FreeBSD 5.1 Beta 1 was released during the last few days and can be obtained from here (ISOs here, select a mirror). The release notes are available from here. They will be replaced with RC-1 in 3-4 weeks.
FreeBSD 5.1 Beta Available
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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 am looking forward to the official release.
It seems that this release is going to be more evolutionary than anything.
Mainly just bug fixes and a few minor updates to stuff that was already in 5.0R. Atleast this is what I got out of the release notes.
Does anyone know what the status of KSE and SMPng is?
I kind of get the feeling that those aren’t going to be truly useful for a few more releases.
“Due to code size limitations, the i386 boot loader can only load kernels from root file systems that are 1.5TB or smaller in size.”
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m screwed.
Hey All, yesterday I downloaded and installed 5.1-Beta, on my dell inspiron 8200, and played around with it for an hour, and I would like to share my brief experiance with the osnews community. There were two notable problems I found with the install 1) It went slooooow, and I really mean slow, the transfer rates sometimes droped as slow as 50kb/sec from the cdrom. 2) the Krb5 package could not be installed. The default partition type was UFS2 as announced recently. I also got some bizzare acpi messages during the boot from the cd, something about buffers with length zero (I believe this has to do with dells acpi implementation). The cd contained the following pre compiled packages:
XFree86 4.3.0
KDE 3.1.1.a
Gnome 2.2.1
Emacs 21.3
Samba 2.2.8a
Mozilla 1.3.1
And ofcourse contained many more packages, but those are just the ones I installed. In terms of system software it had:
Gcc 3.2.2
GDB 5.2.1
Perl 5.6.1
… And all the rest of the usual. I didnt to extensive testing, or anything, I mostly just wanted to see what was going on with the -Current branch. KDE worked fine, and I couldnt get Gnome to start but the was *my* fault, because I couldnt figure out how to edit my .xinitrc file. Thats really it, I just played around for a while, and then went back to 5.0, which is still a little faster/stable, or so it seems… That is basically my experiance, and I look foward to 5.2, should be a really solid OS.
I don’t think I’ll install 5.x until it spawns a -STABLE branch. 4.8-STABLE runs fine on my Thinkpad T21 laptop.
-3BSD
…there is no “upgrade path” from 5.0-release to 5.1-beta. The only ways to get 5.1-beta is either installing from scratch using the provided images or cvsupping the source from the -CURRENT branch hoping it’s not broken and hasn’t changed a lot since the 5.1-beta release.
5.1-beta was basically a snapshop of the -CURRENT branch and as such, there is no source branch to “cvsup to” in order to get it, except -CURRENT, which is always on the move. I guess I’ll have to wait a little bit for the final 5.1-release.
Not that it has any real importance, but it is a nice touch for desktop-oriented users.
Prog.
And what is wrong with the current installer? what will the graphical installer provide? thousands of half-witts who don’t want to RTFM hogging the IRC chat channels? No, I think the text installer is the first line of defence FreeBSD has against clueless morons.
The current installer just plain stinks, if you make a mistake somewhere at critial points, you have to start over. Hell even most linux /other distro’s have a more user friendly interface to use that sysinstall. It just plain sucks. Also, people dont have to be “clueless morons” to use a graphical installer. Personal preference is more like it. Perhaps if the installer itself weren’t so klugey more people would take the plunge. RTFM isn’t an excuse anymore, loads of people are doing just that and perhaps need a little pointing in the right direction. There’s just no need to be a prick about it when the issue of graphical installers comes up.
What does RTFM mean…?
Read the Friggen’ Manual
ah… thanks 🙂 new to the lingo 🙂
Why do you guys want a GUI installer for FreeBSD!? Isn’t Linux enough? LEAVE FREEBSD ALONE! PLEASE!
sysinstall kicks ass, please leave it like that.
-3BSD
Anonymous wrote:
“the i386 boot loader can only load kernels from root file systems that are 1.5TB or smaller in size.”
I don’t know about you guys, but I’m screwed.
LOL! What a limitation! That’s as good as speed limitting a car to 325Km/h!
But I wouldn’t worry too much. I’m sure that something like FIPS or Partition Magic will be able to deal with resizing all of your 20TB partitions… And there must be a native FreeBSD version of P.M. right around the corner. *cough*.
