FreeBSD 是一种支持 x86 、amd64、ARM、IA-64、PC-98 以及 UltraSPARC® 架构的操作系统，大多用于服务器。FreeBSD 提供了网络、性能、安全以及兼容性等多方面的先进特性。FreeBSD 7.4-RC2 支持 i386 和 amd64 框架，安装包中包含 Gnome 和 KDE 桌面环境。
预计 7.4 RC3 将在一个星期后发布。
发布公告说明如下：
The second ">Release Candidate for the FreeBSD 7.4 release cycle is now available. For this build only the amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures are available.
An initial set of pre-build packages are available on the DVD and CDROM images for the amd64 architecture. At the time the i386 images were created the two large meta-packages that are the bulk of what we normally provide (Gnome and KDE) were not available so there are some packages on the i386 images but what is there is not a reflection of what we expect to include with the final release.
Several bugs we feel are critical enough to warrant fixing before the 8.2/7.4 releases are finalized, so the release will be delayed and we will be providing a third Release Candidate about a week from now. The Web pages have not been updated with a new schedule yet but we should get that done shortly. The wiki page tracking the release is here:
http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.4TODO
If you find problems you can report them through the normal Gnats based PR system or here on the mailing list.
If you are updating an already running machine the CVS branch tag for 7.4-RC2 is RELENG_7_4. If you prefer SVN use "releng/7.4".
The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases. Systems running 7.0-RELEASE, 7.1-RELEASE, 7.2-RELEASE, 7.3-RELEASE, 7.4-BETA1, or 7.4-RC1 can upgrade as follows:
# freebsd-update upgrade -r 7.4-RC2
During this process, FreeBSD Update may ask the user to help by merging some configuration files or by confirming that the automatically performed merging was done correctly.
# freebsd-update install
The system must be rebooted with the newly installed kernel before continuing.
# shutdown -r now
After rebooting, freebsd-update needs to be run again to install the new userland components, and the system needs to be rebooted again:
# freebsd-update install
# shutdown -r now
Users of earlier FreeBSD releases (FreeBSD 6.x) can also use freebsd-update to upgrade to FreeBSD 7.4-RC2, but will be prompted to rebuild all third-party applications (e.g., anything installed from the ports tree) after the second invocation of "freebsd-update install", in order to handle differences in the system libraries between FreeBSD 6.x and FreeBSD 7.x.
下载地址：
FreeBSD-7.4-RC2-i386-dvd1.iso (1,145MB, SHA256), FreeBSD-7.4-RC2-amd64-dvd1.iso.gz (2,029MB, SHA256).