It's funny.  Laugh.

OpenBSD 3.3 Song 30

flynn_nrg writes "Even although version 3.3 is not out yet, users can already enjoy the new 3.3 song: "Puff the Barbarian". Like other Barbarians before him, Puff has had to face some pretty crazy challenges. This song is an allegory of the recent difficulties we went through dealing with Sun, who refused our request for documentation about their UltraSPARC III processors. We want documentation, because these are the fastest processors with a per-page eXecute bit in the MMU, needed to fully support our new W^X security feature. In the meantime, the AMD Hammer has come onto the scene, and this processor supports an eXecute bit in 64-bit mode. And it is going to be faster... Both mp3 and ogg versions available."
Operating Systems

OpenBSD Stomping On Buffer Overflows 47

A reader writes:"There's a story on ZDNet that describes how Theo de Raadt & co. are hoping to eliminate buffer-overrun exploits for good. On closer inspection, it's a scheme to stop a buffer-overrun leading to executable code. It doesn't stop the buffer-overrun itself."
GNOME

GNOME 2.3.0 Ported, Ready For Testing On FreeBSD 22

Dan writes "The first of the GNOME 2.4 development releases is now available. Code named 'Mighty Atom,' this FreeBSD release includes quite a few new proposed modules. Those wanting to test this release should checkout the ``ports'' module per these instructions. Be sure to download the ``marcusmerge'' script from the same page. This script will help you merge the GNOME development ports tree into your main ports tree."
BSD

Staying Current with NetBSD 22

BSDForums writes "Open source never stands still. Even the flexible and mature BSDs are continuing to evolve. In this article, Michael Lucas looks at the NetBSD upgrade process, demonstrating the most common steps to stay abreast of the current source code. This article isn't a comprehensive tutorial that covers every possible situation; rather, it covers the most common situation: updating your source with CVS, building that source code, and installing it on the build machine."
BSD

Running .NET on FreeBSD? 36

Dan writes "Interesting read on running .NET on FreeBSD. Chip Morton thinks this could be very beneficial to FreeBSD or any OS to have a fully functional .NET CLR (Common Language Runtime) environment. With over 9,000 files, and including some 1300 public classes to pore through, the Shared Source CLI (Common Language Infrastructure) can teach you quite a bit about the internal workings of the CLR. This relevant MSDN article discusses some of the things you can learn from the source code facsimile of the CLR, like how JIT compilation works. One thing that the CLI specification does not mandate is that managed code has to run on Windows. To prove this point, Microsoft built the Shared Source CLI to compile and run on FreeBSD Unix as well as Windows XP."
BSD

FreeBSD Looking for People with Lots of RAM 302

drdink writes "A few weeks ago, PAE (Physical Address Extension) support was added to FreeBSD 5-CURRENT. This allows memory above 4GB to be used normally by the kernel and userland on the x86 platform. Jake Burkholder, the man behind PAE, is now looking for users to help him test this new feature. In his message to the freebsd-current mailing list, Jake describes the current caveats to PAE and also says 'We'd like this feature to be solid for 5.1-RELEASE, so I'm hoping there are people out there with systems with more than 4G of ram that are willing to test it.' This, along with other features make FreeBSD 5-STABLE look very promising."
BSD

FreeBSD Boots on x86-64 42

craig2787 writes "FreeBSD developer Peter Wemm has successfully booted FreeBSD on a real AMD ClawHammer CPU, in both 64- and 32-bit modes. Original posting to the -current mailing list is here."
BSD

New Performance Mailing List for FreeBSD 23

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD's fast as is, but it appears that folks over there are going the extra mile to make sure that it continues to be the top dog according to this recent announcement. With 5.1 promising to have native threads and 5.1 only a few months out, it is really good to see performance being taken seriously."
BSD

Reverse Engineering IRIX Multithreading For NetBSD 32

Anonymous Coward writes "Onlamp.com publishes the sixth paper of Emmanuel Dreyfus's series on NetBSD's IRIX binary compatibility implementation. This time, this is about reverse engineering IRIX multithreading and the odd virtual memory features involved with it. It's an adventure at kernel and userland boundaries, with a debugger as the sole weapon. A must read!"
Operating Systems

Using OpenBSD's chrooted Apache 101

BSD Forums writes "OpenBSD recently changed the mode of operation for the Apache webserver from the normal non-chrooted operation to chrooted operation. This enhances the security of the server on which Apache is run but it imposes a few challenges to the system administrator. In this article Marc Balmer discusses selected aspects of running a chrooted HTTP daemon and present strategies on how to set up a chrooted environment for more complex applications like database access or using CGI-scripts."
BSD

FreeBSD 4.8 Released 207

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information."
BSD

Interview with Jay Michaelson of Wasabi Systems 116

Gentu writes "The main commercial company behind NetBSD is Wasabi Systems. The company has contributed advances and big chunks of code to the open source project, while they do offer a boxed release of NetBSD. However, their main business for the company is the embedded market and NetBSD is marketed as an embedded OS. OSNews talked to the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, Jay Michaelson. Linux in the embedded market is also discussed."
Security

OpenBSD Packet Filter Changes Syntax Language 29

An anonymous reader writes "As seen on this article on the OpenBSDJournal, Henning, one of PF main contribuitors writes: 'After much discussion we made a hard decision: we will change pf syntax from English to German.' So, what are the implications of this? And why the change? Read on."
BSD

BSDs to be Merged 217

A dæmon writes "According to Daily Daemon News and The FreeBSD Diary, NetBSD, FreeBSD and GNU/OpenBSD are to be merged. Read the full story here." This is a good thing since one of the two BSDs clearly sucked, and the other was clearly superior.
BSD

FreeBSD From Scratch 58

geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."

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