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New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD

Posted by timothy on from the under-the-new-year's-wire dept.

tearmeapart writes "The teams at FreeBSD have reached another great achievement with FreeBSD 9.1, with improvements to the already fantastic zfs features, more VM improvements (helping bringing FreeBSD to the next generation of VMs), and improvements in speed to many parts of the network system. Support FreeBSD via the FreeBSD mall or download/upgrade FreeBSD from a mirror. Unfortunately, the torrent server is still down due to the previous security incident." And new submitter northar writes "The other day the NetBSD project released their first update to the 6.x series, 6.0.1. They also (rather discreetly) announced a fund drive targeting 60.000 USD before the end of 2012 in the release notes. They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."

9 of 149 comments (clear)

  1. FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven by AddisonW · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I've got FreeBSD 9.1 running on my machine now and it is absolute Unix heaven.

    The NVidia drivers work perfectly with my 580 card. The rest of my hardware was recognized and works properly.

    All my gaming is done on my PS3 and Wii and a little bit on my Android devices. So my FreeBSD is primarily used for development and some webbrowsing. Working on a system that is stable and free from the crazy and random crap that plagues the various Linux distros is wonderful. The only negative I've found so far is the desktop's ports aren't as fully setup as you get as with something like Ubunut or Mint since the major focus of most of the FreeBSD devs is on server use.

    I would like to thank all the lame people who have so diligently been posting their lame 'is dying' posts. I would never have checked out BSD if it wasn't for them. And it looks like the latest attempt at BSD FUD about funding massively backfired and led to a huge surge in project donations.

    I usually hate these type of cute little sayings but after having switched from Linux to FreeBSD it really rings true:

    Linux is for people who hate Microsoft
    BSD is for people who love Unix

    1. Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

      OS X is for people who love Unix.
      FreeBSD is for people who love Unix but too cheap to get a Mac.

    2. Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven by LizardKing · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Dear God. I used IRIX on an SGI Indy, and it was the perfect disaster of buggy, unstable software on top opf painfully slow hardware. In comparison, the OpenWindows desktop on my Sun workstation was a thing of reliable elegance.

    3. Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven by AddisonW · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Why would I pay effectively double for a Mac that:

      1. I can't even get a Blu-Ray drive with

      2. Apple's crap OpenGL drivers

      Having had a tablet now for the past year and finding I spend most of my casual computing done with it and all my development work on my FreeBSD system.

      Buying a Mac would be a waste of money. The only reason I would ever get a Mac desktop would be if for some reason I needed to work on a Mac desktop application. That is highly unlikely to ever happen.

  2. BSD is for people who hate Linux by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Judging by your comments I would say that BSD is for people who hate Linux. :(

    1. Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux by Bengie · · Score: 4, Insightful

      More like any time some troll comes in to the FreeBSD forums and smack talks about how great Linux is and how bad BSD is, it turns into a "Linux is teh awesomeest!!!!!1!" and "FreeBSD works well for us"

    2. Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux by shaitand · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Has it ever occurred to you that despite having done some things wrong the Linux world has developed some very solid technology and BSD might, just might, benefit from pulling it's head out of the sand adopting some of them.

      You can't have rational conversations with people who think the word "bloat" belongs in a discussion where the difference is like a meg. Those conversations made sense back in the 90's. People in BSD land still seem to think that the question of whether EMACS is bloated relative to VI is a legitimate discussion rather than a tongue in cheek reference to the old days. Hell last I checked BSD's still come with vi and not vim out of the box.

      Is there any legitimate justification for the fact I have a more capable tar out of the box on a Linux system than BSD? Surely nobody can say bloat with a straight face. I would hope nobody is saying security we aren't all plagued with tar worms. And as for stability, I've never had an issue with a lack of stability in any version of tar. I've never known anyone who has. I've never HEARD of anyone who has. Not even a legend of a guy who knew a guy who knew a guy.

      The Linux world has it's problems and if you use the cutting edge stuff you will have some glitches here and there. But at least it is doing SOMETHING. Those glitches will be worked out. Some things will be discarded in time others will stabilize into solid technology. BSDland is doing a whole lot of nothing and calling it a feature and most of the software running on BSD is developed in projects that are cross platform because it is easy to be but those projects exist and thrive because they run on Linux not because of BSD.

      BSD has some nice technology but the only reason it continues to exist and talented people waste effort developing that technology there instead of on Linux (where more people will benefit from it) is because some people who felt l33t running a hard to use Linux in the 90's hated Linux going mainstream and because nostalgic old UNIX admins still perpetrate the myth that it is more stable/secure/somehow betterer because much of it originates from the old UNIX(TM) code base. Of course, thanks to SCO we all know that any of that code that was worth having migrated into Linux a long long time ago.

      It's a shame. If there wasn't so much resentment and hate there could be more collaboration between two communities that really should be staunch allies.

  3. Re:BSD loses support from Open Source by rmstar · · Score: 1, Insightful

    [...]Where it's claimed that BSD is losing a lot of support due to Linux related tools and development processes only cares for Linux and not BSD.[...]

    You know, part of the problem is that they have a crappy package management infrastructure, something I really find puzzling. Ports just does not scale, and things like a WM environment (kde, or xfce) are just hard to get working.

    For example, if you start from a bare install, and build & install xfce (which will take a while) you will be surprised to find that X isn't a dependency. If you compile X, well, startx has to be compiled separately, which sort of makes sense if you are seriously autistic. Gdm? It builds, no problem. Installs in a broken and unusable state by default. Xfce plugins? Please build each one separately. And it goes on and on and on like this.

    The net result is that freebsd is frustrating to install and use. More so than slackware was a decade ago, and this should really tell you how bad the situation is.

  4. Bent over, spread wide, take that black box! by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Insightful

    Yes! That's why I choose FOSS like BSD and Linux!

    So I can install a proprietary driver like NVidia's 'blob' for BSD or Linux, which has had at least 2-3 remote exploits which were patched and we don't know if there's more because we cannot audit the code.

    Between NVidia's proprietary driver(s) and proprietary Flash, you guys make me laugh.

    Would you install a rootkit too, if it jacked you off?