FreeBSD 5.4 has been released. Many improvements in functionality and stability have been made since the FreeBSD 5.3 release. Most users should find 5.4 stable enough to migrate off the aging 4.X branch. New features include: – Improved support for machines with more than 4Gb of memory
– More of the network stack and network drivers are MP safe
– Common Address Redundancy Protocol (CARP) was added
– Several new disk controllers supported
– Updates to some contributed software like BIND, OpenSSL, sendmail
FreeBSD 5.4 released
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Well thats just made my day, can’t wait to get home to download it. Might have to just get off early
I’ve been using FreeBSD 5.3 on my laptop till recently and everything besides the wifi (and the layer to run windoze drivers) worked great. But since I upgraded to 5.4RCx and today to 5.4 release, the sound card doesn’t work anymore, I always get:
pcm0:play:1: play interrupt timeout, channel dead
pcm0:play:4: play interrupt timeout, channel dead
The card is a realtek using the via driver. None of the other drivers work either…
I love freebsd. I find it sad to have to downgrade!!
From the release notes:
“A number of bugs have been fixed in the ULE scheduler.”
Does this mean that the ULE scheduler is back in play? Is it in the default kernel, or does it have to be changed to in the kernel configuration?
I’ve never used FreeBSD before but I might give this a shot. I see it will run linux apps, anyone know if shake would be a problem? That’s really the only think binding me to Linux.
No, it isn’t a problem. If it is an open source ( so as the most of programs in Linux distributions ), it is probably ported to easy installation and use under FreeBSD. Look at http://www.freshports.org – this site will help you to find out, which programs are ported and which do not…;)
so when does freebsd 6.0 come out hahaha
but seriously this is great news I cant wait to go home and upgrade
Many Linux apps will also run in binary format. You can choose to install a Linux sub system like RH 6, 7.3, 8, 9; SuSe 9.* and Debian. I tried the Linux version of Skype (static linked version 1.0.20) and it worked (except the sound was really bad) with the SuSe 9.1 but not 9.2 nor Debian Linux subsystems…
But as someone mentioned before, 99% of the apps are open source and thus recompiled, eventually patched, for FreeBsd.
more info:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/linuxemu….
@atomicplayboy
The changes were merged from 6.0 current back to 5.4 however it is still unstable enough to be considered as a the default scheduler.
I like the idea of using torrents to save bandwidth
I am getting 13 seeders and 44 peers on i386 isos
where can i get a mini iso?
i only see the full version and some boot only iso
Hi Nate,
As we can see from Anands mail referring to location
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/query-pr.cgi?pr=amd64/67745
This problem is reported with 5.2.1 and yet not resolved in 5.4, though there are workarounds. Also the web page reflects that this problem is not seen in NetBSD and Debian 64 bit versions. This strongly supports Anand displeasure, if not support him then we must atleast not use unpleasent words against him.
B/w thanx for appritiating IBM Laptops as I am writing this on my Thinkpad, FreeBSD 5.3, I will try upgrading on weekend.
5.4 definately looks promising. Inclusion of ‘Virtual Scrolling’ and the new version of portupgrade got me excited.
Abhay
Cool, I’m currently running 5.4 rc3 – been good as ever
Can anyone comment about usb2.0 support in this relese. Lats time with 5.3 release I noticed that usb2.0 support for my flash card reader was poor(it worked oas USB1.1). In win32/linux things are ok. Also from man ehci:
“The driver is not finished and is quite buggy.”
I wonder if things have changed?
Just cvsup’d from 5.3-RELEASE to 5.4-STABLE and all is well. Good thing too because the computer doesn’t have a monitor keyboard or mouse, just good ole ssh from my iMac.
Keyboard fix:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/kbd/atkbd.c?only_…
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?20050324065558.87376.qmail
ACPI quirk:
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/dev/acpica/acpi_quirk…
http://docs.freebsd.org/cgi/mid.cgi?200503211119.30585.jkim
(Note: If you don’t need ACPI, don’t bother. If you do, you need a USB keyboard (or via network) to patch DSDT, of course.)
AGP GART (not merged in time):
http://www.freebsd.org/cgi/cvsweb.cgi/src/sys/pci/agp_amd64.c.diff?…
PCCard workaround (as root):
pciconf -w -b pci0:10:0 0x1a 0x0a
I stopped working on this laptop but most of the fixes are available in 5.4-RELEASE.
I stopped it because I lost interest. As somebody said, I am not paid for doing this.
It’s in there now. If you cvsup your system be sure to add
device ehci # EHCI PCI->USB interface (USB 2.0)
to your kernel config.
and about mono, is well supported in 5.4 ? Can I run xsp and monodevelop in it ?
