FreeBSD Release Engineering Team’s Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites.
FreeBSD 5.1-RC1 Now Available
About The Author
Adam Scheinberg
Technology Executive • Web Developer • Father • Foodie • Music Snob • OS enthusiast
Follow me on Mastodon @[email protected]
I am wondering what exactly is supposed to be knew in this version? Is it supposed to be the next Production Release of FreeBSD? The way I figure it, by their numbering scheme, 5.2 likely will be (on account I was told this by several people related to FreeBSD – 4.9 is supposed to be the stable stuff from 5.1 merged with 4.8). If this is not a Production Release, why would anyone want to download and use it? FreeBSD is supposed to be about stability, releasing products that still have features in the works that is included is simply a bad call by whoever decided it. FreeBSD went 2 years almost without a release, now there is an onslaught of unfinished work, why?
I guess this is the answer to all the complaints FreeBSD got while not releasing anything to the public, I thought that wasn’t FreeBSD’s way though, I guess I was mistaken.
Downloaded on Sunday night.
I love it. Just a beautiful OS.
It’s a dot release. Enough said.
If this is not a Production Release, why would anyone want to download and use it?
I have a desktop at home and a desktop at work running FreeBSD 5.0. Countless other people do as well. This is an upgrade for all of the people currently running 5.0 who want a relatively stable system but also the feature set of FreeBSD 5.
FreeBSD is supposed to be about stability, releasing products that still have features in the works that is included is simply a bad call by whoever decided it.
No, “release early, release often” is a shrewd development practice. A greater userbase of testers will greatly increase the rate at which bugs are discovered, leading to further system stability.
FreeBSD went 2 years almost without a release, now there is an onslaught of unfinished work, why?
The system reached a point in its development where it could become useful to the average FreeBSD user. By stabilizing the branch they allow a great deal of bugs to be fixed even as development continues.
it’s been extremely stable so far.. no problems at all. Thank God for FreeBSD! A OS that works.
FreeBSD unstable is more stable than most stable Linux distros from my experience.
I look forward to trying out 5.1 when it is released
good work FreeBSD team…you remain my favorite OS
A query from a pre-newbie considering taking the plunge, when I get another box to run it on:
I’m curious to know whether a 4.9 will follow before 5.2 or whether 5.1 is considered “production ready”.
FreeBSD unstable is more stable than most stable Linux distros from my experience.
tsk.. can’t you talk about FreeBSD’s stability without comparing it to Linux?
while this is a dot release the 4-STABLE branch should still be used for production servers. 5.1 is a small step forward, but 5.2 should be much better with a greater number of system resources coming out from under the GIANT mutex. Performance should then be on par or even better than the 4-STABLE branch.
The subject says it all. But allow me to go into further detail. You see, I was a Windows user until 2 months ago. I am definently NOT a newbie, and have been trying to move over to Linux and use it as my full time desktop OS. Everytime I tried to move over, I ran into a problem, and got disgusted with it. So I would reinstall Windows, and wait another 5-6 months until another release, and then try that one. Well, the last Linux Distro that I used was RedHat 9. Which was great, the fonts (which were a big thing for me) actually looked good. I only ran into problems when trying to install 3rd party applications. rpm’s mostly. Anyway, I had been running a FreeBSD server for the past 6 months, so I was pretty confident I could use FreeBSD with relatively few problems as my main desktop OS. And so far it has!
I haven’t run into a single problem that I haven’t been able to solve (quickly)!
When I use Linux the filesystem always seems so chaotic, most distro’s use different paths, no uniformity there! I am also by no means a FreeBSD zealot. I am just stating what I have found with FreeBSD, and Linux.
“why would anyone want to use it…”
You want the 5-STABLE branch to be production ready soon don’t you!?!
Well, I’d used Gentoo for a month or so, so the next logical step for me would have been to try FreeBSD. Unfortunately, my main computer got put out of commission temporarily, so I wiped an old one and decided to do it there. The CD-ROM drive in it does not read data well at all, and it didn’t boot from CD.
No problem, I fetched the floppy images. dd’ed them, etc, thinking to do an FTP install. I put it in, went through the FS creation process, configured my network card, then selected the network install.
