FreeBSD 6.0 released

[prathapml]

homepage- http://www.FreeBSD.org

It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. This release is the next step in delivering the high performance and enterprise features that have been under development in the FreeBSD 5.x series for that last several years. Some of the many changes since 5.4 include:

* Significant performance improvements to the filesystem and direct disk access layers of the OS. The filesystem is now multithreaded and can take full advantage of multiple CPU systems.

* Expanded support for wireless networking adapters and new support for the WPA wireless security protocol.

* Experimental support for the PowerPC platform.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list, available at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.0R/relnotes.html

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.0R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng

[Zxian]

Muahaha.... go terminal!

[prathapml]

Yeah, seriously....

Go FreeBSD indeed. And if you are comfortable with terminal, even better!

As I remember, we initially started using linux in 1999 and loved it for its non-bloat nature. But now pretty much every mainstream linux distro is getting slow-running & bloated (except gentoo to an extent).

And from the other end of the spectrum, FreeBSD is getting more compatible with linux, hardware support, its getting GUIs (like KDE, GNOME...) & is still secure & light-weight. So I favour FreeBSD now.

[Gouki]

Bloat free Linux is **** Small Linux! 17Mbs if I remember right.

[prathapml]

Try doing any remotely useful things with **** Small Linux! It just cant!

Lets say, a KDE desktop, OpenOffice document printing, hosting a PHP/MySQL portal....

[Gouki]

Never said you could... Just said it was bloat free.

[DigeratiPrime]

linux is really just a kernel, it doesnt make sense to say its bloated.

The desktop environment (KDE, GNOME, or XFCE) could be, but bloated usually describes overun software packages.

Fortunately Linux is a modular system so the components are interchangeable. Linux is about choice, the user can choose a distro like DSL or the Knoppix DVD. BTW Knoppix, although being probably the most bloated distro, performs incredibly fast in my experience! B)

Edited November 6, 2005 by DigeratiPrime

[Incroyable HULK]

Too many choices made me switch to Gentoo...

[phkninja]

Linus has said the linux kernel is bloated. He and others are currently thrying to remove 200,000 lines of code from the kernel as certain filesystem access etc i sno longer required.

[suryad]

Interesting phkninja. Wehre did you get that tidbit of info from?

[phkninja]

*UPDATE*

Misread an article. The article said "The 2.6.13 kernel was released on 28 August 2005. it added some 200,000 new lines of code, and had the same number of lines modified". [Linux Format, P.54 LXF73 December 2005]

But from what i can gather from the article and from what i can read on the internet (from various sources), the kernel code shall be modified to improve new features and to remove code that is no longer required. The kernel team have added new features to the 2.6.13 kernel that make old features redundant but also make the kernel more versiile (one such new feature allows access to the existing filesystems with more languages and create your own filesystems using a tool in the new kernel called fuse, which allows languages like perl and python to have the same control as the c code would usually allow.)

[suryad]

I dont get why people are making kernels so **** complicated. Just make it as streamlined and as tweaked and compact as is possible. Forget supporting existing filesystems and so on. They need to have the basic kernel with the one preferred filesystem and a certain set of really preferred basic configurations. If people then want support for other things then they just download patches that automatically update the kernel and add the functionality. Like XEN for example. If I understand it correctly it will be a major feature of the kernel? Then what about all those people who dont want to use it ever? They are going to be stuck with bloat. Makes no sense.

[prathapml]

Makes perfect sense.

Linux believes in choice. And for your info, "all those ppl who dont want to use it ever" can easily re-compile, or use a distro that doesnt have the extra file-systems & fuse by default.

And like DigeratiPrime said, its not LINUX itself thats bloated, its just a kernel - as a matter of fact, the windows kernel is far more bloated. Its just that all major linux DISTROS (distributions) are going downhill & getting slow (because of trying to emulate windows, instead of leveraging the inherent strengths of linux).