[molotov]

"Announcement
------------

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability
of FreeBSD 4.11-RC3. This will be the last Release Candidate for the
FreeBSD 4.11 release unless a "show-stopper" problem is found while testing
RC3.

A schedule for the Release Cycle is available at:

http://www.freebsd.org/releases/4.11R/schedule.html

We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified
and worked out. Availability of ISO images and support for doing FTP based
installs is given below. If you have an older system you want to update
using the normal CVS/cvsup source based upgrade the branch tag to use
is RELENG_4_11. Problem reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1)
command.

It has been decided to provide two disc1 ISO images, one with the KDE
windowing system packages on it and the other with the GNOME windowing
system packages. They are named disc1-kde and disc1-gnome respectively.
Other than which major windowing system is on them they are identical.
Most users can choose one of the disc1 ISOs to download and install from.
At this time disc1-gnome for Alpha is not available. It may be made
available later this week.

At the moment there are no known severe issues.

Changes since RC2:

- fix to some string handling in file(1)
- additional device support to mpt(4)
- tcp fix to make RST attacks harder plus knob to turn off new behavior
- fixes to sk(4) and em(4)
- fixes to USB
- fixes to kernel linux emulation
- addition of ips(4) driver
- lots of doc fixes/updates

Availability
------------

The RC3 ISOs and FTP support are available on most of the FreeBSD Mirror
sites. A list of the mirror sites is available here:

http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/mirrors-ftp.html

The MD5s are:

MD5 (4.11-RC3-alpha-disc1-kde.iso) = b0b829a27d32e035e10d76fa5c517376
MD5 (4.11-RC3-alpha-disc2.iso) = 1a842a0b0f039b4059ccc84da3dc854e
MD5 (4.11-RC3-alpha-miniinst.iso) = 4d8e8ea552cbe1a76de29ae5f56211f2

MD5 (4.11-RC3-i386-disc1-gnome.iso) = 35a1edeec3efdabccd2ba2a90bfe4cd0
MD5 (4.11-RC3-i386-disc1-kde.iso) = dd3eb1a0a9474557fb607bd7467fcee2
MD5 (4.11-RC3-i386-disc2.iso) = c081a7a6f0762a1e2bf5ca34a3a8ac85
MD5 (4.11-RC3-i386-miniinst.iso) = 8bfa7a081641cfe0befe1ea9679459ed
"

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=freebsd-stable&m=110592768815584&w=2

[LooseChanj]

Oh for crap's sake...Isn't 5.x stable now? And don't even get me started on the whole four point eleven thing...

:silly:

[bmw]

Not quite as stable as some require. There's some discussion about how well it does on UP (single-CPU) vs SMP as compared to 4.10. More cautious, conservative users still need the 4.x branch around until 5.x has some more mileage on it. Some people want/need the latest stuff and don't mind the odd glitch, others (eg firewall builders) value proven legacy over bleeding-edge. At least ya got choice! :-)

[LooseChanj]

Don't care, four point eleven is just ridiculous. :-P

[bumbler]

Ridiculous or not, it's what I run and like it very well. My hardware is a tad bit older and In can't justify a system rebuild time that's 3 times what's needed for 4.x. BTW, my update claims it's just 4.11-RELEASE. And if there's a 4.12 out there in the future, I'm likely to upgrade to that, too.

[LooseChanj]

Isn't that what DragonflyBSD is for? Building on the 4.x releases?

[bmw]

It's a different distro though, isn't it? With its own conventions, foibles, issues. If I wanted to use another BSD I'd sooner go to NetBSD or OpenBSD. FreeBSD 4.10/4.11 is almost indistinguishable from 5.3 at the surface API level (filesystem, kernel calls, libraries, etc.). And best of all, you can boot a FreeBSD 5.3/5.4 CD on a 4.x system and do an "Upgrade install" and it will 99.995% "just work". That's how I usually do system upgrades. (When I'm not simply doing a clean install.)