Announcement ------------
The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.1-RC1. It is meant to be a refinement of the 6-STABLE, branch with few dramatic changes. A lot of bugfixes have been made, some drivers have been updated, and some areas have been tweaked for better performance, etc. but no large changes have been made to the basic architecture. This RC is late in coming due to many more bugs being fixed, as well as a keyboard multiplexer being added. This is enabled by default via the 'kbdmux' driver and allows multiple keyboards of any type to be plugged in and work at once. In turn, the boot menu option to handle USB keyboards specially has been removed as it is no longer needed. This feature has been tested for several months, but more testing is always needed.
We encourage people to help with testing so any final bugs can be identified and worked out. Availability of ISO images 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_6_1. Problem reports can be submitted using the send-pr(1) command.
The FreeBSD 5.5 release process is on hold while we put the final touches on 6.1. It will resume within 1-2 weeks with a 5.5-RC1 release.
The list of open issues and things still being worked on are on the todo list:
http://www.freebsd.org/releases/6.1R/todo.html
Known Issues ------------
The NDIS driver is known to not work correctly with the wpa_supplicant package. This will be fixed for the release.
A string termination problem can cause geom( commands to abort randomly. This will be fixed for the release.
Availability ------------
The RC1 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 (6.1-RC1-alpha-disc1.iso) = c9ce5255facfc44a30f34f55dd6ee2d6 MD5 (6.1-RC1-alpha-bootonly.iso) = 9277c6cd9c5dd17a9aeaa9394fe1d2f8
MD5 (6.1-RC1-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 93abe294e7678e00b7391f47a01074fe MD5 (6.1-RC1-amd64-disc1.iso) = c1b718b6752f0e48edb8b822ee9b0dc8 MD5 (6.1-RC1-amd64-disc2.iso) = 4a67ae8ed7a7852e08442205d6a5cd7c
MD5 (6.1-RC1-i386-bootonly.iso) = b56aac9ca1a868daaf5673cd21bf78f5 MD5 (6.1-RC1-i386-disc1.iso) = 12521c3f9d40f637e4cdb40ea398d072 MD5 (6.1-RC1-i386-disc2.iso) = 53615f19889fe85c41e2bcea0b2be525
MD5 (6.1-RC1-ia64-bootonly.iso) = b2f284c8f6c28455ac59cb37ff2f6658 MD5 (6.1-RC1-ia64-disc1.iso) = e1385927a3272674512f8205aef0addc MD5 (6.1-RC1-ia64-disc2.iso) = 8b212b2f0914f13621996a8ad8397c71 MD5 (6.1-RC1-ia64-livefs.iso) = 75fdb240f273e7f9b2cdefcab43144c2
MD5 (6.1-RC1-pc98-disc1.iso) = 65465e3298efc5122607ea3d0b3e7136
SHA256 (6.1-RC1-alpha-disc1.iso) = d40b8e3e1944f28c5ba1b1f55eb7b5cc22472177116b98f85f2c5bb0ffb59a5f SHA256 (6.1-RC1-alpha-bootonly.iso) = 43ceaf712475d00b7287d09753635383cb284ad8fc63b98608e55ab458aed157
SHA256 (6.1-RC1-amd64-bootonly.iso) = 88e072b4898692813517aa254a33f1e7469de0e590c36bfb3e92cb120ac0ad16 SHA256 (6.1-RC1-amd64-disc1.iso) = 017e69c5461fe2c865a395830dde88c8a55e7ec83d9a195b3b619346b44f9cc6 SHA256 (6.1-RC1-amd64-disc2.iso) = 81624f3b8dfa67ceab1dc6ec0a94c4485ad85955321c39d13c9ab4a678f776ef
SHA256 (6.1-RC1-i386-bootonly.iso) = ec1a3fbf53186b5bc44dbfcdc77872c847f3c55532bb62f2afb4133328e7994f SHA256 (6.1-RC1-i386-disc1.iso) = e0b83f2cbd27db20f330036d0a25b8366b9e45df4b9c09354f76e584a9eb3b83 SHA256 (6.1-RC1-i386-disc2.iso) = de1fe5009229efd44b25bb18c4e68b03027259171cd9e017fe5bffadaa3402bb
SHA256 (6.1-RC1-ia64-bootonly.iso) = 2b7290e4babcb647ec8b2a499fc5e0fc6918ac20ee0432e9ce2d216c84a540fa SHA256 (6.1-RC1-ia64-disc1.iso) = 64c035cf52544e2088720d6e6e602f95b53f6d7b342431a1aa2f4b4c32438847 SHA256 (6.1-RC1-ia64-disc2.iso) = e4f2f0599e9e80edec10f30de565e34e16bd8716da6673834036ce4c66d32dc0 SHA256 (6.1-RC1-ia64-livefs.iso) = cac9b95ba01a69d78af0034d96868a7b93e20840f3ec0eacb7a30c7e7dd0b39a
SHA256 (6.1-RC1-pc98-disc1.iso) = b797113a34628130f759dc9756b741230dcd064f4519f1a477b3491a02f346ca