Dan writes "Erik Reid has been working on adding DRI support for NetBSD. Direct Rendering Infrastructure, also known as the DRI Project, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. Some of Erik's work has been imported into XFree86 4.3.0 which is now in xsrc tree. He has subsequently put together a fairly large patch which compiles and works on his NetBSD/i386 1.6P system with a matrox g450. Try out the patch and give him some feedback!"

Dan writes "Adam Getchell has published instructions on installing Tomcat on OpenBSD in the form of install logs. The config is setup as non-root so that anyone can start/stop Tomcat. He has not tried loading any EJB's and is playing with Cocoon to make the setup work with XML publishing framework. Adam is looking for feedback relating to his setup."

jschauma writes "This week marks the tenth anniversary of the beginning of development of the NetBSD Operating System. The very first commit to the NetBSD source tree (src/Makefile) was by Chris Demetriou on Friday 21 March, 1993. Parties are being held in various cities around the world, see the press release for more details. Happy 10th Birthday, NetBSD!"

*no comment* writes "Deadly.org has an article running that started out as a call for Seattle OpenBSD people to start a local usergroup, but has since turned into a thread for people all over the country looking for people."

dnaumov writes "miniBSD - reducing FreeBSD is a great guide, which explains in great detail, how you can create a truly small installation of FreeBSD on your system, completely by yourself. There is also the PicoBSD project, which has similar goals, but it's based on an outdated version of FreeBSD and is considered to be way too minimalistic (2 floppies) by many. The guide will walk you through things like creating the directory tree inside a chroot jail, rebuilding the bootloader and everything else needed to create a FreeBSD install that takes just around 20 MB of space."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 for i386, he says that the alpha build is in progress. You can download 4.8 RC2 mini iso, install iso's, etc. from FreeBSD ftp site or from one of the mirror sites."

Dan writes "Alistair Crooks says that by his calculations, at the end of January 2003, there were 3461 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3402 the previous month, a rise of 59. The package of the month award goes to rdesktop (pkgsrc/net/rdesktop), nominated by Andrew Brown and Ross Harvey. Rdesktop is a "dependency-free" utility to manage a session on a Windows box in an X window."

Dan writes "FreeBSD's Scott Long provides the Jan-Feb 2003 bi-monthly FreeBSD status report. Highlights include focus on making 5.0 faster via more fine-grained locking, adding high-end features like memort support for i386. FreeBSD 5.1 is expected to ship in late May, early June, with 5.2 following end of summer with significant speed and stability improvements over 5.0. FreeBSD 4.8 release due shortly adds XFree86 4.3.0 and intel hyperthreading support. Major FreeBSD project statuses are also provided in this report."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokley indicates in his email that the latest FreeBSD 4.8 release will need to be postponed until March 24 in order to include suggested fixes related to the XFree86 4.3.0 port. After a complete package rebuild, they plan to release FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 first. Murray requests everyone to continue testing the XFree86 4.3.0 port to ensure a quality release."

BSDForums writes "OpenBSD has a well-deserved reputation for fanatical security. Why is the U.S. military funding it? What do you get out of it? Cameron Laird and George Peter Staplin investigate and talk to Theo de Raadt, the creator, overseer, and taskmaster of the OpenBSD project!"

*no comment* writes "Well with all the advancements in PF and secure code wouldn't it be nice if someone would write a book on OpenBSD??? Oh wait, someone is. A guy named Jacek Artymiak is doing just that. The OpenBSD Gazetteer is scheduled for release shortly after the release of what may be the best release ever of OpenBSD (IMHO). Vastly improved PF, ALTQ, and BIND 9 is now default, not to mention procop stack protection. Out of the box it's ready to go as a firewalling packet-filtering bandwidth-throttling machine. A thread had started to pick up over at deadly.org."

Dan writes "Eric Anholt has committed the long awaited XFree86 4.3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree. Please report any issues, bugs, etc. directly to him. The port appears to have support for popular cards such as NVidia, ATI, etc. Eric suggests that you use portupgrade to ensure you update fully from an earlier version of XFree86."

Mock asks: "I work for a web services company, and so part of our business process involves setting up web servers for our customers that include a JVM for running our software. Although I've found FreeBSD to be rock-solid for server applications and the quickest to fix security issues, the JVM support has been lagging behind other systems, for some time now. I would like to know if it is wise, or even possible, to run the Linux JVM under BSD? Are there other alternatives I'd be better off considering (besides using a different operating system)?"

Dan writes "OpenBSD's Markus Friedl is requesting everyone to test the latest OpenSSH 3.6 nightly snapshots to help ensure a quality final release. The OpenSSH Portability Team takes the pure OpenSSH version and adds portability code so that OpenSSH can run on many other operating systems. Folks, download snapshots for your OS from one of these mirrors."

drdink writes "The long awaited FreeBSD/Java port has hit beta. The port was committed yesterday afternoon by Alexey Zelkin. 'This is complete and close to production quality native JDK with both working client and server native JVMs. Local micro benchmarks shown very little difference between Linux and FreeBSD JVMs in speed.' And more importantly, 'we are very close to passing of Sun TCK tests. Currently about 20 of >27000 tests are known to be broken (tests were run at -STABLE).'"

jtorin writes "Daniel Hartmeier (of OpenBSD fame) has written a short but interesting article which explains how to better utilize available bandwidth. In short it gives priority to TCP ACKs over other types of traffic, thereby making it possible to max both upload and download bandwidth simultaenously. Be sure to check ot the nice graphs! Also note the article on OpenBSD Journal. OpenBSD 3.3 beta is now stable enough for daily use, so why not download a snapshot from one of the mirrors and try it out?"

Dan writes "Matthias Scheler has imported XFree86 4.3.0 into NetBSD current, it is only tested under NetBSD-i386 at the moment. Also, as part of updating the toolchain, Matthew Green has imported the latest GNU binutils (2.13.2.1) into NetBSD-current. The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa and x86_64, improved support for existing architectures and is known to work for almost all CPU types NetBSD currently supports. Updates of gdb and gcc will follow."

TrumpetPower! writes "Recently there's been quite a row in the OpenBSD community over copyright infringement by the OpenBSD spinoff, MicroBSD. Many parts of MicroBSD would seem to be a wholesale search-n-replace of the two names...including copyright notices. As a result, MicroBSD has shut down. It's worth noting that, as of this story submission, the MicroBSD Web site is still up and running with no special notices."

An anonymous reader writes "OpenDarwin released a 'fixed' version of the Darwin 6.0.2 ISO (the OpenDarwin-20030213 Binary Release) for both x86 and PPC. It is currently installing, so I can't tell you all what works now, etc. Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this..." Apparently, it is mostly a recompile, without local OpenDarwin modifications. It doesn't include perl, pending integration of perl 5.8 ... could this mean Mac OS X will finally have a current perl in the next Mac OS X release?

Dan writes "The Journaled File System for FreeBSD (JFS4BSD) Project has the goal of porting the JFS Technology from IBM/Linux to FreeBSD. It uses a log-based, byte-level file system that was developed for transaction-oriented, high performance systems. Scalable and robust, its advantage over non-journaled file systems is its quick restart capability: JFS can restore a file system to a consistent state in a matter of seconds or minutes. The jfsutils is under a compilable state on FreeBSD."