FreeBSD 5.2, the latest in the 5.x development series has been released and is now available from the master server and should appear at mirrors shortly. New features include ACPI 2.0, a much refined ATAng, a new swap pager providing improved throughput and many other changes. For the UI-inclined users, GNOME has been updated to version 2.4.1 and KDE to 3.1.4.
Well now I can download it with a clean conscience 🙂 I’ve been running 5.2RC2 till now and it’s been great.
I haven’t seen the announcement from Scott yet, so it’s not yet released. Simple.
Too late, ./ already ran the story.
BTW, too bad that Gnome 2.4.1 is not included (which fixes a lot of bugs over 2.4.0). I don’t want to spend 6 hours compiling it from ports, it should have being included IMHO, it is more stable than 2.4.0.
Not considered a stable release officially yet though? Right?
BTW, too bad that Gnome 2.4.1 is not included (which fixes a lot of bugs over 2.4.0). I don’t want to spend 6 hours compiling it from ports, it should have being included IMHO, it is more stable than 2.4.0.
It’s included. The meta-port (or meta-package, for that matter) claims that it’s 2.4.0, but the dependencies of it (the actual packages) have been updated to 2.4.1. Check the package lists on the FTP mirrors to see what I mean
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downloading iso now. i think i will try an upgrade from cd. I usual just upgrade via cvsup/buildworld/buildkernel. think ill try it a new way.very nice. bsd is the f00king best. makes an awsome stable desktop.
keep up the g00d work.
-adapt
Here is a quote of /.
“Folks,
The mirrors are still updating. While 5.X is imminent, /. has once again jumped the gun.
In the past, we of the FreeBSD Project have started distributing an image to our mirrors and then recalled it when a last-minute bug is discovered. IIRC, at least once /. has pre-announced the release and people got bad code.
Please do not grab this image thinking that it’s FreeBSD 5.2! It won’t be out until Scott Long says that it ready and available, and he has the right to nix this image up until the time he makes that announcement.
mwlucas at the obvious domain name”
Someone should pull the plug on that site.
Anyway .. the release is pretty imminent
.
> Someone should pull the plug on that site.
Think of all the ./ people who will come over here *shudders*
what’s up with ACPI 2.0? is there a better chance my laptop, which reports it has a blacklisted ACPI bios when I try the linux kernel (2.6 included).
it’s a compaq presario 1700t.
i’m in the same boat with a compaq presario, last time i tried 5.x on it i had to disable loading of the acpi kernel module in order to get the blasted thing to even boot off the install floppies, i sure would loooove to be able to have a functioning acpi, it’s nice to have warning before your battery dies
Please do not grab this image thinking that it’s FreeBSD 5.2! It won’t be out until Scott Long says that it ready and available, and he has the right to nix this image up until the time he makes that announcement.
Scott Long just has sent to the mailing list recently; it’s released now. 🙂
It’s pretty clear that Eugenia lurks on Slashdot to get most of the *nix stories stories here, but I guess she’s on vacation because this has been on Slashdot for quite a while now.
Until 5.3 comes out?
“It’s pretty clear that Eugenia lurks on Slashdot to get most of the *nix stories stories here, but I guess she’s on vacation because this has been on Slashdot for quite a while now.”
The news was on OSNews several hours before Slashdot. I think Eugenia get it back because of “may not the very final” sendrome.
OSNews is the fastest news portal I’ve ever seen..
All info is in the FreeBSD website… http://www.freebsd.org/releng/
I posted this accidentally in another thread earlier (FreeBSD: NetFlow Records, Interrupt API change, Vinum & GEOM) – so here we go again:
Just finished rebuilding world (+ nvidia drivers)
) Everything looks fine. I have a question though. I choose this time to build the base system (make.conf):
NO_SENDMAIL=true – I use postfix, and didn’t want to overwrite binaries everytime I rebuild world
NO_OPENSSH=true
NO_OPENSSL=true
NO_KERBEROS=true
I had to set path to have /usr/local/bin before /usr/bin so sshd installed from ports would start. And that leads to my question: is there an option that would instruct the buildworld process to delete those stuff that I set it not to build? (like in ports the *default delete line). I read the instructions for ssh in pkg-message, but couldn’t find anything about openssl. Would my already installed progs know about the new openssl install? Thanks in advance.
