iXsystems Announces Release of PC-BSD Version 1.5

Release features AMD 64-bit as well as 32-bit processor support

iXsystems announced today the release of PC-BSD Edison Edition. PC-BSD is a fully functional open source desktop operating system based on FreeBSD 6.3-STABLE. FreeBSD is one of the most used UNIX-like operating systems in the world and is widely renowned as the most stable and secure server operating system. PC-BSD has a Push-Button Installer (PBI) wizard developed exclusively for PC-BSD that lets users download and install a wide range of available applications in a self-extracting and self-installing format.

Read The Press Release.

FreeBSD 7.0 Available

From Freebsd.org, Febuary 27th, 2008:

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches.

Some of the highlights:

• Dramatic improvements in performance and SMP scalability shown by various database and other benchmarks, in some cases showing peak performance improvements as high as 350% over FreeBSD 6.X under normal loads and 1500% at high loads. When compared with the best performing Linux kernel (2.6.22 or 2.6.24) performance is 15% better. Results are from benchmarks used to analyze and improve system performance, results with your specific work load may vary. Some of the changes that contribute to this improvement are:
  • The 1:1 libthr threading model is now the default.
  • Finer-grained IPC, networking, and scheduler locking.
  • A major focus on optimizing the SMP architecture that was put in place during the 5.x and 6.x branches.

  Some benchmarks show linear scaling up to 8 CPUs. Many workloads see a significant performance improvement with multicore systems.

• The ULE scheduler is vastly improved, providing improved performance and interactive response (the 4BSD scheduler is still the default for 7.0 but ULE may become the default for 7.1).
• Experimental support for Sun’s ZFS filesystem.
• gjournal can be used to set up journaled filesystems, gvirstor can be used as a virtualized storage provider.
• Read-only support for the XFS filesystem.
• The unionfs filesystem has been fixed.
• iSCSI initiator.
• TSO and LRO support for some network drivers.
• Experimental SCTP (Stream Control Transmission Protocol) support (FreeBSD’s being the reference implementation).
• Much improved wireless (802.11) support.
• Network link aggregation/trunking (lagg(4)) imported from OpenBSD.
• JIT compilation to turn BPF into native code, improving packet capture performance.
• Much improved support for embedded system development for boards based on the ARM architecture.
• jemalloc, a new and highly scalable user-level memory allocator.
• freebsd-update( provides officially supported binary upgrades to new releases in addition to security fixes and errata patches.
• X.Org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, GNOME 2.20.2.
• GNU C compiler 4.2.1.
• BIND 9.4.2.

Read the full announcement.

FreeBSD 6.3 Released

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE. This release continues the development of the 6-STABLE branch providing performance and stability improvements, many bug fixes and new features. Some of the highlights:

• KDE updated to 3.5.8, GNOME updated to 2.20.1, Xorg updated to 7.3
• BIND updated to 9.3.4
• sendmail updated to 8.14.2
• lagg(4) driver ported from OpenBSD/NetBSD
• unionfs file system re-implemented
• freebsd-update( now supports an upgrade command

Read the full announcement here.

DesktopBSD 1.6 released

 

From DesktopBSD.net:

 

It is my great pleasure to announce the availability of DesktopBSD 1.6 final. This release is the first stable release of the 1.6 branch and comes with a great number of new features and improvements. It is based on the second release candidate of FreeBSD’s upcoming production release 6.3 and provides the user with an enhanced KDE 3.5.8 desktop environment.

 

The most notable new features are:

• FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system
• X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware
• Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive
• Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates
• Improved package manager usability and performance
• Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools
• Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs
• Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering
• DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages

 

Please read the release notes for more information.

 

ISO images for the 32-bit DVD (i386), 64-bit CD (amd64) and 32-bit CD (i386-CD) are available. An add-on CD with language packages for the 32-bit CD is also provided (not required with the DVD). The files can be obtained from our download page.

FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 Available

Ken Smith has announced the availability of the first release candidate for FreeBSD 7.0:”FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 available. The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on the ISOs. Even a very basic post-build test turned up one latent bug in sysinstall, and once that was fixed a more extensive test (load both KDE and GNOME) turned up two more latent bugs. The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren’t fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is.

The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren’t fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 (they were fatal to installs on 6.3-RC2…) and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is. It’s a memory leak while installing packages, as long as you have more than 512Mb of memory in the machine even installing either kde or gnome shouldn’t cause you too much trouble. More than that it’ll start paging which is annoying. All three fixes have been put in RELENG_7_0 at this point but the 7.0-RC1 builds were done before the the second two fixes went in.”

Read the rest of the announcement for more details and where to download it.