BETA3 for the FreeBSD 6.2 release is now available on most of the FTP mirror sites. There have been a lot of fixes to many things since BETA2. The most important of the things that have been worked on is the driver for em(4). More info here.
FreeBSD 6.2 Beta 3 Released
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Eugenia Loli
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I really must admit, I love FreeBSD for server work.
I usually use Debian if I need something quick up and running, but it always feels brittle for some reason, even though it’s very stable, just BSD feels so rock solid, and will take on anything you throw at it.
Keep up the great releases guys.
BSD is alive and kicking since decades. It fulfills Unix KISS principle to the maximum, in the end it’s the cause for stability and endurance at the desktop and the server
Agree, I have a machine with FreeBSD 4.10 that already up for 310+ days. Old P3 766Mhz Dell server is very stable!
Now I’m cvsup-ing the source and compiling the kernel for my other server that is already use 6.2.
This hopefully means that PC-BSD 1.4 will be based on FreeBSD 6.2.
I suggest you should just try FreeBSD instead of waiting for PC-BSD if you haven’t yet.
It doesn’t have a fancy graphical package manager and a custom theme, but FreeBSD is still surprisingly easy to use.
pkg_add -r nvidia-driver is even shorter than apt-get install nvidia-glx
NB: Although bringing apt-get might be considered OT, I feel inclined to respond to this.
“pkg_add -r nvidia-driver is even shorter than apt-get install nvidia-glx”
It might be shorter, but is it as easily remembered? YMMV in this respect, but I for one find the apt-get version more natural apart from the name of the package being installed.
Also, see this comment http://www.osnews.com/permalink.php?news_id=16357&comment_id=177505
for another reason that the *BSDs need more work done on their respective packaging systems.
Finally, as this is about PC-BSD and FreeBSD, a better comparison on your part would be pkg_add versus PBI. I for one welcome an easy to use packaging system.
“I suggest you should just try FreeBSD instead of waiting for PC-BSD if you haven’t yet.”
I have, thanks and I may very well do it again. However, my primary interest in the *BSDs is easy to use servers and here I believe that PC-BSD can fill a nice role.
“It doesn’t have a fancy graphical package manager and a custom theme, but FreeBSD is still surprisingly easy to use.”
That’s kind of the point. PC-BSD does have a fancy graphical package manager and hopefully fancy server configuration tools will pop up too. And that, my friend, is exactly what I’m looking for in the *BSDs.
I administer a number of servers, ranging from Click’n’Drool Windows to headless, remote Ubuntu installations. I’d very much like to start using a BSD-derivate for some of those servers, but the lack of an easy way to update and upgrade remote servers is the chief reason I’ve yet to do so. Hopefully PC-BSD can change that.
Well as off version 6.2 there is freebsd update which update the base system with binairy updates.
So you can use FreeBSD as of 6.2 for your servers 😉
regards,
Johan
That’s really nice, but I don’t see any problem in updating FreeBSD.
-portaudit to see if there are any holes
-portinstall/portupgrade/portmaster to update via source or as binary package
What is for example difficult with portupgrade apache? Or portinstall apache for example? The latter for a new install.
I don’t know any servers out there that works with fancy desktoptools, all of them work in the console, because it’s fast.
What is for example difficult with portupgrade apache? Or portinstall apache for example? The latter for a new install.
Correct me if i’m wrong but didn’t he say binairy updates?
portupgrade as far as i know compiles from source aka gentoo.
“portupgrade as far as i know compiles from source aka gentoo.”
portupgrade can do both, cited from “man portupgrade”:
-P
–use-packages
Use packages instead of ports whenever available. portupgrade searches the local directories listed in PKG_PATH for each package to install or upgrade the current installation with, and if none is found, pkg_fetch(1) is invoked to fetch one from a remote site. If it doesn’t work either, the port is used.
-PP
–use-packages-only
Never use the port even if a package is not available either locally or remotely, although you still have to keep your ports tree up-to-date so that portupgrade can check out what the latest version of each port is.
So you can do binary installs (with -P or -PP) using the newest precompiled packages or install from source. In this case the sources should be up to date (cd /usr/ports ; make update).
Regarding system sources (kernel and base system) – as far as I know -, there’s only the way of compiling. No binary updating here. For the correct procedures, please refer to the FreeBSD handbook available at freebsd.org.
Didn’t know that.Saves an awfull lot of time:-)
+1 from me
Yes I correct you,
portupgrade -P | –use-packages ; uses packages for example if available.
“I have, thanks and I may very well do it again. However, my primary interest in the *BSDs is easy to use servers and here I believe that PC-BSD can fill a nice role. ”
PC-BSD cannot fill that role but FreeBSD does a very good job at filling the “easy to use servers” role. PC-BSD is a great desktop OS, and I will leave it to that. OTOH, FreeBSD is great for server use, especially as a headless, remote installation, since it has one of the cleanest command line/directory structure Unix implementation.
