FreeBSD 7.3 Is Out

The stable legacy branch of the popular BSD-based operating system FreeBSD has been updated to FreeBSD 7.3. The release is a housekeeping update that brings some newer packages and some security fixes, but no new features. FreeBSD 7.3 is now available for the amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.2 and introduces a few new features. There will be one more release from this branch to allow future improvements to be made available in the 7-STABLE branch but at this point most developers are focused on 8-STABLE," the FreeBSD team wrote in the official announcement.

Highlights of FreeBSD 7.3:

· Updated to Gnome 2.28.2;
· Updated to KDE 4.3.5;
· Updated to Perl 5.10;
· Updated to ZFS 13;
· Updated to BIND 9.4-ESV;
· New boot loader GPTZFSBoot supports GPT and ZFS;
· The HWPMC(4) driver has gotten some enhancements including support for Core2/i7 processor and pmcannotate(8);
· New MFIUTIL and MPTUTIL tools for widely used RAID controllers;
· NULL pointer vulnerability has been fixed.

The FreeBSD team is now focused on the FreeBSD 8 branch, but the older FreeBSD 7 branch, released a couple of years ago, is still supported with package updates, bug fixes and security plugs. The previous update, FreeBSD 7.2, was released almost a year ago in May 2009. FreeBSD is a flavor of the Berkley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system, itself a derivative of UNIX. It is one of the BSD descendants and it sees active development along with other notable projects like NetBSD and OpenBSD. FreeBSD is the base for other projects like PC-BSD.

FreeBSD 7.3 is available for download here on Softpedia.