FreeBSD Archive

KernelTrap has interviewed kernel hacker and guru Jordan Hubbard, one of the creators of FreeBSD and currently a manager of Apple's Darwin project. With just a high school education, Jordan has offered some impressive contributions to the world of computing. In this interview, Jordan talks about his current involvement with Darwin, as well as his past efforts with FreeBSD and 386BSD. He also reflects on his recent decision to step down from the core FreeBSD team.

No, the web site is not updated yet as I write this, but the announce has been sent out to the subscribers of the freebsd-announce mailing list and all the files and ISOs are into place for immediate download. You can read it at BSDForums.org. One of the most significant changes in FreeBSD 4.6 is the adoption of XFree86 4.2.0 as the default version of the X11 System. Some contributed programs have been updated, such as sendmail and the ISC DHCP client. For more information about the most significant changes with this release of FreeBSD, please see the release notes.

Luigi Rizzo, has done an extensive rewrite of the FreeBSD IPFW firewall code (userland and kernel) in an attempt to make it faster and more flexible. His announcement is available over at BSDForums.org. IPFW, the software supplied with FreeBSD, is a packet filtering and accounting system which resides in the kernel, and has a user-land control utility, called ipfw(8).

"I'm one of those people who is sacrificing a small portion of their mental health to the greater good, by testing FreeBSD-current. Now that we're approaching FreeBSD 5.0, the FreeBSD Project needs people to test -current in a wide variety of installations and environments." Read the tutorial at OReilly.

The question was asked recently on a FreeBSD mailing list, "What will be new in FreeBSD 5.0?" The thread discussed several ways a person could obtain such information, one good source being the latest release notes. The first developer preview of 5.0 was released on April 8th. The final release is targeted for the end of this year. Robert Watson offered an interesting summary of items to look forward to in FreeBSD 5.0, including: SMPng ("next generation" symmetric multiprocessing), KSE (improved scheduling), devfs (automatic /dev management), Firewire support, and much more. Read on KernelTrap for more details.

As seen on BSDForums: "The FreeBSD-STABLE branch of the source tree has now been frozen in preparation for the release of FreeBSD 4.6. This means that any new commits to the -stable source tree must be approved by the release engineering team first. The expected ship date for 4.6 is June 1 2002."

Katsushi Kobayashi has recently been added to the FreeBSD team so that he can add IEEE 1394 support to FreeBSD 5.0. Get more information here and here.

ClosedBSD is a firewall and network address translation utility which boots off of a single floppy disk or CD-Rom, and requires no hard drive. ClosedBSD is based off of the FreeBSD kernel, and uses ipfw as its native ruleset management system, and natd as it's network address translation utility. The CD-Rom version has full DHCP client support. The floppy version (1.0B) is still without it for now.

This is Part 2 in a two-part series on system panics. In his first column, Michael Lucas talked about how to prepare a FreeBSD system in case of a panic. In this column, he talks about what to do when the worst happens.

A developer preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT is now available. Please see the release notes for more information. Also be sure to check the release errata for a list of known problems.

"This is Part 1 in a two-part series on system panics. In this column, Michael Lucas talks about how to prepare a FreeBSD system in case of a panic. In the next column, he'll talk about what to do when the worst happens." Read the article at ONLamp.com.

Most tech savvy geeks can work their way through a FreeBSD install, even if they have no prior UNIX experience. However installing an OS and configuring an OS are two totally different things. This article is targeted towards anyone who might be wondering about FreeBSD, but doesn't know what to do with it after they install it. This isn't then end-all be-all of FreeBSD howto's. Just some of the simple stuff. Update: Some of the readers of OSNews have emailed me concerning corrections that need to be made in this article. Dig in (third page) for more.

"FreeBSD now works with multiple processors on sparc64 systems, thanks to the efforts of Jake Burkholder, and Thomas Moestl", the FreeBSD news page reports.

This document at BSDToday covers the basic steps in building a bootable CD containing a live FreeBSD filesystem with a couple of security features enabled and configured. With this CD, it is possible to transform a PC from a mediocre workstation into a VPN Gateway or firewall or both without touching the hard drive.