howardjp writes "The December Edition of Daemon News is out! There are some cool articles on OpenSSH as well as Applixware. "

The folks over at DaemonNews are running a review of Applixware, the 'Office Productivity Suite'. Featuring all the standard components (word processor, spreadsheet, presentation tool, and so on), it's been available for Linux for a while now. However, this is the first time native binaries have been produced for FreeBSD. Read the review to find out whether it was worth waiting for.

Lots of you wrote in with this -- we've been holding back at Theo's request until the CDs were available, but OpenBSD 2.6 is now released and available from the FTP sites, or by ordering CDs. There are lots of technical enhancements to this release (which are detailed below), and if they don't grab you, check out the very cool CD cover art.

There have been a spate of reports about the usefulness of FreeBSD's Linux ABI recently. First off, Daeron wrote in with the news that VMWare now runs on FreeBSD, thanks to the efforts of Vladimir Silyaev. Vladimir has a page up with instructions and caveats. Secondly, Jacob Hart has confirmed that the Unreal Tournament Demo works flawlessly. Finally, Mark van Woerkom has created FreeBSD ports skeletons for Linux Quake 3 Test.

antigen fiend wrote in to note that Debian Weekly News has a bit about a recent debate about a Debian port to the FreeBSD Kernel. There are several comments relating to licensing, ease of porting, and other relevant topics. Its definitely an interesting project, with a lot of political and technical snags. Any thoughts?

Brett Glass sent this message to the FreeBSD -chat mailing list, about his experiences and perceptions at COMDEX, and agreed to let me repost it here. Of particular interest are the problems he had trying to get vendors to support the BSDs and Linux. Read on for more.

brianm9 wrote in with this tidbit from BSDI's home page. "LAP enables a BSD/OS system to execute many dynamically linked Linux ELF binaries (both libc5 and glibc) with no significant loss of performance. This release has been tested with the following Linux applications: Adobe Acrobat, ApplixWare, Informix and Word Perfect." The beta is only available to BSDI customers with current support contracts; more information can be had from BSDI's Linux Application Platform page.

From the NetBSD -annouce mailing list: "Frank van der Linden (frank@wins.uva.nl) has brought Kirk McKusick's trickle sync + FFS soft update code into the main tree." For the uninitiated, softupdates is an extension to FFS which collects and orders writes to the filesystem, removing unnecessary metadata writes, and carrying out necessary metadata writes asynchronously. All the speed of Linux's default filesystem configuration, with all the safety of UFS. More information at the NetBSD news page, and Kirk McKusick's softupdates page. Softupdates has been in FreeBSD for a while, it's great to see NetBSD getting it as well.

Several people submitted this, but Nate Williams was first. In his own words: "As head of the current FreeBSD/JDK porting development team it's been difficult to finish our JDK2 efforts due to lack of help from Sun. In order to try and make JDK2 on FreeBSD a reality, we are lobbying Sun using a RFE (Request For Enhancement) on the Java Developer network to demonstrate to them the number of people interested in seeing FreeBSD as a supported Java platform.". Read on if you're interested in seeing more complete Java support on FreeBSD.

eboy writes "Gnatbox is floppy only FreeBSD based distribution. It does NAT and some pretty comprehensive firewalling. To me it looks like what LRP would like to be. Too bad the buy-in is $995!"

Scott Brady writes "In an announcement to customers November 11, Virtual Server provider iServer announced plans to migrate from BSDi to the more open FreeBSD on ''...[n]ew Virtual Server accounts provisioned after November 23, 1999". They went on to say that "...we anticipate that all Virtual Servers will eventually be migrated to the new FreeBSD Virtual Server platform.'' Look for an official announcement to be forthcoming. "

logictype asks: "How would you configure a FreeBSD NAT box so it will work with netmeeting or my webcam? Here is a page thatdescribes the ports needed. I am not familiar with FreeBSD so all help is appreciated."

Bob Frankenberg was CEO of Novell in the early nineties, when Novell were marketing DR-DOS as a replacement for MS-DOS (DR-DOS is now the subject of a law suit between Caldera and Microsoft). In part of this CBS interview he explains why his new company, Encanto, is not using Microsoft software, and why they chose FreeBSD. Read on for a few notes.

nicedream writes "Linux.com is running a feature on BSD, and the latest installment profiles one guy's experience with OpenBSD. Haven't read a thorough review of OpenBSD ever, so it was nice to check this out.

wozz writes "Walnut Creek will be bundling Applixware with their FreeBSD Power Desktop " Good news - wonder if there are any other similar deals in the works.