14 DAY TRIAL // FreeBSD, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures, is now at version 8.3 RC1.
The developers of FreeBSD 8.3 RC1 have said that there will probably be another release candidate before the final release.
The freebsd-update utility provides support for binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Users that have previous systems intalled, more precisely FreeBSD 8.1 and FreeBSD 8.2, can update with the following command, in a terminal:
freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.3-RC1
In the update process, the update utility may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly. Just use the following commands to continue with the installation:
freebsd-update install shutdown -r now
The system will reboot, but users will need to run freebsd-update again to install the new userland components.
freebsd-update install # shutdown -r now
Download FreeBSD 8.3 RC1 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development release and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended to be used for testing purposes only.