“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the
availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches 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.” Download from one of the mirrors.
If no news is good news, then news as insignificant as a beta release of FreeBSD must be fairly good news.
Hooray! I like good news.
“Fedora Core 5 Test 3 Released” news can fall into “insignificant” by your judgment.
If offtopic comments are signs of intelligence, it makes you a very, very intelligent person.
Unfortunately, I think not.
That being said, it looks like FreeBSD 6.1 is going to roll out really soon, the list of unresolved show-stoppers is really small. B2 seems quite stable as well, for hoots I threw it on one of the production servers in my cluster (if it blew up I’d just remove it from the cluster, no harm done.) It’s running quite well, I haven’t benchmarked but it seems even a tad bit better than 6.0. Yippee!
I’am tracking -STABLE development branch (for those who don’t know: STABLE is a development branch, not STABLE as in Debian STABLE)on my home machine, and it was quite… well stable. Noticed the 6.1 Prerelease tag a few weeks ago
It still says prerelease.
As a desktop user, probably the most important news is the enhancments to the multimedia supbsystem. New drivers, fixes for old ones (fixed a problem I had with skype), etc… thanks to Ariff and friends (@multimedia has become quite active lately).
Performance … well, 6.0 was quite good already! Try PC-BSD and be amazed at the boot up speed, and the general desktop performance
)) I might not have noticed changes, because I gradually updated (every 1-2 weeks) … but I can imagine that the devs did some optimizations now that 6 has become pretty stable (6.0 must have been the most stable .0 release I have ever tried).
And hey – almost every fedora or (k)kubuntu pre-alpha release is news, yet few are complaining. Besides, we are talking about 2 releases actually, so.
Many major Linux distros, both binary and source-based, use GPG signing with their package management to increase their security. Debian and Ubuntu have secure APT, and RPM- and Slackware-based distros have their own implementations. Of the source-based distros Gentoo has its secure Portage at least in development, and Source Mage GNU/Linux uses rather advanced GPG signing in its package and source managemnet too:
http://wiki.sourcemage.org/Spell_GPG_Checking
As I’m not very familiar with FreeBSDS, I was wondering if FreeBSD – or, the other BSDs – have anything similar, already in use or at least in development? Are the traditional MD5sum checks the only means in BSDs to check whether installed packages are ok aand trustworthy? Please, enlighten me on this subject.
By the way, here’s a good article on the subject that compares various implementations of these kind of GPG signing technologies in Linux and BSD operating systems:
– Package and distribution security
http://www.edos-project.org/xwiki/bin/Main/SecurityTopic
FreeBSD uses SHA256 in ports and for the binary update systems (freebsd-update and portsnap).
portsnap(8) at least grabs signed snapshops and encrypts the transfer, that’s can’t be said for updating your source tree from cvs however.
Why there are 2 different branches ???
What are the differences between the 2 branches, 6.1 and 5.5???
What is each branch good and bad for ??? that’s to say… what are the pros and cons of each one ???
any recomendation;;; ???
Enlight this humble BSD distros learner please…
Angel
6.x is the coninuation of work began in 5.x
It is pretty widely recommended to always choose 6 over 5, that might be an understatement. That is to say anythig 5 does 6 does better.
The answers are in this article if you click on a link.
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-hackers/2006-February/01…
The FreeBSD 5.5 Release is being done for people who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time. We do encourage people to make that transition as soon as possible, though. There have been some updates made between FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 5.5 but not all of the bugfixes done to RELENG_6 have been backported to RELENG_5. This will almost certainly be the last 5.X release.
Well, Thank u (to both of u) for the anwsers. But, I was looking for a more concrete answer…
I had check the release announcement before, and I have done it again and something else too.
“The FreeBSD 5.5 Release is being done for people
who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time”
Maybe it is obvious for an BSD xpert, but not for me…
What would make someone “unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time” There must be something powerful enough to make the developpers pursuing the development with 2 branches… but what would be the cases ?????
I mean, you do not see that frecuently in other distros (BSD or Linux …)
The developpers just release a new version and people update or not… but you don’t get a new branch of development with every release… If not there wolud be infinite development of branches (one for every release of every distro…)
So, I just want to understand the reasons for which the old 5x release has produced a parallel branch of develpopment. Incompatibility of the 6x branch with some other paramount software (database… or whatever?), maybe … ??? But what important cases/examples would impeade anyone from updating to the 6x branch ???
Thanks , Angel
That question is rather easy to answer.
stability and welltestedness.
Debian does the same thing…one platform is without question stable for everyone.
one is pretty stable but we cant exactly be certain it will work all the time.
The 5 branches has its own packages, too.
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/ports/i386
Suppose someone has a production server running 5.4 or 5-stable.
Upgrading to 6 means upgrading all the packages installed too.
Even if some packages uses the same release on both branches.
Suppose that apache is 1.3.99 for 5.x and 6.x both.
There exists different packages built for 5.x and 6.x even if the version of apache is the same.
Well upgrading to 6.x it doesn’t mean that you can use the 1.3.x package for 5.x with 6.x you need to reinstall it.
The migration to 5.x and 6.x is not only a matter of upgrading binaries.
Check this:
ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/6.0-RELEASE/INSTAL…
I’m not a tech so my answer could not be accurate.
Edited 2006-02-22 08:06
ok .. thanks to U 2..
So i guess it is something like debian “stable” and “unstable” etc…
…and that when they release the 7x, they will continue to develope aswell the 6x branch; until the 8x is released…
thx
Angel
What about the ULE scheduler, is it (reasonably) safe and is it worth the trouble of recompiling the kernel for a UP desktop?
I’ve been using the ULE scheduler for months and it’s been fine. There’s suppose to be some benefits for a UP system. All I can do is tell you to go ahead and try it.
Upgrading to 6 means upgrading all the packages installed too.
I don’t think so. For example if you upgrade via cvsup from 5.4-release to 6.0-release you don’t have to recompile you packages.
If you have binary packages compiled on 5.4-release you can use them out of the box on 6.0-release as long as you install misc/compat5x for binary compatibility.
Edited 2006-02-23 07:13