The final release of FreeBSD 5.3 should be up on the mirrors within the next two weeks. In all likelihood, this will be the first “production release” of FreeBSD 5.x series, so perhaps this is a good time to take a look at the new features in this much anticipated release.
What’s new in FreeBSD 5.3 at LWN
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This is good. I am also quite pleased that someone mentioned FreeBSD as a potential Dektop OS. I have used FreeBSD in the past for a desktop OS, and it’s quite fast.
It’s about time the 5.x series is polished-up a bit.
I’m interested to know the truth about the speed difference between 5.3 and 4.10. Can anyone truthfully give an objectionable opinion?
I haven’t used 5.x since around 5.0/5.1, and at the time I did not find it to be that much slower than 4.x (on a p2-450). I ask this because I’m on a bad dialup connection and I don’t want to waste a week downloading 5.3 if I’m just going to ditch it for 4.10.
Wait a couple weeks. I’m sure you’ll see some benchmarks. They probably won’t be as great as expected but will be quite in line considering the amount of work the FreeBSD had, and still has ahead of them. I’m sure that by 5.4 you’ll see quite a performance improvement.
after reading up on the install procedure at freebsd.org and this here article at LWN i am tempted to give it a try, i already downloaded & burned the ISOs for this one (5.3)
i am using Slackware for a desktop/workstation OS and i am beginning to feel that if a user can install and configure Slackware then FreeBSD-5.3 is not that much different (both use Xorg both use CUPS – etc…etc…
…don’t fix it.
On my P3-500 with 128MB ram 5.2 was incredibly slow and reminded me the times when I tried out Fedora Core 2 (it was awful experience). On faster machines the speed penalty would be indifferent ofcourse.
I would definetly stick to 4.x right now.
5.3 should be faster than earlier 5.x’s because the debugging code has been removed. I’m using it on a dual 1.8ghz Xeon w/1GB RAM so speed is definitely not a problem. Some of the gnome 2.8 bits lag but I think that’s Gnome itself.
5.3 seems really fast to me. Of course I have not used 4.x for quite some time. The people who complain about it being slow are those who never recompile from source. By default FreeBSD has no optimizations in the binaries — not even Pentium optimization!! If you recompile with -O2 -march=(yourproc) it will be incredibly fast.
So far I’m enjoying playing with my new FreeBSD 5.3 installation, but I do wonder about the bootup message indicating that the “giant lock” on the kernel is still in place. Isn’t there a project to remove and replace that with “fine-grained locking” which would speed things up considerably?
Not that I’m complaining – it’s already pretty fast – but it would be exciting if the developers can make it even faster.
cheers,
DB
What kind of modem are you using? If I am to try it out, which I want to, I will have to buy a modem since there is no “linuxant-like” drivers for FreeBSD.
So far I’m enjoying playing with my new FreeBSD 5.3 installation, but I do wonder about the bootup message indicating that the “giant lock” on the kernel is still in place. Isn’t there a project to remove and replace that with “fine-grained locking” which would speed things up considerably?
Have a look at http://www.freebsd.org/projects/busdma/ for the status of driver conversions to the new busdma API, which doesn’t rely on the Giant lock.
However, keep in mind that Giant is now implemented as an adaptive mutex, which means that when a thread on one CPU is holding giant and another wants to lock Giant, the second thread will keep running and wait for the lock to be released instead of going to sleep and waiting for its next chance to run. This has resulted in considerable performance improvements, up to 30% on MySQL.
And I just compiled Gentoo Linux last night… Oh well.
I gave a try to 5.1 and 5.2-RC1 a while ago but I didn’t kept them for very long as they were not really stable. The ACPI-enabled kernel kept crashing. I must admit that I was also not very used to the BSD way of doing thing… The init system, okay, but /etc/rc.conf for pretty much everything, no.
I know I am hijacking the thread a bit but does somebody have a link to a small guide on setting up a FreeBSD desktop quickly? Other than the Handbook… Thanks.
I am posting this from my freshly isntalled FreeBSD 5.3 desktop (literally 15minutes after install). I’m running GNOME, which BTW was super easy to install, and it is light years faster then fedora core 2 and 3t. I’m very glad I tried it. Oh, and it was easier to install then Slack 10 on this system… Good stuff. The only thing that doesn’t work is my mouse wheel.
“nd it is light years faster then fedora core 2 and 3t:
you mean you managed to actually install fedora core 3 already and use it enough to know whether it was fast or not?
congragulations. ….
I wonder if it’s really worth reformatting the server’s hard drive…
“I wonder if it’s really worth reformatting the server’s hard drive…”
its not. just choose them for new partitions
I’m using an external US Robotics 33.3. External modems are easiest to get working. Next easiest I’d say would be a hardware modem of some sort.
Well, I’ve been using FreeBSD 5.3 since it was beta1. In beta1, it was significantly slower than 4.10, but when I upgraded to RC1, everything became nearly as fast as 4.10.
I saw in the release notes it has some improvements in the way PCI resources are allocated, hopefully my laptop’s sound card will work now… ¡can’t wait to try it!
I’ve got the impression too, that if you’ve got two network cards in a computer (for example, a wireless one and an ethernet), if you’re not using both, disabling the unused one ( # ifconfig xyz0 down ) speeds things up.
I was using FC3 *Test 3*. Yes, I used it enough to make initial speed comparison..
I, too, would like to see a quick install guide.
Actually I was using… still do use… fedora core 3 Test3. So its not as valid of a comparison. However, I do use the release of FC2 as well, and can make a fair comparison, at least as far as one can, given my origenal qualifier, that I had only been 15 or 20 minutes after initial setup.
