BSD & Darwin Archive
Darwin 7.6 sources Available
As always after a minor OSX revision, Apple has posted updated sources for Darwin.
Darwinports 2000 packages milestone
The Darwinports project recently announced the 2000th package has been added to its collection.
September issue of DaemonNews
The September issue is out and Matt Dillon of DragonFly is featured.
MirBSD #8-beta-20041016 Released
MirOS BSD originated as a patch set against OpenBSD-current, a 4.4BSD-derived ultra secure operating system. This release includes bugfixes and enhancements for many system components, including libc, ld.so, ntpd, make, and others. There is support for PowerNow on AMD Athlon / Athlon XP systems. libexpat is in the base system now. gcc support for C++ and other languages is still missing.
Gnu-Darwin 1.1 rc2 Available
It seems that the gnu-Darwin project announced release candidate 2 of 1.1 version of its distribution.
A glance at Darwin 8.0b1 new software
Apple computer posted on the open-source section of its site a list of softwares included in the next version of Darwin, 8.0 (currently in beta). Here a glance at the new software included.
FireFlyBSD unveiled
Formerly known as SilverOS (previously featured on OSnews),
FireFly is a commercially supported BSD system based on DragonFlyBSD. You can read the FireFly whitepaper here.
GNU-Darwin-1.1rc1 for PowerPC Available
The first release candidate for the GNU-Darwin Distribution .v 1.1 for PowerPC is now available. Get the installer here. Is is built for Darwin 7.x including Panther. It ships with GNOME 2.6.1, GNUstep, GNUMail, MPlayer etc.
Peter Mitchell Sets Up XDarwin 4.4 with KDE
Australian Peter Mitchell has written up a description of his efforts to use XDarwin in combination with KDE. In his article, he describes the command line installation steps for running GNOME and KDE using XDarwin as the windowing layer. He describes both the challenges he faced and some suggestions as to the best order in which to install the various components necessary to run GNOME and KDE environments on Mac OS X. Also, the XDarwin project is to switch from XFree86 to X.org.
Two Technical BSD Books Reviewed
I manage computers running BSD variants every day, at work and at home. After many man page and RTFM iterations to support vital administrative aspects, a desire grew to understand what lay beneath my level of expertise. As eager as I was, I found the prospect of simply plunging into a lengthy code review unappealing.
Differentiating Among BSD Distros
Organizations that want to use a public Unix variant have two solutions from which to chose: Linux and BSD. The much talked about Linux camp contains a variety of distributions that include different utilities and tool sets. The same is true of the less frequently covered BSD camp. This article compares and contrasts the four main BSD variants and offers recommendations for both server/desktop solutions.
DragonFlyBSD 1.0A: A strong start
"Don't mistake DragonFlyBSD 1.0A for a complete, finished, polished operating system. At this stage of development, DragonFlyBSD isn't good for much, as it has problems with SMP on systems that use Hyper-Threading Technology, and the XFree86 port (among others) didn't compile properly for me despite using the special compatibility overrides." Read the review at NewsForge.
ekkoBSD Dead?
ekkoBSD's site seems to be closing doors, but there is not enough information about it.
OpenDarwin 7.2.1 Released for PPC and x86
OpenDarwin 7.2.1 (which corresponds to Mac OS X 10.3.2) has been released for both PowerPC and Intel x86 architectures: complete release notes are available here.
DragonflyBSD 1.0A Released
Due to an installer/fdisk bug there is an update available. Current Dragonfly version is 1.0A.
EkkoBSD released version 1.0 Beta 2
Fresh back from their break, the EkkoBSD team has released another beta of their BSD flavour for general consumption.
DragonFly BSD 1.0 Release Candidate 1 Released
Matt Dillon has announced the availability of DragonFly BSD's 1.0 Release Candidate #1. Changes and features include: variant symbolic links, UDF support, lightweight kernel threads, message passing, GCC 3.4 in the tree, binutils 2.14, Kernighan's awk 2004-02-07, BIND 9.2.4 rc4, CVS 1.12.8, libpcap 0.8.3, tcpdump 3.8.3, less 381, MMX/XMM kernel optimizations are now on by default, greatly improving bcopy/bzero/copyin/copyout performance for large (>4K) buffers, XIO, acpica5, new AC'97 codec support, network stack revamping, long standing bug fixes for wide variety of support and stability issues, and more. A final is expected in two weeks.
Daemon’s Advocate: How to be an Advocate for BSD
"The BSD phenomenon is quite remarkable: a community of incredibly talented and experienced developers, administrators, and users, joined by diverse technical interests and a common desire to build and use the best operating systems in the world." Read the rest of the editorial here.
Managing Packages on Panther with DarwinPorts
"One of the first things I started doing almost immediately after installing Mac OS X when it first came out in March 2001, was to begin downloading and building Unix-based open source applications. I was able to build quite a few applications by performing the usual configure/make/make install sequence." Read the rest of the article at MacDevCenter.