This will be the last Beta version in the series

Oct 1, 2014 13:34 GMT  ·  By

A new Beta version has been made available for the FreeBSD 10.1 branch, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures. Users can now download and test it.

The FreeBSD developers now have another Beta version in the wild and it looks like they might be getting ready to advance to the next stage. There still are a large number of fixes and new features left to be added to the distribution, so it's likely that we'll have more than just one Release Candidate.

The development cycle is powering on and there is no sign that it will slow down. If anything, it has even picked up some Steam and this version seems to be a little bit bigger than the previous one.

One last Beta

"The third 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. This is expected to be the final BETA release of the 10.1-RELEASE cycle," say the devs in the release notes.

"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."

The developers also provide images for the virtual machines, in case users already have one set up and they want to test the operating system. A number of file formats are offered and they should work with various applications.

According to the changelog posted by the devs, serial and null console support has been added to the UEFI boot loader, the OpenPAM packages have been updated, a number of important bugfixes have been implemented, and the encryption and decryption features for the hard drive have been improved.

If you have an older version of FreeBSD already installed, you can upgrade to the new one pretty easily. Just enter this command in a terminal:

code
freebsd-update upgrade -r 10.1-BETA3
freebsd-update install
shutdown -r now
The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions for various problems that can occur during the upgrade process. You can download FreeBSD 10.1 Beta 3 right now from Softpedia. Do keep in mind that this is not Linux, so things will work a little bit differently from what you would expect.

Also, this is still a Beta release, so if you are going to test it, please don't use a production machine.