BSD & Darwin Archive

Taking MicroBSD for a Test Run

Eugenia Loli 2002-09-06 BSD & Darwin 6 Comments

"Well, I've been reading a little about MicroBSD. So I decided to quickly give it a try. This article talks about installing MicroBSD, what features make it special, troubles and successes I encountered, and the beauty of the BSD license. So I retrieved the MicroBSD 0.5 mini ISO image and burned a CD." Read it at BSDNewsLetter.

CompactBSD for Embedded Projects Released

Eugenia Loli 2002-08-24 BSD & Darwin No Comments

From Slashdot: "FatPort (a wireless Internet service provider in Vancouver, BC) just released CompactBSD. It's a set of tools that allow you to build your own customized, lightweight distribution of OpenBSD and then burns it onto compact flash (or similar) so that it can be run on an embedded PC platform (like FatPort's own FatPoint). CompactBSD takes the security and networking features of OpenBSD that we know and love, and combines them with ease-of-build and small footprint, which is great for embedded devices. Check out the project on SourceForge."

Introducing the Future of Mach: Yamit

Guest post by Igor Shmukler 2002-06-12 BSD & Darwin 61 Comments

Yamit is a microkernel, developed under a BSD compatible license. Mentioned capabilities are a thread-aware kernel and multiprocessor support (including both tight SMP and loose - NUMA architectures). The project is largely based on the Mach microkernel that was being designed for many years by CMU and OSF.

The Birth of OpenDarwin

Eugenia Loli 2002-05-05 BSD & Darwin 13 Comments

From DaemonNews.org: "The goal of the OpenDarwin project is to provide a binary compatible development environment for Mac OS X. The OpenDarwin project is based on the latest sources available from the Darwin project at Apple Computer. One of the key aspects of the project is to enable interested Mac OS X and Darwin developers to be able to retrieve, modify, build, and distribute operating system changes. It also seems Jordan Hubbard is a member of the OpenDarwin Core Team, recently resigning from the FreeBSD Core Team."

Darwin/Mac OS X: The Fifth BSD

Eugenia Loli 2002-04-14 BSD & Darwin 29 Comments

Lance M. Westerhoff has written an interesting article over at AppleLust.com, regarding the history of the BSD UNIX. The article talks about the first versions of BSD and continues with the story of BSDi, NetBSD, OpenBSD, FreeBSD and it concludes with Darwin and MacOSX.

Wind River Announces Plans for Its BSD/OS

Eugenia Loli 2002-03-15 BSD & Darwin 2 Comments

Wind River Systems announced the release of version 4.3 of BSD/OS, the company's commercial UNIX-based operating system, and detailed roadmap plans for the product. Version 4.3 of BSD/OS is available now. Future releases of the operating system will target server appliances, security and traffic management appliances, network attached storage (NAS) devices, and telecom application processing blades as part of Wind River's strategy to provide end-to-end development platforms across the entire spectrum of original equipment manufacturer (OEM) and embedded market segments.

Apple: BSD is 3 Times as Popular as Desktop Linux

Eugenia Loli 2002-02-14 BSD & Darwin 10 Comments

"BSD is now three times as popular on the desktop than Linux, Apple's Ernest Parbakar told attendees at the annual USENIX BSD Conference here yesterday. That's thanks to Mac OS X, of course, which is a BSD-based Unix (although much of this remains hidden). Read the rest of the story at TheRegister. Our Take: This is definetely true for the desktop where Linux holds less than 1% (and Apple a bit less than 3% according to Oct 2001 stats), but that is certainly not true for the server market, where Linux holds around 25%.

Gnu-Darwin for x86

Submitted by Ludovic Hirlimann 2001-11-19 BSD & Darwin 7 Comments

Gnu-darwin has released its distribution in the form of a x86 binary distribution. People with the supported hardware can now use lots of software without having to recompile it to use it.

OS Alternatives – PCWorld on *BSD

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-14 BSD & Darwin 7 Comments

"It's hard to browse the Web or read a computer magazine without finding a reference to Linux, the operating-system wunderkind created by Linus Torvalds and developed by a host of others. But although Linux steals the headlines, ISPs and system administrators often choose one of the BSDs - a group of operating systems based on code polished during more than 20 years of research at one of America's leading academic institutions. What are the BSDs? And why should you consider using them if you're looking for a non-Windows operating system?"

BSD’s Strength Lies in Devilish Details

Eugenia Loli 2001-11-07 BSD & Darwin 4 Comments

"BSD is the established favorite of Internet service providers, which are attracted to BSD for its familiarity (many ISP techies cut their teeth on BSD-based SunOS) and its low cost. And BSD is well-entrenched as a general server OS, as well as serving a niche role as a provider of network security services such as packet filtering and authentication." InfoWorld analyzes *BSD and even compares it (briefly) with Linux.

GNU-Darwin Goes Beta

Eugenia Loli 2001-10-29 BSD & Darwin No Comments

One step install. OSX.1 users can now install the GNU-Darwin base distribution automatically with one command (as root). Darwin-only users will have to take a few extra steps to fetch wget or curl to their computers. The beta sources are the first addition to the new BSD-style source tree. The team hopes to eventually mirror the Apple's Darwin source code there, but in BSD src tree format. In other news, they also have a new Fortran distribution for Darwin and OSX.1 users."

FINK 0.3.0 Offers 400 Unix Ports to MacOSX/Darwin

Eugenia Loli 2001-10-07 BSD & Darwin 5 Comments

Fink is a distribution of ported Unix software for MacOSX and Darwin. Using a combination of a custom build engine and Debian's dpkg package manager and related tools, Fink can either build packages from source on your Mac, or download binary packages from the distribution site. Fink 0.3.0 was released this Saturday, and the process of updating the binary packages was finished today. Visit the Fink download area for the whole range of upgrade and fresh install options. Visit the package database for a list of available packages (400 packages up to now have been ported over).