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BSD Operating Systems

First Official CD Release of FreeBSD 205

Posted by timothy from the since-1994 dept.
Chris Coleman writes: "Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD. We will be using the official FreeBSD 4.5 ISOs created by the FreeBSD project. The expected release date for FreeBSD 4.5 is January 20th. We expect to have CDs available two weeks after that. We are taking pre-orders at this time to help gauge the number of CDs we will need to produce. You can pre-order CDs here. CD subscriptions are available here. Vendor pricing will be handled through cylogistics.com."
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First Official CD Release of FreeBSD More

First Official CD Release of FreeBSD

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  • Do I miss-understand , or can any produce these cd's and charge a "reasonable" free for them ?
    • Well seeing as though you can find 4.4 on cheapbytes [cheapbytes.com] I'd be quite sure anyone could sell them. I guess the idea is that these are Official CDs from the originators and hence spending the extra $27.01 will get you the happy feeling of knowing you have substantially supported the FreeBSD project.
      • agree. People are much likely to donate money when you give them a token for their donation. Offering a 'something' for a donation, even when that 'something' is cheeper somewhere else, people are more willing to open their pockets. I give to PBS all the time, but I'm more when they offer me a 'free' PBS coffee mug or tee shirt.
      • Personally, I buy a copy of every version of Red Hat that I use. Typically I make the purchase a few weeks after having been one of the initial people clogging the mirror sites to get an ISO "fresh off the press"... this is done to a) support Red Hat because I like their product (and I hope the stock I own in them evertually make some money:) and b) I like the little "Powered By" stickers that I can put all over the place.

    • Re:Copyright (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Alien54 ( 180860 )
      Do I miss-understand, or can any produce these cd's and charge a "reasonable" free for them ?

      I believe that is how it works. But IANAL [smile]

      Even so, I intend to pre-order and pay these guys for at least one set of CDs, if not more. Just to reward them for doing the work and doing a good job.

      They deserve it.

    • It's fully free, not GPL. YOu can give it away, turn it proprietary, charge an outrageous price, use it to plan a nuclear attack on Australia, or to engage in the violent overthrow of the government. About the only thing you *can't* do is remove the copyright when you place it under the GPL :)


      hawk

    • You cannot resell the CDs they are releasing. Their CDROM ISO image is copyrighted. Not the software on it, but the CD image. You can however, make your own ISO image with the software, and resell it.

      • I don't know about the new 4.5 CD's but the 4.4-RELEASE CD's say "This CDROM may be duplicated and redistributed" right under the copyright notice on the disc.

        The 3.2 CD's don't have this, so I don't know when this was changed. Probably at the same time the project begun releasing ISO images on the FTP site.

        Regards,
        -Jeremy

  • I would love to support daemonnew and give them money for cd's but its hard to wait 2 weeks after a release.

  • just the cd? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by minusthink ( 218231 )
    I looked on the page, and didn't see anything about what comes for the 40 dollars.

    Is it just the CD? Because I'd rather just donate 40 dollars and download the ISO when I can get it. (Which would seem to be less than 2 weeks after the release).

    =\ /shrug

    • Re:just the cd? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by whee ( 36911 )
      It says the standard 4 FreeBSD ISOS, so I'm assuming you get the following on CD (version 4.5 of course):

      4.x-install.iso - 4.x ISO 9660 bootable (El Torrito) CDROM image.
      4.x-disc2.iso - Live filesystem "Fix it" CD and CVS repository.
      4.x-disc3.iso - Extra packages for FreeBSD 4.x
      4.x-disc4.iso - Extra packages for FreeBSD 4.x

      This probably includes ports, tons of documentation, and everything else that you'd expect from FreeBSD.

    • Re:just the cd? (Score:4, Insightful)

      by realdpk ( 116490 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @02:04PM (#2810650) Homepage Journal
      Daemonnews is not *directly* related to the FreeBSD project (I don't know how deep the ties are, if at all - please post if you know). I do believe some of the money does go on to the project, however.

      Anyways, I'm a subscriber to the FreeBSD CD set, and I suggest that anyone else who has found FreeBSD useful in work or home should subscribe as well. FreeBSD has saved me unmeasurable time and aggravation that I would have experienced using other OSs, so it's worth well more than the $40 or so the subscription costs a couple of times a year.

