For starters and advanced *BSD users
Ashmash writes “After their Mac OS X versus Ubuntu benchmarks earlier this month, Phoronix.com has now carried out a performance comparison between Ubuntu 8.10, OpenSolaris 2008.11 and FreeBSD 7.1. They used a dual quad-core workstation with the Phoronix Test Suite to run primarily Java, disk, and computational benchmarks. The 64-bit build of Ubuntu 8.10 was the fastest overall, but FreeBSD and OpenSolaris were first in other areas.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Linux blog writes “The new version of OpenBSD is available for download. There are lots of nifty new features to try out including OpenSSH 5.1 with chroot(2) support, Xenocara, Gnome 2.20.3, KDE 3.5.8, etc. Machines using the UltraSPARC IV/T1/T2 and Fujitsu SPARC64-V/VI/VII are now supported. It seems amazing to me that they keep delivering these new results on a six-month release cycle.”
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The call of ktulu writes “Good things come to those who wait. After eight months of work the relatively new project BSDanywhere has announced its first final release 4.3. BSDanywhere is a bootable Live-CD image based on OpenBSD. It consists of the entire OpenBSD base system (without compiler) plus enlightenment desktop, an unrepresentative collection of software, automatic hardware detection and support for many graphics cards, sound cards, SCSI and USB devices as well as other peripherals. Give it a spin.”
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thhamm writes “The GNOME community hopes to make our users happy with many new features and improvements, as well as the huge number of bug fixes that are shipped in this latest GNOME release! Well. What else to say. I am happy.” Notably, this release is also the occasion for the announcement of videoconferencing app Ekiga’s 3.0 release.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Gonzalo Martinez-Sanjuan Sanchez writes “The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce PC-BSD version 7.0! (Release Name: Fibonacci Edition.) This release marks a milestone for PC-BSD, by moving to the latest FreeBSD 7-Stable and also incorporating the KDE 4.1.1 desktop. Users will immediately notice the improved visual interface that KDE 4.1.1 offers, as well as a large improvement in hardware support and speed from the update to FreeBSD 7-Stable.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
StoneLion writes “After months of development and controversy, the KDE project announced the release of KDE 4.1 today. Linux.com (a Slashdot sister site) took a hands-on look at the new code, and reviewer Jeremy LaCroix says, ‘KDE 4.1 simply rocks.'” Bruce Byfield’s review is quite positive, as well.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
andrewmin writes “Recently, Gnome’s been gaining a lot of ground on its KDE counterpart in the desktop environment wars. The KDE developers were hoping to change this with KDE 4, the new radical release of KDE, but it was not to be. KDE 4.0 was buggy and unstable, leaving everyone except the hard-core KDE lovers. Mainly, this was because it just didn’t work most of the time. However, the developers were not without hope. They promised that KDE 4.1 would be more stable and fix all the holes and problems with KDE 4.0. That time is coming soon: in just four days, K Desktop Environment 4.1 will be released to the Linux masses.” A release candidate for 4.1 came out just over a week ago, with binaries available “for some Linux distributions, and Mac OS X and Windows.”
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I found a tool to move your FreeBSD installation to a new hard disk named: clonehdd
[quote]Tool for copy partitions to another HDD. FreeBSD stores its data on partitions, which incapsulated in slices. Soft, such as Partition Magic, Acronis, etc. detect only slice, not real partitions on that slice. CloneHDD correctly understand size diference.[/quote]
The port can be found in /usr/ports/sysutils/clonehdd
Example to move from ad4 to ad6
[shell]clonehdd -src=ad4 -dst=ad6 -swap=2048 -fstab=ad6[/shell]
Sol-Invictus writes “The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
On freebsdhowtos a short howto is written to find out which hardware is installed in your FreeBSD machine.
From the howto:
[quote]Dmidecode is a tool or dumping a computer’s DMI (some say SMBIOS) table
contents in a human-readable format. The output contains a description of the
system’s hardware components, as well as other useful pieces of information
such as serial numbers and BIOS revision.[/quote]
install it from /usr/ports/sysutils/dmidecode
just run it without any options:
[shell]root@bsdfreaks ~ # dmidecode
sample output (stripped):
BIOS Information
Vendor: Phoenix Technologies, LTD
Version: ASUS PCH-DL ACPI BIOS Revision 1004
Release Date: 09/29/2004
Processor Information
Socket Designation: Socket 604
Type: Central Processor
Family: Xeon
Manufacturer: Intel
Signature: Type 0, Family 15, Model 2, Stepping 9
Flags:
FPU (Floating-point unit on-chip)
Version: Intel Xeon(tm)
Voltage: 1.4 V
External Clock: 134 MHz
Max Speed: 3200 MHz
Current Speed: 2814 MHz
Status: Populated, Enabled
Upgrade: ZIF Socket
L1 Cache Handle: 0x000B
L2 Cache Handle: 0x000D
L3 Cache Handle: 0x000F
[/shell]
