PuceBaboon writes "It's worth noting that, in addition to the main FreeBSD release covered here recently, PC-BSD has also released their 'Isotope' edition, based on FreeBSD 9.0. Why would you be interested? Well, PC-BSD, while not the first, is certainly the most current version of FreeBSD aimed squarely at the desktop user. Pre-configured for the desktop and using a graphical installer, the 9.0 release includes KDE, GNOME, XFCE and LXDE desktop environments, an update manager, WiFi 'quick connect,' BootCamp support and auto-configuration for most common hardware. Live-CD, VirtualBox and VMware release images for 32- and 64-bit architectures also make it easier than ever for users to test the release before committing to a full install. Check out the torrents (scroll down), main download page and the PC-BSD 9.0 manual pages."

An anonymous reader writes "FreeBSD 9.0 has been released. A few highlights include: A new installer, bsdinstall(8) has been added and is the installer used by the ISO images provided as part of this release, The Fast Filesystem now supports softupdates journaling, and Kernel support for Capsicum Capability Mode, an experimental set of features for sandboxing support."

An anonymous reader points out an interesting, detailed interview with Andrew Tanenbaum at Linuxfr.org; Tanenbaum holds forth on the current state of MINIX, licensing decisions, and the real reason he believes that Linux caught on just when he "thought BSD was going to take over the world." ("I think Linux succeeded against BSD, which was a stable mature system at the time simply because BSDI got stuck in a lawsuit and was effectively stopped for several years.")

snydeq writes "Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying — at least I've said it many times — that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.'"

First time accepted submitter tearmeapart writes "A new version of the operating system that most of us would love to love, but probably hardly ever directly use, has been released. As scheduled, release 5.0 brings support for more hardware, network improvements, and OpenSSH 5.9. The links: changelog; download; main 5.0 page; and how to order your OpenBSD products!"

An anonymous reader writes "It's that time of the year again: when we all unite regardless of the (free) licenses we cherish and go out into the streets to let people know how Free Software has changed our lives. With over 425 events in 80+ countries, communities as diverse as Joomla!, FreeBSD and The OpenDisc, to name just a few, will be celebrating all over the world. Don't wait; grab your best arguments and join the wild masses of freedom lovers to the software freedom parties. Where will you be partying today?"

An anonymous reader writes "The developers behind the Mesa 3D graphics library, which provides the default graphics driver support for most hardware on Linux (and BSD/Solaris), has ended their support for older hardware. Being removed from Mesa (and therefore versions of Linux distributions) is support for hardware like the 3Dfx Voodoo, Intel i810, ATI Rage, and S3 Savage graphics processors. Also drivers being dropped were for Matrox and VIA graphics. Mesa developers also decided it's time to end support for the BeOS operating system. Dropping this code lowered the developers' responsibility by some 100k L.O.C., so maybe we will see GL3 support and OpenCL in Linux a bit sooner."

badger.foo writes "OpenBSD-current just turned 5.0-beta, providing us a preview of what the upcoming release (slated for November 1st) will look like. Peter Hansteen takes us through the main new features and explains the development process that has consistently turned out high-quality releases on time, every six months for more than a decade."

halfaperson writes "In an interview with LinuxFr.org, Lennart Poettering speaks freely about his creations, PulseAudio, Avahi and systemd among other things. Naturally, what has stirred up most of the discussions online is Lennart's opinions on BSD. Following the recent proposal to make Gnome a Linux-exclusive desktop, Lennart explains that he thinks BSD support is holding back a lot of Free Software development. He says this while also taking a stab at Debian kFreeBSD: 'Debian kFreeBSD is a toy OS, people really shouldn't misunderstand that.'"

Moderator writes "Could Gnome drop support for non-Linux operating systems? That was a recent proposal on the Gnome mailing list, although there were significant objections in response. Quoting: 'It is harmful to pretend that you are writing the OS core to work on any number of different kernels...the time has come for GNOME to embrace Linux a bit more boldly.'"

