BSD News
Edited by Claus Andersen
News & Releases
New NetBSD core members
August 30, 1999: The NetBSD team has
announced four new members in the NetBSD core team:
Alistair G. Crooks,
Frank van der Linden,
Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino,
Luke Mewburn. The task of the previous core/board members was to produce a reorganization proposal to improve the project's management. Unfortunately nothing came to fruition, and in the mean time, most members resigned. The new members first priority is to work on the reorganization proposal and present a draft by the end of September.
NetBSD 1.4.1 Released
August 26, 1999: The NetBSD Project
announced the release of NetBSD 1.4.1. This release fixes problems found in the 1.4.x family of releases, including some security issues. They urge users to upgrade their systems as NetBSD 1.4.1 includes some important changes on many architectures. It can be found at the
NetBSD ftp-site and mirrors.
No Future Releases of Microsoft Products on 32-bit or 64-bit Alpha Platform
August 24, 1999:Microsoft has
announced that they will discontinue development on the Alpha platform. This is a huge opportunity for the BSD community to get even more widespread as Alpha administrators might not be quite ready to scrap their hardware. Unfortunately this leaves Alpha even more troubled as a viable CPU architecture for the future.
ZDNet has a little more
background on the story saying more than 100 skilled engineers were let go from Compaq. So get the word out: Your Alpha platform is now unsupported by Microsoft but still fully supported by BSD!
OpenBSD for Hitachi Super-H 4 7750/7751
William T. Graham and
Kyle D. Drake has started porting OpenBSD to the Hitachi Super-H 4 7750/7751.
This port is based more or less on what already has been done in the NetBSD/sh3 port. The SH4 (Hitachi Super-H 4 7750/7751) is a CPU found in the
Sega Dreamcast and various other PDA hardware. As they write, "It is a fast, featured 64-bit RISC processor, yet surprisingly inexpensive." The OpenBSD-SH4 port will boot from a CD-ROM driver which is the same approach that Windows CE has. In other words: People will be given a choice.
BSD - In writing...
Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls
Wes Sonnenreich and Tom Yates are releasing a book titled
Building Linux and OpenBSD firewalls in October. The book will be 512 pages long, published by John Wiley & Sons; ISBN: 0471353663. More information to follow when we receive the book.
Theo de Raadt on OpenBSD
Michael MacMillan from ComputerWorld Canada has had a talk with Theo de Raadt from the OpenBSD project. The
article goes through the history of OpenBSD and Theo de Raadt himself. It is a very interesting piece to read and only lets the reader down when dealing with the NetBSD and OpenBSD split. This is just attributed to "political" reasons and left to the reader to speculate.
A Daemon seen with penguinglasses
Arthur Johnson who is Manager and Webmaster of Linuxberg has written a nice
article on how a first time install of BSD feels for an experienced Linux user. He starts by covering the history of BSD and how it all started. Then he proceeds on to his own experiences with BSD and talks about the differences to Linux. This covers i.e. how BSD handles disk partitions in another manner than Linux. This article can be highly recommended for Linux users who dare have a go with BSD.
Theo de Raadt honoured in Canadian magazine
August 10, 1999:Theo de Raadt, OpenBSD's project leader, is among five Canadians chosen for a profile of "Technically Excellent Canadians" by Canadian Computer Wholesaler. The
article by Megan Johnston talks about OpenBSD, its security and cryptography focus and its development process for a general audience in the commercial marketplace.
Pure BSD magazine!
A Japanese company is about to launch the first ever 100% pure BSD magazine.
ASCII Corporation founded in 1977 is providing a wide range of products including book, magazine, electric media, and software in Japan. This September, they are about to launch "BSD Magazine", which will be a seasonal magazine, specializing only in BSD topics for the first time in the world. We will have a closer look when we get our hands on the first copy.
