FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #2 Announcement
Date: Monday, 18 Nov 2002 16:39:13 -0800
From: [email protected] (Bruce A. Mah)
To: [email protected]
Subject: FreeBSD 5.0 Developer Preview #2 Now Available
The FreeBSD Project is proud to announce the availability of the second Developer Preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 (5.0-DP2). This snapshot, intended for widespread testing purposes, is the latest milestone towards the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, currently scheduled for mid-December 2002.
Since the release of 5.0-DP1, a number of new features have been added on the CURRENT development branch. A few of these include:
- The GEOM disk geometry module and the GBDE on-disk encryption system.
- A compiler toolchain based on GCC 3.2.
- A new extensible Mandatory Access Control framework, the TrustedBSD MAC Framework.
- The new UFS2 on-disk format, with support for larger filesystems and extended file attributes.
- Support for Firewire devices.
- Experimental support for the RAIDframe software RAID disk driver.
Much more information can be found in the release documentation, as described below.
WARNING
This snapshot is not a supported release, and has not undergone any of the usual quality assurance checking that is a part of normal FreeBSD releases. It may include serious software bugs. Do not install this software on a machine where important data may be put at risk.
The purpose of this snapshot is to get wider exposure to FreeBSD 5.0's new features, in advance of the release. As such, we expect that testers of 5.0-DP2 will follow the technical discussions on the freebsd-current@ mailing list.
AVAILABILITY
FreeBSD 5.0-DP2 is being released for the alpha, ia64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. As of this writing, 5.0-DP2/i386 is available, with other architectures to follow soon.
The checksums for the two i386 ISO images are as follows:
MD5 (5.0-DP2-disc1.iso) = 997ef9ed5aa3e0721678f5482d2fc664
MD5 (5.0-DP2-disc2.iso) = 425718dbf1b771c8317556b7a13842c6
Before trying the central FTP site, we strongly recommend that you check FTP mirror sites in your country or region, such as:
ftp://ftp.<yourcountry>.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
Any additional mirror sites will be named ftp2, ftp3, and so forth. Appendix A of the FreeBSD Handbook has additional information about FreeBSD mirror sites; it is available on-line at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html
Some of the mirror sites known to carry 5.0-DP2 (in alphabetical order by country code) are:
- ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
- ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
- ftp://ftp2.at.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
- ftp://ftp.au.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
- ftp://ftp4.de.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
- ftp://ftp.dk.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
Release documentation is available in the distributions, as well as on the FreeBSD Web site:
- Release notes: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/DP2/relnotes.html
- Hardware notes: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/DP2/hardware.html
- Errata: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/DP2/errata.html
- Early Adopter's Guide: http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.0R/DP2/early-adopter.html
LATE-BREAKING NEWS
Certain parts of the KDE and GNOME desktop environments did not make it to the package sets in the i386 ISO images.
The sparc64 and ia64 snapshots may or may not have package sets associated with them.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The FreeBSD Project wishes to thank the companies, developers, and users who continue to make FreeBSD releases possible.
Many companies donated equipment, network access, or person-hours to finance our ongoing release engineering activities, including The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, NTT/Verio, and Packet Design. We greatly appreciate their contributions.
The release engineering team for 5.0-DP2 includes:
| Murray Stokely <[email protected]> | Release Engineering Team Lead |
| John Baldwin <[email protected]> | Release Engineering, alpha and sparc64 Builds |
| Scott Long <[email protected]> | Developer Communications |
| Bruce A. Mah <[email protected]> | Release Documentation, i386 Build |
| Robert Watson <[email protected]> | Release Engineering, Security |
| Marcel Moolenaar <[email protected]> | ia64 Build |
| TAKAHASHI Yoshihiro <[email protected]> | pc98 Build |
| Kris Kennaway <[email protected]> | i386 and alpha Package Builds |
FreeBSD 5.0-DP2 is, as with every release, a cooperative effort of all of the FreeBSD committers <[email protected]>, as well as FreeBSD users all over the world who have submitted new features, bug fixes, and suggestions. Please join us in thanking everyone for their hard work in polishing and improving the state of the FreeBSD -CURRENT development branch.
We'd like to emphasize once again that this snapshot represents a work-in-progress. Please help us by testing it now, so that we can make FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE as stable and useful as possible.
Thanks!
Bruce A. Mah
(For the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team)