Nate stop speaking out of your ass. He reported a genuine problem. His machine is not crappy, your attitude is crappy. You should have looked at the machine specs before jumping to conclusions.
And i hate this attitude of some lame OSS zealots that either use what developer write or shut up. Is this how you think FreeBSD will improve? No, hell no. I am glad that most developers in OSS respect their users or FreeBSD, Linux and other OSS software won’t be where they are today.
The reason I raised this point is not because I could not install FreeBSD there is already a FreeBSD ISO for R3000z. My reason was if the developers can’t support one of about ten 64 bit Laptops in the market today, what good is the talk of supporting other platforms.
Uh huh. So in other words, it wouldn’t work with a piece of hardware you own, so you decided to throw a temper tantrum and make trollish, broad, sweeping generalizations about the quality of FreeBSD as a whole. Yes, those are *certainly* the actions of a mature, rational adult.
I hope they have fixed ports in this one, i had a nightmare in 5.3 where nearly everything was unavailable for download… uuguh
After seeing the type of attitudes from this lot, I think Linux is a better choice. There are certain Linux Distros with a similar bunch of zealots that I avoid, but with these attitudes BSD and Linux will always remain a niche market. Can’t we just get along?
That’s funny. The reason why I have mostly switched to FreeBSD was because of the attitudes of most linux users I’ve encountered 🙂
Adam
Yup, it goes both ways. Not all Distos are like this, just some. Looking at what’s happening here it seems that FreeBSD is the same way. You know what they say about first impressions! I would hope it’s different, but to see that someone is called names as soon as they asked a question or voice a concern looks very negative.
I have FreeBSD 5.4 RC4 running on my system and it is pretty good no complaints except I am not able to run Totem on kde and compile VLC, is the final version of FreeBSD 5.4 any different from the last release candidate version.
Upgraded from 5.3 rel to 5.4 rel, upgrade went fine and it is running well, no cashes or anything yet. Seems a little snappier than before.
You know what they say about first impressions! I would hope it’s different, but to see that someone is called names as soon as they asked a question or voice a concern looks very negative.
You’ll notice that this only happens when the question is phrased in a rude manner. Someone who says: this is a problem I had and rather than ask someone here for a solution I’ll say that I’m sticking with linux. Well if that’s what he wants to do fine, but then why post about it here? Why not in a linux thread?
After seeing the type of attitudes from this lot, I think Linux is a better choice. There are certain Linux Distros with a similar bunch of zealots that I avoid, but with these attitudes BSD and Linux will always remain a niche market. Can’t we just get along?
Your talk of “zealots”, “distros”, and “niche markets” have nothing to do with the release of freebsd 5.4. No one is going to go out of their way to convince you to use bsd if that is what you are looking for. If you have a specific question that you would like answered by all means ask. You may get RTFM but it will also refer you to the section that answers your question and it will be a somewhat polite RTFM at that.
I agree with the just get along part.
Jared
There is no ass-talk involved with me, I am calling it as it is.
HP’s Compac laptops have been known in recent years to be getting worse for the quality of the machine (as I said, not the speed, the quality, the spes mean nothing towards the quality of equipment).
Open source developers only do the work they want to, there is no need for them to support hardware they don’t have or to do work that isn’t fun or interesting for them.
Submitting a bug report does not ensure someone will want to fix that bug.
And if you think that it is lame for someone to tell a stuck-up kid to quit complaining about the free stuff they get, then you really need to take a second to look at the way these things are made – because if you think your attitude gets anything done or improves things in any way, you sir are incorrect.
Code gets things done, hardware, money and documentation get people interested in getting that code made – without them, there is no need or desire to get something to work.
but most people you find on the ‘net that use FreeBSD aren’t overly-zealous about it. The OS has a nice size following but it doesn’t have the same goal as Linux does nor do *most* users try to force it on others. The fact is, FreeBSD makes a high-performance, scalable, and secure server OS that doesn’t make it’s primary goal to build an all-encompassing desktop system. You won’t find alot of FreeBSD devs working on porting FreeBSD to a Palm PDA or wrist watch. We know what BSDs strengths are and we count them by hits per second, concurrent users, and other meaningful measurements.
I have a laptop and was wondering if it is possible to install FreeBSD via VMWare (WinXP primary OS) and use my wireless network card as the network connection for FreeBSD. If this is possible, please tell how.
Thanks
I do prefer Linux, but will give FreeBSD a try. I was not trying to knock FreeBSD, but just want to point out that negative attitudes will tend to scare potential new users to the FreeBSD Community.
Hopefully your right and the actions of a few are just a small representation of the whole Community.
