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."

ccparrish writes "'In Calgary until May 20, they belong to an organization known as OpenBSD, a grassroots software movement with historical links to the University of California at Berkeley.'"

BSD Forums writes "The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.1 "Daddy Walrus", is now available. FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has ported this release (2.3) on FreeBSD and is looking for your testing help. Also, the KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1.2, a maintenance release for the third generation of this UNIX desktop."

Dan writes "Stacy Olivas has put together a hack of PicoBSD .500 using the FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE-p7 source tree. After seeing WarLinux and how it used an embedded version of Linux to get the job done, he started wondering if PicoBSD could be used for the same thing. He calls it WarBSD. Its main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate thier wireless network installations."

Dan writes "Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support."

Just Some Guy writes "I recently received a promotional copy of Roderick W. Smith's "FreeBSD: The Complete Reference". I was pretty skeptical at first - it's my nature - but was pleasantly surprised at the range and depth of information presented in a very accessible format. While not ready to supplant Greg Lehey's "The Complete FreeBSD", it's certainly a worthwhile read for new and moderately-experienced users." Read on for Just Some Guy's full review.

fvdl writes "As the number of AMD64 users grows, new snapshots of NetBSD/amd64 will be made available on a regular basis, until the next NetBSD release (2.0) is out. NetBSD/amd64 is almost two years old by now, but did not have a formal release yet, since hardware was not publicly available at the time of the last major NetBSD release. The latest snapshot is available at ftp.netbsd.org. It is a fully-featured NetBSD port, made available in the form of a bootable ISO image."

Dan writes "Gordon Tetlow has put together a patch to have /bin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system. He cautions that the patch is preliminary and should probably be installed on a test machine."