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An anonymous reader writes "Continuing his series of interviews, Emmanuel Dreyfus asks NetBSD's Jan Schaumann about his experience with NetBSD on the desktop. From the article: 'Jan Schaumann has been an important contributor to the NetBSD project for several years. He spent a lot of time working on the NetBSD package system, known as pkgsrc, and he currently uses NetBSD as his desktop system. We will try to learn from his experience during this interview.'"

jschauma writes "One of NetBSD's developers, der Mouse, was interviewed by DaemonNews about his real-time network backup system (originally presented at BSDCan 2005), where changes to your local filesystem are automatically propagated to a backup server. In his interview der Mouse tells about his idea, how it works, and of course, how cool it is."

An anonymous reader writes in to say that "Rob Braun (OpenDarwin core developer claims Apple's open source efforts are now dead, because Apple is afraid of assisting OSx86 piracy. First, Apple withheld the source of cctools required to to build Darwin. Now it seems they are no longer releasing the source to OS X's xnu kernel. "

Drawoc Suomynona writes "The Xen virtual monitor is a new generation virtualization software that enable running multiple OSes at the same time with unprecedented level of performances. Manuel Bouyer was recently interviewed about his work porting Xen to the NetBSD operating system. The interview touches on why some consider Xen to be so good, how hard it is to integrate such a software package into an OS, and more."

Drawoc Suomynona writes "The Xen virtual monitor is a new generation virtualization software that enable running multiple OSes at the same time with unprecedented level of performances. Manuel Bouyer was recently interviewed about his work porting Xen to the NetBSD operating system. The interview touches on why some consider Xen to be so good, how hard it is to integrate such a software package into an OS, and more."

essdodson writes "Scott Long of FreeBSD release engineering team describes some of the finer points where FreeBSD continues to innovate and display its mature development environment. Items such as netgraph, geom and incredible desktop support by way of Gnome and KDE." From the post: "While I strongly applaud the accomplishments of the NetBSD team and happily agree that NetBSD 2.0 is a strong step forward for them, I take a bit of exception to many of their claims and much of their criticisms of FreeBSD."

An Anonymous Coward writes "FreeBSD has been known for excellent documentation and here is a rare sneak peak behind the scenes of the FreeBSD document project with FreeBSD's very own Tom Rhodes."

GMan00 writes "Daemon News' latest May EZine has been released online. This issue covers BSDCan which was held last weekend in Ottawa, Canada. As you'll see from the DN EZine, the conference was a great success, with some 170 developers, sysadmins and end-users from around the world. Some travelled as far away as Japan, the Ukraine and the Netherlands. Speakers included Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino of the IETF and a lead authority on IPv6 besides being the NetBSD Security Officer, Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD, Poul-Henning Kamp, the creator of the FreeBSD GEOM Disk i/o subsystem, and Robert Watson, the founder of the TrustedBSD Project. Dan Langille, the brain behind FreeBSDDiary and FreshPorts, organized the conference and is planning a repeat performance next May."

GMan00 writes "Daemon News' latest May EZine has been released online. This issue covers BSDCan which was held last weekend in Ottawa, Canada. As you'll see from the DN EZine, the conference was a great success, with some 170 developers, sysadmins and end-users from around the world. Some travelled as far away as Japan, the Ukraine and the Netherlands. Speakers included Jun-ichiro itojun Hagino of the IETF and a lead authority on IPv6 besides being the NetBSD Security Officer, Theo de Raadt of OpenBSD, Poul-Henning Kamp, the creator of the FreeBSD GEOM Disk i/o subsystem, and Robert Watson, the founder of the TrustedBSD Project. Dan Langille, the brain behind FreeBSDDiary and FreshPorts, organized the conference and is planning a repeat performance next May."

Dan writes "A few weeks ago Xavier Humbert succesfully compiled NetBSD-current on a MacOSX 10.3 with an i386 target. He has provided a summary of his crossbuild execution as well as his build script. But why bother crossbuilding ? Erik Berls's article explains the process of cross compilation on NetBSD. He says that NetBSD's crossbuild framework allows a host to build a version of NetBSD 1.6 or later regardless of the version of the host. Crossbuilding has several major benefits, if you have production servers, you can build the OS without needing to load down the machine that is actively surviving as a production host."

A dæmon writes "According to Daily Daemon News and The FreeBSD Diary, NetBSD, FreeBSD and GNU/OpenBSD are to be merged. Read the full story here." This is a good thing since one of the two BSDs clearly sucked, and the other was clearly superior.

geekmedia writes "Daemon News has an excellent article which describes a fully automated installation of a customized FreeBSD system compiled from source, including compilation of all your favorite ports and configured to match your idea of the perfect system. If you think make world is a wonderful concept, FreeBSD From Scratch extends it to make universe."

