FreeBSD Archive

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA4 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA4. A couple of significant changes were made to 6.1-BETA4. First is a large set of fixes to the VFS layer and various filesystems that should significantly help performance under heavy load and also fix problems with forcefully unmounting these filesystems. The second large change is that sysinstall will now install both the GENERIC and SMP kernels and automatically select the appropriate one based on whether it detects one CPU in the system or multiple CPUs.

"This article shows how I created a jail under FreeBSD 5. Though FreeBSD 6.0 has come out since I wrote this article, the strategy should remain the same. I'll update the article with any changes should anything be different."

Ten years ago, on 24 February 1996, Greg Lehey submitted for publication the final version of the first ever book on the FreeBSD operating system, "Installing and Using FreeBSD". It was later renamed to "The Complete FreeBSD", as is now known and appreciated by the users of this OS. Grog have always retained full rights to the book, and for today he has decided to release it for download under a Creative Commons license. Besides, he doesn't have the time to keep updating it, so he is asking for help. He can't guarantee money, "just" recognition in the preface.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA2 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA2. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Download from one of the mirrors.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the beginning of both the FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 release cycles with the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-BETA1 and FreeBSD 5.5-BETA1. Both FreeBSD 6.1 and FreeBSD 5.5 are meant to be a refinement of their respective branches with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture." Please select a download mirror for downloading.

An update of the Gentoo GNU/kFreeBSD proof-of-concept tarball has been rolled out. Improvements include an up-to-date toolchain (gcc 4.0, glibc 2.3.5, etc.), and the system being bootable and usable as a standalone system. It is now provided as a CD installer for anyone with minimal Gentoo experience to try it out.

"For software that's been around since the late '70s, before any of today's more popular operating systems, open source BSDs (in their current avatars) don't get their due share of hard disks. FreeBSD, one of the first BSD flavors to emerge from the 386BSD project, is a Unix-like free operating system based originally on the BSD branch of 386BSD and later 4.4BSD-Lite. This makes BSDs more like traditional Unixes than Linux. Late last year FreeBSD unleashed release 6.0, with better support for 64-bit and wireless hardware. Here's our review."

"One of the more intriguing capabilities of the BSD operating systems is their ability to run binaries for other Unix-like operating systems. I recently found myself requiring the commercial PGP Command Line for a project. Rather than install a Linux box just for this one piece of software, I jumped through some hoops and made it work perfectly on one of my existing FreeBSD systems. Getting a random piece of commercial Linux software running on a FreeBSD system isn't always as transparent as you might like, but you can do it with a minimum of fuss if you have a few extra troubleshooting skills".

"FreeBSD is an enterprise-grade operating system that leaves little to be desired. Most people have tried Linux by now, but a surprisingly large number of people have not yet taken FreeBSD for a spin. Now may well be the optimal time to take the plunge, as FreeBSD 6.0 provides the same rock-solid stability for which FreeBSD is known, and also implements some outstanding new features."

"The FreeBSD project has hundreds of active developers spread all over the world, and many of them have their own parts of the source-tree that they work on. However, there are always a lot of new interesting projects and ideas that needs to be investigated and evaluated, and this is where the FreeBSD project relies on heroic efforts from volunteers. The following list of possible projects is in no way complete, but it should serve as a nice starting point for volunteers who would like to become committers in the future."

"I have been a Linux user way back from the first time I was introduced to an alternate OS than windows. Even though I was aware of other Unixes like FreeBSD and Solaris, I hadn't come around to installing them on my machine. Two days back, things changed when I downloaded the latest FreeBSD version 6.0 from their official website."

After a long, exhausting, yet very productive third quarter of 2005 FreeBSD 6.0 has been released. Many activities were put into the background in order to make this release the success it has become. Read the status report here.

"The FreeBSD operating system is finally through it's buggy 5.x series and into the more reliable 6.x series. Most of the problems of the old days - kernel panics on multi-CPU machines, AMD64 troubles galore, and shaky network drivers - are gone. FreeBSD still isn't perfect, but at least with 6.0-RELEASE it's more stable and functional than it has been in the recent past."

The clocks have fallen back, the leaves are hitting the ground and new BSD releases are on the Net. Among all the noise and buzz created by Linux, it's important to remember that it's not the only open source variant of Unix. OpenBSD, NetBSD and FreeBSD are all still very much alive and kicking and have recently been released from their respective projects.