A new development cycle has been completed

Aug 16, 2015 07:02 GMT  ·  By

FreeBSD, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, has been upgraded to version 10.2, which brings this development cycle to an end.

Users might forget from time to time that Linux is not the only operating system out there and that BSD is alive and thriving. There are a number of BSD derivatives in production, and FreeBSD is just one of them. Its developers are quite active, and updates are made all the time.

To make things even more interesting, FreeBSD comes with support for a large number of platforms, including 64-bit, IA64 (from Intel), PowerPC (older Mac computers), and SPARC64. It takes a lot of work to keep the support going for these platforms, especially since a few of them are no longer in use.

FreeBSD 10.2 comes with a ton of updates

The BSD platform is not as strange as it might seem. For example, the FreeBSD operating system can use pretty much the same components as any Linux OS, including stuff like GNOME or KDE, which coincidentally have been updated as well in the repos.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 10.2-RELEASE. This is the third release of the stable/10 branch, which improves on the stability of FreeBSD 10.1-RELEASE and introduces some new features," say the developers in the official announcement.

According to the changelog, resolvconf has been upgraded to version 3.7.0, the NTP suite is now at version 4.2.8p3, and CentOS 6 ports are now supported.

Moreover, the DRM code has been updated to match Linux version 3.8.13, a few ZFS performance and reliability improvements have been implemented, GNOME has been upgraded to version 3.14.2, and KDE is now at version 4.14.3.

You can download FreeBSD 10.2 right now from Softpedia. Do keep in mind, though, that this is not Linux, so things will work a little bit differently from what you would expect.