New Releases From FreeBSD and NetBSD

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."

Comments

60 dollars?

[Osgeld]

Now that is cost efficiency!

Re:60 dollars?

[andrewa]

Submitter could be from any of these countries.... Albania, Andorra, Argentina, Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Belgium, Bolivia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Brazil, Bulgaria, Cameroon, Canada (French-speaking), Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Croatia (comma used officially, but both forms are in use elsewhere), Cuba, Cyprus, Czech Republic, Denmark, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, Estonia, Faroes, Finland, France, Germany, Georgia, Greece, Greenland, Honduras, Hungary, Iceland, Indonesia, Italy, Kazakhstan, Kirgistan, Latvia, Lebanon, Lithuania, Luxembourg (uses both marks officially), Macau (in Portuguese text), Macedonia, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa (officially[15]), Spain, Sweden, Tunisia, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay, Uzbekistan, Venezuela, Vietnam. See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decimal_mark

Re:netbsd=hobby

[reboot246]

Don't you mean 30.000 employees?

No need to hurry

[K. S. Kyosuke]

"They better get going if their donation page is anything like recently updated."

Well, since the date on the image is Dec 30, 2009, I don't think you need to be in any sort of hurry.

Lots of good fixes

[Anonymous Coward]

It should be an easy upgrade for anyone running 9.0, and it does add some neat stuff. These dot releases are usually logical improvements and fixes, but important new features do get introduced with regularity when they've been tested extensively in the the development branches.

9.1 is adding KMS for intel (Unless that was already MFC'd back to 9), I think the new code for LSI cards including IBM M1015, support for newer Ralink wireless cards, lots of bug fixes and improvements.

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/9.1R/relnotes.html

FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[AddisonW]

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

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Lord_Naikon]

Yes, that is exactly the way to enjoy FreeBSD - use it for what it's good at. FreeBSD + nVidia is awesome. State of the art compilers, every port installs its development headers, knowing that _you_ are in complete control of the system instead of the other way around. Outstanding development platform. I love it!

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[LizardKing]

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.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

You have never used FreeBSD or a traditional UNIX. I get it.

OS X is neat, but entirely 100% different. Please don't bring up the UNIX trademark.

I used OS X before FreeBSD (FreeBSD was not evening running on PowerPC at the time) and MacBSD before there was an OS X.

OS X is much more similar to NeXT/OpenStep than it is to FreeBSD.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[AddisonW]

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.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[siDDis]

There are many reasons!

Jails
ZFS
GEOM Framework
Ports
PF
Carp
Hast
The FreeBSD Handbook / Documentation with consistency

However FreeBSD doesn't excell for everything, for example Java support is far away from production ready. And another thing I ran into recently was that monitoring a lot of files for changes was slow/not scalable at all because kqueue uses file descriptors for monitoring changes in your filesystem. Linux, OS X or even Windows have scalable and working solutions for this.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[Anonymous Coward]

You can (and, on a long-enough timeline, will) unwittingly destroy a Debian / Ubuntu / Mint system, leaving it unbootable, simply by selecting a wrong package in Synaptic. Package installer also enables and launches daemons without asking you, which is a huge security problem. That's never the case on any BSD's. The base system is kept separate, and screwing up with packages never screws up your whole system.

Linux distros also tend to be desktop-oriented and bloated. (For example, can you name one Linux distro that doesn't absolutely require perl? FreeBSD doesn't - in that aspect it is even more flexible than Gentoo!) For me sound always "just works" in FreeBSD, while all popular Linux distros require a huge bloated stack of needlessly-complex crap (ALSA, PulseAudio, etc) in order to make it work. I run `top` on my FreeBSD desktop, and I know what everything is, with no process being redundant; I run `top` on Linux, and I feel like I'm trapped in Mumbai during rush hour! As the result of this Linux bloat, FreeBSD actually runs faster than Linux without even trying!

