hugo_pt writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.11-RC2. This is the second of three scheduled release candidates. At the moment there are no known severe issues. However the Linux Emulation subsystem (mostly added as a package) has been completely updated based on Red Hat 8.0. We would appreciate people testing the Linux emulation support. In particular testing to see if Linux applications continue to behave correctly if the linux_* packages get installed while using sysinstall(8) during the initial installation of the machine. The package set for disc1 is still being decided on, what is on disc1 for this RC will most likely change before the release."

MTS writes "Thanks to the generous contributions of over 800 donors, a combination of both first-time donors and existing supportors, the FreeBSD Foundation has met and exceeded its fund-raising goal necessary to qualify for the 1/3 'public support' goal required to maintain its 501(c)3 status with the IRS. Your continued donations will help to support a broad variety of FreeBSD activities, including critical development, developer collaboration, testing, and involvement in standards processes." Convoluted tax laws meant that FreeBSD's success in attracting larger donations had threatened the organization's tax-free status.

ashpool7 writes "In an *extremely* late announcement, the FreeBSD foundation has posted in their quarterly newsletter that they're $30,400 short on donations in order to prove that they're a non-profit charity (501(c)3 as they say). If your organization relies upon FreeBSD, it might be a good idea to see if you can scrounge up the $8,000 maximum donation."

linuxbeta writes "FreeSBIE is a FreeBSD LiveCD, or an operating system that is able to load directly from a bootable CD, without any installation process, without any hard disk. It's possible to use the BSDInstaller to install FreeSBIE on your hard drive, and then turn it into FreeBSD 5.3-STABLE by means of cvsup. At OSDir we installed FreeSBIE 1.1 and grabbed a series of great screenshots of this slick FreeBSD OS."

An anonymous reader writes "In spite of FreeBSD 5.3 going to "production" status, FreeBSD is still planning at least one more full release of the mature production 4.x series. FreeBSD 4.11 Release Candidate 1 has been announced. The complete 4.11 release schedule is here. This is good news for those who can't or don't want to migrate to FreeBSD 5 yet."

An anonymous reader writes "It's my pleasure to announce FreeSBIE 1.1, a LiveCD based on FreeBSD 5.3-RELEASE. Some of the innovations since 1.0 include: A renewed series of scripts to support power users; An installer to let users install FreeSBIE 1.1 on their hard drives, thus having a powerful operating system such as FreeBSD, but with all the personalizations FreeSBIE 1.1 carries; and the presence of the best open source software, chosen and personalized, such as X.Org 6.7, XFCE 4.2RC1, Firefox 1.0 and Thunderbird 0.9.2. Moreover, many bugs were solved thanks also to the help of numerous beta testers which we are honoured to thank. For more information visit FreeSBIE.org"

thequbemaster writes "The OpenBSD project, responsible for OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, and OpenNTPD, has created OpenCVS, a BSD licensed implementation of CVS client and server. From the site: 'It aims to be as compatible as possible with other CVS implementations, except when particular features reduce the overall security of the system. The OpenCVS project was started after discussions regarding the latest GNU CVS vulnerabilities that came out. Although CVS is widely used, its development has been mostly stagnant in the last years and many security issues have popped up, both in the implementation and in the mechanisms.' No releases are available yet. The README in the OpenCVS CVS repository states that the server is not ready yet, but looks like the client is usable." Update: 12/15 20:18 GMT by T : This project was mentioned briefly the other day, too.

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 4.9 has become the first non-commercial open-source operating system to be supported as a VMware ESX guest. This allows enterprise users to benefit from a powerful open-source OS with the benefit of subscription free binary updates. This also solves a number of enterprise support issues around lack of hardware vendor support and issues around using non-commercial operating systems on SAN fabrics as the SAN access is abstracted through VMware, which the SAN supplier is more likely to have certified."

Quique writes "NetBSD 2.0 is the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, and has just been released. It can be downloaded from one of the mirror sites. NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty four different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals." The release announcement is also available.

Jeferey Bakins writes "In an effort, by Jean-Francois Brousseau (jfb@openbsd.org), to rid the OpenBSD CVS tree of GPL'ed licensed code, OpenCVS is now officially part of the OpenBSD project. For more details, see the OpenCVS homepage; http://www.openbsd.org/opencvs/"

jschauma writes "Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds."

Anonymous Reward writes "During the final weekend of October, nearly 200 people attended EuroBSDCon in Karlsruhe, Germany. The event offered a keynote by Apple's Jordan Hubbard, 23 talks organized in two tracks, a social event inside Luigi Colani's exhibition, and multiple coffee breaks to socialize. ONLamp.com has just published a report with funny pics..."

davidwr writes "Groklaw has the newly-released-previously-secret 1994 Berkeley/UNIX Systems Laboratories settlement which gave rise to BSD4.4(Lite) (as pdf and text with commentary). This may have an impact on the SCO vs. Linux war."

ulib writes "NetBSD 2.0_RC5 has now been tagged. Changes since RC4 include fixes to various COMPAT_ emulations, IP Filter backward compatibility fixes, XFree86, pax(1), rsh(1), hp300 boot blocks, pthread fixes for amd64 and i386, documentation updates. Binary snapshots of NetBSD 2.0_RC5 are available in the daily builds directory on the main FTP site."

putko writes "Here's an update on the OpenBSD firmware activism. Basically, Intel says no. Plenty of contact info, in case you want to write someone an email or a phone call. As Theo writes, 'Without these firmware files included in OpenBSD, users must go do some click-through license at some web site to get at the files. Without those files, these devices are just bits of metal, plastic, and sand.'" While I applaud the notion behind Freer distribution (as in beer) it's also highly probable that Intel doesn't have much ground make them freer - we've seen this before on machines like the HP nw8000; basically, the wireless stuff is owned by someone else, licensed by Intel. That's not to say that the fight isn't worth fighting for freer distribution - it is. But if you want to make your voice heard, remember to be effective advocate.

44BSD writes "As noted at undeadly, the OpenBSD Project has announced an BSD-licensed implementation of the Border Gateway Protocol, BGP. Project details, design goals, documentation, and more are at the project web site. BGP is documented in RFC 1771. Lucky for Cisco, BSD is dying..."

cpugeniusmv writes "FreeBSD 5.3 has been released! This release marks a milestone in the FreeBSD 5.x series and the beginning of the 5-STABLE branch of releases. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the release notes and errata list. Bittorrent Download."

I was catching up on mailing list archives when I came across an announcement from Scott Long of FreeBSD's release engineering team, noting that after the rather substantial amount of time that it took to take FreeBSD 5 to a -STABLE designation, their release schedule will be speeding up in the future. With the official release of FreeBSD 5.3 coming Real Soon Now, a new branch for 6.0 is now tentatively scheduled for mid-2005. It would seem that while the version numbers may increase more rapidly, so will the rate at which new features are merged from -CURRENT, so end users can get new features faster.

An anonymous reader writes "The NetBSD-PT User Group did an interview via e-mail with Hubert Feyrer. He has been a NetBSD developer for years and we wanted to know his views on NetBSD, his projects and some personal questions. He talks about the origin of pkgsrc and the g4u - g4l issue."

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an insightful interview with OpenBSD creator Theo de Raadt, discussing their recent activism to try and open up wireless chipsets. In the interview, Theo discusses what has been accomplished so far, the difficulties involved, and why such efforts are important to all free and open source operating systems."