Operating Systems

Submission + - FreeBSD 6.2 Released to Mirrors

Submitted by
AlanS2002
AlanS2002 writes: "FreeBSD 6.2 has been released to mirrors. The release notes for your specific platform are also available. "FreeBSD is an advanced operating system for x86 compatible (including Pentium and Athlon), amd64 compatible (including Opteron, Athlon64, and EM64T), ARM, IA-64, PC-98 and UltraSPARC architectures. It is derived from BSD, the version of UNIX developed at the University of California, Berkeley. It is developed and maintained by a large team of individuals. Additional platforms are in various stages of development.""
The Courts

Gentoo/FreeBSD On Hold Due To Licensing Issues 200

Posted by Hemos from the the-hangover-of-license-versions dept.
Alan Trick writes "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.

The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.

At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
The Courts

Submission + - A shadow lies upon all BSD distributions

Submitted by
Alan Trick
Alan Trick writes: "Flameeyes (a Gentoo/FreeBSD developer) recently came up with some serious problems among the various *BSD projects who use BSD-4 licensed code (which is all of them). Even other projects like Open Darwin may be affected.

The saga started when he discovered the license problems with libkvm and start-stop-daemon. "libkvm is a userspace interface to FreeBSD kernel, and it's licensed under the original BSD license, BSD-4 if you want, the one with the nasty advertising clause." start-stop-daemon links to libkvm, but it's licensed under the GPL which is incompatible with the advertising clause. The good new is that the University of California/Berkley has given people permission to drop the advertising clause. The bad news is that libkvm has code from many other sources and each of them needs to give their permission for the license to be changed.

At the moment, development on the Gentoo/FreeBSD is on hold and the downloads have been removed from the Gentoo mirrors."
Wireless Networking

The Battle for Wireless Network Drivers 163

Posted by timothy from the mind-the-nazgul dept.
An anonymous reader points out this Jem Matzan article "about the pain Linux and BSD programmers have in trying to obtain/write device drivers for various wireless cards," writing: This article also has a fairly detailed explanation of how wireless firmwares and drivers work. Two of the manufacturers are actively working with the FOSS community without requiring an NDA."
Announcements

Submission + - New office suite from Germany for FreeBSD, Linux

Submitted by
martin-k
martin-k writes: "Commercial office suite software is coming to FreeBSD ... and Linux, Windows, Sharp Zaurus and Windows Mobile! SoftMaker, a German developer, today released SoftMaker Office, a multi-platform office suite that excels in Microsoft Office compatibility, is much leaner and faster than OpenOffice.org and works on many operating systems, down to PDAs."
Programming

Third NetBSD Hackathon Summary 15

Posted by kdawson from the fun-in-the-channel dept.
jschauma writes, "The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006. NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensuring build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes."
Programming

Submission + - Third NetBSD Hackathon Summary

Submitted by jschauma
jschauma writes: The third NetBSD Hackathon was held on Saturday and Sunday, November 25th and 26th, 2006, where NetBSD users and developers met on IRC to prepare NetBSD for the upcoming re-branching of NetBSD 4.0. Approximately thirty NetBSD developers and more than 140 NetBSD users joined in on the two days, paying particular attention to improving install documentation and ensure build stability. A Wiki page as a TODO list was used for the first time, an approach that is likely to be used in future hackathons. All in all, over 200 bugs have been worked on in those two days and while not all of the critical showstoppers could be fixed, valuable progress was made in identifying root causes.
Operating Systems

Submission + - NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 released

Submitted by
hubertf
hubertf writes: "The NetBSD release engineering team has announced that the NetBSD 3.1 and 3.0.2 releases are now available. NetBSD 3.1 contains many bugfixes, security updates, new drivers and new features like support for Xen3 DomU, NetBSD 3.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 3.0 release branch which includes a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. See the NetBSD 3.1 Release Announcement and the NetBSD 3.0.2 Release Announcement for more information."
Bug

Submission + - First NetBSD Bugathon a success

Submitted by
Daniel de Kok
Daniel de Kok writes: "Last weekend the first NetBSD Bugathon weekend was organized by Elad Efrat to handle as many open PRs (problem reports) as possible in a weekend, checking and fixing the bugs that were reported. Although the first Bugathon was not announced widely, it was a success: about 30 developers and 20 users closed around 270 PRs, bringing the number of open PRs down from 4200 to less than 4000.

The next Bugathon will take place on 7-8 October, and NetBSD users and developers are invited to help fixing bugs and handling PRs."
Operating Systems

Submission + - OpenBSD 4.0 pre-orders are up

Submitted by fuzzyping1
fuzzyping1 writes: Pre-orders for OpenBSD 4.0 are now available in the online store. Five architectures on three CDs in a soft-shell DVD case. Check out the highlights of OpenBSD 4.0. This new release includes support for many new wireless chipsets, the UltraSPARC III platform, a new load-balancing feature for network trunks, and much, much more.
Operating Systems

Submission + - Confessions of a Recovering NetBSD Zealot

Submitted by
debilo
debilo writes: "ONLamp.com is featuring a lengthy interview with Charles M. Hannum, to Slashdotters probably best known for his wake-up call aptly titled The Future of NetBSD that generated a rather vocal discussion. In his interview, Charles speaks about his role in and the beginning of The NetBSD Project, shares his thoughts on software licenses, discusses the popularity of Linux and its development model, and again addresses the problems that NetBSD is facing. Some notable quotes include: 'If I were doing it again, I might very well switch to the LGPL. I'll just note that it didn't exist at the time.' and 'There was a lot of FUD around this issue — some of it from Linus, actually — and it did cause us some problems.'"
Operating Systems

Submission + - The Future of Netbsd

Submitted by
ErisCalmsme
ErisCalmsme writes: "In this email Charles Hannum (one of the founders of NetBSD) tells us that "The NetBSD Project has stagnated to the point of irrelevance. It has gotten to the point that being associated with the project is often more of a liability than an asset. I will attempt to explain how this happened, what the current state of affairs is, and what needs to be done to attempt to fix the situation." What will happen to NetBSD?"
Announcements

NetBSD 2.1 Released 109

Posted by CowboyNeal from the new-and-improved dept.
jschauma writes "NetBSD for everyone! Lots of news regarding new NetBSD releases: On October 31st, 2005, NetBSD 2.0.3, a source-only security update of the NetBSD 2.0 release, was announced. Since many people are still somewhat confused by the new versioning scheme used in NetBSD, this release was preceeded by an explanation of the NetBSD branches. Only two days after the 2.0.3 announcement, on November 2nd, 2005, NetBSD 2.1 was released. NetBSD 2.1 is the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, and was announced with binary distributions for 54 architectures. Primary means of distribution include bittorrent."

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