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"

OpenBSD 2.3 is now shipping in a 2 CD set. The two CDs cost $30 plus shipping and handling. OpenBSD is an excellent OS, chock full of crypto, and is probably the most secure OS out there. The OS can also run binaries for other operating systems, including Linux. The release will be available soon via FTP, but users are encouraged to help the project by purchasing a CD, as head developer Theo de Raadt has put forth thousands upon thousands of dollars of his own money into the project. Besides, what other OS comes with cool stickers?

The FreeBSD Project, Inc. released FreeBSD 2.2.6 to the world. The release may be downloaded or purchased on CD from Pacific Creek CDROM shortly. Definately worth a look- a rock-solid and speedy OS.