Detailed descriptions of past, present, and future releases. Look here first to determine what the latest version of FreeBSD is.
There are many options for installing FreeBSD, including installation from CDROM, floppy disk, an MS-DOS partition, magnetic tape, anonymous ftp, and NFS. Please read through the installation guide before downloading the entire FreeBSD distribution. If you are installing on a machine connected to the Internet, you may only need to download a single installation disk image!
The official sources for FreeBSD are:
If you plan on getting FreeBSD via ftp, please check the listing of mirror sites in the handbook to see if there is a site closer to you. For more information about past, present and future releases in general, please visit the release information page.
If you're interested in a purely experimental snapshot release of FreeBSD-current (AKA 5.0-current), aimed at developers and bleeding-edge testers only, then please see the daily snapshot server FTP site.
The FreeBSD packages collection is a diverse collection of utility and application software that has been ported to FreeBSD. The packages are pre-compiled binaries ready to drop into your system and run.
The Ports collection is like the packages collection, but the necessary patches and makefiles to compile the source code are provided instead of compiled binaries. For software with important configuration that must be done at compile time, the "port" version may be more useful than the "package" version.
For information about how you can contribute your favorite piece of software to the port collection, have a look at The Porter's Handbook and the Contributing to FreeBSD chapter in the FreeBSD handbook.
Beginning with FreeBSD Release 2.0.5, FreeBSD includes demo versions of some commercial as well as some shareware products. In addition to the demos available in the FreeBSD distribution, a number of other commercial vendors offer software products specifically for FreeBSD.
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