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<P><B>Date:</B> Wed, 25 Feb 2004 20:31:31 -0700 (MST)<BR><B>From:</B> Scott Long
<scottl@FreeBSD.org><BR><B>To:</B>
freebsd-announce@FreeBSD.org<BR><B>Subject:</B> [FreeBSD-Announce] FreeBSD 5.2.1
Released!</P>
<P>It is once again my great privilege and pleasure to announce the availability
of FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE. This is a 'point release' and is intended to address
several bugs and vulnerabilities discovered in the FreeBSD 5.2 release. These
include:</P>
<UL>
<LI>Significantly improved ATA/IDE and SATA handling. Problems with timeouts,
error recovery, and certain master/slave configurations have been largely
addressed.
<LI>The <TT>kdeadmin3</TT> package has been updated to fix the password
database corruption found with the KUser tool.
<LI>Third-party NSS modules can now support groups with many users.
<LI>Multicast and promiscuous modes have been fixed in the 'sk' Ethernet
driver, allowing it to operate in a DHCP environment.
<LI>Latest updates to the XFree86 4.3 server to protect against several
published security vulnerabilities. </LI></UL>
<P>FreeBSD 5.2.1 also contains a number of significant stability and performance
improvements over FreeBSD 5.2. However, it is still considered a 'New
Technology' release and might not be suitable for all users. Users with more
conservative needs may prefer to continue using FreeBSD 4.X. Information on the
various trade-offs involved, as well as some notes on future plans for both
FreeBSD 4.X and 5.X, can be found in the Early Adopter's Guide, available
here:</P>
<P><TT><A
href="http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/early-adopter.html">http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.2.1R/early-adopter.html</A></TT></P>
<P>For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the
release notes and errata list, available here:</P>
<P><TT><A
href="http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/relnotes.html">http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.2.1R/relnotes.html</A></TT></P>
<P><TT><A
href="http://www.freebsd.org/releases/5.2.1R/errata.html">http://www.FreeBSD.org/releases/5.2.1R/errata.html</A></TT></P>
<P>For more information about FreeBSD release engineering activities, please
see:</P>
<P><TT><A
href="http://www.freebsd.org/releng/">http://www.FreeBSD.org/releng/</A></TT></P>
<P><B>Availability</B></P>
<P>FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE supports the i386, pc98, alpha, sparc64, amd64, and
ia64 architectures and can be installed directly over the net using the boot
floppies or copied to a local NFS/FTP server. Distributions for all
architectures are available now.</P>
<P>Please continue to support the FreeBSD Project by purchasing media from one
of our supporting vendors. The following companies will be offering FreeBSD
5.2.1 based products:</P>
<TABLE border=0>
<TBODY>
<TR>
<TD>FreeBSD Mall, Inc.</TD>
<TD><TT><A
href="http://www.freebsdmall.com/">http://www.freebsdmall.com/</A></TT></TD></TR>
<TR>
<TD>Daemonnews, Inc.</TD>
<TD><TT><A
href="http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html">http://www.bsdmall.com/freebsd1.html</A></TT></TD></TR></TBODY></TABLE>
<P>If you can't afford FreeBSD on media, are impatient, or just want to use it
for evangelism purposes, then by all means download the ISO images. We can't
promise that all the mirror sites will carry the larger ISO images, but they
will at least be available from:</P></FONT></DIV></BODY></HTML>