7.0-BETA1 Available, 6.3-BETA1 coming soon…

Ken Smith kensmith at cse.Buffalo.EDU

We have entered the final phases of the FreeBSD-7.0 Release cycle which
also means the beginning of the FreeBSD-6.3 Release cycle.  Because the
people who support the ports for FreeBSD also need to go through a
freeze cycle as part of releases we had decided to combine the two
releases to try and minimize the impact on the ports maintainers.

The current plan is to interleave the BETAs/RCs of the 7.0 and 6.3
releases, trying to follow this for the dates when the builds will get
started (with them becoming available on the FTP mirrors a day or two
after the builds start):

            7.0     6.3
    BETA1   10/17   10/24
    BETA2   10/31   11/7
    RC1     11/14   11/21
    RC2     11/28   12/5
    REL     12/12   12/19

Tomorrow (10/23) the RELENG_6 branch will be marked "6.3-PRERELEASE" to
note that we have entered the 6.3 release cycle.

The schedule dates are, as usual, tentative.  At this point RELENG_6 is
pretty mature so that schedule should be fairly accurate.  Being a new
branch it is at least somewhat likely the dates for 7.0 will wind up
slipping.

The 7.0-BETA1 builds have completed and are on many of the FreeBSD
mirror sites.  If you want to update an existing machine using cvsup use
RELENG_7 as the branch tag.  Instructions on using FreeBSD Update to
perform a binary upgrade from FreeBSD 6.x to 7.0-BETA1 will be provided
via the freebsd-stable list when available.

For quick dl :

7.0-BETA1-i386-disc1.iso