Just about 12 days late, FreeBSD 4.6-Release is here. Download its files, or the ISOs (only the mini-iso has been uploaded as of now), and read its release notes. Mirrors available.
FreeBSD 4.6 (Unofficially) Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I just checked freebsd.org’s front page (14:30 EST), and the site still had the latest release at 4.5. Didn’t slashdot get in trouble recently for telling everyone that 4.6 was released? Shouldn’t we have learned from their mistakes.
These things take time. You know everyone will be pulling down the latest version. How about giving the mirrors a rest and waiting a while?
The Release version is done. And it is available. It is just the ISOs that are not uploaded yet. This is what they are waiting for to update their web site. But that does not mean that 4.6 is not done. Because it IS done.
Slashdot got it wrong for 4.5, some months ago saying it was released, but it was just the RCs that was available. This situation here is different. 4.6 is indeed done *and* available.
http://bsd.slashdot.org/bsd/02/06/10/222250.shtml?tid=122
i don’t know if they got in trouble.. but yeah.. they jumped the gun about 3-4 days ago..
eugenia: they got it wrong for 4.6 aswell..
Now just to get those ISO’s……
You can’t go grabbing the ISOs quite yet. Only the mini one is available from their FTP site.
Just as a side note, I think OSNews messed up just like Slashdot did. If you read this from Murray, “The release is not ready yet, and will not be until the front page of FreeBSD.org is updated and a PGP signed announcement message is posted to [email protected].”, and consider that neither has taken place as of 5 minutes ago when I looked, it appears that the gun has been jumped again.
… that i finally set up my 4.5 and all the apps i need to have, they are releasing 4.6.
well …
so I can update my FreeBSD box at work tomorrow. Whatever
happened to the native jdk1.3 anyway?
As of 2:30pm (PST) the release has NOT YET BEEN MADE.
Murray Stokely <[email protected]> wrote:
> The release is not official until a PGP signed message
> is sent to [email protected] by someone on the
> release engineering team. For 4.6, that message will
> come from me.
I think that this is pretty unambiguous.
http://docs.freebsd.org/mail/current/freebsd-announce.html
The announce is not up yet, we know that. The point is that 4.6 is DONE. The files are ready to download, it is just that they haven’t finish up uploading the ISOs yet, this is why they haven’t announce it. And as of 10 minutes ago, the second ISO CD, the disk-2 has been successfully uploaded. The upload is in progress. But the files difectory contains the whole FINAL version of 4.6, even if the ISOs are not up yet.
Someone does not like my eubonics.
I recommend you to be more serious at this board FrostByt. If you have something useful to say, please, by all means, say it.
If not, your comments will be deleted by the admins, as they did today and the other one 2-3 days ago.
Eugenia, you’re wrong. FreeBSD 4.6 is not released. It’s not released until Murray says it is. He hasn’t send a mail to announce@ yet, so you are just too early. There’s no excuse for that. You just made a mistake. I think you owe the readers an appology.
It could as well be someone finds a bug in the iso’s, or something else comes up, before it’s released. In that case it could be delayed again.
jk
RELEASED = ISO_ON_FTP + Official http://www.freebsd.org Announcement!
This is getting nutty, this seems like the drool fests when ID released Quake 3. People were pounding the servers so hard that ID couldn’t update their own stuff! I do wish that the ISO’s would be ready by now…..seems more folks are interested in using the CDR version than relying on their network connection.
> I think you owe the readers an appology.
I do not owe anything to anyone.
As far as I am concerned, FreeBSD 4.6 is available to download in its entirety, with-or-without an accompanied official announcement. That for me counts as “release”. Maybe not official yet, but a release nevertheless. My article never suggested anything more anyway, in fact, I clearly say that not all the ISOs are available atm.
I believe I heard this will be the last release of the 4.x branch. Does anyone know approx. when 5.0 is due out? I heard it could have the first ppc and sparc64 ports.
There is going to be 4.7 in September and 4.8 *after* 5.0 comes out. 5.0 is due to the end of this year.
(I know there is the release notes and other lists) It would be good to know if this 4.6 comes with KDE 3 already and Mozilla 1.0.
(I always buy official CD’s on FreeBSD and Debian).
I run FreeBSD 4.4 and would upgrade to 4.6 if it justifies the troulble of config the whole system again or backup /etc and others. (never mind the kernel enhancements I read the notes).
And this will be the first with XFree 4.2 as default. Do you know about new packages ?
It comes with both it seems. The files directory of 4.6 contains both KDE 2.2.2 and KDE 3.01.
ftp://ftp2.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/4.6-RELEASE/packa…
It seems that KDE 2.2.2 will be installed by default and then you would be able to use ports or packages to upgrade to KDE 3.01 with one of the subsequent optional CDs that come with 4.6.
