
FreeBSD 8.1 released - kunley
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.1R/announce.html
======
patrickgzill
ZFS boot support is huge. Now you can build big fileservers on commodity
hardware without having to worry about Solaris or OpenSolaris driver
availability.

~~~
jbronn
Because I'm concerned about the future of OpenSolaris, I downloaded 8.1 and
attempted to get a ZFS boot install going -- I was unsuccessful. The process
is extremely complex, and the best doc you're going to get is a wiki page with
incomplete and complex instructions:

<http://wiki.freebsd.org/RootOnZFS/GPTZFSBoot>

Moreover, there's no support for ZFS boot in the installer (sidebar: the
installer has barely changed since when I first tried FreeBSD 2.2 in 1998).

I'd say stick to OpenSolaris if you require ZFS boot; alternatively keep boot
on UFS and use ZFS for your data filesystems.

~~~
munkyboy
for an easy install, use the PCBSD installer (all graphical). Choose to
install just vanilla FreeBSD and format your primary disk as ZFS

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adbge
I spent some time earlier fiddling with FreeBSD 8.1 RC and was really blown
away by how much more advanced ZFS is compared to every other filesystem I've
ever used. It's feature rich and it's very intuitive to use and configure. You
don't need to be running a massive pool of disks to benefit from the features
of ZFS, either. I was just using it on my desktop and transparent, filesystem-
level compression and date deduplication are really cool.

And then there's ports, of course, which is awesome, especially if you prefer
to build your software from source.

I'd probably move off of Linux as my desktop OS if I could use Mangler on
FreeBSD.

~~~
sivers
I'm a huge FreeBSD fan and run it on all my servers. I've tried many times to
use it as my main desktop/laptop system, but it keeps falling short in those
few damn nice-but-proprietary things like Skype and Flash.

I found a Linux that feels like FreeBSD, though. Arch Linux:
<http://www.archlinux.org/> \+
[http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_D...](http://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Arch_Compared_to_Other_Distributions#FreeBSD)

Doesn't have ZFS, but stays minimalist and constantly updated.

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cturner
Something that has surprised me in the free unix world is the ongoing strong
support and emphasis on sendmail. I notice openbsd highlights updates in its
releases also.

I don't know much about MTAs. From what I read, sendmail has a bad reputation
for being complicated and unwieldy. I've played around with it a little and
found it cryptic. But mail systems seem to be inherently complicated, so maybe
sendmail attracts a lot of criticism that could is in fact only slightly less
true of all programs of that sort.

What's the thinking about ongoing strong support for sendmail?

~~~
jolan
sendmail has a BSD-compatible license and other MTAs don't. postfix's license
has some weird clauses due to IBM. Exim is GPL.

There is ongoing work in OpenBSD on "opensmtpd":

<http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.sbin/smtpd/>

~~~
beagle3
qmail has been placed in the public domain a few years ago.

~~~
jolan
And development on it stopped a few years ago as well.

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sgt
With the future of OpenSolaris being as uncertain as it is, I see FreeBSD as
the potential rescue. I've been a user of (Open)Solaris, FreeBSD for many
years and they are simply rock stable. FreeBSD just needs better Java support
and I'd host all my Java EE stuff on it.

~~~
c00p3r
What do you mean by better Java support? That JRE doesn't support kqueue, aio,
and other base functionality?

btw, what's wrong with openjdk6 port?

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thepumpkin1979
This was my first time with FreeBSD, it wasn't that hard. I downloaded the
amd64 boot iso and run it on a VM. I choose minimal and started to extract the
source on /. Pretty cool. Still extracting though :)

Give it a try: 1\. Download the i386 iso 2\. Follow these instructions
[http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/in...](http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install-
start.html)

(on the disk partitioning part, press A so it will be automatic)

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flojo
Flippen wish Debian had a better release cycle. Its amazing how FreeBSD gets
it right.

Well done guys.

~~~
flojo
Debian 6.0 "Squeeze" frozen

<http://lists.debian.org/debian-announce/2010/msg00009.html>

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koenigdavidmj
zfsloader. Sweet, I can boot off of it now!

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c00p3r
Seems like zfs is still unstable, at least if you take a look at mailing lists
- people still reports crashes and problems. There are more hype than
stability.. ^_^

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first
first post

~~~
sgt
Has the slashdot/reddit/digg-ification of HN begun?

~~~
koenigdavidmj
It's probably becoming a meme in itself to point this out, but they don't want
us saying that until we've been around for a year.

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heatdeath
Does FreeBSD have any real purpose anymore except as the base of your new
proprietary OS?

~~~
crad
While it seems your comment is flamebait, it is true that many of the
proprietary hardware appliance platforms I've run across are FreeBSD.
Surprisingly, I'm seeing more and more Linux in said devices too.

~~~
nailer
(Responding to your comment, not the troll grandparent): I'd agree. It
wouldn't surprise me if the largest financial benefactor of the various BSD's
work was NetApp.

