Release announcement of the FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 release available here.
FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 Available
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
Release announcement of the FreeBSD 5.3-RC2 release available here.
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
I sure hope that BSD gets better. I’ve tried 4.10 up to 5.3 RC 1, and thus far the only thing I actually liked about FreeBSD is the fact that it’s faster than Hell. The UFS2 filesystem is really great. I am of the mind that FreeBSD would indeed make a great desktop OS, not just a server OS, in fact I have 3 friends that use it as such. However FreeBSD needs an easier installer, I’m not saying GUI, but at least as easy as the SlackWare installer. Their partition tool is not the greatest either. Also FreeBSD should include the adsl-configure, adsl-start,adsl-stop, and adsl-connect scripts from Roaring Penguin as default, because for the average user and even for some people who use linux on a regular basis have trouble getting FreeBSD online.
.:: my 2 cents ::.
I agree with some of your points regarding adsl setup and partitioning on FreeBSD which tripped me up initially trying to go on the FreeBSD bandwagon. There are however some nifty things that they are doing right such as the FreeBSD handbook at the great attitude of the people behind FreeBSD-gnome at http://www.freebsd.org/gnome or at the irc channel #freebsd-gnome. Their exemplary support to new users is something useful that a community based project such as Linux would do good to pick up.
I’d like to install either FreeBSD/NetBSD on a new computer for desktop use too (dual boot). I’ve been following the development in each and unfortunately it sometimes seems like FreeBSD’s SMPng development is never going to come to an end. DragonFly seems to have made a better design choice in that respect and the code seems much more maintainable. Even with a dew developers they achieved quite some milestones. On the other hand FreeBSD seems to have stalled in several areas maybe because in 4.x->5.x translation the code have become quite hard to maintain (check http://www.freebsd.org/smp and some of Matthew Dillon’s complaints) . There still seems to be some KSE related issues. Its ULE scheduler which was supposed to be default a few release cycles ago and then they totally removed it from the new kernel. All these seems a bit suspicious.
NetBSD’s scheduler activations implementation appears to have gone through with less of a problem. It runs in so many architectures thus it has to be pretty much complete I guess. And they’re reputed to have the cleanest + most portable code. I wonder what NetBSD will do about the giant lock issue.
What I like about FreeBSD: It has a port of Intel C compiler, native Opera, nvidia drivers.
What I like about NetBSD: It seems to be leaner.
Actually, the problems with ULE+PREMPTION may have been fixed on i386 with a recent commit.
Its ULE scheduler which was supposed to be default a few release cycles ago and then they totally removed it from the new kernel.
Not total remove, just disable it. I am still using ULE here in 5.3-STABLE and no problem. Also, see Russell’s reply about there is recently work in ULE area again by Jeff Roberson.
I love FreeBSD however I was very disappointed to see the lack of support for Prism based USB Wi-Fi devices. My laptop is now waiting to get debian or gentoo on it because of this. Hell, even OpenBSD has support for these devices!
I am going to use my upcoming move at the end of November, and the fact that a buddy of mine will be hosting my website for a while, as an opportunity to rejump my main server to FreeBSD 5.3. Hopefully if I don’t move again, and I don’t have any power outages, I’ll get a good year of uptime out of it.
FreeBSD has become much more attractive for me once I figured out how to use cvsup, pkgdb, and portupgrade. It is really easy to keep everything nice and up-to-date.
1) want to post a link to the mailing list where the news was released?
2) why i386 only? always sounded like an issue higher up that would be above where you’d want to use assembly (and thus platform dependent…)
3) when can we expect a stable release with ULE as default do you think? do you think they’ll wait till 5.4? release a 5.3.1 with it? do you think they’ll speed 5.4 out the door to get it out the door? b/c i’ve looked at the averagetime between releases and it seems ~6months…
2) why i386 only? always sounded like an issue higher up that would be above where you’d want to use assembly (and thus platform dependent…)
Perhaps because it hasn’t been tested on anything but i386 sofar? FreeBSD supports other platforms also but maybe Jeff doesn’t want to make claims is is fixed before testing on those are done (this is quite common). It doesn’t have to do with assembly but rather some platforms (sparc esp) sometimes have different issues that require specific code (not assembly).
3) when can we expect a stable release with ULE as default do you think? do you think they’ll wait till 5.4?
If ULE is fixed and works with the preemtion patches then I guess 5.4 would be the target. I assume that ULE will be default in 6-CURRENT once the issues with ULE and PREEMT is fixed (perhaps even sooner).
