Kelly McNeill writes "The reaction one gets when attempting to get a manager in a corporate environment to consider an alternate operating system can sometimes be likened to a typical dilbert comic strip. Joseph Mallett contributed the following editorial to osOpinion/osViews which suggests that if you present the case properly, your pointy haired boss will make the right decision when choosing a Unix operating system to run the business."

gManZboy writes "Poul-Henning Kamp, a FreeBSD committer, has an article up about BSD Jails as part of Queue's special report on virtual machines. He describes BSD's interesting 'semi-permeable' approach to VMs, and the importance of security in VM architectures. The article is co-written by Robert Watson, a DARPA principal investigator in the Host Intrusion Protection (HIP) Research Group at McAfee Research."

Daniel de Kok writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailinglist. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed. This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs."

GMan00 writes "A flurry of BSD UNIX-related (Berkeley Software Distribution) books have hit the bookstores during the recent past, and more are on the way. From books specific to Secure Architectures with OpenBSD in April 2004 and the reissue of The Design and Implementation of the BSD Operating System for FreeBSD 5.x (expected in August 2004), to Michael Lucas' series of BSD Books from NoStarch Press, print documentation is certainly available for those interested in learning about the free, open source UNIX system which powers operations such as Yahoo! portal and Sendmail.org website, Verio and Pair hosting, not to mention web server survey site Netcraft. Dru Lavigne's BSD Hacks (O'Reilly and Associates, May 2004), is the latest book in these releases, and is an enormously useful resource for system administrators and end-users alike." Read on for the rest of George's review.

An anonymous reader writes "A new book on BSD system programming has been released. And, in the spirit of open source, the book was released using the GNU Free Documentation License. Anyone interested in system programming on the BSD's can use this."

Nirbo writes "FreeBSD switches to X.Org, The 'HEADSUP' can be found here, and on the -x11, -current, and -ports mailing lists. Very good news for those FreeBSD users who have either changed to X.Org in anticipation, or have been waiting in hope for this momentous change."

eeg3 writes "NewsForge has a review of OpenBSD 3.5. It encompasses a fair amount of information, more specifically it details security, cryptography, installation, and new features." While not afraid to point out OpenBSD's shortcomings as a desktop OS, it's still a good tour of possibly the most secure OS. NewsForge and Slashdot are both owned by OSDN.

sniperu writes "The EkkoBSD team leader announced the project's premature death , only 12 days after their latest release . No clue is given about the causes of such an unespected end other than saying "It's been a stressful fun trip" . You can still get the last release from the downloads page . Get it while you can ."

44BSD writes "The folks at OpenBSD have announced OpenNTPd, a BSD-licensed implementation of the NTP protocol. As with OpenSSH, there are two teams responsible for the code, which, like OpenSSH, is available in pure OpenBSD and portable versions." TLA FYI: This Wikipedia entry offers a quick overview of the Network Time Protocol. Read on below for some more on OpenNTPd.

Ed Waldmire writes "I am pleased to annouce to the /. community that the OpenDarwin community has released OpenDarwin 7.2.1. This release corresponds to Mac OS X 10.3.2 and includes many bugfixes and additions. Most notable are ncutil, YUM, and a tulip NIC driver."

eeg3 writes "One year after starting the project as a fork of the FreeBSD-4.x tree, the DragonFly Team is pleased to announce its 1.0 release. Check out the project's diary for a list of the improvements the project has implemented. Also, be sure to grab it from one of the mirrors."

lowks writes "A nice little interview from the ONLamp BSD advocacy page where we get to peer a little into the goings ons and updates as well as plans for DragonFlyBSD. Highlights include the rationale behind DragonFlyBSD and peeks into the current engine as well as goodies planned to be implemented in the future versions. DragonFlyBSD is another flavour of BSD which forked from the FreeBSD 4.x branch not too long ago. It's headed by Matt Dillon, who forged out on his own and started DragonFlyBSD due to technical differences with the FreeBSD team ."

jpkunst writes "Robert Storey at DistroWatch com has written an in-depth and favorable review of OpenBSD: OpenBSD - For Your Eyes Only. 'The first OpenBSD memento I ever saw was a T-shirt with a picture of a cop chasing a script kiddie. That image remained etched in my mind for well over a year before I finally got my hands on a copy of this fine OS. Now that I have it installed on my machine, I only wonder what took me so long.'"

imp writes "The regular elections for the FreeBSD governing board has completed. The new core team is the same as the old core team, with Scott Long replacing Greg Lehey after his resignation earlier in the year. Details can be found here."

Daniel de Kok writes "Jan Schaumann announced that the second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004 is now available online. This report covers the major recent developments within the NetBSD project during April, May and June."

CoolVibe writes "Matt Dillon announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Get it at Dragonfly BSD's site (please use a mirror or post mirrors as comments). Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and way, way, way more. A new installer is also in the works that uses DragonFly's new CAPS IPC mechanism. The installer beta is available from LiveBSD. (Not updated to RC1 just yet, but it gives a nice idea of the progess made)"

agent dero writes "Naysayers beware, at the recent Calgary OpenBSD Hackathon, there has been some major improvements in OpenBSD's SMP support which was recently merged with -current. According to this recent article at undeadly.org the code is ready for testing, but the OpenBSD team could really use some permanent AMD64 SMP hardware for testing. Notable achievments include a kernel compile in around 80 seconds."

Durt_b1ker writes "Check this link out for a highly mobile FreeBSD computer with obligatory pics and video."

Triumph The Insult C writes "Aside from some stealth developers, the annual OpenBSD Hackathon, held in Calgary, is underway, according to Theo. They've been doing some recent work on SMP, and have some impressive AMD SMP gear there that they've got to hack around with. A few years ago, it was PF. Who knows what they'll come up with this time that knocks our socks off."

mrdeathgod writes "The Port Knocking project at SourceForge has just released portknocking_v1.0. Based on my undergrad thesis, this client/server package does not use pre-defined knock sequences, but rather utilizes Blowfish in order to encrypt the client data into a sequence of port numbers. This enables a client with the proper password to remotely manipulate firewall rules without fear of replay attacks. While currently designed for FreeBSD+ipfilter, expanded portability is in the works."