Slashdot Mirror
Domain: freebsdforums.org
Stories and comments across the archive that link to freebsdforums.org.
Stories · 55
-
GNOME 2.5.0 Available For FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke announces that GNOME 2.5.0 desktop, the "Obviously you're not a golfer" release, is now available for FreeBSD. You can check out this release from the MarcusCom CVS repository. Be sure to get the latest copy of the "marcusmerge" script while you're there to help with the upgrade. Thanks to FreeBSD GNOME users, there is also a man page to go with this script. NOTE: this is a developers release, and bugs will exist. If you're not into bug-hunting, you should probably steer clear until 2.6.0 is released." -
NetBSD's COMPAT_DARWIN Adds XDarwin Support
Dan writes "NetBSD's Emmanual Dreyfus says that COMPAT_DARWIN is now able to run Mac OS X's XDarwin (this is, the X Window server for Darwin). The server is fully functional: display, keyboard and mouse work. He says that running Darwin has no interest in itself, but having it working ensures that NetBSD's IOKit (1) emulation is good enough to be used. Darwin is Apple's Mac OS X core. A fully functional Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc & NetBSD/i386 will imply getting MacOS X libraries to run any Mac OS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes." -
FreeBSD to Celebrate 10 Year Anniversary in SF, CA
Dan writes "A long time ago, in a galaxy far far away...in the early part of 1993...the last 3 coordinators of the 'Unofficial 386BSD Patchkit' would go on to start the FreeBSD project that has grown to be used by millions of websites and installations around the world. Murray Stokely is talking about Jordan Hubbard, Nate Williams, and Rod Grimes. Looking for a catchy name, David Greenman suggested FreeBSD and it stuck. With the help of Walnut Creek CDROM, the first CDROM distribution, FreeBSD 1.0, was released in December of 1993." -
FreeBSD 4.9-RC4 (i386) Available For Pounding
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokely has announced the availability of RC4 - the final Release Candidate for FreeBSD 4.9. He says that RC4 includes SATA, DRM and other bugfixes; he is requesting everyone for help with testing. He says that if all goes well, they will be able to release Monday." -
FreeBSD 4.9 RC2 Available
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Eng. Team's Murray Stokely says that the FreeBSD team has resolved many of the issues brought up with the first release candidate and made FreeBSD RC2 ISO available for testing. They are especially interested in hearing from people who can deploy this on heavily loaded systems." -
nForce MCP Network Driver Working On FreeBSD 5.1
Dan writes "Quinton Dolan is in the final stages of porting the NVidia Linux nForce MCP network driver to FreeBSD-5.1. He is looking for users/developers with access to this hardware for testing help. The driver currently appears to be stable on his hardware (an MSI K7N420 Pro), although he hasn't done much stress testing, nor does he have access to an nForce2 based motherboard to test." -
FreeBSD 4.9-BETA i386 ISO With Packages Available
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engg. Team's Murray Stokely has put together a FreeBSD 4.9-BETA ISO image for i386 with the latest package build provided by portmgr@. If you haven't yet given 4.9PRE a try, hopefully this will encourage you to do so!" -
KDE 3.1.4 Released on FreeBSD
Dan writes "On September 16th 2003, the KDE Project released KDE 3.1.4. KDE 3.1.4 is a maintenance release which provides corrections of problems reported using the KDE bug tracking system and two vulnerabilities in KDM. Ports have been committed, binary packages for FreeBSD are available, including 4-STABLE, 5-RELEASE, check KDE on FreeBSD or your favorite mirror." -
Network Stack Cloning Updates on FreeBSD
Dan writes "Network stack cloning patches on FreeBSD allow for multiple fully independent network stacks to simultaneously coexist in a single FreeBSD kernel. Marko Zec has prepared a latest snapshot of the patches (against 4.8-RELEASE). The latest snapshot includes (a) internal restructuring - - struct vimage is now separated in resource-specific containers, and (b) Kernel message buffers - each vimage / vprocg now has a private kernel message buffer instance. Julian Elischer gave a talk on this subject at the USENIX Annual Technical Conference (FreeNIX track) in San Antonio, TX, June 2003. Marko's slides were presented at BSDCon Europe 2002 in Amsterdam." -
Announcing GNOME 2.4.0 for FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says that GNOME 2.4.0 is now available for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, due to timing issues with FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, it will not make it into the official ports tree until after 4.9 is released (looks like early October right now). In the meantime, you can get to it from his CVS tree. For those without CVS access, he has periodic tarballs made, and are downloadable from the same URL. You should also download the marcusmerge script to aid in merging his ports tree with the official tree. If you already have a copy of the script, download it again because things have changed." Update: 09/18 15:25 GMT by M : FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says due to popular demand, but more importantly to the fact that 4.9-RELEASE has been pushed back at least two weeks, GNOME 2.40 has been merged into the ports tree. -
