FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE is the third major 5.x release for the next generation of the FreeBSD Unix system (release notes). For the last few years I only used the 4.x stable releases, waiting for a mature 5.x release to come out before trying it. I felt that the time had come with 5.2, but has it?
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Samba is not broken at all. I have a stock 5.2 box here and typing smb:/// in Konqueror worked just fine. You might blame Nautilus instead 
I remember i could set up FreeBSD 4.3~4.5 without problem, I set up BSD server for DNS and Workstation with KDE and Gnome.
But today, i can not even start the X.
The 5.2 add a boot menu, but the menu acts strangly: first time, it does not appear, and the boot just halt. I have to reboot, then the menu show up.
I tried several install install settings, even ALL, but still can not go to X desktop.
:{
On the upside, FreeBSD 5.2 comes with client support for NFS version 4, much better integration with the ACPI power management subsystem, full tier-1 support for all AMD64 systems, better driver support for IDE, SATA, and 802.11a/b/g devices, dynamically linked root partition and (experimental) first-stage support for multithreaded filtering and forwarding of IP traffic.
The extensive use of dynamic linking in 5.2-RELEASE has been a major point of contention. While it may complicate the recovery process (what if the dynamic linker's configuration gets hosed?) and decreases overall performance (through slight increases in application start-up times), it does help memory usage and reduces the size of the base system. There are many places this is advantageous, most notably jails where an administrator may give you a mere 1GB of space for the base system and all of the content you'd like to serve. I'm certainly a supporter of the move to dynamic linking and don't see it considerably impacting system performance.
My main gripe with 5.2-RELEASE is that gcc -pthread is still linking with libc_r instead of libkse, and the ports collection is still configured to use libc_r by default. At this point, KSE threading seems to be at least as aproblematic as NPTL threading as bundled with Redhat 9, and 5.2-RELEASE seemed like an excellent release with which to start pushing a widespread move to KSE threading instead of userspace threading, yet the core team chose not to do it at this point in time. I can't possibly fathom why...
Here's hoping that 5.3-RELEASE will ship with the ULE scheduler enabled per default and KSE threading as the default. As it stands 5-STABLE is seeming farther and farther away...
I got a Nvidia geforce 2 mx400 card, but everytime, the BSD config tool just think i have 2 video card, one is Nvidia, another one is ATI.
Once i deleted the ATI one, the system automaticly add ATI one in the config file.
Eugenia, did you use ULE as the scheduler? If so, is it up to what people claim it to be (as good if not better than kernel 2.6 of linux)?
>Eugenia, did you use ULE as the scheduler?
No, I used the defaults. ULE was stated as the future's default after the release of 5.2.
mirrors my own experience of:
there are things to get excited about, but the frustration levels are up there too.
it's hard to know when you are doing something wrong, vs when a system bug is at fault.
spent HOURS and DAYS, sometimes, only to finally find a single message via google, "oh yea..that's broken"
this is hardly a freebsd only thing. all the linuxes are the same.
but it comes down to this:
the system with the most users, has it's faults found faster, and fixed faster.
and freebsd isn't the most widely used system among the free oses.
Does using one system as a home router really prove something "excels as a server"? I know someone who's been using a Windows98 machine as a router for a year now. It seems to do the job decently, but I would never call Windows98 stable.
I like BSD, though I've only ever used FreeBSD.
It is our router/nat and firewall. Works great.
My husband also uses FreeBSD 4.x at his work as his build-monkey (the machine builds his software 24-hours a day and sends emails when something goes either right or wrong) and AFAIK, it is 100% rock stable and reliable!
I am serious, 5.2-RELEASE has a lot of new bugs. I recommend to wait for 5.2.1-RELEASE to be release sometime soon. The -CURRENT has much far lesser problem(s) than 5.2-RELEASE.
The FreeBSD installer let me choose of 2-3 ways of configuring X, and I first chose the graphical one, which failed.
I always recommend anyone to not use X configure during the installtion (in sysintall). It's always nasty since 4.x, so recommend to skip and do it later when you are done with the installtion. Use the XFree86 --configure..
I could not test it because I couldn't see any EHCI option ("device ehci") on the FreeBSD configuration kernel file except of OHCI and UHCI and so I didn't bother recompiling the kernel
I see, you are new to 5.x.. The 'device ehci' does exist in the kernel config. In 5.x is differet.
/usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES (this is for general platforms)
/usr/src/sys/{i386,alpha,amd64,ia64,powerpc,sparc64}/conf
You can go to /usr/src/sys/i386/conf and do the 'make LINT' to collect the all options from general config and i386 config into LINT.
# cat /usr/src/sys/conf/NOTES | grep ehci
device ehci
In my opinion, FreeBSD rocks as a server, but it is pretty poor as an "out of the box" desktop system is concerned.
No comment, I agree. It doesn't bother to me, because I always enjoy to configure FreeBSD to turn into a desktop. :-)
I could be wrong here, but I feel as though I'm at least 99% correct in saying that there was never "option EXT2FS" in the GENERIC file by default. Maybe you're thinking the LINT file.
No, I am thinking of the GENERIC file. I never messed up with the LINT file.
Eugenia, did you use ULE as the scheduler? If so, is it up to what people claim it to be (as good if not better than kernel 2.6 of linux)?
I know, I am not Eugenia but I can tell you my experience. I like ULE better than old one. I can play 1gig movie while I am doing the buildworld or compiling some huge apps (ie Mozilla). It's very rare to see lag in the movie, like 1 to 2 sec of lag for two to three times on a movie (2 hours).
