Slashdot Mirror

386BSD was last released back in 1994 with a series of articles in Dr. Dobb's Journal -- but then developers for this BSD-based operating system started migrating to both FreeBSD and NetBSD. An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: The last known public release was version 0.1. Until Wednesday, when Lynne Jolitz, one of the co-authors of 386BSD, released the source code to version 1.0 as well as 2.0 on Github.

386BSD takes us back to the days when you could count every file in your Unix distribution and more importantly, read and understand all of your OS source code. 386BSD is also the missing link between BSD and Linux. One can find fragments of Linus Torvalds's math emulation code in the source code of 386BSD. To quote Linus: "If 386BSD had been available when I started on Linux, Linux would probably never had happened."
Though it was designed for Intel 80386 microprocessors, there's already instructions for launching it on the hosted hardware virtualization service Qemu.

An anonymous reader writes "Some Wikipedians have objected to Virgin Unite's participation in the Wikimedia Foundation's fund drive, calling it adverising. But there's a strong case that Wikipedia should run advertising. The funds raised could support dozens of Firefox-scale free knowledge and free software projects, outspending all but the wealthiest foundations."

mlinksva writes: "Safeweb cancelled their free service late last year, but their P2P anonymizing proxy, Triangle Boy, has been spotted in the wild (south of Fort Worth, Texas). 'Because of its stealth nature, the P2P software does not show up in reports from many filtering products and the administrator doesn't even know the problem exists and has no way to check it.'(via UniteTheCows)."

Mike Linksvayer sent in this link and this one where you can read about the guys who created LesTif, and how they are now going to try to create an Official GNU version on the Java Virtual Machine. With Kaffe going proprietary, and all the hoopla surrounding HP and Microsoft's JVMs, I think we need a solution with open source or Java is going to be so fragmented that it will be useless on the net. Not that it's exactly spectacular today.