LiquidPC writes: "OSNews is running an article describing CVSup, mounting, ports, and the FreeBSD init system; focused primarily towards new users to FreeBSD."

Serin K Medusa writes: "The folks over at FreeBSD.org have put up a new 'roadmap' detailing the plan of action for the remainder of the year. In particular, check out the plans for a 5.0 preview and expected dates for 4.6. Interesting reading if you're following -CURRENT."

Chris Gilbert writes: "This Thursday, a new *BSD OS project went online which is entitled 'LainOS.' LainOS is for the most part a heavily recoded version of FreeBSD 4.5 made to eventually resemble Lain's Navi from the anime 'Serial Experiments Lain.' It sports an animated splash screen, a more fully integrated X server, and a custom graphical login interface, amoung several other improvments over FreeBSD and Linux. You can check the homepage out at http://www.lainos.org ."

Dahan writes: "I just saw that the development branch of NetBSD is now at version 1.5ZB. A change log is available for those interested. Note that although the title of the page says it's a list of changes from NetBSD 1.5 to 1.6, NetBSD 1.6 is not out yet--the page lists changes that will be in 1.6 whenever it's released. (And when will that be? "When it's ready," of course.) Standard caution about not running development kernels on mission-critical systems applies, although I've been running 1.5ZA on my DEC^H^H^HCompaq Alpha PC164 web/mail/DNS/whatever server for a few months now, and it's been great. And for those of you used to the Linux version numbering scheme and are wondering what all these letters mean, here's an explanation of NetBSD's version numbering."

Kees writes "Since this weekend there's a new *BSD portal site. You can find it at: nedbsd.be (the nedbsd.nl domain is coming too, but DNS works so slowly :-( ). This site is pretty unique, since it is the first portal site for *BSD users in The Netherlands, and the second one in Dutch. This site really looks like it's going to be a real community. Every Dutch/Belgian *BSD lover should give it a chance! The site is going to contain a huge pile of documentation, written by and for visitors. Just like the bsdvault.net. Everyone is welcome, everything is welcome."

RazzleDazzle writes: "AMD released a MP Athlon system that has been certified by Daemon News to work with FreeBSD. Read the full article here."

An unnamed reader submits: "Joshua Bergeron released ClosedBSD 1.0B today. ClosedBSD is a firewall which boots off of a single floppy diskette, and requires no hard drive. It is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as it's native ruleset manager. Best of all: it is freely available under the BSD License. ClosedBSD also features an advanced curses based configuration utility for designing and managing firewall rulesets: Screenshots available.

hubertf writes: "NetBSD/mvmeppc is a new port of NetBSD to the Motorola MVME PowerPC Single Board Computers. This was made possible through a donation by Gan Starling of two (plus one loaner) MVME160x boards so that a porting effort could be made. Due to NetBSD's highly portable architecture, the operating system was up and running multi-user after just two weeks worth of part-time effort. A NetBSD/mvmeppc specific mailing list has been set up for people to discuss any issues with running NetBSD on their MVME PowerPC boards, and a snapshot of NetBSD/mvmeppc is also available for anyone wishing to experiment with the new port. Steve Woodford is the NetBSD/mvmeppc port maintainer."

Some random person wrote: "O'Reilly's OnLamp.com has a long article about using OpenBSD to secure small networks connected to the Internet."

LiquidPC writes: "Todd Miller has made his BSDCon slide presentation available online. It's primarily focused on new features in 3.0, the pf filter, and what to look forward to in 3.0.1."

LiquidPC writes: "OpenBSD's Louis Bertrand has put his MUSESS 2002 presentation online, entitled Fix the Bugs, Secure the System. Does an overview of OpenBSD, then explains Format String Ugliness, Buffer Overflows, The Wrong Way to Fix Overflows, along with numerous other things."

LiquidPC writes: "ONLamp.com's Big Scary Daemons section has yet another great new BSD article, this one on Understanding NFS and using it in FreeBSD."

Jason123 writes: "Almost twenty days ago, FreeBSD's (& also Apple's) Jordan Hubbard gave an interview via IRC to BSDVault. With permission from BSDVault, OSNews has now cleaned-up the interview, formatted it in a more readable manner and published the result. Jordan talks all sorts of interesting things, like FreeBSD 5, his job at the kernel team at Apple, the FreeBSD commmunity, XFree, Microsoft and more." (This is the interview featured in slightly rawer form here.)

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Alcachofo writes "The FreeBSD Foundation needs a logo. If you want to help, check out the details here. Start drawing, and send your entries to them."

questionlp writes "The February 2002 Issue of Dæmon News has been published and has a total of ten articles ranging from support for the Japanese language in NetBSD, an overview of RADIUS Authentication and auto-mounting drives. As well as a continuation of the DOSSIER documentation project and the last of a series of three articles on tcsh."

Eugenia writes: "OSNews published a guide that could help users migrate from Linux to FreeBSD by spotting the main differences between the two popular systems. Interesting read & relevant to the recent FreeBSD 4.5 release a few days ago."

fvdl writes: "After last year's first EuroBSDCon confercence, another EuroBSDCon event will be held this year. EuroBSDCon 2002 will be held in November, in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. The Announcement / Call For Papers can be found at the EuroBSDCon 2002 website. A great opportunity for BSD folks (especially the European ones) to meet and share experiences."

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

An Anonymous Coward writes: "OS News is carrying an interview with Robert Watson about FreeBSD 4.5, due out almost immediately, and FreeBSD 5.0, due out later this year. He talks a little about the related kernel development work between Linux and FreeBSD, including kernel preemption. Apparently he even reads the linux-kernel mailing list, although he complained about the volume."