The latest version of this distro can be downloaded from Softpedia

Jun 8, 2014 19:22 GMT  ·  By

The second Beta version of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now ready testing, just days after the previous version was released.

It is nice to see that the FreeBSD developers remember that people are still using the “old” 9.x branch of the distribution. They have made an effort to provide more updates and they are working on the 9.3 iteration.

“The disk images are available in QCOW2, VHD, VMDK, and raw disk image formats. The image download size is approximately 135 MB, which decompress to a 20GB sparse image,” reads the official announcement.

According to the changelog, the newsyslog.conf file now includes files in the /etc/newsyslog.conf.d/ and /usr/local/etc/newsyslog.conf.d/directories by default, a system crash caused by destroying an if_tap device while it was in use has been fixed, and a number of security problems have been corrected.

As usual, it's possible to upgrade your installed version directly. During this update process, freebsd-update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files. This command will have to be entered in a terminal:

freebsd-update install

A reboot will be necessary to complete the installation of the new kernel and users will have to run the command mentioned above once more.

The official changelog comes with a complete list of instructions. You can download FreeBSD 9.3 Beta 1 right now from Softpedia.

Remember that this is a development version and it should NOT be installed on production machines. It is intended for testing purposes only.