The FreeBSD Project $FreeBSD$ 2000 2001 2002 2003 The FreeBSD Documentation Project The release notes for &os; &release.current; contain a summary of This document lists applicable security advisories that were issued since the last release, as well as significant changes to the &os; kernel and userland. Some brief remarks on upgrading are also presented. This document contains the release notes for &os; &release.current; on the &arch.print; hardware platform. It describes recently added, changed, or deleted features of &os;. It also provides some notes on upgrading from previous versions of &os;. The &release.type; distribution to which these release notes apply represents a point along the &release.branch; development branch between &release.prev; and the future &release.next;. Some pre-built, binary &release.type; distributions along this branch can be found at . ]]> This distribution of &os; &release.current; is a &release.type; distribution. It can be found at or any of its mirrors. More information on obtaining this (or other) &release.type; distributions of &os; can be found in the Obtaining FreeBSD appendix to the FreeBSD Handbook. ]]> Users who are new to the &release.branch; series of &os; &release.type;s should also read the Early Adopters Guide to &os; &release.current;. This document can generally be found in the same location as the release notes (either as a part of a &os; distribution or on the &os; Web site). It contains important information regarding the advantages and disadvantages of using &os; &release.current;, as opposed to releases based on the &os; 4-STABLE development branch. All users are encouraged to consult the release errata before installing &os;. The errata document is updated with late-breaking information discovered late in the release cycle or after the release. Typically, it contains information on known bugs, security advisories, and corrections to documentation. An up-to-date copy of the errata for &os; &release.current; can be found on the &os; Web site. This section describes Typical release note items document recent security advisories issued after &release.prev.historic;, new drivers or hardware support, new commands or options, major bug fixes, or contributed software upgrades. They may also list changes to major ports/packages or release engineering practices. Clearly the release notes cannot list every single change made to &os; between releases; this document focuses primarily on security advisories, user-visible changes, and major architectural improvements. Users with existing &os; systems are highly encouraged to read the Early Adopter's Guide to &os; &release.current;. This document generally has the filename EARLY.TXT on the distribution media, or any other place that the release notes can be found. It offers some notes on upgrading, but more importantly, also discusses some of the relative merits of upgrading to &os; 5.X versus running &os; 4.X. Upgrading &os; should, of course, only be attempted after backing up all data and configuration files.