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Agreed, once that hits 6.0 I'm throwing it on an old laptop. Previous PCBSD felt nice for desktop, and it's for my wife who only need to surf and do word processing. She used to run Slackware on it, but I want her to try this next.

P

That sounds like good news!!!

Does that meen it will be i686 optimized. It's fast enough as it is.

"Hope we get GCC 4.0 in FreeBSD 6.0. Kudos to the efforts of developers at FreeSBD," FreeBSD 6.0 will not have GCC 4.0 in the base system. Install it from the ports collection. Note, I'm actively contributing to the GCC development of gfortran, and I will vocally discourage the inclusion of GCC 4.0 into the base system because 4.0 isn't as good as 3.3.4 in some area.

From what I read FreeBSD is soing to be more optimized for Pentium 4 systems and the support for slower systems is going to be dropped

You hear wrong. FreeBSD binaries are compiled for the i386. If you want to optimise the binaries, you need to edit /etc/make.conf and set CPUTYPE and CFLAGS as you desire.

The only change in 6.0 compared to previous versions is that CFLAGS now defaults to -O2 instead of -O.

Do I have to recompile the Kernel then. Any place I can find more info on this topic.

Hi. Like lots of other things when working with Unix, I think that most people learn this from a mentor. Or as K&R put it "a local expert". The handbook does cover it, but I reckon, makes it a little harder than it is. It really isn't difficult at all. My master took me through it many years ago. I can help you out ... my son! This works for me:

i) # cp /usr/share/examples/stable-supfile /root

ii) Edit the release tag to RELENG_6. Edit the cvsup server to a server geographically nearby.

iii) # cvsup -g -L 2 /root/stable-supfile

iv) # cp -Rp /etc /etc.bak

v) # mergemaster -p -v

vi) # cd /usr/obj ; chflags -R noschg * ; rm -rf *

vii) # cd /usr/src ; make buildworld && make kernel KERNCONF=YOURKERNEL

viii) Drop into single user mode:
# shutdown now

ix) # cd /usr/src
# make installworld

x) # mergemaster -v
You'll be prompted for a while about which of your /etc files and scripts to update. I keep my rc.conf, hosts and a couple of others that I want to keep. For MOST files and scripts, you'd want to install the new one. I just think to myself "If I had to customise it, I'll have to keep it". This is the only tricky part. But, if you use my simple rule, it isn't tricky at all. It's either 'keep' or 'install' - I don't bother with 'merge' (usually).

xi) Reboot your system into full, multi-user mode:
# reboot

EASY! If all goes well, you'll feel a somewhat undeserved sense of pride

Hope this helps.

Does mass storage work properly this time?
over usb2

Depends on the USB2 chipset, and the USB2 device. Most work fine, some will lock up the system. It's pretty much trial-and-error. The ehci device is not part of the GENERIC kernel for this reason.

is getting USB2 to work properly going to be a priority.

Actually device ehci is enabled in the GENERIC kernel on FreeBSD 6.0-BETA1

like someone said ehci isnt that great.

and a thumbdrive i have works wonderfully. (extremely fast etc)

but more to the point. i dont think plugging in a problematic device should CRASH the system.
there should be graceful exits.

I never had any problem with it under 4.10.

Yes, FreeBSD 6.0 can read ReiserFS partitions

umass0: Apple iPod, rev 2.00/10.01, addr 2
da0 at umass-sim0 bus 0 target 0 lun 0
da0: <Apple iPod 2.70> Removable Direct Access SCSI-4 device
da0: 40.000MB/s transfers
da0: 992MB (2032640 512 byte sectors: 64H 32S/T 992C)

# mount -t msdos /dev/da0s1 /ipod
# ls /ipod
.DS_Store .VolumeIcon.icns iPod_Control
.Spotlight-V100 ._.Trashes
.Trashes ._iPod_Control

avg. read speed when copying from the shuffle seems to be between 2.1-2.2 MB/s

Well, as I said earlier, FreeBSD 6.0 can _READ_ ReiserFS partitions...

from the mount_reiserfs man page:
CAVEATS
This utility is primarily used for read access to a ReiserFS volume.
Writing to a volume is currently unsupported.

Did you try the "Boot FreeBSD with USB keyboard" boot menu option when booting FreeBSD 5.x?

So get on it and start coding

http://www.awprofessional.com/title/0201702452

If you break binary compatibility, you need to use a new major version number. That's the way it works in BSD-land. In fact, even after 6.0-RELEASE, you'll still see a number of 5.x releases, most likely. It's an excellent versioning scheme.

Why use FAT when there's UFS2

http://people.freebsd.org/~grehan/

Better wait for BETA2 though...

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-ppc/2005-July/001270.htm...

If you really need to mount it on windows, you could partition the drive into, say, 4 x 100 GB FAT32 partitions.
Since FAT32 partitions has a 4 GB maximum file size limit, you could also try using the limited NTFS write support in FreeBSD.

UFS2 is a file system with soft updates, which solves the problem in a different way than a journalling fs

http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix2000/g...