Does FreeBSD support dbus yet? What about ndiswrapper? Or usb? Does it even support acpi?
D-Bus has been in ports since last year. FreeBSD has had ndis supported as part of the base system for several releases now. FreeBSD has had USB support since 1999 (1998 with patches/-CURRENT). It’s also had strong ACPI support through the 5.x series (and weaker support since 2000).
yes.
Does 5.4 has support for ndis on amd64? Google points me to mailing lists from Spe. 2004 that says ndis is not supported. wondering if that has changed
Well thats just made my day, can’t wait to get home to download it. Might have to just get off early
Well that just made my yesterday.
yesterdaymorning I upgraded my first server from 5.3-RELEASE to 5.4-RELEASE, yesterday evening the second, I finished the third this afternoon and my core desktop is cvsup-ing right now. 🙂
[trolling]
And it was amazing to me how smooth it all went compared to, for example, OpenBSD.
[/trolling]
Only supporting USB doesnt mean necessearily, that it works well with it
Remember the recent serious problem using USB keyboard when you install 5.3? (keyboard didnt respond after loading the kernel)
Or what about most of the USB memory sticks/pendrives, or USB wlan adapters? Connecting some USB devices hard-freezes the whole system (which didnt ever happen on my box with w2k).
I had to name these problems, althought i am a freebsd-fun.
Nearly every USB memory stick/pendrive I’ve connected to it has worked, so far the only one which did not work was because the makers were too fancy to use the standard and it needed drivers even in windows. Not very intelligent.
Without ehci – (ie in usb1 mode) everything is rock solid – works better than in linux in my limited (I mean limited linux) experience. With ehci (usb2) I had constant freezes up until the beginning of this year. Apparently, they fixed a lot of issues with ehci. Now I have ehci for at least 3 months, not a single freeze, all pendrives worked I have thrown at it, except one – which worked on windows thought.
I don’t know if Shake runs on FBSD. I’ve tried XSI on earlier (4.x) FreeBSD, it installed with errors and after some startup script tweaking it tried to run but it seemed to be using some unimplemented linux kernel call and failed.
It may well be so that those calls are already implemented in newer (5.x) FreeBSDs.
Do you know if Digital Fusion has a Linux version? I like it a lot (I have never tried Shake) and I would like to try it on FreeBSD as it would make great compositing workstation.
> Only supporting USB doesnt mean necessearily, that it works
> well with it
Remember the recent serious problem using
> USB keyboard when you install 5.3? (keyboard didnt respond
> after loading the kernel)
there is a new boot option in the boot menu for all you usb keyboard users… i guess its there to aid those who had problems with this kind of configuration in the past…
– Improved support for machines with more than 4Gb of memory
FreeBSD has had support for more than 4 gigabits (512 megabytes) for a *long* time.
I think you meant 4 GB (gigabytes).
Does FreeBSD support dbus yet? What about ndiswrapper? Or usb? Does it even support acpi?
D-Bus is in the ports, but DCOP is much nicer and more mature.
Project Evil (NDISulator) has been around longer than the Linux NDIS support.
Same with USB.
ACPI support was in 5.0.
smart users will not let negitive attitudes become the deciding factor if they want to use a OS or not. What made me drop linux for FreeBSD was linux distros are assambled in a way that makes it hard for the users to manage it overall
the structured behind many linux distros are poorly design for example FreeBSd has one of the best strucureds out there they have the ports,etc. the software ports are avaliable at there website, every software gets install into /usr/local directory for a clean structered, and there are other reasons that makes freebsd a good os comparing to many linux distros that are assambled by developers that might know how to assemble a os but know jack on how to maintain it that is one of the reasons many linux distros have died off.
few linux distros have tried to adopt the ports system but have not really succeeded to the level of FreeBSD’s. the only reason linux is so popular because of rehat and only redhat. red hat is being backed by ibm,sun,etc. so this actually makes the kernel kind of worthless if it’s not being back by those same companies that is the reason why other distros are not picking up ground and are unheard of . now there are rumors that microsoft is tryng to acquire redhat. there are many reasons but i such used the ports systems as an example.
Gets kinda tiresome to have to alter the sourcecode of if_ed to get it to work every time you try to get FreeBSD to accept your good ole NE2k card, so, has anyone gotten if_ed to work out of the box with 5.4 Release?
mcsaba@mcsaba$ ifconfig
ed0: flags=108843<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,SIMPLEX,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 192.168.0.1 netmask 0xffffff00 broadcast 192.168.0.255
inet6 fe80::250:bfff:fe5e:7f26%ed0 prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x1
ether 00:50:bf:5e:7f:26
It always worked for me out of the box – can it be that your hw is flaky?