FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely has announced the availability of RC4 - the final Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.9. He says that RC4 includes SATA, DRM and other bugfixes; he is requesting everyone for help with testing. He says that if all goes well, they will be able to release Monday."

Comments

Re:Color me thoroughly confused...

[__past__]

It's a little like the odd/even minor number branches of the Linux kernel being developed in parallel. FreeBSD 5 is the development branch. While more stable than many other OSes, it is not recommended for production use yet - there is a lot of new functionality that has to thoroughly tested, and some things still change. AFAIK, the current plans are to declare the 5.x series the "stable" one is with the release of 5.3, ealier plans had 5.2 in that role (the current release is 5.1).

While FreeBSD 5.x is still maturing, the stable 4.x series continues to be actively developed (not only bugfixed). Hence the new 4.9 release. It's successor was released after 5.0 came out as well.