I always buy official CD’s on FreeBSD and Debian
I never knew there was an “official” source for Debian CDs to support the Debian project. Linux Central used to give you the option of making a donation to Debian when you bought CDs, but I don’t see that option on their site anymore.
A couple years back my first Debian experience was a box set of Slink I bought that came with an O’Reilly Debian book and a Debian bumper sticker, and I reckon the proceeds went to Debian. That’s the closest to an “official” CD set I’ve ever seen.
Eugenia, it’s not you who decides whether something is released or not. It’s the job of the software makers, the team behind it. In this case the FreeBSD team.
You can’t know the ISO’s on the server are the final ones, because they didn’t tell you they were. They could as well be trojaned versions because somebody hacked the server. (remember the irssi backdoor? remember the perforce hack? remember the monkey.org hack?)
Now if you don’t admit you’re wrong, i’ll be forced to give you a good spanking if i ever see you in real life!
He hasn’t send a mail to announce@ yet, so you are just too early. There’s no excuse for that. You just made a mistake. I think you owe the readers an appology.
In case you haven’t noticed Eugenia is always out for so called “World premieres” when it comes to announcements. I’m not sure what that is good for though. Luckily it doesn’t create the sorts of problems that occur when Slashdot “pre-announces” packages without waiting for mirror site
to be seeded.
fooks
You guys must be “proud”, after all instead of doing something productive like discussing the new version features, etc. all you can do is argue that Eugenia is worng about when it is released.
I’m sure people would happily discuss all the spiffy new features if it had been released, but it hasn’t been, and most FreeBSD users are likely to wait for the official announcement before downloading it. If you post a story like this it actually is important that it is factually correct, especially when you give download links. Of course people are going pick you up on something like that, just as they would if this were a newspaper, which in a sense it is.
Eugenia, you don’t have to apologise, although I think you are wrongly.
To settle, you just have to change the topic from “FreeBSD 4.6 Released” to “FreeBSD 4.6 *UNOFFICIALLY* Released”. This way, you are happy, folks are happy, I am happy.
There is NO RELEASE, even if ISOs are on FTP, until official announcement is done to [email protected].
Please, remove this article until PGP-signed message to [email protected] from Murray Stokely will tell us that he is pleased to announce 4.6-RELEASE.
4.6 has not been released.
I do not owe anything to anyone.
As far as I am concerned, FreeBSD 4.6 is available to download in its entirety, with-or-without an accompanied official announcement. That for me counts as “release”. Maybe not official yet, but a release nevertheless. My article never suggested anything more anyway, in fact, I clearly say that not all the ISOs are available atm.
I would think that out of respect for Murray and the whole FreeBSD team you would swallow your pride and let your readers know that while it may be “available” it has not been officially released. User’s who care already know this apparently, but it would still be the courteous thing to do.
OK I installed this 4.6 but configured xfrr86 file wrong and now the damn Xserver tries to start all the time.I cant to anything while it tries to start
.How can I prevent it starting so I can edit config file?
OK I installed this 4.6 but configured xfrr86 file wrong and now the damn Xserver tries to start all the time.I cant to anything while it tries to start
.How can I prevent it starting so I can edit config file?
At the boot prompt, you can type `boot -s’ to boot the system into single user mode. From there you can edit whatever files you need to fix the problem, or run /stand/sysinstall.
> As far as I am concerned, FreeBSD 4.6 is available to ?
> download in its entirety, with-or-without an accompanied
> official announcement. That for me counts as “release”.
> Maybe not official yet, but a release nevertheless.
Whatever you think, it is not a FreeBSD release. A release (in FreeBSD terminology, at least) is a single fixed set of files. Once created it never changes. That is what makes it a release, and it is what distinguishes it from any other set of files extracted from the source code repository, such as a copy of freebsd-stable. It undergoes a significant testing and review process which culminates in an announcement from the release engineering team. After that the files will not be changed. Before that they may be changed. You can download and run any code that you find on the FreeBSD server, but to call it a release when it is not is to do a disservice to the entire release engineering process, and the trust that it builds in the FreeBSD system.
> My article never suggested anything more anyway,
> in fact, I clearly say that not all the ISOs
> are available atm.
Whether or not the ISO images exist is immaterial to the question of what is or is not a release.
> I would think that out of respect for Murray and
> the whole FreeBSD team you would swallow your pride
> and let your readers know that while it may
> be “available” it has not been officially released.
> User’s who care already know this apparently, but it
> would still be the courteous thing to do.
Hear! Hear! Props to the FreeBSD engineering team. A retraction from Eugenia, please!
