FreeBSD 10.0-RC3 images available | Hacker News Reader

FreeBSD 10.0-RC3 images available

ftp.freebsd.org

51 pointstachion31 comments

Please consider donating [1] to FreeBSD.

They still need $400k and there's only 4 days left

Even if you don't use FreeBSD, their work still benefits the open source community with ZFS, etc.

I was thinking about posting something like that too. FreeBSD is a great operating system and we'll all benefit from having more choice than less, therefore I've already donated to the FreeBSD Foundation, and I encourage everyone to do it as well - every little bit helps!

It's particularly important to get donations from a large number of donors, even if they don't add up to a huge dollar amount -- large donors often look at the number of donors as a sign of the strength of the community when deciding how much money to donate.

It is also a tax status necessity for non-profits.

It doesn't look like the FreeBSD Foundation is in danger of failing the IRS "public support" test any time soon; but yes, that can theoretically be an issue.

The FreeBSD Foundation set up a Bitcoin donation page recently, so you can donate that way if you'd rather:

https://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/bitcoin

Done. Applied for company matching, too.

I downloaded the 10.0-RC3 ISO and spent the day spinning up multiple vm images using Vmware Fusion. My primary goal was a tour of different desktop environments, but I decided to create and build out a separate VM for each. I used the "open-vm-tools" package to improve integration with vmware, because their tools (reasonably enough) don't yet support 10.0.

I never experienced any difficulties with any of the the vm images. I used the "pkgng" packaging system for 99% of the software I installed, and built a couple of things from ports.

In my tests I was evaluating FreeBSD 10.0 as a developer's workstation. Chromium, Firefox, vim, git, VLC, ruby, gem, rake, etc - everything installed painlessly and worked as expected.

BTW, my preferred desktop environment is now XFCE (1) plus slim (2). I've been a happy KDE user for years, but I realized that I don't use 90% of what KDE gives me. Speaking for myself, XFCE does everything I need.

(1) http://www.xfce.org (2) http://daemon-notes.com/articles/desktop/slim

Any thoughts on using this vs. using PC-BSD?

I've never actually tried PC-BSD. I've read good reviews about it, but I wanted to do things the "hard way" because I was as interested in the process as the result.

That's also why I spun up a separate VM for each desktop environment that I looked at, rather than just installing all of them one one VM. I wanted the "muscle memory" of starting from a bare bones installation and walking forward from there.

A link to the announcement would probably be more helpful:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-Decem...

Some like to wait until x.1 for production use, but FreeBSD development tends to be a good deal more conservative than Linux, and is usually already pretty solid for the x.0 release. They've also been more incremental with changes between major versions since the major SMP additions in versions 5-7.

Since it's not in the announcement or linked directly from the website itself, here's what's new in 10.0: https://wiki.freebsd.org/WhatsNew/FreeBSD10

Since it's not in the announcement or linked directly from the website itself

Bingo! Thanks for that.

The FIRST thought I had when visiting the FreeBSD website was "what are the differences between these versions?". Why would I choose one or the other?

Simply calling them "Production", "Legacy", and "Upcoming" is IMO a special type of stupid. Or, stated slightly more kindly, it's the classic stereotype of Programmers and Asperger's syndrome. They know all the differences between versions, and it's inconceivable to them that there are still people in the world who don't. Fortunately, someone created a wiki to enlighten those remaining few people.

Based on the above, I predict that FreeBSD 11.0 will be the pinnacle of OS achievement. After all, it'll be when FreeBSD "goes up to eleven", which is clearly one better than ten.

They'll normally list all the new features on the main website when the new -RELEASE version is actually available, this is just a -RC.

No TLS/SSL ? In the wake of all the security news recently, it's surprising that there is no secured download option.

Plus, no official bittorrent download ? That sucks. If anyone is interested, here's the torrent for the bootonly img. I hope FreeBSD devs these by default in the future.

http://torcache.net/torrent/5f0621060da88eb18c5765c8a2e87e93...

Why would you need TLS/SSL when you have checksums?

Checksums offer no security. An attacker can alter them right after altering the image. Now if the images were signed, it would be a different story...

Just to follow up on this, what checksums do offer is a way to verify that the file you have locally matches the remote file.

Checksums do not offer this property if both the remote file and checksum are both sent unsecured. If an attacker can MitM the remote file, then they can also do the same for the checksum file.

As long as they send the cryptographic checksum through ssl/tls, you are fine. No need to send the whole file through it.

Unfortunately, ftp.freebsd.org doesn't seem to support https.

Checksums are also found in the PGP signed release email.

FreeBSD used to release official torrents of ISOs, but the torrent server was taken offline due to a data center migration last year and wasn't ever restored.

I suggested putting magnet links on the download page so they wouldn't need to run a separate server to seed the torrents; as a bonus, they'd be able to use the "web seed" functionality supported by many torrent clients to seed the ISOs from their existing distribution infrastructure.

Discussion on the FreeBSD Forums: http://forums.freebsd.org/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=35711

I made this account just to reply to this comment. The email about the releases come from the release engineer and are signed. The signed email has the SHA256 of each file. It's just not as apparent when looking at the archived version of email. Also, nearly every subdomain and page on the FreeBSD website cluster has HTTPS available.

I may look like a jerk for complaining, but I'm sad that the default options for downloading FreeBSD are not secure and not technically optimal. (The email are signed with the sha256 sigs, but the archives are not accessible in https _by default), yet I understand they may have other priorities.

Other than that, I applaud FreeBSD's efforts in Libre software at large.

Here's the announcement posted to freebsd-stable, which does include the checksums:

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2013-Decem...

In addition, that list is mirrored in several other locations so you can verify it independently from across the Internet.

Personally, I feel that this is better than simply posting the checksums in the same directory as the ISO images. I do wish the announcement e-mail was GPG signed, though.

List of mirror sites (which are usually faster to download from): http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mi...

Still has text-based install and no working mouse upon first boot without hacking config files (tried in VMware and VirtualBox). Definitely STILL not for desktop / casual consumption.

If you're looking for a user-friendly desktop-install of FreeBSD, you probably want to check out http://www.pcbsd.org/ instead. They have a 10.0-RC2 available for download already, and will probably have a 10.0 released a few weeks after FreeBSD.

I don't know if related to freebsd but the latest FreeNAS doesn't boot on KVM :(

There are a bunch of threads on the FreeNAS forums about running FreeNAS on virtualization:

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/kvm-freenas.13040/

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/absolutely-must-virtualize...

http://forums.freenas.org/threads/please-do-not-run-freenas-...

Those are just the first few I saw -- if you search the forums, I'm sure you'll be able to find threads with additional information.

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