De leden van FreeBSD Release Engineering Team hebben dan eindelijk FreeBSD 6.0 uitgebracht. Het besturingssysteem heeft een lange geschiedenis achter de rug van FreeBSD 1.0 uit december 1993 die in de loop van de jaren uit gegroeid is tot wat het nu is. Voor meer gedetailleerde informatie over het hoe en wat van FreeBSD verwijzen we jullie door naar het Nederlandstalige Handboek. De aankondiging waarmee FreeBSD 6.0 aan de wereld bekend werd gemaakt ziet er als volgt uit:
It is my great pleasure and privilege to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE. This release is the next step in delivering the high performance and enterprise features that have been under development in the FreeBSD 5.x series for that last several years. Some of the many changes since 5.4 include:For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list.
- Significant performance improvements to the filesystem and direct disk access layers of the OS. The filesystem is now multithreaded and can take full advantage of multiple CPU systems.
- Expanded support for wireless networking adapters and new support for the WPA wireless security protocol.
- Experimental support for the PowerPC platform.
FreeBSD 6.0-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, powerpc, and ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using bootable media or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all architectures are available now.
The FreeBSD project encourages the use of BitTorrent for distributing the release ISO images. A collection of torrent files to download the images is available at: ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/torrents/6.0-RELEASE
Many companies donated equipment, network access, or man-hours to finance the release engineering activities for FreeBSD 6.0 including The FreeBSD Foundation, FreeBSD Systems, Hewlett-Packard, Yahoo!, Sentex Communications, and SPARTA.