Announcing GNOME 2.4.0 for FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says that GNOME 2.4.0 is now available for FreeBSD. Unfortunately, due to timing issues with FreeBSD 4.9-RELEASE, it will not make it into the official ports tree until after 4.9 is released (looks like early October right now). In the meantime, you can get to it from his CVS tree. For those without CVS access, he has periodic tarballs made, and are downloadable from the same URL. You should also download the marcusmerge script to aid in merging his ports tree with the official tree. If you already have a copy of the script, download it again because things have changed." Update: 09/18 15:25 GMT by M : FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke says due to popular demand, but more importantly to the fact that 4.9-RELEASE has been pushed back at least two weeks, GNOME 2.40 has been merged into the ports tree. -
OS Fingerprinting in OpenBSD's PF Firewall
Dan writes "Mike Frantzen has committed "Passive operating system fingerprinting" to PF which exposes the source host's OS to the filter language. The goal of this work is to allow firewalling decisions to take place based not only on the source of a connection, but the operating system of that source. Powerful policy enforcement is now possible such as redirecting all older windows boxes to a web site telling them to upgrade. Or blocking all windows boxes from connecting to mail servers (damn worms). A writeup can be found here. Please help contribute to the OS fingerprint database by going to http://lcamtuf.coredump.cx/p0f-help/ and typing in your OS description if it does not recognize your OS." Sorry - my fault. It is a dupe. -
HEADS UP: gettext port update on FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has committed an update to the gettext port to 0.12.1 on FreeBSD. GNU `gettext' is an important step for the GNU Translation Project, as it is an asset on which we may build many other steps. This package offers to programmers, translators, and even users, a well integrated set of tools and documentation. Specifically, the GNU `gettext' utilities are a set of tools that provides a framework to help other GNU packages produce multi-lingual messages." -
Dynamic Root Support For FreeBSD Now Available
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Gordon Tetlow has committed his enhancements to enable users to build /bin and /sbin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. His reason to do this is two-fold. One is to give better support for PAM and NSS in the base system. The second is to save some disk space. Currently (on his x86 box), /bin and /sbin are 32 MB. With a dynamically linked root (and some pruning of some binaries), the /bin, /lib, and /sbin come out to 6.1 MB. This should be great for people with 2.x and 3.x era root partitions that are only about 50 MB. Gordon says that there will be a performance hit associated with this. He did a quick measurement at boot and his boot time (from invocation of /etc/rc to the login prompt) went from 12 seconds with a static root to 15 seconds with a dynamic root." -
Broken FreeBSD Ports Scheduled for Removal
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Kris Kennaway says that the following FreeBSD ports are scheduled for removal on November 7 if they are still broken at that time and no PRs have been submitted to fix them. If you are interested in saving these ports, please send your patches to the maintainer. If the maintainer is unresponsive or the port has no maintainer, then please submit them via send-pr." -
FreeBSD security Advisories: FreeBSD-SA-03:09.sign
Dan writes "FreeBSD security team has released two new advisories. The first advisory entitled "Insufficient range checking of signal numbers" could allow a malicious local user to use this vulnerability as a local denial-of-service attack. The second advisory "Kernel memory disclosure via ibcs2" could allow a malicious user to call the iBCS2 version of statfs(2) with an arbitrarily large length parameter, causing the kernel to return a large portion of kernel memory containing sensitive information." -
ATAng Driver Preview for FreeBSD
Dan writes "Soeren Schmidt announces the availability of the first preview release of ATAng drivers for FreeBSD. Before these rather radical changes to the ATA driver hits the tree, here is the opportunity to test them out, give useful feedback and for the depending subsytems to adjust to the new ways of things (burncd & atapicam are good examples). These drivers provide the framework for supporting new ATA controllers that have facilities for chaining commands and HW XOR's etc. These changes also facilitate merge of ATA and ATAPI code, as well make full use of fx Promise's new chips." -