I think I’ll wait till all the fussing and fighting’s over. 😉 I’ve been running 4.2 for a while now, and didn’t see much of a need to update to 4.4.
But everybody seems so eager to update to 4.6, I have to wonder: are there serious problems with 4.4, or are there supposed to be some *really special* new features in 4.6?
Ok so now the code for the OS is complete…..how long does it take to compile the ISO’s? Are they so afraid that the servers will be r4p3d that they are delaying? What gives?
“Whatever happened to the native jdk1.3 anyway? ”
It’s taking a lot longer than anticipated. I read on usenet that it won’t be out until later this year now.
JDK 1.4 is already out for Linux, Solaris, and Windows, and the version for FreeBSD (when it arrives) will only be 1.3.1…already out of date.
I got tired of waiting for it and went back to Slackware Linux.
Yeah well, I might do the same myself, which is a shame
because I really like FreeBSD. The last jdk I compiled from
the ports and it works pretty well (except for the mozilla plugin) but I don’t know if I’ll do it again.
I tried installing 4.6 on my Dell C600 laptop and it gives me an error about there not being a package index. I tried to install from the mini ISO and via FTP through http://ftp.freebsd.org and ftp2.freebsd.org. They all give the same error. I was able to install 4.4 and 4.5 just fine. Anybody know what gives?
Just go to /usr/ports/java/linux-jdk14 and type “make install”. You will then have Java JDK 1.4 running on your FreeBSD 4.5 box.
Funny, but I already have a native 1.3 jdk running on my FreeBSD system…. Built from /usr/ports/java/jdk13
Adam
Yes and it’s been there for a while. What they are waiting for is to get some official Java certification (read: blessed by the Sun) AFAIK.
Umkay, I figured out the (simple) problem. There really isn’t an index file in the packages directory. Hmmm…
FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE was in its final form, ready for public consumption. You could get it and install it. I was looking through the directory tree on the FTP server last night, and low and behold there it was. I asked some people if 4.6-RELEASE was out, and they persisted with the “It’s not a release until an RSA signed message is sent to the freebsd-announce mailing list” blah blah blah.
Eugenia, I think you were right. If idiots want to quibble over the semantics of the word “release” rather than spending their time actually doing something productive like upgrading their systems, let them. In my mind, 4.6-RELEASE (notice the big RELEASE in caps on the end) was, well, released.
(Of course, that’s not to say I don’t understand the FreeBSD people’s side of the story. They don’t want an onslaught of messages saying “The ISOs are broken!” because they haven’t finished uploading them. But still, you get the picture.)
Since it’s the developers themselves that are insisting that it isn’t a release and is not to be treated as one, it seems to me that you are calling them idiots. Not good.
As an aside, I’m amazed that some people here install an unofficial version of an operating system and then report that they have problems with it.
Also, if any of the above reasons wern’t good enough for waiting on the announcment, waiting allows the ISO’s to get out to mirror sites. Having hundreds (thousands? millons?.. well maybe not millions) of people hammering one site continually checking if the ISO’s are uploaded for an OS that hasn’t been “offically” released is a _BAD_THING_. Unless I’m mistaken, you are not a FreeBSD developer Eugenia?
OMG, I reported having a problem with it! I never said I considered it an official release. It was more of a “Hey, has anybody else tried to install this and run into the same problem?” Then I posted why the error occured in case anyone else was wondering why they were getting an error. According to your statement, If I was running FreeBSD-CURRENT and issued a bug report or asked a question on the CURRENT mailing list, I’d be an idiot, because it is not an official release. Way to go, Objekt! You can display your crippled intelligence in way few others are capable of doing!
they havent announced it yet.. and the ISO’s arent on the site yet.. and i never said it was.. and i don’t have to apologize to anyone.. because i’m a stubborn asshole who disrespect the hard work of others.. in fact it seems i try hard to not only disrespect it.. i also try to ruin their great reputation..
but defending it till you die is not acceptable.. yes, you changed the title.. but that does not change the fact that you know have a bunch of users who can’t find the INDEX file on the mirror sites.. because the DAMN THING HAS NOT BEEN RELEASED.. NOW PULL THE PHREAKIN ARTICLE UNTIL IT HAS BEEN RELEASED!!! please.. for god’s sake.. or whatever religion you have..
I’m new to OSNews but my god, some of you guys need to lighten up a bit after all this is “just” a website with OSNews and related stories. Not the bible
Bascule wrote:
> FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE was in its final form, ready for public consumption.
Wrong. As recently as *ONE HOUR AGO* the Release Engineering team was still putting the finishing touches on, committing to the CVS tree and even slipping the CVS release tags, as they fixed release build problems.
You must be the guy who ignores the “Wet Paint” sign.
– Chand
Just got notification on the freebsd-announce list