The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-BETA1, which marks the beginning of the FreeBSD 5.4 release cycle.
FreeBSD 5.4-Beta-1 Released
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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nice !!!!
In case anyone is interested:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.4R/schedule.html
Which one is the defaut scheduler in 5.4?
I’ve always been interested in FreeBSD as an OS on my desktop computer (I only have one desktop though so haven’t had a chance to experiment).
How is it in comparison to Linux in terms of performance? I’ve already examined how it seems to be set-up and it looks interesting to try.
Also, I know some work was done recently with allowing Cedega to work under FreeBSD. Anyone familiar with the platform have any experience with this?
Cheers
I tried to give it a whirl on the desktop side of things, but really I think any of the linux distros as of recent have that down better.
There are some sifferences to it, like the dev naming scheme, default shell, the way you do your kernel, but those by no means will hold you back from getting it up and running.
The bootloader sucks, and I’m a lilo fan. One thing that kinda turned me off when I first installed it on a system was updating my packages, and getting busy signals from the servers to try back in a bit. It wasn’t until I hit cvsup7 I got in first try. Would be nice if I could get bounced to another server if one was too busy…
FreeBSD has been no different for me as a desktop than Linux has last time I even used Linux (2 years ago). I have been on a BSD kick since than and am now pretty much a convert to BSD and DragonFly in particular. This for various reasons that I don’t need to get into here.
Anyway, Try FreeSBIE! It is a FreeBSD 5.x based LiveCD and will let you try before commiting. Very well put together and has two default desktop environments for you to choose. You will get to see most importantly if it FreeBSD supports your hardware out of the box and mess with ports, etc. Than you can install to the HD if you like it customize it (kernel/world compile) and see why BSD has kept a following through the Linux explosion.
Ultimately *YOU* can decide if it is for you, or if Linux suits you better. Or if it doesn’t matter.
http://www.freesbie.org/
Unfortunately there seems to be no forcedeth ethernet support.
I am typing this on a FreeBSD 5.3 with KDE and I also dual-boot with Fedora 3 with Gnome. I find FreeBSD noticeably snappier. It also boots faster than Fedora 3.
Yup, but I remember in the past years it was never followed and they then adjusted it.
On March 18 we should have RC1, right ?
BTW, go freebsd, can’t wait it even if, afaik, the packages CDs won’t contain gnome 2.10 and kde 3.4 :-(, but next time be more conservative on your schedule dates ;-).
Maybe you can try out /usr/ports/net/nvnet
Just use fastest_cvsup ( /usr/ports/sysutils/fastest_cvsup )
It will automatically find the fastest non-busy cvsup server. Here is an example of the command line I use:
cvsup -g -L 2 /usr/share/examples/cvsup/ports-supfile -h $(fastest_cvsup -Q -c us)
Works like a charm every time!
4BSD.. you can switch to ULE if you want to.
Check out Dru Lavignes blog at
http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/wlg/6041
for a nice script using ‘fastest_cvsup’ for keeping FreeBSD up to date.
I’ve added this to make.conf, and running “make update” under either /usr/src or /usr/ports pulls in the server from fastest_cvsup.
SUPHOST= `/usr/local/bin/fastest_cvsup -Qc us`
I’m a Linux guy, but I just started playing with BSD (FreeBSD 5.3) to perpare for a job that I may be offered. What is the BSD equivelent of “emerge” or “apt” or “yum”? Thanks!
see:
man ports(7)
and:
/usr/ports/sysutils/portupgrade/
portupgrade
You can use freebsd ndis wrapper!
(use windows driver)
works really fine for nforce network drive! using that at home…
You can use /usr/ports/net/nvnet instead for your nforce onboard ethernet instead of bothering with ndis.
Thank you guys!
I can’t use the /usr/ports/net/nvnet port yet because the current 5.4-beta1 AMD64 ( The only one that bootet) does see some obstacles with packages.Nonetheless correct me if i’m wrong,but in order to issue make && make install in the aforementioned port i would need an working net connection.Nevertheless i think it’s worth waiting till they include the driver or i will give the ndiswrapper a go.FreeBSD is worth waiting for.
Just wanted to know if anyone on the board tried FreeBSd Current 6.0 and how is performs
there are a couple of options:
pkg_add -r name_of_port
cd /usr/ports/cat/name_of_port && make install
there is also
portupgrade and portmanager, you can get them from the ports
Thanks for that tips on the updating, I’ll have to try them out!
so what does this release bring to the table that is new?
