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."

ve2asm writes "As sent to the freebsd-announce mailing list, Kris Kennaway is resigning as Security Officer. The core team has approved Jacques Vidrine as the new security officer.

flynn_nrg writes: "As a lot of you already know, an interview with Jordan was held Sunday January 27 at 10:30 PM EST. The log of the interview has been posted in bsdvault.net. The complete text of our question and answer session with Jordan Hubbard can be found here. Jordan was mainly asked about his work at Apple and SMPng, the new SMP code that will debut on 5.0. Enjoy ..."

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

rjk191 writes: "Darren Reed, the author of IPFilter, has created his own release of OpenBSD which puts IPFilter back in. IPFilter was removed from OpenBSD 3.0 by the OpenBSD team due to license issues. See his newsgroup posting that announces it here." Here's the whole thread for some more information.

bXTr writes "Interesting project over at SourceForge. Quoting from the website, 'Debian NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development and cannot currently be installed from scratch. Instead, a tarball of the current envionment is available and can be extracted into a handy directory on a NetBSD system.' Check out the reasons why they're doing it and some interesting commentary at DailyDaemonNews on this."

wackysootroom writes: "On January 14th, Wind River Systems, Inc. agreed to transfer its sponsorship of FreeBSD to FreeBSD Mall, Inc. This should be a good thing, since general pessimism abounded when Wind River took over Walnut Creek's BSD sponsorship. Here is the full story." There's also a story on news.com. We published a note about this in the BSD section but it deserves front-page treatment.

ChrisKnight writes: "According to this article FreeBSD is returning to Walnut Creek. Cool. They never screwed up my subscription, unlike Wind River." The article briefly traces the complicated ownership history of the FreeBSD name, too.

oscarcvt writes "While browsing through daily daemon news I found a story posted on Jan 4th that made reference to an article about securing FreeBSD 4.x. The article is titled 'A basic guide to securing FreeBSD 4.x-STABLE' . Everything from mounting ro to secure levels and lots of other stuff. Happy secureading!"

Chris Coleman writes: "Daemon News is pleased to announce the availability of pre-orders for FreeBSD 4.5. This will be our first release of FreeBSD on CD. We will be using the official FreeBSD 4.5 ISOs created by the FreeBSD project. The expected release date for FreeBSD 4.5 is January 20th. We expect to have CDs available two weeks after that. We are taking pre-orders at this time to help gauge the number of CDs we will need to produce. You can pre-order CDs here. CD subscriptions are available here. Vendor pricing will be handled through cylogistics.com."

Johan Allard writes "New mailinglist started discussing the use of IPsec clients connecting to a OpenBSD gateway on http://www.allard.nu/mailman/listinfo/openbsd-ipse c-clients. I have also updated the HOWTO describing how to use PGPnet clients with OpenBSD using x509 certificates to authenticate and to use PGPnet's Acquire Virtual Identity feature. Please check http://www.allard.nu/openbsd for more details."

Jeremy writes: "KernelTrap has interviewed Matthew Dillon, a well-known FreeBSD kernel hacker. He has recently been in the spotlight due to many impressive NFS related bug fixes, as well as fixes to the TCP stack. In this interview he talks about these bug fixes as well as his history with computers, programming and FreeBSD. He also discusses Linux, open source, embedded systems, the Amiga (and his DICE C compiler), and much more."

LiquidPC writes: "The folks over at ONLamp have a new article which discusses IP security, including details on setting up Internet Key Exchange, policies, and using racoon."

mbadolato writes: "From an email which was sent out to the freebsd announcements list: The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it is now accepting credit card donations via PayPal. Donations can be made via the Foundation's home page or direct from PayPal. The Foundation's account with PayPal is donations@freebsdfoundation.org. This is a great way to help support a great OS initiative. Funds we donate could be used to help offset the legal fees incurred whilst negotiating the inclusion of Java (as reported on /. recently)"

nt2UNIX writes: "There is an article on Daily Daemon News that the FreeBSD Foundation has announced the inclusion of a FreeBSD native SUN Java SDK and RunTime Environment for the January 2002 release of FreeBSD 4.5 The whole announcement can be found here."

mbadolato writes "From an article at kerneltrap.org: On the FreeBSD hacker mailing list, Jordan Hubbard commented on some serious issues with NFS, posting a tool called 'fsx' - originally developed for the NeXT OS - that was ideal for finding them. Matt Dillon was quite impressed by the tool and immediately started playing with it. In very little time, he presented a number of major fixes..."

There's a good collection of the emails here describing some of the fixes that Matt Dillon has made."

camateg writes: "I've yet to find news of someone who has done this with a single hard disk, but I'm sure someone has. However, I seem to be the first to make a web page about it having done it, correct me if I'm wrong. This page is just a small tuturial I came up with to describe how I *finally* got things working. No netboot, no ofwboot.xcf on CD, etc. Yeah, I should probably include yaboot to make it complete..."

JT writes: "OSNews features an article introducing the FreeBSD operating system to newbies and Windows users. The article describes the installation, its GUI, application base and it has some more information about Unix and *BSD in general." Since Linux (at least the varieties with cute installation routines) is often presented as the *nix beginner's best choice, it's good to see articles like this one pointing out a broader range of choices.

mvw writes: "Here is an interview with OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt. Interesting is his comment on Soft Updates and the comparison to the rivaling Journaling file systems technology. Further he links to a very interesting paper by some Soft Updates researchers." And although OpenBSD 3.0 has an "official" release date of December 1 for whatever reason, it seems to be available by FTP or CD already. Lots of changes since 2.9.