NetBSD Archive

"This is the first quarterly status report of 2006. However, since there was no status report for the last quarter of 2005, this report summarizes the changes within NetBSD over the last six months, which includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches, among many other things."

"The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 3.0 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in stability, performance, networking, security, also includes support for two new platforms (iyonix and hp700), and many new peripherals. Far reaching improvements to the network stack will not only provide better performance but also make NetBSD an excellent choice for a VPN gateway. PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) framework adds more flexibility to NetBSD's user management and simplifies integration into heterogeneous networks. The kernel, libraries and utilities can now handle filesystems larger than two terabytes, and support for Xen 2.0 allows hosting many virtual servers on a single machine." Read the full changelog here, and downloads are here.

"On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I'm happy to announce the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC6 for testing." Download locations are here.

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Matthias Scheler announced the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC5 for testing. NetBSD 3.0 RC5 is available in the "daily builds" section of your local FTP mirror, and users are encouraged to test it out and report any bugs using send-pr(1). A brief summary of changes from NetBSD 3.0_RC1 to 3.0_RC5 is available in Matthias's announcement (a list of changes from NetBSD 2.0 to NetBSD 3.0 can be found here).

Apache httpd is full of features and abilities, but sometimes it's too heavy for simple sites or static pages. In some cases, a simpler, lighter web server is a good alternative (or addition). Julio M. Merino Vidal demonstrates how to install and configure the simple, fast, and powerful thttpd to serve simple static and generated content very quickly.

As reported previously, the NetBSD Foundation made a call for donations a few months ago. This was widely publicized, and the open source community responded generously, donating almost $30000,- (E25500,-). As also previously noted, this money was earmarked for specific purchases, and the NetBSD Project would like to let its users know what in particular was bought from these donations. Please see Thor Lancelot Simons detailed summary for information regarding what was bought, the current status and a long list of people that made all this possible.

NetBSD 2.0.3 is the third security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. All fixes in security/critical updates (ie., NetBSD 2.0.2, 2.0.3, etc.) are cumulative, so this latest update contains all such fixes since the NetBSD 2.0 release. These fixes will also appear in future releases (NetBSD 2.1, 2.2, etc.), together with other less-critical fixes and feature enhancements. Download locations are here.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce the results of its participation in Google's "Summer of Code". After Google announced this program to introduce students to the world of open source software development at the beginning of June, the NetBSD Project was happy to join the approximately 40 other open source groups as a mentoring organization and compiled a list of suggested projects.

A new release candidate of NetBSD 2.1 is now available for testing, 2.1-RC5.

Julio M. Merino Vidal's Google Summer of Code Project, a new memory-based file system called tmpfs has been imported into the NetBSD source tree. See Julio's message to the tech-kern mailinglist for more details.

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for October 2005; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. These dates are of course subject to change.

This bootable ISO image contains NetBSD 3.99.7 and allows you to boot NetBSD/i386 -current without having to install to a hard disk. The LiveCD was initially intended to be a rescue cdrom, but is now capable of much more. KDE-3.4.2 and all kde3-i18n packages were included.

The NetBSD project would like to thank all contributors for their generous response to the recent call for donations. In only one month, almost US $27K were donated allowing the NetBSD Foundation to purchase five new machines; three of those machines will be added to the nightly build infrastructure and two of those machines will become anonymous cvs servers. For more information, including the detailed specifications of the hardware purchased, please see Christos Zoulas' email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

The NetBSD Foundation published its second quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months April through June of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers NetBSD's participation in Google's “Summer of Code”, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items.