I can't make any comment on Linux, because I haven't tried Linux 2.6.x yet.
The text-based installation is the same as in past versions of FreeBSD, so there is nothing new to report on this
You may right but FreeBSD sysinstall(8) is more mature and feature rich than anaconda and many others linux install tools.
The FreeBSD installer let me choose of 2-3 ways of configuring X, and I first chose the graphical one, which failed
Read the documentation driver from XFree before trying to configure X via graphical interface. Instead the graphical configuration tool you may probe xf86cfg -textmode.
When I created the "eugenia" user using the installer, I typed /bin/bash as the shell for that user but what I didn't remember was that the location of that binary on FreeBSD was /usr/local/bin/bash. I could edit the passwd files later to correct this
Don't blame FreeBSD for user mistakes. FreeBSD has a wonderful tool to change system password database, pw(8).
FreeBSD doesn't come with all the cool stuff already preconfigured for the user as most newer Linux distros try to.
Very Good... I hate every "user-friendly" linux distribution, all of them install fancy software and preconfigure the system in very insecure and ineficient way that need to be corrected by a pro.
Before you write a review of some OS you may first understand it and have certain knowledgement, Don't write all kind of criticizes without make sure of what are you talking about. I never, never, never could write a review of OS/2, BeOS, etc.... because i don't have any deep knowledge of that OSes.
>Read the documentation driver from XFree before trying to configure X via graphical interface.
It is not the first time I use XFree. You are insulting me. Most of the time I configure XFree manually, I don't need any visual tools. I just mentioned that the graphical configuration that is *offered* doesn't always work.
Please stop this cheapshot of "if you don't understand an OS don't write about it". I have used FreeBSD for quite some time already, thank you very much. This is a very cheap way of advocating your favorite OS.
>Don't blame FreeBSD for user mistakes. FreeBSD has a wonderful tool to change system password database, pw(8).
You are WAY OUT OF LINE here. FreeBSD *includes* kuser in its CD. From the moment this application is included it SHOULD have being tested. From the moment it is included it stops being a KDE or user responsibility and becomes FreeBSD's. That's how professionalism is regarding the included software. It is not my fault that FreeBSD includes two ways of creating new user accounts. The user is free to use whichever of the two. I did my choice because I find it faster doing so via the GUI, and I paid for it. And I wasn't the only one who paid for this bug.
for configuring X, but of course, YMMV.
has never worked for me.
on about 8 different machines.
the ncurses version always worked for me, though.
makes me want to tell them "take it out, it doesn't work reliably"
Repsone to Anonymous (IP: 200.55.153.---): Eugenia is right about that if there's anything that is include in the sysinstall and CD, they have to be work. There's no reason for you to insult on her, which you should insult on the FreeBSD team. Because, the X config in the sysinstall has never been work correct since 4.x even the FreeBSD team knew about it.
Nothing is her fault; it's FreeBSD team's fault for not well test.
Most file systems are not linked statically into the kernel. They are loaded automatically at runtime when needed. By default, that module isn't compiled due to bugs. If you do want to compile it, you need to add WANT_EXT2FS_MODULE=yes to your make.conf. I completely agree that mount_ext2fs probably shouldn't be build if the module isn't available.
what is the kernel config option for ULE scheduler?
That's what this release is for; testing.
You need to replace the line "options SCHED_4BSD" to "options SCHED_ULE" in your kernel config file.
>That's what this release is for; testing.
Not quite. While "release" is not marked as "stable", it should have being in a much better shape than that.
And Russel, please use the correct subject when replying.
I always thought of FreeBSD as a great workstation and server OS. I don't think anyone would seriously use it for a desktop OS. The difference of a workstation and a desktop OS is that a desktop OS is used for entertainment purposes (video, games, pictures, music, etc.) and that workstations are used for working (word processings, web browsing, email, spread sheets, database access, programming, etc.) Maybe if Eugenia was reviewing Lindows or Xandros, she would have the right to complain about missing desktop features. But is it fair for Eugenia to complain that FreeBSD is not a good desktop OS when it never really tries to be? Isn't it kind of like giving Cisco IOS a poor grade, complaining that it is a terrible Database platform?
I might point to you to the release notes.
"FreeBSD 5.X marks the first new major version of FreeBSD in over two years. Besides a number of new features, it also contains a number of major developments in the underlying system architecture. Along with these advances, however, comes a system that incorporates a tremendous amount of new and not-widely-tested code. Compared to the existing line of 4.X releases, the first few 5.X releases may have regressions in areas of stability, performance, and occasionally functionality.
For these reasons, the Release Engineering Team <re@FreeBSD.org> specifically discourages users from updating from older FreeBSD releases to 5.2-RELEASE unless they are aware of (and prepared to deal with) possible regressions in the newer releases. Specifically, for more conservative users, we recommend running 4.X releases (such as 4.9-RELEASE) for the near-term future. We feel that such users are probably best served by upgrading to 5.X only after a 5-STABLE development branch has been created; this may be around the time of 5.3-RELEASE."
And, Eugenia, please spell my name correctly when replying :-P
I suggest you re-read my article. Many of the problems and bugs I mention there will be VERY problematic to any user no matter if he/she used the OS as a desktop OR as a workstation. The dependancy stale problems for example (popping up like mushrooms), or the inability to use samba with Nautilus or mount a CD via nautilus these are go beyond a "desktop" setup, but they are in the realm of the workstation setup as well.
