FreeBSD Archive

Using FreeBSD’s ACLs

Submitted by Nix_User 2005-09-29 FreeBSD 8 Comments

"The standard Unix permissions scheme works fine if you have simple needs, but juggling groups and users can grow unwieldy very quickly. FreeBSD's Access Control Lists give you more control over who can access files and directories. Dru Lavigne explains how to understand and use them."

FreeBSD-6.0 Beta 5 Released

Submitted by Reader 2005-09-24 FreeBSD 34 Comments

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

FreeBSD Announces 6.0-BETA4

Submitted by Anon_Coward 2005-09-08 FreeBSD 27 Comments

"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."

Solaris’ DTrace To Be Ported to FreeBSD

Submitted by george 2005-09-08 FreeBSD 34 Comments

One of the most useful tidbits from the basket of code released into the public domain this year by Sun Microsystems is likely to make it to the FreeBSD platform. DTrace is currently being ported to FreeBSD by Devon O'Dell, a FreeBSD developer working for OffMyServer, a US-based vendor which sells servers running BSD and Linux variants.

Submitted by ghen 2005-09-02 FreeBSD 31 Comments

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 Released to Mirrors

Submitted by James Hopton 2005-08-25 FreeBSD 53 Comments

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.

FreeBSD 6.0 Will Target Wireless Devices

Submitted by R_T_F_M 2005-08-19 FreeBSD 63 Comments

FreeBSD developer Scott Long said on Thursday that the next version of the open source BSD-based operating system, planned for release in September, includes support for "a lot more" wireless cards and for wireless security standards such as the Wi-Fi Protected Access.

Submitted by SQwerl 2005-08-11 FreeBSD 170 Comments

"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: Windows Network Drivers on FreeBSD

Submitted by FreeBSD_User 2005-08-09 FreeBSD 15 Comments

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 6.0-BETA2 Available

Thom Holwerda 2005-08-06 FreeBSD 51 Comments

"The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 6.0-BETA2." A list of mirrors is available here.

FreeBSD Ported to XBox

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-26 FreeBSD 43 Comments

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.

FreeBSD Developer Seeks Sponsorship

Submitted by Matthew Grooms 2005-07-26 FreeBSD 24 Comments

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%.

Why FreeBSD; Guide to PC-BSD

Submitted by anonymous 2005-07-24 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.

Code Analysis Shows Low Number of Possible Bugs in FreeBSD

Submitted by Just_A_User 2005-07-19 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.

FreeBSD 6.0 Beta 1 Available

Submitted by n/a 2005-07-15 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."

FreeBSD Snapshot Release July 2005 Available

Thom Holwerda 2005-07-05 FreeBSD 18 Comments

The FreeBSD 6-CURRENT snapshot releases in July 2005 are now available. The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has released snapshot releases of 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT to encourage people to test new features and improve the reliability.

FreeBSD 6.0 code freeze

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-07 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.

TrustedBSD Status Report

Eugenia Loli 2005-06-03 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.

FreeBSD/NetBSD Summer Projects

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2005-06-02 FreeBSD 40 Comments

The FreeBSD Project is excited to take part in the Google Summer of Code 2005. This project endeavors to fund students to contribute to an open source project over the summer break. The URL for NetBSD's suggested projects is here.

FreeBSD 5.4 review

Submitted by Jem Matzan 2005-06-01 FreeBSD 33 Comments

NewsForge has a review of FreeBSD 5.4 up today. While it's better than the previous three releases, it still doesn't work as well as it should. Many bugs have been fixed, but some big ones still remain, especially on multi-processor and AMD64 machines.