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LiquidPC writes: "OSNews is running an article describing CVSup, mounting, ports, and the FreeBSD init system; focused primarily towards new users to FreeBSD."

Serin K Medusa writes: "The folks over at FreeBSD.org have put up a new 'roadmap' detailing the plan of action for the remainder of the year. In particular, check out the plans for a 5.0 preview and expected dates for 4.6. Interesting reading if you're following -CURRENT."

Serin K Medusa writes: "The folks over at FreeBSD.org have put up a new 'roadmap' detailing the plan of action for the remainder of the year. In particular, check out the plans for a 5.0 preview and expected dates for 4.6. Interesting reading if you're following -CURRENT."

LiquidPC writes: "ONLamp.com's Big Scary Daemons section has yet another great new BSD article, this one on Understanding NFS and using it in FreeBSD."

GlobalEcho writes: "Developers associated with Darwin are beginning to think about package management and source building. At issue is whether something like dpkg, RPM or *BSD's ports could suffice, or whether they are all just way too mid-90's. Jordan Hubbard himself (now of Apple) weighed in with his opinions (user and passwd 'archives'). Apparently he thinks it is time for something more advanced, and he gives some ideas about what that might look like. Does anyone else have good ideas?"

GlobalEcho writes: "Developers associated with Darwin are beginning to think about package management and source building. At issue is whether something like dpkg, RPM or *BSD's ports could suffice, or whether they are all just way too mid-90's. Jordan Hubbard himself (now of Apple) weighed in with his opinions (user and passwd 'archives'). Apparently he thinks it is time for something more advanced, and he gives some ideas about what that might look like. Does anyone else have good ideas?"

Jason123 writes: "Almost twenty days ago, FreeBSD's (& also Apple's) Jordan Hubbard gave an interview via IRC to BSDVault. With permission from BSDVault, OSNews has now cleaned-up the interview, formatted it in a more readable manner and published the result. Jordan talks all sorts of interesting things, like FreeBSD 5, his job at the kernel team at Apple, the FreeBSD commmunity, XFree, Microsoft and more." (This is the interview featured in slightly rawer form here.)

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

Joe Marcus Clarke writes: "The FreeBSD GNOME project is proud to announce the opening of our project site. This site is devoted to the GNOME desktop and its development on FreeBSD." While the port is an ongoing project, quite a few applications are ready, as are instructions on putting GNOME on your FreeBSD box.

FreeBSD-RockS writes: "Panasonic released a desktop PC called Panacom LC/W with two 15-inch (1024x768) LCD monitors arranged side by side. The LCD screens can be arranged so that they can be used either in a portrait or a landscape form. The new model will be put on sale on March 8 and the retail price through direct marketing is around $2000 USD."

Eugenia writes: "OSNews published a guide that could help users migrate from Linux to FreeBSD by spotting the main differences between the two popular systems. Interesting read & relevant to the recent FreeBSD 4.5 release a few days ago."

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

The_Rift was one of many who wrote in with this news: "The official mail has gone out to the FreeBSD-announce mailing list announcing the availability of Freebsd 4.5. Check your local mirrors for the ISOs.". The release notes have all the details, but take it from me -- this one is worth it just for the TCP/IP performance improvements by Matt Dillon and others. Kudos to Murray, Bruce, and the rest of the release engineering team.

ve2asm writes "As sent to the freebsd-announce mailing list, Kris Kennaway is resigning as Security Officer. The core team has approved Jacques Vidrine as the new security officer.

flynn_nrg writes: "As a lot of you already know, an interview with Jordan was held Sunday January 27 at 10:30 PM EST. The log of the interview has been posted in bsdvault.net. The complete text of our question and answer session with Jordan Hubbard can be found here. Jordan was mainly asked about his work at Apple and SMPng, the new SMP code that will debut on 5.0. Enjoy ..."

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

Jordon Hubbard writes: "The latest release in the FreeBSD 4.X branch has been released after an extensive release engineering process. Important bugfixes for the TCP stack and NFS are included in this release. You can view the release notes and find a mirror here." Update: 01/24 21:42 GMT by Hemos :Fake submissions, not really released. Yah. Comedic value provided for the day.

wackysootroom writes: "On January 14th, Wind River Systems, Inc. agreed to transfer its sponsorship of FreeBSD to FreeBSD Mall, Inc. This should be a good thing, since general pessimism abounded when Wind River took over Walnut Creek's BSD sponsorship. Here is the full story." There's also a story on news.com. We published a note about this in the BSD section but it deserves front-page treatment.

ps asks: "A small club I belong to is looking to install an electronic phone tree. This is one of those boxes that you can call into, leave a message, and it will deliver that message to all the members of a group. There are ones commercially available for over $1000, but this seems like something that wouldn't be too difficult to build. I could imagine that either a sound card based system, or a specially designed microprocessor system would work. Has anyone built one of these before?"

We've had a number of posts noting that Boston.com's digitalMASS has a very decent article on Apple's OS X, BSD and Jordan Hubbard.