The title doesn't cover the analysis done in this article. What has been explored in this article is FreeBSD as desktop. It is not server related in any way whereas the title nor the intro do not speak about this. Bad journalism.
"couldn't login as "eugenia" yet because of bash's wrong path"
No, because of your assumption it is part of the base system whereas it has never been and none of the 3 most known BSD's have had bash base. It is GPL, and GNU. So don't expect it. It is however in ports, though. My suggestion is try tcsh for the time being and eventually install bash later on.
As a freebsd user, in server, workstation and laptop situations, i found this review perfectly fair, I agree with everything in this article, infact i probably would have written pretty much the same thing apart from the problems with root, i think some of the comments being made toward the author are completely unfair, 5.2 really does feel like they pushed out the release to satisfy deadlines rather than completeness, i was actually waiting for 5.2 to set up a permenant workstation rather than my current duel boot (i say duel boot because no matter how much i and fight back from booting to windows ... i need a few apps)and i have also been dissapointed, a simple recompile of my kernel to unclude ule and i lost the drivers for my pcmcia network card, to be honest i dont get why people complain about the whole linux/freebsd freebsd is a server os, and a damn fine workstation os ... but its not meant to be 100% configured out of the box, thats left to the user, anyway, i enjoyed the review and it seemed very fair
Very just article. FreeBSD 5.2 has some tempting innovations but it is not yet as stable or fast as 4.9. This ULE scheduler sounds like a winner, can I use it in FreeBSD 4.9? Also, does anyone know if the rumours that they are planning to rewrite Sysinstall are true? Oh, and I'd recommend new users to try tcsh instead of bash. Tcsh is included in the base system (so that you need not choose any extra packages during installation) and you'll find it in /bin/tcsh. I'll still stick to FreeBSD 4.9 for now but I'll be sure to test 5.2.1 when it comes out. :-)
"You may right but FreeBSD sysinstall(8) is more mature and feature rich than anaconda and many others linux install tools."
Huh? Perhaps "more mature" as in older, and before Jordan Hubbard left he said it was way too stale. Everyone in the FreeBSD community was jumping up and down about 'libh', but that project has been dormant for nearly a year now. Hey, I like the simplicity of sysinstall, but Anaconda offers much, much more (particularly in terms of hardware detection).
"Don't blame FreeBSD for user mistakes."
As Eugenia said, that's not remotely a user mistake. Software needs to be thoroughly tested before release. It's always entertaining when BSD users make snide comments about Linux's stability, and yet in my experience the Debian package archive is considerably better than FreeBSD's -- tested for longer, and in more depth, and very well regulated.
Not sure the critics have anything to do with stability as a previous poster is saying, but problems with KDE on FreeBSD must be adressed by the kde-freebsd team, which is not the FreeBSD team. That team has been formed specifically to take care of KDE on FreeBSD. As for Gnome, they have declared FreeBSD an official development platform, hence, if there is any problem, I believe Gnome has to adress them.
5.2 is at an experimental stage...of course there are things broken and yada yada. I've used linux back in 1996, I found out about FreeBSD when 4.7 production came out. Ever since I've never looked back at linux. I don't want a bunch of crap pre-installed after installation. I want a clean machine to start with and configure it to my needs.
I ran 5.2 and it needs work...but I don't critique what's wrong with it since it's not ready for production as the engineering team has stated.
Manik, you are missing the point. At the end of the day, a KDE or a Gnome developer will address the kde or gnome problems on freebsd, yes. But what we discuss here is who is actually responsible for the shipped software and who to blame, and that's the FreeBSD project, even if the FreeBSD core team might have never written a single KDE or Gnome code. You have to think the whole thing more "consumer-wise" and professinally and less "geek-wise".
@ Eugenia: Right. Anyway, it's true, it lacks polishing. It has always lacked polishing. I have seen thre was some glitches with pkg_version too. pkg_version is not perfect, and that's not new. I remember when I was trying to upgrade with pkg_version, it always wanted to delete Apache and replace it with...AALib!
Everyone in the FreeBSD community was jumping up and down about 'libh', but that project has been dormant for nearly a year now.
sysinstall2/libh is one of the worst cases of second system effect I've ever seen. Frustrated with the shortcomings of sysinstall and the current packaging system, the FreeBSD developers wanted to create not a new installer, but a combination installer framework and package management system which could be used to easily create a variety of different installers to address different needs. Supposedly this would also allow the base system to be packaged, so components also available through the ports collection could be removed when ports are used in their stead, or removed when they're unused (e.g. sendmail, BIND)
Unfortunately, the scope of the project is too big and the number of interested developers is too small, coupled with the amount of development work remaining in 5.x which is currently tying up most developers who would otherwise be working on libh.
That said, sysinstall is tolerable but ugly and inflexible. The current packaging system is highly flexible, more so than any other packaging system I've seen, but somewhat crude and underdeveloped, especially when you try to throw something like portupgrade on top of it.
What in the hell are you all blathering about??
5.2 has been designated up front as not being stable by the FreeBSD team. With that being mentioned, what is this pap about professionalism and so forth. They told you this from the beginning. I mean really, you are complaining about a branch of development that is WIDELY KNOWN as NOT STABLE.
This review makes very picky points about FreeBSD, many of which seem to be fromt he point of view from a person who uses the OS as a desktop media center and expects graphical configuration tools for most tasks. FreeBSD is designed to be (mainly) accessed from the command line. Don't use any of the graphical configuration tools if you want a stable system.
