I want someone tell me the positives and negatives points of FreeBSD 5.2.1, if someone help me, i thanks a lot!
I look at it in a simple way... If I have a workstation or server that I want to run the latest, unstable versions of software on, then I would install 5.2.1. I would also use 5.2.1 if I had some type of hardware device that wasn't supported in 4.10.
If, OTOH, I was running a server that was connected to the rest of the world and providing potentially insecure services like named, httpd, mail, etc. Then I'd probably choose the stability and security of 4.10...since running bleeding edge is not really a sane choice when running a public server.
Personally, I'm paranoid and I run OpenBSD -STABLE on servers in a DMZ. And in my LAN and on my workstations I run more bleeding edge stuff like FBSD 5.2.1 OBSD-CURRENT and gentoo with ~x86 set in make.conf.
I detest: FreeBSD 5.2.1 is not `unstable'. Granted it hasn't been tagged `stable', per se, as yet, but you make it sound worse than Microsoft Windows.
However, I do agree with your remark regarding a mission critical server. If this is what your purpose is, then use the `stable' branch, otherwise, use (as I do) the latest 5.x-RELEASE.
this is true of ALL os's with a stable and unstable branch...
Some other things worth noting about FreeBSD 5.2.1
5.x now supports background fsck's when soft updates are enabled. It creates a snapshot of the filesystem, and does a filesystem check on that. For people coming from the Linux world, it is something like Ext3/Rieserfs journaling. (however, in the background it works very differently)
5.x has alot more driver support. Check the supported hardware list if you want to be sure your hardware is supported. For example, I was forced to use FreeBSD 5.2 rather then 4.10 because of an 802.11g card I have.
5.2.1 has better jail() support then 5.0.
5.2.1 no long requires perl to be installed in the base system (allowing you to install just the ports version of perl rather then having both a system perl and a ports perl, as well as lowing the disk requirements for the base install)
And there is a number of other changes you could check the FreeBSD changelog for.
As stated above, FreeBSD 5.2.1 is not marked as stable, but I consiter it much more stable then some other 'stable' operating systems.