I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, the
latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE in April 2003, we have made conservative updates
to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known
security issues, and merged support for large memory i386 machines
with Page Address Extensions (PAE) from 5.1.
For a complete list of new features, known problems, and late-breaking
news, please see the release notes and errata list, available here:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/errata.html
This release does not include all of the new technologies that were
introduced with FreeBSD 5.1 in June. Most developer resources are
focused on improving the FreeBSD 5.X branch, and this may very well be
the last major release of FreeBSD 4.X. The security officer team will
continue to actively support the 4.X branch according to the normal
policy. Additional 4.9.X releases may be made available when
necessitated by security vulnerabilities or high-impact bugfixes.
We encourage all our users to evaluate FreeBSD 5.1 and the upcoming
5.2. Because PAE support has only been a feature in 4.X for a few
months, it has not received wide-spread testing, and our most
conservative users may wish to stay with FreeBSD 4.8 until they choose
to migrate to 5.X.
For more information about the distinctions between FreeBSD 4.X and
5.X, or for general information about the FreeBSD release engineering
activities, please see :
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/
Availability
------------
FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE supports the i386 and alpha architectures and can
be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied
to a local NFS/FTP server.
Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media
from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies have
contributed substantially to the development of FreeBSD:
FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/
Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html
Each CD or DVD set contains the FreeBSD installation and application
package bits for the i386 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles
used to build ports in the ports collection, please see the FreeBSD
Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing extra bits which no longer fit on the 4
CD set, or the DVD distribution.
If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, 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.FreeBSD.org
ftp3.FreeBSD.org
ftp.au.FreeBSD.org
ftp2.de.FreeBSD.org
ftp4.de.FreeBSD.org
ftp7.de.FreeBSD.org
ftp.tw.FreeBSD.org
ftp6.tw.FreeBSD.org
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, 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.html
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 4.9 including
The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and
NTT/Verio.
In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.9-RELEASE
includes:
Scott Long <scottl@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Bruce A. Mah <bmah@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering,
Documentation
Wilko Bulte <wilko@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Alpha arch
Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com> PAE Testing
Luoqi Chen <luoqi@freebsd.org> PAE Merge
Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering, Security
John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus@FreeBSD.org> Package Building, GNOME
Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> Package Building
Will Andrews <will@FreeBSD.org> Package Building, KDE
Jacques A. Vidrine <nectar@FreeBSD.org> Security Officer
Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into
making this release. Many thanks are also due to the FreeBSD
committers (committers@FreeBSD.org), without whom there would be
nothing to release, and thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who have
contributed bug fixes, features, and suggestions.
Enjoy!
Murray Stokely
(For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)
MD5 (4.9-i386-disc1.iso) = 9195be15a4c8c54a6a6a23272ddacaae
MD5 (4.9-i386-disc2.iso) = 51d28c35308cc916b9a9bfcacb3146b8
MD5 (4.9-RELEASE-alpha-miniinst.iso) = 51e189a32a5f1bb058adc7627b673ae6
MD5 (4.9-RELEASE-alpha-disc2.iso) = ec316dcfb33ca76ba2a240e50d7c9fce
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