While this is not yet officially out, since there was no announcement made, we're very close to official release. Be aware, that this may, or may not, use the images available right now, so hold your horses until the announcement is made (or accept the risk).
Regardless of that, I'd like to remind everyone that FreeBSD is not 'just another OS out there' but an important piece of technology powering lots of things we often use: from Sony's PlayStation and WhatsApp, through Netflix and Yahoo, to Juniper and PFSense networking gear and EMC storage and FreeNAS appliance - and many, many more!
So, have you donated yet? We need FreeBSD and FreeBSD needs your support!
No offense meant, but knowing that a bunch of very profitable multinationals rely on FreeBSD doesn't make me more willing to donate my hard-earned paycheck :)
You have that problem not just in OSS, but basically all infrastructure donations. That's actually part of the reason why I think infrastructure should be government-backed in the sense, that "if everyone uses it/benefits from it it might be worthwhile to make everyone pay for it". For a lot of those things usage kind of scales with income. Not always, but more than in other cases.
And indeed governments be it the European Union and DARPA for example invest in Open Source.
However since it also isn't really like FreeBSD has huge amounts of money each individual donation helps a lot. That's basically where the money that could be taxed goes.
Also you kind of ensure that the projects you enjoy a lot make progress, thereby creating more job opportunities where you can work with those technologies.
I agree that big corporations should donate more. Maybe writing emails to them makes sense. Kind of making a good press/bad press campaign.
Like Apple building products that are based on government sponsored research and therefor shouldn't do every little thing to avoid taxes.
Companies invest such big amounts into marketing, selling themselves as good corporate cititzens. I really think that people should put more effort into calling out socially bad companies and praising good behavior. Then they have the choice whether they make marketing to counter or maybe invest and start to be good.
Would even be a cool project to track those things. All good and bad stories of companies.
Of course companies could try to manipulate that, but they are already trying to cover up bad stuff. I think that could make companies to be more inclined to do the socially good thing.
I really hope that marketing will kind of become the showing of how great a company behaves on the planet. Not just making TV spots that look like that.
Speaking of FBSD releases, is this were everyone gets their ISO images via torrent now? I know 11.0 isn't there yet (probably because it isn't released yet)
The last time I ran FreeBSD, it seemed like the way the ports worked made it, in practice, something like running Arch or Gentoo. The ports tree didn't seem to branch into any kind of stable platform. It's been some years, and I do remember some VuXML thing for checking for packages with known security vulnerabilities so you could just upgrade those. This is in contrast with, say, NetBSD's pkgsrc, which it looks like they try to keep in a stable state and rotate quarterly. This is also in contrast to OpenBSD, where a version of the ports tree is synced to the OS itself. (You can upgrade to a -current ports tree and run it on -stable, but that's not "supported", despite typically working.)
So, is that still the current state of affairs? I'm just the sort of person that prefers packages held at a fixed version and patched for a while. In a lot of ways, I like FreeBSD, but it appears to be, de-facto, in terms typically used to described Linux, a rolling-release server distribution. Perhaps some derivative or other project tries holding a stable set of packages or ports on FreeBSD for some time?
Leaving packages at a fixed version and patching them is a terrible idea. This is a Linux mindset and while it was fun for a few years it does not scale and it is not sane. You're effectively forking the software by diverging from upstream and then you have the fun of creating new security vulnerabilities by incorrectly backporting fixes. Go look at the update history for Apache HTTPD on RHEL -- this has happened several times in the past.
That said, since FreeBSD 10.0 there is now a stable "quarterly" branch which is enabled by default. The goal is to relieve you from the rolling release trauma for 3 months at a time. You get security and bug fixes: if it's very trivial, it's a backported patch; if it's a minor update, we will not hesitate to do that instead; if it's a major update and we don't trust backporting the fix, we push that update. The goal is to prevent major changes that could break compatibility or default behavior when possible, but that's not always achievable.
Anyway, it works pretty well. We will continue to strive to be better, but it's very usable. We heavily rely on the community for feedback and notification if something has been overlooked. Please try it out and let us know if you have any problems.
FreeBSD land seem a lot more package centric after the introduction of pkgng (now just pkg) a few years ago. It's, in my experience, fast, simple and reliable. Not half-baked like the old package system. Even among those why build themselves it seem fairly commom to use poudriere (a jailed package builder system) and then just install packages from there.
Other than what already was mentioned a lot of ports follow software's individual branches. There are multiple branches of PostgreSQL, PostGIS, ElasticSearch, etc. So you get to choose those and combinations of those, which is very unlike Arch Linux for example.
Guys, I landed in state where I can't do any upgrade:
root@slave:/ # freebsd-update -v debug fetch -F
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
Fetching public key from update.FreeBSD.org... fetch: http://update.FreeBSD.org/11.0-ALPHA3/i386/pub.ssl: Not Found
failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.
Apparently there is no 11.0-ALPHA3 version published anywhere. How do I upgrade to RC3 now?
I don't think FreeBSD update is supported from alpha. Just lie to it about what version you have. It does verification via checksums and knows what the end result is supposed to be so it will do the right thing. Just don't try to use this to go backwards.
root@slave:/ # freebsd-update upgrade -r 11.0-RC3 -v debug
Looking up update.FreeBSD.org mirrors... none found.
Fetching public key from update.FreeBSD.org... fetch: http://update.FreeBSD.org/11.0-ALPHA3/i386/pub.ssl: Not Found
failed.
No mirrors remaining, giving up.
I don't quite understand, the FreeBSD site has version 12 available and listed as it's current release where as 11 is only at rc3, which is strange that 11 is clearly older than 12?
I've been trying up upgrade my VPS since yesterday, but none of the mirrors freebsd-update tries to contact seem to carry it, yet. :(
OTOH, the project homepage does not have an official announcement, yet, either.
Can anyone give me a brief overview of what changes 11.0 will bring? I think I remember something about support for the Raspberry Pi (and other ARM-based systems), but my memory is not what it used to be...
In the interim, it's possible to use freebsd-update to upgrade to 11.0-RC3 and then up to the final release once it's public. I've upgraded a few machines at home and work without any problems.
Yeah, you don't need to do that anymore on FreeBSD: we officially distribute x86_64-unknown-freebsd (as tier 2) and i686-unknown-freebsd (as tier 3) versions of std, rustc, and cargo these days: https://doc.rust-lang.org/stable/book/getting-started.html#p...
Yeah and it's not the socially best thing to announce it here before that, not giving mirrors time to sync (note: it's the master mirror and not download.freebsd.org for example). Also because theoretically there could be updated images uploaded still, causing chaos.
Also it doesn't make a lot of sense to link to a download mirror in first place.
Maybe the link should be changed to release notes or download.freebsd.org for a load balanced version.
People are doing this wrong for ages. It is brought up with every release. That will not change.
The only way to change it, is to adapt and change the release rollout process. If it would be really a big problem for the project, they would probably have done that a long time ago. Just my guess.
Regardless of that, I'd like to remind everyone that FreeBSD is not 'just another OS out there' but an important piece of technology powering lots of things we often use: from Sony's PlayStation and WhatsApp, through Netflix and Yahoo, to Juniper and PFSense networking gear and EMC storage and FreeNAS appliance - and many, many more!
So, have you donated yet? We need FreeBSD and FreeBSD needs your support!
https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/