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Announcements Operating Systems Software BSD

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7 Released; 5.3-RELEASE Soon 76

Posted by timothy from the film-at-11-back-to-you-in-new-york dept.
hugo_pt writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7. This is the seventh and final BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. Fixes and enhancements made since BETA6: fix timekeeping on sparc64 and alpha that would result in the day of the week being stored incorrectly in NVRAM; add support to the fxp driver for the ICH6 chipset; fix the panic on detach problem with USB hubs; import BIND 9.3.0, this completely replaces the old BIND 8.x nameserver in the base system; fix panic when allocating swap on a busy system; fix loader crash when using the 'lsdev' command.... You can read the release announcement, and download the beta ISO." (ISO 1, ISO 2)
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FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7 Released; 5.3-RELEASE Soon More

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA7 Released; 5.3-RELEASE Soon

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  • Close to FreeBSD 5.3 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @08:45AM (#10449769)
    I am a long time Slackware Linux fan, and I have been looking extensively at FreeBSD. I wish to try FreeBSD, and I would like some of my newer supported devices (wireless ones, to be more precise), to be supported. Is it time to take the *BSD plunge? Does FreeBSD support a large enough database of hardware to give a try, even with strange and obscure devices?

    • Re:Close to FreeBSD 5.3 (Score:5, Informative)

      by the real darkskye ( 723822 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @09:02AM (#10449953) Homepage
      FreeBSD 5.3 supports Project Evil, ala NDIS support.
      It can take binary windows drivers for a majority of networking hardware and use them to run the device.

      Information on Project Evil can be found at http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ndis&apro pos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-current&format =html [freebsd.org]

    • Re:Close to FreeBSD 5.3 (Score:5, Informative)

      by JQuick ( 411434 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @09:21AM (#10450136)
      "Newer supported devices" is uselessly vague, as you are aware. Adding the words "wireless one" is more detailed, but not as you state, "more precise".

      Wireless could still mean almost anything. IRDA, 802.11*, bluetooth, heck you might be talking about anything from a mouse or a keyboard to an interface to an amateur packet radio band (via short wave). As a result, though I would like to provide an answer, I cannot. I can only make it easier for you to find it on your own.

      FreeBSD supports a wide range of devices. Note however that FreeBSD strive for quality over quantity, and that your particular hardware may not be well supported yet, if supported at all. You should look at the hardware support page for the release you want to run. (version and host architecture)

      For FreeeBSD 5.x on intel that page is:

      http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/5-STABLE/hardwar e/ i386/index.html

      It list all the hardware specific release notes for the i386 architecture, including motherboard, processors, and devices.

      The device page covering everything from mice to raid controllers is:
      http://www.freebsd.org/relnotes/5-STABLE/hard ware/ i386/support.html

      Does it support strange and obscure devices?
      Yes.
      Does it support your strange and obscure device?
      I don't know, take a look and see. Good luck, I hope you give it a try. It's a very nice environment.

      • Re:Close to FreeBSD 5.3 (Score:5, Informative)

        by TheRaven64 ( 641858 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:20AM (#10451522) Journal
        The FreeBSD hardware support lists are not always particularly accurate. I own a wireless card and a sound card, neither of which is listed as being supported by the hardware list, but both listed by the drivers' man pages (and both work). If you can't find the device you're looking for in the hardware list, take a look at the man pages of similar devices (linked to from the hardware compatibility list pages).

      • Re:Close to FreeBSD 5.3 (Score:4, Informative)

        by VVelox ( 819695 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @02:12PM (#10453182) Homepage
        There is also a NDIS wrapper in 5.x. This allows NDIS drivers from windows to be used. Here are the links to the man pages. http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ndis&apro pos=0&sektion=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-current&format =html http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=ndiscvt&s ektion=8&apropos=0&manpath=FreeBSD+6.0-current

  • Keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)

    by agent dero ( 680753 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @10:14AM (#10450691) Homepage
    remember that 5.3 has a good chance of becoming -STABLE (by good chance, I am really making an assumption based on how 5.2 has progressed, etc)

    FreeBSD is making good progress in SMP, and a lot more backend stuff than is noticable to most. I'm looking forward to running a 5-STABLE branch on my main (dual Xeon) server.

    Thanks guys :)

    • Re:Keep in mind (Score:1, Interesting)

      by torstenvl ( 769732 )
      I must admit I've bought quite a bit of FUD about how 5.x sucks and so on, but that fear has been somewhat mitigated by learning that the early 4.x series sucked pretty bad too, and 4.x now has a reputation for being one of the best FreeBSD series ever. I'm interested to see where this will go.

      • Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)

        by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:31AM (#10451652)
        So far in my experience, i do not see any ensuckulation for 5.x.... Granted, i'm not an overly experienced FreeBSD user, though.

        But for doing the usual things on the most usual hardware (like probably 90% of the BSD and Linux users would) it seems to be quite a pleasant and well-done computing experience, IMHO...

        If there are issues with 5.x, either i'm not doing the things that cause them, or i'm oblivious to them, because i'm seriously considering wiping my Debian installation from my main workstation when 5.3 is officially released.

        The only issues i've ever had with FreeBSD in the past is that i'm wined and dined with some of the more `current' or special features that are easily available in Linux- Things in the past like AA fonts for X11, games like quakeforge (kinda buggy on fbsd), mozilla-firebird, vmware, libSDL, etc... No effort to make it go, just apt-get install it and it works.

        Some of these things are now available in FreeBSD, and some of the applications in Ports have caught up in version numbers, and as for the rest, i probably just need to put a little more effort into making it work ;)

        Linux has always been good to me, i have no complaints or regrets about my years of running Slackware and Debian, but FreeBSD just seems so much more *elegant* in a lot of ways. The installation, the administration, the documentation, the overall smoothness...

        Well, that and the Linux Zealotry is getting out of hand. Every camp has their zealots, but some of the latest Linux ones (we all know who) are really making it hard for me to keep the faith. I know i shouldn't pay any attention to them, and it's just a vocal minority, but it's hard to remember these things when everywhere you look on the web (or slashdot, heaven forbid!) there is all this half-cocked stupidity in your face. The lack of zealotry and evangelism is refreshing when talking to the folks and working with apps and documentation in the BSD camps. It's good to set the politics aside and just focus on the geek factor and neatness of tinkering on a UNIX-like system.

        My $0.02 + Sales Tax.

        • Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Informative)

          by Homology ( 639438 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @11:56AM (#10451950)
          The only issues i've ever had with FreeBSD in the past is that i'm wined and dined with some of the more `current' or special features that are easily available in Linux- Things in the past like AA fonts for X11, games like quakeforge (kinda buggy on fbsd), mozilla-firebird, vmware, libSDL, etc... No effort to make it go, just apt-get install it and it works.

          All of the *BSD has this, with the exception that OpenBSD does not accept non-free binary drivers.

          I'm typing this on an older laptop (PII 30MHz) with XFCE4 as desktop, using mozilla-firebird as web-browser. And yes, the AA actually works fine (this is part of XFree86).

          Actually, I'm surprised that so many are not aware that most applications used on Linux works just fine on any *BSD.

          • Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)

            by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @12:03PM (#10461029)
            Actually, I'm surprised that so many are not aware that most applications used on Linux works just fine on any *BSD.

            Exactly. I was just naive or perhaps not motivated enough to get something like that to work. I didn't even try. But in this case i'm seeing how very simple it is, and in some cases more simple (or at least more logical) than what it was on linux.

            (silly me, i know)

            I'm really starting to think that this will be the turning point for me though. My main workstation is Debian (sid) and my secondary machine is FreeBSD 4.9... but i think after the official release of 5.3 my main will be Fbsd and my secondary will be linux.

    • Re:Keep in mind (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Baki ( 72515 ) on Thursday October 07, 2004 @09:13AM (#10459057)
      I have tried out 5.3 beta7 on my thinkpad (r50) laptop and I was very impressed. On my desktop I run linux latest 2.6 kernel (gentoo), and a true suspend and resume (acpi S3) does not work at all. ACPI S4 (hibernation) with software-suspend2 patches does not resume properly. However in this FBSD release it works flawlessly, even when running X (xorg 6.7), with connected internal laptop mouse and usb mouse. Everything just works without tweaking and patching: set correct options in /etc/rc.conf, that's all.

      I have really pounded the installation by installing ports while playing DVD's and xdiv files using mplayer and ogle on the background, using emacs for newsgroup reading: everything runs smoothly, sound just works (snd_ich module).

      The complete install of OS and ports (after cvsup) and rebuilding world and kernel was really painless. It took only a few hours in total to get a "cpu optimized" install similar to gentoo.

      If it were not for vmware I would move my desktop immediately to FBSD 5.3. It's ease of use from an admin perspective is unmatched by anything I know.
    • You really should run one of the -RELEASE (like 5.3-RELEASE) version of FreeBSD instead of running -STABLE. -STABLE on FreeBSD is like the "testing" distribution from Debian, while -CURRENT is like the "unstable" distribution from Debian. Sort of. Except that -STABLE is turned into a -RELEASE a lot more often than "testing" is turned into a real release of Debian.