In all serousness, My question is, why would someone have a root file system that’s any bigger than it positively needs to be? Sounds like poor planning to me – I was always taught to keep the root file system small (though I admit, my last one was 1GiB) and to use partitions and mount points. *shrug*.
Does anyone out there on x86 architecture actually have 1 TB?! (All Sun owners can just be quiet…)
I prefer a text installer but I agree that it needs a bit of tidying up. Look at NetBSD’s i386 installer for an excellent example. The FreeBSD one is fine but it is a bit spagettified and the checkbox menus need to be a bit clearer. The “custom” install option is in fact easier than the “standard” option because it gives a nice menu that makes it easier to go back to an earlier stage to change something.
Anyone who complains about FreeBSD SysInstall should try their hand at installing some other OSes first. Ever install OpenBSD? NetBSD? Solaris? Debian? You’ll come back crying for SysInstall…i guarantee it!!!
-bytes256
nice to see 5.1 will ship with an update to drm. that’ll save me the time it takes to update XF86 from the dri trunk.
I have no problem with the installer, I actully can deal with it better then most linux distros. But as some pointed out, one mistake and it’s start over. I sorta likened it to a video game. You learn your mistakes and it starts to get easy. I the biggest trick is to have 2 computers next to each other and be able to have the install guide up and people to talk to. This is important for trying to get into any alt OS unless it’s super simple like beos. This is were many fail to understand difficulting in installs. It not bad if you can get help while doing something, but to have to restart and go talk to people and then go back and try again and so forth is hell.
Anyways, i’m fine with the installer except with 3 things. 1) for 5.0 the install guide doesn’t line up with what i’m seeing very well for a few things, could be an issue of not fully updated. 2) the xfree86 setup just doesn’t work, I can’t get all that is done in the intall guide and if locks up everytime in the middle of it. 3) once I have things installed I reboot, log in and don’t know what to do next, having some sorta install guide part 2: where to go from here, would be nice. I can get freebsd installed, but I can’t do shit after that. Without going out and bugging people with questions I have no where to go. I’m sure what i’m looking for is out there, and i see things on the freebsd page, but i think what to do after the install and reboot would be good to be part of the install guide even if it isn’t technecly installing.
I see freebsd having the brightest future of the opensource OS’s . I just want to be able to get a desktop up and going. But i’m not going to complain from them to jump through hoops and make an idiot proof installer, but it wouldn’t hurt anything.
And no I won’t try linux anymore, aside from having basic moral issues with it, after having my last attemp eat windows and beos on me I decided to never touch it again. It had it’s dozen chances.
I agree. It is my opinion that the installer should be redone, to make it a little more friendly, but I am not opposed to keeping the installer as text based. The one they have is very powerful already, and I believe it should just be modified to be a little more friendly. Sometimes it is hard to understand exactly what does what, where you need to go, and what is selected (items in menu versus buttons at the bottom). But it does have some awesome features, like installing from FTP, booting straight to a live CD, etc.
yea, i loved the text based installer… it seemed really nice and simple (except for the fact that i messed up like 200 times, but that was ok cause i learned from my mistakes and gained a lot of knowledge)… it just requires a little more effort sometimes to set up certain things (ex: i had no idea how to set up my {swap, var, […] usr} partitions before this… i usually left this up to my previous linux partitions. It was kinda fun 🙂 I enjoyed it. Anywho, i am all up for the idea of making the installer simpler and friendlier than it is now… i would also support the idea of having the installer still all text-based. I enjoy it. Not all things have to be graphical, ya know…
🙂
to answer your question antarius,
I infact do have HDD space totally more than 1TB. Though i only have BSD running on about 250GB of that space.
Actually, I find NetBSD’s sysinstall much easier than Free’s. The problem with BSD installers is that they don’t do much besies putting the OS on the hard drive. They should come with some post-install package for setting up things such as services, networking, time zone, keyboards, locale and all that. I suppose that Sushi may turn out to be something like that once they get it to work.
They should come with some post-install package for setting up things such as services, networking, time zone, keyboards, locale and all that.
Uhhh, FreeBSD’s sysinstall will do all of that post-install (it installs into /stand/sysinstall) as well as help with things like partitioning/labeling/formatting new hard drives, installing new packages, and doing a complete system upgrade…
> They should come with some post-install package for setting
> up things such as services, networking, time zone,
> keyboards, locale and all that.
Um, sysinstall does this. And besides, do we want to end up with an installer that asks hundreds of questions like the debian one? I dont think so.