Want to configure X? Use "xf86cfg -textmode" and "ee /etc/X11/XF86Config" for more fine tuning. Want to add a user? Use "adduser". Want to configure services? Edit /etc/rc.conf and DON'T try to use KDE's SysV init editor for god sakes!
Eugenia, the tasks you described are all "once off" things that can be done with little effort at the command line. Should a release of FreeBSD really be held up a few weeks because of a bug in one of KDE's many applications (KUser). One that almost every user will never use. Remember also that this is a DEVELOPMENT release.
On my machine Nautilus works with smb:///.
But I compiled from ports so there may be a different behaviour when Nautilus is installed via precompiled packages.
Eugenia, I agree with many of the complaints you made. Many of your complaints did apply to FreeBSD as it is intended to be used. However, I think you went too far complaining about certain aspects of the OS (particularly the ones focusing on the desktop aspect of an OS.) I don't think anyone in the FreeBSD team is focusing on anything past basic multimedia purposes. If you want to review FreeBSD as a desktop OS, you are very free to do so. But please make it clear that you are reviewing it as something it never really tries to be. However, if you are going to do a real review OF FREEBSD, you should focus on only the roles it is trying to fill and how well it does this. For example, a car magazine will never complain that a Porsche performed extremely poor off road. Going off road is not the purpose of a Porsche. Another example closer to home is that you will never read an OS review complaining that a C compiler, and visual development environment was not included with Windows XP Home Edition. That is not the market it is going for. Well the same should apply to all operating systems. Just my opinion.
When you have aRts server installed - due to KDE I guess - then gstreamer-plugins will discover it and automatically build with dependency upon it. This is what makes the gtk apps depend on qmake.
Well I think it's safe to say that 5.2 lacks polishing in a few areas because there were more important things that needed to be dealt with before the release. One can't exactly expect all desktop stuff to work.
As for the desktop -- I'm pretty sure the FreeBSD developers know FreeBSD lacks here. Maybe the critics should volunteer their time to fixing it. Part of the problem is that most desktop stuff is GPL'd and not many BSD developers want to waste too much time contributing to projects that are going to assimilate their code. I know I wouldn't.
Anyway, I find it's useless to bitch about things unless you're willing to put in the time to fix them yourself. I know what it's like from the developers' perspective -- they spend all this time and effort trying to produce something neat -- and then some clueless idiot tells them it's all wrong.
I get this sort of thing on occasion, and usually reply with: "when you code something better I'll consider using it".
But it's funny -- very rarely has anyone ever put their code where their mouth is.
I tried FreeBSD 5.2 too (previously with 4.9). My hardware - a '99 PCChips M748MR which cannot detect my new 40GB hdd. Got to enter CHS manually into the BIOS. 1st partition installed with Win2003, 2nd with FreeBSD 5.2 and 3rd partition with Debian GNU/Linux 3.0. The installation sequence is Win, BSD and Linux.
Win runs perfectly. Debian too. FreeBSD is a lot problematic. It hung again repeatly. Sometimes it hung right after login, sometime after few minutes, and sometime during the sysinstall, sometime when startx. (But I must admit when GNOME runs, it's smooth and fast, much better than on Linux.) After 7 hours trying, I thought my hdd died (too many times of power-off due to hung). Unplugged the hdd ready for replacement. Brought hdd to other machine to
test - it is alive.
Last night put back the hdd and tried again - this time I read the errata. Disabled ata_dma and acpi. FreeBSD 5.2 works fine for hours, even with GNOME, KDE and wmaker. But the DEs are now very slow.
That's my experience!
I never use the graphical setup tools. I much prefer xf86config. I've gotten used to it, and I know my hardware like the back of my hand by now.
I've used FreeBSD since around 3.2 or 3.3. I forget, it's been a while. My home file server is currently running 4.9, and will be running it for quite some time. It started out with 4.8, and after 4.9 came out, I used buildworld to update it.
I have to say that my FreeBSD server is probably the most stable computer I've ever used. I have never had it crash, and have only had to shut it down when we lost power for too long, and my UPS died. I don't reboot it unless I'm running buildworld because of a security patch.
I have used FreeBSD as a desktop system before (4.x and 5.x), and will probably use it in the future. I much prefer to use the stable branch for both desktop and server, but I usually setup a test machine for the newly released versions (except for this time, my wife is using my test box for college! ;-)
I prefer Linux, mainly because I've used Linux longer, and like Debian so much, but if I had to, I'd switch over to FreeBSD and not give it a second thought.
Just my $0.02
Check out:
http://www.freebsd.org/gnome - Gnome on FreeBSD
http://freebsd.kde.org - KDE on FreeBSD
FreeBSD has still long way to go. Till now it has problems in the sense that parition of disks is not friendly to user. Also installation is too geeky stuff. Once you get things installed in place, bootloader and configuring X and sound remind you of earlier versions of unix/linux where you have to manually edit everything to get going.
Even getting packages installed is a bit trivial in 5.2 As far as my experience goes, FreeBSD is long way from becoming a perfect system.
On good side, it is very robust and boots very fast as compared to any other os i guess. It also is very stable.
Sincerely,
Anmol Misra
Gnome/KDE: Installing Gnome or KDE isn't any difficult. Just "pkg_add mirror://path/package.tgz". KDE and Gnome weren't designed for non-GNU/Linux systems, however, and there are sometimes some issues with certain components.
