FreeBSD 6.3-RELEASE is now available for the alpha, amd64, i386, pc98,
and sparc64 architectures. It can be installed from bootable ISO images
or over the network; the required files can be downloaded via FTP or
BitTorrent as described in the sections below. While some of the smaller
FTP mirrors may not carry all architectures, they will all generally
contain the more common ones, such as i386 and amd64.
MD5 and SHA256 hashes for the release ISO images are included at the
bottom of this message.
The contents of the ISO images provided as part of the release has changed
for most of the architectures. Using the i386 architecture as an example,
there are ISO images named "bootonly", "disc1", "disc2", "disc3", and "docs".
The "bootonly" image is suitable for booting a machine to do a network based
installation using FTP or NFS. The "disc1", "disc2", and "disc3" images are
used to do a full installation that includes a basic set of packages and does
not require network access to an FTP or NFS server during the installation.
In addition, "disc1" supports booting into a "live CD-based filesystem" and
system rescue mode. The "docs" image has all of the documentation for all
supported languages. Most people will find that "disc1", "disc2" and "disc3"
are all that are needed. If you intend to install ports from source
instead of using the pre-built packages included with the release only
"disc1" is needed.