The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-RC1. This will likely be the only Release Candidate before the final release of 5.3.
FreeBSD 5.3-RC1 Released
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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I always wanted to delve into the BSD world but was always kind of afraid…I installed 5.3 Beta7 on an old PC I have upstairs and I loved it. I now understand the whole Linux vs. BSD thing even less. Coming from a Gentoo background, I see little differences in the two systems. Great work FreeBSD team!
It has been ages since any argument about such things has been about technology, thanks to the modern age of slashdottism it is all politics and marketing.
lets wait and enjoy on 25 oct…
Well, if we all wait, won’t that just ensure the relatively subtle bugs which may have been caught a bit earlier in the RC, will instead be caught after the final release?
I say get to testing!
yeah i’m gonna test the RC so i can also test the update functionality of freeBSD. does work that good? never dealt with freeBSD before…
when I first saw the schedule when it said October 17th I was betting on Halloween, but now I think it may be longer. With that many Known Issues and one marked as “errata candidate” and with that many “Needs Testing” I’m guess that either a) FreedBSD 5.3 will be released in the Beginning of December (last of the majour BSDs to release) or b) 5.3 will be called the first stable but 5.4 will really be.
Anyone have any predictions?
I think 5.3 is gonna have bugs but overall be pretty darn stable. I don’t think there is any single peace of software that ships without any known bugs. Look at Windows 2000. By the time it hit the stores, there were already 100’s of known bugs. Look at the Linux kernel, there are known bugs all over the place, especially in drivers, but they keep releasing new kernel revisions. My point is that 5.3 is already extremely stable. On some hardware and under certain circumstances it crashes, but so do so many other “stable” operating systems. And in my personal experience 5.21 already was extremely stable, much more than the 2.6 Linux kernel, so 5.3 should be really good. Anyways, my guess is that 5.3 will be released November 1st. And while we are playing this game, I am guess that Debian Sarge would be released December 6th.
I now understand the whole Linux vs. BSD thing even less. Coming from a Gentoo background, I see little differences in the two systems.
And if you check out bsdforums.org, you’ll understand this linux vs. freebsd thing even less. I don’t feel any antagonism in the bsd community against linux – not on bsdforums at least. Most of the linux threads on bsdforums are quite positive there, so i think that this vs. thing is blown out of proportion by some ./ trolls. Dual (or whatever you say it in english – trial?) boot between WinXP, FreeBSD and Slackware.
hehe, it works that good. You need a few ports, like cvsup-without-gui and portupgrade (the latter only for ports). Than edit a few files (you’ll find them in /usr/share/examples/cvsup after installing cvsup-without-gui), synchronize your source, read the handbook (this should be the first step), and make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel – reboot into single user – make installworld and mergemaster. Reboot into your 5.3-RELEASE system on the date it is released
))
Coming from a Gentoo background, I see little differences in the two systems.
I found this article to be a fairly good read on some of the major differences between BSD and Linux. The author is speaking generally about BSD, but mostly has FreeBSD experience.
http://www.over-yonder.net/~fullermd/rants/bsd4linux/bsd4linux1.php
The gentoo portage system was built to mimic the FreeBSD ports system. That is why you don’t see much of a difference. Portage really seems to seperate Gentoo from most Linux distributions by allowing you to update your software without having to wait for the next release of your distro or having to deal with rpms and their dependencies. But deep down, there’s other major differences with the two OS’s.
It’s really a matter of choice, both with their pro’s and con’s that no one here wants to get into… personally I like ports and I like FreeBSD better than Gentoo and portage (and other linux distro’s).
I have a question – When you upgrade a system, like FreeBSD/port or Debian/apt-get, etc., to a new version, do you then have a system with a lot of legacy/orphaned files on your hard drive? I’m coming from a Windows and Mac background mentalilty where, when you install a new OS version on your hard drive, you still have a lot of old, unused files junking up your drive in various places.
It’s obviously easier than erasing your HD and installing the new OS everytime an upgrade comes out.
I’m just curious.
Thanks.
I don’t know about apt-get, but FreeBSD port will remove the old files/directories unless someone misconfigured the pkg-plist. The old liraries will be save in /usr/local/lib/compat/pkg/ if you use portupgrade to upgrade the stuff. You can force option to remove the old libraries.
I’m starting to think we’ll see FreeBSD 6-UNSTABLE before we actually get a FreeBSD 5-STABLE
I don’t think we’ll have to wait quite that long. (Taking up the debian naming style? Not very likely.
)
6-CURRENT, on the other hand, is already usable.
Eh? We already have 6.0-CURRENT and 5.3-STABLE.
No, those are just CVS tags, no releases (yet).
The installation by floppies will require 3 disks (boot, kern1, kern2).
After kern2 the boot floppy is required again.
5.2.1 required two floppies.
As stated here:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/x11.html
As of FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE, the default and official flavor of X11 was changed to Xorg
Any performance difference between xorg and Xfree?
After two month using FreeBSD you should find many differences between FreeBSD and Gentoo.
How is FreeBSD’s support of laptop, especially PCMCIA card? I installed Gentoo on Thinkpad A21p, but PCMCIA doesn’t work, no matter how i configure it..:( It can be used during installation when emerging through the net, but after install, the PCMCIA card for internet failed
RedHat and Mandrake works well, don’t know what’s wrong with gentoo. neither 2.4 nor 2.6 works
I have had absolutely no problems using my Dell Inspiron 1100 with 5.3-RC1. I have to admit that I haven’t tried any PCMCIA cards yet, but AFAIK there is no problem with supported hardware. I also noticed that Xorg (default for 5.3) seems snappier than the previous default XFree86. It seems to me that memory management is great in 5.3. Even with only 128 MB RAM, my laptop is quite useable with many services running (Apache, PostgreSQL, CUPS, Samba) as well as the frontend KDE desktop, Firefox, Thunderbird, etc…
Here is a good place to get started if you are considering FreeBSD on your laptop: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/laptop/article….
Also, here is some more information on ACPI, suspend/resume, etc…: http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/acpi-debu…
That would be your fault for either misconfiguring your kernel or not loading the right modules. This is rather obvious since it worked on the live-cd.
I’m starting to think we’ll see FreeBSD 6-UNSTABLE before we actually get a FreeBSD 5-STABLE
$ uname -a
FreeBSD xxx.xxx.nl 6.0-CURRENT FreeBSD 6.0-CURRENT #0: Wed Aug 18 21:15:50 CEST 2004 [email protected]:/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/DESKTOP i386
Any performance difference between xorg and Xfree?
I use X.org now for a few months and I think it’s almost the same in performance. Still a Xfree86 fork. 😉
Alex, I have a TP 600E and huge problems with sound and supposedly supported 3Com CardBus NIC. I didn’t find a decent site about installing FreeBSD on laptops, I’ll try whining on the newsgroups this weekend and see what happens
I really like FreeBSD, but I’ll have to switch if my laptop stays numb for another week.
I switched to Xorg on my linux desktop (when fedora switched) and I have found X to be far more unstable. No actual crashes, but XVideo doesn’t work sometimes and some of my DRI games no longer work. I am using the mga video driver. I would switch back if I could find some fc2 rpms for XFree86.
I have 5.3 Beta7 updating right now to RC1 on a Dell 5000e, and it works like a charm. Also going to try it on a Sony Vaio here in a bout a month. On the dell I have an aironet wireless 16 bit card running just fine. My only concern with 5.3 is the lack of USB Keyboard support when installing.