FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE README
The FreeBSD Project
Copyright (c) 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2008
The FreeBSD Documentation Project
$FreeBSD: src/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/readme/article.sgml,v
1.41.2.1.2.1 2009/10/25 01:10:29 kensmith Exp $
FreeBSD is a registered trademark of the FreeBSD Foundation.
Intel, Celeron, EtherExpress, i386, i486, Itanium, Pentium, and
Xeon are trademarks or registered trademarks of Intel Corporation
or its subsidiaries in the United States and other countries.
Motif, OSF/1, and UNIX are registered trademarks and IT DialTone
and The Open Group are trademarks of The Open Group in the United
States and other countries.
Sparc, Sparc64, SPARCEngine, and UltraSPARC are trademarks of
SPARC International, Inc in the United States and other countries.
Products bearing SPARC trademarks are based upon architecture
developed by Sun Microsystems, Inc.
Many of the designations used by manufacturers and sellers to
distinguish their products are claimed as trademarks. Where those
designations appear in this document, and the FreeBSD Project was
aware of the trademark claim, the designations have been followed
by the "(TM)" or the "(R)" symbol.
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This document gives a brief introduction to FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE.
It includes some information on how to obtain FreeBSD, a listing
of various ways to contact the FreeBSD Project, and pointers to
some other sources of information.
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1 Introduction
This distribution is a release of FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, the latest
point along the 8.0-STABLE branch.
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1.1 About FreeBSD
FreeBSD is an operating system based on 4.4 BSD Lite for AMD64 and
Intel EM64T based PC hardware (amd64), Intel, AMD, Cyrix or NexGen
"x86" based PC hardware (i386), Intel Itanium Processor based
computers (ia64), NEC PC-9801/9821 series PCs and compatibles
(pc98), and UltraSPARC(R) machines (sparc64). Versions for the
ARM(R) (arm), MIPS(R) (mips), and PowerPC(R) (powerpc)
architectures are currently under development as well. FreeBSD
works with a wide variety of peripherals and configurations and
can be used for everything from software development to games to
Internet Service Provision.
This release of FreeBSD contains everything you need to run such a
system, including full source code for the kernel and all
utilities in the base distribution. With the source distribution
installed, you can literally recompile the entire system from
scratch with one command, making it ideal for students,
researchers, or users who simply want to see how it all works.
A large collection of third-party ported software (the "Ports
Collection") is also provided to make it easy to obtain and
install all your favorite traditional UNIX(R) utilities for
FreeBSD. Each "port" consists of a set of scripts to retrieve,
configure, build, and install a piece of software, with a single
command. Over 20,000 ports, from editors to programming languages
to graphical applications, make FreeBSD a powerful and
comprehensive operating environment that extends far beyond what's
provided by many commercial versions of UNIX. Most ports are also
available as pre-compiled "packages", which can be quickly
installed from the installation program.
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1.2 Target Audience
This release of FreeBSD is suitable for all users. It has
undergone a period of testing and quality assurance checking to
ensure the highest reliability and dependability.
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2 Obtaining FreeBSD
FreeBSD may be obtained in a variety of ways. This section focuses
on those ways that are primarily useful for obtaining a complete
FreeBSD distribution, rather than updating an existing
installation.
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2.1 CDROM and DVD
FreeBSD -RELEASE distributions may be ordered on CDROM or DVD from
several publishers. This is frequently the most convenient way to
obtain FreeBSD for new installations, as it provides a convenient
way to quickly reinstall the system if necessary. Some
distributions include some of the optional, precompiled "packages"
from the FreeBSD Ports Collection, or other extra material.
A list of the CDROM and DVD publishers known to the project are
listed in the "Obtaining FreeBSD" appendix to the Handbook.
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2.2 FTP
You can use FTP to retrieve FreeBSD and any or all of its optional
packages from ftp://ftp.FreeBSD.org/, which is the official
FreeBSD release site, or any of its "mirrors".
Lists of locations that mirror FreeBSD can be found in the FTP
Sites section of the Handbook, or on the
http://mirrorlist.FreeBSD.org/ Web pages. Finding a close (in
networking terms) mirror from which to download the distribution
is highly recommended.
Additional mirror sites are always welcome. Contact
<freebsd-admin@FreeBSD.org> for more details on becoming an
official mirror site. You can also find useful information for
mirror sites at the Mirroring FreeBSD article.
Mirrors generally contain the ISO images generally used to create
a CDROM of a FreeBSD release. They usually also contain floppy
disk images (for applicable platforms), as well as the files
necessary to do an installation over the network. Finally mirrors
sites usually contain a set of packages for the most current
release.
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3 Contacting the FreeBSD Project
3.1 Email and Mailing Lists
For any questions or general technical support issues, please send
mail to the FreeBSD general questions mailing list.
If you're tracking the 8.0-STABLE development efforts, you must
join the FreeBSD-CURRENT mailing list, in order to keep abreast of
recent developments and changes that may affect the way you use
and maintain the system.
Being a largely-volunteer effort, the FreeBSD Project is always
happy to have extra hands willing to help--there are already far
more desired enhancements than there is time to implement them. To
contact the developers on technical matters, or with offers of
help, please send mail to the FreeBSD technical discussions
mailing list.
