ehovland writes "There is an interesting article about the BSD variants in the latest SunWorld. Nothing new for the experienced reader but lots of good info on what makes them different for those with no experience with them. What is especially scathing is the paragraph which compares the cdrom archive with Microsoft's suggestions for a good ftp server cluster:" In contrast to Microsoft's 6 GB of downloads per day, however, it routinely transfers more than 700 GB of data a day for to up to 3,600 concurrent users." " I think we need a generic BSD icon.

Woody wrote in to tell us that NetBSD 1.3.3. was released on December 23rd. Full list of changes here.

nikc writes "The December 17th issue of LinuxWorld features an excellent article about FreeBSD. It's refreshingly free from hype and unsubstantiated claims often made by supporters of both systems, and well worth reading. "

bghandhi was the first to let us know that OpenBSD 2.4 has been released. The new release contains lots of new ethernet drivers (esp. for SBUS cards), security improvements, and a lot more integrated crypto: a shared SSL library, IPSEC improvements, and more. You can find a summary of the most important changes here. If you would like to support the project, please order the US$30 CD set (which includes stickers!)

Eivind Eklund wrote in to say FreeBSD 2.2.8 has been released. See the announcment here. Some of the important changes include support for IDE drives larger than 8GB, a 3c905B driver, Linux emulation support improvement, as well as all BugTraq advisories against 2.2.7.

KeLp writes "The November issue of Daemon News just hit the wire. All can take a check it out at www.daemonnews.org Also the latest issue of the FreeBSD Quick NewsLetter it out there. Very good stuff! "

kfort writes "ftp.cdrom.com has set a new record, serving up 759 GB of data in one day! The machine that did it is a single p6/200 with 1 GB of RAM and half a TB of RAID-5 storage. It broke the old record on October 24th, and broke it again today! Long live FreeBSD! "

r3cgm writes "Today, we opened up The FreeBSD Mall. This site is dedicated to showcasing all manner of FreeBSD products. It also includes HTML'ized versions of the 2 FreeBSD newsletters we've done so far (very slick if I do say so myself). Feedback and comments are appreciated. "

Derek D Owens was the first to write in and tell us that FreeBSD 3.0-Release is appearing on the FreeBSD main ftp site , all you BSD boys and girls can rejoice, download and have at it.

Linux Weekly News Daily refers to a nice informative article in the Irish Times about how Free Unixes (Linux and FreeBSD) are used at Trinity College (Dublin).

DrZiplok writes "There's a picture of ftp.cdrom.com, the world's largest and busiest FTP archive online. At least, I think it looks boring. Some heavy-duty nerds might like it though. It might even qualify as ammunition in a "we don't need an entire room of servers" argument." Key attached to the link below.

Jordan K. Hubbard of the FreeBSD project wrote in with a statement regarding the recent entry of FreeBSD in to the world of beta. Read on if you're interested. Highlights include SMP, and a rewritten SCSI CAM subsystem, and perl5 ("perl4 is dead! long live perl4!").

Jason writes "In light of all the questions about the different forms of BSD and why it took so long for them to catch on, here is an article that describes the differences and the legal battle for the source. A good read for any non-BSD person.

Micah Mayo writes "The current branch of the FreeBSD source tree switched from a.out to the ELF binary system around midnight August 30th. Hopefully the transition wont be as horrid as the linux transition was."

CPIO Networks, run by a cool guy named Jon Katz, has announced they will provide technical support and enterprise consulting services, for anyone from Joe Random User, to the biggest of the big corporations. I have to wonder about that centralized development remark near the bottom, but this is definitley a cool thing, for all free software folk.

Chris Mikkelson writes "Walnut Creek's FTP server (ftp.cdrom.com), powered by FreeBSD, set the record for the most bytes transferred in a single day, at 417 Gig! Note that this is a single 200MHz PPro (overclocked to 233, last I heard). The previous record of 350Gig in a day was set by Microsoft during the Win95 release. They used 40 servers to get this!" You can read the press release if you desire. Very very cool.

luqin wrote in with the news: FreeBSD 2.2.7 is available via CVSup. He says a cvsup followed by a make world should bring you up to date. It should be available from Walnut Creek CDROM soon. Now, if only those CheapBytes CDs were bootable...

The NetBSD Project claims to be "first to support USB". They have a keyboard driver, a mouse driver, a printer driver, and more all done! Congrats, guys! USB sounds like something really cool - perhaps the NetWinder folks at CCC should take note! Now, let's get hacking on those Linux drivers!

Bart Smit writes "jkh just sent out an announcement of a contest meant to make people think about making FreeBSD easier to use and more attractive 'out of the box'. See the contest page. There's some cool prizes (how about a 12Gb disk...). "

Ashley writes "A year after issue one came out, issue two of this fine "quarterly" publication has landed at the FreeBSD ftp server. For those of us who subscribed for a paper copy it should be arriving in the mail anytime soon. Regardless of whether you use FreeBSD it makes an interesting read. It can be downloaded from here"