Just wanted to know if anyone on the board tried FreeBSd Current 6.0 and how is performs
Been using it on my laptop since sometime around November / December of last year (since the update to net80211 and ath around that time) on my work laptop. Haven’t had any problems with it since moving to 6-CURRENT. Granted, I read the -current mailing list and only do buildworld cycles when there’s no known issues.
6-CURRENT is a must for anyone who wants to use all the features of 802.11 wireless networking. It’s also a must for just about anybody using a laptop who wants to have goot battery life and performance. Nate Lawson just updated the acpi_perf and cpufreq modules to give you full ACPI throttling, SpeedStep, Cool’n Quiet/PowerNow!, and P4TCC cpu frequency control. Works nicely, even on my lowly little P4-Celeron Toshiba laptop (very crappy ACPI implementation).
SCHED_ULE also works again in 6-CURRENT. Depending on your workload, this may or may not be better than SCHED_4BSD. On my laptop, running a bunch of KDE apps, it seems smoother than 4BSD.
Beyond that, I haven’t really noticed any difference between -CURRENT and 5.3-RELEASE. All my apps work, so I’m happy.
I was a FreeBSD desktop user for about a year until I switched to Linux. Got tired of configuring macromedia flash and other commercial stuff that runs better on Linux (Java, Cisco VPN client). Life as a desktop user is simply easier with Linux,
I would love to see FBSD improve on these issues, making it easier for users – the BSDs could need more momentum and commerical support
can’t use the /usr/ports/net/nvnet port yet because the current 5.4-beta1 AMD64 ( The only one that bootet) does see some obstacles with packages.Nonetheless correct me if i’m wrong,but in order to issue make && make install in the aforementioned port i would need an working net connection.Nevertheless i think it’s worth waiting till they include the driver or i will give the ndiswrapper a go.FreeBSD is worth waiting for.
They won’t include this driver [into their base system], beacuse it contains propieritary nVidia linux binary.
You just need to download needed source packages (directly from FreeBSD ports pages – but you need to do that on diffrent PC of course), copy these into /usr/ports/distfiles, change into /usr/ports/net/nvnet and type “make install”. Done.
(Can’t say about AMD64 – does this port work on it, but I hope the best. You may try to run 32bit x86 FreeBSD with ACPI disabled – may work too.)
I wanted to try – but didn’t got nforce network driver (net/nvnet) running. It was some months ago – maybe devs have fixed/changed something.
Thank you !
Have they recovered some of the performance they lost in 5.x with this release? I’ve tried 5.0 – 5.3 and they all performed bad compared top 4.x or Linux.
I don’t know what most people are talking about, complaining about FreeBSD 5.3 performance. That has not been my experience at all. But, I suppose one reason for the complaint might be that FreeBSD’s default configuration is fairly conservative. Recompile your kernel with only I686_CPU support, and set shmmax and shmall to at least 3X the default (in /etc/sysctl.conf), and then you might be happier. For laptops, you might want to also remove all SCSI drive support from the kernel (but leave in the default “SCSI peripherals” section).
I watch fullscreen movies on my Inspiron 1100 laptop all the time, and have never had a hint of stuttering, freezing, etc… I don’t think I have had KDE freeze up on me once (in fact, my KDE experience with FreeBSD is much better than with Linux, when it comes to stability). Even with only 128 MB of RAM, it did well. Now that I have 400 MB RAM, I can have Firefox, Mozilla, Konqueror, OpenOffice, xmms, etc… and more all running at once with no problems.
I’ve been running fbsd on a variety of hardware and my experiences have differed greatly, with one consistent fact– each major release of 5.x makes the previous releases seem unusable. MacOS X is the same way, where 10.2 was dead on its face next to 10.3, at least for me, just a personal example. So worse case we can expect things to improve a pace as the groundwork now in 5.x matures.
That said, I have never has problems running any of the 5 branch without X11. The issues I do have seem tied to specific hardware and always dealing with Xfree/Xorg applications. Writing this now on a thinkpad T41, under 5.4-PRERELEASE, which has largely been fine other than some instability with firefox and flash. A dual p3 system I have has been a nightmare on a gradual upward spiral. Even when it is painful or ugly it seems I can’t let go.