FreeBSD 6.1-RC1 has been released. “The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RC1. It is meant to be a refinement of the 6-STABLE, branch with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc., but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture.”
I have been inspired to install freebsd again. I will install the current stable (6.0), I just need to have good luck this time. I can never seem to get freebsd to work properly. But I have faith this time. sounds like a nice project.
And on the subject of 6.1, What are the dramatic changes?
I just need to have good luck this time. I can never seem to get freebsd to work properly.
How so? If you have had issues before, I recommend following the handbook on your next install; it some of the best open source documentation I’ve ever seen:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/
And on the subject of 6.1, What are the dramatic changes?
Certainly not as much from 5.5 -> 6.0, but still worthwhile. Full list here, scroll to the bottom for ones in ‘testing’ that have been addressed:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.1R/todo.html
I think the most dramatic change is the keyboard multiplexer. Beyond that most of the changes are just bug fixes and driver updates.
I’ve been running 6.1 for a few weeks (since pre-release). It’s been running fantastic.
Question from someone who hasn’t done any FreeBSD major updates…
If I install FreeBSD 6.1-rc1 today, can I seemlessly upgrade to 6.1-stable when it is released? I would imagine so, but I just wanted to make sure… some Linux distros don’t support anything but a fresh install of stable releases.
(This will be on a home ‘server’ so there isn’t really anything mission critical about it – just laziness)
Yeah you can seemlessly update to 6.1 stable. All you have to do is download the sources and rebuild the world http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/makeworld….
If you do a cvsup with the RELENG_6 tag and follow the procedure in the handbook, you’ll be running 6-Stable, which in turn will show you as running 6.1-RC1
Very easily. When you set up the cvsupfile, set:
*default tag=RELENG_6_1
Then when final is released, go thrugh the regular cvsup/make buildwolrd/etc process, and you’ll be running 6.1 Final. You can upgrade from 6.0 this way too.
I’m sure 5.x to 6.1 would work, but there could be some cruft or changes that may make it partially unplesent.
As an aside, I went from 5.4 to 6.0 via source, with no issues.
Yep. I’ve been running 6.1 BETA for quite some time now and it’s working fantastic.:)
There are no dramatic changes…did you read the link or the RC1 anouncement.
Is there any possibility they will ever make it so you can install FreeBSD on a non-primary partition? I don’t have the luxury right now of having a spare primary partition and therefore I cannot use FreeBSD.
I’m not sure about FreeBSD, but I know OpenBSD wants to be the OS on the primary partition. I had it install to a third harddrive, then booted into Windows and installed a bootloader called xosl. After configuring xosl, I was able to boot between Windows and OpenBSD.
As for FreeBSD, I’d say give it a try and see if it lets you install to the other partition. If you can’t boot into it you can try to install a bootloader, if that doesn’t work then no loss since you weren’t able to use FreeBSD before anyway. You can also get a vmware image of it if you wanted to try it without installing.
Primary, secondary is DOS invention. In UNIX there are partitions and slices. You can boot FreeBSD from any partition on any disk (if you install a bootloader). You can not expect to boot FreeBSD from DOS partition.
Primary, secondary is DOS invention. … You can boot FreeBSD from any partition on any disk
That certainly doesn’t seem to be the case. If you are simply taking issue with his terminology, perhaps you should take issue with the FreeBSD folks as well.
From http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-p…
“A PC disk can be divided into discrete chunks. These chunks are called partitions. By design, the PC only supports four partitions per disk. These partitions are called primary partitions. To work around this limitation and allow more than four partitions, a new partition type was created, the extended partition. A disk may contain only one extended partition. Special partitions, called logical partitions, can be created inside this extended partition.
…
FreeBSD must be installed into a primary partition.”
when I first used BSD I also did not have enuf space.
I put root and /var (or root and tmp) into a primary
partition.
I had space remaining in a “secondary dos” partition.
I formatted the space with BootIt shareware as type 165, bsd, and installed usr and tmp (or usr and var) into it.
so 2 of the 4 were in space within an extended partition. Remains for someone else to test whether
BootIt or something else can do the same procedure and
fully boot a BSD that is installed *if it will* into
a previously-formatted 165 “bsd” area within the
extended partition.
The / filesystem (which contains the boot blocks, the laoder, and the kernel) of FreeBSD *must* reside on a primary (DOS) partition. All other filesystems can be on primary (DOS) or extended/logical (DOS) partitions.
This is a misunderstanding. The handbook wants to tell you that you cannon create a FreeBSD partition inside a logical drive on extended partition. The origin of thes e troubles can be tracked to MS “concept” of primary and secondary partitions. In DOS you can have only 1 primary partition. Only MS knows why (maybe than you have no other partition to install something different. Even today when you install Windows they destroy your bootloader). In this case next partition must be “extended”. Normally just create partitions (if you use FreeBSD fdisk utility you can create 4 “primary” partitions) and install a bootloader (FreeBSD native works well, but if you want more comfort GRUB is recommended). <gently flame=off>The complete message is that you must create a FreeBSD partition.
!!!
Well I think freBSD is fantastic. I’m happy they are almost in 6.1, always improving. I would like some more hardware recognition though…
I think I may install the RC1 or the stable 6.1in one machine to check it.
Anyway, I have been chekin Linuxtracker for the torrents with more leechers ( http://linuxtracker.org/index.php?sort=9 )and guess what… FreBSD is there, as one of the most torrented distros, in 3rd position…
But the most torrented and downloded FreeBSD relese is the 5.4 ???
!!!
that’s just wierd.
Yesterday I downloaded and installed it.
I also installed the packages from stable.
I then installed the java package for 6 from <a href=”http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/downloads/java.shtml“>here</….
It required javawmwrapper package and I installed it.
(It gave to me a warning because the version in stable is major than the one required by that tbz compiled for 6).
Then I went to jedit’s website and downloaded it’s jar and installed it.
Now I can do code with my fav editor.
The nice thing it that I have a small and slow machine, celeron 400 + 128MBram, and that I did all the previous steps with packages…what are ports ? 😉
Nice job FreeBSD folks, now with the availability of the jdk binary package I don’t have any reasons to use another OS.
The nice thing it that I have a small and slow machine, celeron 400 + 128MBram, and that I did all the previous steps with packages…what are ports ? 😉
Packages are compiled ports. Packages are mostly outdated, while ports are not (after updating them with “portsnap fetch; portsnap update”). See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/ports.htm… for more explanation.