      I realize not all of the money goes directly to the project, but Daemonnews has good people and I'm proud to support them as well.
  • its always nice to see other OS's hitting the shelves. anything that detracts from the space windows would be occuping.

  • What Timothy SHOULD have used as title .... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Daeron ( 4056 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @11:00AM (#2809307)
    is that this is the First Official CD Release of FreeBSD by the DaemonNews Crew. FreeBSD by itself has been available on CD for as long as i can remember .... (at least back to the 2.2.x days).

  • Sigh. This submission is almost completely wrong. (Score:4, Flamebait)

    by Palin Majere ( 4000 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @11:05AM (#2809327)
    FreeBSD has had "official" CD sellers for a damn long time. Just flip through freebsdmall [freebsdmall.com]'s history list and see how long they've been selling them for. Oh, and I hate to break it to you, but FreeBSD's been sold in chain-stores like CompUSA for quite a while too.

    Now, had anybody (the original submitter, or the Slashdot staff) actually bothered to read this, they would've noticed that it said that this is Daemon News' first time carrying official FreeBSD CDs. Which isn't true either, based on the Daemon News online store, but hey. This is Slashdot. What do we care about actual fact?

    I mean, geez. Come on, Slashdot staff, can't you actually take 30 seconds and read the @#$#ing article you're posting?

    • Re:Sigh. This submission is almost completely wron (Score:4, Troll)

      by SirSlud ( 67381 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @11:14AM (#2809370) Homepage
      I think you're the one that read this wrong.

      Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD.

      our which means, their, which means Daemon News. So its Daemon News' first time offering 4.5 on CD. So yeah, it's not news, but the submission isn't wrong. What bothers me about the way things are going, submissions are turning more and more into (community-level, granted) ads.

      Ah well.
      • our which means, their, which means Daemon News. So its Daemon News' first time offering 4.5 on CD. So yeah, it's not news, but the submission isn't wrong. What bothers me about the way things are going, submissions are turning more and more into (community-level, granted) ads.

        It's the difference between "First Official CD Release of FreeBSD" and "DaemonNews' First Official CD Release of FreeBSD". The former is news, the second is a press release. It's not "wrong", it's just kind of....yellow (cf. Hearst).
    • It is not wrong. It *is* the first release of Daemon News. Before they were sold by others, such as Walnut Creek etc.
    • You'd have to both read the posting pretty carefully *and* know some history behind the FreeBSD distro to figure out what's going on here. Looking at the posts on this artcle, it's clear that a lot of people think this is the very first time you could get FreeBSD on CD.

      Hell, I had a subscription to the Walnut Creek CD's back in the 2.2.x days -- I think I still have 2.2.6 hanging around here someplace.

    • Guess what? The original submitter of the aritcle is Chris Coleman what is the Editor in Chief of daemonnews.org.

      So I am pretty sure that the original submitter bothered to read this, and that is why the slashdot staff posted it verbatim. Who looks like they didn't read the @#$#ing article now?

      How your post got modded up to +5 is beyond me.

    • It's whoever wrote the headline that can't read.

      I noticed this morning on freeBSD.announce. I read it wrong myself to start with but seeing as I can remember a bit further back than Timothy i said "eh, but I've seen it in the shop? ah it's Daemon News's first CD, big deal."

      In fact I'd forgotten all about it until I came here and wondered what all the fuss was about.

      we live in a world of hype & attention grabbing.

      I'm sure it must satisfy a deep human need for novelty. Neoteny at work I suppose.

      .

  • Why not a support fee? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by GdoL ( 460833 )
    There are already Cds with this. So why not create a way tosupport, wich should be reliable and tax deductible, for donate the money? It would be far less expensive, didn't had to have a hard logistics, only an account on some emonet stuff and a piece of paper for tax deductions!
    • I just got this from the Free BSD site:
      http://www.freebsd.org

