Welcome to the FreeBSD archive! ------------------------------- Here you will find the official releases of FreeBSD, along with the ports and packages collection and other FreeBSD-related material. For those who have World Wide Web access, we encourage you to visit the FreeBSD home page at: http://www.FreeBSD.org/ Contents of this directory: --------------------------- releases/${ARCH}/*-RELEASE/ The official FreeBSD releases. See README.TXT files in these directories for more information. The releases/${ARCH}/ISO-IMAGES directory also contains ISO 9660 (+ rockridge extensions) installation CD images for the latest releases. Please consider supporting the project and purchasing a FreeBSD CDROM from http://www.freebsdmall.com rather than burning your own ISO images. snapshots/${ARCH}/*-YYMMDD-SNAP/ Any "snapshot" tests of an upcoming release. YYMMDD represents the year, month and day of the snapshot. These are not frequently updated on this site for load reasons. For the latest snapshots, see ftp://current.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD instead. FreeBSD-current/ This contains files relating to FreeBSD-current, which is the active development version of FreeBSD. It is *strongly* advised that you be familiar with UNIX development in general and FreeBSD in particular before running this branch. FreeBSD-stable/ This contains files relating to FreeBSD-stable, the stable code branch of FreeBSD. development/FreeBSD-CVS/ This contains the FreeBSD CVS repository. It is intended for use by developers. However, a better way to update your CVS repository is with the cvsup tool. See http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html for more information. doc/ Documentation for FreeBSD including the FAQ and the FreeBSD handbook. Both these documents are available in hypertext form from http://www.FreeBSD.org/ ports/ports/ A snapshot of the FreeBSD ports collection. It contains makefiles, patches and configuration scripts necessary to make the applications in the distfiles/ directory compile and run on FreeBSD. If your FreeBSD machine is connected to the Internet, you need not download the application source code from distfiles/ because the makefile will automatically fetch it for you. A better way to update your ports collection is to use the cvsup tool: see http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/cvsup.html for more information. ports/${ARCH}/ The FreeBSD package collection for supported architectures and FreeBSD branches. These are pre-compiled applications ready to install with the pkg_add command. Packages for recent releases are also included, but are not updated and are "frozen" to the state of the package collection at the time of release. ports/distfiles/ ports/local_distfiles/ Original source code distribution files for applications included in the ports collection. tools/ A collection of useful tools for people installing FreeBSD. This includes MS-DOS tools such as RAWRITE used for making installation disks, FIPS for splitting an MS-DOS partition and a couple boot managers to allow easy booting on computers with more than one operating system installed. Mirror Sites: ------------- The mirroring of FreeBSD distributions from this location is handled by mapping each FreeBSD mirror into a common "namespace" which can be said to follow this rule: ftp://ftp[n][.domain].FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD Where "n" is an optional, logical site number (when you have more than one FTP server for a domain) and ".domain" is an optional domain, specifying which particular region of the world you're interested in. Examples: ftp://ftp3.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD [3rd logical ftp mirror] ftp://ftp.fr.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD [primary French mirror] ftp://ftp4.de.FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD [4th logical German mirror] Logical site assignments are dynamic, with the "fastest, best connected" mirrors having the lowest logical numbers. The DNS administrators are expected to keep this true as mirror sites are created or retired. New Mirrors: ------------ If you create a new mirror of these FreeBSD distributions and wish to make it more generally available, you should send mail to hostmaster@FreeBSD.org and ask that your site be added to the global logical namespace map (ftp://ftp[n].FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD). If the mirror is in a subdomain then mail must ALSO be sent to hostmaster@domain.FreeBSD.org (where domain is your country's domain designator) since each country is responsible for and "owns" its own local DNS administration for domain.FreeBSD.org. It also goes without saying that should you shut down a mirror after so registering it, you're expect to send notice to these addresses again so that the namespace can be updated. Finally, you must make sure that all FreeBSD distributions are available under the pub/FreeBSD hierarchy, as they are at ftp.FreeBSD.org. This can be a symbolic link or an actual directory, just so long as the URL ``ftp://ftp[n][.domain].FreeBSD.org/pub/FreeBSD'' works for your site (with appropriate values for "n" and ".domain"). That is an important requirement for automating the process of locating and loading distributions from FreeBSD mirrors. o What if my country does not have its own freebsd.org subdomain? If that is your situation, you might well consider becoming the DNS administrator for your country. That person is responsible for the day-to-day administration of ``somedomain.FreeBSD.org'' and should both be skilled in DNS setup and maintainence *and* be contactable most days of the year since, essentially, any ftp or www site in that country will be relying on the DNS administrator to register and maintain the name space for the entire nation. If you think you're qualified and there is no existing FreeBSD.org subdomain for your country, please send email to the FreeBSD Hostmaster (hostmaster@FreeBSD.org) and include details on your DNS server's IP address and contact information for the DNS administrator. As mentioned above, you should also make sure that the hostmaster@yourdomain.FreeBSD.org alias reaches the DNS administator since that address will be used by others to report problems or submit new entries to the regional subdomain.