Henceforth FreeBSD 8.4-BETA1 is available for testing: known issues and features.

For those unfamiliar FreeBSD is a free, open source operating system base on UNIX and aims to be one of the most secure, versatile and safest O/S's available.

Since March 22, 2013 officially developers have announced the availability of the first BETA build for the FreeBSD-8.4 release. ISO images for the amd64, i386 and pc98 architectures are available on most of our FreeBSD

mirror sites.

However some known issues are present in this release:

1) Due to a change in sshd, sshd does not look for authorized_keys2 in

   addition to authorized_keys.  This will be fixed prior the next

   release.

2) Selecting 'All' on the 'Choose Distributions' screen attempts to

   install a DEBUG kernel which is not present in the image so the

   installation will fail.  Just select one of the other distributions

   ("Developer", "Kern-Developer", "User", etc).

3) There is an accidental breakage in the OpenSSL ABI in this BETA

   build that will be fixed before the next test build.  Applications

   built against OpenSSL will need to be rebuilt after upgrading to

   8.4-BETA1.  Additionally, any applications built on 8.4-BETA1 will

   need to be rebuilt when upgrading from -BETA1 to -RC1.

The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64

systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.  Systems running 8.2-RELEASE or

8.3-RELEASE can upgrade as follows:

# freebsd-update upgrade -r 8.4-BETA1

During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging

some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed

merging was done correctly.