It didn’t find its release on any of the servers, and when I tried again it broke my network configuration, so I had to reboot. Same thing, again and again. Long story short, hours later I got it to find *some* release (5.0?). The FreeBSD installer does not have a progress meter for downloading, and that was uber-annoying, plus the lack of tasksel-like things got on my nerves because I had to select each package I wanted manually.
Right. So eventually it downloaded and installed, and I found myself at the command prompt with a set of horribly ugly console fonts (dunno why that is). I configured XFree and startx-ed, at which point it proceeded to attempt to assassinate my monitor. I *know* I set everything in xf86cfg correctly, I’ve used this combination many times with Linux. Looks like it was trying to get a higher refresh than possible–my monitor didn’t fry, but showed an OUT OF RANGE message like it normally does in these situations.
After spending a couple of hours trying to get it to work, I said “Screw this” and installed Debian. I don’t give a damn that it’s slower and less stable and secure, with Debian I was completely up and running in 3 hours (kde, mozilla, etc).
And that’s my FreeBSD story. Maybe if one of you gives me compelling advice, I will try again, but otherwise, no BSD for me, ever.
Also, can someone tell me why so many BSD trolls hate Linux and the GPL so much? I’ve run into this lots, and it makes no sense. Seems like our two communities should be allies, not warring factions.
>The FreeBSD installer does not have a progress meter for downloading, and that was uber-annoying…
Are you sure?
Also, can someone tell me why so many BSD trolls hate Linux and the GPL so much? I’ve run into this lots, and it makes no sense. Seems like our two communities should be allies, not warring factions.
Probably because of the ying-yang. They are probably needed to balence the world of the Linux trolls & zealots.
There are trolls everywhere. They believe in their OS as in a religion and they’ve engaged an OS jihad against competitors. I’m surprised that you’re surprised of that situation. Note that these extremists are only specific cases.
Actually what I and many others like about the BSDs, is that we aren’t so much anti-MS, but rather pro-Unix.
It seems a fact that many BSDers have used Linux, but mostly not vice versa, and some might dislike Linux for all the hype and unstable distributions.
While in forums like this you might see a lot of trolling, most BSD users just don’t care in Linux, while many are interested in both systems.
Well, mine didn’t. It displayed how many chunks it got, but not the total number or the number remaining.
The ‘feature’ where the freebsd installer toasts the network settings, if something goes wrong when looking for the files on a server, is totally annoying. However it is possible to press alt+F3 (or F2-F4
and hit a console somewhere, in one of the consoles you can see that the installer ‘downed’ your network interface, and in the other console it can be enabled again with: ‘ifconfig rl0 up’ or whatever the interface is called 
From what I have been able to tell, not all releases are available on all the servers. Your best bet is to stick with the main servers such as http://ftp.freebsd.org unless you pre-verify that a specific distribution exist on a ftp server. Also, there are canned installations available from the installation menu. X-window system, developer workstation, etc. You must have missed these.
I can understand your frustrations while configuring X. Many of the Linux distributions (I would not include Debian here) have gone WAY out of there way to make X workable. By default, the native configuration utility still stinks. FreeBSD is still very archaic in this arena. It’s something we have pretty much learned to live with.
FreeBSD and Linux both have there pluses and minuses. The ports are great in FreeBSD, but so many of them are broken. Personally, I think there are too many to maintain and it should be shrunk. When compared to Debian it’s a different story. The Debian team does a tremendous job making sure that packages work. The packages are tested MUCH more throughly than most of the FreeBSD ports. If you update your ports in FreeBSD using cvsup you will have the luxury of getting new releases much sooner than Debian. However, you pay the price of having many broken ports that do not behave very well. There is also the major problem of packages blowing away other package dependicies when you upgrade a port. Hence the hacked “portsupgrade” package written in Ruby to help deal with the problem. Quite often many FreeBSD users start from scratch on old systems by removing all the existing packages and starting clean. This seldom needs to be done with the Debian package manager. I cannot say the same about RPM, I hate it.
In essense, I am biased towards Debian as a Linux distribution but also really like FreeBSD for it’s simplicity, IPFilters, and faster kernel. The downside is that the FreeBSD kernel offers fewer options than Linux.
This could go on forever, seriously. In the end, they all offer something the other does not. Good or bad.
