FreeBSD Archive

TheAge reports: The Top five of the top 10 hosting providers for the month of June, measured in terms of those whose sites experienced the fewest failed requests and provided the fastest connection times, are all running the FreeBSD operating system, data from Netcraft shows.

"New tech" release supports more platforms but is less stable than 4.8, says eWEEK for FreeBSD.

Sam Leffler has added 802.11a and 802.11g support in FreeBSD-Current. Sam says that the 'ath' drivers support all Atheros devices, making FreeBSD the first open source OS to support both standards.

This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. Read more at FreeBSDForums.

FreeBSD 5.1-RELEASE is now available. Release notes for all five architectures, here.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites.

FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded the 5.1 i386 Beta2 release of FreeBSD. He will be uploading the alpha release, work is under way to get a beta2 for sparc64 and pc98. Additionally, FreeBSD team's Hiten Pandya has written a manual page for the Asynchronous Logging Queues (ALQ) for FreeBSD 5.x and is requesting your comments and reviews.

"Robert Watson has started the automatic posting of open issues for the upcoming 5.1 and 5.2 releases. The list for 5.1 is automatically posted to -current every other day, with the most up-to-date version found here. The list is divided into the following four sections: "Must Resolve Issues", "Desired Features", "Documentation items that must be resolved", and "Areas requiring immediate testing". Read it at KernelTrap.

BSDForums reports that the FreeBSD Release Engineering Team has posted the schedule for the Release of FreeBSD 5.1 late spring. FreeBSD roadmap, posted earlier at BSDForums.org, outlines the future of FreeBSD-5 stable releases, specifically 5.1 and 5.2. Also, Maksim Yevmenkin has announced another set of updates to Bluetooth stack for FreeBSD. He has made many code fixes, added new firmware driver support for Broadcom BCM2033 based devices, updated man pages and more. The Bluetooth stack is developed only for the 5-CURRENT branch. OSNews featured an in-depth interview with the FreeBSD Core team a few days ago discussing the 5.x branch among other topics.

Since the introduction of the UFS2 filesystem (to the general public) in FreeBSD 5.0, there have been many questions from BSD users asking what does it actually mean for them. Recently when browsing the freebsd-current mailing list, I stumbled across a micro-FAQ about UFS2, which might be of interest to OSNews readers.

J. Vidrine says he is about to commit a new name service switch (NSS) implementation for FreeBSD.

I have read many OS/distribution reviews in the last couple of years, but it always seems like it is distros like Red Hat, SuSe and Mandrake (and the fairly new distro, Lindows) that get all the attention. The light has sometimes moved towards other less "user friendly" distros as Slackware, Debian and so forth, but the main concern of the authors has always been the distros meant to be used by Joe User.

FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies.

Yar Tikhiy has ported Apple's HFS and HFS Plus filesystem module and tools from Darwin to FreeBSD 5. He says that the port is experimental - he is looking for your help with testing and feedback. Read the announcement at BSDForums.