Date: Thursday, 20 Sep 2001 18:00:00 -0800
From: "Jordan K. Hubbard" <jkh@freebsd.org>
To: announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: 4.4-RELEASE is now available
I am very pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.4-RELEASE, the very very latest in 4.x-STABLE branch technology. Since FreeBSD 4.3 was released in April 2001, we have made hundreds of fixes, updated many different components and addressed a wide variety of security issues. We have also substantially revamped the documentation and provided much more comprehensive release notes. Please see the various HTML (or, at your option, text) files in the release directory for more information.
4.4-RELEASE is available for 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.
ISO (CD) ImagesWe 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/releases/i386/ISO-IMAGES/4.4/
and
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/alpha/ISO-IMAGES/4.4/
Where ${arch} is currently "i386" or "alpha". If you can't afford the CDs, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISOs, otherwise please do continue to support the FreeBSD project by purchasing one of its official CD releases from The FreeBSD Mall. Each CD sets contains the FreeBSD installation and application package bits for the x86 ("PC") architecture. For a set of distfiles used to build ports in the ports collection, please see also the FreeBSD Toolkit, a 6 CD set containing all such extra bits which can no longer fit on the 4 ISO set.
FreeBSD is also available via anonymous FTP from mirror sites in the following countries: Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Japan, Korea, Latvia, Malaysia, Mordor, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Rumania, Russia, Slovenia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Taiwan, Thailand, the Ukraine and the United Kingdom (and quite possibly several others which I've never even heard of :).
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.
Most releases prior to 4.4-RELEASE have been team efforts, only possible at all due to the collaboration of many different people. It still bears noting, however, that 4.4-RELEASE was done completely by a "release engineering team" rather than "a release engineer" and I think it's fair to say that with 4.4-RELEASE, we've completed the transition from having one primary person worry about releases to having many primary people (re@FreeBSD.org) worry about them. This is a distinct improvement from any point of view and, I think, an important milestone in FreeBSD's progress.
In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.4-RELEASE has been:
Murray Stokely <murray@freebsd.org> : Release Engineering
Steve Price <steve@FreeBSD.org> : Package collection
Satoshi Asami <asami@FreeBSD.org> : Package collection
Bruce A. Mah <bmah@FreeBSD.org> : Release notes
Please join me in thanking them for all the hard work which went into making this release. I would also like to thank the FreeBSD Committers <committers@FreeBSD.org>, without which there would be nothing to release, and the many thousands of FreeBSD users world-wide who contributed bug fixes, features and suggestions.
Thanks!