Live CD: Disk two of the install set is essentially a live CD. It doesn't give you a graphical desktop, etc., but those are the same on any system.
I've been using freenix exclusively for about four years now, and I haven't found anything better than FreeBSD. 5.2 works like a charm for me -- apart from my soundcard, which required a "kldload pcm", everything was autodetected and set up beautifully. No GNU/Linux distro has come close to that easy of an install/setup on this machine. Compared to the other operating systems, FreeBSD just flies -- and I've never had problems with hanging or crashes that plague the GNU/Linux distros I've tried on this machine.
FreeBSD 5.2 is perfectly sufficient for my desktop needs. I don't need bloatware like Gnome or KDE (and honestly, I don't see why anyone does) and I'm glad that all kinds of garbage isn't installed on my system by default. I've never had any GNU/Linux distro set up my fonts so well. Everything's so clean and well documented. I guess if I had a webcam or other weird peripherals connected to my machine, I might have cause for complaint, but I don't.
Eugenia,
pkgdb -F will make a best-effort attempt to find which more recently updated package should be used instead of the out of date one, but it still requires some input from the user to verify that it has guessed correctly. In my case, its first guess has always been correct and all I've had to do is say "y" when prompted to make the dependency issues go away.
I installed 5.2-release last night and I have run into some strange problems as well. The installation went very smooth as usual, ( I was running 4.7 previously ) but after that, I have had some issues. First off I tried to compile a custom kernel and it died about 5 min in. I quick search on google came up with one other guy that had posted to the mailing list with the same problem but I didn't see any responses. I'm also getting a 'protocol error' message when I try to install anything from the ports. I don't know if this is actually a problem with 5.2, but I know that any other version of FreeBSD that I have ran on the same box had no problems. I also get a "dc0: failed to force tx and rx to idle state" in dmesg, but I don't know if that is actually causing any problems. Anyways, I haven't had a whole lot of time to play with it and try to get things working, but I have noticed that there are more bugs in 5.2 than any other version that I have used.
Good review and pretty much my own 5.2 experience. FreeBSD 4.9 went smooth for me and has been on my test machine for a while now, but 5.1 and 5.2 pushed me to my limits. Had to break down and buy grog's (Greg Lehey's) book to help me try to sort out lots of those 5.2 "silly little annoyances" as Eugenia calls them.
I keep Slack 9.1/dropline on my production box and don't see FreeBSD bumping it any time soon. BUT, I am learning lots from FreeBSD that makes Slackware work that much better for me ;-) Much of Lehey's book applys well to Slackware.
And, like most others, I have gained great respect for FreeBSD. I want to continue learning and growing in that direction.
What a disheartening release. I've had more problems with 5.2 than I have with 5.1 (which worked flawlessly for me). So many irritations, like broken ports on the installation CD (many GNOME and KDE apps come to mind) and some odd 'mixer' problems that keep mysteriously popping up.
The new dynamic root doesn't 'feel' significantly slower, though I've been told that 'tests' indicate that it is (I'm inclined to believe that, but I would love to see). Eugenia pointed out that some of the bugs that made it into 5.2 were known before the release, and were not fixed because of the pre-release 'code freeze.' A poor reason in my opinion. Bug fixes should never be exempt.
I had thought that ULE would be the default scheduler in 5.2, but it was pulled at the last moment. Yeah they probably had very good reasons for that one, and it's not exactly hard to build a kernel that uses it yourself, but if they had of waited... what was it, two weeks? They would have had 5.2 with ULE by default.
Although I am sure that the issues will be resolved, I certainly hope that the developers take more time to do things 'correctly,' rather than 'by the book.' I'd love to see FreeBSD 5.something be something other than a 'New Technology Release.'
...and as such there will be bugs, things now working as they should and things that are downright broken.
I don't think you made it clear enough for those that don't understand the FreeBSD release cycle.
I also bet you wouldn't have run into many of those problems on 4.X (but then again, maybe you would have had a few more hardware incompatabilities, YMMV).
I see a lot of people here picking at some of the unpolished edges in FreeBSD. I've read comments like Anmol Misra's "FreeBSD has still long way to go". To say it simple: Don't hold your breath.
I've been using FreeBSD since 4.0, including as main Desktop OS for about 1.5 years now. I like it. I like it a lot. Why? Because I can understand how it works. SuSE has nice GUI tools for everything, but if something breaks or doesn't do what I want, I need ages to figure out what the GUI tool really does behind the scenes, and how I can do it. For the FreeBSD developers, polish has second priority behind functionality and clean design.
This has advantages: it builds up trust. I feel very comfortable with the thought that between me editing my rc.conf and the system reading it, there is no intermediate layer, which could be a source of errors. Of course, it also means you will need to invest an amount of time to get to know the system and grow comfortable with it. It suits the curious type, the type who likes to tinker with his system.
FreeBSD will probably not be "easy to install" or "easy to use" (meaning: intuitive, without much prior knowledge) anytime soon, because the people using FreeBSD don't want it to be. They don't want sugar and polish. They want the system laying open before them, not hidden behind a GUI. The best example is sysinstall: People have been moaning and bitching about it for years. However it is great for installing the system, it has great flexibility, it works well. It sucks utterly at configuring the system, hence people don't use it for that. The system is easy to configure without such a tool, hence noone really feels a pressing need to write a replacement.
