FreeBSD 5.0 Released

After three years and many revisions, the fifth incarnation of FreeBSD will be available this weekend. Early Friday morning, volunteers at FreeBSD.org began distributing the popular and free version of the UNIX operating system to its main FTP sites and corresponding mirror sites for download. Patterned after the BSDI (Berkeley Software Design Inc.) operating system, the server software runs on x86-compatible, DEC Alpha and PC-98 architectures.

Besides a number of new features, FreeBSD 5.0 also contains a number of major developments in the underlying system architecture. But because the system has a tremendous amount of new and not-widely-tested code, the release engineering team says you might want to wait for the FreeBSD 5.1 release or the FreeBSD 5.2 release.

"We would not advise our conservative customers downloading this 'dot-oh' release," FreeBSD.org Release Engineer Team member Murray Stokely told internetnews.com. "Clearly staying with the 4.7 release is just as safe until 5.1 comes out with its stable version. Version 5.0 is certainly for early adopters."

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