FreeBSD Passes 9000 Ports
Dan writes "Kris Kennaway believes that the french/med port has the honour of being the 9000'th in the FreeBSD ports collection. Congratulations to everyone who has helped to make the Ports Collection such a success over the past 9 years!" -
RFC: Alternate Ports Fix For Older FreeBSD
Dan writes "For those of you running older versions of FreeBSD (prior to 4.7), FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has an alternate fix for the recent port install problem people were seeing. This fix involves adding a new port, pkg_install, which is a snapshot of the -CURRENT pkg_install code. This port can change periodically as new pkg_* features are added that bsd.port.mk depends on. Joe is also looking for testers for this fix." -
Kerberos Support In OpenSSH
Dan writes "Marshall Vale writes on behalf of the MIT Kerberos team and several other parties interested in the availability of Kerberos authentication for the SSH protocol. Kerberos is a network authentication protocol. It is designed to provide strong authentication for client/server applications by using secret-key cryptography. Marshall says that Kerberos support within OpenSSH may be incomplete and needs more work. In particular, implementing draft-ietf-secsh-gsskeyex in addition to any other Kerberos mechanisms will better serve the needs of Kerberos community. Secondly, he says that they would like to reduce user confusion associated with all of the different options for Kerberos and SSH. He suggests adoption of the GSSAPI key exchange mechanism in the IETF draft (which uses Kerberos to authenticate both parties to each other), in order to avoid man-in-the-middle attacks." -
KSE Progress On FreeBSD SMP Environment
Dan writes "This is a significant milestone to be shared with everyone! Khairil Yusof reports that libkse is now running quite well on his FreeBSD 5.1+ current based SMP system. He has tested a bunch of apps on his system, taking the approach of enabling kse one app at a time. He reports a current uptime of 23hrs with these apps running with libkse.so.1, and basically a usable Gnome 2.2 desktop environment. He says that with recent updates, you can now see the threads with top(8). Kernel Scheduler Entities (KSE), is a kernel-supported threading system similar in design to Scheduler Activations [Anderson, et. al.]. It strikes a balance between user-level (1:N) and kernel-level (1:1) threading models, giving most of the advantages of both, and few of the disadvantages of either." -
LKM NVidia Drivers Now Available For NetBSD
Dan writes "Quentin Garnier has made a loadable kernel module (LKM) version of the NVidia drivers on NetBSD. This release is very preliminary, rough and mostly meant to test the installation procedure. You will need a NetBSD-current system but the downloadable drivers code itself should be quite backward compatible with some caveats. For example, you need 'options KVM86' in your kernel config. His NVidia drivers on NetBSD page indicates that known working hardware includes RIVA TNT2 Model 64 (PCI), GeForce2 MX/MX 400, Vanta(AGP) and more!" -
dvd+rw-tools Ported to FreeBSD
Dan writes "Matthew Dillon has finished porting Andy Polyakov's excellent dvd+rw-tools to FreeBSD. These tools support DVD-R, DVD-RW, DVD+R, and DVD+RW format dvd burners, including the popular Sony 500A, which he has bought himself. He says that these tools should work on a wider variety of burners than the half-broken GNU dvdrecord tools work on." -
GCC 3.3 Native Build For NetBSD/dreamcast
Dan writes "Marcus Comstedt has a native build of the new GCC 3.3 for NetBSD/dreamcast platform. It was built using the latest binutils (2.13.2.1), and he then rebuilt the binutils with the new compiler. Also included is a gdb 5.3 built with the GCC and binutils." -
libevent Integration Into NetBSD
Dan writes "Niels Provos says this is a heads up for the upcoming integration of libevent into the NetBSD source tree. Libevent provides a simple API to abstract event notification and handling. Applications are notified via callbacks on IO events, timers and signals. Libevent is meant to replace the event loop found in event driven software." -
FreeBSD 5.1 i386 RC1
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Scott Long has uploaded FreeBSD RC1 for i386, he says that alpha RC1 is in the works. Kris Kennaway has uploaded i386 packages. Marcel Moolenaar is working on RC1 ia64, ISOs for which will be available sometime tomorrow. You can find RC1 at one of your preferred mirror sites" -
New Bootloader for FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering team's Scott Long has written a bootloader front-end script that allows one to enable/disable acpi, boot single users, etc. His primary motivation was to allow users to easily disable ACPI, since so many problems are popping up these days with it. He is hoping to have this be on at least the i386 bootcd for FreeBSD 5.1 scheduled for release June 2nd, and is looking for feedback." -
GNOME 2.3.2 Released, Ported On FreeBSD
