OpenBSD Ports and Packages Explained 28
jpkunst writes "As reported on undeadly.org: an interesting interview with OpenBSD developer Marc Espie about the internals of and the philosophy behind the OpenBSD ports and packages system."
NetBSD and Google's Summer of Code 15
ruipaulo writes "When Google announced the "Summer of Code", its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen. See the associated press release for all the details."
Looking at FreeBSD 6 and Beyond 273
Provataki writes "OSNews published an interview with core FreeBSD developers John Baldwin, Robert Watson and Scott Long. They discuss about the upcoming FreeBSD 6 and its new features, the competition, TrustedBSD, Darwin and much more."
NetBSD Makes Plea for 'Cold, Hard Cash' 34
daria42 writes "NetBSD has e-mailed its user community asking for donations. "There are many upgrades we'd like to make to the NetBSD project infrastructure," said the e-mail, "but which we cannot make because, to be blunt, our project is poor. Not poor in innovation nor poor in developer resources nor poor in features -- poor in cold, hard cash, the kind we need to buy hardware that would let us better serve our users." The e-mail pointed out while sister projects OpenBSD and FreeBSD had received tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations, NetBSD had up until now been embarrassed to ask its users for money."
Comparing Linux and BSD, Diplomatically 448
Joe Barr writes "Talk about a red-button issue. How do you compare Linux and the BSDs and keep the debate from turning into a friendly-fire flame-fest nightmare between bigots on both sides of the line? Linus Torvalds once handled a similar situation by wearing a BSD beanie at USENIX while delivering a Linux talk. Now he tries it again in this interview on NewsForge ."
NetBSD Project Calls for Donations 43
A reader writes:"Thor Lancelot Simon from the NetBSD project recently made a post to the netbsd-advocacy mailing list, outlining the project's desperate need for monetary donations from its users and supporters to help improve NetBSD for everyone. Please read Thor's post here and think seriously about helping out this excellent open source project. Even the smallest donation counts, if enough people pitch in."
FreeBSD 5.4 Review 120
gammelgul writes "Jem Matzan has written a review of the new FreeBSD 5.4 release on NewsForge. He writes about enhancements and the 64bit edition of the OS."
OpenBSD 3.7 Reviewed 197
busfahrer writes "Jem Matzan has written a review of OpenBSD 3.7 for Newsforge. He talks about their licensing issues, network features, upgrading packages and the new supported architectures."
OpenBSD 3.7 Released 325
pgilman writes "It's official: OpenBSD
3.7 has been released.
There are oodles of new features, including tons of new and improved wireless
drivers (covered
here
previously),
new ports for the Sharp
Zaurus and SGI,
improvements to
OpenSSH,
OpenBGPD,
OpenNTPD, CARP, PF, a new OSPF daemon, new functionality for the already-excellent ports & packages system, and lots more. As always, please support the
project if you can by buying CDs and
t-shirts, or grab the goodness from your local mirror."
OpenBSD Hackathon Approaching 173
BsdFreakZoid writes "OpenBSD developers from all over the world get together once a year at their annual 'hackathon'. This year's hackathon is about to start with around 60 developers, taking place in Calgary, Alberta in Canada from May 21st through May 28th. KernelTrap has spoken with a number of OpenBSD developers about this year's and past hackathons. OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt is quoted saying, "a few hackathons ago we had a slogan of 'shut up and hack', this is because hackathons are not conferences. People don't come to chit-chat, but to do what projects do. Some other projects hold discussion meetings, I would call those talkathons. We don't discuss, we do." Past OpenBSD hackathons have seen the introduction of SMP support, support for the amd64 architecture, and many other significant advances. What big advance will come out of the 2005 hackathon is yet to be seen."
FreeBSD 5.4 Released 268
FreeBSD 5.4 is out. Reader KFW excerpts from the announcement: "The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Stable development branch. Since FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE in November 2004 we have made many improvements in functionality, stability, performance, and device driver support for some hardware, as well as dealt with known security issues and made many bugfixes." Here are the release notes.
