Daemon News 199906 : BSD News

BSD News

Copyright © 1999 Louis Bertrand

NEWS AND RELEASES

FreeBSD Toolkit CD-ROM set aimed at power users and developers

May 1 -- Jordan K. Hubbard announced the release of the FreeBSD Toolkit 6-disc CD-ROM set for power users and developers. The toolkit includes binary snapshots for the 2.2-stable, 3.1-stable and 4.0-current as of March 27th, 1999. It also contains a full 4.0 snapshot for the Alpha platform. The Toolkit is to be released 2-3 times a year but is not part of the regular Walnut Creek FreeBSD subscription plan.

New isdn4bsd beta release available

May 7 -- Hellmuth Michaelis announced a new isdn4bsd beta version (i4b-00.80.00-beta-070599.tar.gz) has been made available on the isdn4bsd distribution sites. The release fixes many bugs and adds new enhancements. The release supports FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD.

The isdn4bsd package is available from two sites:

ftp://isdn4bsd@ftp.consol.de/pub (the main site)
http://www.freebsd-support.de/i4b

On ftp.consol.de, you must log in as user "isdn4bsd" and give your mail address as the password. Then go to the "pub" directory. You will find the latest available isdn4bsd package. Anonymous ftp as user "ftp" or "anonymous" will not work.

NetBSD 1.4 released

May 12 -- Perry Metzger announced the full release of NetBSD 1.4 with binary distributions for 16 distinct architectures. Binaries and sources are available at the project ftp site as well as the mirror sites.

NetBSD 1.4 includes many improvements in the TCP/IP stack, the virtual memory system, better POSIX and XPG standard compliance. The system compilers have been upgraded to egcs 1.1.1 and the compiler toolchain has been replaced with the latest GNU binutils.

The Packages collection was updated and stabilised during April in preparation for the release.

VMware supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD as guest operating systems

May 15 -- VMware release 1.0 supports FreeBSD and OpenBSD as "guest operating systems". VMware allows the same hardware to run multiple concurrent operating systems over top of a "host" operating system.

FreeBSD 3.2 released

May 18 -- Jordan K. Hubbard announced the availability of FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE. Many bug fixes and general enhancements have been made to the system and a number of new features added, as detailed in the release notes.

FreeBSD 3.2-RELEASE is available at ftp.freebsd.org and various FTP mirror sites throughout the world. It can also be ordered on CD from The FreeBSD Mall, from where it will be shipping soon on a 4 CD set containing installation bits for both the x86 and Alpha architectures as well a lot of other material of general interest to programmers and end-users alike. All profits from the sales of this CD set go to support the FreeBSD Project

OpenBSD 2.5 released

May 19 -- Theo de Raadt announced the official release of OpenBSD 2.5 with significant improvements in nearly all areas of the system: hardware support, security and cryptography. OpenBSD ships with a built-in SSL library, supporting by default the patent-free DSA public-key algorithm. RSA support is trivially added by downloading one file. OpenBSD 2.5 can be downloaded from the project's ftp mirror sites and is available on CD-ROM. Proceeds from the sales help support the project.

"SETI at Home" binaries ready for *BSD

May 20 -- The SETI at Home project wants people to use spare CPU cycles to analyse signals collected from space. Binary distributions of the client are now available for FreeBSD 2.2.x, 3.x, 4.0 (i386) and OpenBSD (i386, SPARC, Alpha and Mac68K) at the project web site. The source code is not published because the project wants to ensure the integrity of the results.

NetBSD user group information page

May 21 -- David Brownlee has placed information about *BSD and NetBSD user groups on the NetBSD web site.

REBOL 2.0 distributed computing language released

May 24 -- REBOL Technologies released version 2.0 of REBOL on FreeBSD, OpenBSD, NetBSD and BSDI. REBOL is a new Internet Messaging Language for solving day-to-day distributed computing tasks.

The core of REBOL is freely distributed as i386 binaries from the company's download page. The company plans to add other *BSD platform binaries soon.