--libman

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

I think he should be modded down on the solid basis of having referred to a Perl requirement as being 'desktop-centric' and 'bloated'. Vim is bigger than Perl. Some people think vim vs plain vi is bloat, those people need to go back to the early 90's where their definition of bloat belongs.

I don't know about you but I don't actually WANT to spend hours fiddling with the system whether it be desktop or server. The only time I should be fiddling is when I want something unusual or custom.

The server oriented versions of the major distributions are enterprise quality and stable.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

Done right in the sense that it is stable but quite frankly a Linux system is pretty rock solid as well. Systems suffer no bitrot, don't crash, don't need rebooted and are easily secured. I generally find that the increased development effort on Linux has resulted in serious speed improvements relative to BSD as well. The "features" missing in BSD land are now old tested technology. CLI utilities are missing basic functionality. Old vi vs vim? What possible justification can there be for this? It saves a few bytes on disk? You can't even get a thumb drive smaller than 2GB now.

The difference is the BSD experience is closer to what I found with Linux is the 90's and hasn't really evolved. The community surrounding it seems to be the kind who hate polish for the sake of hating polish and justify it by claiming it makes them more secure or stable. There certainly were no shortage of Linux users from the 90's with that mentality who jumped ship as Linux became more polished. Polish isn't about being pretty, it doesn't always carry a performance hit, and most importantly it is about reducing administrative overhead. Having to fiddle and tweak to get a configuration that is clearly optimal is educational, but it isn't constructive. In the 90's I had to configure almost everything by hand to get a config that was optimal for almost all users. In BSD I still do.

And yes, do things the way windows does it. Not under the hood but in the user experience. This has nothing to do with being second class or the windows way being optimal. At the end of the day the extra time spent by users re-learning the system is far more serious defect than any particular behavior of an interface. If a user who is fluent in graphics manipulation on the leading platform for that task has to spend hours learning your interface to do work then your interface is NOT better. Any platform I have to spend hours tinkering with is a hobby platform because people with work to do just don't have time to do this.

That said, there are some nasty things happening in user interfaces all over the place and some of them have come to Linux land. I don't really credit BSD for not doing something nasty like Unity though. It wasn't because BSD has something better or made a choice. It was because BSD didn't do anything at all and by chance this time the old stuff is better.

If you NEED pfsense, ZFS, or you are an old UNIX admin who is nostalgic about the archaic way UNIX used to be then BSD is the way to go. Otherwise, you are better off with Linux. Even if you don't need the additional capabilities, the top programming talent in the world, whether they are focused on the server space, distributed computing, embedded computing, they have all been spending their efforts building Linux and not BSD for the past decade so it is going to outperform BSD.

Re:FreeBSD 9.1 Is Unix Heaven

[shaitand]

"A base system should not have somebody's favorite scripting language just because they couldn't write their components in C, like real system programmers should."

This is just an old school mentality and I say that as someone who hates the quick adoption of bloat used by today's programmers in their 40 layers of abstraction, object oriented code that by nature reduces your familiarity with the function of underlying components, and adoption of not reinvent to the wheel to the point where everyone assumes that every piece of already written code is more efficient and better tested than their own or worse that efficiency doesn't matter at all.

Perl is implemented in C so Perl implemented correctly, and for tasks well suited to Perl, you get C performance out of it. In fact, used properly you will probably get better performance because few are up to the interpreter coders skill level and even if they are don't have time to dedicate to turning their implementations like those guys do. Properly structured and written Perl is far easier to maintain and less prone to vulnerabilities than C code. And, the 'base system' we are talking about isn't the low level code that qualifies as 'systems' programming. Remember the base system we are talking about isn't actual systems programming it includes daemons, userland, and plenty of shell scripting.

