FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD is a well known and advanced BSD UNIX operating system for the Intel compatible (x86), DEC Alpha, and PC-98 architectures. The new version, 4.4, came out just some days ago. Announcement here, the BSD Installation Guide here and the release notes are here.

One of the main developers of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, announced today that the next release of FreeBSD, version 5, will be delayed until November 2002. Jordan said that "Unfortunately, a lot of the features on the TODO list for 5.0, such as SMPng (next-generation symmetric multi-processing), KSE (kernel scheduler entities) or support for a new architectures like the PowerPC, SPARC64 or IA64 (Itanium) are nowhere close to being complete. Without these features, there's just not a lot of reason for 5.0 to exist in non-snapshot form and it's therefore been decided that rather than release 5.0 prematurely, we're going to give ourselves the time we need to finish it properly." Jordan also talked about the general economic down-turn and the decline in resources which various companies have had available to donate to such efforts.