By the time you read this, FreeBSD 3.4 will have been released. Being a 3.x release, this primarily contains fixes and enhancements to existing parts of the system, rather than complete new functionality and subsystems. Those will come with the 4.0 release, later next year. That said, there are a few new developments that have been shaken out in the -current branch, and have been backported. Read on for more.

From Wes Peters, via DaemonNews. Intel's InBusiness Storage Station is a network file server in-a-box. Intel, despite their investment in Linux companies, is using FreeBSD as their OS of choice, as they are now stating. Of particular interest is their Mean Time Between Failure, 77,244 hours, or a shade under 9 years. That's probably a little on the low side, but quite respectable nonetheless.

After last Sunday's story about Microsoft looking for Linux skills, Alfred Perlstein wrote in with the news that talented FreeBSD admins can also find themselves positions with Microsoft, in particular, at Hotmail. The Hotmail guys do seem to have a sense of humour though; witness hostnames like rotate-the-shield-harmonics.hotmail.com.

hideki writes "I am a long-time linux user, having used it exclusively for nearly two years now. However, I would like to expand my horizons, and FreeBSD and OpenBSD came to mind. (I like Theo de Raadt's puns, so I might try OpenBSD first. :) My question -- does anyone know of good "So, you would like to try *BSD after using Linux?" documents? What is the easiest way to learn a BSD, specifically the differences. :) "

Laz writes "I just checked this out on daily.daemonnews.org. Apparently Linus Torvalds has written a patch to the FreeBSD kernel that has been submitted. "

Python writes "OpenBSD have issued a security advisory describing a buffer overflow problem in the RSA crypto reference implementation. RSA crypto is patented in the US (expiring Sept 20, 2000), and for non-commercial use, RSA Inc. requires the use of their reference implementation (called RSAREF2). So not only are software patents a bad thing - they can even force you into using a crypro reference implementation with known security bugs..." It's worth noting that this is not just an OpenBSD issue. Anything that uses the RSA reference implementation will have the problem.

Daemon News, the Adventures of Darby Daemon are now in their final episode. Given the content, a lesser man than I might try and make a "horn" joke about now.

howardjp writes "The December Edition of Daemon News is out! There are some cool articles on OpenSSH as well as Applixware. "

The folks over at DaemonNews are running a review of Applixware, the 'Office Productivity Suite'. Featuring all the standard components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and so on), it's been available for Linux for a while now. However, this is the first time native binaries have been produced for FreeBSD. Read the review to find out whether it was worth waiting for.

Lots of you wrote in with this -- we've been holding back at Theo's request until the CDs were available, but OpenBSD 2.6 is now released and available from the FTP sites, or by ordering CDs. There are lots of technical enhancements to this release (which are detailed below), and if they don't grab you, check out the very cool CD cover art.

There have been a spate of reports about the usefulness of FreeBSD's Linux ABI recently. First off, Daeron wrote in with the news that VMWare now runs on FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Vladimir Silyaev. Vladimir has a page up with instructions and caveats. Secondly, Jacob Hart has confirmed that the Unreal Tournament Demo works flawlessly. Finally, Mark van Woerkom has created FreeBSD ports skeletons for Linux Quake 3 Test.

antigen fiend wrote in to note that Debian Weekly News has a bit about a recent debate about a Debian port to the FreeBSD Kernel. There are several comments relating to licensing, ease of porting, and other relevant topics. Its definitely an interesting project, with a lot of political and technical snags. Any thoughts?

Brett Glass sent this message to the FreeBSD -chat mailing list, about his experiences and perceptions at COMDEX, and agreed to let me repost it here. Of particular interest are the problems he had trying to get vendors to support the BSDs and Linux. Read on for more.

brianm9 wrote in with this tidbit from BSDI's home page. "LAP enables a BSD/OS system to execute many dynamically linked Linux ELF binaries (both libc5 and glibc) with no significant loss of performance. This release has been tested with the following Linux applications: Adobe Acrobat, ApplixWare, Informix and Word Perfect." The beta is only available to BSDI customers with current support contracts; more information can be had from BSDI's Linux Application Platform page.

From the NetBSD -annouce mailing list: "Frank van der Linden (frank@wins.uva.nl) has brought Kirk McKusick's trickle sync + FFS soft update code into the main tree." For the uninitiated, softupdates is an extension to FFS which collects and orders writes to the filesystem, removing unnecessary metadata writes, and carrying out necessary metadata writes asynchronously. All the speed of Linux's default filesystem configuration, with all the safety of UFS. More information at the NetBSD news page, and Kirk McKusick's softupdates page. Softupdates has been in FreeBSD for a while, it's great to see NetBSD getting it as well.

Several people submitted this, but Nate Williams was first. In his own words: "As head of the current FreeBSD/JDK porting development team it's been difficult to finish our JDK2 efforts due to lack of help from Sun. In order to try and make JDK2 on FreeBSD a reality, we are lobbying Sun using a RFE (Request For Enhancement) on the Java Developer network to demonstrate to them the number of people interested in seeing FreeBSD as a supported Java platform.". Read on if you're interested in seeing more complete Java support on FreeBSD.

eboy writes "Gnatbox is floppy only FreeBSD based distribution. It does NAT and some pretty comprehensive firewalling. To me it looks like what LRP would like to be. Too bad the buy-in is $995!"

Scott Brady writes "In an announcement to customers November 11, Virtual Server provider iServer announced plans to migrate from BSDi to the more open FreeBSD on ''...[n]ew Virtual Server accounts provisioned after November 23, 1999". They went on to say that "...we anticipate that all Virtual Servers will eventually be migrated to the new FreeBSD Virtual Server platform.'' Look for an official announcement to be forthcoming. "

logictype asks: "How would you configure a FreeBSD NAT box so it will work with netmeeting or my webcam? Here is a page thatdescribes the ports needed. I am not familiar with FreeBSD so all help is appreciated."

Bob Frankenberg was CEO of Novell in the early nineties, when Novell were marketing DR-DOS as a replacement for MS-DOS (DR-DOS is now the subject of a law suit between Caldera and Microsoft). In part of this CBS interview he explains why his new company, Encanto, is not using Microsoft software, and why they chose FreeBSD. Read on for a few notes.