miércoles, 24 de marzo de 2010

FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.2 and introduces a few
new features. There will be one more release from this branch to allow future improvements to be made available in the 7-STABLE branch but at this point most developers are focused on 8-STABLE.

Some of the highlights:

  • ZFS updated to version 13
  • new boot loader gptzfsboot supports GPT and ZFS
  • hwpmc(4) enhancements including support for core2/i7 processor and pmcannotate(8)
  • new mfiutil and mptutil tools for widely used RAID controllers
  • NULL pointer vulnerability mitigation
  • bind updated to 9.4-ESV
  • Gnome updated to 2.28.2
  • KDE updated to 4.3.5
  • Perl updated to 5.10

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sábado, 13 de marzo de 2010

Taking a look at PC-BSD 8.0

Toward the end of 2009 I took FreeBSD 8.0 for a test drive on an old PC. The experiment went so well that I was immediately looking forward to trying out PC-BSD, a desktop variant of the popular FreeBSD operating system. Unfortunately for me, the new version of PC-BSD wasn't to arrive for several weeks. Like a penniless child with his nose pressed up against the window of a candy store, I went over to the project's website.

The PC-BSD site maintains a very similar look and feel to its FreeBSD counterpart. That is to say, it's well crafted, easy to read, painless to navigate and filled with lots of useful information. The installation documentation especially is a well-done piece of work. Open source projects, and their developers, often take flak for putting so little effort into the user manual. This is not the case with PC-BSD. While browsing, I read the teaser for the upcoming release - and good things were planned. New features include better ZFS support, a live DVD, improvements to the package updating system, the ability to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit system and better binary support for Linux programs.

It felt like a long wait, but in February the PC-BSD team released their latest offering, version 8.0, and I downloaded their live DVD. It's a hefty image, weighing in at just over 3 GB. There's also a USB image file for people who like to carry their operating system in their pocket. For my PC-BSD test drive I used a desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM), my HP notebook (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM) and a virtual environment, provided by VirtualBox.

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sábado, 6 de marzo de 2010

FreeBSD 7.3-RC2 Available!

The third and what should be last of the test builds for the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, 7.3-RC2, is available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The target schedule as well as the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

The schedule has slipped by a bit over a week so the actual target for the release announcement is really about a week and a half from now. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list.

There are known issues with the Radeon video driver that have caused some people problems. The problems have been nebulous enough that we have decided to not hold up the release due to that specific issue. At the point that driver has stabilized it will be handled as an Errata Notice. So far that is the only big problem we've been tracking as part of the release that has not been resolved in one way or another.

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