http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2012, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Wed, 15 Feb 2012 02:23:37 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/25515/PC-BSD_9_0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25515/PC-BSD_9_0_Released/ Hot on the heels of the release of FreeBSD 9, it's the ninth version of its desktop-oriented offspring to jump into the spotlight. "Based upon FreeBSD 9.0-RELEASE, this is the first release of PC-BSD which offers users a variety of desktop environments to choose from, such as KDE, GNOME, XFCE, LXDE and more! Also available are pre-built VirtualBox and VMware images with integrated guest tools for rapid virtual system deployment, and native support for installing directly to OS X BootCamp partitions." Mon, 16 Jan 2012 22:48:44 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News twitterfire http://www.osnews.com/story/25461/Interview_with_Adrian_Chadd_on_802_11n_in_FreeBSD/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25461/Interview_with_Adrian_Chadd_on_802_11n_in_FreeBSD/ Adrian Chadd is the current FreeBSD net80211/ath driver maintainer and developer. He's been working with a few others to get usable 802.11n support into FreeBSD. We thought we'd have a quick chat and ask how things are going. Tue, 27 Dec 2011 17:50:26 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 Interview http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25334/DragonFly_BSD_MP_Performance_Significantly_Improved/ The DragonFly BSD project has recently decided to hold off on the 2.12 release to address a couple of long-standing issues. Some of the disruptive work done to address these issues has also resulted in the MP Token (giant kernel lock) and other major contention points being finally pushed out of the way of all critical paths. The result? Wed, 16 Nov 2011 00:17:25 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News evilsjg http://www.osnews.com/story/25327/FreeBSD_Hypervisor_Call_For_Testers/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25327/FreeBSD_Hypervisor_Call_For_Testers/ Via Ivan Voras' blog (yes a few days late....but this place needs more BSD news). Michael Dexter of CFT has published a tutorial on FreeBSD's upcoming type 2 hypervisor known as BHyVe. The article guides the reader through the procedures to configure, build & boot a hypervisor capable host and guest system. BHyVe currently only supports Intel's x86 virtualization hardware & the project itself is still currently under early development. Mon, 14 Nov 2011 04:57:28 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 5 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News al http://www.osnews.com/story/25305/In_Favor_Of_FreeBSD_On_The_Desktop/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25305/In_Favor_Of_FreeBSD_On_The_Desktop/ Deep End's Paul Venezia wonders why more folks aren't using FreeBSD on the desktop. 'There used to be a saying -- at least I've said it many times -- that my workstations run Linux, my servers run FreeBSD. Sure, it's quicker to build a Linux box, do a "yum install x y z" and toss it out into the wild as a fully functional server, but the extra time required to really get a FreeBSD box tuned will come back in spades through performance and stability metrics. You'll get more out of the hardware, be that virtual or physical, than you will on a generic Linux binary installation.' Tue, 08 Nov 2011 01:29:42 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 66 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News snydeq http://www.osnews.com/story/25272/pfSense_2_0_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25272/pfSense_2_0_Released/ After three years of hard work and many enhancements, pfSense 2.0 has been released. Of the more impressive stats, more than 108,000 unique IP addresses have downloaded the snapshots during 2011, resulting in some amazing testing, feedback and now reliability with the 2.0 release. Among the many notable features and enhancements: Based on FreeBSD 8.1, Enhancements to IP Aliases, dashboard and widgets, SMTP and growl alerts, new traffic shaper, Layer 7 protocol filtering, major improvements to NAT engine and configuration, certificate manager, VPN improvements, virtual wireless AP support and many others. Fri, 28 Oct 2011 22:11:55 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Goyuix http://www.osnews.com/story/25023/FreeBSD_9_0_Enters_Beta/ http://www.osnews.com/story/25023/FreeBSD_9_0_Enters_Beta/ The first BETA build of the 9.0-RELEASE release cycle is now available. One of the many new features in 9.0 that needs thorough testing is the new installer, so fresh installs on test systems are being encouraged. Ivan Voras has taken the time to thoroughly document all the 9.0 changes at his web site. Wed, 03 Aug 2011 16:38:15 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/24834/Interview_FreeNAS_8_s_Project_Lead/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24834/Interview_FreeNAS_8_s_Project_Lead/ "FreeNAS is an open source operating system based on FreeBSD and, as its name implies, designed for networked storage. The project recently celebrated the release of FreeNAS 8, which racked up some 43,000 downloads in the first 48 hours after its release. I caught up with Josh Paetzel, director of IT at iXsystems and project manager for FreeNAS 8, to talk about the current state of the OS, what lies ahead for it, and the relationship to FreeNAS 0.7." Wed, 08 Jun 2011 21:27:59 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 24 