Chris Coleman writes "Move over Microsoft, OpenOffice.org is starting to take hold on Mac OS X. To facilitate this, we at Daemon News have put together a CD set that makes it really easy to install and use. We are also donating part of our booth space at Mac World Expo to the OpenOffice.org group to help spread awareness."

A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.

LiquidPC writes "The new Daemon News is out. This month there are various articles such as Lightweight FTP jail with NAT, Getting More NetInfo Backups, Setting Up Sophos + Amavis For Postfix. And, of course, the usual Newbie's Corner, Answer Man, and Daemon's Advocate columns."

bsdmike writes "DaemonNews has a link to an news article that reports that Yahoo! has saved something like $470,000 by switching HotJobs from Sun Solaris to FreeBSD. It's really amazing what affordable hardware and great Open Source technology can do!"

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

Chris Coleman writes "With the publication of this month's online ezine, Daemon News is now 4 years old! Since it's our birthday, we decided to invite the slashdot crowd over for a little birthday bash. We have a special coupon code for slashdot readers that will entitle them to a 40% discount on the latest releases of BSD CDs. So you can see for yourself why BSD isn't dying. Pickup FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, or Darwin and enter 'happybday' as the coupon code when you checkout. [This won't last long.]"

SirGeek writes: "According to the Daemon News and the FreeBSD site a code freeze has taken place in preparations for the impending 4.7 release on October 1st."

djcdplaya writes: "DaemonNews is reporting that the good guys over at NetBSD have gotten dual PowerPC processors working on dual-G4 Apples. The NetBSD mailing can be found here."

questionlp writes "The August 2002 Ezine has been published and is packed with articles and columns with topics ranging from behind-the-scenes look at VicFUG 2002, a report on the recent O'Reilly OSCON, one's adventure through Unix starting from Linux to FreeBSD, a HOWTO on backing up FreeBSD with tar and SMBFS, plus a look at some of the most popular web browsers (most of which are available in the BSD Ports collection)."

veg writes: "DaemonNews have kicked-off their new review section with a review of the DataHive server; a funky-looking, BSD-based, SoHo server/firewall. Reminds me of a NeXT cube - I want one!"

veg writes: "DaemonNews have kicked-off their new review section with a review of the DataHive server; a funky-looking, BSD-based, SoHo server/firewall. Reminds me of a NeXT cube - I want one!"

zmcgrew writes "From Daemon News:
"The decision was made to remove Perl from the FreeBSD -current base system [earlier story ]. Perl will be supported as a port that the user can install after the base installation, however it will no longer be required. Mark Murray put out a call to the -current mailing list asking for volunteers to port all Perl scripts in the base system to another language, such as sh or C. All critical programs are already being ported, with only a few minor ones left to be claimed." Wow..."

Donald Burr of Borg writes "Following in the footsteps of Jordan Hubbard, Michael Smith leaves the FreeBSD core team. Reasons cited are similar to those that jkh gave, including displeasure at the bureacracy and politicking, and FreeBSD not being "fun" anymore."

SteelX was one of many readers to cite this story in the Daily Daemon News which reports that "Jordan Hubbard is resigning from the FreeBSD core. Jordan is a founding member of the FreeBSD project." Note: According to this email, Hubbard is definitely not quitting FreeBSD; he's just changing the nature of his involvement with it.

SteelX was one of many readers to cite this story in the Daily Daemon News which reports that "Jordan Hubbard is resigning from the FreeBSD core. Jordan is a founding member of the FreeBSD project." Note: According to this email, Hubbard is definitely not quitting FreeBSD; he's just changing the nature of his involvement with it.

RazzleDazzle writes: "AMD released a MP Athlon system that has been certified by Daemon News to work with FreeBSD. Read the full article here."

RazzleDazzle writes: "AMD released a MP Athlon system that has been certified by Daemon News to work with FreeBSD. Read the full article here."

questionlp writes "The February 2002 Issue of Dæmon News has been published and has a total of ten articles ranging from support for the Japanese language in NetBSD, an overview of RADIUS Authentication and auto-mounting drives. As well as a continuation of the DOSSIER documentation project and the last of a series of three articles on tcsh."

bXTr writes "Interesting project over at SourceForge. Quoting from the website, 'Debian NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development and cannot currently be installed from scratch. Instead, a tarball of the current envionment is available and can be extracted into a handy directory on a NetBSD system.' Check out the reasons why they're doing it and some interesting commentary at DailyDaemonNews on this."

questionlp writes: "The January 2002 issue of Dæmon News Ezine has been published. This month's issue has the continuation of the tcsh article, test driving NetBSD, NetBSD's 2001 timeline, an article on embedded BSD, DOSSIER and the Meta project, and a book review of FreeBSD Unleashed."