“I administer a number of servers, ranging from Click’n’Drool Windows to headless, remote Ubuntu installations.”
No need to insult Windows. Windows does what Windows is made for very well. For certain tasks, nothing beats having a good GUI. Winodws is good for those tasks. For other tasks, a GUI can’t scale nor provide the functionality a good CLI can. Windows is not so good for those tasks.
As to headless, remote Ubuntu installations, I could never understand why people would use Ubuntu for that purpose. Don’t get me wrong, I love Ubuntu as a desktop OS. It reminds me very much of PC-BSD in the BSD world. BUT, I can’t take an OS that dumps everything in the /etc directory seriously for a server. Do a simple ls and you will see thousands of directories. How do people even find their way in the command line? Sure if you don’t install the applications, they won’t appear there. But to me, it just screams poor directory design. IMHO, CentOS/RHEL/Fedora do a much better job at this. And of course, the BSD’s do the best job out of all of them.
“PC-BSD does have a fancy graphical package manager and hopefully fancy server configuration tools will pop up too. And that, my friend, is exactly what I’m looking for in the *BSDs. “
Maybe you want to use /stand/sysinstall in a color capable X terminal. It’s not fancy graphical, but hey, it’s in colour. 🙂
BTW: There are the ports sysutils/fpkg (Package Tool Wrapper for FreeBSD), sysutils/gpkgdep (Shows package dependencies in tree views) and sysutils/qtpkg (A Qt based package removal tool). Are you looking for these?
Not quite. I’m looking for out-of-the-box graphical server configuration tools. Think frontends to mail, DNS, web and so forth.
I usually just use pkg_add -r webmin, does the trick for me, at least as a starting point. Using webmin makes it easy for my non-technical users to administer many things themselves. For everything else, I’m familiar enough with the interface to step them through other tasks. Just my 2 cents.
Don’t miss looking into the excellent documentation of FreeBSD, especially the FreeBSD handbook (which goes through many installation and configuring procedures for for mail subsystem, web service and so on) and the great man pages (for the respective commands and files).
Thanks to the FreeBSD developers for not just good programming, but especially for good documentation – tha “alpha and omega” of an OS!
Actually, it does have a fancy package manager:
sysutils/desktopbsd-tools
These are as fancy as they can get
I never use it though, portinstall progname is faster than pushing buttons.
Since it is ridiculously easy to update the base system, you can bet that it will be based on 6.2. Probably it would take PC-BSD devs a day to do it. On normal FreeBSD it takes 3 commands (and mergemaster, the only “tricky” part) to update your OS – and your installed ports will keep working as usual.
I’m using the latest CVS revision in my laptop and this computer has never been that fast with any GNU/Linux distribution, FreeBSD 6.2 is lovely fast.
That’s weird. I haven’t seen any numbers or benchmark in the last 5 years or so (since around the time when FBSD5 was started) that shows FreeBSD being faster than Linux.
The most recent benchmark…
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-performance&m=1161745245241…
FreeBSD 6.1 44188 (queries per second)
Ubuntu 6.06 37294 (15% slower)
Was supposed to “blow away the rumor that the FreeBSD thread library is slow”. However it turns out to be a suboptimal interaction between the Linux and the FBSD TCP/IP stacks. When using a Linux host for the benchmark, the Linux server gets 53225 queries per second (20% faster).
So I wonder where your speed increases are coming from. Can’t be compiler because FreeBSD uses gcc as well. In fact FreeBSD uses much the same userland (when talking about GUI stuff, which I assume you are using). What is your workload like, exactly? Are you doing much networking? IO? Swapping?
Also, what magnitude of increase are we talking about?
Nick,
I can’t speak about any benchmarks as I don’t bother with them. I only worry about the XPerience. Userland is where I know FreeBSD is the top performer, however even that may be biased as the only Linux I run now is debian SID which in my personal usage was always the fastest running Linux, so I have no other options to compare against.
One thing that also must be considered is how up-to-date most of the applications are in FreeBSD ports compared to other *nix’s. That has to be a performance measure as well.
Edited 2006-11-02 16:58
I hope they fixed the nve timeout issue.It keeps me from installing FreeBSD.
I’ve been using the nve driver for months. It has been fixed for awhile now.
*BSD dead?
As FreeBSD is still using Xorg 6.9 officially does somebody have information or a good guess how long it might still take from the FreeBSD developers to integrate the new modular Xorg 7.x into FreeBSD?
I’ve had a look around, and it appears so far that due to the compexity of Xorg 7.1, its going to take a while; I guess their aim is for FreeBSD 7.0 inclusion.
They are also in the process of moving XBASE /usr/X11R6/ over to /usr/local. The recent release of gnome just made the move, so it’s also a matter of getting all the ports ready for the new path.
“They are also in the process of moving XBASE /usr/X11R6/ over to /usr/local. The recent release of gnome just made the move, so it’s also a matter of getting all the ports ready for the new path.”