      Even if you're not a programmer, there are other ways to contribute to FreeBSD. The FreeBSD Foundation is a non-profit organization for which direct contributions are fully tax deductible. Please contact bod@FreeBSDFoundation.org for more information or write to: The FreeBSD Foundation, 7321 Brockway Dr. Boulder, CO. 80303. USA
      • Can you find out if that is good for all the countrys, like frosty Canada and sunny Brazil? Or if they have branchs on other country so people can contribute and get his/hers tax deductions?
    • Cylogistics (DaemonNews) just isn't big enough to be the main support stop for FreeBSD. Although I believe that they offer support, there's no way they could handle all the support calls even for just North America.
  • I have an extra 42 gigs of HD space (2 + 40) that I'd like to pop into a Pentium 200 system with 128 megs of RAM and run as a misc file/web/mp3 server. Coming from a Mandrake 8.1 environment, how well do you think I'd love FreeBSD?
    • FreeBSD is a nice, stable Unix. I haven't used it for any great length, but my impressions were that it's at least as good as Linux. I was quite happy with it.
    • Dunno how well you'd love FreeBSD (I think it's pretty swell), but I'll bet you are going to have problems getting a P200 motherboard to be able to handle a 40 GB disk.
    • The install isn't hard. You will be fine as long as you are comfortable with the command-line.
      Its a sweet system, especially if you want stability to be you first priority.
      • I'm good with the command line; I use bash all the time at home and telnetted into a Solaris system all the time in college. How is FreeBSD in terms of maintainability of things like NFS, Samba and Apache servers?
        • I'm good with the command line; I use bash all the time at home and telnetted into a Solaris system all the time in college. How is FreeBSD in terms of maintainability of things like NFS, Samba and Apache servers?

          The standard configuration tools that you'll see in most Linux distributions work. The FreeBSD folks are also very good about including documentation and plenty of sample configuration files for manual reference.

          Anyone who feels at home with a Linux distribution such as Debian should be quite happy with FreeBSD as well. If you want a central configurator for everything, such as is offered with RedHat, you may have difficulty.

          Check out the Daemon News site. You can order a very nicely written FreeBSD book to go along with the CDs. It covers many common BSD and UNIX tasks, as well as pretty much everything that's unique to FreeBSD.

    • It will work fine and you will be happy with it. I've been running smb, ssh, smtp, pop, nfs, dns, dhcp, ldp, ipfw and natd services on a 486/133 with 64MB RAM for about 5 years now. I upgrade the machine to STABLE at 18-month intervals and watch the security notices closely.

      I've been subscribed to the company formerly known as Walnut Creek's FreeBSD subscription service since somewhere in the early 2.2.x's. Although I only used about every fourth release of the CDs I received, the money was going where I wanted it, when I wanted it.

      If you haven't been beyond Linux, FreeBSD has a lot to teach you. It is a strong server OS.

  • Native Java ? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by FauxPasIII ( 75900 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @11:19AM (#2809405)
    This release is supposed to be the first one to include out of the box, native support for Java [daemonnews.org], right ? Does anyone know if they are still on track with that ?

    • Re:Native Java ? (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      My understanding is this will be the first official release with native Java2 binaries (if the Java compatibility tests from Sun are successfully completed in time).

      Native JDK1.1.8 has been available for as long as I have used FreeBSD. I have used the native 1.2.2 and 1.3.1 jdk's, but you have to build them from source and accept Sun's licensing agreement.

    • Re:Native Java ? (Score:4, Informative)

      by Krellis ( 19116 ) <slashdot@@@krellis...org> on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @12:21PM (#2809814) Homepage
      You are correct, Java support has been incorporated into the FreeBSD-STABLE source tree since briefly before the 4.5-PRERELEASE code freeze, and has been in testing since then. As far as I know it's working fine, and should be in 4.5-RELEASE without any worries. The FreeBSD Foundation [freebsdfoundation.org] worked with Sun to get this licensing taken care of.
      • Uh, not quite. You can build it as a port without having to go through Sun's licensing thing and separate download, and packages may be included on the new CDs, but:

        find /usr/src -name "*java*"
        /usr/src/contrib/file/Magdir/java
        /usr/src/contrib/perl5/eg/cgi/javascript.cgi

        So it's not in the source tree, which includes, unlike linux, a complete system. Vi, not a stripped-down Vim, for example.

