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The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide

Don't discuss installation of old FreeBSD

When writing this chapter, I had two possible paths. First, I could make the installation instructions extremely short and narrowly targeted to only one specific version. Second, I could make the installation instructions as applicable as possible to the largest number of FreeBSD versions (basically versions 2.1.X through 4.X). In so doing these instructions would necessarily be longer, as they would be much more detailed.

I decided to go the long way for the following reasons:

1. Older versions of FreeBSD support some hardware that newer versions don't. For example, the Ultrastor 14F SCSI card, the Western Digital WD7000 SCSI card, and the Adaptec 1520 SCI card were unsupported between versions 2.2.8-early 3.X. Besides SCSI, some support for iffy network cards (Intel EtherExpress 16, 3c507) was eliminated. Also, the Panasonic and Sony proprietary CD-ROM interface drivers are now missing from the generic install kernel, although they are still available in 4.X if the kernel is recompiled.

Now, all this basically reflects the fact that, as FreeBSD changes, support for older and less-used devices starts to become unmaintained. FreeBSD isn't the only UNIX that this happens to. Sun Solaris version 8 (the most recent) dropped EISA support, which is much more fundamentally damaging than the little stuff that has fallen away in FreeBSD. However, just because this is the Right Thing To Do with an OS isn't any consolation to the user that is sitting at 9:00pm in the evening in front of his experimental or test system that he is using to try out FreeBSD on and who has just discovered that a particular piece of hardware he has isn't supported in the newest version of FreeBSD.

2. While the new versions of FreeBSD offer many additional benefits, there is ONE extremely significant benefit that they don't offer over the older versions: reliability. Ever since mid-to-late version 2.1.X, FreeBSD has been 100% reliable, and the new versions aren't any more reliable than that. Another way of saying this is that the old versions are not any more unreliable then the new ones. So, the upshot is that unlike Microsoft OSs, there is little incentive to run the latest version if you're happy with an older one. So, why should I overtly push people into running the latest version in the text? The inclusion of the FreeBSD 4.2 CD-ROM in the book is already plenty enough incentive to do that.

© Copyright 2000-2003 Ted Mittelstaedt. All rights reserved.