*BSD News Article 27726


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From: jkh@whisker.hubbard.ie (Jordan K. Hubbard)
Newsgroups: comp.os.386bsd.announce
Subject: FreeBSD 1.1 BETA released
Followup-To: poster
Date: 24 Feb 1994 20:13:23 -0800
Organization: Jordan Hubbard
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This is an announcement that the FreeBSD 1.1 BETA program has now
started.  It will continue for 2 weeks or so until March 13th, at
which point FreeBSD 1.1 will be released, both to the net and on CD
from Walnut Creek CDROM (and others).  These are FIRM dates, so we
need BETA testers who are willing to seriously beat on this
distribution as soon as possible so that any remaining bugs may be
found and fixed before the 13th of March.

What we need from our BETA testers:
-----------------------------------

A willingness to communicate any problems with the installation of
FreeBSD 1.1 to us in a timely fashion, and in enough detail that we
can hopefully reproduce and fix it.

Enough technical ability to contribute to the repair process is
desirable but not necessarily essential - we also need "green" testers
who are willing to install the release from scratch and with few
preconceptions of how to do it.  We need to test the release from the
FreeBSD beginner's perspective as well as that of the advanced user.

A 386, 486 or Pentium class machine with any mix of peripheral
hardware.  Some BETA testers will be chosen purely for the fact that
they have hardware that none of the other testers do! :-)

A sincere desire to improve FreeBSD, since there's not really much
point in joining a BETA test group otherwise - it's a lot of extra 
work that you can just as easily avoid by waiting a couple of weeks!


Who should not be a BETA tester:
--------------------------------

Someone with limited time - if you seriously think you won't have time
to really test FreeBSD, then there's probably not much point in signing
up.

Someone who just wants the bits before anyone else.  Let's face it, it's
just a couple of weeks, so why not save yourself the hassle and just wait
for the tested release?

Someone who's using FreeBSD for mission-critical work and doesn't have
a machine they can afford to blow away and reinstall from scratch.


What to expect as a BETA tester:
--------------------------------

FreeBSD 1.1 BETA installation floppies and binary release from
freebsd.cdrom.com:~ftp/pub/FreeBSD/FreeBSD-1.1-BETA, or optionally
just the source release if you want to try a source 1.0.2 to 1.1
upgrade (there will be a script provided for that purpose).  The
source is not currently available but should be in place by the time
you read this announcement.


NO SUPPORT PROVIDED for going between FreeBSD 1.1 BETA and FreeBSD 1.1
in _binary form_.  That is to say, if you elect to go the binary
upgrade route, you'll have to upgrade the binaries one more time when
we go to FreeBSD-1.1 Release.  It's simply too much trouble to build
binary distribution sets for only a changed set of utilities (or the
kernel).  We WILL be providing a patch file for upgrading 1.1 BETA
_source_ upgraded folks to 1.1 Release, since that's a lot easier to
do.  As always, if you've got the full sources, it's a lot easier all
around (but we appreciate that not everyone has the space).

The possibilty, as always, of blowing yourself away!  We have
naturally tried to turn out a BETA release of the highest possible
quality, but we are volunteers and we do make mistakes (which is what
we're looking to you BETA testers to help correct! :-), so it's quite
possible that you'll be the first to trip over a nasty bug and thus
save others the displeasure of doing so themselves - that's what being
a BETA tester is all about, of course!


More details
------------

As previously mentioned, the place to get freebsd 1.1 BETA is from:

	FreeBSD.cdrom.com:~ftp/pub/FreeBSD-1.1-BETA

In this directory you'll find compressed and split files for the 1.1
BETA binary and source releases.  A shared version of XFree86 2.0
built for both FreeBSD 1.1 BETA and 1.1 RELEASE will be found in
XFree86.cdrom.com:~ftp/pub/XFree86/XFree86-2.0-for-1.1 as soon as it
is availiable (expected no later than 1994/22/24 23:00 PST)


You will also find, over the course of the next few days, parts of the
new FreeBSD 1.1 ports collection, which will be trickling into place
as the individual ports are validated.  Those ports which support
being bundled into the FreeBSD binary "package" format will also have
corresponding files appear in the packages/ directory.  You are also
encouraged to try these guys out and report any problems you may find!
We can't guarantee to be as responsive to problems with the ports
collection as we are with the main source tree (and I doubt that many
of you would have it any other way), but we will do our best in the
time left available before FreeBSD 1.1 Release.


What's changed between FreeBSD 1.0.2 and FreeBSD 1.1 BETA
---------------------------------------------------------

Hah!  Wouldn't you like to know! :-)

Seriously, this is a difficult question to answer since the change
logs are still being massaged into something that WILL be included
with the FreeBSD 1.1 Release distribution, but I'll try to at least
cover some of the highlights (in no particular order):

1.  Shared libraries (Sun style, not Linux style implementation)
2.  A substantially new VM system - FreeBSD runs on 4MB machines again.
3.  Many updates to the SCSI system.
4.  Improved and more explanatory kernel messages all around.
5.  Support for WD8013W, WD8003W, and WD8003EB based ethernet cards.
6   Support for 3C509 based ethernet cards.
7   Support for Toshiba ethernet cards.  Also the SMC Ultra.
8.  Support for booting FreeBSD diskless from a fileserver.
9.  Considerable improvement to the SIO driver.
10. SCSI crashdumps now work.
11. Default magic format is now QMAGIC (compatable with BSDI's BSD/386)
12. Support for the WINE Windows Emulator.
13. Fully SYSV IPC support (messages, semaphores).
14. A /proc filesystem (makes ps and friends faster).
15. Memory below 640K is now used properly.
16. The wd (IDE/ESDI) driver has been substantially improved.
17. Updated Mitsumi CDROM driver, now works with all models.
18. Substantially updated floppy driver code - can now format floppies, too.
19. YP code updated.
20. Support for WT-80 (floppy tape) drives.
21. New exec and ptrace code.
22. mmap() now works for arbitrary regions of memory (like frame buffers).
23. A new version of `vi' (from 4.4 BSD).

There are many many more bug fixes, enhancements and general redesign
efforts than those listed here, but as I said, this is just an attempt
to list the highlights.  For far more information, check the document
in /sys/i386/doc/Changes  [ Rod - anywhere else for user land changes? ]
or wait for FreeBSD 1.1 Release.

Thanks!

				Jordan (for the FreeBSD core team)

--
Jordan K. Hubbard	FreeBSD core team	Electric Bivalves Anonymous
On the net, no one can hear you scream.
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