The “reverse” BIOS modes (on shitty laptops) were fixed by Philip Paeps recently. Though I’m not certain whether they’re in 5.2 already.
The problem is that some BIOSs have the cooling-states reversed, so it cools down when it’s supposed to go faster and stops cooling when it’s overheating :/.
Not considered a stable release officially yet though? Right?”
Well, it’s not a -STABLE branch yet which means that 4.x will still be recommended for production machines. Nonetheless, I’ve had few major issues with 5.x and it’s worth running on anything not totally mission-critical (ie desktops etc.). It’s still stable (as in reliable), just not -STABLE
I haven’t seen the announcement from Scott yet, so it’s not yet released. Simple.
I really get tired of hearing this. If you wish to subscribe to the semantics of the term “release” as put forth by the FreeBSD core team, that’s your business, but you have little right to impose them on others.
FreeBSD is a wonderful product, but as of late the attitudes of the core team have been less-than-respectable. (most notably the circumstances surrounding Matt Dillon’s departure) For those of us who care about accessability to the technology rather than buckling under to the semantics of said technology’s developers, it’s nice to know when the release is officially available on the servers than when a detail as mundane as an official release announcement has been posted. The former is practical information; the latter superfluous.
Unfortunately most OS zealots tend to care much more about a particular technology’s development process and individuals involved than the technology itself.
As for the argument that “last minute changes” have supposedly been made “repeatedly”, proof please? In my 8 years of using FreeBSD I have never knowlingly had issues installing a FreeBSD branch before an official release announcement has been posted.
It’s out …
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2R/announce.html
I’d have to agree with you whole-heartedly (it’s quite often hard not to).
Furthermore, I always wondered why the FreeBSD folks don’t just have cryptographically signed md5sums along with the iso files on the ftp servers. The old line about the iso files possibly being trojaned before an official announcement bothers me for it’s utter sillyness.
As if an official announcement prevents this from happening anyway.
I really get tired of hearing this. If you wish to subscribe to the semantics of the term “release” as put forth by the FreeBSD core team, that’s your business, but you have little right to impose them on others.
The post really wasn’t meant to offend you or anyone else. The problem is that some releases ago, (I think it was 4.7, but I’m not sure), it happened that Slashdot announced the release before the official announcement. However, a late bug was discovered, the ISO’s were pulled back, and a new release was posted (all before the official announcement). Many people already downloaded the incorrect ISO’s because of the early announcement by Slashdot, causing a lot of confusion.
That’s why I’m a bit sceptic now when I see the headline ‘FreeBSD 5.2 Released’ when I haven’t seen any mail on announce@ yet.
Unfortunately most OS zealots tend to care much more about a particular technology’s development process and individuals involved than the technology itself.
I assure you that that had nothing to do with my post, as I have explained above. My only intention was to make sure that people wouldn’t download any half or bugged ISO’s. Again, my most sincere apologies if I offended anyone.
My comment wasn’t directed at you in particular, but at anyone who complains about a news site announcing the presence of a particular branch on an FTP server as a “Release”
I’ll admit an “(Unofficially) Released” headline would be nice, along with an “install at your own risk” caveat for those who may be unaware of such potential problems.
Isnt just the matter of an official proof, or waiting for a final redphone call to pull everything back of the wagon. Because even if you pull a bogus release you can later work that out by magically cvsuprading. Gets nasty for n00bs if you complaint and later someone spots you are running an indevelopment release or whatever.
Its a matter of worldwide announcement and world wide reliability. On time slashdot was announcing it, mirrors were still populating all around the globe and not a single word about the release was heard from FreeBSD website commiters, developers or contributors. Itsnt the first time slashdot does this, and many problems in the past could be avoided, like linking to the master ftp server and say “go grab it /. leecher while its hot” and beeing slashdoted and killined ending up with a dead server its a nasty nasty and undesireble thing to do.