        Still, this represents a nice bump in convenience for FreeBSD and Java together. And it's a whole lot nicer than using linux java binaries. That's also part of the recent achievement; I haven't installed it yet, but it apparently means you don't need the linux-jdk1.2.2 port to build java 1.2 for FreeBSD, which is great.

  • I have an ok knowledge of Unix's (the vendor supplied ones) my question is BSDi did that die in the hands of the wrs takeover or where did it come from ?

    FreeBSD looks quite nice and I like the idea of the ports system

    but what are its high's and lows ?

    regards

    john jones
    • (a deltic so please dont moan about spelling but the content)

      delta'ic or del'tic adj.

      Word History: A Greek letter sits at the mouth of many rivers. Noticing the resemblance between the island formed by sediment at the mouth of a river such as the Nile and the triangular shape of their letter delta, the Greeks gave the name delta to such an island. English borrowed this sense from Greek, although the word delta appeared first in English as the name of the letter, in a work written possibly around 1200. The sense "alluvial deposit" is not recorded until 1555, when delta is used with reference to the Nile River delta.

      So, I can't help but wonder what being a Greek letter has to do with bad spelling?

      Dinivin
    • BSDi is no more. When Wind River bought them they took the embedded stuff that BSDi was working on and hired a few FreeBSD programmers. Since the economy in the US has turned to crap, they fired all of the FreeBSD programmers.

      I have been a FreeBSD CD purchaser for a long time, since the Walnut Creek FreeBSD 2.1 days. At that time part of the money for the CD's went back into the project. Since the Wind River take over, they have stopped putting money back in.

      The guys over at Deamonnews have started publishing a magazine and started doing the CD subscriptions. They have said that they will put money back into the project. So I dropped by Wind River subscription and decided to put my money with these guys. I'm also a subscriber to the magazine and have been very happy with it also.
  • I've have enormous trouble installing 4.3 and 4.4 (and I'm not the only one). The base install goes fine as always, but when installing additional packages, the problems start. The first packages are installed at normal speed, but after a few minutes, it takes about 2 minutes/package, no matter how big or small it is. I've tried the cd, ftp install, it doesn't matter. Does anyone know whether or not that problem is fixed ?

    Marko No. 5
    • Is this for every package? I've seen this myself on a package or two off of the cdrom (but not every one). If you are doing an install off of a cdrom, you might have a bad CD, or your cdrom is having problems reading it. I had huge problems installing off of a CDRW (where it would cough and spit out errors), but when I burned the iso to a CDR everything worked fine. Anyway, you might try burning a new cd.
    • FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE was, in my experience, badly broken in many and sundry ways. Maybe it worked better from CDs, but all the FTP installs I did were horrible. Additionally, there were some major problems with the TCP implementation that have now been fixed. I had a good experience with 4.1.1, 4.2, and 4.3, but 4.4 was a nightmare for me - I've been installing 4.4 and immediately upgrading to the -STABLE branch to avoid all the problems in the distribution.
  • It sounds vaguely naughty. Is it something one can do in public without getting arrested or heckled?

    I think they meant to say 'gauging.' Simple (and easy-to-do) transposition.
  • But /. told me *BSD was dying!
    • Do you believe everything you read on the internet? Probably not, or you'd be posting from a Windows XP system. (You aren't, are you?)
  • On my shelf next to me, there's an official FreeBSD 2.1.7 release cd, dating back to March 1997 [freebsd.org]. Makes me wonder whether they're introducing time travel as part of the 4.5 release. The release notes say nothing about that, however, and recent activity on the mailing lists doesn't mention time travel as well. It's probably some kind of secret.
  • I recently tried installing FreeBSD on my old P166 machine. This box has seen about a dozen Linux distributions dating back to Slackware 3.0 with no problems.

    The FreeBSD installation program freezes nearly immediately after booting the CD. There is nothing I could do (BIOS, options, etc) to get the installation to go.

    So I installed NetBSD (with no problems) and am extremely impressed. I highly recommend NetBSD to anyone wanting a non-bloated pure UNIX installation. It just works and is very nice.

    The package system blows me away. Adding a new package is as simple as 'pkg_add mozilla'. It downloads the package and all dependencies and installs flawlessly. I have not tried Debian's package system, but BSD's pkg and pkgsrc system is in my mind perfect.
    • Too bad you had a poor experience with the FreeBSD installer. I have had no problems at all but that's just my experience.

