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FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Announcement

Date: Thu, 3 Apr 2003 21:43:09 -0800
From: "Murray Stokely" <murray@FreeBSD.org>
To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE is now available

I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.7-RELEASE in October 2002, we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, added initial support for Firewire and other new hardware technologies, and dealt with known security issues.

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/4.8R/relnotes.html

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.8R/errata.html

This release does not include all of the new technologies that were introduced with FreeBSD 5.0 in January. FreeBSD 4.X releases offer a more conservative platform than FreeBSD 5.0 at this time. For more information about the distinctions between FreeBSD 4.X and 5.0, or for general information about the FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see :

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/

Availability

FreeBSD 4.8-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. Distributions for the i386 are available now. As of this writing, the final builds for the alpha architecture are in progress and will be made available shortly.

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

Acknowledgments

Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 4.8 including The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and NTT/Verio.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.8-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
Ruslan Ermilov <ru@FreeBSD.org> Release Engineering
Kris Kennaway <kris@FreeBSD.org> Package Building
Will Andrews <will@FreeBSD.org> Package Building, KDE
Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus@FreeBSD.org> GNOME Integration
Julian Elischer <julian@FreeBSD.org> Release Testing

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)