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It is my privilege and pleasure to announce the availability of FreeBSD
5.0-RELEASE. The culmination of nearly three years of work, this
release starts FreeBSD on the path of advanced multiprocessor and
application thread support and introduces support for the sparc64 and
ia64 platforms. Among the long list of new and improved features:
- UFS2, the second generation UFS filesystem, shatters the current 1TB
filesystem barrier.
- Background filesystem checking (bgfsck) and filesystem snapshots
eliminate the need for downtime to do filesystem repair and backup
tasks.
- Experimental support for Mandatory Access Controls (MAC) provide
an extensible and flexible means for administrators to define system
security policies.
- Fine-grained locking in the kernel paves the road for much higher
efficiency of multi-processor systems.
- Support for Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394, and experimental
hardware crypto acceleration keeps FreeBSD at the forefront of new
technology.
- The GCC 3.2.1 compiler provides the latest installment of the
ever-improving GNU Compiler Collection.
- GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, and DEVFS,
the device virtual filesystem, simplify storage and device
management while opening the door for new enterprise storage
technologies.
- Support for the sparc64 and ia64 platforms expands FreeBSD's
support of advanced 64-bit computing platforms.
Although FreeBSD 5.0 contains a number of new and exciting features, it
may not be suitable for all users. More conservative users may prefer
to continue using FreeBSD 4.X. Information on the various trade-offs
involved, as well as some notes on future plans for both FreeBSD 4.X
and 5.X, can be found in the Early Adopter's Guide, available here:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/early-adopter.html
For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
release notes and errata list, available here:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/errata.html
For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities,
please see:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Availability
- ------------
FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, and
ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the
boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for
all architectures are available now.
Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media
from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be
offering FreeBSD 5.0 based products:
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html
If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to
use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO
images. We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the
larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from:
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp12.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.tw.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp{2,3,4,5}.jp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp7.de.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.lt.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.za.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.se.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp{1,2,4}.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the
following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada,
China, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany,
Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Japan, Korea, Lithuania,
Mitchistan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Portugal, Romania,
Russia, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain,
Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, and the United Kingdom.
Before trying the central FTP site, please check your regional
mirror(s) first by going to:
ftp://ftp.<yourdomain>.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD
Any additional mirror sites will be labeled ftp2, ftp3 and so on.
More information about FreeBSD mirror sites can be found at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.ht
ml
For instructions on installing FreeBSD, please see Chapter 2 of The
FreeBSD Handbook. It provides a complete installation walk-through
for users new to FreeBSD, and can be found online at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/install.html
Acknowledgments
- ---------------
Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to
finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 5.0 including
The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and
NTT/Verio.
The release engineering team for 5.0-RELEASE includes:
Scott Long <scottl@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering and Building
Bruce A. Mah <bmah@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering,
Documentation
Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Security
John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Murray Stokely <murray@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Marcel Moolenaar <marcel@FreeBSD.org> IA64 Release Building
Takahashi Yoshihiro <nyan@FreeBSD.org> PC98 Release Building
Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> Package Building
Jacques A. Vidrine <nectar@FreeBSD.org> Security Officer
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