[FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 4.9 is now available

[Murray Stokely]

I am happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, the
latest release of the FreeBSD -STABLE development branch.  Since
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE in April 2003, we have made conservative updates
to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known
security issues, and merged support for large memory i386 machines
with Page Address Extensions (PAE) from 5.1.

For a complete list of new features, known problems, and late-breaking
news, please see the release notes and errata list, available here:

     http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/relnotes.html
     http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/4.9R/errata.html

This release does not include all of the new technologies that were
introduced with FreeBSD 5.1 in June.  Most developer resources are
focused on improving the FreeBSD 5.X branch, and this may very well be
the last major release of FreeBSD 4.X.  The security officer team will
continue to actively support the 4.X branch according to the normal
policy.  Additional 4.9.X releases may be made available when
necessitated by security vulnerabilities or high-impact bugfixes.

We encourage all our users to evaluate FreeBSD 5.1 and the upcoming
5.2.  Because PAE support has only been a feature in 4.X for a few
months, it has not received wide-spread testing, and our most
conservative users may wish to stay with FreeBSD 4.8 until they choose
to migrate to 5.X.

For more information about the distinctions between FreeBSD 4.X and
5.X, or for general information about the FreeBSD release engineering
activities, please see :

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

Availability
------------

FreeBSD 4.9-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.

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/
  Daemonnews, Inc.          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:

  ftp.FreeBSD.org
  ftp3.FreeBSD.org
  ftp.au.FreeBSD.org
  ftp2.de.FreeBSD.org
  ftp4.de.FreeBSD.org
  ftp7.de.FreeBSD.org
  ftp.tw.FreeBSD.org
  ftp6.tw.FreeBSD.org

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 4.9 including
The FreeBSD Mall, Compaq, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and
NTT/Verio.

In addition to myself, the release engineering team for 4.9-RELEASE
includes:

 Scott Long <scottl at FreeBSD.org>	  Release Engineering
 Bruce A. Mah <bmah at FreeBSD.org>          Release Engineering, Documentation
 Wilko Bulte <wilko at FreeBSD.org>          Release Engineering, Alpha arch
 Mike Silbersack <silby at silby.com>        PAE Testing
 Luoqi Chen <luoqi at freebsd.org>           PAE Merge
 Robert Watson <rwatson at FreeBSD.org>      Release Engineering, Security
 John Baldwin <jhb at FreeBSD.org>           Release Engineering
 Joe Marcus Clarke <marcus at FreeBSD.org>   Package Building, GNOME
 Kris Kennaway <kris at FreeBSD.org>         Package Building
 Will Andrews <will at FreeBSD.org>          Package Building, KDE
 Jacques A. Vidrine <nectar at FreeBSD.org>  Security Officer

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 at 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)

MD5 (4.9-i386-disc1.iso) = 9195be15a4c8c54a6a6a23272ddacaae
MD5 (4.9-i386-disc2.iso) = 51d28c35308cc916b9a9bfcacb3146b8
MD5 (4.9-RELEASE-alpha-miniinst.iso) = 51e189a32a5f1bb058adc7627b673ae6
MD5 (4.9-RELEASE-alpha-disc2.iso) = ec316dcfb33ca76ba2a240e50d7c9fce
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