JT writes: "OSNews features an article introducing the FreeBSD operating system to newbies and Windows users. The article describes the installation, its GUI, application base and it has some more information about Unix and *BSD in general." Since Linux (at least the varieties with cute installation routines) is often presented as the *nix beginner's best choice, it's good to see articles like this one pointing out a broader range of choices.

Murray Stokely writes: " The second edition hardcopy release of the FreeBSD Handbook is now available! Written by the FreeBSD Documentation Project, the FreeBSD Handbook is a comprehensive guide to installing and running FreeBSD. This book was typeset using entirely open source software. It covers the installation and day-to-day use of FreeBSD, the ports collection, kernel configuration, the X Window System, printing, FreeBSD's Linux binary compatibility support, upgrading your system from source by using the ``make world'' command, and much more. Among the many changes since the 1st edition are the inclusion of a full index, all new graphical network diagrams, several new chapters, more professional typesetting, and content that has been completely updated for FreeBSD 4.x and 5.0-CURRENT. If you are interested in purchasing a copy of the handbook, you can do so online from the FreeBSD Mall."

Kartoffel writes: "FreeBSD hackers have been hard at work getting the OS to run on PowerPC, IA64, and Sparc64 machines. These announcements are originally from FreeBSD.org. PowerPC: Benno Rice has committed a mega-patch which added support for OpenFirmware to the FreeBSD loader. The loader can now load a kernel over the network and execute it on an Apple iMac. IA64: After a few months of development Doug Rabson and Peter Wemm have committed patches which extends the FreeBSD/ia64 port's functionality and adds the possibility to boot on real hardware. Sparc64: Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have been porting FreeBSD to the ultra sparc for the past few months and first booted a machine into single user mode on the 18th of October. The log from the serial console is available."

Kartoffel writes: "FreeBSD hackers have been hard at work getting the OS to run on PowerPC, IA64, and Sparc64 machines. These announcements are originally from FreeBSD.org. PowerPC: Benno Rice has committed a mega-patch which added support for OpenFirmware to the FreeBSD loader. The loader can now load a kernel over the network and execute it on an Apple iMac. IA64: After a few months of development Doug Rabson and Peter Wemm have committed patches which extends the FreeBSD/ia64 port's functionality and adds the possibility to boot on real hardware. Sparc64: Jake Burkholder and Thomas Moestl have been porting FreeBSD to the ultra sparc for the past few months and first booted a machine into single user mode on the 18th of October. The log from the serial console is available."

Søren Schmidt was browsing through the 2.4.10 linux kernel source when he saw something that looked a bit familiar. Too familiar in fact. Søren is the principle developer of FreeBSD's ATA drivers, including FreeBSD's support for ATA RAID cards, and as he looked through the linux/drivers/ide/ files the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Read on for more.

"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."

ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.

You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.

Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.

Søren Schmidt was browsing through the 2.4.10 linux kernel source when he saw something that looked a bit familiar. Too familiar in fact. Søren is the principle developer of FreeBSD's ATA drivers, including FreeBSD's support for ATA RAID cards, and as he looked through the linux/drivers/ide/ files the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Read on for more.

"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."

ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.

You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.

Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.

Søren Schmidt was browsing through the 2.4.10 linux kernel source when he saw something that looked a bit familiar. Too familiar in fact. Søren is the principle developer of FreeBSD's ATA drivers, including FreeBSD's support for ATA RAID cards, and as he looked through the linux/drivers/ide/ files the sense of deja vu was overwhelming. Read on for more.

"They just took my code and filed off the copyright" said Søren. "This is clearest with the two header files hptraid.h and pdcraid.h. Compare these with FreeBSD's ata-raid.h, and just look at the similarities." And it's true that these two header files certainly look like a chopped up copy of the FreeBSD header, after a quick search-and-replace. "The reading of the RAID config from the disks is their own code, but is clearly "inspired" from our code," said Søren, "but that's encouraged by the license. It's the verbatim use of the other code without retaining the copyright that's the problem."

ata-raid.h, and the other files, are copyright Søren, and released under the three clause BSD license, which includes the restriction "Redistributions of source code must retain the above copyright notice". So using these files, or significant portions of them, in your own code, without retaining the copyright information, as has happened here, is prohibited.

You may be thinking "This is only a couple of header files, what's the big deal?". As Søren says "The problem here is that the structures in the headers is the whole story. That info tells how you read the proprietary struct off the disks, and was reverse engineered and documented by me after a lot of effort." Søren's intellectual property is tied up in those files.

Right now, Søren is in discussions with the authors of the Linux ATA drivers (employed by RedHat) to ensure that his copyright notice is returned to these and other files, and to ensure that this situation does not recur. And it is hoped that an amicable solution can be reached.

proclus writes: "GNU-Darwin has provided a special FreeBSD ports tarball (20 Mb) for GNU/Linux users. We have modified the FreeBSD Ports System to bring thousands of free software offerings within the reach of every GNU/Linux user. The system is not fully automated yet, but you can untar it in your home directory and try it. Just follow these directions. This system provides full access to the FreeBSD ports, so that users can compile and install software in their home directories. Root access is not required."

