FreeBSD News flash!

FreeBSD is a is a rapidly developing operating system. Keeping up on the latest developments can be a chore! To keep on top of things, be sure and check this page periodically. Also, you may wish to subscribe to the freebsd-announce mailing list.

August 1996

• 1-Aug-1996 The 2.2-960801 snapshot has been released. Please see the Release Notes for more information.

July 1996

• 14-Jul-1996 FreeBSD 2.1.5-RELEASE is now out. Please see the announcement or the Release Notes for more information.

June 1996

• 27-June-1996 The 2.1-960627 snapshot has been released. It is equivalent to a 2.1.5-BETA release.

• 25-June-1996
  The stuffed daemon plushies are now shipping from Liebscher & Partner. Please contact the company via email for more details. A picture of an early prototype is here. Do note that this is a prototype and that the final, shipping version has had some improvements made to it.
• 12-June-1996
  The 2.2-960612 snapshot has been released. The new features of this snapshot are:
  • A considerable number of changes to the VM system have been made to increase the stability under certain types of load. If you had panics under the last snapshot, try this one and see if they persist.
  • The AHC driver now does considerably more in the way of handling error conditions gracefully.
  • More cosmetic work on the installation, /stand/sysinstall now genuinely useful after installation time (though still missing a man page - urk!).
  • Basically, lots-o-fixes. If you're trying to use the 2.2 SNAPs in more serious applications, please upgrade to this version.
  [Note: This release will not be made available on CDROM to 2.2-SNAP subscribers].

May 1996

• 1-May-1996
  The 2.2-960501 snapshot has been released. The new features of this snapshot are:
  • Early support for APM (automated power management) and PCCARD (formerly PCMCIA) features of laptops. Many PCCARD devices are supported, from modems to ethernet cards to SCSI adaptors.
  • Adaptec AIC7850 support has been added.
  • The Yellow Pages (NIS) support has had many optimizations made and no longer has portions copyright under the GPL.
  • Various VM system enhancements and a few bugs fixed (gzip'd binaries now work again, for example).
  • The system installation tool has been revamped with slightly different menu behavior and a number of bugs have been fixed. It's hoped that this installation will be more intuitive for new users than previous ones (feedback welcomed, of course).
  • Much miscellaneous cleanup work with the header files and sources.

April 1996

• 15-Apr-1996
  A new FreeBSD-emulation mailing list has been created for discussing ongoing development efforts for DOS, Windows, Linux and other forms of binary emulation.

• 14-Apr-1996
  Berkeley Software Design, Inc. has donated their DOS emulator rundos to the BSD community! Work is now ongoing in integrating this into FreeBSD, and interested parties can join the FreeBSD-emulation mailing list to find out more about how this work is progressing.

March 1996

• 23-Mar-1996
  The 2.2-960323 snapshot has been released. The new features of this snapshot are:
  • The Intel EtherExpress Pro/100B PCI ethernet card is now supported.
  • The 3COM 3C590 and 3C595 ethernet cards are now supported.
  • The ARNET (now Digiboard) Sync 570i high-speed serial card is now supported.
  • The Linux emulation is now good enough to run the Linux version of Netscape, with JAVA support (as well as a number of other Linux utilities).
  • The Matrox Meteor frame grabber card is better supported.
  • It is now possible to burn CDROMs using the Plasmon or HP 4080i CDR drives (see `wormcontrol(1)').
  • The pipe code has been substantially sped up, as have some components of the VM system.
  • A /dev/random device (and associated "pool of entropy") has been added for applications which require more unpredicatable sequences of random numbers for security. See the random(4) man page for more info.
  • Early NFS v3 support (not enabled by default).
  • An early implementation of the Device Filesystem (devfs) is available (see mount_devfs). Device switch tables are now also dynamically built.
  • Early IPX routing support.

November 1995

• 19-Nov-1995
  FreeBSD 2.1 is now available at ftp sites all around the world. See the Release information for details.

• 4-Nov-1995
  Snapshot 2.1.0-951104 is now available. The purpose of this snapshot is:
  • To incorporate changes based on all the feedback and bug reports received for the previous snapshot's installation.
  • To incorporate the latest XFree86 release (3.1.2-S) with security enhancements. There may be more fairly minor changes here before 2.1 is put on CD, but this is basically what will be shipping.
  • To get feedback on the new ``Novice Install'' split out of the Express installation (which now truly is an express installation).
  • To give folks something a little less buggy to load on new systems while they are waiting for 2.1 to come out.
  • To fold in the latest versions of the FreeBSD Handbook, updated for 2.1.
  • To correct some slight whiffy english in the online help.
  • To go back to the previous approach of just uncommenting the ATAPI and wcd0 entries in GENERIC for building atapi.flp. The idea of commenting out the wd2 and wd3 entries in an effort to make things better seems to have only made them worse in the last SNAP. If this atapi.flp image works for you, great! If not, I'm afraid that it's far too late to do anything about at this stage so any failure reports will be simply filed for post-2.1 analysis. Sorry IDE CDROM hackers, but you had your chance!

