FreeBSD 9.1 enters beta

The developers at the FreeBSD Project have released the first beta for version 9.1 of the open source FreeBSD operating system. Aimed at developers and testers, the first test build of FreeBSD 9.1 was originally expected to arrive on 6 July but later fell behind schedule. In the mailing list announcement, Ken Smith, a member of the Release Engineering Team, says that the developers "hope this will be the only BETA build", noting that it will be followed by two release candidate builds.

FreeBSD 9.1 will be the first stable major point update to version 9.0 from January of this year, and will include updates to the GNOME and KDE desktops, to drivers and various other new features. At the time of writing, however, the developers have yet to publish specific details about the changes between 9.1 Beta 1 and 9.0. The project's 9.1 release schedule still lists 17 August as the date for the final release, though Smith points out that the schedule should be updated "within the next couple of days".

FreeBSD 9.1 Beta 1 is available to download for amd64, i386, powerpc64, and sparc64 systems from one of the project's mirrors. As with all development releases, use in production environments and on mission critical systems is not advised. Users testing the release are encouraged to provide feedback and report any bugs that they find.

Source code for FreeBSD is licensed under the two-clause BSD license. The current stable production releases of FreeBSD are versions 8.3 and 9.0.

See also:

• FreeBSD 10 will be using Clang instead of GCC, a report from The H.
• Health Check: FreeBSD - "The unknown giant", a feature from The H.

(crve)