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."

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 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.

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."

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."

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."

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!"

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."

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."

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.""

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."

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."

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK and PAM support, the opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items."

jschauma writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks has announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the NetBSD Packages Collection (aka pkgsrc). This branch includes all the updates to the thousands of existing and additions of hundreds of new applications since the hereby obsoleted pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch. Some noteworthy infrastructure changes applicable to all 13 operating systems for which pkgsrc is available include the support for multiple digests to check the integrity of the distribution files as found on the Internet (triggered by the recently-found problems with the SHA-1 algorithm) and the so-called alternates framework."

hugo_pt writes "The BSD Certification Group was formed in January, 2005 to create a BSD certification program that is recognized as the industry standard for administering BSD systems. The resulting certification process will provide a measure of excellence in both understanding and the ability to perform complex administrative tasks on BSD systems. 2005 will prove an exciting year as the BSD Certification Group develops certification level(s) and testing methodologies. Stay up-to-date regarding the latest developments by joining the public Mailing List. This initiative will prove very important for BSD administrators, as right now, companies don't have any way of knowning if a person is an experienced BSD administrator."

andy753421 links to today's announcement of the official release of KDE 3.4, and writes "Several KDE 3.4 based distributions such as ArkLinux and Kubuntu are soon to follow. Features in the release include built in Text to Speech, a revamped trash system, enhanced PDF support and PC to PC synchronization, as well as a new theme. KDE 3.4 weights in at 6,500+ bug fixes, 1,700+ enhancements, and a grand total of 80,000+ contributions." Reader gotr00t adds a link to the KDE download mirror page . Update: 03/16 20:58 GMT by T : mrevell points out an interview with KDE hacker Aaron Seigo in the latest LugRadio, in which Seigo "dispels various myths about KDE and talks about the desktop environment's future."

Sam writes "The OpenBSD cvs server has a failing RAID array. Users of the projects on that array: OpenBSD, OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, OpenNTPD, and the upcoming OpenCVS are all invited to contribute towards the $12,500 cost of a suitably high-spec replacement. OpenBSD Journal article, and original request (thread)."

jimmy_dean writes "The latest issue of The GNOME Journal has just been published. This regularly published online magazine features original content and commentary for and by the GNOME Community. This issue covers some technical articles, including Audio CD Ripping/Burning by Ken Vandine and Simplified Package Management in Ubuntu Hoary by John Meuser. Celebrating the release of GNOME 2.10, we include a tour of 2.10 by Sayamindu Dasgupta and also the evolution of Evolution 2.2 by Jorge O. Castro. Also, art.gnome.org gets a face lift as told by Link Dupont."

UnderScan writes "As seen on openssh-unix-announce: 'OpenSSH 4.0 has just been released. It will be available from the mirrors listed at http://www.openssh.com/ shortly. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol version 1.3, 1.5 and 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. We would like to thank the OpenSSH community for their continued support to the project, especially those who contributed source and bought T-shirts or posters.' See the changelog or the freshmeat.net changes summary for more details."

nazarijo writes "You can usually tell someone who's been writing a lot of code by how they write code. That may sound like a tautology, but it's got a deeper meaning than that. What editor they use, what idioms they use to avoid common pitfalls, and what organization patterns they employ all tell you what kind of programmer you're meeting. When you first start writing code, so many things are inconsistent and just plain wrong that it's almost embarrassing. I know that when I look over older code that I've written I feel sheepish about it. But how do you grow as a programmer, and what really makes a good programmer beyond language familiarity?" Read on for Nazario's review of Code Reading: The Open Source Perspective, a book which attempts to instill deeper knowledge about programming than just "knowing how."