Almost one month after the last release we're happy to announce the second beta of BSDanywhere - enlightenment at your fingertips.
Though we have compiled a summarized as well as a detailed changelog I'd like to briefly describe the major changes of this exiting release:
MFS Population I
What most people saw with beta1 was that it would take ages to boot. The reason for this is we used the 'standard' way of populating an mfs file system:
swap /var mfs rw,auto,-P/mfsvar 0 0
This example /etc/fstab entry would copy all files in /mfsvar into /var, the mfs file system. However, what makes total sense for a normal system, causes performance problems on a CD. In beta2 we've hooked into /etc/rc instead and untar a previously packaged tgz into the mfs. This decreased boot time drastically.
MFS Population II
Also new in beta2 is that we offer to copy all binaries from /{bin,sbin}, /usr/{bin,sbin} and /usr/local/{bin,sbin} into RAM - if at least 512M are seen in your system. Of course, this process takes time, but speeds up program launches later on (this area is not yet finished. Applications like Firefox still take too long to start).
Packages
We've added lots of packages, mostly tiny little ones. We want to make BSDanywhere as useful as possible for the majority of people, and of course system administrators as well. However, we can't fulfill the frequent wish for vim or emacs - it's just not enough space available, given we already have vi and mg in base and nano as a package now.
IPv6
I was recently playing with IPv6 and we thought it would be cool to integrate it in beta2. Well, OpenBSD is already ipv6-ready - all we do is to launch rtsol in addition to dhclient, so you're getting an IPv6 address in case your environment is ipv6-ready.
Tiny stuff - getting mature!
In addition to the major changes described above, we were trying to make BSDanywhere more mature and robust. Lot's of bugs have been fixed, also thanks to your feedback! Our build script has gained some more flexibility which might result in an amd64 flavour appearing soon. We will also look into USB images.
This is it for now, I hope you'll enjoy BSDanywhere beta2 - I'd like to thank all our mirrors as well as Renè, the second main 'developer' of BSDanywhere!