Hmm, thanks. That was a great overview.
I tried even looking for the releases on the main ones, the snapshot ones, and the FTP mirror ones and they all drew blanks until I set “release” to “any”. Why can’t FreeBSD mirrors be actual *mirrors* instead of “try your luck, maybe we have it”?
I was reading about the libh project to make a better sysinstall, and it mentions debconf. Debconf is actually great, it provides a central interface for package setup. Its XFree86 configurator is also far superior to xf86cfg, as it doesn’t have a bunch of hidden, but necessary options.
Hi,
I have been using FreeBSD since release 3.3 . It was the first free Unix that I felt really comfy with after having used SunOS and Solaris at work and attempts with Linux which at the time (1997-1998) I found rather chaotic.
I can’t wait to move over to 5 as soon as it is stable. I use 4.8 now for my work (embedded software development) and this cannot suffer from using an unstable release. Thanks FreeBSD people for building the best Unix currently available!
Ewout
“Actually what I and many others like about the BSDs, is that we aren’t so much anti-MS, but rather pro-Unix.”
That seems true to me, but it is probably caused by the fact that you need some Unix expertise to start using BSD. When I started working with Linux (1994) I hated Microsoft, right now, I don’t really care. *nix just works for me. But it is not true that all Linux users are anti-MS. I know many Slackware users who have the Unix attitude, most also have BSD experience but prefer Linux.
I think the number of “anti people” depends on how many userfriendly variants an OS has. Many people still work with Windows and they hate Microsoft for Windows and their licensing policies. The fist logical step for those people is to use a userfriendly Linux distro. Once there would be a comparable BSD variant BSD would also get its “anti crowd”.
“It seems a fact that many BSDers have used Linux, but mostly not vice versa, and some might dislike Linux for all the hype and unstable distributions.”
Many do. But, fortunately, there are also hype-free Linux distro’s which are rock-stable.
… the fact that you need some Unix expertise to start using BSD
I’d say you need just a little bit of UNIX knowledge, not expertise. Using the excellent FreeBSD Handbook you need just the bare necessities to install and start using it.
But it is not true that all Linux users are anti-MS. I know many Slackware users who have the Unix attitude, most also have BSD experience but prefer Linux.
Then again, Slackware have borrowed ideas from BSD amongst others the init system. Slackware is the purebreed of the Linux distro-seeps
There are several Linux distros that have borrowed ideas from BSD (Gentoo for instance). Unfortunately very few have adopted the BSD-init system which us so much nicer than SysV (rcng in NetBSD and FreeBSD 5 is far better).
Once there would be a comparable BSD variant BSD would also get its “anti crowd”.
Actually I don’t see that happening as the BSD world is more reformist than revolutionary. You don’t see many prominent BSD people on the barricades against closed source and MS. Because of this those that are anti-MS will never be appealed by BSD and the idea of “just using what works”. You see the idea behind the BSD license is that of benefitting everyone, regardless if you’re a corporation or an individual. It is the academic idea at it’s best.
But, fortunately, there are also hype-free Linux distro’s which are rock-stable.
Um, I thought it was Linux as a whole (unfair as it may be to the individual distros) that is hyped, not a specific distro.
FreeBSD is coming along nicely and for the machines I’ve set up using 5.0 (2 servers, 1 router/firewall/mailserver, 1 laptop and 2 desktops) it has been rock solid and from my impressions just as fast as 4.8 if not even a little bit faster. You really should consider
(Continued, Oops didn’t finish)
… upgrading your systems unless it is a system that is mission-critical. Now I’m not saying that not using it on mission-critical systems is because it is unstable cos it isn’t. I have yet to experience a system failure on any of the systems I’ve set up and most (xcept desktops and the laptop) run 24/7.
[Error: distro-seep should be distro-sheeps]
I am waiting for either FreeBSD 5.2 or the eventual release of MacOS X. Maybe they’ll happen around the same time? I don’t know.
FreeBSD 5.2 appears that libc_r will finally be replaced by libpthreads/kse which should make the likes of mono and other iffy ports to work nicely on FreeBSD.
Reponsiveness should also be much improved especially with the use of GCC 3.2.3 as the default compiler (IIRC).
Someone mentioned that FreeBSD has faster kernel than Linux.