Thanks, I never got around to trying Free out because of the installer.
However, if Free is anything like Net, I think that moaning about the complexity of the installer is senseless. If you can’t get your head around the installer, you’ll never manage to go into /etc/rc.conf when you boot your fresh OS.
> The problem with BSD installers is that they don’t do much besies putting the OS on the hard drive.
FreeBSD installer does not even warn you when the HD is full. I tried to install on 500 MiB partition and landed with a 100% full filesystem.
I’ve been that moron, and but I was even more “puzzled” (to say the _least_) by the fact that I was kicked from the efnet #freebsdhelp channel before even being able to ask something…I though that channel purpose was to help people on the freebsd topic (as the name implies it) not instantly banning them.
I admit I didn’t look extensively on the web for any single clue that could help me solve my problem, and I asked a couple of questions in the wrong channel before. Perhaps there’s a relation between those facts, I wouldn’t know anyway, since I couldn’t ask.
Still, FreeBSD is a really great system, and I wish my laptop could accept it as well as it does with Linux.
No offense to NetBSD…but their installer is probably the worst of any BSD i’ve ever tried.
Still a little better than Debian IMHO
Personnally my favorite OS installers, in order are FreeBSD, Slackware, and OpenBSD. They’re just very simple and get you up and running very quickly. They don’t do everything for you, but that’s not the goal of these OSes anyway. In addition, the BSDs are so well documented no post-install handholding should be necessary. The Handbook available at http://www.freebsd.org/ and the faq available at http://www.openbsd.org/ should walk you through all but the most complex tasks, and thus BSDers are actually quite justified in saying RTFM.
Besides, FreeBSD is a genuine UNIX afterall, it’s not supposed to hold your hand. If you want a UNIX that holds your hand the whole way, get a Mac or Red Hat or Mandrake or Lindows or Xandros or Lycoris…you get the idea.
-bytes256
I timed myself installing FreeBSD once. Good luck doing that with some of the Linux/Microsoft GUI installers. Once you know your way through sysinstall it can be really fast
No offense to NetBSD…but their installer is probably the worst of any BSD i’ve ever tried.
Personnally my favorite OS installers, in order are FreeBSD, Slackware, and OpenBSD.
OpenBSD? Last time I installed Open, which isn’t such a long time ago, it used the same installer as NetBSD 1.1 (1995 vintage). It performed the same tasks as NetBSD sysinst, only it didn’t make us of VT100/curses features, so it was just a long dialogue. Most noteworthy, when you were labeling and partitioning your hard drive, the help command was so long than it ran off your screen before you could read all the commands.
NetBSD’s installer doesn’t do much, but it also doesn’t leave much room for mistakes.
I like OpenBSD for it’s balance of simplicity and power. It’s very simple and efficient to run through an install of OpenBSD. Probably the fastest OS install routine of any modern OS.
It definitely is not idiot proof, and there is considerable margin for user error, but as somebody mentioned about FreeBSD, this is a great first line of defense against people who have no business using this OS. Anybody who has installed OpenBSD will realize that it’s definitely not focused on desktop use. So many things are shutoff by default that it takes a considerable amount of time to turn on and install the software that you’d need to make a decent desktop for yourself.
However, as a server or firewall, virtually nothing turned on by default is a DESIRED behavior. It’s all about focus. OpenBSD is probably the hardest to use of all the BSDs, just because it’s focused on security to an almost comical degree of paranoia.
I will admit that I’ve only installed NetBSD twice, as I don’t see any advantage of using it on my plain vanilla x86 boxes. The software is too outdated and performance is lackluster. Of course this was NetBSD 1.5, so if i get my hands on some exotic hardware, I would love to try out NetBSD again.
-bytes256
Sysinstall isn’t bad, sysinstall and friends are *confusing*. The way some keystrokes/button positions/mechanics/etc are are way too confusing – yes, and I *need* to install FreeBSD systems sometimes. There’s even a JKH writing where he acknowledges this, it’s a bit outdated (still speaks about Lizard!) but still valid: http://rtp1.slowblink.com/~libh/sysinstall2/sysinstall2.html .
LibH looks like progressing slowly: http://www.freebsd.org/projects/libh.html
Well to know what RTFM you’ll have to read the fine manual:
http://internet.ls-la.net/man-pages/rtfm-1.html
http://internet.ls-la.net/man-pages/rtfm-2.html
😀