nt2UNIX writes: "There is an article on Daily Daemon News that the FreeBSD Foundation has announced the inclusion of a FreeBSD native SUN Java SDK and RunTime Environment for the January 2002 release of FreeBSD 4.5 The whole announcement can be found here."

nt2UNIX writes: "There is an article on Daily Daemon News that the FreeBSD Foundation has announced the inclusion of a FreeBSD native SUN Java SDK and RunTime Environment for the January 2002 release of FreeBSD 4.5 The whole announcement can be found here."

questionlp writes: "The December 2001 issue of the Daemon News E-zine is now live on the Internet. This month's issue contains great articles about generating MRTG graphs of qmail statistics under FreeBSD, coding styles, SNMP agent development and the first of three parts on the csh and tcsh shells. Also launched this month for Daemon News is their hardware certification and driver development services."

mvw writes: "Here is an interview with OpenBSD's Theo de Raadt. Interesting is his comment on Soft Updates and the comparison to the rivaling Journaling file systems technology. Further he links to a very interesting paper by some Soft Updates researchers." And although OpenBSD 3.0 has an "official" release date of December 1 for whatever reason, it seems to be available by FTP or CD already. Lots of changes since 2.9.

A BSD User writes: "Yesterday, Daemon News announced a new line of BSD clothes. The clothes themselves look very cool and have a "Daemon Crossing" sign on them. It's nice to see Daemon News and their BSD Mall site filling in the hole recently left by WindRiver Systems."

Daemon Staff writes: "Daemon News has just announced FreeBSD Training Classes and a really cool new t-shirt. They finally have one on black! Chris Coleman announces everything in his Editorial in this month's Daemon News Ezine."

LordGibson writes: "DaemonNews.org is taking up some of the slack following Wind River's massive layoffs of FreeBSD developers. 'Daemon News has been a BSD organization from day one. We are now happy to announce that we will be publishing our own FreeBSD CD sets, beginning with the next release, 4.5, scheduled for January 2002. We offer CD subscriptions, and our subscription plans can be for any desired combination of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin. Since the FreeBSD Mall isn't offering subscriptions any more, you can get your BSD fix from us--at a better price, too.' You can read all about it here or jump for joy and go directly to the subscriptions page."

LordGibson writes: "DaemonNews.org is taking up some of the slack following Wind River's massive layoffs of FreeBSD developers. 'Daemon News has been a BSD organization from day one. We are now happy to announce that we will be publishing our own FreeBSD CD sets, beginning with the next release, 4.5, scheduled for January 2002. We offer CD subscriptions, and our subscription plans can be for any desired combination of FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, and Darwin. Since the FreeBSD Mall isn't offering subscriptions any more, you can get your BSD fix from us--at a better price, too.' You can read all about it here or jump for joy and go directly to the subscriptions page."

SidVicious and Intosi both wrote in with news that Wind River Systems (WRS), who had acquired BSDi's software assets earlier this year, including a team of FreeBSD developers, has laid off those developers. This has also been reported in other places, such as DaemonNews. This raises some interesting questions; for example, what happens to the "FreeBSD" trademark, which Wind River currently own. Read on for Wind River's answers to this and other questions.

In the interests of full disclosure. I'm also nik@freebsd.org, although not a WRS employee. I was employed by BSDi in Europe, before the European team were laid off as part of the WRS acquisition. These questions were answered by WindRiver's PR department.

Q: WRS has already been through two rounds of layoffs in the recent past. Why this third set of lay offs now? Are the FreeBSD developers the only ones affected?

Wind River has only had two rounds of layoffs. During the second round Wind River decided to divest itself of the FreeBSD project. We spent several weeks looking for a suitable corporate sponsor but did not find any company with sufficient interest and financial capability in this challenging economy. This week's layoff of the FreeBSD employees is therefore Wind River's "final option" in executing the plans set in motion by the second round of layoffs.

Q: WRS currently own the trademark "FreeBSD". Do WRS plan to retain the trademark? If so, why? If not, will WRS let the trademark lapse? Or are there plans to transfer it to a third party, such as the FreeBSD Foundation?

Wind River plans to ensure continuation of the altruistic, open stewardship of the FreeBSD trademark. We feel strongly that the FreeBSD project must be protected and encouraged and that a FreeBSD trademark in the wrong hands could be very detrimental. We continue to search for the best solution. No specific third-party has yet been determined, but transfer to a suitable third-party is the leading option being considered.

Q: WRS own the "bsd.com" domain. Will that be retained?

Possibly. Wind River will continue to invest in BSD/OS and participate as a highly interested member of the *BSD community. As such, the bsd.com domain may be important for Wind River. We are weighing this against the needs of the *BSD community and hope to resolve the issue later this month.

