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."

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."

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."

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!"

Dan writes "Matthew Dillon has finished porting Andy Polyakov's excellent dvd+rw-tools to FreeBSD. These tools support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW format dvd burners, including the popular Sony 500A, which he has bought himself. He says that these tools should work on a wider variety of burners than the half-broken GNU dvdrecord tools work on."

Dan writes "Marcus Comstedt has a native build of the new GCC 3.3 for NetBSD/dreamcast platform. It was built using the latest binutils (2.13.2.1), and he then rebuilt the binutils with the new compiler. Also included is a gdb 5.3 built with the GCC and binutils."

Dan writes "Niels Provos says this is a heads up for the upcoming integration of libevent into the NetBSD source tree. Libevent provides a simple API to abstract event notification and handling. Applications are notified via callbacks on IO events, timers and signals. Libevent is meant to replace the event loop found in event driven software."

LogicX writes "FreeBSD 5.1 is now available. Mirrors and press release are at FreeBSD.org. Enjoy." Here are the release notes for this new version. Update: 06/09 18:15 GMT by S : Here's a BitTorrent link at scarywater.net, and another BitTorrent link from the original poster.

BSD Forums writes "'Of course it runs NetBSD.' NetBSD is fantastically portable, but that doesn't make it supremely easy to install on oddball hardware like a Dreamcast or a palmtop computer. Michael Lucas demonstrates cross-installation with the HP Jornada."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites"

porkrind writes "No Starch Press has announced its latest BSD title, Absolute OpenBSD, by Michael Lucas, scheduled to be in stores in July, 2003. Lucas is known as a FreeBSD contributor and the author of Absolute BSD. You can read all about it and pre-order now direct from No Starch Press or at Amazon."

BSD Forums writes "WEP has been proven insecure and is thus inadequate for protecting a wireless network from eavesdropping or abuse. IPsec can be used as a replacement to WEP in the following scenarios. Joshua Stein has implemented IPsec on OpenBSD with manual keying between a router and a client as a replacement. Also, Thomas Walpuski describes in detail the configuration of an IPsec Host-to-Host connection between OpenBSD and Windows XP Professional with Authentication via X.509v3 Certificates."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long has written a bootloader front-end script that allows one to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc. His primary motivation was to allow users to easily disable ACPI, since so many problems are popping up these days with it. He is hoping to have this be on at least the i386 bootcd for FreeBSD 5.1 scheduled for release June 2nd, and is looking for feedback."

HellRazr writes "From the FreeBSD hackers mailing list: 'at http://www.tel.fer.hr/zec/vimage/ you can find a set of patches against 4.8-RELEASE kernel that provide support for network stack cloning. The patched kernel allows multiple fully independent network stack instances to simultaneously coexist within a single OS kernel, providing a foundation for supporting diverse new applications.' We can sure have fun with this..."

BSD Forums writes "FreeBSD's Dag-Erling Smorgrav reports the successful cross-world build of the amd64 tree (A tinderbox is system designed to test builds and report failure. In the FreeBSD case, tinderboxes build world [the base system], GENERIC, and if applicable LINT kernels. Dag-Erling Smorgrav currently runs all the tinderboxes by cross-building from i386)."

Dan writes "The GNOME Development Series Desktop 2.3.2 "Little Hero" has been released and ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. This release is an UNSTABLE development series snapshot. It is intended for testing and hacking purposes ONLY. On FreeBSD, featuring gnopernicus, the FreeBSD GNOME team presents this development snapshot as GNOME 2.3. Testers should checkout the ports module per these instructions and download the new marcusmerge script to aid in the upgrade."

Dan writes "Jeremy Zawodny, who looks after all of Yahoo!'s MySQL servers says MySQL now runs very well on FreeBSD. He is no longer steering people toward Linux. There are two important things you should do to make the FreeBSD/MySQL combo work well: (1) build MySQL with LinuxThreads rather than FreeBSD's native threads, and (2) use MySQL 4.x or newer."

Dan writes "Daniel Hartmeier says that the OpenBSD hackathon is over and provides a summary of the pf related work that was done in Calgary this year. Accomplishments include packet tagging, TCP scrubbing and normalization extentions, SYN proxy, adaptive timeouts and minor bug fixes. Henning Brauer points out that the binary format of pf logs has changed to log additional items."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Downloads for i386 are available here."

Dan writes "John Gordon has completed a set of changes to the NetBSD build infrastructure that allows him to build at least two architectures (i386 and ibmnws platform, a PowerPC box) under Cygwin/Windows XP Home Edition and PowerPC. He has made a CVS patch for Cygwin, and provides instructions on the required configuration of Cygwin to avoid a problem with directory name clashes due to the case insensitive file system on Windows."