October 1995

• 30-Oct-1995
  The 2.1.0-951026 Snapshot has been re-released with several bugfixes:
  • Atapi boot floppy now assumes it's alone by itself on the second IDE controller - this seems to work a lot better for most folks who were provided with dedicated controllers when they purchased their IDE CDROMS. People with IDE disks on multiple IDE controllers should NOT use this floppy image. Stick with boot.flp and build a custom kernel or something.
  • The apache WEB server installation makes fewer assumptions about where you'll be putting things.
  • Installing the secure dist no longer requires that you also install Kerberos in order to get things like telnet to work.
  • Boot floppy should now support the Adaptec 2940 ULTRA (this was a side-effect more than a bug fix).

  However, there are some outstanding bugs you should know about:

  • sysinstall seems to croak in certain situations if you run it after the system is installed.
  • The FTP retry code still isn't 100% there - apparently it now doesn't handle reselection very well. Sigh. I'm so truly sick of looking at that part of the code that if somebody else wanted to have a look, I wouldn't fight them off! It seems like every time I fix one thing, I break something else.
  • The media selection screen protects itself from re-entry in some situations when you'd really like it to be allowed. Whoops!
  • Using more than one FreeBSD ``slice'' can cause problems.

• 26-Oct-1995
  Snapshot 2.1.0-951026 is now available. New fixes/features include:
  • All /etc/sysconfig information now written correctly.
  • WEB server option now works properly.
  • The package installation menu now works.
  • All the auto-installation instrumentation (installation by config file) now works. It's possible to install everything from start to finish on a new system in a fully-automated fashion (if you install a lot of systems, this is a big help).
  • You may now read the HTML Handbook and FAQ documents directly from the boot floppy after installation (as well as visit any other WEB site).
  • Failure to create a /usr is no longer an error, just a warning.
  • The matcd driver was shrunk down some more, possibly resulting in a return to 4MB operation (please test this).
  • The latest ATAPI CDROM changes were merged in and another atapi.flp boot image generated. Again, please test.

• 22-Oct-1995
  Updated floppies for snapshot 2.1.0-951020 are now available.

• 20-Oct-1995
  Release cannidate snapshot 2.1.0-951020 is now available.

• 06-Oct-1995
  Updateded floppies for snapshot 2.1.0-951005 are now available.

• 05-Oct-1995
  Snapshot 2.1.0-951005 is now available.

September 1995

• 29-Sep-1995
  Snapshot 2.1.0-950928 is now available.

August 1995

• 19th: An IDE CD-ROM driver has been added to FreeBSD-current, thanks to Serge Vakulenko. If you are running -current, the driver can be enabled by adding:

  options ATAPI
  device wcd0

  to your kernel configuration file, rebuilding the kernel and rebooting. Please let us know if you have problems by sending a message to bugs@freebsd.org.

July 1995

• 27-Jul-1995
  Snapshot 950726 is now available.

June 1995

• 23-Jun-1995
  Snapshot 950622 is now available. Bugs fixed and new features include:
  • SLIP installation didn't ``ifconfig sl0'' properly.
  • It was not possible to do certain operations atomically, e.g. just write out fdisk information, or just extract distributions. This can now be done from the Custom Install menu.
  • There is now an Express Install menu that leads you through all the necessary steps.
  • /usr/src/bin is now properly extracted as part of the source distribution.
  • A couple of panics in the kernel are now fixed.
  • DOS filesystems are now mounted read-only by default until we figure out what it is about R/W DOS filesystems that clobbers some systems.

  As always, this snapshot is offered as a complete replacement for the previous release and is aimed at new users installing the system from scratch. Still no update mechanism yet, but there are rumors of a project being formed to deal with this soon. If you've any interest in being part of it, then please send mail to hackers@freebsd.org. I'll also be getting involved in the whole update mechanism issue since it's been a gaping hole for far too long now and I'd like to see a solution sooner rather than later. I'm sure that many of our users feel the same way!

• 12-Jun-1995
  Because of some glitches in the 2.0.5 RELEASE boot disks, an update has been provide at ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0.5-RELEASE/UPDATES

• 10-Jun-1995
  FreeBSD 2.0.5 RELEASE has been released! See the announcement and release notes for more details.

• 5-Jun-1995
  Even more installation bugs have been fixed. Please check ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0.5-ALPHA/UPDATES/ for the latest installation disks if you encounter problems.

