FreeBSD 14.2-RELEASE README

For general questions or technical support, please address the FreeBSD general questions mailing list.

If you track the 14-STABLE branch: you must subscribe to the FreeBSD-STABLE mailing list, to keep abreast of developments and changes that may affect your use and maintainance of the system.

Being a largely volunteer effort, the Project is always happy to have extra hands willing to help — there are far more desired enhancements than there is time to implement them. To contact the developers on technical matters, or with offers of help, please address the FreeBSD technical discussions mailing list.

These lists above can experience significant amounts of traffic. If you have slow or expensive email access, or if you are only interested in major announcements, you may prefer subscription to the FreeBSD announcements mailing list.

All public mailing lists can be joined by anyone wishing to do so. More than a hundred lists are public; https://lists.freebsd.org/ shows them all, and provides information about browsing the archives, subscribing, and unsubscribing.

Suggestions, bug reports and contributions of code are always valued. Please do not hesitate to report any problems you may find. Bug reports with attached fixes are of course even more welcome.

The preferred method to submit bug reports from a machine with Internet connectivity is to use the Bugzilla bug tracker. Problem Reports (PRs) submitted in this way will be filed and their progress tracked; the FreeBSD developers will do their best to respond to all reported bugs as soon as possible. A list of all active PRs is available on the FreeBSD Web site; this list is useful to see what potential problems other users have encountered.

For more information, "Writing FreeBSD Problem Reports", available on the FreeBSD Web site, has a number of helpful hints on writing and submitting effective problem reports.

A number of other files provide more specific information about this release distribution. These files are provided in various formats. Most distributions will include both ASCII text (.TXT) and HTML (.HTM) renditions. Some distributions may also include other formats such as Portable Document Format (.PDF).

During installation, these documents are available via the Documentation menu. Once the system is installed, you can revisit this menu by re-running the bsdinstall(8) utility.

As with almost all UNIX®-like operating systems, FreeBSD includes a set of manual pages, accessible online or with the man(1) command.

In general, these pages provide information on the different commands and APIs available to the FreeBSD user.

Some pages are written to give information on particular topics. Notable examples include tuning(7) (a guide to performance tuning), security(7) (an introduction to FreeBSD security), and style(9) (a style guide for kernel coding).

FreeBSD Project-maintained documentation includes the highly useful FreeBSD Handbook, which includes a detailed guide to installing and upgrading the operating system, and FreeBSD FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions). The Handbook and FAQ are online in the documentation portal and at mirror sites.

Other Project-maintained books and articles are more specialized — covering a wide range of topics, from effective use of the mailing lists, to dual-booting FreeBSD with other operating systems, to guidelines for new committers. Like the Handbook and FAQ, these documents are in the portal, mirrors and doc repository.

For offline documentation in HTML and PDF formats: you can install a language-specific package such as misc/freebsd-doc-en (-en for English), or multi-language misc/freebsd-doc-all. Alternatively, use a copy of the doc repo to build and install from source code.

A listing of other books and documents about FreeBSD can be found in the bibliography of the FreeBSD Handbook. Because of FreeBSD’s strong UNIX® heritage, many other articles and books written for UNIX® systems are applicable as well, some of which are also listed in the bibliography.