      You are dead on about the package system. Truly head and shoulders above RPM (please, it's just my opinion). The ports section of FreeBSD is a work of art. There is a great program (pkgdb) that manages ports wonderfully. You can easily check to see if your installed packages are up to date and what you need to fix if they are not.

      -Donald
    • On FreeBSD, Real Men(tm) do:

      cd /usr/ports/genre/cool_proggie
      make && make install

      Why mess around with precompiled binaries when you've got a beautiful source fetch script + makefile sitting there begging to be used? If it's compiled on *your* box, you can bet it will run on *your* box!
      • Ports is for weenies. :P

        Real Men download tarballs using FTP and figure out their own damn config options and find needed patches by scouring old Usenet postings, mailing list archives, and Magic 8 Balls.

        After failing to enjoy either RPM or .deb very much I did try FreeBSD because of ports (well, plus wanting to just try it out for a while anyhow), and I found there was too much other stuff that got in my way (mostly culture shock I'm sure).

        Now I'm tinkering with how I might get my own rudimentary ports system up and running as a way of extending a very basic install of a system like Debian, rather than simply managing package downloads, patching, configure options, build processes, and installation stuff all by hand. If I do it on one machine. I should be able to automate it on a second machine.
        • Real Men download tarballs using FTP and figure out their own damn config options and find needed patches by scouring old Usenet postings, mailing list archives, and Magic 8 Balls.

          Okay, well, I guess I'm half of a Real Man then. :)

          I do download tarballs and figure out my own config options; but the only time I ever use the patch command is when I've been sent a FreeBSD Security Update that tells me to; I think the last time was when I patched telnetd a year or so ago. :)

          However, the only Standard Tools that I have compiled from tarballs on my FreeBSD box are Apache, sendmail, openssl, openssh, and socks5. These are all programs that I know I will never remove from the box (unfortunately I can't run qmail; I do actually need sendmail, sigh). The only ones with very wacky config directives are Apache and sendmail. (The gateway box runs Apache with CGI turned off, along with a lot of other things disabled; mostly it's a front-end for the web servers that sit behind it on my LAN.)

          However, ports are really really good for one major thing: experimenting with new software. I played with about a dozen or so text editors before settling on jed (which I'm still running from the port). Also, they're handy for installing tools that you need to compile certain tarballs. (For example, automake tends to get deleted off my system once I've got Stuff Installed. Another one is GCC-2.95. I don't have nearly enough drive space on the gateway box to compile it but I can bring it in as a port without too much pain when I really need it.)

    • I had the a similar problem with the installer. It would croak during installation. I've had many distros of Linux on the machine, without ever having a problem with installation. The installer was having page faults due to the cdrom. I used different Cdrom's with the same errors. I decided now to try Openbsd or Netbsd.
  • Does this come with a boot floppy? Considering the junk floppies I have around (and new ones aren't much better) I could use one.

    • Re:extras (Score:2, Informative)

      by Rich_Morin ( 547665 )
      Previous distributions have included image files for the boot floppies; I assume that this one will, as well. Most modern PCs can boot directly from the CD-ROM, however.
  • well, it would appear that, at the time of posting, this will be the only non-troll-y, un-stupid comment attached to this article (imho).

    come on my fellow freebsders, hit reply and lets show the world that we are happy with our lot (and of course, happy to try other OSen on occasion).

    personally, i came to freebsd from a purely professional angle as the result of working with sunos 4, then on to bsd/386 [bsdi] (1.1, i still have the source cd) and now to the pure joy that is freebsd 4.4-stable.

    i don't use ports, packages (and i've tried debian and apt-get) or anything like that. i like the whole "incremental improvement" buzz of downloading source and patches and installing them myself. hell, i even like breaking open the occasional header file and inserting a "#include or somesuch.

    i can't believe i'm the only one.

    si

    (ps, excuse the lower case, but my shift button has broken and i can't be bothered to use the left one for anything but brackets)
  • it is also the first *BSD OS to have version above 4.4.

