FreeBSD Puts Out Beta 4 of 5.5 and 6.1 Releases

Published: March 16, 2006

by Timothy Prickett Morgan

The FreeBSD project this week moved closer to getting FreeBSD 5.5 and 6.1 to market, with the announcement of the fourth betas of these two implementations of the open source BSD Unix platform.

FreeBSD went into code freeze on February 5, when the first beta of the code was presented to the public for testing. Beta 2 followed on February 20 and Beta 3 on March 3. The project was anticipating that the code would be released to customers by March 20 in its initial roadmap, but this is software and if there wasn't some slippage in the schedule then it, uh, wouldn't be software. FreeBSD 6.1 is running a little more than a week behind schedule, so it seems likely it will get here in the first week of April. As it stands, the current FreeBSD has some "show stopper" bugs, which the project is working on, including several issues on 64-bit Sparc platforms. You can get more information and the beta code at this link. FreeBSD 6.1 is not a dramatic departure from FreeBSD 6.0, which was released in November 2005, but rather has a bunch of tweaks and bug fixes.

As for FreeBSD 5.5, say goodnight, Gracie. "The FreeBSD 5.5 release is being done for people who are unable to make the jump to FreeBSD 6.X at this time," the beta release notes explain. "We do encourage people to make that transition as soon as possible, though. There have been some updates made between FreeBSD 5.4 and FreeBSD 5.5 but not all of the bug fixes done to RELENG_6 have been back-ported to RELENG_5. This will almost certainly be the last 5.X release."