

FreeBSD 8.2 released - kia
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/8.2R/announce.html

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Getahobby
This is going to kill me to say this because I have been using freebsd since
2.x but the lack of commercial support from the likes of Dell really hurts.
Recently I couldn't find the cli utility to manage a raid card because the
ports system had an out of date location for the source. I was reduced to
shutting down a production server just to flip some configuration bits.
Freebsd is absolutely rock solid as an OS. The support from certain hardware
vendors is a different story.

~~~
calloc
I wish there was a commercial vendor out there that would have FreeBSD
available. It would be very helpful in getting it into more businesses as that
is a major show stopper.

~~~
Lanzaa
I believe there are commercial vendors supporting FreeBSD out there.

Here is one that I have heard of: <http://www.ixsystems.com/bsdsupport>

I'm sorry I don't have any experience with them, but you might be able to try
them out.

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trotsky
Does anyone have any insight into how well freebsd runs on laptops? Power
management, suspend, wireless and such? As an X desktop is it in the same
league as fedora/opensuse when running KDE?

~~~
calloc
Wireless depends on the chipset that is in use. Atheros still has by far the
best support. Power management there are some, it is still hit and miss. My
old laptop is fully supported, which is pretty awesome.

As an X desktop you can run gnome, kde, xfce, xfwm, or really anything. Some
components are Linux only (Xfce was recently bit by this) and thus may not
work as expected or poorly if there is no abstraction layer that allows for us
the use of devd(8) for example.

FreeBSD is my favourite OS for servers, it has good hardware support there
where it matters most, and best of all is extremely stable. If Linux has met
your needs so far, or even Windows, then stick with it. You won't find
anything new and exciting and may even find it frustrating that certain things
don't work as expected due to differences in API's that are available.

If you want a distribution of FreeBSD that is pretty well geared towards
desktops, may I suggest taking a look at PC-BSD. They generally are not too
far behind the official release of FreeBSD with their FreeBSD version, and it
is an KDE environment that is easy to install.

~~~
jonathansizz
Actually, PC-BSD is not at all behind FreeBSD these days: PC-BSD 8.2 was also
released today.

~~~
calloc
The last time I played with PC-BSD there was a lag time of a couple of days. I
hadn't checked before making my statement above. I hereby stand corrected.

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mberning
It would be nice to see Amazon provide an official EC2 AMI for this release.

~~~
jambo
Colin Percival is working on it.
[http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-20-FreeBSD-on-
EC2-FA...](http://www.daemonology.net/blog/2010-12-20-FreeBSD-on-EC2-FAQ.html)

~~~
calloc
According to this tweet they are up:

<https://twitter.com/cperciva/status/39911086518050816>

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uxp
FreeBSD 7.4 was also released concurrently.

<http://www.freebsd.org/releases/7.4R/announce.html>

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javanix
If you are running ZFS this release marks a _major_ improvement.

ZFS v15 really helps with the overzealous memory allocation that earlier
versions were plagued with on FreeBSD. Upgrading to 8.2 gave me a 20% - 30%
R/W performance increase out of the box without any sort of tuning or
optimization.

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Sargis
Question: Will I get billed for a FreeBSD micro instance or does that fall
under the 1 year free hosting?

~~~
zcid
I currently run a free amazon micro instance with FreeBSD and haven't received
any surprise charges. As long as you respect the boundaries of the free
instance, you should have no problems.