I installed FreeBSD 4.10 a while ago.Now i installed 5.3 RC2
on a spare PC.While installing 4.10 i got a much higher
install bandwith then with 5.3 RC2.Why is that during the last phase of the installer (installing the ports) the bandwith
drops dramatically? 5000KB/s —> 140KB/s?
Project evil allows windows wireless drivers to be used on freebsd so with a bit of messing about you should be able to get that working, and in response to the ports install, the ports directory contains meta-data describing locations of files and where to look for them plus an extremely large number of small directors and patch-files (over 10,000), as with all transfers they are faster if they are a constant stream not continually stopping and starting with new files, so this portion of the install takes longer as there is a large number of small files.
[i]Project evil allows windows wireless drivers to be used on freebsd so with a bit of messing about you should be able to get that working[i]
NDISulator needs a lot more work before it becomes stable in my opinion tho. I use it to support my Netgear WG311v2 and it’s currently flaky as hell :/
Have you submitted a PR?
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/articles/problem-reports…
~
Actually releases are about 3-4 months. Looks a little like:
3 months “Stable”
3 months “New Technology”
3 months “Stable”
3 months “New Technology”
Between branchs its 6 months not between releases. Here is a link just as an FYI: http://www.freebsd.org/releases/index.html
IMHO, that is one tough schedual. That trend has been kept up since 2002 and breaks in 2001. And resumes 4 releases a year to 1997 (1996 had 2 releases). That is just plain amazing.
I, for one, love the partitioning tool. Slices and disklabel s are so much easier to work with then setting up extended and logical partitions. You just set up one slice (partition) for FreeBSD, then use disklabel to break that down into /, swap, /home, etc.
It would be great if other operating systems adopted such a methodology.
There’s no need for roaring penguin. Just edit /etc/ppp/ppp.conf… much faster, and much more efficient. I’m using pppoe on FreeBSD as I post this.
Best server OS hands down.
As usual, the handbook has a nice summary:
http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/pppoe.htm…
I really like the FreeBSD installer, I believe it is as good as or better than Slackwares. Both of them do minimal hardware detection. I think FreeBSD is requires less work regarding NICs. However, regarding setting up things like printers and such I would tend to agree with you that Slackware is easier. But again neither of the installers does it automaticaly.
Acpi support, wireless configuration in the installer? bouhouhouuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!
1) want to post a link to the mailing list where the news was released?
Search in the cvs-src mailing list.
Date: 2004-10-30 07:35:53 UTC
Subject: cvs commit: src/sys/kern sched_ule.c
and
Date: Sat, 30 Oct 2004 12:19:15 +0000 (UTC)
Subject: cvs commit: src/sys/kern sched_ule.c
I think the FreeBSD installer needs some additional work. FI had 2 problems in 5.2.1: choose a default set (develepor, user, x-user etc.) and after that you can choose whether to install ports skeleton or not. If later in the procedure you cancel, and restart from the beginning, it wont ask you again about the default sets or the ports skeleton (i cant clearly remember which one)
The other issue is, that if i dont choose network config (ip address, gateway, dns ip) and later when i configure it in sysinstall, it doesnt save changes after exitting sysinstall.
My big beef with 5.3 is you currently can’t install with a USB keyboard… 4.10 works, and 5.2.1 works… So what happened? Can’t use 5.3 without it…
A fix for this has been committed to -CURRENT and is being tested for inclusion in 5.3. It may have been brought into 5.3-RC2, I’m not sure, though. You can drop to the loader prompt, though, and use set hint.atkbd.0.flags=”0x01″ to enable USB keyboard support manually.
I am typing this from my T41 running FreeBSD. Wireless NIC and X work great. The only issues I have had are with power management. The trackpoint works fine, though I whish I could configure it to a lighter touch. Can’t seem to figure how to do that.
I can’t get usb mouse or usb hd working on my nforce3 motherboard using the GENERIC kernel. It seems that usbd.conf isn’t creating a /dev/ums0 (mouse) or /usb/da0 (hd)
You’ll never get a USB harddrive detected or supported using GENERIC. In order to use USB harddrives, you need to have SCSI emulation in your kernel (also known as device atapicam), which is not included in the GENERIC kernel.
You also need to add usbd_enable=”YES” to /etc/rc.conf in order for USB mice to be correctly identified and device nodes created.
You’ll also find that the nForce chipsets are not fully supported as nVidia does not release specs, drivers, or manuals for their chipsets. If you want a fully-supported 64-bit capable chipset, grab a VIA K8T800/K8T800Pro-based mobo.