  • Time to desert Linux ? (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    We are running on all desktops and servers SuSE 7.0 Linux plus Win2K as second operating system on the desktops. However I am getting increasingly worried about security issues.
    Quite frankly it is almost impossible for us (due to time constraints) to keep track of all software updates necessary to keep the firewall and main server secure. The SuSE distributions are at times painful to use for upgrades - As far as I can see the SuSE scripts cant handle all our configurations. We tried on the server to upgrade from 7.0 to 7.1 SuSE but numerous reconfigurations were required to keep the running e.g. yellow pages - so we didnt upgrade in the end. I guess we would need to sit down several days to do it properly - but simply dont have the time. It is beyond me why distros as SuSE must make it that hard to upgrade. It seems that upgrading involves inevitably to reconfigure half of the system because numerous configuration file formats have changed which the SuSE scripts cant handle. I really wonder why we do pay for distros - only to have several GB of software which we dont install anyway ?

    The firewall machine acts as a proxy, masquarading, DSL access point - so I do regard it as the most crucial point to tackle. The firewall log is now spilling out lines as if there is no tomorrow, the fw crashes the DSL regularly over weekend (absolutely no clue why) and we could probably employ another person just to check the logs. I am now thinking about switching over to BSD on the firewall (and possibly later on the server).
    My reasoning is that BSD is less exposed since there are fewer systems around and secondly it should be easier to keep track of security problems since development is more centralised. Any views on that ? What would be the choice FreeBSD, OpenBSD ?
    • My preference is to use a special-purpose box for the first-level firewall. Packet filtering isn't a job that requires a full OS and a simple state machine doesn't provide many oportunities for hacking. If you need fancier services, you can provide those by means of a second-level firewall; I suspect that OpenBSD is a better answer for this than FreeBSD (it certainly tries hard to be!), but I have no personal experience with it.
    • I update FreeBSD all the time directly from CVS. It gets from 10 to 75 updates/day (in the stable branch--I don't touch the current branch).
      One command to update the source for everything on the system, one command to compile it, one command to install it.
      Everything gets compiled using my favorite compiler settings which I put in /etc/make.conf
      (-s -O2 -fschedule-insns2 -malign-functions=4 -fexpensive-optimizations -fomit-frame-pointer -pipe)

      Piece of cake.

    • You only mention having one firewall. It sounds to me like you've moved past the time where one firewall is sufficient.

      Normally, big organizations use two firewalls. One firewall sits at the main connection to the 'net. Behind this firewall are the organization's public servers; web servers and so on.

      Another machine which sits behind this firewall is also a firewall. This second firewall is much more paranoid; ideally it's just running a SOCKS5 proxy and maybe a few other proxies, no NAT. Anyway, it blocks all incoming server accesses: you can't run a server on any machine behind it that will talk to the public 'net. You put every machine that doesn't need to be a public server behind the second firewall.

      This makes it much easier to relax. Intruders have to compromise two firewalls in order to reach your organization's private documents and databases.

      Normally, the area between the two firewalls where the servers live is called the DMZ. You can find out much more about this method of firewalling in an excellent book with a rather dull title: Building Internet Firewalls by Elizabeth D. Zwicky, Simon Cooper, D. Brent Chapman, and Deborah Russell. [amazon.com]

      Anyway, back to your original question. Generally if you want to run a pure firewall, with no non-standard services, and don't mind a certain degree of hair, OpenBSD is recommended. It's got a stellar security record, and will dramatically reduce the number of updates you have to make. FreeBSD's advantages usually lie in performance: but with a firewall, performance issues matter a lot less than they do with, say, a database server. FreeBSD is far from insecure though, but OpenBSD is definitely up there in the sky as the God of Freenix Security.

      But lastly, I will tell you something that you'll find out anyway if you read Zwicky: Masquerading provides inferior security to application-based proxies. Get NEC SOCKS5, or at least Dante SOCKS4 running (if you don't use any UDP services, SOCKS4 is fine). Turn off the NAT (or masq or whatever you linuxies call it :)... Your firewall will thank you.

  • You can cut the cost in half by subscribing [bsdmall.com] to one or more operating systems. They also ship subscriptions sooner than ragular orders.

  • _NOT_ 1st CD. 1st CD from DN. (Score:4, Informative)

    by Lazaru5 ( 28995 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @01:58PM (#2810588)
    "Official" FreeBSD CDs have been available for years and years, at least as far as 2.1.X (as that's the earliest I've seen) and probably earlier.

