14 DAY TRIAL // The final version of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, has been released and is now available for download.
The FreeBSD developers have been very busy and managed to finish this update for the oldest and still maintained version of their operating system. Even if they've already launched a 10.0 version of the OS, they haven't forgotten the users who are still relying on the old branch.
Even if this is just a maintenance release, the developers have made quite a few changes and improvements and it took them three Release Candidates just to reach this point.
“The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release of the stable/9 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 9.2-RELEASE and introduces some new features.”
“FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE is now available for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64, and sparc64 architectures. FreeBSD 9.3-RELEASE can be installed from bootable ISO images or over the network. Some architectures also support installing from a USB memory stick,” say the devs in the release notes.
According to the changelog, the zfs(8) filesystem has been updated to support the bookmarks feature, the uname(1) utility has been updated and it now includes the -U and -K flags, the fetch library has been updated and is now able to update support SNI (Server Name Identification), several updates for GCC have been imported from Google, the hastctl utility has been updated and is now able to output the current queue sizes, and the protect command has been added, allowing exempting processes from being killed when swap is exhausted.
Also, a tool called etcupdate for managing updates to files in /etc has been merged from head/, a new shared library directory, /usr/lib/private, has been added for internal-use shared libraries, OpenPAM has been updated to Nummularia, a new flag, “onifconsole,” has been added to /etc/ttys, Sendmail has been updated to version 8.14.9, BIND has been updated to version 9.9.5, the xz utility has been updated to a post-5.0.5 snapshot, OpenSSH has been updated to version 6.6p1, and OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8za.
The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions. You can download FreeBSD 9.3 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.