• 1-Jun-1995
  Following extensive feedback from the ALPHA release, A new installation disk has been generated with numerous bug fixes and enhancements. It is available via anonymous ftp from ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0.5-ALPHA/UPDATES/

May 1995

• 30-May-1995
  FreeBSD 2.0.5 ALPHA has been released! See the announcement and release notes for more details.

April 1995

• 14-Apr-1995
  Snapshot 950412 is now available. New features include:
  • Even more bugs fixed.
  • Driver for Matsushita CDROM ("Sound blaster" CDROM) in second revision - it now supports audio commands.
  • Driver for Adaptec 294x improved.
  • FDDI network interface support (DEC cards) improved.
  • Support for DEC 100Mbit "FAST" ethernet cards (DE 500-XA).
  • /etc files revamped fairly significantly - most customization done through one file now, /etc/sysconfig.
  • Performance improvements to networking code (connection information now hashed rather than being stored in a linear linked list).
  • Package code improved - now supports package dependencies.
  • New version of "libforms".

  Known problems:

  • If you want to run programs linked under 2.0, you will need the file libgcc.so.261.0 which can be found in the same directory as the snapshot release. The file should be placed in in /usr/lib once you have installed the release.
  • The hostname still isn't being set properly in /etc/sysconfig for some reason - you should edit this file after the initial installation and customize it for your system. The comments in the file should make the fields you need/want to change pretty self-explanatory.

March 1995

• 22-Mar-1995
  Snapshot 950322 is now available. New features include:
  • NIS (YP) server/client support for FreeBSD much improved.
  • A number of panic bugs fixed.
  • Merged VM/Buffer cache much improved - hopefully last of the bugs fixed!
  • Faster wd.c driver
  • Driver for Intel EtherExpress card
  • Driver for Matsushita CDROM ("Sound blaster" CDROM)
  • Better disk access algorithms ("clustering").
  • PCI support much improved. Interrupt sharing now works.
  • Driver for Adaptec 294x much improved
  • Boot -c writeback/save program (customized info saved across reboots)
  • Soundcard support greatly cleaned up
  • Prototype support for ISDN
  • Support for the Creative Labs Video Spigot(tm) video card.
  • FDDI network interface support (DEC cards).
  • TCP/IP Firewall code much improved.
  • GCC 2.6.3 integrated

  If you want to run programs linked under 2.0, you will need the file libgcc.so.261.0 which can be found in the same directory as the snapshot release. The file should be placed in in /usr/lib once you have installed the release.

February 1995

• 10-Feb-1995
  Snapshot 950210 is now available. New features include:
  • Screen swapping bug with syscons fixed
  • XFree86 3.1.1
  • NIS (YP) support for FreeBSD much improved
  • A number of panic bugs fixed.
  • Everything listed in the February 2nd SNAP README but much improved!
• 2-Feb-1995:
  Snapshot 950202 is now available. New features include:
  • Merged VM/Buffer cache much improved! General stability now approaching 2.1 quality levels.
  • Lots more bug fixes
  • Syscons now supports scrollback - use scroll lock and arrow/travel keys to move around in your scroll-back buffer.
  • NIS (YP) support for FreeBSD as server and client.
  • First cut at on-demand ppp dialing. Docs still in Japanese, but we're working on that! See /usr/bin/ppp for more details.
  • IP Firewall code much improved
  • AHA294x controller support now added
  • Sony CDU33a CDROM drive support added
  • Source distribution now split into logical pieces
  • Install much improved - still not what will be in 2.1, but a lot easier to use nonetheless.

January 1995

• 12-Jan-1995
  Snapshot 950112 is now available. New features include:
  • Merged VM/Buffer cache! Does it work? Is it faster? Find out! This is the culmination of over 6 months of careful hacking.
  • Lots-o-bug fixes
  • Lots-o-bugs (probably)
  • Fixes to floppy driver - may fix some of the reported problems.
  • Genius GS-4500 Scanner driver; scan pictures from FreeBSD!
  • Fixes for U24F SCSI controller
  • Many fixes to Seagate driver - Future Domain people please test!
  • GNU Info files resurrected from the dead (see infodist)
  • share/doc now quite a bit more functional.
  • A number of new syscons features - software settable cursor, more modes for LCD displays, dynamic console allocation, woo doggies.
  • Still no kernel srcdist, just one big srcdist still. Sorry.
  • Lots of changes to the installation - hopefully this one even mostly works for once.
  • A billion other things I've forgotten for now but will remember right after I save this document.

December 1994

• 7-Dec-1994
  If you are having trouble with installing Release 2.0 please check ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/2.0-RELEASE/floppies to see if you have the most recent installation floppies. The all new installation procedure for 2.0 brought with it a whole set of all new bugs. With the latest installation floppies, we hope that these bugs are fixed.

Updated May 2, 1996 at 14:42 (PDT)
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