8.0-release: April 2010 Archives

This is one of the great things about FreeBSD: They make a release, and you know right then how long it will be supported by the security team.

Look at this post by Remko Lodder (linked to from Planet FreeBSD) on the March 23, 2010 release of FreeBSD 7.3-release (which I'm running right now):

The FreeBSD Security Team currently plans to support FreeBSD 7.3 until March 31st 2012. Users of FreeBSD 7.2 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.0 before the FreeBSD 7.2 End of Life on June 30th 2010.

A two-year support life with the option to upgrade to the FreeBSD 8.x branch at any time? That's great. More than one -release branch going at the same time? More than one -stable branch, plus a -current branch if you want it? FreeBSD has a whole lot of flexibility depending on what you want out of the system and what your comfort level is with bleeding-edge software, frequency and quantity of updates, and of course what your hardware and tasks require.

I chose 7.3-release for a couple of reasons: I wanted to run a -release branch, and at present 8.0-release doesn't have as many precompiled binary packages as 7.3-release, and since 7.3-release is newer, all of its packages are newer as well.

The next 8.x release will probably take care of that, and I'll be more comfortable upgrading to it, but for now 7.3-release is working great for me.

Following Remko's suggestion to look at the FreeBSD Security page, you can see that every other release in a given numerical series is an "extended" release, meaning it gets two years of support.

So 7.2-release, being a "Normal" release, has an "estimated EOL (end of life)" of about a year and a month.

FreeBSD 8.0-release is also a "Normal" release, supported until Nov. 30, 2010. And when 8.1-release is finally released (no date set), it will be an "extended" release and be supported for two years after its release date.

So right now you can run FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x and 8.x -release branches with support from the FreeBSD security team.

The FreeBSD Handbook appeared cryptic on how exactly to update packages and ports. I'm sure the answer is in there, but I just couldn't find it.

However, I do have Dru Lavigne's new book, "The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD," and I'm following her instructions on pages 247-251 on how to use csup and portupgrade to update both packages and ports on my FreeBSD 7.3-release installation.

Yep, her PC-BSD book is helping me with FreeBSD — which isn't so unusual since PC-BSD 8.0 is based on FreeBSD 8.0.

Yesterday I fixed my problem with pkg_add, which was pulling packages from 7-stable instead of 7.3-release. I'll write that up soon.

My short review of Dru's PC-BSD book is that it's a must for the novice PC-BSD user and has more than enough tips for the advanced BSD user who wants to run PC-BSD or even FreeBSD. It's a great companion for her "Best of FreeBSD Basics" book, which I also highly recommend.

I'm still in the middle of my csup, so I'll report on how it turns out. And while I'm sure I have a GhostBSD (FreeBSD live with GNOME) disc somewhere, I'm about to burn a new one and see how its GNOME environment compares to my own. Hopefully I'll glean a few tips that will help me in my GNOMEish FreeBSD 7.3-release install.