Category: *BSD

OSNews covers FreeBSD 5.0-Release:

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

Here’s a little pic of the SPARCclassic that I bought over the weekend.  It runs at 50MHz with 48 megs of RAM and a 2 gig HD.  It runs OpenBSD 3.2, which is a really good (light weight) OS to run on this particular Sparc processor.  I have a couple of Sparc 5’s that run Solaris 8 (too lazy to upgrade to 9 so far), but 50MHz cries out for OpenBSD or NetBSD. It is resting on top of a stack of D-Link DES-3205’s, one of the nicest (but noisiest) 5 port managed 10/100 switches that you can find on Ebay for under $30 or so.  The DES-3205 doesn’t have an uplink port, but you can just use a crossover cable to link them together.