That’s a good idea. FreeBSD’s directory structure is very very tidy by itself (“man hier”). All local applications (that do not belong to the operating system) reside in /usr/local/ and /usr/X11R6/. (From Linux systems, I know that there’s sometimes /opt/, sometimes also /usr/lib/ or even /etc/ used for non-system software.) If the last one gets obsoleted, we would have a masterpiece of tidyness – all apps in one directory subtree. 🙂 You could expect files to be in a certain place – and there they are.
Xorg 7.x is work in progress – they currently don’t have enough manpower (and of course, they want to get it right, as usual), but it’s almost there.
“A few developers (lesi, flz, anholt, joel) have been working on making ports of the modular xorg packages in a git repository. We are packaging the latest stable versions of all modules, not tying our packages to an X.Org katamari release (X11R7.0, X11R7.1, etc.). More help/testing with this is needed though. and more people looking at this would be very welcome!”
I saw reports of successfully installing and running the latest xorg version by some users on the mailing lists.
Above quote is from this howto: http://wikitest.freebsd.org/ModularXorg?highlight=%28xorg%2…
You can try it out yourself, and help with testing!
Glad to see that this problems are being sorted out and soon we’ll have 6.2 in our dirty hands
But since 4.9 that I don’t see a release coming in the scheduled date… that means that they are really fixing bugs
Let’s get those em’s working!
My understanding is that X.org 7.x is still somewhat broken. 6.9 is modular, and FreeBSD has that.
X.org 6.9 is definately not modular. Is is feature-wise equal to X.org 7.0 and they were released at the same time.
I would like to (re) post this movie made by my colleagues inspired by the FreeBSD logo. Its out there in MySpace and can be viewed by following this link: http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoi… . Long live FreeBSD!
Net Supremacy is too technical for most people, IMHO. That really gets into the nitty gritty of software development!
i have been wanting to wade back into freebsd land, but i would like a livecd version of 6.2 before i commit to trying to install it.
Browser: ELinks/0.11.1-1-debian (textmode; Linux 2.6.17-2-686 i686; 92×31-3)
Please see http://www.freesbie.org, the next release 2.0 will be based on FreeBSD 6.2.
You can have the second beta via torrent here:
http://torrent.freesbie.org/FreeSBIE-LVC-20061010.iso.torrent
The third beta will be available soon, you might want to check http://www.riondabsd.net/category/freebsd/ frequently to see what’s happening next.
HTH, Daniel
thank you daniel, for an informative answer! i have downloaded the iso and will keep an eye on this!
Does anyone know if the nVidia team’s requests (missing pieces to release an amd64 driver) are implemented for this release?
I think they are working on that in CURRENT, so I don’t think it will be available in the 6.x series.
Their goal is to have a 64bit driver for 7.
Although this is the worst possible place to ask, I’m really wanting to get back to running FreeBSD, and would love to know if the 3945abg can be used either natively or with the NDIS?
I’ve tried with the NDIS, and found that the whole system locks, and the kernel crashs on boot up; all the information so far have been out of date, and even the files they do use (when obtained) still suffer from the same problem.
Like I said, I’d love to give 6.2 a go, its an incredible release, but the lack of wireless networking is a real show stopper for me, in those regards.
6.2beta2 amd64 replaced kubuntu64 as my main laptop OS on its release day just by finally getting my broadcom wifi working with ndisgen, the install was easy and worked on the first try. 6.2 seems to be the fastest my little Acer has ever flown. If only I could run VMWare on it then I would never need anything else. To the FreeBSD devs, thanks for all the troublefree years!!
Cheers,
For making such a wonderfull OS that I’ve been using for the past 5 years!! I must admit I’ve only recently started to donate but this will continue as far as I’m concerned.
FreeBSD Forever:-)
Thanks for one of the easiest to learn unix-like OS! I’m serious! I tried to learn linux for one and a half year (perusing various howtos, handbooks – two of them: mandrake’s and red hat’s -, switching to debian in the final days) – but finally it was FreeBSD that I could understand and learn.
Many people think that FreeBSD is a hardcore unix OS – which it is, but it is so well thought out, so clean, config files so well commented (plus very well written man pages and of course, the handbook), that for those who want to learn a unix-like OS in depth, FreeBSD is probably one of the better choices. If you are not afraid of reading documentation, it is also easier than linux. Except maybe archlinux, which is my favorite linux distro now (but I came to arch after learning FreeBSD). Anyhow, thanks FreeBSD developers for this excellent OS!
Hey man,
I have the same experience with FreeBSD. 5 years ago when I started, I tried Caldera linux first. Didn’t no what to do and was staring at command prompt.
With FreeBSD plus the Handbook my early steps into OSS went very smooth. The reason I started was because of some article on the net which explained why yahoo was using FreeBSD. I jumped on the bandwagon and never jumped off…..marvelous.
And don’t forget the mailinglist too, I’ve never been turned down if I’ve asked for help!!!
FreeBSD OS+Documentation+mailinglist=the Best OS