FreeBSD Archive

Why FreeBSD; Guide to PC-BSD

  Submitted by anonymous FreeBSD 30 Comments
The FreeBSD operating system is the unknown giant among free operating systems. Starting out from the 386BSD project, it is an extremely fast UNIX-like operating system mostly for the Intel chip and its clones. In many ways, FreeBSD has always been the operating system that GNU/Linux-based operating systems should have been. It runs on out-of-date Intel machines and 64-bit AMD chips, and it serves terabytes of files a day on some of the largest file servers on earth. Elsewhere, here is a guide to PC-BSD.
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Code Analysis Shows Low Number of Possible Bugs in FreeBSD

  Submitted by Just_A_User FreeBSD 49 Comments
On Tuesday, code-analysis software maker Coverity announced that its automated bug finding tool had analyzed the community-built operating system FreeBSD and flagged 306 potential software flaws, or about one issue for every 4,000 lines of code. The low number of flaws found by the system underscores that FreeBSD's manual auditing by project members has reduced the vulnerabilities in the operating system, said Seth Hallem, CEO of Coverity.
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FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 1 Available

  Submitted by n/a FreeBSD 56 Comments
The FreeBSD 6.0 release cycle has begun. According to the FreeBSD team, "FreeBSD 6.0 will be a much less dramatic step from the FreeBSD 5 branch than the FreeBSD 5 branch was from FreeBSD 4. Much of the work that has gone into 6.0 development has focused on polishing and improving the work from 5.x These changes include streamlining direct device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11 features, as well as countless bugfixes and device driver improvements."
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FreeBSD 6.0 code freeze

FreeBSD 44 Comments
FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long says that the much anticipated and feared 6.0 code freeze is about to begin. Scott says that from June 10 until the release, the number one priority will be to fix all outstanding bugs. They will not release FreeBSD 6.0 until it is ready; he is pretty confident that it will be ready by August 2005.
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TrustedBSD Status Report

FreeBSD 4 Comments
Robert Watson has posted a number of status updates relating to various pieces of work going on in the TrustedBSD Project, and in particular, relating to integration of recent changes into the FreeBSD CVS tree for inclusion in the upcoming 6.0 release. This includes a information on verified execution, the MAC Framework, the SEBSD port of NSA's FLASK/TE to FreeBSD, and the new security event audit framework in FreeBSD 6.0.
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FreeBSD 5.4-RC3 Released

  Submitted by Indigo2 FreeBSD 28 Comments
The third release candidate of FreeBSD 5.4 is now available for testing. Also, due to one major issue that crops up on large (4-processor) systems under heavy load that is still being debugged there will be at least one more RC added to the schedule. Timing for the extra RC and the new Release date have not been set yet.
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FreeBSD: ‘make’ for non-programmers

FreeBSD 18 Comments
"If you're a typical FreeBSD user, you don't have a background in C programming. Yet, if you've ever used make world to upgrade your operating system or issued a make install somewhere within your ports tree, you've compiled C code. This article covers some make basics so you have an idea what is happening behind the scenes. It also examines some of the options you have available when issuing make commands." Read it here.
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Mastering FreeBSD & OpenBSD Security

  Submitted by n0dez FreeBSD 15 Comments
In this chapter (pdf), the author defines system security, specifically for OpenBSD and FreeBSD systems, but also more generally. He looks at a variety of attacks so that you, as an administrator, will have some perspective on what you’re trying to defend against. He looks at risk response and describes how exactly you can go about securing your FreeBSD and OpenBSD systems. Also, the FreeBSD 5.4-RELEASE schedule has been published.
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