Bob Bruce writes: "There will be a BSD BOF (Birds Of a Feather meeting) at Spring Comdex, on Wednesday April 19 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The BOF is at the Essex Inn at Grant Park, Chicago. You do not need to be a Comdex attendee to come along, everyone is welcome." Read on for more details.

keepper writes. . . well, absolutely nothing actually. But he (or she) did send a pointer to There's no BS in BSD, another ZDNet think piece on the Walnut Creek/BSDI merger.

As seen on the OpenBSD -announce list, OpenBSD now has hardware cryptographic support to boost IPSEC performance. "Currently, only cards using the HiFn 7751 chip can be used. This Hifn chip is an IPSEC-oriented DES/3DES and SHA1/MD5 hmac engine; ie. only symmetric cryptography..&nbsp.we are getting 63.12Mb/s 3des/sha1 ESP IPSEC. That's documented as the top performance the chip can provide. In other words, we're pretty damn impressed at ourselves." Read on for more from the message, or go straight to the OpenBSD Hardware Crypto page.

vrkid writes: "Found this on OpenBSD Journal: OpenBSD just moved up a notch in its minor number and is now at 7. The first beta release of 2.7 is out. For people with strong stomachs, a habit of banging the head against the wall and a love for testing other's software: Download, install and send bug reports. "

AC writes: "Another NetBSD port has come out of the closet. Ben Harris reports that NetBSD/arm26 can mount its root file system over NFS now, an important milestone! A binary test kit can be downloaded from his ftp directory."

Kaufmann writes "It seems the BSD family has a new member: TrustedBSD. From its site: 'TrustedBSD provides a set of trusted operating system extensions to the FreeBSD operating system, targeting the Orange Book B1 evaluation criteria. This project is still under development, and much of the code is destined to make its way back into the base FreeBSD operating system; however, this site will provide access to documentation, code relating to features that are still under development, and code that has its fingers in too many places to justify integrating into the base OS.' Sweet!"

Minix is now Free Software! Andrew Tanenbaum posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup yesterday announcing: "Better late than never. I finally got permission from Prentice Hall to change the MINIX license to the BSD license. The lawyers sort of sat on this for two years." You can read the full posting on deja, as well.

bangpath writes "In this somewhat dumbed down and somewhat whiny article, TechWeb reintroduces BSD to the fashionable world. Perhaps more non-conformist Windows haters will be spurned into action instead of more kvetching. Or maybe not." It's interesting to note that lack of a bundled JVM is seen as a negative. Whatever happened to shipping systems relatively lean, and making it easy to add additional packages post-install, eh?

Duke of URL writes: "Boardwatch interviewed OpenBSD contributor Louis Bertrand. It's an excellent article about OpenBSD's niche and mission. They discussed the continued code audit, OpenSSH, and future version plans, including SMP development, ports rework, and continued integration of IPv6. Journalist Jeffrey Carl does a good job of pointing out OpenBSD's strengths and tradeoffs."

xlogan writes, "I just received my FreeBSD 4.0 subscription CD in the mail today. According to a memo inside, they will NOT be shipping a 3.5 CD (the last of the 3.X series) and instead sent out this 4.0 CD. 3.5 will be available for FTP download in May." S'true. It was decided that the extended testing period before releasing 4.0 was so effective that the CD sets would continue with the 4.x releases, rather than the 3.x branch. This is contrary to earlier releases (in particular, 3.0). Of course, 3.5 will still be available for download, but if you've got a CD subscription from WC you'll get 4.0.

Joey the Lemur writes "I saw this article over at Yahoo! about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger that has some good points concerning FreeBSD and Apple. The author talks about Apple's proposal to stay synced with FreeBSD (Darwin), and why they should actually follow through with it. It also has some good commentary on why BSD isn't as prominent as Linux. "

Quite a number of folks have written in with announcement from Apple saying that Darwin 1.0 is released. It's got the BSD core that's been discussed before, along with Mach 3.0 - and here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX, at least in some fashion or another.

After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available. Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.

Another month, another issue of DaemonNews. Highlights this month include a report from ApacheCon 2000, an interview with the NetBSD Foundation about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger, Greg Lehey's Daemon's Advocate column, and the latest article in the "Managing Websites using Unix" series.

O'Reilly's FreeBSD DevCenter is currently running an interview with Keith Bostic, one of the principal architects of 4.4 and 4.4-lite BSD, and a co-founder of BSDI. In it he discusses the genesis of BSDI, the merits of the BSD and Linux development models, marketing open source software, and more.

Elik asks: "I have been looking for solid support for the ISDN cards for FreeBSD in the U.S. considering the drivers currently available are for the Europe-based ISDN Cards. Is there anyone willing to help write the drivers using the ISDN4linux as the base for the ISDN4BSD for American users? It sucks to purchase the external ISDN when I have quite a few ISDN Cards around and I would like to put them to use. "

The AC crowd were the first to write in with the news. From Wilfredo Sanchez's diary at Advogato, "Today another big milestone has come up. I imported the sources to the kernel into the Darwin CVS repository today, which means that at this point all of the sources needed to build Darwin are available externally for the first time." For those not in the know, Darwin is the foundation on which MacOS X is based. It's a BSD Unix, including significant contributions from the NetBSD and FreeBSD kernel and userland code.

LinuxWorld carries an article by Michael Lucas, Customizing The FreeBSD Kernel. The twist is that it's written partly from the perspective of a Linux user, highlighting the similarities and differences between the two systems.

sekure writes "I was just on OpenBSD.org, and as I was reading the wanted hardware page I noticed that the OpenBSD project needed more Alpha gear, and if they don't get what they need, they won't ship OpenBSD/alpha on the 2.7 CD-ROM. I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I think it would be a shame. I know I'm going to talk to my boss about lending (or maybe even giving?) an Alpha to the OpenBSD project. Maybe people have old (or new) Alpha's kicking around they don't use anymore, or maybe there are some multi[million|billion]aires that wouldn't mind donating some fresh new Alpha's. What do you think?"

SecretAsianMan writes, "With all the hoopla about the WC/BSDI merger, it's easy to forget that FreeBSD 4.0 will be out soon. Boardwatch has an interview with Jordan K. Hubbard about what's new in FreeBSD 4.0, porting to different architectures, and what the future holds for FreeBSD. "