DonsDeals Blog: FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Announcement

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Friday, February 25, 2011

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE Announcement

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

Xen HVM support in FreeBSD/amd64 and Xen PV support in FreeBSD/i386 improved
ZFS on-disk format updated to version 15
aesni(4) driver for Intel AESNI crypto instruction set
BIND and OpenSSL updates
Gnome updated to 2.32.1
KDE updated to 4.5.5
Many misc. improvements and bugfixes

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list available at:

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities please see:

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

Availability

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, powerpc, and sparc64 architectures.

FreeBSD 8.2 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures (currently amd64 and i386) also support installing from a USB memory stick. The required files can be downloaded via FTP or BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some of the smaller FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally contain the more common ones such as amd64 and i386.

MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO images are included at the bottom of this message.

The purpose of the images provided as part of the release are as follows:

dvd1

This contains everything necessary to install the base FreeBSD operating system, a collection of pre-built packages, and the documentation. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. This should be all you need if you can burn and use DVD-sized media.

disc1

This contains the base FreeBSD operating system and the documentation packages for CDROM-sized media. There are no other packages.

livefs

This contains support for booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode but does not support doing an install from the CD itself. It is meant to help rescue an existing system but could be used to do a network based install if necessary.

bootonly

This supports booting a machine using the CDROM drive but does not contain the support for installing FreeBSD from the CD itself. You would need to perform a network based install (e.g. from an FTP server) after booting from the CD.

memstick

This can be written to an USB memory stick (flash drive) and used to do an install on machines capable of booting off USB drives. It also supports booting into a "livefs" based rescue mode. The documentation packages are provided but no other packages.

As one example of how to use the memstick image, assuming the USB drive appears as /dev/da0 on your machine something like this should work:

# dd if=8.2-RELEASE-amd64-memstick.img of=/dev/da0 bs=10240 conv=sync

Be careful to make sure you get the target (of=) correct.

FreeBSD 8.2-RELEASE can also be purchased on CD-ROM or DVD from several vendors. One of the vendors that will be offering FreeBSD 8.2-based products is: