Chris Coleman writes "Apple has just announced their annual World Wide Developer Conference to be held May 21 - 25, 2001. If you find yourself wondering why you should attend, let me see if I can help. In addition to the regular Mac OS application development, this year Apple has added conference tracks for BSD UNIX and Darwin."

The Complete FreeBSD, The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD, and The FreeBSD Handbook are among the most notable books available for BSD, but recently it was my pleasure to review a new book about FreeBSD, The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide by Ted Mittelstaedt.

An unnamed correspondent writes: "At least, that's the rumor on the street. Wonder what this will mean for Apple's Darwin project?" The rumor is confirmed, boys and girls, Wilfredo Sanchez has indeed left Apple. A statement is on his Advogato page; apparently he has gone to KnowNow. Sanchez says on that page too that he'll still be involved with Darwin maintaining Apache and Perl for that platform.

After a short downtime, the FreeBSD'zine is back up at a new home. One of the new articles is a How-To on using VMWare2 with FreeBSD. Check it out!

Every BSD article posted, trolls come out and post about BSD dying. Naysayers at every turn, mostly pro-Linux, say that BSD doesn't have the marketing and advocacy to succeed. Greg Lehey, author of The Complete FreeBSD and FreeBSD core team member, takes a look at naysayer's claims, the history of BSD, the root of the "quiet" BSD advocates, and the relationship of Linux to it all, in this month's Daemon's Advocate at Daemon News

Patrick Mullen writes: "OpenBSD 2.8 is a big release in many ways, but who has time to read the long release information pages? The Duke of URL has just reviewed OpenBSD 2.8 and covers all the new features, installation (including a mini-HowTo for those new OpenBSD users), information about the organization, and much more."

howardjp writes "Today, Feb. 7, Tucows announced they would bring back the BSD section. Apparently a number of users sent mail encouraging the Tucows/BSD group and with the help of both Wasabi Systems and BSDi, it will be back."

A reader writes: "This byte.com article finds byte.com's Linux guru wondering why he isn't running FreeBSD. 'Linux 2.4.0 is available for no money. So is FreeBSD. Linux uses advanced hardware, so does FreeBSD. FreeBSD is more stable and faster than Linux, in my opinion. We penguinistas sometimes believe we are having more fun than anybody. But then I lean over the fence and discover the FreeBSD folks are having a hell of a party, too. And their OS is as fast as I have seen. I have to ask myself why I don't just switch my server to FreeBSD.'"

hubertf writes: "NetBSD now supports the SEGA Broadband (i.e. ethernet) Adapter. Check out the screendump of someone telnetting into a Dreamcast running NetBSD!" Considering that this adapter only came out a short while ago, this is pretty fast work. Next stop: electric toothbrushes.

sparcv9 writes "The NetBSD Team has added another port to their ever-growing list. This time, it's NetBSD/hpcsh (HPC = Handheld PC, SH = Hitachi Super-H processor), and it currently supports the SH3 processor, with the SH4 promised in the future. It currently runs on the up-until-now WinCE-only HP Jornada palmtop PC."

Wolverine writes "IBM has finally seen the light and modified the BIOS on their T20/T21 laptops so users can now install FreeBSD without worrying about turning their machine into a paperweight. Although the official fix is listed as a fix for "System can not boot from a hard disk with partition ID of n5h.(n is 1 or greater)", they may have well just posted "You can install FreeBSD so stop whining". ThinkPad T20 bios can be found here and T21 bios update can be found here."

Brew Bird writes "Qwest explains how they handle the various issues that crop up being a large ISP/Backbone Provider. They've got the presentations setup in a nice little website." It's very *BSD focused, since I believe that's mostly what Qwest runs but the presentations are interesting in the scaling issue - what do you do with that much data and that many machines?

BSD Today ran a comment on Tucows shutting down the Tucows BSD Section after flames from the BSD community about the misinformation they had on the site. Tucows says that they cannot meet the demands of all the "factions" within the BSD camp. It's a cop-out in my opinion; BSD Today and Daemon News seem to do it fine. All any of us asked for was for the inflammatory pro-linux/anti-BSD flavor of it to be toned down, and the misinformation cleared up. DaemonNews also carries some appropriate comments.

Last Friday we solicited questions for Robert Watson, hard-core FreeBSD and TrustedBSD developer. His answers (below) are breathtakingly deep and instructive. Whether you're "just curious" about BSD or a FreeBSD user who wants to see what's going on with the inner circle of developers, you'll want to spend the time it takes to read everything here, and possibly even send Mr. Watson a brief "thank you" email.

hubertf writes: "The NetBSD pkgsrc crew has released a 2-CD-set loaded with apps for NetBSD 1.5/i386. The set consists of the two files i386pkg1.iso (680MB) and i386pkg2.iso (660MB), and is also available on any mirrors of ftp.netbsd.org. See the README file that describes the contents of the CDs for more details."