ValourX writes "Here's a full review of FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE complete with screen shots, a short comparison with GNU/Linux, and some notes on migrating to FreeBSD from Windows and GNU/Linux."

Sit back, read Slashback. Tonight, (another) revision to the "Hidden Agenda" collegiate games contest, torrent files for the new Mandrake release, and the by turns heated-and-cool responses to Forbes' unfriendly description of the FSF -- for attempting to protect their copyrights -- as Linux's "hit men." Read on below for the details.

Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks, on behalf of the Board of Directors, The NetBSD Foundation, announces the appointment of a new NetBSD core team. He says that after a long period of discussion and debate, they have decided to keep the core team at the same size as the original (5 members), with what they believe is a good balance of knowledge, skill, inspiration and enthusiasm."

skelley writes "As seen on deadly.org, OpenBSD 3.4 CDs have begin to ship. If you ordered one already, you should see a charge appear on your credit card (if that's how you paid) and you should expect to see your CD in the next few days to week (depending on where you are). The CDs are being shipped from Calgary. This is earlier than expected, but hey ... enjoy it!"

martin-k writes "There is commercial software built for FreeBSD after all... SoftMaker, a German vendor of office apps, just ported the TextMaker word processor to FreeBSD, making this the fifth platform it runs on (after Windows, Pocket PC, Handheld PC, and Linux). Blazingly fast, reads and writes Microsoft Word files seamlessly, and offers everything you expect from a modern word processor. Also coming to your desktop: the PlanMaker spreadsheet and DataMaker database package."

uninet writes "Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major BSD variants (other than the highly customized Mac OS X). Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz." And our own Roblimo, Windows-free for five years, has spent a week learning Windows XP.

BSD Forums writes "Kernel programming sometimes feels like a dark art where application programmers should never venture, but sometimes it's the right way to solve a problem. (Oh, and it's also very interesting.) One of the easiest places to start is by adding a new system call to a kernel. Kevin Lo explains how and why, with the OpenBSD kernel in this OnLamp article."

Dan writes "The NetBSD security team has formally announced 4 security advisories and fixes for the following advisories: NetBSD-SA2003-014 Insufficient argument checking in sysctl(2); NetBSD-SA2003-015 Remote and local vulnerabilities in XFree86 font libraries; NetBSD-SA2003-016 Sendmail - another prescan() bug CAN-2003-0694; NetBSD-SA2003-017 OpenSSL multiple vulnerability. There is an integer overflow in the XFree86 font libraries, which could lead to potential privilege escalation and/or remote code execution. Sendmail advisory involves a prescan() bug in sendmail packages prior to 8.12.10. OpenSSL had multiple vulnerabilities, they were found by tests performed by NISCC. Finally, insufficient argument checking in sysctl(2) which could be exploited."

edhall cut-and-pastes "After a six-month hiatus, a new FreeBSD Status Report has just been issued, along with a promise to resume its bi-monthly publication. As the report itself makes obvious, a lot has happened over the last six months. Progress has been happening along many fronts; those groups making reports include: [snip] These are, of course, just the projects that remembered to send in a report -- there are many more ongoing efforts than listed here; see this page for a fuller but not necessarily complete list (you'll note that there are status reports for projects not listed there, such as the AMD64 port)."

Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems."

weebl writes "Thursday October 9th at 6:00PM PDT (9PM EDT/1AM GMT) SlashNET's #forum channel will be hosting a Q&A session with Matthew Dillon of the DragonFly BSD Project. This is your opportunity to ask about DragonFly BSD, BSD in general, or any other questions you might have for him. DragonFly BSD was first announced this past July." If you can't make it to the forum, SlashNET will have a bot running earlier in the day for question submissions, and logs available afterward.

jschauma writes "Starting Monday, October 6th, 2003, the NetBSD Packages Collection will be frozen in order to stabilize pkgsrc on the various supported platforms. As Alistair Crooks explains in his message to the tech-pkg mailing list, this freeze is done so that the pkgsrc team can shake out bugs, fix broken packages and close pkgsrc related problem reports. If you want to help out, you can take a look at the PR database and submit patches."

BSD Forums writes "This OnLamp article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work. Since it started with almost zero gcc internals knowledge, it should be understandable by anyone able to read C code, and proves that diving into gcc is not as hard as one could imagine."

shking writes "Theo has pre-released the OpenBSD 3.4 song. It was written, arranged & recorded by Ty Semaka and Jonathan Lewis of the Plaid Tongued Devils. You can find the new song at www.openbsd.org/lyrics.html. Enjoy."

wumpus188 writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). He is requesting everyone to download and test, including helping with finding bugs. As indicated in the Release Engineering Team's testing agenda, more testing should be done with PAE systems to test device compatibility and performance. In particular, active systems with 12 gigs of RAM or more should be thoroughly tested to make sure the various memory allocation algorithms in the kernel still scale properly."