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BSD

FreeBSD 8.0 vs. Ubuntu 9.10 Benchmarks 268

Posted by CmdrTaco from the two-oses-enter-two-oses-leave dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Phoronix has brought benchmarks comparing the FreeBSD 8.0-RC and Ubuntu 9.10 Alpha 6 operating systems. FreeBSD rather ends up taking a wallop to Ubuntu Linux, but there are a few areas where FreeBSD 8 ran well. They also posted benchmarks comparing this near-final FreeBSD 8.0 build to that of FreeBSD 7.2 to show performance improvements there but with a few regressions."
BSD

DragonFly 2.4 Released 73

Posted by kdawson from the four-wings dept.
electrostaticcarrot writes "DragonFly — that fourth major BSD — has had its 2.4 release. The 'most invasive change' is the addition and usage of a DevFS for /dev; building on this, drives are now also recognized by serial number (along with /etc/devtab for aliases) as listed in /dev/serno. This is also the first release with a x86-64 ISO, stable but with limited pkgsrc support. Other larger changes include a ported and feature-extended (with full hotplug and port multiplier support) AHCI driver (and SILI driver based on it) originally taken from OpenBSD, major NFS changes, and HAMMER updates. A pkgsrc GIT mirror has also been set up and put in use to make future pkgsrc updates quicker and smoother. Here are two of the mirrors."
The Courts

Danish FreeBSD Dev. Sues Lenovo Over "Microsoft Tax" 318

Posted by kdawson from the cracks-in-the-dam dept.
Handbrewer writes "The FreeBSD developer Poul-Henning Kamp (phk) has sued Lenovo in Denmark (Google translation, original here) over their refusal to refund the Windows Vista Business license, even though he declined the EULA during installation. Lenovo argues that they sell the computer as a full product, and that they cannot refund it partially, such as the power supply or the OS even if people intend to use a different one. This seems to be contrary to previous rulings in the EU where Acer and HP has been forced to refund the 'Microsoft tax.'"
Operating Systems

Why OpenBSD's Release Process Works 310

Posted by timothy from the those-slides-are-a-bit-dense dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Twelve years ago OpenBSD developers started engineering a release process that has resulted in quality software being delivered on a consistent 6 month schedule — 25 times in a row, exactly on the date promised, and with no critical bugs. This on-time delivery process is very different from how corporations manage their product releases and much more in tune with how volunteer driven communities are supposed to function. Theo de Raadt explains in this presentation how the OpenBSD release process is managed (video) and why it has been such a success."
KDE

KDE 4.2.4 Released 153

Posted by timothy from the smoothing-a-smoothie dept.
An anonymous reader writes "KDE 4.2.4 has been released. See the release announcement for details." Barring a "security issue or another grave bug," this is the end of the KDE 4.2 line, which means for distros based on long-term support, it might be the thing to get used to for a while.
Operating Systems

When VMware Performance Fails, Try BSD Jails 361

Posted by kdawson from the like-a-virtual-machine-without-the-machine-part dept.
Siker writes in to tell us about the experience of email transfer service YippieMove, which ditched VMware and switched to FreeBSD jails. "We doubled the amount of memory per server, we quadrupled SQLite's internal buffers, we turned off SQLite auto-vacuuming, we turned off synchronization, we added more database indexes. We were confused. Certainly we had expected a performance difference between running our software in a VM compared to running on the metal, but that it could be as much as 10X was a wake-up call."
GUI

Hardware-Accelerated Graphics On SGI O2 Under NetBSD 75

Posted by timothy from the progress-in-unexpected-places dept.
Zadok_Allan writes "It's a bit late, but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly, this might interest a few. The gist of the story is this: NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn't get any help from SGI, and the documentation available doesn't go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation, which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver still has a few rough edges (all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don't have one — like on most SGI hardware — you'll have to jump through a lot of hoops and make sure there's no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it's usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you'd expect, and since Xsgi doesn't support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX."
Announcements

FreeBSD 7.2 Released 204

Posted by timothy from the quite-up-to-date dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.2-RELEASE. This is the third release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.1 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: Support for fully transparent use of superpages for application memory; Support for multiple IPv4 and IPv6 addresses for jails; csup(1) now supports CVSMode to fetch a complete CVS repository; Gnome updated to 2.26, KDE updated to 4.2.2; Sparc64 now supports UltraSparc-III processors. For a complete list of new features and known problems, please see the online release notes and errata list." Adds another anonymous reader, "You can grab the latest version from FreeBSD from the mirrors or via BitTorrent. There is also a quick review of the new features and upgrade instructions."
Operating Systems

