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FreeBSD 8.0 Released
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8 stable release. Some of the highlights:
Xen DomU support, network stack virtualization, stack-smashing protection, TTY layer rewrite, much improved ZFS v13, a new USB stack, multicast updates including IGMPv3, vimage — a new virtualization container, Fedora 10 Linux binary compatibility to run Linux software such as Flash 10 and others, trusted BSD MAC (Mandatory Access Control), and rewritten NFS client/server introducing NFSv4. Inclusion of improved device mmap() extensions will allow the technical implementation of a 64-bit Nvidia display driver for the x86-64 platform. The GNOME desktop environment has been upgraded to 2.26.3, KDE to 4.3.1, and Firefox to 3.5.5. There is also an in-depth look at the new features and major architectural changes in FreeBSD 8.0, including a screenshot tour, upgrade instructions are posted here. You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors (main ftp server) or via BitTorrent. Please consider making a donation and help us to spread the word by tweeting and blogging about the drive and release."
Technically, 8.0-RELEASE has not yet been announced. Judging by the links in the submission, it looks like the "anonymous reader" is whoever owns cyberciti.biz, and he decided to submit the story early in order to drive traffic to his site.
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid
I was intending to install RC3 on a new desktop machine a few days ago, but got the error message "this version not available on this server". So I went to the options screen and changed it to 8.0-RELEASE just on a hunch and happily it was there and installed without a hitch. Definitely several good performance improvements over 7.2, especially when copying large amounts of data from a USB disk. So far this seems like a nice, solid release and I look forward to migrating my servers to it (after a month or so, just to be sure).
Caveat Utilitor
That depends on your definition of BSD. Some people look at the userland and the large amount of BSD code in Mac OS X and call that BSD. I'd say there are more than 0.01% of users that are on mac os.
I started a project to make a desktop friendly BSD operating system called MidnightBSD. There's also PC-BSD and the now defunct DesktopBSD. The new problem is that Linux folks have grown inpatient with the linux on the desktop idea. They want it now and feel that supporting other operating systems in their FOSS work is slowing linux down. A few projects have really done some serious changes to their software to make it function poorly (or not at all) on other OSes including *BSDs. Sometimes it's a lack of people to make reasonable updates to the kernels for various things like "new" video interfaces. Even things like X.org have done shifts that make hardware acceleration a real pain in the butt on BSD platforms. I've been shunned many times for trying to provide patches both for MidnightBSD and previously FreeBSD to other projects.
The FreeBSD project has had trouble getting patches upstreamed for things like GCC and binutils in the past. In general, I think many GNU projects are starting to get grumpy with respect to *BSD patches. There's a backlash with BSD developers trying to write alternatives that are under the BSD license because we must to survive. Also, you get into situations like Apple buying cups and switching to LLVM because of fear of the GPLv3. Perhaps fear is not the right word.
The open source community is not one big happy group but a series of factions that don't get along. It's a shame really.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone