It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x
series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. Some of
the many changes since 5.2.1 include:
- A binary compatibility interface has been introduced for the i386
platform that allows running Microsoft Windows NDIS network drivers
natively in the kernel.
- The network and socket subsystems are now multi-threaded and
reentrant. This allows for much better use of SMP parallelism when
processing and forwarding local and remote network traffic.
- The development environment has been updated to GCC 2.4.2, Binutils
2.15, and GDB 6.1
- The choices for graphical environments have been updated to include
X.org 6.7, Gnome 2.6.2 and KDE 3.3.0.
There has also been a significant focus on testing and bug-fixing with
this release, as well as the freezing of most kernel and userland APIs.
Users and vendors are encouraged to consider transitioning to it as
FreeBSD 5.x is no longer considered a 'New Technology' release series.
Information on migrating from FreeBSD 4.x to 5.x can be found at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/migration-guide.html
For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
release notes and errata list, available at:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.3R/errata.html
For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities,
please see:
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng
Availability
-
FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and
ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using
bootable media 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 5.3 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 the
following sites. MD5 checksums for the release images are included at
the bottom of this message.
Bittorrent
--
Bittorrent distribution is being tested on an experimental basis. A
collection of trackers for the release ISO images is available at
http://people.freebsd.org/~scottl/5.3-torrent
FTP
---
ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp4.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp5.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp6.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp7.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp10.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.au.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.cz.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp.fr.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.jp.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp1.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.ru.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp2.tw.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp3.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp10.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp11.us.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD/
ftp://ftp15.us.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,
Amylonia, 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..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 5.2 including
The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, Sandvine, Inc.,
FreeBSD Systems, Inc, and NTT/Verio.
The release engineering team for 5.3-RELEASE includes:
Scott Long <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Release Engineering,
