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.
congrats (Score:5, Interesting)
I have one (uneducated) question though: they mention a number of security fixes. How long does it generally take for a fix/patch to come out on freebsd compared to linux (or the other bsd variants)? I'm considering experimenting with it, but the relative comfort of packaging systems I'm familiar with makes it sort of hard.
Re:congrats (Score:3, Interesting)
openbsd
VIA CLE266/VT8235 USB support (Score:3, Interesting)
Free BSD (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:good stuff (Score:5, Interesting)
It would be hard for them to talk their way out of the rhetorical position they're in, where (it is claimed) Unix is inferior/dead/too expensive.
It's too bad, because I think they would be in a stronger position had they gone the Apple route. Can you imagine how different things would be if they had released a Unix-based OS a couple of years ago? Unthinkable.
GUI to desktop (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:congrats (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:So what's 5.4 like for 4.x users? (Score:3, Interesting)
There are worse problems than that though. I recall having mysterious behavior (also seen on mailing lists) when trying to forward things to a local FTP proxy, which is the only way to have transparent FTP NATting with PF (and IPFW/natd just didn't work at all, but I might have just missed something: it's been years since I last used it). So it has some caveats as a gateway, but if you're willing to work around them it's a great system.
Personally I'm waiting until all of the other important work is done first, finally revealing the power of their SMP and VFS implementations and so on. We could either have a strong contender for Linux' position of "does everything fast enough without being too complicated", or a depressing failure (which is more likely to be from lack of software support than any developer issues: there's little point running DFly if the package manager issue isn't resolved).
Miniinst iso (Score:2, Interesting)
-eventhorizon