Date: Tue, 28 Oct 2003 23:19:08 -0800
From: "Murray Stokely" <murray@FreeBSD.org>
To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE is now available
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 and known problems, 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/
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/ |
| Daemon News | 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:
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
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 Mah <bmah@FreeBSD.org> | Release Engineering, Documentation |
| Wilko Bulte <wilko@FreeBSD.org> | Release Engineering, alpha builds |
| Robert Watson <rwatson@FreeBSD.org> | Release Engineering, Security |
| John Baldwin <jhb@FreeBSD.org> | Release Engineering |
| Mike Silbersack <silby@silby.com> | PAE Testing |
| Luoqi Chen <luoqi@freebsd.org> | PAE Merge |
| Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus@FreeBSD.org> | Package Building, GNOME |
| Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> | Package Building |
| Will Andrews <will@FreeBSD.org> | Package Building, KDE |
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)