NetBSD Announces Sun Hardware Donation 33
Jeremy C. Reed writes "NetBSD announced that Sun donated two machines running Solaris '[i]n order to support and further the development efforts of the NetBSD
Packages team, to promote the build of binary packages for Solaris 8,
Solaris 9 and Solaris 10 and to enhance the support of the Sun Forte
Compiler chain.' The NetBSD Package Collection can be used on many platforms beyond NetBSD
to provide an easy way to
consistently install third-party software and manage packages."
EuroBSDCon '05 - Call For Papers 5
mlaier writes "EuroBSDCon 2005 announces its Call For Papers:The fourth European BSD conference is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community and to meet some of the developers behind the different BSDs. The two day conference program (Nov 26 and 27) will be complemented by a tutorial day preceeding the conference (Nov 25). The program committee is inviting authors to submit innovative and original papers not submitted elsewhere on the applications, architecture, implementation, performance and security of BSD-derived operating systems. Investigations on economic aspects regarding the operation of BSD systems are also welcome."
Encrypted Fileserver with Bittorrent Web Interface 266
mistermark writes "I built a fully encrypted (samba) fileserver with a web interface for managing torrent downloads on it. All I used is OpenBSD 3.6 and its package collection, except for the TorrentFlux-interface (which you need to install separately). Anyway, it can be built using binary packages only. I included a rough HOWTO on how to make one of these yourself."
OpenBSD Up & Running on Sharp Zaurus 32
Eh-Wire writes "OpenBSD is now up and running on the Sharp Zaurus C3000. A photograph of the OpenBSD powered Zaurus shows it sitting beside another fine Western Canadian product that can boast an equal measure of integrity as that of the OpenBSD/Zaurus OS - Big Rock Beer! The world now has a fully capable ssh machine that fits in a shirt pocket. Good work guys!"
NetBSD - Live Network Backup 156
dvl writes "It is possible but inconvenient to manually clone a hard disk
drive remotely, using dd and netcat. der Mouse, a Montreal-based NetBSD
developer, has developed tools
that allow for automated, remote partition-level cloning to occur
automatically on an opportunistic basis. A high-level description of the system has been posted at KernelTrap. This facility can be used to
maintain complete duplicates of remote client laptop drives to a server
system. This network mirroring facility will be presented at BSDCAN 2005 in Ottawa, ON on May 13-15."
PC-BSD 0.5a Beta: BSD For Dummies 98
linuxbeta writes "PC-BSD 0.5a beta has now been released! You can download the 670Mb ISO file from our download page. This version fixes some minor bugs, and now has fully automatic network support. Screenshots available." So what's it all about? From the PC-BSD FAQ: "This OS has as its goals to be user-friendly, especially in the area of software installation and management, something that many of the *nix based distros have not yet mastered."
Lyrics to OpenBSD 3.7 Song Released 65
Eh-Wire writes "Theo has announced the release of the lyrics to the OpenBSD 3.7 song "The Wizard of OS". Theo writes in the announcement, "Please be sure read the commentary I have written next to the lyrics of the song. The artwork and lyrics for each of our releases relate to something big we have been dealing with over the last 6 months of the release -- our fight to get programming documentation and redistributable firmwares.""
NetBSD 2.0.2 Released 36
jschauma writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the
NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed
critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are
available in the NetBSD
2.0.2 Release Announcement."
DragonFlyBSD 1.2 Released 184
vsarunas writes "The DragonFlyBSD Team is
pleased to announce
the official release of
DragonFly 1.2.0! Get it
here,
or here,
or as a torrent.
DragonFlyBSD is a continuation of the stable and high-performance FreeBSD
4 branch of FreeBSD with acpica5 and updated drivers so it runs on more
and newer machines. DragonFlyBSD can execute FreeBSD 4 and Linux binaries
and uses the FreeBSD ports collection. In addition, DragonFlyBSD is also
officially supported by pkgsrc. This release represents a significant milestone in efforts to improve
the kernel infrastructure. It features a standards-conformant
SACK implementation, improvements to the VFS layer, and a multithreaded
networking stack that utilizes the DragonFly lightweight message
passing system to communicate among processors. More information can
be found on Matt Dillon's journal and the
Status page
of the DragonFly wiki."
