FreeBSD – OSnews

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA6 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-26 FreeBSD 61 Comments

FreeBSD announced the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA6. This is the sixth BETA of the 5.3 release cycle and includes fixes and enhancements. There are five known critical issues in this release.

FreeBSD 5.3-Beta5 Released

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-20 FreeBSD 19 Comments

The fifth beta of FreeBSD 5.3 is now available for testing: "updated floppy device driver; fix for panics on certain hardware during boot if no media in the CD-ROM drive; change to pf logging format to handle 64-bit time; many more scheduler fixes, we encourage testers to turn PREEMPTION on..." and more.

Building a BSD Netboot Server

Submitted by BSD_User 2004-09-17 FreeBSD 3 Comments

Diskless FreeBSD workstations work beautifully for many users. With recent changes in FreeBSD 5.x, the old methods of building a netbooting lab have changed. Read more at OnLamp.com.

DaemonNews eZine for August

Submitted by TTF 2004-09-16 FreeBSD 2 Comments

There's August's BSD eZine which includes articles such as: DHCP server with Dynamic DNS, FreeBSD Documentation: An Interview with Tom Rhodes, SSH - The Secure Shell: An overview and Cross compiling from FreeBSD to Windows.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4 available

Submitted by Nix_User 2004-09-13 FreeBSD 24 Comments

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is proud to announce the availability of FreeBSD 5.3-BETA4. This is the fourth BETA of the 5.3 release cycle. It is intended for early adopters and those wishing to help find and/or fix bugs.

FreeBSD-based, Triance OS 1.0 beta

Submitted by Nix_User 2004-09-10 FreeBSD 34 Comments

Looks like there is a new commercial OS on the block and its name is Triance. Triance OS is based on FreeBSD with KDE as the default DE. Beta testers wanted, for a completely gui'ed-up version of FreeBSD. Mandatory screen shots can be found here.

Unsinkable FreeBSD Rising

Eugenia Loli 2004-09-09 FreeBSD 24 Comments

Of the 10 most reliable hosting providers in August, Netcraft finds that five ran Linux. One site ran Windows, another, Solaris...and two ran that still-rising system called... FreeBSD. Read the article.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA3 Released

Submitted by Joel Dahl 2004-09-06 FreeBSD 26 Comments

FreeBSD has released a new Beta of 5.3. Release notes can be viewed at here.

Summary of network changes in FreeBSD 5.3

Submitted by Jan-Oliver Neumann 2004-09-04 FreeBSD 11 Comments

André Oppermann has held a presentation on new things and changes in the 5.3-FreeBSD Network Stack at the SUNCON 04 in Zurich yesterday. His very informative summary is available here. The original announcement can be found here.

FreeBSD UFS2 Snapshots Management Environment

Guest post by Ralf S. Engelschall 2004-09-04 FreeBSD 3 Comments

OnTap WAFL's .snapshot feature is such easy to use since years while on FreeBSD UFS2 the unprivileged users were not able to as easily use snapshots for retrieving old stages of their files. To solve this I've implemented a little snapshot management environment for FreeBSD around mount(8), mdconfig(8), amd(8) and cron(8) which provides a similar environment than what people are used to from WAFL. A summary article and proof of concept implementation is available.

Increase Denial of Service Resilience on FreeBSD

Submitted by Avleen Vig 2004-09-01 FreeBSD 8 Comments

This paper on how to tune FreeBSD to better withstand DoS attacks was at OnLamp a few months ago. It is now up on Silverwraith.com, along with several other FreeBSD tuning papers by the author.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 Released

Submitted by Matthew Baulch 2004-08-29 FreeBSD 21 Comments

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA2 is now available directly or via ISO images. Release notes have changed little since BETA1 but several showstopping bugs have now been swatted. Much of the recent work has centered around the network and filesystem layers, ACPI and testing of the ULE scheduler which will become the default in 5.3. Elsewhere, Open For Business, Ed Hurst has another in a series of articles introductory articles describes describing FreeBSD; for email (part 5) purposes.

Poll: FreeBSD’s Popularity

Eugenia Loli 2004-08-29 FreeBSD 228 Comments

FreeBSD is the most popular BSD flavor, however, it is not as popular as Debian/RH/Fedora/SuSE are even individually. Vote below to give us your take as to where do you pinpoint the roots of this fact.

FreeBSD 5.3-BETA 1 Released

Submitted by Matthew Baulch 2004-08-23 FreeBSD 38 Comments

Only two days behind schedule, the FreeBSD team released the first in a series of betas leading up to what will (possibly) become the 5.3-STABLE milestone. FreeBSD 5.3-BETA1 one can be obtained from here or one of many mirrors. Release notes here.

FreeBSD: Lock Order Reversal Documentation

Submitted by FreeBSD_User 2004-08-15 FreeBSD 1 Comment

While FreeBSD -current is still moving toward more stable footing, many users have posted issues with panics and deadlocks in recent kernel builds. Bjoern A. Zeeb has kindly compiled a running list of lock order reversals, links to relevant threads, PRs, and existing patches. Lock order reversal messages are the result of FreeBSD's lock validation facility, witness(4), notifying the system of potential deadlocks as a means for developers to isolate bugs. Robert Watson explains in a Dec. 2003 thread.

Desktop FreeBSD Part 4: Printing

Submitted by Timothy R. Butler 2004-08-06 FreeBSD 11 Comments

As a writer, the only reason Ed Hurst ever got his first computer was because it was far more efficient than a typewriter, and certainly more readable than his own handwriting. To enjoy that efficiency, however, you need a working printer, and Ed explores accomplishing just that on FreeBSD in this piece.

Is FreeBSD Getting Uglier?

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-30 FreeBSD 19 Comments

Hendrik Scholz has mined the FreeBSD source code for references to other operating systems, undocumented features, and developers cursing the dark corners of the system. His results are tabulated graphically and summarized in this well-written article.

FreeBSD: May-June 2004 Status Report

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-27 FreeBSD 4 Comments

FreeBSD core team member Scott Long posted the latest bi-monthly status report, covering FreeBSD development for May and June of 2004. Scott begins: "May and June were yet again busy months; the Netperf project passed major milestones and can now be run with the debug.mpsafenet tunable turned on from sources in CVS. The ARM, MIPS, and PPC ports saw quite a bit of progress, as did several other SMPng and Netgraph projects. FreeBSD 5.3 is just around the corner, so don't hesitate to grab a snapshot and test the progress!" Read the rest over at KernelTrap.

Local company develops FreeBSD-based radars

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-26 FreeBSD 17 Comments

Being freely available, easy to develop for, secure, and stable made FreeBSD the operating system of choice for Adelaide company Genesis Software's radar systems which are now being exported around the world. Genesis software and network engineer Daniel O’Connor said FreeBSD was the best choice when research and development on the radars began eight years ago.

FreeBSD Install Guide

Eugenia Loli 2004-07-16 FreeBSD 37 Comments

This is a step-by-step guide to installing FreeBSD 5. It assumes moderate experience with linux and leaves you with a fully updated FreeBSD system.

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