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Operating Systems Upgrades BSD

FreeBSD 8.2 Released 183

meta coder writes with word of the release of FreeBSD 8.2: "This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights includes improvements in Xen support and various bugfixes."
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FreeBSD 8.2 Released

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  • ZFS improvements (Score:3, Informative)

    by ulzeraj ( 1009869 ) on Friday February 25, 2011 @12:31AM (#35309558) Homepage
    Version 15 of ZFS seems to have a better support for quotas and other accounting stuff: http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Community+Group+zfs/15 [opensolaris.org]
    • I've been running ZFS v28 on FreeBSD 8.2 prereleases for quite some time now. More or less weekly patches are at http://people.freebsd.org/~mm/patches/zfs/v28/ [freebsd.org]. I have not had anything to report to the maintainer and from what I see, he's mostly cleaning up the code to merit further patches, the functionality is all there already.
  • by kriston ( 7886 ) on Friday February 25, 2011 @12:35AM (#35309572) Homepage Journal

    But I just installed 8.1.
    Sigh.

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Looks like it's another 2-3 hours of compiling packages and the odd several hours of library/package build error resolution for you!

      • by cdp0 ( 1979036 )

        Looks like it's another 2-3 hours of compiling packages and the odd several hours of library/package build error resolution for you!

        You can use freebsd-update [freebsd.org] to do a binary update. Also, recompilation of ports is not usually necessary in between minor upgrades (ie. 8.1 to 8.2). Of course, you may have chosen to build a custom kernel and then you need to build it manually. On my dual core CPU with 4GB RAM it takes about 10-12 minutes to build the kernel and 30-40 minutes for world. To deal with etc scripts you can use etcupdate [freshports.org].

        Also, if you don't like this way of doing things and you are a more desktop oriented user, you can look at PC- [pcbsd.org]

        • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

          On the contrary: rebuilding ports is usually perpetually necessary due to package security problems. Seems damn near half the time I update a ports tree, some prerequisite library port gets 'updated' to something that breaks a significant portion of the system, silently - something not noticeable until after you start (or even complete) your ports upgrades.

          Access to ports is not a badge of pride. Someone running ports on a server, without an extensive in-house vetting and change control system for ports its

          • CAIMLAS, do you never tired of trolling FreeBSD articles?

            There is a binary upgrade path to both base system and ports. It takes approxiamately the same time to binary upgrade a Debian system as a FreeBSD one, except for certain ports which FreeBSD is not licensed to redistribute a binary form of the program. An example of this would be FreeBSD native JDK.

            • by kriston ( 7886 )

              THe real reason I am bellyaching is because this particular system is a 1.5 GHz VIA C7 Esther with an ancient 1 gigabyte CompactFlash card on the IDE port. It's not fast in any notion of the word.

    • # /usr/sbin/freebsd-update -r 8.2-RELEASE upgrade

  • Does this mean full headcrab support?

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Yes, but it's experimental headcrab support. That means it's full featured, you've just got to read the source to figure out how to use it.

  • Either or.. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by libcrypto ( 599315 ) on Friday February 25, 2011 @12:43AM (#35309614) Homepage
    Even if FreeBSD just manages to keep up with Linux I for one am glad its around. Remember Open Source is about choice. BSDs provide one more. One that is far better than Hurd, Haiku etc. at the moment.
    • by Kjella ( 173770 )

      Even if FreeBSD just manages to keep up with Linux I for one am glad its around. Remember Open Source is about choice. BSDs provide one more. One that is far better than Hurd, Haiku etc. at the moment.

      Reality is that the user probably doesn't want FreeBSD or OpenBSD or NetBSD, there's choice but not in a good sense. What the user wants is probably one system where everything works. I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken. That kind of thing is just a lot of effort and wasted time for little or no gain. That Linus has managed to keep the kernel from fragmenting I think has only been a strength for Linux ov

      • by koinu ( 472851 )

        You know that by comparing different BSDs you are comparing totally different products? Developers are exchanging/porting code, of course, but it's hell difficult. Point is... a FreeBSD system, for example, is exactly one single distribution. You cannot say it about Linux. It does not even have a default configuration that everyone would pick (see: "GENERIC kernel" in FreeBSD).

        And btw, desktop user would rather use a preconfigured FreeBSD environment like PCBSD or DesktopBSD.

      • I've been there doing the distro rounds where yes, my problem is fixed on $new_distro but it turns out that instead $other_feature is broken.

        I've done this as well. SuSE, Mandrake, Red Hat, Debian, Slackware, Gentoo for varying periods of time. I've dabbled a bit with FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD for various reasons as well, but ran into software incompatibilities that may be fixed by now.

        I've found Arch Linux to be absolutely right for my needs and wants, it's like a best of breed between Debian and Gentoo,

      • What the user wants is probably one system where everything works.

        I agree with you. It's very important I can fix anything that breaks. That's the only way you can achieve a system that works. If the component doesn't come with source code, my efforts to address brokenness are stymied.

        Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works. How nice to live in a world where you never reach a fork in the road, such as a stable 2D video card with source code vs a faster 3D video card with no source code. When confronted with a fo

        • Glad we've all agreed to jettison binary blobs in favour of a platform where everything works.

          Are you on crack? The closed nVidia driver is probably an order of magnitude higher quality than the open ATI one, which doesn't support hardware which has been out for quite some time, and which doesn't properly support hardware which has been out for years. If I want my Linux system to work I NEED binary blobs. I would PREFER open-source drivers all else being equal but for example the only vaguely compliant hardware-accelerated path to OpenGL on free Unix is through nVidia.

  • ah - does anyone remember the days when Slashdot, in need for a "scoop", would make a release-announcement the moment the ISOs were hitting the main FTP site?
    A couple of comments down the original story, JKH would make an angry comment and insist that slashdot stop that practice....

    Those were the days ....
    ;-)

  • KDE 4.5.5? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by tyrione ( 134248 ) on Friday February 25, 2011 @04:57AM (#35310430) Homepage
    Now how sad is it that FreeBSD 8.2 has KDE 4.5.5 before Debian Sid? Great news for FreeBSD but truly pathetic for Debian, who keeps punting on any exact dates for KDE 4.6 builds, let alone 4.5.5.
    • by koinu ( 472851 )

      It's a tradition that FreeBSD has recent desktop environments earlier than Debian. When I moved from Debian to FreeBSD almost a decade ago, FreeBSD already had KDE3 since over 6 months and Debian could not get it into the package manager somehow. I've been fed up with this slowness and was impressed how great the FreeBSD portage system is being managed. I sticked to FreeBSD since then with occasional excursions to different Linux distributions, but I always ended up on FreeBSD.

    • And 4.6 is just about ready to hit the FreeBSD ports tree. :)

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