I’ve tried a couple of Linux distros (not any source-based distro, although) and FreeBSD 4.8 as my desktop, and FreeBSD appears to be out of the box a LOT faster than Linux. Is FreeBSD kernel really that much faster or is it just not as bloated as kernels in most Linux distros?
You can trim down the FreeBSD and Linux kernels to the options that are relevant to your hardware and the conditions (firewall or not, server or not, …) under which you use them. Then, test them to see which one boots faster. Maybe this will answer your question.
I notice many of you are unknowledgable about a curtain recent commit to FreeBSD (the NetBSD init routines). They no longer use the inadiquate BSD init, but rather a SysV type init like most Linux distros… from the sounds of things, this is a supprise it would seem… but it was reported on this site…
This morning I cvsupped with RELEASE_5_1-tag, and /usr/src/UPDATING contained an entry on the release of 5.1.
Buildworld in process…
I just cvsup’d a couple seconds ago.. and confirm it. 🙂 Of course something terrible could happen & they could push it back. Either way I’m building world too.
20030603:
FreeBSD 5.1
Success! 🙂
What I would like to see is at least one huge company supporting FreeBSD fulltime, and promoting it to corporations. That way, it can get more market share in the intel server market. It is cool when developers write what they want, market share or no market share, but it is even more cooler when the stuff you write on your free time finds good use in lots of places. Organised FreeBSD advocacy is almost non-existent. That’s something that really needs attention.
They no longer use the inadiquate BSD init, but rather a SysV type init like most Linux distros…
RCng is “SysV type init” because instead of monolithic RC scripts, they have been divided up by processes and put in rc.d/ ??
RCng is still only two runlevels and the /etc/rc.d/ scripts do not accept “start” and “stop” commands….
so where is the SysV-ness?
Hmmmm…..Walnut Creek (is that what they were called?)?
Just upped my sources from 5.0 to 5.1. Funny how uname -a says my system is now 5.1-RELEASE, I thought this was just a RC1? Anyway, everything seems to work and KDE seems noticably more responsive than with 5.0 or 4.8 (but that could just be me of course).
Actually, if the ELF prebinding patch made it into this release, that’s perfectly possibly. It’s supposed to have a noticeable impact on apps that load lots of libraries, like KDE.
“…the /etc/rc.d/ scripts do not accept “start” and “stop” commands”
Yes they do. Notice the line at the top of the script:
“. /etc/rc.subr”
This means include the file /etc/rc.subr. If you read that it tells you all the arguments an /etc/rc.d script can use.
Dependency handling in rcNG scheme is superior to Linux startup scripts and there’s no fscking about with deleting and creating links in various runlevel directories.
Actually, yes, but the next Linux kernel (2.6) looks very promising. It’ll be far more responsive than 2.4, according to the comments I’ve read.
I don’t know why so many folks have to draw the line at using one or the other OS, why not use them both? I have a nice Linux workstation running Debian unstable, a FreeBSD 4.8 server and a FreeBSD 5.0 workstation (soon to be upgraded to 5.1 RC1 :-), and I like them both.
That’s one of the great things about the free/open source community, you don’t have to stick with just one OS, you can play with lots of them!
“Anyway, everything seems to work and KDE seems noticably more responsive than with 5.0 or 4.8 (but that could just be me of course).”
I’m going out on somewhat of a limb here, but I heard that FreeBSD has gotten some fancy new prelinking ability. This features could quite well speed up KDE due to the fact that KDE binaries tend to do a LOT of linking. Not sure if this feature is in 5.1 though. Anyways, it could be a real effect you’re noticing.
really like FreeBSD for it’s […] faster kernel.
Sigh, can people please stop spouting this nonsense? Take a look at this post for instance: http://article.gmane.org/gmane.os.freebsd.architechture/3842
(I give a gmane link as the post hasn’t been archived on FreeBSD.org yet).
And while 5.x at this stage is showing a performance regression vis-a-vis 4.x, 2.6 from the looks of things will be quite the performer compared to 2.4. I think this in large part is due to the amount of performance monitoring done on the Linux side, with projects like Con Kolivas’ contest, Joel Beckers WimMark (http://oss.oracle.com/~jlbec/wimmark/wimmark_I.html), and bigger stuff like these:
http://www.osdl.org/projects/performance/
http://www-124.ibm.com/developerworks/oss/linuxperf/
That last one is actually a brand new initiative.
