NetBSD Archive

Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate and/or the '/etc/postinstall' script. See Christos' email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.

The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.

Here's a bunch of NetBSD and related news floating around.

An interesting summary from the 2004 Annual NetBSD Group Meeting was posted to the NetBSD -announce mailing list. The report discusses past achievements as well as future goals.

NewsForge has published an interview with several prominent NetBSD developers: "NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports 52 system architectures . . . To celebrate the release, we've asked several well-known NetBSD developers to comment on some of NetBSD 2.0's new features." Read the interview here.

Tamura Kent formally unveils his plans to add new functionality to NetBSD's audio framework (audio(9) and audio(4)) - specifically, the addition of an audio converter pipeline and in-kernel mixing. These additions along with audio device cloning would make it possible to natively support hardware mixing without the use of a software based soundserver.

The ISO of NetBSD 2.0 is currently available here.

Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. Update: LiveCD/ISO instructions.

The NetBSD project has chosen their new logo. High-res version available too.

"In NetBSD's sweet spot are organizations looking for a slim, lightweight, highly stable, and capable operating system to run the latest server applications on modest or specialized hardware." Read the article at ServerWatch.

Gavan Fantom of NetBSD, has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree, the new NetBSD/iyonix port. The IYONIX pc is an ARM-based desktop machine. It offers virtually silent operation, low heat, and all the other odds and ends offered by a modern PC. NetBSD is one port closer to a NetBSD/toaster port.

A new release candidate RC4 of NetBSD 2.0 has been tagged. The changes since RC3 include fixes for IP Filter (concerning IPv6 and better backwards compatibility with existing configurations), checksum processing for bridge interfaces, support for the Adaptec AAR 2810SA raid controller, linux compatibility and changes to the pagedaemon in order to improve performance under heavy disk load.

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's third quarterly status report, covering the months July through September of 2004.

The much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0 is getting closer and closer.