FreeBSD Archive

Here is a detailed introduction to FreeBSD especially geared for current Linux users.

Frenzy is a "portable system administrator toolkit", LiveCD based on FreeBSD. It generally contains software for hardware tests, file system check, security check and network setup and analysis. The system is oriented to Russian-speaking users, but this could change if project will get more popularity.

This article discusses how to get your FreeBSD system to act as a NetFlow probe exporting records to a collector. Elsewhere, FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that at the September DevSummit, Peter Wemm proposed changing the device driver API so that interrupt routines return an INT instead of a VOID, while FreeBSD's Greg Lehey discusses the future of Vinum and GEOM on FreeBSD. Greg says that with the advent of GEOM, there may be some overlap with the features and functionality offered by Vinum. On the other hand, GEOM and Vinum do some things not only differently but in an incompatible manner.

"The FreeBSD installation process requires what many Windows users would likely call "a lot of command-line interaction." Coming from a Windows environment to something like FreeBSD takes a bit of getting used to, if you have to install the operating system yourself. If you're slightly above average in experience, I'd say go for it; you'll like it, and you should have no trouble to speak of." Read the installation overview at NewsForge.

"Any systems around the world have been possessed by penguins and dead rats. It would be nice to exorcize these evil spirits, but this can be difficult without physical access to the machines in question. Thanks to a new depenguinator, it is now possible to upgrade Linux systems to run FreeBSD 5.x without requiring anything more than an SSH connection." Read it here.

This useful tutorial-article will explain how you can move your FreeBSD installation from one hard disk drive to another.

The latest of the FreeBSD 5.2-RCx series has been released. FreeBSD 5.2-RC2 fixes a showstopper filesystem bug that could occur when using soft-updates. Get it now from the main ftp server or try one of the mirrors. Promptly report any bugs you find as this is likely to be the last release candidate.

Matt Olander, CTO of Offmyserver and Brooks Davis, FreeBSD cluster engineer, demonstrate how computers can be used to create a giant supercomputer.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures.

These papers were written against FreeBSD 4.x systems but should be equally applicable to 5.x systems on almost all counts: "Compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel" and "Performance tuning FreeBSD for different applications".

What follows is a tutorial aimed specifically at the ordinary desktop user interested in getting started with FreeBSD. Ed provides an easy to understand guide through FreeBSD's Sysinstall installer in part one of this series. Read the full story at OfB.biz.

FreeBSD's Scott Long announced the availability of 5.2-BETA ISO images and ftp install sets for i386 and alpha. Amd64, sparc64, ia64, and pc98 sets will be available shortly.

We've all heard the age old argument second only to the vi vs. emacs religious wars: FreeBSD Vs Linux. As a long time linux user, I decided that is was time I spent some time on the other side of the fence to see if it was any greener. Oh, and by the way, vi rules.

I've been using computers since I was quite young and have been using Unixlike OSes for about two years. Most of my life I've used Macs and only started using Windows and Unixlike OSes recently for programming. I'm good at learning OSes as long as they are documented. I've been using FreeBSD for about a year and a half.