http://www.osnews.com/ Exploring the Future of Computing en-us Copyright 2001-2008, David Adams OSNews version 4 donotreply@osnews.com (Adam Scheinberg) donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) Sat, 17 May 2008 06:22:19 GMT http://www.osnews.com/images/osnews.gif http://www.osnews.com/ 120 http://www.osnews.com/story/19598/What_Is_Darwin_/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19598/What_Is_Darwin_/ "I am very happy about the direction in which the Mac OS X GUI is going, although sadly many Mac users aren't interested in (or don't know about) the "lower levels" of the Macintosh Operating System. Have you ever wondered why the Terminal greets you with the words "Welcome to Darwin"? Why do BSD and Mac OS share certain bits of code? Why does Wikipedia describe Mac OS X as a graphical operating system? Today we're going to take a look at the underlying open source technology which powers your fancy Leopard OS - the hidden core set of components, named Darwin." Tue, 08 Apr 2008 16:33:40 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 61 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19496/The_NetBSD_Project_Celebrates_Its_15th_Anniversary/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19496/The_NetBSD_Project_Celebrates_Its_15th_Anniversary/ Free OS pioneer NetBSD marks its fifteenth birthday tomorrow. The first commits were made to the NetBSD source code repository on March 21, 1993. In addition to the robust OS it is, NetBSD code has contributed to countless other projects. Congratulations to NetBSD contributors past and present. Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:25:49 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 5 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/19487/MirOS_BSD_10_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19487/MirOS_BSD_10_Released/ The MirOS BSD project has released MirOS BSD xi. "The MirOS Project proudly presents release 10 of MirOS BSD: MirOS xi. A mini-ISO for the installation can be downloaded from mirbsd.org. This image can be burned to a CD and used for installing over the network. The full CD image can be downloaded via BitTorrent. MirOS BSD is a secure operating system, originally based on OpenBSD, for i386 and sparc machines. Read more about it at the 'About MirOS' page. Tue, 18 Mar 2008 21:37:39 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 16 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News http://www.osnews.com/story/19396/DragonFlyBSD_1.12_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/19396/DragonFlyBSD_1.12_Released/ DragonFlyBSD 1.12 has been released. "This release is primarily a maintainance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year. Of the current big-ticket item work, the new HAMMER filesystem is almost to the alpha stage of development and is expected to be production ready by the mid-year 2.0 release." Wed, 27 Feb 2008 18:41:45 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 9 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/18987/FreeBSD_6.3_Release_Candidate_1_is_avialable/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18987/FreeBSD_6.3_Release_Candidate_1_is_avialable/ The first of the Release Candidate builds for FreeBSD 6.3 is now available. There is one more Release Candidate planned, which will be followed by the release unless a major show-stopper issue crops up during testing. Fri, 30 Nov 2007 19:21:19 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (David Adams) BSD and Darwin derivatives 6 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News vermaden http://www.osnews.com/story/18962/DesktopBSD_1.6RC3_for_AMD64_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18962/DesktopBSD_1.6RC3_for_AMD64_Released/ "DesktopBSD 1.6RC3 for AMD64 is now available for download via BitTorrent and from our mirror sites. It includes several improvements made since the release of 1.6RC3 for i386, including: better performance by disabling SMP on single core/processor computers, fixed installation on disks with special partition names, inclusion of the FreeBSD ports collection on the DVD, and more." Thu, 22 Nov 2007 16:59:22 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 47 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/18943/PC-BSD_1.4.1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18943/PC-BSD_1.4.1_Released/ PC-BSD 1.4.1 has been released. "A update to PC-BSD has been released today, version 1.4.1. This new version may be obtained from our download page, additionally users who are running version 1.4 may download a patch to upgrade." It's mostly a bugfix release. Sun, 18 Nov 2007 15:42:49 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 15 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News http://www.osnews.com/story/18888/Apple_Releases_Darwin_9_Source_Code/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18888/Apple_Releases_Darwin_9_Source_Code/ Apple has released the source code to Darwin 9, the underlying open source operating system ofMac OS X 10.5 Leopard. "Darwin is the open source UNIX-based foundation of Mac OS X. Darwin integrates a number of technologies, including the Mach 3.0 microkernel, operating system services based on FreeBSD 5 UNIX, high-performance TCP/IP networking, and support for multiple integrated file systems. Because the design of Darwin is highly modular, you can dynamically add device drivers, networking extensions, and new file systems." Tue, 06 Nov 2007 21:38:50 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 31 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News SK8T http://www.osnews.com/story/18792/Ten_Years_of_pkgsrc/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18792/Ten_Years_of_pkgsrc/ "10 Years ago - on October 3rd 1997 - the pkgsrc software management system was created by Alistair Crooks and