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

ocipio writes: "The FreeBSD team announced that 4.4-RELEASE is available for download. There are a whole bunch of changes and notes. Please be sure to use a mirror." Those installing for the first time will no doubt find chapter two of the Handbook invaluable.

Satai writes: "FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE has been delayed a full year, until November of 2002. The reasons included a lack of support for SMPng - including a developer fall-off ratio of 15 to 1 - a desire to finish the PowerPC/Sparc64/IA64 architectures, and a general desire to robustly test the additions. The economic downturn even makes an appearance in the announcement."

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."

NAI Labs has been awarded a $1.2 million contract for FreeBSD security development. The main focus for this contract is to develop the TrustedBSD security extentions. The name of the project is CBOSS, (Community Based Open Source Initiative), led by Robert Watson and Lee Badger, and such developers as Kirk McKusick, Poul-Henning Kamp, Jonathan Lemon, and Eivind Eklund will work on it as subcontractors. I am excited over the news; the press release can be found at NAI Labs' CBOSS website.

FreeBSD Services Ltd. has announced their intention to distribute FreeBSD on (bootable) DVD, including packages, ports distfiles, the CVS repository, and a technical documentation set. I managed to get one of the promotional DVD's here at USENIX and I can't wait to get home and check out what's on it. Ultimately it will be offered as a subscription based service and documentation will be kept up-to-date.

Anonymous Coward and many others wrote in to tell us that Jordan Hubbard is going to work for Apple. Here's his post to the FreeBSD-announce mail list.

Joe Wanker writes: "Robert Watson, of FreeBSD-core and TrustedBSD fame, compiled and publicized a FreeBSD status report. The idea is to take advantage of FreeBSD's more centralized "committer" development model, in order to produce an ongoing report that shows the public what's happening with FreeBSD in a singular location. Take a look!"

David O'Brien writes " FreeBSD SMP on Alpha processors is now stable and has been checked into CVS repository on the development branch (5.0-CURRENT). John Baldwin, Andrew Gallatin, and Doug Rabson first booted single-user SMP on Friday, April 13th, and full multi-user support followed on Tuesday, April 17th. The code was stablized and then checked into the CVS repository on Friday, April 27th. Since being checking into the repository, it has been verified to work on quad-CPU DEC AlphaServer 4100s, dual-CPU Compaq DS-20s, dual-CPU API UP2000, and dual-CPU DEC AlphaServer 2100s. "

David O'Brien writes " FreeBSD SMP on Alpha processors is now stable and has been checked into CVS repository on the development branch (5.0-CURRENT). John Baldwin, Andrew Gallatin, and Doug Rabson first booted single-user SMP on Friday, April 13th, and full multi-user support followed on Tuesday, April 17th. The code was stablized and then checked into the CVS repository on Friday, April 27th. Since being checking into the repository, it has been verified to work on quad-CPU DEC AlphaServer 4100s, dual-CPU Compaq DS-20s, dual-CPU API UP2000, and dual-CPU DEC AlphaServer 2100s. "

David O'Brien writes " FreeBSD SMP on Alpha processors is now stable and has been checked into CVS repository on the development branch (5.0-CURRENT). John Baldwin, Andrew Gallatin, and Doug Rabson first booted single-user SMP on Friday, April 13th, and full multi-user support followed on Tuesday, April 17th. The code was stablized and then checked into the CVS repository on Friday, April 27th. Since being checking into the repository, it has been verified to work on quad-CPU DEC AlphaServer 4100s, dual-CPU Compaq DS-20s, dual-CPU API UP2000, and dual-CPU DEC AlphaServer 2100s. "

Anonymous Coward writes "Chris Faulhaber, one of the TrustedBSD developers, announced on the trustedbsd-discuss mailing list that Samba's POSIX.1e ACL support is now working on FreeBSD 5.0-CURRENT, and even has a screen shot. This has been a high-demand feature, apparently, and could be a big selling point for sites currently running Windows NT as their enterprise operating system.

Date: Tue, 24 Apr 2001 19:17:52 -0400
From: Chris Faulhaber <jedgar@fxp.org>
To: trustedbsd-discuss@TrustedBSD.org
Subject: Native ACL support for Samba

With the release of Samba 2.2.0, samba offers ACL support to remote clients. I just committed the changes to the FreeBSD CVS tree required to allow Samba to access the FreeBSD ACLs. With an updated -current system and samba-devel port (define WITH_ACL_SUPPORT), Windows NT 4.0 and 2000 clients can now remotely manipulate ACLs. Testing and comments are appreciated.

In addition, the ACL utilities, getfacl and setfacl, have been updated to fully make use of the ACL editing library. They should compile on most ACL-enabled systems (tested on Linux + ACL patches) with little or no change."

jesseraf was one of the first to write, and now that the release is official we can post this. Release notes are available, or find the nearest mirror.

jesseraf was one of the first to write, and now that the release is official we can post this. Release notes are available, or find the nearest mirror.