FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 was just released, download its ISO from an ftp server near you.
FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 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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I’d like to see another ISO that has a few more default drivers in its kernel… especially sound drivers (pcm) and the firewall options too. It’s slightly annoying to have to recompile sound back into after an update, although it is almost brainless to do so given FreeBSD’s wonderful handbook. Maybe this would cause too much work for the already overloaded development team. Too bad I don’t know enough or have any time to contribute.
I really like FreeBSD, but it does take more setup time than some other “free” OSes (eg, RedHat), although the end result is usually really nice and stable. I especially like the ports system combined with packaging, if you don’t want to compile X for instance you don’t have to, but you can if you want (and it is pretty straightforward).
I can never get my printer to work though, it’s a shitty Lexmark Z32 USB. Perhaps by now there are CUPS drivers for it. Oh well, my fault for not being rich enough to get a PostScript printer, right? 🙂 On the other hand, my HP Deskjet always seemed to work well, even if it is only at 300x300DPI (printing PNGs especially is bad if not on best quality).
Has anyone tried the new NVIDIA drivers out? How do they work? Are they stable or not?
A release candidate? 5.0 must be REALLY close, a few months ago?
Must be awesome!
Has anyone tried the new NVIDIA drivers out? How do they work? Are they stable or not?
It’s great and have been stable to me for long time by now, since it released. I am able to play tuxracer, Quake3 and other games with OpenGL and etc. 🙂
BTW: It does work in the FreeBSD 5.0 too, as long you modify a file by just add comment in there. Check -> http://www.bsdforums.org/forums/showthread.php?s=&threadid=5000
Yes, that would be nice, although as you say, it is quite easy to recompile the kernal for sound – if you have the instructions from the manual. Looking forward to the 5.0 release!
“I can never get my printer to work though, it’s a shitty Lexmark Z32 USB. Perhaps by now there are CUPS drivers for it.”
try looking it up at http://www.linuxprinting.org/ i dought that it cups is very much different between BSD and GNU/Linux.
I wish you’d say “FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 was just made available” instead of it “was just released”. It’s not a release, it’s a release candidate. I know this sounds picky, but it’s an important distinction. FreeBSD has a well earned reputation for reliability. A big part of how that reliablility is achieved is by having a well controlled release process. In Open Source projects all of the development code is visible to the world. Anyone can make a snapshot at any time, and it is quite possible that it will not be particularly reliable. It is very important that people understand what is development code and what is released code. If people download the development code thinking that it is a polished product, they will probably experience problems, and come away with an undeserved bad impression of the entire project. So let’s give the FreeBSD release engineers the respect they deserve and follow their naming standard.
They said “FreeBSD 5.0-RC1” was released, so they clearly stated that it was a release candidate.
Release canidates are not released, they are only available for testing, they are beta versions. A release implies that the code is tested and stable. Besides maybe not everyone knows what RC1 means, and they might think that this is a stable release.
However, this argument is really stupid anyway and is basically fighting over symantics and not matter.
Go FreeBSD!
Skipp
….until the consensus of stability starts rolling in. I like FreeBSD, but can’t run 4.x on my laptop due to power management issues.
(fingers crossed…)
Yay, another fight over the semantics of the word “release”
I think the best way to solve semantic arguments is to ask if anyone was confused by a particular wording. If your world was shattered by the statement “FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 Released” please speak up now.
In other news, just upgraded one of my systems… not noticing any problems… seems to run just as stable as 5.0-DP2. I’ll let everyone know if I encounter any major problems.
Now, let’s see some benchmarks of FreeBSD 5.0 SMPng versus Linux 2.5/6
i just finished the DL of the DP2 double iso’s yesterday.. doh! another iso to dl and install… (saying that, dp2 installed without hassle yesterday, dp1 bugged bigtime.. looksl ike huge improvements!)
I’d like to see another ISO that has a few more default drivers in its kernel… especially sound drivers (pcm) and the firewall options too. It’s slightly annoying to have to recompile sound back into after an update, although it is almost brainless to do so given FreeBSD’s wonderful handbook.
Have you heard of ‘kldload pcm’, ‘kldload ipfw’ and loader.conf ?
It’s worth pointing out that it will likely take the 5.x line a few releases to reach the stability of the 4.x line, since it has nearly two years worth of changes and enhancements.
For more information, see
http://people.freebsd.org/~bmah/relnotes/CURRENT/early-adopter.html
–Jon
Uhhh… Every time I’ve installed FreeBSD in the past 2 years, it’s installed a large number of kernel modules to support various sound cards. No kernel recompilation necessary.
Adam
It’s worth pointing out that it will likely take the 5.x line a few releases to reach the stability of the 4.x line, since it has nearly two years worth of changes and enhancements.