    This announcement marks the first CD published by Daemon News, which took over the CD distribution after Wind River (who did 4.4 after inheriting it from BSDi (who did 4.3 and 4.2 as well I think after inheriting it from Walnut Creek CDROM (who did all of them up to 4.2))) stopped.

    The CDs have always been "Official"ly mastered by Jordan Hubbard as the Release Manager. The only difference is that the only .iso's available have been for CD #1 of the 4 CD Set. Now there's an .iso for all 4 CDs.

    Hopefully the majority of people know this (at least the first part), but the story title could be confusing to those who don't, or those who have limited memory capacity.

  • Important clarification on the wording of this (Score:5, Informative)

    by jkh ( 3999 ) on Wednesday January 09, 2002 @02:02PM (#2810629) Homepage
    I'm sure that being first or official isn't what Chris meant to imply and is as distressed by the heading of "BSD: First Official CD Release of FreeBSD" as everyone else is.

    Just to clarify this for everyone else, there is no longer any "official" CD publisher of FreeBSD in the sense that they're somehow blessed or endorsed by the FreeBSD project. The project releases all the ISO images one would need to build a full 4-CD boxed set, that being the benchmark product standard established by Walnut Creek CDROM, and simply leaves it up for grabs as to who publishes them in whatever packaged form.

    The ISO images themselves are called "official" simply to denote the fact that they're the authoritative reference for FreeBSD release bits. Anyone who publishes something which doesn't deviate too much from this standard is more than free to call the resulting product "FreeBSD" and sell it/give it away/rub it on their bodies/whatever as such.

    Needless to say, there also are and have been multiple publishers of FreeBSD CDROM products, so this isn't exactly the "first" such distribution of FreeBSD on CD. But hey, this is Slashdot so two errors in one sentence is actually a fairly high standard when taken in context. :)
  • I think I shall forego cvsup'ing and just get the CD. Why? Because I'm lazy. ;) God bless /usr/ports. BSD forever (or at least longer than Linux... wait, it's already outlived Linux).
  • Correct/Forgive me if I'm wrong, but wasn't FreeBSD released for many years on CD via Walnut Creek? In fact, I have a FreeBSD 2.2.6 CD set right here that clearly says "Walnut Creek" on it.... so, is this some sort of 2nd official official?

    I know Walnut Creek was bought by Digital River (or something like that), and has thus stopped making the CD-ROMs, but the title is somewhat misleading.
  • from the freebsd-java mailing list
    > The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has secured a
    > license from Sun Microsystems to distribute a native FreeBSD version of
    > both the Java Development Kit (JDK) and the Java Runtime Environment (JRE).
    > Thanks to the great efforts of the FreeBSD Java team, these should be
    > available for inclusion with the upcoming release of FreeBSD 4.5 in
    > January, 2002.

    I'm looking forward to this. It was possible to get the sources from sun and bootstrap it with the linux-jdk, compile it and install it, but it doing it wasn't completely pain free.

    Now it will be available with the CD install. (and possibly as a port?)

  • Why I like FreeBSD (Score:2, Interesting)

    by jetski666 ( 119633 )
    This is just my opinion. Nothing more.

    After trying to use Linux (redhat 6x/7x, mandrake 7x/8x, debian, slackware) I found that none were upgradeable as easy as FreeBSD. Try upgrading from Redhat 7.1 -> 7.2. I've had it fail on 3 different machines (at work). Nightmares doing that. Plus everything is changing on a .x release. Debian sounds the best, but it didn't even install on the computer I tried. Mandrake just died one day (no clue)...the os wouldn't boot and i just gave up. Slackware is good, but it doesn't seem to have the documentation of FreeBSD. I used to love Linux, until I used it. The biggest problems I have had are with dependencies and non-kernel related problems. I think a centrally managed OS like the BSD's are much more efficient. With kernel releases every few months for Linux, how can you expect it to be stable? I'm a business person. I value time and money. /stand/sysinstall is the greatest utility FreeBSD has. From that 1 utility I can change anything I need to. Simple as that. Redhat had utilities that don't even work right!