New cdrom.com FTP server passes terabyte/day milestone

May 26 -- Walnut Creek's popular FTP server has broken the record for greatest download volume in a single day from a single machine: 1.39 terabytes (TB). The record was set while testing Walnut Creek's new gigabit network connection.

Earlier in the month, the company had received a donation from Micron Electronics to upgrade the server hardware to a Micron NetFRAME 9201. During its first full day of operation, the new server set a new all-time one day download record of 969GB of files, surpassing the previous record set last year of 873GB/day.

Brazilian user group for OpenBSD

May 29 -- Gustavo Henrique is creating a user group in Brazil because he feels many new users are afraid to adopt OpenBSD because there's no support in their own language. The group's home page looks like the OpenBSD.org site, but with content tailored to the group. There will also be a mailing list and a FAQ-br.

Paul Kranenburg resigns from NetBSD board

May 30 -- Paul Kranenburg announced his resignation from NetBSD's core team and from the NetBSD Foundation board. He cited that he felt he had over-stretched his term and that he hoped his successors would be able to start out with a more adequate project structure. He will continue to work on the project, notably on the SPARC port.

1999 USENIX ANNUAL TECHNICAL CONFERENCE

May 2 -- The USENIX Association announced more details about the USENIX annual technical conference, June 6-11, to be held at the Monterey Conference Center, Monterey, California.

New *BSD and Debian Linux releases given away

USENIX is providing grants to the OpenBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Debian Linux development projects, to support each of them in issuing new releases. The releases -- OpenBSD 2.5, FreeBSD 3.2, NetBSD 1.4 and Debian 2.2 -- will be distributed through usual channels, and, as a bonus, will be given to Annual Conference technical session attendees.

FREENIX track and BOFs by leading developers

The FREENIX track is devoted to high-level technical discussion of open source software. Peer-refereed papers, expert talks, and evening sessions will be led by leading OSS developers including Linus Torvalds, Kirk McKusick, Theodore Ts'o, Theo de Raadt, and Robert J. Chassell for Free Software Foundation/GNU.

Other Highlights

The Keynote by John Ousterhout, creator of Tcl/Tk, speaking on a fundamental shift in software development to applications created by extending existing applications, protocols, frameworks, and devices.
Refereed papers on topics of especially high interest: management of resource systems, file systems, virtual memory systems, storage systems, security, web server performance and O/S performance.
Invited talks concentrate on the extremely practical: UNIX/Open System & Y2K, IP Multicast, E-mail Bombs, IPv6,IP Telephony.
24 tutorials are being offered over three days, with Eric Allman, Tom Christiansen, Peter Galvin, Evi Nemeth, and Marcus Ranum among the instructors.
And, as always, lots of discussion in the halls and over beers. This year, there's a desserts Reception in the fantastic Monterey Bay Aquarium.

BSD IN THE PRESS

Why I run FreeBSD

May 2 -- In the May issue of SunWorld, Silicon Carny columnist Rich Morin explains why FreeBSD is the superior OS for him.

The other open-source OS: FreeBSD

May 3 -- In PC Week Online, Anne Chen interviews users from Internet startup companies and finds that FreeBSD makes a great server platform but concludes it's not for everyone.

UNIX and Beyond: An Interview with Ken Thompson

May 5 -- The IEEE Computer Society's Computer Magazine recently visited Ken Thompson at Lucent's Bell Labs to learn about Thompson's early work on UNIX and his more recent work in distributed computing.

OS Also-Rans

May 17 -- In the St.Paul-Minneapolis Pioneer-Planet, Julio Ojeda-Zapata looks at alternative operating systems, including OpenBSD and FreeBSD.

Operating system designed to foil hackers

May 25 -- In a National Post interview with technology reporter David Akin, OpenBSD project leader Theo de Raadt makes the point that securing an operating system is largely an issue of software quality.

Changes to the news page

This is the last news page I will be editing for Daemon News. I will be working on press relations for OpenBSD and wouldn't have time to do justice to both jobs. If you would like to take over the news page, or simply help, please contact myself or the editors.