As far as I know, there are no organizations putting in similar efforts on performance monitoring on the FreeBSD side.
But 5.x runs much snappier on my hardware than 2.4. I will stick with my FreeBSD. Besides, it sounds like they are talking SMP there, and that doesn’t apply to me. On my single processor machines, FreeBSD whips 2.4’s ass.
There’s a difference between being faster and snappier/more responsive… I agree that BSD whips 2.4’s ass, but we’ll see who will whip who when 2.6 will be out!
samb you read too much. Try it first (hint remove debugging options from kernel as 5.x branch is still beta). Assuming that you know what (and how) are you doing.
About prebinding new feature of FBSD 5.1.
libmap.conf allows dynamic object dependencies to be mapped to arbitrary names. One can try new FBSD threading model libkse and libthr without re-compiling all the programs.
“What I would like to see is at least one huge company supporting FreeBSD fulltime, …”
There are some. Yahoo! have few fulltime FreeBSD hackers on the payroll, NAI Labs have one, ISC have… We could use more, of course. Since Walnut Creek went down there is no company which main concern is FreeBSD thou…
After using Linux off and on since 1999. I tried FreeBsd 5.0 recently. I was very impressed with it. If i needed a server I would choose it.
I have to agree with some that some of the linux distros can be somewhat unstable sometimes. That is why I have tried Linux off and on since 1999 because of this. But recently I have tried debian stable and it is stable for me at least. I havent tried yet Gentoo or Slackware but like someone aaid here I love the open source oses. You can try them all. I love this freedom of choice. mix and match or ist ix and ix
Always being a windows user, my first run with linux was Slackware 3.0 . Some years later without touching linux and solely windows, doing MCSE and other all around Microsoft stuff, I started playing around Linux again: Slackware 8.1
I had to learn “Linux” again. With Slackware that was rather easy, as the distro itself is simplistic. Almost one year later I finally test out FreeBSD, 5.0 Release was my choice. Man, I tought Slackware was easy!
In a matter of hours(most of them reading) I had setup most of what I needed! Asides some minor problems which were fixed in no time, I spent MUCH fewer hours(got to love those Ports 8) ) setting up a system with FreeBSD than I ever did with Linux(Although the HandBook is still 5.0 short, it’s a solid piece of information for most users).
Stability sake, I have no complaints on either systems, I only use them as servers, so I almost forget them, they just sit there…up and running =)
The main reason to use Gentoo is because of its great user community.
The main reason not to use Slackware is because of its mean user community (newsgroup).
Debian is better on remote machines and laptops than Gentoo, because it is pre-compiled. Otherwise – Gentoo is better.
FreeBSD would be better than Gentoo if they ever get VMWare 3.2 or 4.0 to run on it.
I have to run Debian because of my laptop and servers, but Gentoo is better, and I’d rather be running FreeBSD but I can’t because I have to run VMWare for WinXP compatibility.
“FreeBSD would be better than Gentoo if they ever get VMWare 3.2 or 4.0 to run on it.”
# uname -rs && pwd && cat distinfo && cat pkg-descr
FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE
/usr/ports/emulators/vmware3
MD5 (VMware-workstation-3.2.1-2237.tar.gz) = c1cb12c183152c7ca1b3838860bbcc03
MD5 (vmmon-only-3.2.1-20030514.tar.gz) = f6551b7738c7384ee2fb4e65324ac9d8
MD5 (vmnet-only-3.2.1-20030412.tar.gz) = 70549315476d893cf9cb67c914382dda
This is the Linux version of the VMware virtual machine emulator made
to run on FreeBSD using the Linux compatibility mode. VMware can be
used to run Microsoft MS-DOS, Windows 95/98/NT/2000, Linux, FreeBSD,
or any other operating system that runs on the i486.
Official VMware, Inc. web site:
WWW: http://www.vmware.com/
We all are thankful to Vladimir N. Silyaev for porting vmmon/vmnet
modules to FreeBSD. Have a look at his page for the latest
information:
http://www.mindspring.com/~vsilyaev/vmware/