FreeBSD Archive

The second release candidate of FreeBSD 7.2 has been released. "The second of the two planed Release Candidates for the 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. We believe with the exception of the new bce(4) driver not working with lagg(4) all the major issues that have come up from the testing have been addressed. We will work with the vendor to get that issue addressed post-release."

KenSmith announced the immediate availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RC1 in the FreeBSD-stable mailing list. "The first of two planned Release Candidates for the FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE cycle is now available. Testing of some of the recent work would be particularly appreciated." The release schedule states that the final release is to be expected early May, at which point we'll cover FreeBSD 7.2 in much more detail.

If you wanted to try FreeBSD but didn't have the right hardware, or enough time to make it useful on the desktop, VirtualBSD might fit the bill: it's a VMware appliance based on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE and features the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and a few of the most common applications to make it very functional right out of the box. If you're curious you can have a look at the screenshots, or proceed to the download page and grab the torrent file right away (note: VirtualBSD also works in VirtualBox 2.x as long as you create a new virtual machine and select the virtual disk from the archive instead of creating a new one).

The FreeBSD 7-STABLE branch saw its first point release today. Don't let the point release moniker fool you, though, as FreeBSD 7.1 comes packed with a number of pretty significant changes, such as support for OpenSolaris' DTrace, as well as a new, more efficient scheduler.

"FreeBSD 7.0 has already been released. If you are a real hacker, the best way to jump in and learn it is hacking together an introductory kernel module. In this article I'll implement a very basic module that prints a message when it is loaded, and another when it is unloaded. I'll also cover the mechanics of compiling our module using standard tools and rebuilding the stock FreeBSD kernel. Let's do it!"

"Here we are at the moment of truth for the FreeBSD operating system - the 7.0 release. This is what FreeBSD users and developers have been waiting for ever since the dark days of the 5.X series when the promises of superior performance, threading, and stability fell flat. Though each release in the FreeBSD 6.X series improved markedly in quality and performance, 7.0 has been widely anticipated as the release that FreeBSD fans can have confidence in. I wish I could say that FreeBSD 7.0 lived up to the hype."

"The next major update of FreeBSD 7, due this December, is in the running to be one of the most impressive FreeBSD releases to date. The ULE scheduler has now reached maturity, leading to significant gains across the board (particularly in server workloads). This new scheduler brings notably impressive performance improvements to both MySQL and PostgreSQL. In the first section of this article, I'm going to take a look at what's new. In the second section, I will discuss what the future holds for FreeBSD beyond the upcoming FreeBSD 7.0 release, including screen shots of the revamped FreeBSD installer 'finstall'."

FreeBSD 7.0 has been released. "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE. This is the first release from the 7-STABLE branch which introduces many new features along with many improvements to functionality present in the earlier branches."

"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between October and December 2007. AsiaBSDCon 2008 is approaching and will be held at the Tokyo University of Science in Tokyo, Japan on the 27th - 30th of March 2008. The FreeBSD Foundation has released a Newsletter detailing their activities over the past few months. FreeBSD 7.0 is nearing release and the 2nd Release Canidate is ready for testing and is available for download now."

The FreeBSD project has released the second release candidate for FreeBSD 7.0. "We sincerely hope this will be the last of the public tests for 7.0 and that the -RELEASE builds will start in about a week and a half. If bug(s) considered big enough to be show-stoppers are found we will of course reconsider but hopefully we're in good enough shape now to proceed with the release."

You guessed it from the headline (bravo!): FreeBSD 6.3 has been released to the public (that's us). From the release notes: "Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after 6.2-RELEASE, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to FreeBSD between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements."

DesktopBSD 1.6 has been released. These are the most notable features introduced: "FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system. X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware. Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive. Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates. Improved package manager usability and performance. Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools. Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs. Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering. DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages" Download.

FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 has been released. "The ports team has gotten the release package sets built for most of the architectures (sparc64 is still a long way off) so we have begun including the pre-built packages on the ISOs. Even a very basic post-build test turned up one latent bug in sysinstall, and once that was fixed a more extensive test (load both KDE and GNOME) turned up two more latent bugs. The 7.0-RC1 builds have one of the three bugs fixed in them. The other two bugs aren't fatal to installs on 7.0-RC1 (they were fatal to installs on 6.3-RC2) and we have more 7.0-RCs coming so I went ahead with making 7.0-RC1 available as-is."

There is a new edition of the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. "The innovation of the past lives on in FreeBSD. From SMP and network scalability to innovations in security APIs and wireless networking, the technology of FreeBSD is making an impact on our world. What future piece of BSD technology will help foster a new public commodity like the Internet? I can't say, but the past shows us that investing in open source OS development and its commercial use pays large dividends. The two testimonials in this newsletter from Isilon and Network Appliance show this process at work."