Date: Fri, 04 Nov 2005 08:40:04 -0700
From: Scott Long <scottl@FreeBSD.org>
To: freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org
Subject: [FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 6.0 Released

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:

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.

For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list, available at:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.0R/relnotes.html
http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/6.0R/errata.html

For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please see:

http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng

Availability
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.

Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be offering FreeBSD 6.0 based products:

FreeBSD Mall, Inc. http://www.freebsdmall.com/

Daemonnews, Inc. http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html

If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images. We can't promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they will at least be available from the following sites. MD5 and SHA256 checksums for the release images are included at the bottom of this message.