Duke of URL writes: "Boardwatch interviewed OpenBSD contributor Louis Bertrand. It's an excellent article about OpenBSD's niche and mission. They discussed the continued code audit, OpenSSH, and future version plans, including SMP development, ports rework, and continued integration of IPv6. Journalist Jeffrey Carl does a good job of pointing out OpenBSD's strengths and tradeoffs."

xlogan writes, "I just received my FreeBSD 4.0 subscription CD in the mail today. According to a memo inside, they will NOT be shipping a 3.5 CD (the last of the 3.X series) and instead sent out this 4.0 CD. 3.5 will be available for FTP download in May." S'true. It was decided that the extended testing period before releasing 4.0 was so effective that the CD sets would continue with the 4.x releases, rather than the 3.x branch. This is contrary to earlier releases (in particular, 3.0). Of course, 3.5 will still be available for download, but if you've got a CD subscription from WC you'll get 4.0.

Joey the Lemur writes "I saw this article over at Yahoo! about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger that has some good points concerning FreeBSD and Apple. The author talks about Apple's proposal to stay synced with FreeBSD (Darwin), and why they should actually follow through with it. It also has some good commentary on why BSD isn't as prominent as Linux. "

Quite a number of folks have written in with announcement from Apple saying that Darwin 1.0 is released. It's got the BSD core that's been discussed before, along with Mach 3.0 - and here's to hoping that Apple will open up all OSX, at least in some fashion or another.

After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available. Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux, and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.

Another month, another issue of DaemonNews. Highlights this month include a report from ApacheCon 2000, an interview with the NetBSD Foundation about the BSDI/Walnut Creek merger, Greg Lehey's Daemon's Advocate column, and the latest article in the "Managing Websites using Unix" series.

O'Reilly's FreeBSD DevCenter is currently running an interview with Keith Bostic, one of the principal architects of 4.4 and 4.4-lite BSD, and a co-founder of BSDI. In it he discusses the genesis of BSDI, the merits of the BSD and Linux development models, marketing open source software, and more.

Elik asks: "I have been looking for solid support for the ISDN cards for FreeBSD in the U.S. considering the drivers currently available are for the Europe-based ISDN Cards. Is there anyone willing to help write the drivers using the ISDN4linux as the base for the ISDN4BSD for American users? It sucks to purchase the external ISDN when I have quite a few ISDN Cards around and I would like to put them to use. "

The AC crowd were the first to write in with the news. From Wilfredo Sanchez's diary at Advogato, "Today another big milestone has come up. I imported the sources to the kernel into the Darwin CVS repository today, which means that at this point all of the sources needed to build Darwin are available externally for the first time." For those not in the know, Darwin is the foundation on which MacOS X is based. It's a BSD Unix, including significant contributions from the NetBSD and FreeBSD kernel and userland code.

LinuxWorld carries an article by Michael Lucas, Customizing The FreeBSD Kernel. The twist is that it's written partly from the perspective of a Linux user, highlighting the similarities and differences between the two systems.

sekure writes "I was just on OpenBSD.org, and as I was reading the wanted hardware page I noticed that the OpenBSD project needed more Alpha gear, and if they don't get what they need, they won't ship OpenBSD/alpha on the 2.7 CD-ROM. I don't know what everyone else thinks, but I think it would be a shame. I know I'm going to talk to my boss about lending (or maybe even giving?) an Alpha to the OpenBSD project. Maybe people have old (or new) Alpha's kicking around they don't use anymore, or maybe there are some multi[million|billion]aires that wouldn't mind donating some fresh new Alpha's. What do you think?"

SecretAsianMan writes, "With all the hoopla about the WC/BSDI merger, it's easy to forget that FreeBSD 4.0 will be out soon. Boardwatch has an interview with Jordan K. Hubbard about what's new in FreeBSD 4.0, porting to different architectures, and what the future holds for FreeBSD. "

Elwood writes "Andrew Gillham has booted NetBSD/i386 -current on his Netpliance i-opener. He did this without opening the case and without using a 2.5" IDE hard drive." Read on for details.

spr writes, "Actually it is uploading as of this posting. Looks like about 200+ MB is already up. You can get it at: ftp.freebsd.org. To quote the README: "This should be enough to install the full operating system, though if you're looking for the full experience or wish to support the project through your CD purchase, please see the FreeBSD Mail."

Mitch Connard was one of several to note that "Google now has a BSD search to go along with its Linux search. The search seems very accurate." I never played with the Linux version, but from what I can gather this means that your searches are restricted to BSD specific sites. Very handy.