FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 6.3 Released

  Submitted by anonymous FreeBSD 18 Comments
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."
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DesktopBSD 1.6 Released

  Submitted by Oliver FreeBSD 8 Comments
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.
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FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 Released

  Submitted by vermaden FreeBSD 55 Comments
FreeBSD 6.3-RC2 has been released. "Sorry for the delay with this phase of the 6.3 release. A few glitches were found during testing of the 6.3-RC2 ISOs that included pre-built packages. The 6.3-RC2 builds for amd64 and i386 should now be available on the majority of the FreeBSD mirror sites. I just finished loading the sparc64 build so that will take a little while to propagate to the mirrors. This is the last planned RC for 6.3. Unless a major show-stopper problem is found the release of 6.3 should happen in about two weeks."
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FreeBSD 7.0-RC1 Released

  Submitted by yourabi FreeBSD 30 Comments
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."
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New FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter Published

  Submitted by Joel Dahl FreeBSD 27 Comments
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."
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FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4 Available

  Submitted by vermaden FreeBSD 12 Comments
"The 7.0-BETA4 builds are now available. If you would like to use cvsup to update an older machine the branch tag to use is still RELENG_7. For users of FreeBSD Update due to some last-minute bumps in system libraries, installed third-party applications must be recompiled as per normal for a 'major' upgrade, even if upgrading from an earlier 7.0 BETA."
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FreeBSD 7 Beta 2 Released

  Submitted by yourabi FreeBSD 14 Comments
The second beta of FreeBSD 7 has been released. "The 7.0-BETA2 builds have completed and are on many of the FreeBSD mirror sites. If you want to update an existing machine using cvsup use RELENG_7 as the branch tag. Instructions on using FreeBSD Update to perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.0-BETA2 will be provided via the freebsd-stable list when available." Additionally, there's a discussion on supporting a subset of c++ in the FreeBSD kernel.
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Introducing FreeBSD 7.0

  Submitted by FreeBSD_User FreeBSD 135 Comments
"FreeBSD 7.0 will be the next release of FreeBSD, and is the first major release in 2 years. It's due out some time later this year (currently in pre-release and available for testing). FreeBSD 7.0 brings major changes to the BSD and open source operating system landscape." This document describes all the changes.
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FreeBSD 7.0 Beta 1 Released

  Submitted by Oliver FreeBSD 25 Comments
FeeBSD 7.0-beta1 has been released, with 6.3-beta1 on its way. "We have entered the final phases of the FreeBSD-7.0 Release cycle which also means the beginning of the FreeBSD-6.3 Release cycle. Because the people who support the ports for FreeBSD also need to go through a freeze cycle as part of releases we had decided to combine the two releases to try and minimize the impact on the ports maintainers."
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FreeBSD Summer of Code 2007 Results

  Submitted by Oliver FreeBSD 4 Comments
"The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2007. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 25 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program. We are happy to report that all students made some progress towards their goals for the summer, and the 22 students listed below completed the program successfully."
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FreeBSD Foundation Newsletter: GPLv3 Concerns

  Submitted by Anonymous FreeBSD 117 Comments
The latest issue of the FreeBSD newsletter contains a letter from the Vice President of the FreeBSD Foundation about the GPLv3. "On June 29th, the Free Software Foundation unveiled version 3 of the GNU General Public license. Even though the majority of software included in the FreeBSD distribution is not covered by any version of the GPL, our community cannot ignore this very popular license or its most recent incarnation. Through extremely successful evangelization, and the popularity of Linux, the misconception that OpenSource and the GPL are synonymous has become pervasive."
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Finstall: a New Installer for FreeBSD

  Submitted by lomax FreeBSD 45 Comments
"Welcome to the home page of the finstall project, accepted for Google's Summer of Code 2007. This project aims to create a user-friendly graphical installer for FreeBSD & FreeBSD-derived systems. The project should yield something usable for 7.0-RELEASE, but the intention is to keep it as a "second" installer system during 7.x, alongside sysinstall. In any case, sysinstall will be kept for architectures not supported by finstall (e.g. all except i386 and amd64)." A first version has been released.
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What’s Cooking for FreeBSD 7?

  Submitted by mark FreeBSD 31 Comments
The next major release of FreeBSD, version 7, is one of the most significant so far, with amount of new technologies and improvement largest since introduction of 5.0. Since constantly searching the mailing lists for important changes can be a bit tedious, this page lists some of the more interesting new things in one place.
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FreeBSD Status Reports Q2/2007

  Submitted by dolores FreeBSD 33 Comments
"This report covers FreeBSD related projects between April and June 2007. Again an exciting quarter for FreeBSD. In May we saw one of the biggest developers summits to date at BSDCan , our 25 Google Summer of Code students started working on their projects - progress reports are available in this report, and finally the 7.0 release cycle was started three weeks ago."
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FreeBSD: Xorg 7.2 Commit

  Submitted by dolores FreeBSD 31 Comments
Xorg 7.2 has almost been committed to the FreeBSD ports tree. "Within the next 24 hours, the long-awaited update to the X.org 7.2 windowing system will be committed to the ports tree. This upgrade has been 6 months in the making and would not have been possible without the dedicated work of Florent Thoumie, Dejan Lesjak and many others in our army of developers."
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FreeBSD Developer Summit at BSDCan 2007

  Submitted by Anonymous FreeBSD 5 Comments
The 2-day by invitation only FreeBSD developer summit at BSDCan 2007 in Ottawa has just ended. Over 60 FreeBSD developers attended the summit, along with representatives from large BSD-friendly corporations such as Apple, Yahoo, Nokia, Juniper, NetApp and Ironport. A variety of topics were discussed, such as ZFS, the BLUFFS file system, SMP scalability improvements and the new virtualized network stack. Video recordings from the summit are available, as well as pictures.
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