FreeBSD Archive

The OSNews mailbox has already been flooded with submissions that the FreeBSD 5.0-Release is already present on many mirrors around the world (i386 USA mirror, Europe one), but the CDs are not present to all mirrors as we type this. 5.0-Release is the next-big-thing for FreeBSD as it includes great new features (some not even found on other OSes) like SMPng, KSE, UFS2, GEOM, MAC etc. Read here for a quick explanation on what is what. The release has two CDs, and for the minimalistic, there is a mini-distro (225 MB) with only the essential tools in it (e.g. no X11). This version will also see FreeBSD supporting more platforms, like the IA64, SPARC-64 etc.

Terminus wrote in to tell us that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 is now available on the FreeBSD FTP servers. He also reminds us "The final release is scheduled for January 17th 2003."

Stephen Beckwith writes: "Over at MacSlash, the "Last" interview with Jordan Hubbard, Mr. FreeBSD. Catch it while you can!" Read the full interview at MacSlash.

FreeBSD 5.0-RC1 was just released, download its ISO from an ftp server near you.

This is an initial FreeBSD beta driver for 2D and OpenGL for FreeBSD. It requires FreeBSD -STABLE, version 4.7 or later. It can run single threaded aplications even in linux compatability mode.

"In the last few articles, I've concentrated on configuring a FreeBSD system and various applications suited for multimedia. I'll wrap up that series today by tweaking a browser's plug-in support and installing some apps which can be either called by a browser or used on their own." Read the article at ONLamp.

"Since FreeBSD 4.6-RELEASE in June 2002, we have updated a number of software programs in the base system, such as GCC and sendmail. Several new drivers have been added for USB devices and disk controllers. We have also incorporated updates for XFree86 and our Linux compatibility libraries. FreeBSD 4.7 also incorporates all of the security and bug fixes from 4.6.2 (released in August 2002), including several ATA-related bugfixes, updates for OpenSSL and OpenSSH, and fixes to address several security advisories." Announcement for FreeBSD 4.7 and release notes.

FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Murray Stokely announces that FreeBSD 4.7-RC3 (i386) is now available for FTP network installs. This includes the recent LDT patch and the final package set that will be used on the CDROMs/DVDs. Read the announcement at BSDForums.

KernelTrap reports: "Bruce A. Mah announced today the availability of FreeBSD 4.7 Release Candidate 1. The final release is scheduled for just a week and a half away, on October 1'st. The release notes for FreeBSD 4.7 include quite a few improvements to PPP, updates to the 'ahc' and 'ahd' Adaptec SCSI device drivers, and several ATA fixes. Packages that have been updated included IPFilter (v3.4.29), Sendmail (v8.12.6) and XFree86 (4.2.1). Read on for Bruce's full announcement."

From BSDForums: The FreeBSD-STABLE branch (development branch for 4-STABLE) of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.7. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the Release Engineering Team first. The expected "ship" date for FreeBSD 4.7 is October 1, 2002.

FreeBSD 4.6.2 is released. Download from here, release notes and changes done here.

FreeBSD has long been known for stability, security, and good performance, as well as for its strong developer community. But this open-source operating system has been dogged during the past few years by its inability to draw on the wealth of commercial and open-source applications available for Linux. Read the preview at InfoWorld.

From DaemonNews.org: FreeBSD 4.6.1 is scheduled for release July 17, 2002 in order to update SSH, BIND, incorporate a partial ATA fix, and other changes from the RELENG_4_6 release branch. On a side note, FreeBSD 5.0 developer preview 2, a full release for the i386, Alpha, and sparc64 architectures is scheduled for release July 25.

Julian Elischer announced that Kernel Scheduled Entities - Milestone 3 (KSE-MIII) have been merged into the -current FreeBSD source tree. The KSE project is a major effort to allow for multi-threaded applications to scale and perform better, especially on SMP servers. The effort involves a considerable amount of re-working the various internal kernel data structures, and though not actually considered part of FreeBSD's "next generation" symmetric multiprocessing project (SMPng), each project greatly enhances the other. Read the full story over at KernelTrap.