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!

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

[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

[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.

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 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.)

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.