FreeBSD Archive

The FreeBSD Handbook is the primary source of documentation produced by the FreeBSD Documentation Project. This new edition contains over 650 pages of material about FreeBSD and has been completely updated to reflect FreeBSD 4.X and 5.0-CURRENT. More information at BSDToday. In related news, "FreeBSD Unleashed" by Michael Urban and Brian Tiemann was also released recently. The book is published by SAMS Publishing and you can buy it at the Daemonnews Mall. Update: The "FreeBSD Unleashed" book includes the latest version of FreeBSD 4.4 in its cover CD-ROM as well as a snapshot of the FreeBSD-CURRENT 5.0 unstable branch.

FreeBSD boots in single user mode on the SPARC platform. The boot log can be found here. FreeBSD already runs on x86 and Alpha, the SPARC port seems to go well, however the PPC port is not moving that fast.

From BSDToday: "Back in March, 2000, BSDI merged with Walnut Creek CDROM, the main distributor for FreeBSD. And BSDI had goals to "form a united front for the BSD operating systems. The company will deliver, support and enhance both BSD/OS and FreeBSD. Then in April, 2001, Wind River bought the BSD properties from BSDi (and BSDi became the hardware company, iXsystems)." The article explains where WindRiver stands today regarding FreeBSD and BSD/OS and clears up that FreeBSD is now without a publisher, solid financial support and 12 FreeBSD full time engineers who were laid off as we have already noted on OSNews in a previous news article. WindRiver even said for FreeBSD that "We see it as a great alternative to Linux". Our Take: If WindRiver was seeing FreeBSD just as a "great alternative to Linux", no wonder they leave it now in its own fate. I sincerely hope that FreeBSD will find a way to boost itself in light of FreeBSD 5.0, find a new publisher and sponsor as it is truely a worthy system.

Alan Clegg reports in a story at Daily DaemonNews that twelve people associated with the FreeBSD project were laid off from Wind River Systems. Only four remain. Also, at least one FreeBSD person was let go from iXsystems (formerly BSDi).David Huff notes, "The comments to the story are worth reading, as they include a lengthy response to this from Jordan Hubbard (FreeBSD release manager and current Apple employee)."

One of the main developers of FreeBSD, Jordan Hubbard, announced today that the next release of FreeBSD, version 5, will be delayed until November 2002. Jordan said that "Unfortunately, a lot of the features on the TODO list for 5.0, such as SMPng (next-generation symmetric multi-processing), KSE (kernel scheduler entities) or support for a new architectures like the PowerPC, SPARC64 or IA64 (Itanium) are nowhere close to being complete. Without these features, there's just not a lot of reason for 5.0 to exist in non-snapshot form and it's therefore been decided that rather than release 5.0 prematurely, we're going to give ourselves the time we need to finish it properly." Jordan also talked about the general economic down-turn and the decline in resources which various companies have had available to donate to such efforts.