FreeBSD 3.4 released

By the time you read this, FreeBSD 3.4 will have been released. Being a 3.x release, this primarily contains fixes and enhancements to existing parts of the system, rather than complete new functionality and subsystems. Those will come with the 4.0 release, later next year. That said, there are a few new developments that have been shaken out in the -current branch, and have been backported. Read on for more.

On the networking front, the 'netgraph' code has been integrated, giving a much more modular networking framework, allowing arbitrary protocols and transports to be connected together. Amongst other things, this means that PPP over ISDN and PPP over ethernet now work. Many ISPs want to support PPP over ethernet now, and FreeBSD is ideal for this environment. The netgraph code was written and donated to the FreeBSD project by Whistle, and interested hackers can read more information about netgraph.

ISDN support has been improved, with an updated i4b(4) driver. Amongst other things, this adds support for more ISDN cards, including Asuscom ISDNlink 128K, AVM Fritz!Card PCI and PNP, and the Siemens I-Surf 2.0.

There have been security improvements across the board, including a new FreeBSD auditing project, to inspect the source code for potential problems, and fix them as necessary. ICMP redirects, outgoing RSTs, and incoming SYN|FIN frames can all be blocked, to negate certain DoS attacks, and the packet forwarding system can be configured to do so without decreasing the TTL, making gateways and firewalls much less visible, to list a few of the security related enhancements.

The Linux ABI has been improved, thanks to the efforts of Marcel Moolenaar. Linux versions of Quake III Arena and Unreal Tournament work flawlessly (and often faster) on FreeBSD, as do many other apps for which only Linux binaries are available.

As well as these, there have been the general plethora of fixes, updates, improvements to the documentation, and additions to the ports tree. There are currently more than 2,800 software ports available, from Apache, to Zope, which makes software installation that bit simpler for everyone.

FreeBSD 3.4 is available now.

Comments

some info for those new to FreeBSD

[nocent]

Here's a few things you might be interested in:
Why Yahoo uses FreeBSD written by David Filo, co-founder of Yahoo
Booting Linux and FreeBSD using BootEasy
Booting Linux and FreeBSD using LILO
Linux+FreeBSD mini-HOWTO Excellent resource for installing and using FreeBSD and Linux on the same system

Re:some info for those new to FreeBSD

[jedinite]

As a long time BSD-bigot ;), the best advice I can give the BSD newbie is to head to Walnut Creek CDRom.com and order two things:

The Complete FreeBSD Manual which flat out contains everything you need or want to know about BSD

New FreeBSD Sub.with 3.4. This will not just get you the brand new 3.4 release for the super-low price of $24.95, but will enroll you in the FreeBSD subscription program, where you'll get a new version of the disc automatically at the discounted subscription rate.

For the subscription, they bill your credit card automatically when the new version ships (credit cards are the only payment method possible for our subscriptions). The normal shipping charge applies. You may cancel at any time, just write, call, fax, or email. FYI, there are approximately four releases of FreeBSD a year, so it'll cost you approximately $100/yr. But you're supporting great, freely available software development... and a kickass OS! :)

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Question: How do I leverage the power of the internet?

A Serious Answer (long though)

[MO!]

Hello,

I've been using FreeBSD for a few years now, along with most other OS's I can get my hands on. ;-)

Currently I have RedHat Linux 6.1 installed on one box, and FreeBSD 3.4-Stable on my gateway machine.

The simple answer is, very similar in most ways, but that really doesn't tell you much. I'll instead mention some of the most obvious differences.

First of all, unlike RedHat, FreeBSD doesn't install and enable everything under the sun. With FreeBSD, if you choose to install "everything", you still have to configure and then enable most added-value type daemons. This is both good & bad, depending upon the user and what they can handle. If you're used to having some sort of defaults set and Samba, Apache, AnonFTP, etc. all startup on your first boot - you may be frustrated that these aren't running the first boot into FreeBSD. Although base defaults are places in .sample files, you have to manually choose what you want to start upon boot, and enable it yourself. Personally, I like this - especially for a home system. I don't necessarily want Apache running all the time, just when I need to test a website I've created.

The second difference, and most important to me, is FreeBSD's install lets you choose the base "distribution" you want (Developer, X-Developer, X-User, Minimal, Everything, etc.) BEFORE it fetches anything. This is really important to me since I install via FTP from the Internet. I just replaced RedHat 6.1 with FreeBSD 3.4 on my laptop. Since I have the full 3.4-Stable sources on my gateway machine, I only need a minimal install on the laptop. I can then NFS mount the gateway's fs and compile/install the complete system from there. This cuts down drastically the amount of transfers over my modem. When I installed the minimal RedHat distributing on my laptop it took quite a few hours to complete. FreeBSD was done with the minimal base in about 20 minutes. Then, since I had already compiled the updated source on my gateway, I just had to mount the NFS exports and do a "make installworld" - BAM! Complete install on my laptop within about an hour.

As for technical differences, Linux uses one entire "DOS" extended partition for it's further slicing into swap and fs points. With FreeBSD, this "DOS" partition is created as a primary, not extended. This makes it easier to delete if you're just playing with OS's, since a DOS diskette with fdisk on it can remove the FreeBSD partition. With Linux, you can't remove the extended partition because extended drives exist, but DOS can't read the extended drive, so you're SOL.

The init scripts are also completely different. Many folks may argue that System V scripts are better than BSD scripts, or vis versa. I don't particularly think either is better, they're simply different.

hmmm... Think that's the major things you'll notice right off the bat. The hardware support is pretty much the same, I rarely find a device that one can use and the other can't. Usually, it's either supported by both FreeBSD and Linux, or neither of them at all.

Good luck! Remember, new experiences are opportunities to learn and grow! I have used/still use about 15 different OS's. Most of them Unix or Unix-like variants. They all have strengths, they all have weaknesses, and they all are different in many ways. But then again, they are all mostly the same.

Michael.