OpenBSD 4.5 Released 118

Posted by timothy from the belts-and-suspenders-and-guns-and-mines dept.
portscan writes "OpenBSD 4.5 has been released. New and extended platforms include sparc64, and added device drivers. OpenSSH 5.2 is included, plus a number of tweaks, bugfixes, and enhancements. See the announcement page for a full list. OpenBSD is a security-oriented UNIX/BSD operating system." As per OpenBSD tradition, of course there's a song.
Operating Systems

NetBSD 5.0 Released 129

Posted by samzenpus from the come-and-get-it dept.
kl76 writes "The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided."
Upgrades

PC-BSD 7.1 Released With Integrated Software Manager 81

Posted by kdawson from the new-bits dept.
Death Metal writes "PC-BSD 7.1 is built upon the FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE operating system. FreeBSD is a UNIX-based operating system that provides a high level of security and stability. The Galileo Edition of PC-BSD includes updated versions of KDE (4.2.2) and Xorg (7.4). The latest version of KDE includes new window effects, screen savers, and better 3D Acceleration. PC-BSD exclusively features the Push Button Installer, a software installation wizard with a wide range of applications. The latest version improves PBI self-containment to increase reliability. The Add / Remove Programs tool and the Update Manager have been consolidated into 'Software & Updates.'"
Debian

Debian Gets FreeBSD Kernel Support 425

Posted by timothy from the types-like-this-kept-me-out-of-good-schools dept.
mu22le writes "Today Debian gets one step closer to really becoming 'the universal operating system' by adding two architectures based on the FreeBSD kernel to the unstable archive. This does not mean that the Debian project is ditching the Linux kernel; Debian users will be able to choose which kernel they want to install (at least on on the i386 and amd64 architectures) and get more or less the same Debian operating system they are used to. This makes Debian the first distribution, and probably the first large OS, to support two completely different kernels at the same time."
Operating Systems

A Taste of FreeBSD With VirtualBSD 43

Posted by timothy from the touches-of-os-x dept.
ReeceTarbert writes "If you wanted to try FreeBSD but didn't have the right hardware, or enough time to make it useful on the desktop, VirtualBSD might fit the bill: it's a VMware appliance based on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE and features the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and a few of the most common applications to make it very functional right out of the box. If you're curious you can have a look at the screenshots, or proceed to the download page and grab the torrent file right away. (Note: VirtualBSD also works in VirtualBox 2.x as long as you create a new virtual machine and select the virtual disk from the archive instead of creating a new one)."
Operating Systems

DragonFly BSD 2.2 Released 44

Posted by timothy from the big-essin'-deal dept.
An anonymous reader writes "DragonFly BSD 2.2 is now available. The second release to feature the HAMMER (versioning, among other things) filesystem — now considered production-ready — it includes 'major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration.' Apart from the CD ISO, this release has a DVD ISO with 'a fully operational X environment,' as well as a bootable USB disk-key image."
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 7.1 Released 324

Posted by CmdrTaco from the for-the-1337-amongst-us dept.
Sol-Invictus writes "The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights: The ULE scheduler is now the default in GENERIC kernels for amd64 and i386 architectures. The ULE scheduler significantly improves performance on multicore systems for many workloads. Support for using DTrace inside the kernel has been imported from OpenSolaris. DTrace is a comprehensive dynamic tracing framework. A new and much-improved NFS Lock Manager (NLM) client. Boot loader changes allow, among other things, booting from USB devices and booting from GPT-labeled devices. KDE updated to 3.5.10, GNOME updated to 2.22.3. DVD-sized media for the amd64 and i386 architectures."
Wine

Bordeaux 1.6 For FreeBSD and PC-BSD Released 53

Posted by kdawson from the old-wine-in-new-cellars dept.
Tom Wickline writes "Steven Edwards of the Bordeaux Technology Group released Bordeaux 1.6 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD today. Bordeaux 1.6 comes with added support for Google's Chrome Web Browser, Google Earth, and Google Picasa. In addition, Cellar support has improved; you can now delete and install into an existing Cellar. There have also been many small bug fixes and tweaks on the backend to improve the speed and reliability of all the supported applications."
Operating Systems

FreeBSD 6.4 Released 64

Posted by timothy from the unsung-but-nicely-free dept.
hmallett writes "FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE, the fifth release from the 6-STABLE branch of FreeBSD development, is now available. In addition to being hosted at many FTP sites, ISO images can be downloaded via the BitTorrent tracker, or for users of earlier FreeBSD releases, FreeBSD Update can be used to perform a binary upgrade."

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