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BSD

ATAng Driver Preview for FreeBSD 33

Dan writes "Soeren Schmidt announces the availability of the first preview release of ATAng drivers for FreeBSD. Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give useful feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples). These drivers provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that have facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. These changes also facilitate merge of ATA and ATAPI code, as well make full use of fx Promise's new chips."
Wireless Networking

Announcing WiFiBSD 40

flynn_nrg writes "WifiBSD is a minimalistic version of FreeBSD based on the 5.x branch. WifiBSD is aimed for wireless routers running on embedded devices such as boards from soekris.com. In addition to the wi driver WifiBSD includes support for Atheros's 802.11b/g and 802.11a/b/g Wireless LAN Chipsets. The latest version of WifiBSD can be found here."
BSD

RFC: Alternate Ports Fix For Older FreeBSD 23

Dan writes "For those of you running older versions of FreeBSD (prior to 4.7), FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has an alternate fix for the recent port install problem people were seeing. This fix involves adding a new port, pkg_install, which is a snapshot of the -CURRENT pkg_install code. This port can change periodically as new pkg_* features are added that bsd.port.mk depends on. Joe is also looking for testers for this fix."
Unix

USENIX 2003 Report 17

BSD Forums writes "Dustin Puryear attended the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (ATC) this year in San Antonio, Texas and presents this report. USENIX offers attendees an interesting mix of papers and talks by academia, well-known industry professionals, and researchers working for companies across the world. What exactly did he really learn from this conference? He says research is as strong as ever within USENIX and open source communities. Samba is making significant progress with the ever emerging Active Directory networks. FreeBSD is emerging as one of the few key OSes of choice for web hosting. Finally, he says that Microsoft is competing for server business with their Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX products."
BSD

NetBSD At Linuxtag 30

Dan writes "The Linuxtag in Karlsruhe is the biggest Linux event in Europe, and of course NetBSD was present there too! The event happened in two buildings, one for the conference, and one big exhibition area. A group of people from BSD and related projects have setup a joint booth to present NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD as well as OpenDarwin, OpenSSH and MirBSD. See Hubert Feyrer's full report for more details."
BSD

Nearly 2 Million Active Sites running FreeBSD 112

Echo|Fox writes "So much for *BSD is dying. The latest Netcraft survey shows over 2 million active sites, and almost 4 million active hostnames all running on FreeBSD. Combined with the report that 5 of the top 10 hosting companies in terms of reliability were FreeBSD based, it's been a very positive month *BSD wise. Perhaps the most interesting quote from the survey is: 'Indeed it [FreeBSD] is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey.'"
Unix

FreeBSD 5.1 Review and BSD Roundup 385

securitas writes "Both eWEEK's review of FreeBSD 5.1 and ExtremeTech's BSD overview and roundup (single page) will be of interest to BSDers and anyone else who wants to explore their open source OS options. The review of FreeBSD 5.1 says it lacks the stability of v4.8 but adds features that some may find useful (for example, more processor architectures are supported) so it shouldn't be considered for critical deployments yet. And the BSD round-up speaks for itself."
Graphics

New FreeBSD NVIDIA Drivers Available 81

CoolVibe writes "Finally, the officieal Nvidia drivers for FreeBSD have been updated to version 4365. The drivers are available at Nvidia's website. They are not in the ports yet, but that won't take very long. Also, this driver supports both STABLE and CURRENT officially. I am using them at the moment, and boy, these fix many problems I had with the older ones."
Encryption

Kerberos Support In OpenSSH 122

Dan writes "Marshall Vale writes on behalf of the MIT Kerberos team and several other parties interested in the availability of Kerberos authentication for the SSH protocol. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Marshall says that Kerberos support within OpenSSH may be incomplete and needs more work. In particular, implementing draft-ietf-secsh-gsskeyex in addition to any other Kerberos mechanisms will better serve the needs of Kerberos community. Secondly, he says that they would like to reduce user confusion associated with all of the different options for Kerberos and SSH. He suggests adoption of the GSSAPI key exchange mechanism in the IETF draft (which uses Kerberos to authenticate both parties to each other), in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks."
Wireless Networking

FreeBSD 802.11a/g Support 61

ByTor-2112 writes "If you are like me, you feel like the "next generation" 802.11 technology was leaving the group of people who got the revolution started in the first place -- the Linux/BSD network enthusiasts -- out in the cold. Well No more. With help from Atheros Comunications, Sam Leffler has built a new 802.11 layer for BSD and drivers for the Atheros chipsets (which are found on many of your 11a/g cards). A Linux version of the driver is here. I will certainly make sure to recommend these supported cards to all my friends."
Businesses

Wind River CEO Unexpectedly Resigns 71

The Finn writes "According to Electronics Weekly Wind River CEO Tom St. Dennis resigned today and left Wind River. For those who forgot, Wind River assumed stewardship of FreeBSD as part of the BSDi acquisition in May 2001, and subsequently Cut it loose in January 2002, and it still sells BSD /OS 5.0. I'll avoid the speculation of BSD dying, but Wind River may not be looking so good."
BSD

KSE Progress On FreeBSD SMP Environment 60

Dan writes "This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. He reports a current uptime of 23hrs with these apps running with libkse.so.1, and basically a usable Gnome 2.2 desktop environment. He says that with recent updates, you can now see the threads with top(8). Kernel Scheduler Entities (KSE), is a kernel-supported threading system similar in design to Scheduler Activations [Anderson, et. al.]. It strikes a balance between user-level (1:N) and kernel-level (1:1) threading models, giving most of the advantages of both, and few of the disadvantages of either."
Graphics

LKM NVidia Drivers Now Available For NetBSD 35

Dan writes "Quentin Garnier has made a loadable kernel module (LKM) version of the NVidia drivers on NetBSD. This release is very preliminary, rough and mostly meant to test the installation procedure. You will need a NetBSD-current system but the downloadable drivers code itself should be quite backward compatible with some caveats. For example, you need 'options KVM86' in your kernel config. His NVidia drivers on NetBSD page indicates that known working hardware includes RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (PCI), GeForce2 MX/MX 400, Vanta(AGP) and more!"

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