FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 4.10 has been released and is now available on the master ftp. It should be showing up on mirrors shortly. Changes include the addition of USB2 support, a "dumb console" driver, a host of security fixes and many other tweaks. Userland utilities such as ifconfig, killall and rtld have also been updated. This release is very much an incremental one and contains no major new features. The current plans are for one more FreeBSD 4.X release which will be FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE. After that, it's expected that FreeBSD 5.3 release will have reached the maturity level necessary for most users to be able to migrate to 5.X.

FreeBSD 4.10-RC3 is available. Changes from RC2 include a full package set for Alpha, fixes for the twe(4) driver under load, fixes for the twa drives not being seen by sysintall, along with various other bug fixes. i386 ISO images are available now, Alpha ISO images are still uploading.

Here is a new FreeBSD-based distro, HawkinsOS, but this time is commercial and offers services.

Pawel Dawidek has been working on GEOM Gate since Aug. of last year, adding incremental features and making requests for testing as required. Earlier this month the code was committed to -current.

FreeBSD 4.10-RC2 is available for download. There are only a few changes since RC1, but it does include the release package set, so feel free to test things like KDE and Gnome. Due to some late issues that are cropping up, it will probably be an RC3 before the final release.

DistroWatch has a a review of the latest release of FreeBSD 5. In the first part of the story they are looking at the history of BSD, compare BSD with Linux from a technical perspective, and talk about licensing considerations. The second part will bring you practical information about installing FreeBSD, followed by a handful of useful tweaks, and configuration examples.

The first release candidate of the next version of FreeBSD's STABLE branch, FreeBSD 4.10-RC1 has been released. It contains many changes including bugfixes and backported features from the development branch such as enhanced USB support. Get it from a mirror before using the master server. Testers should get their hands on this now as the final release is expected in a couple of weeks.

Scott Long announced the availability of FreeBSD 4.10-BETA for i386. 4.10-BETA for alpha will be following shortly as they work out some problems. 4.10 is the next step in the 4-STABLE branch, and as such contains primarily bug fixes and incremental functionality improvements. One significant new feature is the merging of the USB stack and drivers from 5.x.

FreeBSD has a solid reputation in terms of features and performance on x86, powering sites from Hotmail to Yahoo, yet it doesn't tend to be the first (or even second) OS that comes to mind with many people when thinking of Solaris alternatives for the SPARC platform.

A recent patch submission from Bosko Milekic features on-demand memory allocation for mbufs and flexible sysctl tuning options - no more fiddling with NMBCLUSTERS and recompiling. The code does not appear to be committed yet and could probably stand some testing by the willing user population.

What is FreeSBIE? It is a live system on CD, or an operating system that is able to load directly from a bootable CD, without any installation process, without any hard disk. It's based on the FreeBSD OS.

Scott Long has announced the release of FreeBSD 5.2.1. This point release contains security and bug fixes, as well as improvements to the ATA/IDE and SATA handling. A list of mirror sites is here.

As expected, the FreeBSD 5.2.1-RC update is now available either by CVS'upping your sources or by downloading an ISO image from the FTP mirrors. This comes out 20 days after the 5.2.0 release and brings bug fixes mainly for mksnap_ffs, NFSv4, KUser, GEOM and ATA drivers, and also IPsec. It does not load by default the new high-performance ULE scheduler (manual kernel recompile required).

The FreeBSD status reports are back again with the 2003 year-end edition. Many new projects are starting up and gaining momentum, including XFS, MIPS, PowerPC, and networking locking and mutlithreading. The end of 2003 also saw the release of FreeBSD 4.9, the first stable release to have greater than 4GB support for the ia32 platform. Work on FreeBSD 5.2 also finished up and was released early in January of 2004 (our review), while we learned FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE is expected sometime next week with some critical fixes in it.