Dan writes "The GNOME Development Series Desktop 2.3.2 "Little Hero" has been released and ready for testing. It is available for immediate download on ftp.gnome.org and mirrors. This release is an UNSTABLE development series snapshot. It is intended for testing and hacking purposes ONLY. On FreeBSD, featuring gnopernicus, the FreeBSD GNOME team presents this development snapshot as GNOME 2.3. Testers should checkout the ports module per these instructions and download the new marcusmerge script to aid in the upgrade." -
OpenBSD Hackathon Summary
Dan writes "Daniel Hartmeier says that the OpenBSD hackathon is over and provides a summary of the pf related work that was done in Calgary this year. Accomplishments include packet tagging, TCP scrubbing and normalization extentions, SYN proxy, adaptive timeouts and minor bug fixes. Henning Brauer points out that the binary format of pf logs has changed to log additional items." -
GNOME 2.3 Snapshot, KDE 3.1.2 Released
BSD Forums writes "The GNOME Development Series Snapshot 2.3.1 "Daddy Walrus", is now available. FreeBSD's Joe Marcus Clarke has ported this release (2.3) on FreeBSD and is looking for your testing help. Also, the KDE Project announced the immediate availability of KDE 3.1.2, a maintenance release for the third generation of this UNIX desktop." -
WarBSD 0.1 Released
Dan writes "Stacy Olivas has put together a hack of PicoBSD .500 using the FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE-p7 source tree. After seeing WarLinux and how it used an embedded version of Linux to get the job done, he started wondering if PicoBSD could be used for the same thing. He calls it WarBSD. Its main intended use is for systems administrators that want to audit and evaluate thier wireless network installations." -
NTFS Support For OpenBSD
Dan writes "Julien Bordet has ported code from NetBSD to support NTFS4 and NTFS5 in OpenBSD-current. He has heavily tested read accesses to his Windows 2000 partition, and that has worked fine. Julien says that there is an existing port, but his port is new and adds NTFS5 support." -
Dynamic /bin support on FreeBSD
Dan writes "Gordon Tetlow has put together a patch to have /bin dynamically linked on FreeBSD. This is the first step on the way to having everything play nicely with ongoing work on getting NSS into the system. He cautions that the patch is preliminary and should probably be installed on a test machine." -
Debian NetBSD for Sparc
Dan writes "Matthew Garrett has demonstrated his success in building a Debian operating system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Folks working on the project say that porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a Debian-based operating system." -
New PF on FreeBSD snapshot available
Dan writes "Pyun YongHyeon and Max Laier announce a new release of PF for FreeBSD, which is available for download. Since the first release of PF at the end of March 2003, PF has undergone several major updates such as -current and ALTQ support. They have also removed bugs in IPv6, module handling and table support code and believe the current version 0.61 is very close to production use." -
String Cleanup Results On OpenBSD
Dan writes "OpenBSD's Theo De Raadt provides an update on his team's efforts to remove potential buffer overflows within OpenBSD code by always calculating what the bounds of an operation are. They have been going through the source tree cleaning out all calls to sprintf(), strcpy(), and strcat(). Theo says that they have removed (replaced) approximately 2000 occurences of these functions." (The same buffer overrun-squashing effort was mentioned earlier this month.) -
UFS2 Now Default Creation Type in FreeBSD
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Robert Watson says that effective today, newfs(8) and sysinstall(8) will create UFS2 file systems by default, unless explicitly specified. Users wanting to create UFS1 file systems for whatever reason (interoperability with earlier versions, etc) should be sure to employ the -O1 flag to newfs(8), or hit '1' in the label editor in sysinstall(8) to select UFS1." -
PF Gets Synchronization Patch
Dan writes "Julien Bordet announces that Packet Filter (PF) now has "pfsyncd" - the ability to synchronize states across multiple firewalls. Kernel patches and alpha source code to the userland daemon can be found here. This is an alpha release meant for testing and should not be used in production. Testing, patches, and feedback is greatly appreciated." -
GNOME 2.3.0 Ported, Ready For Testing On FreeBSD
Dan writes "The first of the GNOME 2.4 development releases is now available. Code named 'Mighty Atom,' this FreeBSD release includes quite a few new proposed modules. Those wanting to test this release should checkout the ``ports'' module per these instructions. Be sure to download the ``marcusmerge'' script from the same page. This script will help you merge the GNOME development ports tree into your main ports tree." -
FreeBSD 4.8 Released