Like I said. These ideas come from the 90's when they were valid. Perl was an upstart back then, it was slow, it was bloated relative to the other tools out there and slower besides. Hardware and Perl have progressed to the point where Perl is one of the most trim things on your system and any 'bloat' potential is on the level of statistical noise, it is as fast or faster than most of the text mangling builtins, and it far far more powerful than even the combined array of pipeline processing utilities found in your traditional userland. Make no mistake, just because the first digit in the release has stayed the same does not mean Perl isn't advancing. Perl is advancing rapidly. If anything keeping that major release the same means the Perl team is doing the right thing and fixing bugs, optimizing, and tuning to a level you wouldn't believe.

There is nothing wrong with including Perl or even Python (not my cup of tea but w/e) or building processes around Perl. Besides, like I said before. It is so tiny that bloat doesn't even enter the equation. I guarantee that there are dozens of utilities included in your BSD environment that you won't ever use and may not even know are there with a bigger footprint than Perl.

A base script interpreter gains a big portion of its value from being runnable everywhere. This is minimized if you don't have at least the most popular ones in the system to run and since their footprints are extremely small there is no reason not to. I have no use personally for Python (in almost every case where you'd use it Perl is a technically superior and more stable solution imho) or even java but I don't object to others using those tools. Mono I do object to.

As for copyleft. My opinion is that it is a feature and not a bug. But that is a religious debate or a fiscal one depending on what aspect of things you take.

P.S. Why post AC when your sig gives your name?

BSD loses support from Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm just reading an article on LWN.net

http://lwn.net/Articles/524606/

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.

So basicly because of GNOME adopting things like PulseAudio, systemd and so on makes this desktop to disappear from BSD one day because these underlaying technologies doesn't exist on their systems.

The BSD developers are certainly concerned about this issue.

Please read above article for further informations.

Re:BSD loses support from Open Source

[ottdmk]

I have to respectfully disagree. While it takes some getting used to, the FreeBSD ports system is, imo, absolutely awesome. Running into conflicts is extremely rare. I ran into a software conflict two months ago. It was the first time in probably five years. (I've been using FreeBSD as my main home system since 2002.)

Yes, if you install a desktop, X is not automatically a dependency. This situation works rather well for those who want to remotely log into the machine and use a GUI. Until recently FreeBSD supported FreeNX quite well (I've had trouble with the port recently. In my spare time I'm hacking away at it.). If you're remote administering a headless system, having X pulled in as a dependency is not what you want.

I'm sorry you ran into difficulties with X. The thing with X is that you have to remember to use the x11/xorg meta-port. You can install all the X components one at a time through the other ports and I imagine that if you're building a desktop it would be an exercise in extreme frustration.

If you ever decide to try FreeBSD again you might want to try PC-BSD. It's a full FreeBSD system (they just released 9.1 as well) but the installer installs a desktop by default and the PBI system is less arcane then ports can be. (Bear in mind that PBI is built from the FreeBSD ports system and ports remain available to users in PC-BSD.)

Re:amazing.

[K. S. Kyosuke]

License, GNU userland by default, testing various crazy ideas...? Anyway, to me, this question sounds more like "why would anyone eat more than one kind of soup?".

BSD is for people who hate Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[Bengie]

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"

Re:BSD is for people who hate Linux

[shaitand]

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.

Working Great

[Sadsfae]

I've been using 9.1-RELEASE since SVN was tagged 2012-12-04 on both my home and work desktop. ZFS root is awesome, and userland is pretty much the latest bleeding edge upstream, I've had absolutely no issues running a full-fledged XFCE-4.10, Firefox ESR 10.x with Flash, 3D accel, everything desktop.

I've used freebsd-update to go from both 9.1-RC3 and 9.0-RELEASE to 9.1-RELEASE also switching to pkgng.
I'd recommend folks to look at the following guides if they want to use ZFS root or create a nice, full-featured desktop OS.

http://forums.freebsd.org/showthread.php?t=31662 (ZFS ROOT)
https://cooltrainer.org/2012/01/02/a-freebsd-9-desktop-how-to (good desktop guide)

Great job BSD devs, keep it up.