No more hours of downloading for the four FreeBSD ISO CDs. FreeBSD Services has officially begun to distribute FreeBSD on DVD. You can pre-order the FreeBSD 4.5-RELEASE DVD here.
Get FreeBSD 4.5 on DVD
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
BSD gets into the 21st century
now if some one would send me a dvd-rom drive i’d be set…
This is great!
“BSD gets into the 21st century
”
Only now? Muhahahaha
Linux!
want MI6 trojaned binaries w/ those fries ?
Kevin: http://www.pricewatch.com/menus/m212.htm
8x DVD driver for $27.
4 CD! what is on this? Does BSD is full of CG sequece like squaresoft game
i never understood why OS are so big now. They are 500 time bigger than the amiga OS and don’t do 10 time more, i smell a point of diminishing return here.
“4 CD! what is on this? Does BSD is full of CG sequece like squaresoft game
”
No, just thousands of console mail & news clients, along with a few hundred emacs clones that nobody needs.
Installer (basic install)
FixMe Disk (optional).
the other two are miscellaneous packages and are not necessary they are just nice to haves.
>I never understood why OS are so big now
Actually, FreeBSD is only 177 MB. ONLY the first CD is needed to install FreeBSD. The rest 3 CDs is the source code and lots of third party apps. You can download the mini FreeBSD 4.5 (no X of course, only the core OS and utilities included) from <A HREF=”ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/4.5/4.5….
Linux freaks… always the same!
Btw, our postgreSQL server on Linux crashed between 2 and 10 days. The FreeBSD install runs fine for like 76 days now. Oh, if you’re trying to suggest now I’d be unable to configure a proper Linux kernel, go on…
It’s cool that they’re distributing it on DVD now. I’m not sure what the “no more waiting to download four ISOs” deal is supposed to be, though — if you’re mail ordering a DVD, you could have mail ordered the CDs in the past. It’s just handy to have it all on one disc if you’ve got a DVD drive anyway.
As for the other people talking about how large it is, as Eugenia pointed out, it’s not actually very big — most of those discs are just gravy. If you have a fast net connection you wouldn’t install any of that anyway — you’d set up the ports tree, cvsup it, and snag the latest versions of everything from there. If you have a very slow net connection, then the extra CDs might come in handy if you’re mail ordering them, or if you have a fast connection at work but a slow one at home and can download the ISOs to bring home.
All in all you actually have to download very little to install FreeBSD. If the machine is going to have a net connection right away, then grab the kern.flp and mfsroot.flp floppy disk images and the fdimage.exe tool (assuming you’re doing this in Windows — you can use ‘dd’ in BeOS or *nix) — in total a little less than 3MB of files. Use these to boot the system and do an FTP-based install from there. That way it’ll only bother to download the packages you actually select during your install, and you don’t need to burn any CDs at all. Install the ports skeleton tree and pull down apps / utilities / etc. as needed.
You really only need to worry about CDs or DVDs if you’re going to be doing multiple installs and want to save on downloading stuff multiple times, if you can’t access the net (during install), or if your net connection is so slow that it would be worthwhile to just mail order it. (Or if you want to support the FreeBSD Foundation by buying their discs.)
I’m not sure about the “no more waiting to download four ISOs”. I was the one who submitted the story and I sure in hell didnt have that in there. Like you were saying you only need the install disc to well, install. 2nd disc is the live filesystem (cvs rep), 3rd and 4th are just packages. Net-install is excellene. Really comes in handy when a machine doesnt a cdrom drive. Mounting a nfs’d cdrom for install is also great. The DVD is going to be really cool and convenient. Even though I have a good connection its still annoying to download ports (source/packages).
Too bad none of the Isos I’ve downloaded have been error free (crappy dial up, I miss cable) at least I’ve been able to peice together a working install from what worked.
I’ll have to get a DVD drive and order a dvd when my funds are a bit higher. 
>I’m not sure about the “no more waiting to download four ISOs”. I was the one who submitted the story and I sure in hell didnt have that in there.
I added that. What you submitted, was the news. I can change a submission in a way that I can add more info, or take out info, or change the wording completely (without of course changing the core of your submission) etc. This is standard procedure. If you wanted to see the submission _exactly_ the way you submitted it, I would have added “Scud writes: ‘blah-blah’“. But we don’t do that over here much, Slashdot does that.
I know you can add information to submissions, which is fine. But I was just trying to understand what the point of that sentence was as the other fellow, Ifron-Kim Ahmand, was also wondering.
What the sentense tries to say is that downloading 4 CDs with a 56k modem or even with DSL will take forever, so you are better off buying the DVD (which includes everything). I am sorry if the wording was not the right one, but I am sure there was some logic of what I was trying to say.
tso,
that is what i would say, my slack server has been up over 300 days….