Carewolf writes "Finally the KDE 3.4 beta 2 has been released (codename "Keinstein"). Besides being the latest and greatest, it also marks the KDE 3.4 feature freeze and will provide a good demonstration of the splendors that will be KDE 3.4. Feature and release plans can be found here, and the news is also covered on the dot. Download now and help hunt the last bugs for the next major release of KDE."

An anonymous reader submits "The FreeBSD core team has announced a public competition to design a new logo to replace the current BSD daemon logo. The new logo will be used on the FreeBSD website, software media labels, printed media, hardware equipment, and more. The winner of the contest will receive $500." It's too early for an April Fool's Joke; according to the contest page, "this daemon character seems cute from somebody's point of view, but somebody may think which does not suit for the professional products to indicate that are using the FreeBSD inside."

NetBSD Fan writes "KernelTrap offers a fascinating summary of the recent 2004 Annual NetBSD Group Meeting. Included is an introduction by NetBSD foundation president Christos Zoulas discussing NetBSD's relevance in light of competition from well known operating systems such as Linux and Windows which he acknowledges 'both offer more features than we do, and they have behind them the resources of very large commercial organizations.' He also talks about FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris and Darwin, ultimately concluding that they all are facing their own serious challenges, and that plenty of opportunities remain for NetBSD. The NetBSD project recently released NetBSD 2.0."

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project now has an online store where you can indulge yourself in some merchandise-mania and at the same time support your favorite OS. All profits from the store will of course go directly to the NetBSD Foundation; at the moment, the available items include t-shirts, sweatshirts, mugs, clocks, mousepads, logo pads and tote bags. The sale of printed versions of The NetBSD Guide and the pkgsrc Guide is currently being evaluated. For other ways to make a tax-deductible (in the US) donation, please see the donations page."

animus9 writes "There is an interesting interview with Matt Dillon regarding the current status and future of DragonFlyBSD. In it he compares the difference between serializing tokens and the mutex model (a nice contrast to the previously posted Scott Long SMPng interview). He also describes the work being done in the VFS, along with his plans for Journaling, SSI Clustering, packaging, and more."

barryhawkins writes "When sharing with others that I was reviewing an O'Reilly book through their User Group & Professional Association Program, the first question was always the same: 'What book are you reviewing?' After saying the title was Understanding Open Source & Free Software Licensing, responses ranged from 'What's that?' to 'Well, you won't have any trouble sleeping!' One might think that this list of people included relatives and coworkers who were not attuned to the open source community and its issues. On the contrary, the responses came from those within my circle of acquaintances, which includes software developers, system administrators, and even an intellectual property lawyer. Licensing is not exactly the sort of topic where people slide forward in their seats and ask to be told more. Such is the appeal of software licensing; however, the importance of understanding licensing, particularly within the context of open source development, cannot be overstated." Read on for Hawkins' review.

Bruce C asks: "I'm a software developer with 28 years commercial experience. Although my day job is mostly on Windows software, I've been using SuSE Linux for 6 years at home. Before that I worked on HP/UX. I've no pressing plans to abandon Linux, but I am interested in experimenting with a BSD style operating system. My current motivation is largely curiosity. Of course, I might end up being converted, but that isn't my intention. I'm wondering which of the various *BSD systems would be the 'best' introduction for a person like me. The workstation I'm planning to use is a generic beige box: Celeron 1.2, 768Mb RAM, 120 Gb IDE, with about 80Gb free. It's on a LAN, behind a firewall. The live CDs for FreeBSD (Freebsie), DragnoflyBSD, and NetBSD all booted and started on it. I haven't tried an OpenBSD CDROM. Which BSD should I pick?"

noackjr pastes "'The Release Engineering Team is happy to announce the availability of FreeBSD 4.11-RELEASE, the latest release of the FreeBSD Legacy development branch. Since FreeBSD 4.10-RELEASE in May 2004 we have made conservative updates to a number of software programs in the base system, dealt with known security issues, and made many bugfixes.' See the release, hardware and installation notes for more information. Currently there are no errata. FreeBSD 4.11 is available via BitTorrent or one of the many mirrors."

A FreeBSD User writes "Jeff Roberson has announced that he has has begun integrating the Giant-lock free VFS code into the FreeBSD 6.x development tree. These changes will permit the UFS file system to run on multiple CPUs at a time on SMP systems (hyper-threaded, dual-core, or regular SMP), leading to substantially improved efficiency. It will also permit the VFS code to be fully preemptible on uni-processor systems, improving interrupt handling latency. With this change, almost all of the FreeBSD kernel is able to run fully threaded and in parallel on multiple CPUs with much less contention. He anticipates merging this work as an "opt-in" feature to the FreeBSD 5.x branch in the future. He indicates that the testing will be "opt-in", i.e., this change will not be fully enabled by default for the time being, and that it will take a while (a few hours) to complete the merge, so users of the 6-CURRENT branch may want to hold off updating for a few hours while he finishes the merge. The work was sponsored by Isilon Systems."

animus9 writes "There's an interesting interview with Scott Long over at the ONLamp.com. Scott explains the difference between the various locking methods, and the current status of SMP in FreeBSD 5. He also compares the new SMP implementation with that of FreeBSD 4.x, NetBSD, DragonFly, and Linux. Other items touched upon include scalability, the status of KSE & ULE, and much more."

An anonymous reader wrote in to say that "FreeBSD just published status reports covering June to December '04 with many interesting details about the work that went into 5-STABLE and a look ahead on plans and projects for 6-CURRENT."

Enrique writes "The NetBSD Foundation has published its fourth quarterly status report, covering the months October through December of 2004. Among many other things, this status report covers the publication of the new NetBSD Logo, the new pkgsrc branch, the new NetBSD/iyonix port and of course the release of NetBSD 2.0."

An Anonymous NetBSD User writes "NetBSD now supports a new ARM board, the Technologic Systems TS-7200. The TS-7200 is a low cost ($149!) mass produced embedded single board computer that runs on less than 2 watts of power."

diegocgteleline.es writes "According to OSnews, Gregory McGarry benchmarked NetBSD 2.0 against FreeBSD 5.3 and found that NetBSD 2.0 surpasses FreeBSD 5.3 in most of benchmarks. The machine used for benchmarks is a 3 Ghz P4 so it doesn't reflect the improvements of FreeBSD 5.3 in the SMP arena, which is where their developers have put their efforts in the last years and where NetBSD is still using a "big-lock" model. Newsforge is also carrying a interview with some NetBSD developers about the technology behind NetBSD 2.0."

ravenII writes "The FreeBSD foundation has announced the news of Sun terminating the SCSL OEM-like license given to FreeBSD foundation. The foundation's attempts to contact Sun to renegotiate the license have gone unanswered. Javalobby.org also carries the news." It would seem that Sun has terminated all SCSL licenses across the board in preparation for the release of Java 5, and while the renegotiation process may be a bit bumpy, it's likely that Java will continue to be ported to FreeBSD.