Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long presents the FreeBSD November-December 2002 Bi-Monthly status report. Key highlights of the report include the anticipated FreeBSD 5.0 Release, Bluetooth stack development, busdma driver conversion project, DEVD, C99 & POSIX Conformance Project, FreeBSD Package Cluster work and much more!"

Dan writes "NetBSD's Alistair Crooks indicates in his December 2002 report that there are 3402 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 3327 the previous month, a rise of 75. The Package of the Month award goes to pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgdepgraph, nominated by Andrew Brown - you'll need graphviz to look at the dependency graph that it produces, but the output is quite fascinating."

Vegard writes "Although not yet officially announced, the 5.0 version of FreeBSD is beginning to appear on the FreeBSD FTP site and mirrors world wide." Congrats to the developers. Update: 01/19 17:44 GMT by T : Some more detail -- Dan writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD Release Engineering team has officially announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.0 release. Improvements include second generation UFS filesystem, GEOM, the extensible and flexible storage framework, DEVFS, the device virtual filesystem, Bluetooth, ACPI, CardBus, IEEE 1394 and many more! FreeBSD is also available on 64-bit sparc64 and ia64 platforms."

jschauma writes, quoting the NetBSD changelog, was one of several people to point out that "Jason Thorpe has merged the nathanw_sa branch with -current. NetBSD now has a high performance, modern kernel thread implementation using Scheduler Activations in the main source tree. This work was performed by Nathan Williams with contributions by several other developers."

Dan writes "Scott Long announces that FreeBSD 5.0 RC3 has been released and available at all mirrors sites. Release notes can be viewed here, you can download 5.0 RC3 from ftp.freebsd.org or from one of your favorite mirror sites. Many thanks to the FreeBSD Release Engineering team for their work efforts!"

chromatic writes "Following up on an earlier story on NetBSD's fledgling Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer, I've interviewed Emmanuel Dreyfus, who leads the project. The key questions are "what is it?", "what is it not?", and "what does it mean?""

jschauma writes "Largely due to the efforts of Paul Kranenburg, NetBSD -current now supports SMP on sparc. It has been tested on a SPARCstation 20/712, sun4/690 and other systems. See Matthew Green's message to the port-sparc mailing list." (i386 got this back in October.)

Pine Digital Security announced a FreeBSD kernel leak, found when auditing a customer. The leak can be exploited to panic the server or elevate privileges. FreeBSD swiftly updated CVS, a security advisory will probably follow. Both the -RELEASE branch and -CURRENT branch are vulnerable.

An anonymous reader writes "KernelTrap has an interesting article about an effort to add a Mach and Darwin binary compatibility layer to NetBSD. The project has evidently already made a fair amount of progress, currently working to stabilize the WindowServer emulation portion that will then allow NetBSD to run Mac OS X graphical applications."

A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.

RooTchO writes "Included in this release is the new Extended Security Features, Improved/Additional sysctl parameters. New binaries in this release are: pfradix, pfsyncd, aclctl, netacl, getfacl, setfacl and cgdconfig. We have added chrooted sshd, apache, bind. Special files to also see are /etc/sysctl.conf, /etc/acl.conf and /etc/sshd/sshd_conf. And many new other goodies :)))"

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 5.0-RC2 has been uploaded to ftp-master and is showing up on most of the primary mirrors. ia32, ia64, pc98, and alpha images are available now; sparc64 will be pushed out once it becomes available. The plan going forward is to cut an RC3 in early January, followed by 5.0-RELEASE a week later."

essdodson writes "Scott Long of the FreeBSD release engineering team has posted that FreeBSD 5.0 RC2 has been compiled and should be available shortly. Check it out and help make this the best FreeBSD release so far. The updated release schedule lists Jan 17, 2003 as the anticipated release date."

GrosBill writes "Onlamp publishes one more paper about IRIX binary compatibility implementation on NetBSD. This time, this is about emulating IRIX native multithreading capabilities on NetBSD, which is quite interesting since NetBSD does not support native multithreading for its native binaries yet. The paper also covers some reverse engineering tricks: how to use a debugger to discover everything about IRIX multithreading."

mkeke writes "In a post over at OpenBSD Journal, Theo states that he has written a spam blocker that works with pf and Spews. It looks darn cool :)"