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Rohan Pearce http://www.osnews.com/story/24771/libcxxrt_C_Runtime_Available_Under_BSD_License/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24771/libcxxrt_C_Runtime_Available_Under_BSD_License/ "The FreeBSD Foundation and the NetBSD Foundation announced [yesterday] that they have acquired a non-exclusive copyright license to the libcxxrt C++ runtime software from PathScale. [...] This software is an implementation of the C++ Application Binary Interface originally developed for Itanium and now used for the x86 family by BSD operating systems. Libcxxrt will be available under the 2-clause BSD license." Tue, 24 May 2011 14:11:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Hadrien Grasland) BSD and Darwin derivatives 3 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/24672/DragonflyBSD_2_10_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24672/DragonflyBSD_2_10_Released/ This release supports a much larger variety of hardware and multiprocessor systems than previous releases, thanks to updates of ACPI and APIC and ACPI interrupt routing support. Hammer volumes can now deduplicate volumes overnight in a batch process and during live operation. The 'hammer dedup-simulate' command can be used to estimate space savings for existing data. DragonFly now uses gcc 4.4 as the default system compiler, and is the first BSD to take that step. DragonFly now offers significant performance gains over previous releases, especially for machines using AHCI or implementing swapcache(8). Wed, 27 Apr 2011 21:25:45 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 10 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News foldingstock http://www.osnews.com/story/24344/McKusick_Tells_of_the_BSD_Days_As_Only_He_Can/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24344/McKusick_Tells_of_the_BSD_Days_As_Only_He_Can/ "The drought of those who speak without depending on slides has ended at the 12th Australian national Linux conference. Last evening, Marshall Kirk McKusick, a well-known BSD hacker, took those assembled down a slightly different track - after all, this is a Linux conference - with his narrative history of BSD. And what a rollicking ride it was! [...] And the venue for his talk could hold only 100 people. He based his talk on notes he had made while travelling through Australia on a train in 1986 - he was a keynote speaker at the now-defunct Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group conference in 1986." Fri, 28 Jan 2011 23:46:12 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 4 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News jimmy1971 http://www.osnews.com/story/24202/VirtualBSD_8_1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/24202/VirtualBSD_8_1_Released/ It's been a long time coming, but a brand new release of VirtualBSD is out: "VirtualBSD 8.1 is a desktop ready FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE based on the Xfce 4.6 Desktop Environment and, being distributed as VMware appliance, it makes dead easy to take FreeBSD for a test drive." The best part? Not only are the most common aplications available out of the box, this is a genuine FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, which means that if you go past the desktop you'll be dealing with The Real Thing. You can take a look at the screenshots, go to the download page or, if you're impatient, just grab the torrent file. Tue, 04 Jan 2011 23:06:54 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 18 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News karunko http://www.osnews.com/story/23971/DragonFly_BSD_2_8_2_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/23971/DragonFly_BSD_2_8_2_Released/ The 2.8.2 release of DragonFly BSD is now available, featuring significant advances in multi-processor performance based on DragonFly's signature soft token locks. It also includes many feature advancements including: pf from OpenBSD 4.2, the Wifi stack from FreeBSD and DataMapper from NetBSD (with significant enhancements). This release also marks the return of the GUI image. See the release notes for full details. Sun, 31 Oct 2010 19:10:45 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (OSNews Staff) BSD and Darwin derivatives 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Samuel J. Greear http://www.osnews.com/story/23117/DragonFly_2_6_1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/23117/DragonFly_2_6_1_Released/ DragonFly BSD 2.6.1 has been released. "There are numerous big-ticket features in this release as found in the release notes, plus a ton of stability and performance work." Tue, 06 Apr 2010 21:56:47 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 12 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Stathis http://www.osnews.com/story/22235/Security_in_Your_Pocket_OpenBSD_on_ARM/ http://www.osnews.com/story/22235/Security_in_Your_Pocket_OpenBSD_on_ARM/ InformIT has an interview with Dale Rahn, the OpenBSD ARM port maintainer, about the history of OpenBSD on mobile devices, and where some opportunities growing in the mobile space in the future. It covers the DARPA-funded origins of OpenBSD use in mobile (mostly about firms not wanting to use GPL code), and initial enthusiasm for the Zaurus among BSD guys. Rahn touts advantages that OpenBSD has over the more-popular mobile Linux distros, and some shortcomings that still need to be addressed. Fri, 25 Sep 2009 14:33:16 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 1 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News lucas_maximus