Slashback tonight with another round of updates and corrections to recent stories, including transgenic fish, Hilbert's 16th problem, Microsoft's FAT patent plans, Utah's hyped public fiber network, and more. Read on for the details.

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded ISO images and FTP install bits for FreeBSD 5.2-RC1. i386, alpha, and pc98 are available now, amd64 will be available shortly, and sparc64 will be available shortly. Please test this as much as possible so that the FreeBSD Team can release a good 5.2-RELEASE next week. Testing focus for 5.2-RELEASE relates to PCM locking and performance issues, ATA driver improvements, GPT support for sysinstall, ATAng disk corruption issues, SMP and random_harvest panic, vinum data corruption, ACPI kernel module and reported NFS failures."

NaveWeiss writes "According to the OpenBSD Journal, major work has been done on an innovative new OpenBSD feature termed 'fuzzy user profile' intrusion detection system' - or 'fupids.' According to Steffen Wendzel, the code 'creates profiles for every user who does an execve() syscall on obsd systems.'"

BSD Forums writes "Bad guys in the movies all keep their wall safes hidden behind paintings. Is there a metaphor in there for your sensitive files? OnLamp's Dru Lavigne explores steganography, or hiding secret messages in images or sounds, with the outguess and steghide utilities on FreeBSD."

avleenvig writes "Finally I have completed my paper on tuning the FreeBSD system for various common tasks, to compliment the paper on compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel. These papers were written against FreeBSD 4.x systems but should be equally applicable to 5.x systems on almost all counts. Compiling and tuning the FreeBSD kernel: http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-kernel.php Performance tuning FreeBSD for different applications: http://silverwraith.com/papers/freebsd-tuning.php. You will find within, details on tuning your network, disks, sysctls and kernel for maximum performance under various conditions. "

jschauma writes "NetBSD's Andrew Brown has committed a complete rewrite of the kernel's sysctl infrastructure. To test these changes, he cross compiled 150 kernels for 30 architecures to see where some problems might come up. Additional information can be found in Andrew's email to current-users."

jschauma writes "As many users will probably have noticed by the increase in recent pkgsrc commits, the NetBSD Packages Collection freeze is now officially over. Starting October 6th, 2003 and lasting almost two months, the NetBSD Packages team concentrated upon stabilizing the over 4,000 software packages and the pkgsrc infrastructure to prepare for a stable pkgsrc branch. During that time, the number of broken packages during a i386 bulk build was brought down to a mere 15, and a large number of PRs was closed. A new branch with the tag ``pkgsrc-2003Q4'' was created, allowing our users to maintain a highly stabilized third-party software package managment environment, as only pullups of significant importance (such as security issues) are applied to this branch."

Dan writes "Based on Sam Leffer's suggestion, Bruce Simpson has been working on refactoring ifconfig(8). ifconfig is a FreeBSD unix utility used to assign an address to a network interface and/or configure network interface parameters. Bruce says that ifconfig has grown increasingly large and become unwieldy. Part of the effort has been to get a handle on all of the options that are currently supported so he has written a YACC grammar for it. He has uploaded some grammer, created a design document and also generated a PDF file you can view which shows you syntax diagrams for each part of the parse tree."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke announces that GNOME 2.5.0 desktop, the "Obviously you're not a golfer" release, is now available for FreeBSD. You can check out this release from the MarcusCom CVS repository. Be sure to get the latest copy of the "marcusmerge" script while you're there to help with the upgrade. Thanks to FreeBSD GNOME users, there is also a man page to go with this script. NOTE: this is a developers release, and bugs will exist. If you're not into bug-hunting, you should probably steer clear until 2.6.0 is released."

ocipio writes "FreeBSD 5.2 is scheduled to be released by Christmas. Recently marked 5.2-BETA, the ports tree is in a freeze and developers are asking for testing. A TODO list is available for those interested."

ragedev writes "Michael J. Denton, Public Relations for ekkoBSD, has announced the latest BETA release of the ekkoBSD Operating System to the public today. The new Operating System currently supports the ia32 (most PC's) platform, and will be followed soon with sparc64 and Pegasos II PPC support."

FreeBSD FOREVER writes "OSNews has a quick write-up from FreeBSD's 10th Anniversary Party, which they call a success for the project and the attendees."

regs writes "There's a free 10-year anniversary party for FreeBSD tonight. Should be an interesting place to meet-and-greet. The venue is jwz's wonderful nightclub, The DNA Lounge. Of course, if you're not in the Bay Area to start with, you probably can't make it." Bearing that in mind ...

BSDForums writes "The Darwin team is pleased to announce the availability of the Darwin 7.0.1 Installer CD. This is a single Installer CD that will boot and install Darwin on Macintosh computers supported by Mac OS X 10.3, as well as certain x86-based personal computers. The version of Darwin installed by this CD corresponds to the open source core of Mac OS X 10.3. Check out the release notes for more information." dmalloc writes "The Fink team has announced that their binary distribution versioned 0.6.2 is ready for use now. It is a bug-fix release to alleviate issues that came up in 0.6.1. Along with the bug fixes, it introduces an enhanced package manager which is now capable of using the finkmirrors.net-supplied rsync and distfiles mirrors."

CoolVibe writes "For months, the DragonflyBSD fork of FreeBSD was maintaining compatibility with the existing FreeBSD-STABLE branch by using the 'FreeBSD 4.8-STABLE' name internally. In a few commits, Matt Dillon changed all the names, and DragonFly is finally sailing under its own banner. Things that DragonFlyBSD already has that FreeBSD-STABLE doesn't are, among others, application checkpointing, variant symlinks (not unlike Domain OS), Light-weight kernel threads, a more efficient slab-allocator, a multithreaded network stack, and the rcNG system."

Dan writes "Gordon Tetlow just committed a patch in FreeBSD current to change /bin and /sbin from statically to dynamically linked. The reason to do this is two-fold. This feature brings support for loadable PAM and NSS modules to base system utilities located in those directories. It also reduces the storage requirements for the root filesystem due to the use of shared libraries. This feature can be disabled in a buildworld by defining the Makefile (make.conf) variable WITHOUT_DYNAMICROOT. Note that statically-linked, crunched executables are available in the /rescue directory for use during system repair and recovery operations."

An anonymous reader writes "Since the OpenBSD stopped building their nifty little pages containing information about all ports currently in their porstree the community has been searching for an alternative. Yesterday I stumbled upon a webpage called OpenBSD Ports which effectivly fulfills this need. Now I can finally browse through every software program and library that can be installed via the OpenBSD ports-tree, hey I can even do a search!"

schnarff writes "Users of OpenBSD have been asking the Folding@Home team for a port of their distributed computing client since at least May of 2002; I've helped out by figuring out how to run F@H under Linux emulation (mirror of instructions). Note that this procedure should work for NetBSD as well with some minor modifications."

BSD Forums writes "While Unix has roots in document formatting and layout, configuring printers has always required more black-arts arcana. This hasn't been helped by the appearance of low-cost commodity WinPrinters. Fortunately, tools like Ghostscript, gimp-print, and Apsfilter make configuring printers much easier. Michael Lucas demonstrates quick and dirty -- and working -- printer configuration."

An anonymous reader writes "Felix von Leitner recently performed some benchmarks (previous story) for a talk about scalable network programming he held at Linux Kongress 2003. The winners in this scalability lineup were Linux and FreeBSD 5, followed by NetBSD and finally OpenBSD. What's interesting is that in only two weeks time the NetBSD team made dramatic improvements. Felix performed his benchmarks again and the results are nothing short of astonishing. NetBSD now has better scalability than FreeBSD." Read on for a list of improvements.