@Wrawrat & @VitaminT
One more vote for more desktop oriented and comprehensive BSD guides…
I don’t know if a very quick desktop setup is even possible(?). But do you guys know the rather comprehensive Desktop FreeBSD articles at http://ofb.biz/ ? That’s the best one I know. Links to most of those articles can be found from this BSDhound page:
http://bsdhound.com/user.php?name=bumbler
Or just Google for: “Desktop FreeBSD Part”
…For some mystical reason most sites that include or link to those articles seem to miss one or more of them (or just have poor search engines). But you can find all(?) eight articles in easy to read/print form here:
i>Desktop FreeBSD: Parts 1-8:[/i]
http://ed.asisaid.com/#fbsd
I guess if you consider GNOME all that is needed to consider a system a desktop system, then here is a quick desktop install quide.
1. Install iso 1 and select all packages, say yes to include ports.
2. Reboot to a root prompt.
3. xorgconfig
4. pkg_add -r gnome2
5. pkg_add -r gnome2-office
6. gdm
it took me 45 minutes, counting the ~10 it took me to google how to use the package system…
a good link is : gnome.freebsd.org
Here ya go.
http://www.madpenguin.org/cms/?m=show&id=1853
hylas
Thanks, I’ll take a look as soon as possible.
I’ve just upgraded 5.2.1-RLEASE-p11 to RELENG_5 aka 5.3-STABLE thru build/installworld and it all went so smooth including the 58 ports i had to reinstall to use the new libraries.
I also use Linux and have never experienced such upgrade between versions like the way FreeBSD offers.
Gentoo on my laptop was a nightmare to upgrade with the ever so confusing portage.
Only Slackware Linux comes close to rival FreeBSD upgrade process but that’s no brainer since it was inspired by it’s Unix parent.
The FreeBSD team made another quality release and hats off to them, keep up the good work!
Yours,
Chucky the daemon
YET, they always seem to require newer hardware. Does that seem strange to anyone else??? This comment is not directly solely at FreeBSD but to all OS’s
Try debian, you’ll be thrilled. 🙂
apt-get dist-upgrade … wait… done.
I’m using my toshiba notebook (celeron400,128mb ram) with debian/sid.
I installed freebsd 5.3 with a base install, no packages installed.
What I found weird is that even at the login prompt the cooling fan of my notebook is running continuously.
With Debian it runs sometime under some heavy work.
Uh ?
p.s.
Yesterday I installed it with Xorg and Gnome2.8 from marcuscom tinderbox, so even if the fan is running continuosly I didn’t see any slowness.
So my freebsd installation is not slow but it is not nice to listen the fan running all the time. :/
Open your Xorg conf file find the section for mouse Should look something like below. The important thing is to make sure that your Protocol is IMPS/2, and that you have the
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5” line in there for the whell to work.
Section “InputDevice”
Identifier “Mouse1”
Driver “mouse”
Option “Protocol” “IMPS/2”
Option “Device” “/dev/psaux”
Option “ZAxisMapping” “4 5”
EndSection
The simplest way of installing an complete desktop is entering as root: cd /usr/ports/misc/instant-workstation && make install or cd /usr/ports/misc/instant-server && make clean install if you want an instant server to play with.
What Hawke said. I also have this in my /etc/rc.conf
moused_flags=”-z 4″
moused_type=”auto”
I’ve just upgraded 5.2.1-RLEASE-p11 to RELENG_5 aka 5.3-STABLE thru build/installworld and it all went so smooth including the 58 ports i had to reinstall to use the new libraries.
You upgraded from one minor version to another. The recommended upgrade path between major versions is a reinstall.
Only Slackware Linux comes close to rival FreeBSD upgrade process
You don’t know what you’re talking about. Over the past six years I’ve reinstalled my system exactly once (late 2002, and not out of necessity, I just felt like a ‘fresh start’ having bought an all-new computer). Apart from a period of about a year when I didn’t have broadband, my system has been continually upgraded.
but that’s no brainer since it was inspired by it’s Unix parent.
Uh, since when was smooth upgrades ever a Unix heritage?
Hi!
Is the problem still present in 5.3, that some optical mouse (my one is Samsung OMS3PB) gets crazy when i start x? Moving the mouse it instantly jumps to the upper right corner, or randomly to the center of the screen and back to the corner again. It makes my mouse useless.
Thanks for your help on the mouse, but it just started working automagicly, on my last reboot. I have no idea why, but it works…
Yeah i know i upgraded between the release, maybe because i have no time to reinstall from scratch, maybe because i could not quickly backup my stuff, maybe because my older box has no cdrom drive or floppy, maybe because i felt lazy to mount the NFS share on Linux and do the net install or maybe because i could do such a major upgrade on FreeBSD.
I know what i am talking about
or at least in my opinion
Uh, since when was smooth upgrades ever a Unix heritage?
I sould clarify by saying Unix i meant not the upgrade process but rather the way slackware was designed with it’s layout,BSD style init, packages to somewhat resemble the BSD’s.
Cheers,
Chucky the daemon
Actually, I have a samsung optical wheel mouse (usb), and it works flawlessly in FreeBSD. I haven’t noticed any weirdness since 5.1 (previously, I had a ps2 mouse). Model name is (though I can barely read it): OMGB305 (or it can be OMGB30B).
I’ve just installed FBSD5.3 on qemu
it took me (just!) 10 min to install a X-user set with fvwm
it runs very snappy emulated on a FBSD5.2.1 2GZ PIV!
I can’t wait to install it in a true AMD machine..
My mouse is a PS/2 type, this was told to have problems (try google with OMS3PB) , i havent heard about usb-mouse problems