FreeBSD 2.2 Change Announcement

From jkh:

2.2-RELEASE will not support installation of machines with 4MB of memory or 1.2MB floppy drives - that is to say, only > 5MB memory & 1.44MB floppy drive systems are supported. In truth, 8MB of memory is the recommended minimum.

Those who have such limitations on their configuration and can’t upgrade, for whatever reason, are therefore urged to stay with 2.1.6-RELEASE, which has provisions for both types of installation and will probably be more than functional for as long as one might conceivably wish to continue operating such a system.

We regret any inconvenience this may cause some of our users, but we have also been pressed for space on the installation media for some time now, and this was more or less inevitable. We’ve talked about killing the 4MB installation and 1.2MB floppies for over a year, and it’s only through some of the most arcane trickery (you don’t want to know) that we’ve managed to keep it all on a single floppy at all. Now that we’ve made the leap to 1.44MB/>6MB class machines, we’ve at least bought ourselves some room for future enhancements while still remaining on one floppy.

Note that you can still build kernels which will run quite comfortably in a 4MB system, you just can’t install with only 4MB in the machine. If you’re trying to build a custom box with 4MB and a tiny configuration, for example, you might simply build its disk on a different machine set up specifically for that purpose.

Release Home