FreeBSD 5.4 Released 268
FreeBSD 5.4 is out. Reader KFW excerpts from the announcement: "The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes." Here are the release notes.
Remember, cvsup is your friend! (Score:4, Informative)
Re:congrats (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance? (Score:3, Informative)
Re:congrats (Score:5, Informative)
As fast as they are fixed, which in reality ends up being comparable to Linux, just listen on the appropriate mailing lists and follow the step-by step instructions. There are also some automated utilities in the ports collection that ease security updates. The BSD ports system will take care of most of your packaging concerns as well since it is an actively updated collection, although most require compilation from source there is the binary alternative, package, which should be easy enough for most RPM folk I would imagine.
Check out this link [freebsd.org] regarding packages and ports.
Torrents are your friends: (Score:5, Informative)
##### Disk One [freebsd.org] #####
##### Disk Two [freebsd.org] #####
Of course, in their infinate wisdom, the coders of slashdot have decided to make my life difficult with their damn lameness filters
Re:Torrents are your friends: (Score:5, Informative)
Help promote their new torrent option, (Score:2, Informative)
http://people.freebsd.org/~kensmith/5.4-torrent/ [freebsd.org]
if you can, join the all seeds ; )
Re:I hope it's better than 5.3 (Score:1, Informative)
Good things about FreeBSD:
Reasons to prefer Linux:
Commercial flavours of unix maybe. (Score:3, Informative)
5.4 Dedication (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/announce.htm
Requiem for the FUD (Score:1, Informative)
... facts are facts.
FreeBSD:
FreeBSD, Stealth-Growth Open Source Project (Jun 2004) [internetnews.com]
"FreeBSD has dramatically increased its market penetration over the last year."
Nearly 2.5 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD (Jun 2004) [netcraft.com]
"[FreeBSD] has secured a strong foothold with the hosting community and continues to grow, gaining over a million hostnames and half a million active sites since July 2003."
What's New in the FreeBSD Network Stack (Sep 2004) [slashdot.org]
"FreeBSD can now route 1Mpps on a 2.8GHz Xeon whilst Linux can't do much more than 100kpps."
NetBSD:
NetBSD, for When Portability and Stability Matter (Oct 2004) [serverwatch.com]
NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (May 2004) [slashdot.org]
NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record (Sep 2004) [netbsd.org]
OpenBSD:
OpenBSD Widens Its Scope (Nov 2004) [eweek.com]
Review: OpenBSD 3.6 shows steady improvement (Nov 2004) [newsforge.com]
OpenSSH (OpenBSD subproject) has become a de facto Internet standard. [openssh.org]
*BSD in general:
..and last but not least, we have the cutest mascot as well - undisputedly. ;) [keltia.net]
Deep study: The world's safest computing environment (Nov 2004) [mi2g.com]
"The world's safest and most secure 24/7 online computing environment - operating system plus applications - is proving to be the Open Source platform of BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) and the Mac OS X based on Darwin."
BSD Success Stories (O'Reilly, 2004) (pdf) [oreilly.com] ~ from Onlamp BSD DevCenter [onlamp.com]
"The BSDs - FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD, Darwin, and others - have earned a reputation for stability, security, performance, and ease of administration."
--
Being able to read *other people's* source code is a nice thing, not a 'fundamental freedom'.
Re:Might be a stupid question, but... (Score:4, Informative)
*default host=cvsup2.FreeBSD.org
*default base=/usr
*default prefix=/usr
*default release=cvs tag=RELENG_5_4
*default delete use-rel-suffix
*default compress
src-all
(I like to put it under
cvsup -g -L 2
Go make some coffee while your sources are synchronized, then read the Handbook to learn how to build the beast.
Re:tail -f *log (Score:3, Informative)
That enhancement alone is worthy of upgrading!
Never heard of xtail [unicom.com]? It was released in 1989 and does exactly that.
Re:I hope it's better than 5.3 (Score:4, Informative)
Not true. Device drivers are usually backported unless they depend on some system difference between 4.x and 5.x. I've never noticed any hardware incompatibilities between versions and i've used both extensively.
The next one is a doosy...
The FreeBSD ports system is not all it's cracked up to be. Stuff is constantly breaking.
I honestly have not encounted a break in any major apps in ports in the past 3 years. It's evolved a lot since you last used it, i guess.
