FreeBSD

Here we are at the moment of truth for the FreeBSD operating system -- the 7.0 release. This is what FreeBSD users and developers have been waiting for ever since the dark days of the 5.X series when the promises of superior performance, threading, and stability fell flat. Though each release in the FreeBSD 6.X series improved markedly in quality and performance, 7.0 has been widely anticipated as the release that FreeBSD fans can have confidence in. I wish I could say that FreeBSD 7.0 lived up to the hype.

Availability

FreeBSD 7.0-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, pc98, and powerpc architectures. The version for the sparc64 architecture will become available in a few days. Some of the package builds are still in progress.

FreeBSD 7.0 can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network; 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 i386 and amd64.

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

The contents of the ISO images provided as part of the release has changed for most of the architectures. Using the i386 architecture as an example, there are ISO images named ``bootonly'', ``disc1'', ``disc2'', ``disc3'', ``livefs'', and ``docs''. The ``bootonly'' image is suitable for booting a machine to do a network based installation using FTP or NFS. The ``disc1'', ``disc2'', and ``disc3'' images are used to do a full installation that includes a basic set of packages and does not require network access to an FTP or NFS server during the installation. To boot into a ``live CD-based filesystem'' and system rescue mode ``disc1'' and ``livefs'' are needed. The ``docs'' image has all of the documentation for all supported languages. Most people will find that ``disc1'', ``disc2'' and ``disc3'' are all that are needed if you want to install some packages during the initial install, and just ``disc1'' if you prefer to install packages after the initial install is completed.

DOWNLOAD

Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 , Part 5 ,Part 6 ,Part 7 ,Part 8

Part 9 ,Part 10 ,Part 11 , Part 12 ,Part 13 ,Part 14 ,Part 15

Part 16 ,Part 17 ,Part 18 ,Part 20

Part 21 , Part 22