“We Slashdot are proud, as always, to be the first to announce, even before real own project developers have done it”
Rather than having credit for beeing the first, more counts the respect for @respecting@ the developers and the project itself. Isnt the first time /. does this and isnt the last, thats the thing keeps bothering and bulling me and i see noone puting a stop on this or calling somone to reason.
I would suggest freebsd project mantainers that work out that either by minimizing the access to the info, everyone knows that even without reading the RELENG handbook you just need to work out the numbers on main webserver to have prior access to information that should only be available some hours later. apaches handles pretty well authentication requisitons an .htaccess would be enough ..
but that, does not lower the slashdot responsibility in this matter, releasing info even before its official does not any good for the opensource initiative
(well, ppl who know me =P know i mistake english as a real monkey, so dont bother complain that i lack grammar or ortographic skills)
“go grab it /. leecher while its hot”
Well said heh.
Any idea how long before 5.2 comes out in official sets or Power Pak? I ended up getting 5.1 power pak in the meanwhile cause i figured may take a while to get the CD’s and manuals out.
I read this last night, it was posted right after the MS Services for Unix article. Although it didnt’ tell what the new features where and only had a link to one mirror that it was up on so far, it is interesting that it was deleted. What I’d like to know, was it deleted shortly afterwards, or was it deleted when this one went up?
Whats the situation with SMP and KSE? I’ve had a look at the SMP/BUSDMA and KSE pages and they haven’t been updated for over a month. Whats the situation? are they going to get the SMP completed before it stablises or is there going to be more yet to be completed?
Lots of rants about the Ports system in FreeBSD. I found using Debian I can do a: base install, upgrade to unstable. Selective install of X and xfce mozilla-firebird ,xmms , Sylpheed and various apps and weight in at easily less then 700 megs. It seems with FreeBSD if some port has a Gnome dependency or? you end up with the Whole kitchen sink and more resulting in @ least the install size . Sure large drives are the norm now but I prefer the Debian setup.
Oops @ least twice the install size .
Heh, never used FreeBSD, did you? Besides, you don’t need to ‘upgrade’ to an unstable branch to get the latest (what, XFree86 4.2.1 in SID??) packages. And unstable is, well, unstable (I know, you never had any problems, well I did, when pulling a newer shorewall from sarge effectively erased my /etc/networks. Or how many – especially X – packages are actually broken in sid/sarge?)
Hint: you can do whatever you like in FreeBSD ports. Want everything including the kitchen sink? Use the kde metaport. Want just the basics, and add later what you need? Portinstall kdebase (then, if you need: kdenetwork, kdeagraphics, … till kdeaddons as the last). The same is true of gnome. Don’t confuse fsbd ports with gentoo’s portage (now that does some funny things, like when emerging mc on a freshly installed system it began download XFree86
– wtf?)
like when emerging mc on a freshly installed system it began download XFree86
If you don’t want X, put “-X” in your use flags, it’s that easy.
So how does this compare to the latest incarnation of Linux, 2.6, performance-wise?
Well, KSE is reported as:
KSE: Kernel Scheduled Entities allow a single process to have multiple kernel-level threads, similar to Scheduler Activations. The libkse and libthr threading libraries make this feature available to multi-threaded userland programs, using the pthread(3) API.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2R/announce.html
http://www.freebsd.org/
says its an official release now
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2R/announce.html
woow, latest FreeBSD 5.2 .. My loving OS.
I’m in India. we have poor internet connection.
So i’m calling my Friend(Mr.Richard) in Singapore for downloading the files. and send it to me.
Thanks FreeBSD Team. Keep it up. Lots of people are eagerly waiting for ur releases and updates.
/Sathish
no bit torrent?
..on installation, besides the basic documentation available on freebsd.org?
if there was a “here’s how to get freebsd+kde up and running” without all the extras, that would be wonderful.
check http://freebsd.kde.org it has all the info you need
if not mail [email protected] or [email protected] mailling list
If not drop in #kde-freebsd on freenode.org, its not a massed chan and its only intent for developers but for sure ppl there will be glad to help or point you in the right direction. Please read the proper documentation first
you dont get the pgp but iso mdsums are available on the announcement email. And that is what count since the release engineering email its pgp signed
What do you mean basic doc’s?