FreeBSD is not for everyone. There's the people who are not interested in spending their valuable time in figuring out software. When I didn't know better, I encouraged several of them to give FreeBSD a shot, being a FreeBSD enthusiast an all. The result has always been utter frustration. It's not that that attitude is bad, or that the people suck, it's just that FreeBSD isn't made for them.
There is no one-size-fits-all. The products that try to be are not nearly as comfortable as those that are custom-tailored to your needs. Accept that, and don't try to force things or opinions on people. Offer them, and those interested will take them instead of being disgusted at your attitude.
Hm... 4am musings
I realize you try hard to get these articles out the door as soon as possible, but next time could you let a native English speaker (and preferably a professional writer or editor) check your typing and grammar? I like the information, but as prose, this review is frustrating.
> next time could you let a native English speaker (and preferably a professional writer or editor) check your typing and grammar?
I already have. The article HAS being proof read by a native english speaker.
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2R/announce.html
FreeBSD 5.2 also contains a number of significant stability and performance improvements over FreeBSD 5.1. However, it is still considered a 'New Technology' release and might not be suitable for all users. Users with more conservative needs may prefer to continue using FreeBSD 4.X.
Next time, read the release information FIRST.
Putting blame on an OS for short-comings of tools and applications that are NOT NOT NOT part of the OS (and that includes EVERYTHING except the kernel and the userland, in particular everything that can be found in /usr/ports, like GNOME and KDE), pardon my saying, shows that you have no idea what you are talking about.
As is complaining about the lack of support for "exotic" hardware, which shows you have no idea what FreeBSD is about. It is NOT NOT NOT about supporting bleeding edge hardware. If you want that, use Linux.
FreeBSD is about a fine balance between stability and speed. What hardware *is* supported, is supported VERY well. Something you cannot necessarily say about Linux' hardware support.
As long as you do not understand what FreeBSD is about, FreeBSD isn't for you. Period.
it's not a production release....
FreeBSD "LiveCD" release: look for the Freesbie project.
Maxlor said some things I very much agree with: How comfortable I am with an OS that allows (demands, really) you to know about it at a deep level, versus how insecure I feel when anything goes wrong in a system configured automatically or with a GUI and I can't find the proper text files to fix it "right." SuSE's LiveCD, for instance, automagically configured my system to the point where I got the bouncing test pattern that occurs when you unplug the computer with the monitor still on; had to hit the reset button to get it to reboot. Of course, SuSE will likely work just fine for most folks, and automagic is much more likely to have wide appeal than hunting around playing with text config files.
Yep, it's a testing/developmental release, so folks should expect glitches; OTOH, it seems to have been a step backwards from 5.1 or even -CURRENT in some respects, so some criticism of the state of things circa release is fair.
And Eugenia - this is said in gentle fun, since we all know this site we enjoy so much wouldn't even exist without your hard work and tremendous energy: Your response about proofreading would have had a bit more force if you had said the article "has *been proofread*" rather than the article "has being proof read." 
In any case, perhaps those who ask you to have your articles proofread should volunteer for that task - we'll see if they can keep up with you!
What do you mean, ask people proof read my comments in the forum? I hope you are joking.
Define "bleeding edge hardware." I'm on an Asus K8V Deluxe, Athlon 64 3200+, ATI Radeon AIW 9800 Pro, SB Audigy, with a WD Raptor SATA hard drive. And it runs FreeBSD. I had to patch for the sound card (it's now committed to CURRENT), and there is no 3D acceleration in X (I use the VESA driver), and the LAN chip driver doesn't work right (but it can be made to work), but with all of the fixes in place this machine works extremely well with both the AMD64 and the i386 editions of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE.
However, the following GNU/Linux distros will not even install despite trying a variety of different installation options: Red Hat 9, Fedora Core 1, XandrOS 1.1, Sun Java Desktop System, Gentoo 1.4 (i386), LindowsOS 4.0, Mandrake 9.2 (i386), and Debian Woody. SuSE 9.0 will install in safe mode, but the ATI driver won't work so there's no 3D acceleration. MEPIS and Knoppix didn't have a driver for my network card. Gentoo AMD64 will work to a reasonable degree, but I can't get GRUB-static to boot properly because it alternately thinks of the IDE primary master and the SATA drive as HDA.
So from my frame of reference it's GNU/Linux that doesn't support the "bleeding edge hardware" if you can consider my hardware as such (I certainly do, anyway), not FreeBSD. At very very least, at least FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE would install on my machine; the above-mentioned distros crashed before, during, or after the installation.
FreeBSD doesn't have proprietary ATI drivers. I bet there's some obscure RAID card or other little-used piece of hardware that the Linux kernel will support and FreeBSD cannot, but I'm not aware of it. So proprietary ATI drivers are the one big difference between what FreeBSD and GNU/Linux will support in terms of hardware, and that's ATI's decision, not developers from the Free Software communities.
-Jem
"What do you mean, ask people proof read my comments in the forum? I hope you are joking."
Yes.
Well, I've been using 4.x since 4.0, and after skipping 5.0, I put 5.1 on an old 731 celeron. Desktop is wonderful with XFree4, evilwm, Eterm. One thing which I have yet to track down is that ncplogin, which works fine on 5.1, causes a nice, hard lock on 5.2, so (thank Eris I had backed up /etc) I backgraded to 5.1 and am happily back to logging into my novell file server.
Why don't you read the rest of the comments FIRST before you go spouting off? How many did YOU read before you replied?
