The latest version of FreeBSD can be downloaded from Softpedia

Oct 11, 2012 08:24 GMT  ·  By

The second Release Candidate of the upcoming FreeBSD operating system has been announced and it is now available for download and testing.

FreeBSD 9.1 RC2 operating system has been made available for multiple architectures, including amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, and powerpc64.

Besides this version, the developers have decided that they are going to launch yet another release candidate, next week. The stable version will come a week after the last RC.

According to the developers, the community has exerted some pressure to not export the 9.1 release branch activity to CVS. This means that even the 10.X releases will not be exported to CVS, although it's not yet certain that the 8.X branch will get the same treatment. More information about this decision will be made available.

If users want to do a source-based update, to an existing system using SVN, then the branch that needs to be used is releng/9.1. If users might want to use CVS instead, they must make use of RELENG_9_1.

The good news is that the freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems, running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 9.0, 9.1 Beta 1, or 9.1 RC1, can upgrade as follows:

freebsd-update upgrade -r 9.1-RC2

During this process, FreeBSD Update will ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.

freebsd-update install

The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.

shutdown -r now

After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again in order to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted again:

freebsd-update install shutdown -r now

Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 7.X, 8.X) can also use freebsd-update to upgrade to FreeBSD 9.1-RC2, but will be prompted to rebuild all third-party applications, after the second invocation of "freebsd-update install."

Download FreeBSD 9.1 RC2 right now from Softpedia. Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.