Return to BSD News archive
Xref: sserve comp.os.386bsd.announce:496 comp.os.386bsd.questions:14379 comp.unix.bsd:15274 Path: sserve!newshost.anu.edu.au!harbinger.cc.monash.edu.au!bunyip.cc.uq.oz.au!munnari.oz.au!ihnp4.ucsd.edu!agate!agate!usenet From: jkh@freefall.cdrom.com (Jordan K. Hubbard) Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce,comp.os.386bsd.questions,comp.unix.bsd Subject: FreeBSD 2.0 ALPHA is now released! Followup-To: poster Date: 11 Nov 1994 18:46:59 -0800 Organization: Walnut Creek CDROM Lines: 101 Sender: cgd@agate.berkeley.edu Approved: 386bsd-announce-request@agate.berkeley.edu Message-ID: <JKH.94Nov9210607@freefall.cdrom.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: agate.berkeley.edu The FreeBSD Project team is very pleased to announce their release of FreeBSD 2.0 ALPHA; a full 32 bit 4.4 BSD Lite based operating system for Intel PCs (i386, i486 and Pentium class). Since our first release of FreeBSD 1.0 some 18 months ago, FreeBSD has changed almost entirely. A new port from the Berkeley 4.4 code base was done, which brought the legal status of the system out of the shadows with the blessing of Novell (new owners of USL and UNIX). The port to 4.4 also brought in a host of new features, filesystems and enhanced driver support. With our new unencumbered code base, we have every reason to hope that we'll be able to release quality operating systems without further legal encumbrance for some time to come! FreeBSD 2.0 represents the culmination of almost 2 years of work and many thousands of man hours put in by an international development team. We hope you enjoy it! FreeBSD 2.0 ALPHA also features an advanced installation that enables one to install from tape, CD, SLIP or ethernet (NFS or FTP). FreeBSD 2.0 BETA, planned for the 2nd week of November, will also support installation from floppy or DOS partition (sorry, it didn't quite make the ALPHA!) and offer even more "plug-n-play" features for editing disklabels and such. This is, nonetheless, our easiest to use installation yet, and we hope that with your feedback and suggestions, our final 2.0 Release version will be even nicer still! For more information on what's new with FreeBSD, or what general features it offers, we strongly suggest that you simply download our boot floppy and boot from it. You can easily read the release notes on it using a simple menu, and with no danger to the contents of your hard disk (unless you deliberately chose "proceed with installation", in which case your fate is in your own hands! :-). Those truly wishing to wait for the final release version of 2.0 are, of course, encouraged to do so, but I think that many of you will find this to be our most polished "ALPHA" release yet! Give it a try! An upgrade path from ALPHA->RELEASE will also be provided, and we do NOT plan any major changes between now and the final release in December. We generally try to err on the side of conservatism in our releases, and the 2.0 release cycle is no exception. Those wishing to obtain 2.0 on CDROM will have to wait until the 2.0 Release date, at which point it will be made available by Walnut Creek CDROM (info@cdrom.com) and other CDROM publishers. If you're currently running 1.x and are looking for an upgrade path, we're sorry to say that only full installations are supported at this time. Simply back up your password and user files before reinstalling from the 2.0 media, then bring them back. If public demand is high enough, and we can figure out a way of easily doing it, we'll offer something, but it should be understood that the differences between 1.x and 2.0 are *large*, and it's not certain that we'll be able to do it at all. Those unable or unwilling to download the boot floppy may also get the release notes by mail - send mail to <info@FreeBSD.org> for an automated reply. Updated information will also be provided on a more or less continuous basis in our WEB pages: http://www.freebsd.org FreeBSD 2.0A is available for ftp in: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0-ALPHA/ (Translated for the non-URL literate: FreeBSD is available for anonymous ftp on ftp.freebsd.org in the pub/FreeBSD/2.0-ALPHA directory) It will also, no doubt, be available on a number of mirror sites as soon as they pick it up. However, ftp.freebsd.org is on a T3 line and supports 300 simultaneous users (it's a FreeBSD machine :-), so it's unlikely that you'll have too much trouble getting it from this site until the mirrors do so. If you are directly Internet connected, it is also NOT necessary to load the bindist from this site! Simply download the 2 boot floppies, begin the installation, and select the FTP installation method - it will do the rest for you, transparently. Finally, we'd like to publically *thank* Walnut Creek CDROM, without whos continuing support and extreme generousity, we'd probably be long gone! They've been of immense help to us. Thank you, Walnut Creek CDROM! Thanks must also go to Poul-Henning Kamp, our fearless and long suffering release engineer for 2.0. While all of us have sacrificed much sleep to the cause, he has a new wife but has somehow managed to do so as well! :-) And to all of our users (this is probably starting to sound like the academy awards :-), a similar thank you! We couldn't have done it without your constant flow of commentary, patches, donations of code and moral support. As corny as it sounds, we do it all for you folks! [Though the ego gratification is nice too :-)] Thanks to all, and we sincerely hope you enjoy this release! Comments, as always, to hackers@FreeBSD.org. Jordan [on behalf of the FreeBSD Project team]