FreeBSD Archive

FreeBSD 6.0 has been released, but an official announcement is not yet available. You can download the .iso images here (mirror list). More information, documentation and release notes for the various architectures can be found here. Note: read this. Update: It's official.

The new FreeBSD logo has finally been chosen, and can be seen here. The FreeBSD website will be updated shortly with the new logo in place of Beastie (on the website that is, not actually replacing Beastie as the mascot).

As laptops and mobility become more effective and prevalent, your job as a system administrator is to provide users with easy, secure access to their data. IMAP is one way to allow users to receive email wherever they go. Cyrus IMAP is a popular server, but installation and configuration is a bear. Fortunately, Francisco Reyes has the answer in this tutorial on installing and configuring Cyrus IMAP with Postfix.

A rather ambitious new FreeBSD-derived distribution called BSD-HALO is currently in the planning and proof of concept stages. Amongst other things, one of the biggest goals is to attempt to produce a virus, malware, and exploit resistant environment. UI will also be a major design factor, and some pre-alpha screenshots can be viewed on the site as well.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD Project is pleased to announce the launch of the new website today. The new design was created by Emily Boyd, a student at Smith College that they had the pleasure of working with through Google's Summer of Code program. The old website is available here.

BSDForums interviews FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long relating to various aspects of FreeBSD. Topics discussed include FreeBSD general issues, its academic roots, how FreeBSD compares to other BSDs - OpenBSD, NetBSD, and the ongoing debate on FreeBSD vs. Linux. Scott gives us his perspective on the corporate adoption and popularity of FreeBSD. He brings us up to speed on FreeBSD 6.0, its new features and enhancements, including Apple G4 PowerMac, AMD64 and wireless compatibility. Scott also discusses FreeBSD 6.0's upgrade path and release timetable.

The 5th beta of FreeBSD 6.0 has been released to mirrors. There is no official announcement yet, however. Pick a mirror near you.

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA4. ISO images are available for i386, amd64, pc98, alpha, powerpc, and ia64. Sparc64 is still in the process of being built and will be uploaded as soon as it is ready."

Matt Dillon has announced that the next release of DragonFly BSD will use NetBSD's pkgsrc as its official package management system, instead of "dfports" (FreeBSD's Ports with DragonFly overrides), which had already been abandoned by developers in favour of pkgsrc over the last few months. pkgsrc is a portable package management system, developed by NetBSD, and supports DragonFly officially since October 2004.

FreeBSD 6.0-BETA3 has been released to ftp. You can select a mirror near you from this list. There's no announcement yet, however, the release has been uploaded on August 24th.

"The objective of this whitepaper is to explain some of the features and benefits provided by FreeBSD, and where applicable, compare those features to Linux. This paper provides a starting point for those interested in exploring open source alternatives to Linux."

Project Evil provides a set of basic functions commonly used by Windows network drivers. These functions are then translated internally to the FreeBSD driver model. To the driver, it appears that it is running in a normal Windows environment. To the OS, it appears that a native FreeBSD kernel module containing the driver is present. This article explains how it works.

FreeBSD has been ported to the XBox. "Over the last 2 weeks, I have been working on a port of FreeBSD for the XBox. The port is fully functional. The framebuffer is fully supported, same goes for sound and USB devices (such as an USB keyboard). Only ethernet is missing, currently." The FreeBSD on XBox website is here, downloads included.

Network stack developer Andre Opperman appeals to the FreeBSD community to support three months of full time work. The primary focus will be to optimize the IP network stack and estimates a potential perfomance increase of 40-50%.