FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely says that a number of the issues brought up with FreeBSD 4.9 RC2 have been resolved, and the latest release candidate (RC3) is now available for i386.
Most people know what GNU/Linux is, but fewer know about BSD and fewer still have actually used one of the major free BSD variants. Ed Hurst, a writer and a long time GNU/Linux user, decided to give FreeBSD a try. Will Ed join the ranks of happy FreeBSD users? Find out at OfB.biz.
Scott Long released the March-Sepetember 2003 Status report, reviewing the past seven months of FreeBSD development. The paper is loaded with updates covering Bluetooth, ACPI, dynamically linked /bin, icc support, cryptographic support, java, KSE, porting OpenBSD's pf, and much more. Elsewhere, this paper describes an automated system for building and distributing binary security updates for FreeBSD, and describes the challenges encountered.
FreeBSD's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems.
BSDForums.org features the latest news about BSD: FreeBSD's Luigi Rizzo has made some changes to the ipfw code so it can forward packets also when acting as a bridge. Lennart Augustsson says that there's been a long standing problem with some USB printers running in bidirectional mode on NetBSD. An article by Miod Vallat describes how the m88k-specific backend of the GNU C compiler, gcc, was fixed, from the discovery and analysis of the problems to the real fixing work.
FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely announces the availability of first release candidate for FreeBSD 4.9 (RC1). To-do for 4.9 is here. Also, Robert Watson posted another FreeBSD 5.2 "Open Issues" list, still containing 18 "must resolve issues" before 5.2 will be released.
Poul-Henning Kamp has uploaded his paper about the new GEOM-based disk encryption service in FreeBSD, which is a good read for everyone with an interest in information security and encryption.
FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long provides a status report for FreeBSD 4.9 and 5.x. He says that FreeBSD 4.9 Release will be pushed back a few weeks until instability reports are tracked down. FreeBSD 5-stable roadmap document received a major overhaul - among the highlights, KSE is progressing extremely well and is no longer a major source of concern for 5-stable. Stability is also at a very good level.
A common security breach involves exploiting one application to gain access to another. Keeping separate applications separate can limit the potential damage. Mike DeGraw-Bertsch explains how FreeBSD's jails can help secure necessary applications. On other FreeBSD news, a specific schedule for the release of FreeBSD 4.9 is now available.
No more hours of compiling! Binary distributions of Java on FreeBSD are finally here. The FreeBSD Foundation today announced the availability of a binary distribution of the Java JDK version 1.3.1 for the widely used FreeBSD operating system.Wes Peters of the FreeBSD Core Team commented "This announcement hallmarks a new era of Java support for FreeBSD. Having easy to install binary Java packages will ensure that all users can enjoy the benefits of Java technology on the FreeBSD platform."
Soeren Schmidt announced this weekend that ATAng has been merged into the FreeBSD -current kernel tree. Described by the author as "rather radical changes to the ATA driver", ATAng offers a number of impovements over the old ATA driver. This includes removal of the 'GIANT' lock, an improved framework that supports newer ATA controllers, merging of ATA and ATAPI code, and the removal of numerous bugs.
ACLs take care of access control problems that are overly complicated or impossible to solve with the normal Unix permissions system. By avoiding the creation of groups and overuse of root privileges, ACLs can keep administrators saner and servers more secure. On other FreeBSD news, there is a FreeBSD 4.9 code freeze and release schedule announced.
It came to my attention today that there has been a new release of nVidia detonator drivers for FreeBSD. Apparently released on 1st July, the first I heard of them was when I randomly checked the nVidia website today. The new drivers support 4.8 onwards, including -RELEASE -STABLE and -CURRENT branches. The drivers support the most recent hardware including the FX based cards.
DragonFly is an operating system and environment designed to be the logical continuation of the FreeBSD-4.x OS series. Prominent former FreeBSD developer Matthew Dillon is a major player in the development. According to the website, DragonFly gives "the BSD base an opportunity to grow in entirely new direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD-5 series."
Although nearly all of the public focus is geared around advocacy of Linux and Windows, there is a third Intel based operating system, which generates a tiny fraction of the publicity surrounding these operating systems, and has a much smaller user and developer community. FreeBSD secured a strong foothold with the hosting and internet services communities at the genesis of the web and has anything but gone away. Indeed it is the only other operating system that is gaining, rather than losing share of the active sites found by the Web Server Survey, Netcraft says.
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.
Get the basic information necessary to begin installing FreeBSD on a system with another operating system that was previously installed. You will see how to prepare for a FreeBSD installation that will allow the system to operate with Windows, and you will also see how to install FreeBSD on a system that is running Linux.
