AnonymousCow writes "At LinuxTag, an unbiased comparison of performance of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Linux, and Solaris." I'll let Tim's comment on this story stand: "Unbiased is hard to claim - all tests can be seen as biased in their formulation - but this is thorough, with 45 slides and well-explained methodology -- BSD does very well ..."

Fawking DSL writes "Issue #06 of the FreeBSD 'Zine is out. In this issue, the writers explain how to get the best of both worlds (FreeBSD and Windows) using Samba or VNC, how to convert files from Linux, and the collapse of a FreeBSD user group. Michelle Sutton reviews another Solitaire-type game known as PySol. The FreeBSD 'Zine is in great need of new articles, if you have any send them on in."

Fawking DSL writes "``NetBSD can be intimidating from a Linux user's perspective. However, as the Linux user base grows, more people are finding their needs aren't being met by traditional Linux distributions. NetBSD is ready to step up to fill this niche. While Linux and NetBSD share many characteristics, there are some key differences.'' Check out this article at BSD Today."

kono was among the hoards of folks who noted that Tenon is gonna be releasing a tightly integrated X11 Server for MacOS X, which should greatly increase the potential for those of us hoping have a desktop that we could conceivably share with our graphic designer MacOS fanatic girlfriends.

Brew Bird writes "32bitsonline has a nice write up on FreeBSD 4.0. Makes me think I am about do for another upgrade..."

Nearly a year ago, hemos posted the news that the indefatigable NetBSD project had ported NetBSD to the Hitachi Super-H microprocessor which powers the Dreamcast. Now, hubertf writes: "The port of the NetBSD operating system to Sega's Dreamcast game console is reaching a state where it's near to single user mode. Utilizing the NetBSD/evbsh3 port's simple structure and the fact that it supports both big and little endian architectures as well as the general clean design of the NetBSD operating system helped for this port. Device drivers for the game pad, keyboard, etc. are next on the to-do list of Saitoh Masanobu, who works on this port.

InfoMonk writes: "I attended a library conference over the weekend. Tim O'Reilly spoke at a presentation on Open Source Software for libraries. After the conference I asked him about the long running interest in O'Reilly putting out BSD publications. He confirmed that two projects are currently in development, the expected BSD in a Nutshell and another book whose subject is not yet clear. This is very good news of course, to BSD hackers who are slightly tired of the press coverage that Linux has been given in the past year."

QBasic_Dude writes "Freshports, a BSD-centric service similar to Freshmeat, has been upgraded to 1.1. Freshports now has 100% automation, and improved homepage, and of course, more ports."

QBasic_Dude writes "Christian Weisgerber on the openbsd-advocacy list, wrote a summary of his experiences at LinuxTag 2000 in Stuttgart, Germany. Interesting read for anyone in the Stuttgart area."

NetBSD have added another platform to their supported hardware list. As the NetBSD/sgimips and announcement pages say, NetBSD/sgimips is now stable enough to run multi-user, making NetBSD the first OpenSource OS to run on the SGI O2. Currently it's known to work on the R5000 CPU, R10K and R12K are untested due to lack of hardware.

Several Anonymous Cowards have written in with the news that bsd.tucows.com has gone live. Currently they only cover FreeBSD on i386, but they say that i386 Net and OpenBSD support is in the works, with other architectures to be tackled if there's demand (requests to ajohnson@tucows.com).

KarmaHo writes "From the NetBSD web page: Today, the release cycle for NetBSD 1.5 has started. The NetBSD 1.5 release is scheduled for early fall this year. Of course, we want this to be the best NetBSD release ever, as with every release. To help achieve this goal, you can test the ALPHA and BETA snapshots that will be made available, or track the release branch sources."

dougc writes: "FreeBSD 3.5-RELEASE is now available for the x86 architecture. Many changes in both the kernel and userland, plus several very small security fixes were included. A bunch of neat things were also merged from -current." 3.5 is the continuation of the 3.x branch, with mostly important bug and security fixes. New development continues on 5.x. This release is almost certainly the last on the 3.x line, with 4.x becoming the new ``stable'' release. The release notes have the full details on what's changed, you can download 3.5 from here.

jmsohn wrote in with a link to a press release announcing the launch of Wasabi Systems, formed to provide a commercial channel for sales, support, and service for NetBSD. With me in the Usenix terminal room is Perry Metzger, NetBSD's release engineer, and CEO of the new company, to talk about the company's plans.

Anonymous Coward writes: "A very interesting (if somewhat technical) synopsis of the Next Big Thing in FreeBSD SMP coming down the pipes from the geniuses on the FreeBSD core team. Some of the ideas are the beginnings of SMP discussions between BSDI and FreeBSD, along with some input from Yahoo. Very interesting reading!"

Anonymous Coward writes "According to Kirk McKusick's soft updates page, the soft updates code that had a problematic license in the past is now (as of June 21 2000) released under a BSD license!. This is another big plus for the *BSD community, including some people that were hesitant in adding this stuff in their code base."

joe_90 writes "According to RTMX the RTMX O/S has been donated to OpenBSD! Code integration will happen over the next few weeks and probably filter through to the rest of the open source world shortly afterwards. Cool, we get a real time POSIX feature set at last!"

aliya writes: "Microsoft has announced Office and IE5.5 for Mac OS X in mid-2001. Given that OS X is based on BSD, what are the ramifications for those trying to get these apps on unix? Seems like a generic OS X-to-unix API translation would be a lot easier than Win32 API-to-unix. Not that I'm a big fan of the MS Office monopoly or the broken IE5 implementations, but it seems like this is going to have major ramifications for any application ported to Mac OS X." Of course, Microsoft promised products before which have mysteriously failed to appear, but still...interesting.

jim writes "The new issue of the FreeBSD 'zine was put out yesterday. Check it out!"

dragonfly_blue writes: "Just wanted to let you know, OpenBSD 2.7 is out, with significant advances; including OpenSSH2, better Linux binary emulation, DSA encryption, and (my personal favorite) support for encrypting your swap space. Theo and the gang have also expanded the ports and packages collections considerably, so get 'em while they're hot!" (More.)