  • Post BitTorrent in summary for RELEASE! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by CaptainPinko ( 753849 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @10:50AM (#10451144)
    For whomever decides to submit the article for the RELEASE of 5.3 would you please post a torrent? The horde of /. that will want it immediately will get to get it faster since they won't be bogging down the server. People who don't have the a BT client can then have the FTP all to themselves while we share our unsued bandwidth. Plus, that gives those of us on slower connections the ability to turn off the computer and resume the download later WITHOUT the fear of corruption.

    Please mod this up so any submitters and story accepters can see this. (I'm not a karma whoe, got quite enough just wanted this to start at +2)


    PS: why does it take so long for the FreeBSD people so long to update their schedule [freebsd.org]?

    • PS: why does it take so long for the FreeBSD people so long to update their schedule [freebsd.org]?

      Maybe because they are so busy working on the release itself? :oP
    • PS: why does it take so long for the FreeBSD people so long to update their schedule?

      What's part do you consider 'taking long'? It is afaik updated at every new item they complete, which was about once per week for the last 1.5 months. There s nothing that takes long imo.
    • For whomever decides to submit the article for the RELEASE of 5.3 would you please post a torrent?
      THis is a little less necessary for FreeBSD. A majority (though of course not all) people who would use Beta 7 would be people actively tracking 5.3 sequence, meaning they'd be much more likely using cvsup, not downloading full isos. A smaller subset of people would need the ISO, thinking that it will be out of date in a very short period of time, and if they're going to go through the trouble of downloadin
      • I was trying to refer to whoever posts the for 5.3-RELEASE. To post the BT for that.

        My connection is to slow to cvsup but I can grab a few CD-Rs and use my school's connection to d/l and burn the ISOs and then just update using CDs. I'm sure their are other's like me.

        I hope this didn't come off trollish.

  • Surprised (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Homology ( 639438 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @10:52AM (#10451152)
    import BIND 9.3.0, this completely replaces the old BIND 8.x nameserver in the base system

    Isn't it a bit late in the Beta series to import a new BIND?

    • Re:Surprised (Score:3, Interesting)

      by numbski ( 515011 ) *
      As am I. My name servers here are running 5.2.1, which are Bind 8.x. Granted, I'm longing for 9.x so I can use the new commands to block off Verisign's SiteFinder BS.

      I don't think my named.conf or db files need to change for the newer version....can anyone give me a brief summary of what to expect when I rebuild my name servers and fire up my old config?

    • Re:Surprised (Score:3, Insightful)

      by josepha48 ( 13953 )
      Considering how long bind 9 has been in the ports, shouldn't the real question be, wht took them so long?

      This is good news as I am tired of having to add bind 9 from the ports to my system.

      • Re:Surprised (Score:2, Interesting)

        by ivoras ( 455934 )
        This is actually connected to the development model of FreeBSD. Since BIND is part of 'base', very special care is taken in the import and any changes to it once it's released will be extremely conservative. The version of BIND imported in 5.3 will remain the same (+bugfixes) for the whole duration of 5_STABLE, the same as BIND 8 was present almost unchanged for the entire age of RELENG_4. Also, gcc in RELENG_5 will always be 3.4, even when 4.0 is out.

        If you're not happy with it, ports will contain latest

    • Re:Surprised (Score:4, Interesting)

      by hugo_pt ( 759790 ) on Wednesday October 06, 2004 @12:34PM (#10452318) Homepage
      There has been some discussion in the freebsd mailing lists about this change. BIND now resides in /var/named/ and some people are not confortable about this. The default behaviour now is chrooting named too. Personally, I like the old way better (/etc/namedb) as /var has a specific usage on FreeBSD, which is not keeping DNS server records. Changing the default from BIND8 to BIND9 will already make some people angry (because of migration issues), let alone changing bind base directory to a directory that won't fit in the freebsd philosophy.. You can read the whole discussion at http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current /2004-October/039288.html [freebsd.org]
      • Although I am familiar with BIND, I'm not familiar with what it needs from the system. Since I mount /var with 'noexec', is that going to work in a chroot enviornment? I would think that this is probably a common practice which could bite a lot of people in the ass if the chroot and noexec don't jive well together.
        • It will work fine since the chroot is implemented at the named binary level. The problem here is the FreeBSD philosophy as I stated in my other post, for example, named.conf should never reside on /var ; But, as said in one of the posts to the mailing list, you can use the -c option to specify an alternative path to named.conf. At least with the port version, the -c option was (I think, almost sure) relative to the chroot path. I don't know how true the statement in the mailing list was. I say, if it was r

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