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Murray Stokely announces the long awaited availability of FreeBSD 4.8, the latest FreeBSD-stable release, which has dealt with known security issues, and added initial support for Firewire, HyperThreading, and other new hardware technologies. Murray says that the new release is also the result of conservative updates to a number of software programs in the FreeBSD base system, see FreeBSD 4.8 release notes for more information." -
FreeBSD 4.8-RELEASE Status Update
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Bruce Mah provides the latest status of what's holding up the official release of FreeBSD 4.8. We fully support FreeBSD RE's approach to fixing necessary problems before officially releasing the product." -
Four New Security Advisories Released for NetBSD
Dan writes "The NetBSD security team has issued Four NetBSD Security Advisories. (1) Format string vulnerability in zlib gzprintf(): a buffer overflow can result in arbitrary code execution. (2) RSA timing attack in OpenSSL code can enable remote recovery of private keys, from a host with low-latency access to the server - such as the local host, or a host on the LAN. (3) Encryption weakness in OpenSSL code enables an attacker to perform crypto operations using server's private keys. Finally (4), faulty length checks in xdrmem_getbytes (within libc) are susceptible to integer overflows that affect memory allocation in their local buffers." -
Mozilla 1.3 Port Available For FreeBSD
Dan writes "Joe Marcus Clarke announces the availability of Mozilla 1.3 port for FreeBSD. Windows, MacOSX and Linux versions of Mozilla 1.3 were originally released on March 13. Although the port is scheduled to be committed as part of FreeBSD 4.8 Release, diffs for 1.3 are readily available. Galeon2 diff has also been updated for the Mozilla port. Key enhancements include junk mail filtering and API for rich text editing." -
XFree86 DRI on NetBSD
Dan writes "Erik Reid has been working on adding DRI support for NetBSD. Direct Rendering Infrastructure, also known as the DRI Project, is a framework for allowing direct access to graphics hardware in a safe and efficient manner. Some of Erik's work has been imported into XFree86 4.3.0 which is now in xsrc tree. He has subsequently put together a fairly large patch which compiles and works on his NetBSD/i386 1.6P system with a matrox g450. Try out the patch and give him some feedback!" -
January-February 2003 FreeBSD Status Report
Dan writes "FreeBSD's Scott Long provides the Jan-Feb 2003 bi-monthly FreeBSD status report. Highlights include focus on making 5.0 faster via more fine-grained locking, adding high-end features like memort support for i386. FreeBSD 5.1 is expected to ship in late May, early June, with 5.2 following end of summer with significant speed and stability improvements over 5.0. FreeBSD 4.8 release due shortly adds XFree86 4.3.0 and intel hyperthreading support. Major FreeBSD project statuses are also provided in this report." -
FreeBSD 4.8 Release Delayed Until Mar 24
Dan writes "FreeBSD Release Engineering Team's Murray Stokley indicates in his email that the latest FreeBSD 4.8 release will need to be postponed until March 24 in order to include suggested fixes related to the XFree86 4.3.0 port. After a complete package rebuild, they plan to release FreeBSD 4.8 RC2 first. Murray requests everyone to continue testing the XFree86 4.3.0 port to ensure a quality release." -
XFree86 4.3.0 in FreeBSD Ports Tree
Dan writes "Eric Anholt has committed the long awaited XFree86 4.3.0 to the FreeBSD ports tree. Please report any issues, bugs, etc. directly to him. The port appears to have support for popular cards such as NVidia, ATI, etc. Eric suggests that you use portupgrade to ensure you update fully from an earlier version of XFree86." -
Test OpenSSH 3.6 Snapshots
Dan writes "OpenBSD's Markus Friedl is requesting everyone to test the latest OpenSSH 3.6 nightly snapshots to help ensure a quality final release. The OpenSSH Portability Team takes the pure OpenSSH version and adds portability code so that OpenSSH can run on many other operating systems. Folks, download snapshots for your OS from one of these mirrors." -
XFree86 4.3.0, Latest Binutils Imported In NetBSD
Dan writes "Matthias Scheler has imported XFree86 4.3.0 into NetBSD current, it is only tested under NetBSD-i386 at the moment. Also, as part of updating the toolchain, Matthew Green has imported the latest GNU binutils (2.13.2.1) into NetBSD-current. The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa and x86_64, improved support for existing architectures and is known to work for almost all CPU types NetBSD currently supports. Updates of gdb and gcc will follow." -
XFree86 4.3.0, Latest Binutils Imported In NetBSD
Dan writes "Matthias Scheler has imported XFree86 4.3.0 into NetBSD current, it is only tested under NetBSD-i386 at the moment. Also, as part of updating the toolchain, Matthew Green has imported the latest GNU binutils (2.13.2.1) into NetBSD-current. The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa and x86_64, improved support for existing architectures and is known to work for almost all CPU types NetBSD currently supports. Updates of gdb and gcc will follow."