The &os; Project $FreeBSD: head/release/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/readme/article.sgml 109143 2003-01-12 18:23:15Z roam $ 2000 2001 2002 2003 The FreeBSD Documentation Project This document gives a brief introduction to &os; &release.current;. It includes some information on how to obtain &os;, a listing of various ways to contact the &os; Project, and pointers to some other sources of information. This distribution is a &release.type; of &os; &release.current;, the latest point along the &release.branch; branch. &os; is an operating system based on 4.4 BSD Lite for Intel, AMD, Cyrix or NexGen x86 based PC hardware, Compaq (formerly DEC) Alpha computers, and UltraSPARC machines. Versions for the IA64 and PowerPC architectures are currently under development as well. &os; works with a wide variety of peripherals and configurations and can be used for everything from software development to games to Internet Service Provision. This release of &os; contains everything you need to run such a system, including full source code for the kernel and all utilities in the base distribution. With the source distribution installed, you can literally recompile the entire system from scratch with one command, making it ideal for students, researchers, or users who simply want to see how it all works. A large collection of third-party ported software (the Ports Collection) is also provided to make it easy to obtain and install all your favorite traditional UNIX utilities for &os;. Each port consists of a set of scripts to retrieve, configure, build, and install a piece of software, with a single command. Over &os.numports; ports, from editors to programming languages to graphical applications, make &os; a powerful and comprehensive operating environment that extends far beyond what's provided by many commercial versions of UNIX. Most ports are also available as pre-compiled packages, which can be quickly installed from the installation program. This &release.type; is aimed primarily at early adopters and various other users who want to get involved with the ongoing development of &os;. While the &os; development team tries its best to ensure that each &release.type; works as advertised, &release.branch; is very much a work-in-progress. The basic requirements for using this &release.type; are technical proficiency with &os; and an understanding of the ongoing development process of &os; &release.branch; (as discussed on the &a.current;). For those more interested in doing business with &os; than in experimenting with new &os; technology, formal releases (such as &release.prev.stable;) are frequently more appropriate. Releases undergo a period of testing and quality assurance checking to ensure high reliability and dependability. ]]> This &release.type; of &os; is suitable for all users. It has undergone a period of testing and quality assurance checking to ensure the highest reliability and dependability. ]]> &os; may be obtained in a variety of ways. This section focuses on those ways that are primarily useful for obtaining a complete &os; distribution, rather than updating an existing installation. &os; -RELEASE distributions may be ordered on CDROM or DVD from several publishers. This is frequently the most convenient way to obtain &os; for new installations, as it provides a convenient way to quickly reinstall the system if necessary. Some distributions include some of the optional, precompiled packages from the &os; Ports Collection. A list of the CDROM and DVD publishers known to the project are listed in the Obtaining FreeBSD appendix to the Handbook. You can use FTP to retrieve &os; and any or all of its optional packages from , which is the official &os; release site, or any of its mirrors. Lists of locations that mirror &os; can be found in the FTP Sites section of the Handbook, or on the Web pages. Finding a close (in networking terms) mirror from which to download the distribution is highly recommended. Additional mirror sites are always welcome. Contact freebsd-admin@FreeBSD.org for more details on becoming an official mirror site. You can also find useful information for mirror sites at the Mirroring FreeBSD article. Mirrors generally contain the floppy disk images necessary to begin an installation, as well as the distribution files needed for the install process itself. Many mirrors also contain the ISO images necessary to create a CDROM of a &os; release. For any questions or general technical support issues, please send mail to the &a.questions;. If you're tracking the &release.branch; development efforts, you must join the &a.current;, in order to keep abreast of recent developments and changes that may affect the way you use and maintain the system. Being a largely-volunteer effort, the &os; Project is always happy to have extra hands willing to help—there are already far more desired enhancements than there is time to implement them. To contact the developers on technical matters, or with offers of help, please send mail to the &a.hackers;. Please note that these mailing lists can experience significant amounts of traffic. If you have slow or expensive mail access, or are only interested in keeping up with major &os; events, you may find it preferable to subscribe instead to the &a.announce;. All of the mailing lists can be freely joined by anyone wishing to do so. Send mail to &a.majordomo; and include the keyword help on a line by itself somewhere in the body of the message. This will give you more information on joining the various lists, accessing archives, etc. There are a number of mailing lists targeted at special interest groups not mentioned here; more information can be obtained either through majordomo or the mailing lists section of the &os; Web site. Do not send email to the lists asking to be subscribed. Use the &a.majordomo; address instead. Suggestions, bug reports