Hubert Feyrer. pkgsrc, the NetBSD Packages Collection, was intended primarily as a packaging system for NetBSD. Derived from the FreeBSD Ports system, pkgsrc became a success story. Today, pkgsrc is a cross-platform framework, running on the BSDs, Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, many Unix derivatives, and even on QNX and Windows. Ports- and pkgsrc-like software build frameworks are today standard on the BSDs and quite popular on some newer Linux distributions. In 2005 pkgsrc was adopted as the package management system for DragonFly BSD. Presently, pkgsrc provides more than 7300 stable packages. We continue the anniversary celebrations with a series of interviews: developers and users of pkgsrc and of related systems give insights into the history, the concepts, the problems and the future directions of packaging systems." Fri, 19 Oct 2007 14:29:53 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 13 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News irbis http://www.osnews.com/story/18763/Introducing_the_HAMMER_Filesystem/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18763/Introducing_the_HAMMER_Filesystem/ Matthew Dillon writes: "I am going to start committing bits and pieces of the HAMMER filesystem over the next two months. Note that the filesystem will not be operational until we get closer to the 2.0 release in December so these bits and pieces will not be tied into buildworld/buildkernel until then." Features: maximum size of half an exabyte, infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy, streaming backups, asynchronous transactional support (no long fscks to check disk state). Dillon also explains why he chose not to use Sun's ZFS. Sun, 14 Oct 2007 14:52:08 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Oliver http://www.osnews.com/story/18621/BSD-Licensed_C_Compiler_Added_to_NetBSD_OpenBSD/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18621/BSD-Licensed_C_Compiler_Added_to_NetBSD_OpenBSD/ Anders Magnusson's BSD-licensed pcc compiler has been imported into NetBSD's pkgsrc and OpenBSD's src tree. Anders wrote to NetBSD's tech-toolchain list: "It is not yet bug-free, but it can compile the i386 userspace. The big benefit of it is that it is fast, 5-10 times faster than gcc, while still producing reasonable code. The only optimization added so far is a multiple-register-class graph-coloring register allocator, which may be one of the best register allocators today. Conversion to SSA format is also implemented, but not yet the phi function. Not too difficult though, after that strength reduction is high on the list." Sat, 15 Sep 2007 20:14:08 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 102 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News deanna http://www.osnews.com/story/18500/DragonflyBSD_1.10.1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18500/DragonflyBSD_1.10.1_Released/ DragonflyBSD 1.10.1 has been released. It includes several bugfixes. "DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems." Wed, 22 Aug 2007 22:16:02 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 14 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News CrAsH http://www.osnews.com/story/18408/MidnightBSD_0.1_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18408/MidnightBSD_0.1_Released/ MidnightBSD 0.1 is now available. It includes several software packages such as ksh, sudo, OpenNTPD, gcc 3.4.4, BIND 9.3.4 (plus patch), and others in the base system. "MidnightBSD is a desktop operating system for x86 compatible, and soon amd64 compatible architectures. It was originally based on FreeBSD 6.1 Beta. The goal of the project is to create a BSD with ease of use and simplicity in mind." Tue, 07 Aug 2007 17:21:46 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 23 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Lucas Holt http://www.osnews.com/story/18404/DragonFly_BSD_1.10_Released;_Interview:_Matthew_Dillon/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18404/DragonFly_BSD_1.10_Released;_Interview:_Matthew_Dillon/ The sixth major DragonFly BSD release, version 1.10, was announced today by project creator Matthew Dillon. Billed as "more stable than the 1.8 release", it includes improved virtual kernel support, a new disk management infrastructure, improvements to wireless networking, and support for the new syslink protocol. As to what all that means, KernelTrap has just posted an interview with Dillon. Going beyond today's 1.10 release, the interview explores DragonFly's new clustering high-availability filesystem which sounds superior to ZFS, the project's goals for the 2.0 release expected in six months, and a comparison of the BSD license versus the GPL. Mon, 06 Aug 2007 21:50:11 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 42 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News anonymous http://www.osnews.com/story/18328/DesktopBSD_1.6RC3_Released/ http://www.osnews.com/story/18328/DesktopBSD_1.6RC3_Released/ "DesktopBSD 1.6 RC 3 is now available for download from our mirrors or via BitTorrent. This release candidate is considered a large step towards a final release 1.6 with major changes such as: X.Org release 7.2, improving support for modern graphics hardware; NVIDIA graphics driver, providing hardware 3D acceleration for NVIDIA video cards; latest FreeBSD 6-STABLE as base system with High Definition Audio support; support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs; more up-to-date software packages from the DesktopBSD build servers; many small bug fixes and optimizations. Upgrades from 1.0 and previous release candidates are supported. An additional language CD and 64-bit (AMD64) DVD will be released soon." Wed, 25 Jul 2007 22:01:41 GMT donotreply@osnews.com (Thom Holwerda) BSD and Darwin derivatives 21 http://www.osnews.com/topics/71 News Oliver