn't dream of trying this in Qemu).
What would be some good tests? I don't notice any slowdown, but I don't do a lot of intensive stuff on the VM.
VM
1280x1024/32bpp screen
Windows XP
Firefox + Flash (mostly youtube type stuff)
VPN + Remote Desktop
Visual Studio 2003
MS Office
A few OLD non 3D games
Self proclaimed typo king, and inventor of the bear destroying coffee table (patent not pending).
It is official; Netcraft now 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 close 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 a 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 cockeyed miracle could save *BSD from its fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I had this same problem running Win4BSD. It turns out the early Phenoms have a problem (Mine being a 9750). The solution is, of all things, to update you bios. Once I did this, no more BSODs. With kqemu it's much, much faster (on the verge of being close to native).
That's interesting! I'm using the most recent BIOS version available though, so no chance for improvement here. What's puzzling, is that qemu-0.9.1_10 with kqemu-kmod-1.3.0.p11_9 actually don't BSOD XP as often when I run i386. On amd64, it does. Perhaps it's related to this? I don't know, but it's strange.
cpghost at Cordula's Web.
The *ONLY* version of *BSD that matters.
Think different.
Think better.
THINK APPLE.
Err...where's the DVD "release" ? All I could find was some stuff on *creating* dvds and some discussion shunning the idea of having a dvd release. Nothing on their official site as per a dvd "release" is concerned. And Sherlock, when was the last time you installed a linux distribution ? You got baseless arguments against installation of linux distros ( fuck, you just used a windows analogy to hide the problems caused by freebsd installation.)