Freebsd has the most comprehensive documentation I have ever seen for a free OS, it must be around 250 – 300 pages long! – Sorry no pictures though
My point is that it should be on the ftp sites, and not hours later in an official announcement.
Does anyone know if there is difference between 5.2 RC2 and 5.2 RELEASE?
It is almost the same, some minor bugfixes, one of them is tcp/ip stack minor fixes and dc(4) driver fixes.
Lots of rants about the Ports system in FreeBSD. I found using Debian I can do a: base install, upgrade to unstable. Selective install of X and xfce mozilla-firebird ,xmms , Sylpheed and various apps and weight in at easily less then 700 megs. It seems with FreeBSD if some port has a Gnome dependency or? you end up with the Whole kitchen sink and more resulting in @ least the install size . Sure large drives are the norm now but I prefer the Debian setup.”
Since you obviously haven’t tried FreeBSDs way of adding software we’ll enlighten you. There are two ways to add new software which can seen as parts of the ports system (which is not entirely true), ports and packages.
Ports lets you add software through the simple syntax “make install” (add “clean” to clean up the builds afterwards). This lets you use compile optimisations tuned to your CPU and also use other optimisations. Ports have both build- and rundependencies, which, in the case of some ports, add ports that are only used to build the software.
Packages, on the other hand, is precompiled and therefore only adds the appropriate rundependencies and in that way works similarly to Debians apt-get system. Packages is easily added by “pkg_add -r packagename”.
Thus FreeBSD lets you decide which is your preferred way of adding software and does not force you to use a binary-only or a source-only method.
I use a combination of both methods depending on how demanding (CPU wise) a piece of software is. If processor speed is critical for an application then I use the ports system to add it. If I don’t include the kernel & userland sources I still end up with a system that with gnome and Mozilla Firebird installed that takes up roughly 700MB. There is nothing that “by nature” states that an equivalent FreeBSD setup is larger than a Debian setup. As always, YMMV.
…if there is FreeBSD for sparc32…..
are there too much differences between sparc32 and sparc64?
are there some docs about that?
BSDero
What kind of nonsense is this? Maybe you should RT(Fine)M and figure out how ports actually work instead of saying how debian is better ..
Do you remember this article about OS scalability: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/. According to that FreeBSD 5.2 (some earlier -CURRENT version) is slightly slower that linux. I am wondering if there are people that have found other similar performance comparisons.
Do you remember this article about OS scalability: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/. According to that FreeBSD 5.2 (some earlier -CURRENT version) is slightly slower that linux. I am wondering if there are people that have found other similar performance comparisons.
That article might be seen as interesting but is not really relevant for a couple of reasons. One main reason is because 5.2 at that point was hardly optimised and contained experimental code. Also note that the author (as it seemed IMO) wasn’t very experienced with BSD and tweaked Linux more.
New comparison after tweaks by pro’s at both camps would be very interesting though…
“Do you remember this article about OS scalability: http://bulk.fefe.de/scalability/. According to that FreeBSD 5.2 (some earlier -CURRENT version) is slightly slower that linux. I am wondering if there are people that have found other similar performance comparisons.”
LOL. That test the article ran was a joke. NetBSD originally was one of the poorer contenders. When the NetBSD people found out about the test, they tweaked NetBSD for a week and then got something that scales almost as good as Linux 2.6 according to the test. How could that be? I’m not bashing NetBSD, but either you don’t scale well or you scale well, and one week isn’t going to move you to the other extreme. My point is that the test is benchmarking something, but it ain’t scalability. There are lies, then damned lies, and then benchmarks.
I don’t know if it’s only me, but 5.2 is very responsive (with kde 3.1.4) in my system. Compared to SuSE 9.0 and Slackware 9.1 (in same HD), it’s fast (especially loading). I am impressed.
And it rocks.
I’ve submitted problem reports on this issue a few times now, and yet it persists. The drop down URL list in Konqueror does not retain a history. Yeah, it’s a small bug, and certainly not specific to FreeBSD, but it’s downright irritating, and I can’t understand how something so obvious (hey, it is a part of KDE after all) has made it into a release.
Grumble.