March 13, 2012 posted by Jeff Rizzo

On behalf of NetBSD developers, I'm happy to announce the availability of a public beta of NetBSD 6.0, for your testing pleasure.

This beta is substantially feature-complete; there may be some additional changes to the installer and possibly some additional hardware support if some is found missing and is easily added, but the major changes are done. What we need now is for you, the end users, to test it in your preferred configuration.

Please DO keep in mind, however, that this is a beta release; we fully expect there are some lurking bugs, so use with caution.

Binaries of NetBSD 6.0_BETA are available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-6.0_BETA/

Bootable (for many arches) ISO images are also available for download via HTTP, FTP, and BitTorrent.

Here are some highlighted changes since NetBSD 5.0. As always, full details can be found in doc/CHANGES and doc/CHANGES-6.0:

New drivers added to NetBSD 6.0: bwi(4), age(4), atphy(4), ale(4), sdmmc(4), smsh(4), voyagerfb(4), gpioiic(4), tcx(4), zx(4), hdaudio(4), wb(4), lom(4), acpiwmi(4), udl(4), gfb(4), cas(4), acpismbus(4), uthum(4), cgtwelve(4), upgt(4), omapfb(4), otus(4), fujbp(4), fujhk(4), auvitek(4), acpiwdrt(4), vte(4), alc(4), rdcide(4), rdcpcib(4), s390rtc(4), cxdtv(4), hpacel(4), emdtv(4), urndis(4), p5pb(4), pwdog(4), mppb(4), vmt(4), efa(4), gpiopwm(4), powsw(4), tpm(4), valkyriefb(4), videopll(4).

...and LOTS more hardware support added to existing drivers! Please help us out by testing these changes and reporting problems either to an appropriate mailing list, via send-pr, or via the web form.

Please remember that this is a BETA release. Don't use it anywhere where the quirks of a beta might cause problems from which it would be hard to recover!

Thanks again for your help in making NetBSD 6.0 the best release yet!

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