An anonymous reader writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.9 has been announced. New highlights included since 4.8: enabled NTFS by default (read-only), the vmt(4) driver by default for VMWare tools, SMP kernels can now boot on machines with up to 64 cores, support for AES-NI instructions found in recent Intel processors, improvements in suspend and resume, OpenSSH 5.8, MySQL 5.1.54, LibreOffice 3.3.0.4, and bug fixes." Also in BSD news, an anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.10 has been released! The latest release brings data deduplication (online and at garbage-collection time) to the HAMMER file system. Capping off years of work, the MP lock is no longer the main point of contention in multiprocessor systems. It also brings a new version of the pf packet filter, support for 63 CPUs and 512 GB of RAM and switches the system compiler to gcc 4.4."

meta coder writes with word of the release of FreeBSD 8.2: "This is the third release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights includes improvements in Xen support and various bugfixes."

An anonymous reader writes "One week after Sony's PlayStation 3 private cryptography key was obtained, FreeBSD is up and running on the PS3. Nathan Whitehorn writes: 'Yesterday, I imported support for the Sony Playstation 3 into our 64-bit PowerPC port, expanding our game console support into the current generation. There are still a few rough edges due to missing hardware support, but the machine boots and runs FreeBSD stably. These rough edges should be smoothed out in time for the 9.0 release.'" Update: 01/10 15:04 GMT by KD : As several commenters have pointed out, the submission was misleading in that BSD runs in OtherOS, making no use of the cracked keys.

itwbennett writes "In follow-up to last week's controversy over allegations that the FBI installed a number of back doors into the encryption software used by the OpenBSD operating system, OpenBSD lead developer Theo de Raadt said on a discussion list Tuesday, that he believes that a government contracting firm that contributed code to his project 'was probably contracted to write backdoors,' which would grant secret access to encrypted communications. But that he doesn't think that any of this software made it into the OpenBSD code base."

jfruhlinger writes "Theo de Raadt has made the shocking claim that OpenBSD includes a backdoor that the FBI paid coders to build. Brian Proffitt has tracked down one of the programmers named as being on the FBI payroll (actually, he tracked down two programmers with the same name). Both deny working with the FBI."

Aggrajag and Mortimer.CA, among others, wrote to inform us that Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his NDA with the FBI has expired. The code was originally added ten years ago, and over that time has changed quite a bit, "so it is unclear what the true impact of these allegations are" says Mr. de Raadt. He added: "Since we had the first IPSEC stack available for free, large parts of the code are now found in many other projects/products." (Freeswan and Openswan are not based on this code.)

dmbkiwi writes "The first beta release of KDE SC 4.6 was released yesterday. OpenSUSE had packages up almost immediately, so being curious as to what's new, I've downloaded and upgraded to the new release. These are my impressions thus far."

jschauma writes "NetBSD 5.1 has been released. NetBSD 5.1 is the first feature update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It includes security and bug fixes, as well as improved hardware support and new features. Some highlights include: RAIDframe parity maps, which greatly improve parity rewrite times after unclean shutdown; X.Org updates; Support for many more network devices; Xen PAE dom0 support; Xen PCI pass-through support. For a full list of all changes, please see the release announcement. NetBSD 5.1 is dedicated to the memory of Martti Kuparinen, who was the victim of a traffic accident in June 2010."

Mortimer.CA writes "The release of OpenBSD 4.8 has been announced. Highlights include ACPI suspend/resume, better hardware support, OpenBGPD/OpenOSPFD/routing daemon improvements, inclusion of OpenSSH 5.5, etc. Nothing revolutionary, just the usual steady improving of the system. A detailed ChangeLog is available, as usual. Work, of course, has already started on the next release, which should be ready in May, according to the steady six-month release cycle."

Julie188 writes "GNOME 3.0 was scheduled to be released in September but during the developers conference, GUADEC 2010 in Den Haag, the organization had to face facts: the much ballyhooed GNOME Shell really wasn't ready. The Shell is supposed to bring 'a whole new user experience to the desktop.' So now, in September, what users will see is GNOME 2.32, distributed as a new stable release. Next target date for 3.0: March 2011."