FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE is the third major 5.x release for the next generation of the FreeBSD Unix system (release notes). For the last few years I only used the 4.x stable releases, waiting for a mature 5.x release to come out before trying it. I felt that the time had come with 5.2, but has it?

Solaris, formerly known as SunOS, is a trademarked UNIX operating system derived from 4.4BSD-Lite and System V Release 4. It's a combination of BSD, SVR4, and proprietary Sun code, and it currently powers most of the world's 64-bit workstations. It was originally designed for the SPARC and UltraSPARC platforms, but it has moved into the x86 market as well and there will be an AMD64 port possibly as early as Q1 2004.

There are several players in the Unix world, but few are as complete and refined as FreeBSD. It installs easily, scales well, updates without a hassle and holds Netcraft records for uptime.

"AbiWord is a word processor that in a few respects looks it 0.7.14 version-age. And there's no getting around it, these shortcomings will need to be fixed before version 1.0. But there are a lot of areas where AbiWord has positioned itself very well against the product it is emulating."

"FreePM is a full-service open source medical practice management system that is licensed under the GPL. FreePM has reached its current beta 3 state of development in only 1.5 years and according to the company, it is ready for comparison to its closed-source competitors that cost far more."

The good folks at IBM give us some more information on how to extend their tools, with a look at porting Domino applications to Solaris and Linux. This can open up new markets and free it from platform dependence, if you follow a few simple guidelines.

In "AntiTrust," the new movie pitting a bunch of good-looking Open Source coders against a big, bad software company, the message is well-intentioned if a bit heavy-handed, but the plot requires you to suspend disbelief at several turns.

New in this release is Radeon support, a fix for DGA Mouse 2.0 support (to provide much more realistic movement on your favorite games amongst other things), native Darwin support, the Render X Protocol (for anti-aliased text), and much more.

"For speed and security, FreeBSD is the way to go. In no way am I trying to say that Red Hat, or Linux, is inferior. Linux has very good desktop uses, and works well in some server situations. But, the FreeBSD 4.x tree is by far the fastest OS running on Intel hardware that I've ever seen."

In the January, 2001 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal there is an

article about using DOS in an embedded system. There is a

comparison of interrupt-latency times (interrupt disabling

while access the disk), and FreeDOS comes out ahead

with very low times.