    BSD is just rock solid. It's easy to install, upgrade and use. It has been proven. I can't wait to use 4.5 and try it out. Linux is trying to emulate Windows, and it never will. Linux should find it's niche over time. I know BSD has and it's thriving. Doing everything for everyone is bad, and I know BSD isn't.
    • I hear you... I really do. But I still don't run any flavor of BSD myself. Right now, I find I'd rather have support for more devices, and learn to deal with some of the quirks in most Linux distros.

      (Linux has always been very stable for me as a server. It runs into serious problems only when you start trying to make it into a desktop system and extensively use the X environment. In fact, X itself works just fine with a trimmed down window manager like fvwm. It's just not very "cool" or flashy, and not at all user-friendly when you need to add new items to menus.)

      As a business user, I'd assume you're trying to use BSD (or Linux) in a server situation? If so, I'm not sure why you had so many issues with Linux. On the other hand, BSD installs all the basic stuff you need to run a very stable web, ftp, mail, news, etc. type of server - so I'm not faulting you at all for making that choice.
      • Why does everyone like to have support for devices they probably don't have?

        The only thing that I'm missing out on is support for this Iomega Ditto Professional Max or whatnot, which is a bullshit tape drive that I got for free. *Shrug*

  • I bought the FreeBSD 4.4 cd's recently (d'oh!), which included the "FreeBSD toolkit"; what the toolkit consisted of was the files which go in /usr/ports/distfiles (your unpatched src tarballs, in otherwords). They were fucked up, as they were ports for 4.3, so what I would like to know is...A)do the DN cd's provide "extras" ala the "toolkit"?B)Are they really "extras", or just rehashed ports?
    I did keep the cd's, fwiw; Since I'd already downloaded the ISO's previously I gave the cd's to a friend of mine who mostly works on NT (when he's not swearing at me for introducing him to FreeBSD, that is). /stand/sysinstall does consistently hang installing large packages (I noticed it on Gnome and KDE), fwiw. I had no idea (except trying to run gdb? strace?) how to figure out why, though. Since pkg_add worked, I didn't sweat it too much.
  • I'm really pumped for this release since it will contain the new java stuff from sun. Now you won't have to install the linux-base just to run java-1.3.1 :)

    ~Shane
  • One of the great things about FreeBSD is the ability to upgrade to -STABLE, ie new releases via the CVSup utility. The software goes out and finds the source needed to be updated. Then you give the commands "make buildworld", compile a new kernel, and then in single user mode "make installworld". (/etc gets merged seperately)

    It can take less than an hour on a fast computer with SCSI drive.
  • I just got an email back from BSD mall, incase anyone was wondering what was going on with Wind River:

    Date: Wed, 9 Jan 2002 10:45:28 -0800 (PST)
    From: Chris Coleman
    To: Mark C Ballew
    Cc:
    Subject: Re: FreeBSD Subscription
    In-Reply-To:

    The subscriptions will not automatically be transferred to us. I have no
    idea what Wind River will do with them.

    -Chris

    On Wed, 9 Jan 2002, Mark C Ballew wrote:

    > bsdmall,
    >
    > I have been a long time subscriber to the FreeBSD distribution from Walnut
    Creek. When Wind River took over, I still recieved my subscription. Will you
    be taking over subscriptions now? If so, I would like to continue my
    subscription.
  • Does anybody know if there's a place I can check to see if changes made to -CURRENT are being brought into 4.5? I'm particularly curious about some changes made to the IDE CD-Burner technology, but I'm pretty sure it'd be a waste of (their) time to e-mail developers or mailing lists, particularly if there's a place that lists all the changes for the new release.

    (Or maybe I should sit on my hands until the 20th, when I can check it online. ;-)

    • Check the release notes. They should be on the FreeBSD Foundation main site.

      Releases are snapshots of -STABLE I believe made at the time of the release. If you want to find out whether a particular change made it into a release, you need to know whether the code change migrated from -CURRENT to -STABLE before the release was done. A lot of stuff in -CURRENT is pretty experimental though and takes a while to get over to -STABLE. Your best bet is probably to check the release notes, or of course the hairy method which is to download the sucker, install it, and read /usr/src/ to find out what code is there if you think you'll recognize the changes. :)

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