Here's hoping that 5.3-RELEASE will ship with the ULE scheduler enabled per default and KSE threading as the default. As it stands 5-STABLE is seeming farther and farther away...
Well, IMHO, it is better to have a few more months of foreplay with the code than simply jumping in the sandle only to be disappointed. The coders do their thing and release it once it is ready, until then, whats wrong with FreeBSD 4.9? on an SMP machine, yes, there are issues, however, for most people "out there", FreeBSD 4.9 is adequte for every day desktop and server use.
As mentioned earlier there is one for FreeBSD, called FreeSBIE. Website: http://www.freesbie.org
<quote>Define "bleeding edge hardware." I'm on an Asus K8V Deluxe, Athlon 64 3200+, ATI Radeon AIW 9800 Pro, SB Audigy, with a WD Raptor SATA hard drive. And it runs FreeBSD. I had to patch for the sound card (it's now committed to CURRENT), and there is no 3D acceleration in X (I use the VESA driver), and the LAN chip driver doesn't work right (but it can be made to work), but with all of the fixes in place this machine works extremely well with both the AMD64 and the i386 editions of FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE. </quote>
i have that EXACT same setup, except for the hard drive.... i had no problems with the ethernet card, however gnome has been VERY buggy, the panel crashes, evolution doesn't compile, nor does firebird. gaim won't make a proper port connection, gedit wont even run, gftp crashes at random, bitchx crashes at random. KDE stuff is pretty solid though, and when it does work it's noticeably faster than linux 2.4.21, but i haven't tried 2.6 yet. i also had problems with both / and /tmp being at 100% capacity as soon as installation was finished, even on a minimal install. i tried several partitioning schemes, including auto. problem always occured. i really like freebsd, but for the time being i'm back on linux. if you could give me some pointers on how to make a stable gnome desktop on free bsd on that setup, i would definitely be in your debt.
If you know what you are doing, it works fine with KDE. Gnome is a bit shaky, but given that gnome looks and works like dogcrap on almost any system, thats to be expected.
SAMBA, Konq, KDE, Quanta, gcc, etc - all work just fine - as do the pcmcia SCSI and net cards.
If you are competent at the command line, and use ports to build your apps, 5.2 is just fine. If you want hand-holding guid driven non-thinking admin and pre-made binaries, go over to Red Hat.
mount_ext2fs will autoload the ext2fs kernel module, so you don't need "options EXT2FS" in your kernel config. Generally speaking, all the mount_* utilities autoload their respective kernel modules if they haven't been loaded already, so your kernel config doesn't need to explicitly list any filesystems over and above what you need to get your root partition running (usually FFS)
The reason you couldn't mount your ext3 Fedora partition with mount_ext2fs is because ext***3*** and ext***2*** are incompatible with each other, not because the support for ext2 was somehow deficient.
- mark
(Oh. you're saying it wasn't compiled. Well, yes. Valid criticism...)
They actually are compatible, the ext2fs module should be able to access ext3 as well (if not, then it has a bug). The problem was that the module wasn't compiled. FreeBSD's Scott Long is looking at it, he emailed me a few hours ago.
<quote>If you are competent at the command line, and use ports to build your apps, 5.2 is just fine. If you want hand-holding guid driven non-thinking admin and pre-made binaries, go over to Red Hat.</quote>
yeah yeah, assume i'm a noob... yeah i compiled everything from port. i try to compile whenever possible. still no luck, buggy. but as i stated, kde was ok. teh gaim thing is a known issue and i suppose is being dealt with. btw i hate red hat.
the problem with a lot of the bugs is not the fault of freebsd, but from what i read is the instruction set for the amd64 processor itself. i guess if you ran everything 32 bit mode it would be much less buggy.
Stop complaining, its not a STABLE release. If it breaks on your platform then too bad. Once again eugenia has a review that is content-less, And it was a silly undertaking in the first place. Reviews of "beta", "alpha" and "Release-canidate" software is dumb.
Oh, griping about X/KDE problems is dumb, X/KDE is including with freebsd, its not PART of freebsd, like you would consider
it a PART of other linux distributions. Good job on playing computer science, and thats a really nice Gnome screenshot! But seriously, this is the kind of review you would expect out of a Middle School journalism class. It just seems to exist to fill space.
jeez, i just thought i'd join conversation. yeah i installed it several times, yeah it was all new and buggy, and yeah i got rid of it. no big deal.
FreeBSD doesn't come with a make.conf in /etc -- did you copy the generic one over from /usr/share/examples/etc? If not, that could be the problem. The CPU type that I use is x86_64 and I often have to add -fPIC to my CFLAGS line to get some things to compile properly (but I do not leave it in by default).
The / and /tmp problems are strange. I use a 2GB partition for the base system minus /usr, which gets its own 15GB partition, and the rest is a /home partition. Using this setup I have never run out of space, even when doing a buildworld. Just to make sure, you did only use one slice, right? Set up a single slice, then set up partitions in that slice. When I first switched from Gentoo I got confused about this and ran into space problems.
-Jem
at least i tried it out a lot BEFORE i made a comment, unlike many people.
hmmm... yeah i'm retarded... i didn't copy that make.conf file. i guess that's what happens when you assume. maybe i should try it again. did you get mozilla to compile ok?
Yep, Mozilla 1.6 compiled perfectly, as did Firebird 0.7. Previous editions did not compile though. I have had no trouble with GNOME2, but I rarely use it. Fluxbox and KDE3 both work perfectly. I can't remember if Enlightenment worked or not, but I think it did. I didn't try any others.
