Looking for something to do with that old PS/2 in the cupboard? NetBSD can now be booted on it. Support is strictly experimental at the moment, and available as a patchset to the main code.

DaemonNews for May is now hot off the presses^Wweb server. Feature articles this month include a BSD viewpoint on Spring Comdex, an overview of what to do post-installation, and an investigation of the viability of RAIDframe.

schvin writes: "While this does require a free logon, please comment over at the Java Developer Connection to request that Sun port future JDK releases to FreeBSD. You can vote here. "

As this release explains, BSDI are about to start providing support contracts for FreeBSD. Support options will include options from per-incident to 24x7 support. Linux already has a number of high profile companies providing support contracts, such as Red Hat, and IBM. It'll be interesting to see how much of an issue the availability of BSD support turns out to be.

Fans of the OpenBSD artwork (like myself) can now get two posters with the infamous blowfish. The first is armed to the gills, while the second includes the OpenSSHeriff. Get thee to the order page and spend some money.

The European Unix Platform e-zine is running an interview with Theo de Raadt (OpenBSD head honcho) in which he talks a little about his thoughts on the WC/BSDI merger, embedded OpenBSD, and the openssh.{com,org} dispute. Alex de Joode, also involved in the dispute, has written a reply to Theo's points.

reidhoch asks: "My school would like to create a small cluster, we want to use BSD but can't think of any BSD clustering projects. We don't have the time and/or resources to start such a project either. If you know of any such ongoing projects, please enlighten me."

Bob Bruce writes: "There will be a BSD BOF (Birds Of a Feather meeting) at Spring Comdex, on Wednesday April 19 from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The BOF is at the Essex Inn at Grant Park, Chicago. You do not need to be a Comdex attendee to come along, everyone is welcome." Read on for more details.

keepper writes. . . well, absolutely nothing actually. But he (or she) did send a pointer to There's no BS in BSD, another ZDNet think piece on the Walnut Creek/BSDI merger.

As seen on the OpenBSD -announce list, OpenBSD now has hardware cryptographic support to boost IPSEC performance. "Currently, only cards using the HiFn 7751 chip can be used. This Hifn chip is an IPSEC-oriented DES/3DES and SHA1/MD5 hmac engine; ie. only symmetric cryptography..&nbsp.we are getting 63.12Mb/s 3des/sha1 ESP IPSEC. That's documented as the top performance the chip can provide. In other words, we're pretty damn impressed at ourselves." Read on for more from the message, or go straight to the OpenBSD Hardware Crypto page.

vrkid writes: "Found this on OpenBSD Journal: OpenBSD just moved up a notch in its minor number and is now at 7. The first beta release of 2.7 is out. For people with strong stomachs, a habit of banging the head against the wall and a love for testing other's software: Download, install and send bug reports. "

AC writes: "Another NetBSD port has come out of the closet. Ben Harris reports that NetBSD/arm26 can mount its root file system over NFS now, an important milestone! A binary test kit can be downloaded from his ftp directory."

Kaufmann writes "It seems the BSD family has a new member: TrustedBSD. From its site: 'TrustedBSD provides a set of trusted operating system extensions to the FreeBSD operating system, targeting the Orange Book B1 evaluation criteria. This project is still under development, and much of the code is destined to make its way back into the base FreeBSD operating system; however, this site will provide access to documentation, code relating to features that are still under development, and code that has its fingers in too many places to justify integrating into the base OS.' Sweet!"

Minix is now Free Software! Andrew Tanenbaum posted to the comp.os.minix newsgroup yesterday announcing: "Better late than never. I finally got permission from Prentice Hall to change the MINIX license to the BSD license. The lawyers sort of sat on this for two years." You can read the full posting on deja, as well.

bangpath writes "In this somewhat dumbed down and somewhat whiny article, TechWeb reintroduces BSD to the fashionable world. Perhaps more non-conformist Windows haters will be spurned into action instead of more kvetching. Or maybe not." It's interesting to note that lack of a bundled JVM is seen as a negative. Whatever happened to shipping systems relatively lean, and making it easy to add additional packages post-install, eh?