Q: What's happening to the "FreeBSD Mall", at freebsdmall.com?

freebsdmall.com continues to operate and take orders, and all new and existing orders from customers for FreeBSD 4.4 or other products will continue to be fulfilled. Wind River is still evaluating its long term options and strategy for the FreeBSD Mall, but plans to maintain its presence and service either internally or externally.

Q: As part of the BSDi acquisition, WRS will (presumably) have picked up customers who had subscribed to the BSDi CD sets of FreeBSD. Will WRS continue to service those customers, or are their subscriptions now cancelled?

Like all customer contracts, subscription orders will continue to be fulfilled.

Q: BSDi (and, it seemed, WRS) had made some headway in producing additional FreeBSD boxed products to go in to the retail channel. Will WRS continue to do this?

Wind River is currently continuing activities to promote FreeBSD 4.4 through the retail channel. Future FreeBSD releases will probably not be produced or distributed by Wind River.

Q: Will WRS continue to produce the usual 4 disc CD sets of FreeBSD, including one for the recently released FreeBSD 4.4?

Yes, for FreeBSD 4.4.

Q: WRS had been funding work on the FreeBSD Handbook, in order to print the second edition in the near future. [ Disclaimer, I'm co-editor of this work, along with your employee, Murray Stokely ] Will WRS continue with plans to print the second edition of the FreeBSD Handbook?

Wind River will encourage any stewards that emerge to take on FreeBSD publication to complete and publish this work.

Q: WRS houses the "FreeBSD Test Lab" at its Alameda campus. Will WRS continue to host this facility?

No. Some equipment from this lab will be transferred to Yahoo! which hosts much of the build structure equipment for FreeBSD, as well as the primary CVS source repository and main FreeBSD mail server. Wind River does not plan to maintain the FreeBSD test lab at its Alameda, CA headquarters.

questionlp writes: "The October 2001 issue of Daemon News is now on-line. This month's issue has articles on TrustedBSD, placing named into a chroot'd environment, backing up Windows from FreeBSD, and a note on the recent new releases of the different BSD operating systems (including Mac OS X 10.1)."

questionlp writes: "The September issue of Daemon News is now available on-line here. This month's issue has some very interesting articles, such as Loadable Kernel Modules in OpenBSD, the internals of jail, a review of the recently released FreeBSD book, 'FreeBSD an Open Source OS for your PC,' and more."

flynn_nrg writes: "www.daemonnews.org has an interesting article explaining how to fine tune your FreeBSD for maximum performance. In it's default state, a FreeBSD box is tuned for stability and reliability, but more often that not you want to get the most out of you BSD box, specially web servers. Nice article if you ask me."

flynn_nrg writes: "www.daemonnews.org has an interesting article explaining how to fine tune your FreeBSD for maximum performance. In it's default state, a FreeBSD box is tuned for stability and reliability, but more often that not you want to get the most out of you BSD box, specially web servers. Nice article if you ask me."

Chris Coleman writes: "Annelise Anderson has written a new FreeBSD book titled "FreeBSD: An Open Source Operating System for Your Personal Computer". The book includes: * installation CD-ROM for the entire system plus many software applications * space requirements, screen shots, and detailed instructions for installing FreeBSD * step-by-step instructions on configuring and running FreeBSD, connecting to the Internet, setting up an internal network, and setting up sound, X Window System (the graphical user interface), and printing." I think the raftload of available books have helped tremendously in making GNU/Linux popular, by first making it possible for non-experts to install it -- with more BSD books, perhaps the same will happen. Fame awaits you if you care to give this book a Slashdot review :)

questionlp writes: "The great writers and editors of Daemon News has just released the August issue of the Daemon News e-Zine. The topics covered this month include: the NetBSD rc.d system, two security guides aimed at FreeBSD, the monthly Answerman Q&A section, and tuning of a FreeBSD system for high-performance."

ctg1701 noticed that daemonews was running "a story today about openpackages for *BSD," and says "I am a big fan of the freebsd and openbsd operating systems and having a seamless way of creating packages on these and other platforms would be great. It seems they are also working on porting this over to HPUX and Mac OSX. Very cool stuff. Check it out at http://www.openpackages.org."

BorrisYeltsin writes " Old news but Apple have released Darwin 1.3.1. You can get both PowerPC and i386 iso's (i386 gzipped iso) from their site. Installation notes are available for Intel also. Lets hope Darwin now supports my MVP motherboard :) " Dial-up users may prefer to order a CD from DaemonNews instead ;)

questionlp writes: "A new month, a new issue of Daemon News is now available on-line here. The July issue of the e-zine covers happenings at USENIX 2001, a very thorough overview of NetBSD 1.5.1, the horrors of script generated drivers, and the usual mix of BSD articles." It's a good read -- and if you primarily use some other OS, it's interesting to see how the others are doing once in a while. The various BSDs aren't really complaining at the moment;)