Java does not compile yet, and there's no IA32 or Linux binary compatibility yet, but they're in progress. Sun's coming out with Solaris 9 AMD64 in a couple of months, so it's safe to assume that we won't have to wait long for an AMD64-enabled Java port. Binary compatibility I think will be along soon, but you'd really have to ask the people who are working on it to get an idea of how far along it is.
-Jem
Would my linux games(UT2K3,Q3,AA,etc) be able to be run on FreeBSD? I understand that theres a linux compatiablilty layer but does that extend to these?
<quote>If you are competent at the command line, and use ports to build your apps, 5.2 is just fine. If you want hand-holding guid driven non-thinking admin and pre-made binaries, go over to Red Hat.</quote>
yeah yeah, assume i'm a noob... yeah i compiled everything from port. i try to compile whenever possible. still no luck, buggy. but as i stated, kde was ok. teh gaim thing is a known issue and i suppose is being dealt with. btw i hate red hat. The problem with a lot of the bugs is not the fault of freebsd, but from what i read is the instruction set for the amd64 processor itself. i guess if you ran everything 32 bit mode it would be much less buggy.
Did you cvsup your ports tree first? do that then compile from the sources. You may find that there could be some "last minute" patches that didn't make it into the 5.2 release but are sitting in the ports tree right now.
# if you even think about reinstalling a *nix OS because of corrupted password file(s), you certainly have no idea what can be done and should stay with MSware.
# if you dare blame BSD developers/community for the existence of bugs (in KDE/Gnome) or insufficient testing (of all included apps/libs) or the inclusion of questionable programs i dare call you an egocentrical being with (apparently) no experience in software development/packaging.
by the way: you really should buy more RAM
Has the option to configure X EVER worked from the install?
Never has for me.
I've always had to do it AFTER I've installed everything.
they should just remove that option.
course it has.
xf86config
/stand/sysinstall
etc etc etc
There's probly even other programs for this in Ports or freshmeat.net or all purpose config programs like Webmin which can do the job. It's just that people either don't know this, or are lazy. But configuring X can be done via tons of ways. That much is clear.
Hi ..
I hope you're aware of the 'pkg_add -r' option ?
It downloads the latest binary package from the FreeBSD server(s).
I've found that most ports software for a release can be installed as a prebuilt package this way.
but if you cvsup to HEAD then you're on your own 
For a non-native english speaker her writing is very damn good, IMHO. Many native english speakers also have problems with grammer and spelling, let alone for someone who speaks english as a second language. Her grammer is better then my fathers (which, admittedly, isn't hard to pull off..but he is a native speaker). Its such a stupid thing to be picky about, the content is far more important. Can you speak more then one language and have perfect grammer and spelling in either or all languages? That has to be an impossible difficult task.
This review was done from the point of view of desktop user... ahhh. Useless. That`s not the focus.
I had thought that ULE would be the default scheduler in 5.2, but it was pulled at the last moment. Yeah they probably had very good reasons for that one, and it's not exactly hard to build a kernel that uses it yourself, but if they had of waited... what was it, two weeks? They would have had 5.2 with ULE by default.
This is simply not true.
The reason that ULE was made the default JUST AFTER the release of 5.2, is that it has to receive wide-spread testing _before_ putting it in a release.
If it was to be included in 5.2, it should've been made the default after the 5.1 release. At that time, ULE wasn't ready for that. As ULE wasn't the default and alas hasn't received widespread testing, they couldn't just make it the default just before the 5.2 release.
Please read up on the development process of FreeBSD and how -CURRENT works in general, and you'll see why ULE is not the default in 5.2-RELEASE, and for perfectly good reasons.
UT2K and Q3A both run under FreeBSD. NWN does. In fact, every linux game I've tried (Rune, Sim City 3000, UT, Myth2, SOF). I have not tried AA, but since it uses the UT egine, I'd be very surprised if you had any problems with it.
Adam
Eugenia,
Your article is lacking in many, many ways. You may want to run FreeBSD 5.2 for a while longer and then write your review again. Another thing that you need to remember is that FreeBSD 4.9 is stable, FreeBSD 5.2 is NOT considered stable.
Check out the natively packaged games that are available in the FreeBSD ports collection:
http://www.freshports.org/games/
For a server OS the number of available games in FreeBSD is fairly decent. ;-)
In FreeBSD-5.2 you can compile ext2fs as a module! see
/sys/modules/ext2fs
This is not done by default and man make.conf states that
you need WANT_EXT2FS_MODULE=true if you want to build it
automatically.
Also man ehci states the
device ehci
line, and also that the device is buggy!
As far as X config is concerned, in the installer, i recommend
using the "simple configurator" using menus. In fact this fires up xf86cfg -textmode exactly as under Debian and is
VERY easy to configure. This being said FreeBSD-5.2 works fine for me under KDE. Thanks for your review.
First off, the title does not represent the article very well; it should have been titled: "FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE lacks polishing as an out-of-the-box desktop system..."
I haven't done all the things Eugenia has done on the system in order to test it, but I've had my own share of problems with 5.2-R. For one, it won't even boot on a few systems with fairly new hardware, including a Dell PowerEdge 600SC server which runs 4.9-STABLE just fine. I'm running 5.2-R right now, infact I'm typing this comment from the 5.2-R machine, running XFCE 4, and for the most part, its been running trouble free.
One of the cons that Eugenia lists is the lack of "