Here's where you will find the official releases of FreeBSD, along with the ports and packages collection.
If you don't know anything about FreeBSD at all, see the FreeBSD Home Page.
If you want to read the latest FreeBSD news, see the News Flash page.
The most current full release version is FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE for the x86 architecture and the Alpha (AXP) architecture.
Release notes for the latest -stable version. Be sure also to read the ERRATA information when installing 4.2.
If you're interested in running the absolute latest
snapshot
release of either the
The latest official FreeBSD 4.2-RELEASE for the x86 architecture and the Alpha (AXP) architectures.
This contains the source code for FreeBSD-current which is the active development version of FreeBSD. It is strongly advised that you be familiar with UNIX development in general and FreeBSD in particular before running the code from this directory.
This contains the source code for FreeBSD 4.2-stable, the stable code branch of FreeBSD from which all 4.x releases are derived.
This contains the FreeBSD CVS repository. It is intended for use by FreeBSD (or related) developers only!
Various FreeBSD docs in ASCII format, though more readable versions may be found on the FreeBSD Home Page.
Distribution files for the ports collection
The FreeBSD packages collection at the time of various releases. These are pre-compiled applications ready to install with the pkg_add command.
The FreeBSD ports collection. These directories contain makfiles, patches and configuration scripts necessary to make the applications in the distfiles/ directory compile and run on FreeBSD. If your FreeBSD machine is connected to the Internet, you need not download the application source code from distfiles/ because the makefile will automatically fetch it for you.
A collection of useful tools for people installing FreeBSD. This includes MS-DOS tools such as fdimage.exe used for making installation disks, fips.exe for splitting an MS-DOS partition and a couple boot managers to allow easy booting on computers with more than one operating system installed.
If you want to order these FreeBSD releases on CDROM, please see the FreeBSD Mall page.
You can also find bootable x86 installation CD images in ISO 9660 + rockridge format from this ISO images directory or bootable alpha installation CD images from this ISO images directory.
The mirroring of FreeBSD distributions from this location is handled by mapping each FreeBSD mirror into a common "namespace" which can be said to follow this rule:
ftp://ftp[n][.domain].freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD
Where n is an optional, logical site number (when you have more than one FTP server for a domain) and .domain is an optional domain, specifying which particular region of the world you're interested in.
Examples:
Logical site assignments are dynamic, with the "fastest, best connected" mirrors having the lowest logical numbers. The DNS administrators are expected to keep this true as mirror sites are created or retired.
Serious problems with any of the mirror sites should be reported to the local mirror maintainer (usually listed in the FTP site's welcome banner) or, should a local address be unavailable or unresponsive (and give folks at least a week to respond before raising the red flag) to the hubs@FreeBSD.ORG mailing list.
If you create a new U.S. mirror of these FreeBSD distributions and wish to make it more generally available, you should send mail to hostmaster@freebsd.org and ask that your site be added to the global logical namespace map (e.g., ftp://ftp[n].freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD). Please be advised that we are only accepting fairly well-connected mirrors (T1 or better) which allow at least 50 anonymous FTP users to log in since it's not otherwise worth the time and trouble to maintain a reference to the mirror and check it periodically for completeness.
If the mirror is in a non-US subdomain then mail should be sent instead to hostmaster@domain.freebsd.org (where domain is your country's domain designator, e.g. .uk or .au) since each country is responsible for and "owns" its own local DNS administration.
It also goes without saying that should you shut down a mirror after so registering it, you're expect to send notice to these addresses again so that the namespace can be updated.
Finally, you must make sure that all FreeBSD distributions are available under the pub/FreeBSD hierarchy, as they are at ftp.freebsd.org. This can be a symbolic link or an actual directory, just so long as the formula URL ``ftp://ftp[n][.domain].freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD'' works for your site. It is an important requirement for automating the process of locating and loading distributions from FreeBSD mirrors.
We also use symlinks in the various FreeBSD release directories which point into the /pub/XFree86 hierarchy on ftp.freebsd.org, an area under XFree86 Project, Inc. control which contains binary releases of XFree86 for various versions of FreeBSD. You should therefore try to also mirror at least the FreeBSD binary distributions for the latest XFree86 release so that your mirror will allow complete FreeBSD installations to be done from it.
FTP mirroring is typically done with the mirror(1) program, located in /usr/ports/net/mirror on any FreeBSD system with the ports collection installed and on various places around the net. Those wishing to track sections of FreeBSD-current, the CVS repository or the WEB pages, may also use the faster and more efficient CVSup protocol to mirror those areas of this FTP server. If your only interest is in creating a www.somedomain.freebsd.org site, that is almost certainly the best way to go.