Noryungi writes "Yep, OpenBSD 3.2 is now officially in pre-release, and can be pre-ordered from the openbsd.org web site as well. Another very, very wacky design for the CD as well... Is Theo de Raadt a fan of James Bond?"

Walter Belgers writes "This year, the European BSD Conference will be held in Amsterdam, Netherlands. Friday November 15 is a tutorial day, Saturday and Sunday are filled with interesting lectures about FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD and MacOS X, and a keynote by Mike Karels. This is your chance to learn from BSD developers and see how other BSDs are doing. Early registration is open until October 18th. For more information, see the website."

jukal writes "From here: "Hello folks, Due to the upcoming release of OpenBSD 3.2, the 3.0-STABLE branch will be out of regular maintainance starting december 1st. There will be NO MORE fixes commited to this branch after this day. People relying on 3.0-STABLE (or older releases even) are strongly advised to upgrade to a more recent release (preferrably 3.2 as it becomes available) as soon as possible. Thanks for reading, Miod" Download from your preferred FTP mirror."

omega_cubed asks: "'You've successfully installed FreeBSD, now your computer is going to hang at boot up!' -- That was what I just recently suffered. I've been running Mandrake on my ThinkPad X20 for almost a year. But the lack of high speed internet connection over the summer prevented me from keeping up with the various patches/updates. Many services--sendmail, apache, etc.--were shutdown one by one because of security vulnerabilities. Recently I decided that instead of trying to catch all those patches I missed in the last few months, I might just as well do a clean install of FreeBSD. I've done what I think was all the preparations necessary: I backed-up all my files, checked all the hardwares for possible conflicts (on FreeBSD.org) and supports, downloaded the ISO image. And I decided the computer should be able to take it. Unfortunately, I didn't come across the old slashdot article reporting a possible conflict between IBM ThinkPad's BIOS and FreeBSD's filesystem. So last night, after much struggling, I installed FreeBSD. It finished, rebooted, and the computer now just hangs at bootup (here's a more detailed report on what happened). It doesn't even go into BIOS. Does anyone have experience dealing with this? Is there anyway I can update the BIOS? The diskettes provided IBM were not able to boot the computer, and I am at a loss here. Thanks."

LiquidPC writes "ONLamp.com has a new article on DVD playback in FreeBSD. It goes over setting up your system for optimal DVD playback, and describes how to install and use many of the DVD players that are in the FreeBSD ports collection."

MobyTurbo writes "NetBSD-current for the i386 architecture now has SMP. (It used to be that only FreeBSD had this feature among the free BSDs.) See the announcement on the current-users mailing list."

Stigmata669 writes "Over at MacSlash the editors have managed to schedule an interview with Jordan Hubbard, Engineering Manager of the BSD Technology Group at Apple to answer questions about BSD, and Darwin in the context of Mac OS X. The interview is being conducted in the Slashdot style, so comment and in a week they will have the highest moderated comments answered. The specific article is here."

zeekiorage writes "A good informative article about the various BSD OSs, their legacy, philosophy and importance on the ExtremeTech web site. Excerpt from the article: 'Nowadays, the term 'The BSDs' refers to the family of operating systems which were derived, to a greater or lesser extent, from BSD. The five best known BSDs are FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, BSD/OS, and Darwin (which serves as the foundation for Apple's MacOS X). But virtually all modern operating systems -- from Windows to BeOS to Linux -- rely on crucial BSD code to run.'"

An anonymous reader writes "Norway based Opera Software finally released a native FreeBSD version of its fast, standard based browser yesterday. The browser has been available in the ports tree as an app running in Linux binary environment. Opera 6.1 is the first version released for FreeBSD, it has the same set of features as the Linux version."

jschauma writes "After quite some discussion on the current-users MailingList, Luke Mewburn announced that NetBSD-current is now, per default, a fully dynamically linked system. Please see his post to the list for details."

Kataire writes "C|Net posted this story about how Sun Microsystems' has donated 'elliptic curve' encryption technology, (developed by Whitfield Diffie of Diffie-Hellman public key fame) to the OpenSSL project. This potentially means better encryption for lighter-weight systems such as PDAs."

Hugh writes "The FreeBSD NVIDIA Driver Initiative has announced that nVidia itself will be releasing a FreeBSD driver for its line of cards. This is excellent news for people who prefer to Quake on the best OS available."

Dan writes "Maksim Yevmenkin announces that another "bluetooth" engineering release is available for download. This release features several major changes and includes support for H4 UART and H2 USB transport layers, Host Controller Interface (HCI), Link Layer Control and Adaptation Protocol (L2CAP), Bluetooth sockets layer and more. Maksim has subsequently provided followup patches for this release."

BSD Forums writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty two different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6 release contains complete binary releases for thirty nine different system architectures. The thirteen remaining are not fully supported at this time and are thus not part of the binary distribution." hubertf adds some important notes: "Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.6 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. ... Czech, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Portugese , Russian, Spanish and Swedish language translations of the NetBSD 1.6 release announcement are available." The NetBSD packages collection now includes over 3000 pieces of software, including KDE3, OpenOffice and many more of the usual suspects.

Dan writes "With the publishing of the final ballot of the Board Elections on September 12th, a one-year long effort to establish a more democratic structure in the NetBSD Project came to a successful end."