The desktop apps just aren't maintained carefully enough (not surprising, since FreeBSD is not a major desktop OS). After a cvsup, you get left wit a system in a state where you can't upgrade one piece of software without breaking a lot of other software. Portupgrade is a disaster -- I've never seen a better way to bork a system than to unleash portupgrade on it.
No, no no. Not true. I had a production system with apache, php, postgresql, gnome, KDE, etc installed (it was a workstation/light-use webserver for a lab i was working in). I installed it at 4.5, last time i touched it it was at 4.11, all ports upgraded (using cvsup and portupgrade), only one install point. After being a FreeBSD user for about a year. If I can do it, in a production environment, without any break in's or security issues, anyone can. My webserver here at home has been running 5 since 5.2.1, same deal - all things installed from ports, only one point of install, all upgraded by cvsup and portupgrade. No problems. Then there's my workstation, it runs Gentoo, Windows, Solaris and FreeBSD 5.3. FBSD has been installed since 5.3 first made -RELEASE, runs gnome 2.10 (which hit ports before it hit portage, ~1 week after official release). Only one install point, constantly updated using cvsup and portupgrade. Gentoo? Great little distro, but i've installed it at least 3 or 4 separate times due to major breakages or just aggrivation with portage. I don't hold it against portage, it's just still maturing.
Your report couldn't be further from my experience. Ever since i started running freebsd back four years ago i've been able to keep an up-to-date, stable system without much difficulty.
Re:congrats (Score:4, Informative)
Security fixes are backported to earlier versions. Those versions still officially maintained have fixes backported by the security officers. Older versions tend to also get fixes but merely by the work of interested committers. Thus it isn't usual to see fixes being backported to releases as far back as 4.3.
What do I mean by backported? Users can update their
Thus there is for example 5.3-RELEASE, and 5.3-p5.
Generally speaking, there is no need to wait for new releases to get fixes. Fixes are painlessly and automatically available almost overnight.
All of this applies to the software officially maintained by the FreeBSD system--i.e., anything in the "base system" Other software generally gets fixes in ports soon after the upstream version has a fix... but backing this is the port-audit database. port-audit is maintained by the security team and lists all the known vulnerabilities against third-party software. A cron job mails you warnings about vulnerable third-party software. The ports system warns you about vulnerable software and libraries when you attempt to install (even when a new install depends on an already installed but vulernable library.
Re:congrats (Score:5, Informative)
In all honesty... 24 hours is very unusual for us. I can think of one case where it happened recently, but that was when we rushed an advisory out in order to fit into the 5.4 release schedule.
A more typical time is 3 days, since we want to test carefully to make certain that a "security fix" never ends up breaking something else.
Re:So what's 5.4 like for 4.x users? (Score:1, Informative)
On the side issue, however, it would be nice if they actually updated their website, inreference to the smp, kse and busdma status; I mean, not to sound whiny and flamebaitish, but it'd be nice to see a status of how things are *ACTUALLY* progressing *NOW* rather than from up to 12months ago, in regards to the kse status page (since it was last updated).
Re:Might be a stupid question, but... (Score:1, Informative)
http://fastest-cvsup.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]
Re:VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Free BSD (Score:4, Informative)
I'll also point out that the BSD's tend to be more predictable in their quality from release to release. There have been some real brown paper bag kernel releases and distros like RedHat and Mandrake have pulled boners on their own.
I'll bet a real BSD fanboy could probably think of a few more.
Re:Better SMP support? Better MySQL performance? (Score:1, Informative)
MOD THE PARENT DOWN (Score:1, Informative)
FreeBSD Mall [freebsdmall.com]
At least they DO support the FreeBSD development community financially.
making your own world (Score:3, Informative)
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
reboot
boot in single user mode, then
mergemaster -p
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Voila, you should be running 5.4-RELEASE at this point
Re:I hope it's better than 5.3 (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Avoid CVSUP on a server (Score:3, Informative)
1) The stable branch does include security fixes
2) The ports collection is not branched, so there's no possibility for "several ports downgraded" in the "4.x series". The only situation in which ports are downgraded is if there are serious problems with the newer version, and a reversion to the previous version is a net gain.
Re:So what's 5.4 like for 4.x users? (Score:3, Informative)