FreeBSD Archive

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.

Th first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.0 has been released to ftp. As of yet, there are no announcements or release notes. Be sure to use a mirror.

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 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."

"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."

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.

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 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.

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.

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

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%.

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.

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."

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.