Obviously. But since I run the Hurd and Debian Sid on the same machine, stability is not necessarily my main concern. 😀 My notebook is ACPI-only, and under certain OS’s, it overheats. I have problems with many stock Linux kernels, and had bad problems with FreeBSD.
For whatever reason, it’s fine running GNUMach.
But when BSD goes on, Linux comes off. I need a relatively stable platform that I can actually do work in (things like oh, say, graphical browsing…). Debian unstable fits that bill. If the feedback on RC1 is generally positive, I’ll install it.
try looking it up at http://www.linuxprinting.org/ i dought that it cups is very much different between BSD and GNU/Linux.
I installed CUPS on a FreeBSD box here@work. To make the printer work, only got the PPD and put pkg_add -r to work
FreeBSD also comes with loadable kernel modules, so you don’t have to recompile your kernel to get sound. See /boot/defaults/loader.conf for more details about which modules to load for which chip.
Yes I’ve heard of it, but when I tried to load in a module after boot it would sometimes freeze everything. I probably shouldn’t have tried it with X open, though 🙂 I didn’t know about the loader.conf file (and of course I’ll leave it alone and only touch the /boot/loader.conf so my modules don’t get wiped out on an upgrade), will give that a shot sometime. Although I probably won’t on my router (which runs FreeBSD), you can’t use kldload if you have kern_securelevel_enable set to yes in rc.conf, which is of course something that is a good idea to have on a firewall.
As for my printer, linuxprinting.org said something nasty like “prints, but you have to turn it off/on after each print job”. No thanks. Oddly enough, RH8 and Mandrake 8.2 didn’t seem to have a problem with the printer… I suppose I could reverse-engineer what they did to get it working, but I’m too lazy for that (reinstall, deinstall, reinstall again???). And I’ve gotten CUPS working under FreeBSD before (in fact I think it is automatically installed when you do “pkg_add -r samba”) but I think you need a functioning driver in place already to use CUPS if you don’t have a postscript printer. The only driver I could find for it was a binary only one for Redhat. The lxm3200 printer driver mentioned on linuxprinting.org seems like it is severely out of date and doesn’t work with anything…. Sigh.
The previous 2 5.0-DP? releases failed to install on my Athlon XP 1900+ system. However, 4.7-Release works just fine. Hopefully they’ve got things working now. I’ll guess I’ll give RC1 a try. It’s only an iso download and burn. No biggie with a cable modem
Anyone else have problems with the DP? releases and tried RC1?
I didn’t know about the loader.conf file
Well, maybe it’s loader.rc–I never remember, but I do know that the one nice thing FreeBSD has is a bootloader that is able to link modules to kernel before booting it.
The previous 2 5.0-DP? releases failed to install on my Athlon XP 1900+ system.
DP1 and DP2 both work fine on my dual Athlon MP 1700+ system.
FYI As an alternative to downloading the whole ISO, you can also just download and burn 2 floppy images, and the install will pull everything else down over the internet. Works great over a half-decent connection.
>>>FYI As an alternative to downloading the whole ISO, you can also just download and burn 2 floppy images, and the install will pull everything else down over the internet. Works great over a half-decent connection.
I wonder if there’s a mini-iso like 4.6….i really dig the mini-iso. Get bare essentials onto machine, build everything else via ports.
i’m a redhat fan, but freebsd is really neat.
Maybe i’m just impatient but this release hangs when probing the hardware on my machine
4.7 went on without a hitch. I’m a complete newbie still, and found I was having amazing troubles with linux compatibility – i.e. downloading, building and installing was a nightmare. Then I discovered pkg_add. IT RULES!!!
Just wish Slackware could do the same (and maybe windows but I only use that for Visual Studio).
Matt
I have been using FreeBSD as a desktop replacement for Windows for a little while. I think (its only my opinion, don’t throw a hissy fit) that its much more suitable then linux. The FreeBSD handbook explains nearly everything you need to know. I only encountered a few things that I could not look up in there. The package system is very nice, after I learned how to use CVSup, I updated my system, and installed Gnome2. The package system is very pleasant. But.. I was unable to do a few things. I mostly play games
, and Xmame was not able to have sound (I did recompile with it with the appropriate options, no luck), and I could not find an option to play games fullscreen properly (most likely video driver problems, also a problem with ZSNES) . Still, I think if for some reason there is need for a mass exodus from Windows, FreeBSD would be a good solution for many people (although probably less have heard of it then linux). I consider myself somewhat of a technical user, and I found that the time I invested in FreeBSD (much less) had far more quantitative results then the time I invested in Linux.
Just thought I would share.
Pat