14 DAY TRIAL // The first Beta version of FreeBSD 10.1, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is out and it's ready for testing.
The FreeBSD developers have released a fresh update for the 10.1 branch, but this is still the Beta version and it will take a few weeks until the final iteration is made available.
The FreeBSD 10.1 will be just a maintenance release, but the developers have made a number of interesting changes and improvements that should make users feel like they are trying something much more advanced.
What the devs are saying about the latest Beta
“The first BETA build of the 10.1-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, armv6, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.”
“If you notice problems you can report them through the Bugzilla PR system or on the -stable mailing list. If you would like to use SVN to do a source based update of an existing system, use the ‘stable/10’ branch,” say the devs in the release notes.
According to the changelog, a new sysctl (kern.panic_reboot_wait_time) has been added, which allows controlling how long the system will wait after panic before rebooting, the vt driver has been merged from FreeBSD-CURRENT, support for hwpmc has been added for the PowerPC 970 class processors, a panic triggered by removing a urtwn device has been fixed, support has been added for the AMD Family 16h sensor devices, the uslcom driver has been updated to support 26 new devices, and the FreeBSD virtual memory subsystem has been updated to implement “fast path” for the page fault handler.
Also, support has been added for Microsoft Hyper-V to FreeBSD/i386 as loadable modules, the bhyve hypervisor now supports soft power-off functionality via the ACPI S5 state, the WANDBOARD kernel configuration file has been added, support for Ralink RT5370 and RT5372 chipsets has been added, support has been added for the UDP-Lite protocol (RFC 3828) to the IPv4 and IPv6 stacks, and the zfs filesystem has been updated to implement “bookmarks.”
The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions. You can download FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia. Keep in mind that this is not a Linux distribution, so things might work a little bit differently, especially when compiling your own software.
Warning
Keep in mind that this is still under development and there still are a lot of bugs and problems. Please, don't install this distro on a production machine.