14 DAY TRIAL // The second Beta version of FreeBSD 10.1, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, has been released and is now ready for testing.
The FreeBSD developers now have a new Beta in the wild and it looks like the stable version of this point release is getting closer to a final iteration. It comes with quite a few changes and improvements, despite the fact that it looks more like a brand new release and less like a minor maintenance update.
Recent FreeBSD builds have incorporated numerous changes, and it looks like the development pace is not slowing down. Most users will find something interesting in this release and it's a very good version for testing.
Fixes and more fixes
“The second 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,” note the devs in the release notes.
According to the changelog, UEFI-capable memory stick images and CDROM/DVDROM images are now built by default for the 10.1-RELEASE cycle, the gssapi_krb5 library has been included in the gssapi build, the default motd text has been changed to clarify the included information and including references to additional resources, a potential crash in ctld has been corrected, a Denial of Service issue in TCP packet processing has been fixed, and support has been added for the Promise TX8660 8-port 3Gbps HBA.
Also, a crash in clang that was triggered by debuginfo has been fixed, kern.features sysctl will now report if SCTP has been made available in the running kernel, parsing the IPv6 nameserver lines in unbound should now work properly, a crash in pam has been fixed and everything should work just fine if neither PAM_RHOST or PAM_TTY has been set, a few bug fixes and improvements to the vt driver have been merged from FreeBSD-Current, and several optimizations to the math library have been merged.
The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions. You can download FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 2 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.
This is a distribution that's still under construction, so it's advisable that you don't use a production machine to test it.