Press Releases
Code Forge Beta now available for FreeBSD
August 23, 1999: C-Forge is an IDE (Integrated Development Enviroment) with a graphic front end for project management, code editing, compilation and more. With this system you are actually able to put together quality code without knowing the finer arts of the makefiles. C-Forge is able to work with several different programming languages and keep track of multi-user projects. The Linux version has recently received good
reviews in
download at their
website.
Powered by BSD
August 28, 1999: Mirapoint is announcing their new "Rambo" line of single-purpose servers. The servers, which usually are seen at prices between $10.000 and $30.000, are based on the various flavours of BSD Unix we have today. You can see their
press releases or have a look at the
article at
c|net News.
BSD is a bovine!
September 1, 1999: Since in the last couple of months we have mentioned various BSD teams who are involved in the
Distributed.net Bovine RC5 effort, we have compiled a final summary so no-one feels left out. Though not pitching for their "overall" operating system, the Japan FreeBSD Users Group deserves an honourable mention as they are
ranked 4.
| Bovine RC5 | OpenBSD | FreeBSD | NetBSD |
| Current Rank: | 622 | 25 | 32 |
| Total blocks checked: | 1,512,088 | 32,254,214 | 26,776,387 |
| Days working: | 554 | 679 | 677 |
| Overall Rate: | 8,495.29 kkeys/second | 147,802.88 kkeys/second | 123,064.11 kkeys/second |
...or is it an alien?
September 1, 1999: Some people like to look at primes and others watched
Contact one too many times. Again so no-one is left out we have compiled a list for the SETI@home effort. Please do join either a RC5 or SETI team to make the BSD brand known throughout the world (galaxy?).
| SETI@home | OpenBSD | FreeBSD | NetBSD |
| Members: | 6 | 241 | 86 |
| Results received: | 269 | 36277 | 10281 |
| Total CPU time: | 4511 hr 01 min 54.2 sec | 592525 hr 52 min 33.9 sec | 173932 hr 18 min 19.0 sec |
Conventions, Conferences and fairs
FreeBSDCon '99
The new annual
FreeBSD Conference and Expo will be held October 19th through 21st with a tutorial on the 17th and 18th in Berkeley, CA, USA. It is targeted at both users and developers and will, as they say, have it all. There will be tutorials, demos, workshops, panels, presentations, discussions and exhibits.
Open Source conference in Australia
It is now time to
register for this years annual AUUG conference.
AUUG is the Australian UNIX and Open Systems User Group which supposedly is "a bunch of people who gather together to talk about the cool stuff they're doing - preferably over a beer." (Michael Paddon (AUUG President 1994-1998)). It will be held September 8-10, 1999 at the Carlton Crest Hotel in Melbourne, Australia. One of the more interesting keynotes is "OpenBSD: Learning To Rely On System Software" which will be held by Theo de Raadt.
Articles
DarwinBSD?
August, 1999: BSD is getting more and more credit for the new Mac OS X server software.
MacWorld's August edition has an
article titled The Millennium Mac by Stephan Somogyi on the new Mac OS X server software. On page 33 FreeBSD gets a quick mention: "The good news is that Apple said its goal was to synchronise Darwin with FreeBSD 3.x (www.freebsd.org), arguably the most popular version of free BSD Unix available. That move would undoubtedly assure Apple a larger community of programmers who could contribute to Darwin." and later on: "The true measure of success of Apple's open-source strategy, however, will be whether Apple can succeed in making developers care about Darwin the way they care about Linux and FreeBSD today...".
Keeping your system up-to-date
SysAdmin has a
feature article in the current issue on how to keep your BSD system at a current level. The article written by
Michael Lucas will probably move to their
archive when the next issue is released. It discusses the BSD Development Model and goes deeper into what CVS is and how it works. It especially deals with how you would go around doing this in a working environment and how to implement it. The technical details are written in a very friendly hands-on style.
Feedback welcome!
This section is gathered purely by voluntary effort. We may miss some
interesting story simply because we are unaware of it. If you have any
kind of BSD-related news that hasn't been widely publicized, please send
it to us at
news@daemonnews.org.
Comments on news items are also welcome at this address.