and contributions of code are always valued—please do not hesitate to report any problems you may find. Bug reports with attached fixes are of course even more welcome. The preferred method to submit bug reports from a machine with Internet mail connectivity is to use the &man.send-pr.1; command or use the Web form at http://www.FreeBSD.org/send-pr.html. Problem Reports (PRs) submitted in this way will be filed and their progress tracked; the &os; developers will do their best to respond to all reported bugs as soon as possible. A list of all active PRs is available on the &os; Web site; this list is useful to see what potential problems other users have encountered. Note that &man.send-pr.1; itself is a shell script that should be easy to move even onto a non-&os; system. Using this interface is highly preferred. If, for some reason, you are unable to use &man.send-pr.1; to submit a bug report, you can try to send it to the &a.bugs;. For more information, Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports, available on the &os; Web site, has a number of helpful hints on writing and submitting effective problem reports. There are many sources of information about &os;; some are included with this distribution, while others are available on-line or in print versions. A number of other files provide more specific information about this &release.type; distribution. These files are provided in various formats. Most distributions will include both ASCII text (.TXT) and HTML (.HTM) renditions. Some distributions may also include other formats such as PostScript (.PS) or Portable Document Format (.PDF). README.TXT: This file, which gives some general information about &os; as well as some cursory notes about obtaining a distribution. EARLY.TXT: A guide for early adopters of &os; 5.0-RELEASE. Highly recommended reading for users new to &os; &release.branch; and/or the 5.X series of releases. RELNOTES.TXT: The release notes, showing what's new and different in &os; &release.current; compared to the previous release (&os; &release.prev;). HARDWARE.TXT: The hardware compatibility list, showing devices with which &os; has been tested and is known to work. INSTALL.TXT: Installation instructions for installing &os; from its distribution media. ERRATA.TXT: Release errata. Late-breaking, post-release information can be found in this file, which is principally applicable to releases (as opposed to snapshots). It is important to consult this file before installing a release of &os;, as it contains the latest information on problems which have been found and fixed since the release was created. Several of these documents (in particular, RELNOTES.TXT, HARDWARE.TXT, and INSTALL.TXT) contain information that is specific to a particular hardware architecture. For example, the alpha release notes contain information not applicable to the i386, and vice versa. The architecture for which each document applies will be listed in that document's title. On platforms that support &man.sysinstall.8; (currently the i386 and alpha), these documents are generally available via the Documentation menu during installation. Once the system is installed, you can revisit this menu by re-running the &man.sysinstall.8; utility. It is extremely important to read the errata for any given release before installing it, to learn about any late-breaking news or post-release problems. The errata file accompanying each release (most likely right next to this file) is already out of date by definition, but other copies are kept updated on the Internet and should be consulted as the current errata for this release. These other copies of the errata are located at (as well as any sites which keep up-to-date mirrors of this location). As with almost all UNIX-like operating systems, &os; comes with a set of on-line manual pages, accessed through the &man.man.1; command or through the hypertext manual pages gateway on the &os; Web site. In general, the manual pages provide information on the different commands and APIs available to the &os; user. In some cases, manual pages are written to give information on particular topics. Notable examples of such manual pages are &man.tuning.7; (a guide to performance tuning), &man.security.7; (an introduction to &os; security), and &man.style.9; (a style guide to kernel coding). Two highly-useful collections of &os;-related information, maintained by the &os; Project, are the &os; Handbook and &os; FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions document). On-line versions of the Handbook and FAQ are always available from the FreeBSD Documentation page or its mirrors. If you install the doc distribution set, you can use a Web browser to read the Handbook and FAQ locally. A number of on-line books and articles, also maintained by the &os; Project, cover more-specialized, &os;-related topics. This material spans a wide range of topics, from effective use of the mailing lists, to dual-booting &os; with other operating systems, to guidelines for new committers. Like the Handbook and FAQ, these documents are available from the &os; Documentation Page or in the doc distribution set. A listing of other books and documents about &os; can be found in the bibliography of the &os; Handbook. Because of &os;'s strong UNIX heritage, many other articles and books written for UNIX systems are applicable as well, some of which are also listed in the bibliography. &os; represents the cumulative work of many hundreds, if not thousands, of individuals from around the world who have worked countless hours to bring about this &release.type;. For a complete list of &os; developers and contributors, please see Contributors to FreeBSD on the &os; Web site or any of its mirrors. Special thanks also go to the many thousands of &os; users and testers all over the world, without whom this &release.type; simply would not have been possible.