Please note that these mailing lists can experience significant
amounts of traffic. If you have slow or expensive mail access, or
are only interested in keeping up with major FreeBSD events, you
may find it preferable to subscribe instead to the FreeBSD
announcements mailing list.
All of the mailing lists can be freely joined by anyone wishing to
do so. Visit the FreeBSD Mailman Info Page. This will give you
more information on joining the various lists, accessing archives,
etc. There are a number of mailing lists targeted at special
interest groups not mentioned here; more information can be
obtained either from the Mailman pages or the mailing lists
section of the FreeBSD Web site.
Important: Do not send email to the lists asking to be
subscribed. Use the Mailman interface instead.
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3.2 Submitting Problem Reports
Suggestions, bug reports and contributions of code are always
valued--please do not hesitate to report any problems you may
find. Bug reports with attached fixes are of course even more
welcome.
The preferred method to submit bug reports from a machine with
Internet mail connectivity is to use the send-pr(1) command.
"Problem Reports" (PRs) submitted in this way will be filed and
their progress tracked; the FreeBSD developers will do their best
to respond to all reported bugs as soon as possible. A list of all
active PRs is available on the FreeBSD Web site; this list is
useful to see what potential problems other users have
encountered.
Note that send-pr(1) itself is a shell script that should be easy
to move even onto a non-FreeBSD system. Using this interface is
highly preferred. If, for some reason, you are unable to use
send-pr(1) to submit a bug report, you can try to send it to the
FreeBSD problem reports mailing list.
For more information, "Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports", available
on the FreeBSD Web site, has a number of helpful hints on writing
and submitting effective problem reports.
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4 Further Reading
There are many sources of information about FreeBSD; some are
included with this distribution, while others are available
on-line or in print versions.
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4.1 Release Documentation
A number of other files provide more specific information about
this release distribution. These files are provided in various
formats. Most distributions will include both ASCII text (.TXT)
and HTML (.HTM) renditions. Some distributions may also include
other formats such as Portable Document Format (.PDF).
* README.TXT: This file, which gives some general information
about FreeBSD as well as some cursory notes about obtaining a
distribution.
* RELNOTES.TXT: The release notes, showing what's new and
different in FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE compared to the previous
release (FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE).
* HARDWARE.TXT: The hardware compatibility list, showing devices
with which FreeBSD has been tested and is known to work.
* ERRATA.TXT: Release errata. Late-breaking, post-release
information can be found in this file, which is principally
applicable to releases (as opposed to snapshots). It is
important to consult this file before installing a release of
FreeBSD, as it contains the latest information on problems
which have been found and fixed since the release was created.
On platforms that support sysinstall(8) (currently amd64, i386,
ia64, pc98, and sparc64), these documents are generally available
via the Documentation menu during installation. Once the system is
installed, you can revisit this menu by re-running the
sysinstall(8) utility.
Note: It is extremely important to read the errata for any given
release before installing it, to learn about any "late-breaking
news" or post-release problems. The errata file accompanying
each release (most likely right next to this file) is already
out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on
the Internet and should be consulted as the "current errata" for
this release. These other copies of the errata are located at
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/ (as well as any sites which
keep up-to-date mirrors of this location).
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4.2 Manual Pages
As with almost all UNIX like operating systems, FreeBSD comes with
a set of on-line manual pages, accessed through the man(1) command
or through the hypertext manual pages gateway on the FreeBSD Web
site. In general, the manual pages provide information on the
different commands and APIs available to the FreeBSD user.
In some cases, manual pages are written to give information on
particular topics. Notable examples of such manual pages are
tuning(7) (a guide to performance tuning), security(7) (an
introduction to FreeBSD security), and style(9) (a style guide to
kernel coding).
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4.3 Books and Articles
Two highly-useful collections of FreeBSD-related information,
maintained by the FreeBSD Project, are the FreeBSD Handbook and
FreeBSD FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document). On-line
versions of the Handbook and FAQ are always available from the
FreeBSD Documentation page or its mirrors. If you install the doc
distribution set, you can use a Web browser to read the Handbook
and FAQ locally. In particular, note that the Handbook contains a
step-by-step guide to installing FreeBSD.
A number of on-line books and articles, also maintained by the
FreeBSD Project, cover more-specialized, FreeBSD-related topics.
This material spans a wide range of topics, from effective use of
the mailing lists, to dual-booting FreeBSD with other operating
systems, to guidelines for new committers. Like the Handbook and
FAQ, these documents are available from the FreeBSD Documentation
Page or in the doc distribution set.
A listing of other books and documents about FreeBSD can be found
in the bibliography of the FreeBSD Handbook. Because of FreeBSD's
strong UNIX heritage, many other articles and books written for
UNIX systems are applicable as well, some of which are also listed
in the bibliography.
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5 Acknowledgments
FreeBSD represents the cumulative work of many hundreds, if not
thousands, of individuals from around the world who have worked
countless hours to bring about this release. For a complete list
of FreeBSD developers and contributors, please see "Contributors
to FreeBSD" on the FreeBSD Web site or any of its mirrors.
Special thanks also go to the many thousands of FreeBSD users and
testers all over the world, without whom this release simply would
not have been possible.
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This file, and other release-related documents, can be downloaded from
http://www.FreeBSD.org/.
For questions about FreeBSD, read the documentation before contacting
<questions@FreeBSD.org>.
For questions about this documentation, e-mail <doc@FreeBSD.org>.