FreeBSD – the unknown Giant

BSDCan 2013 – Live Streaming and Groups Photo

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Gerard

As you will be aware, the BSDCan 2013 Dev Summit has happened and the Conference taking place this weekend.

BSDCan is an annual conference for users and developers of the 4.4 BSD family of operating system, hosted each spring at the University of Ottawa in Ontario, Canada.

It has been possible to view (some of) the presentation on the Youtube BSDConferences Channel, but this year you will be able to watch live streams thanks to ScaleEngine, the Technical CDN and Silver Sponson

ScaleEngine is the Technical CDN, and so it is fitting that we are associated with the Technical BSD Conference. It’s pretty well known that we are a FreeBSD shop.

View the schedule for a list of the talks or watch via these channels:

https://www.scaleengine.com/read/740/The-BSDCan-2013-Conference/

This BSDCan 2013 Dev Summit group picture was posted on Flickr by Will Backman, who runs bsdtalk.

Click for larger size.

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FreeBSD 8.4-RC3 available for testing

Posted on May 18, 2013 by Gerard

Glen Barber announced last week the availability of RC3 for FreeBSD 8.4, the upcoming new stable version of the Project’s legacy branch. ISO images for the amd64, i386 and pc98 architectures are available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

The FreeBSD 8.4 Release Schedule can be viewed here. The final release should not be far away now.

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BSDTalk interview with Kris Moore (PC-BSD)

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Gerard

BSDTalk has a 12 minutes interview with Kris Moore (BSDTalk225) about PC-BSD, recorded at BSDCan 2013. Listen to the podcast as MP3 or OGG.

Previous interviews with Kris Moore can be found here:

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PC-BSD, a friendly first-time contributor project

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Gerard

IT World has identified 7 open source projects that are friendly to the first-time contributor to get their teeth in.

Apart from LibreOffice, PostgreSQL and Ubuntu, IT World also shortlists PC-BSD:

“If Ubuntu sounds interesting, but you want something a little off the beaten path, Dru Lavigne, Director of Community Development at iXsystems, recommends PC-BSD. Based on FreeBSD (which is based on BSD UNIX), PC-BSD is a relatively young desktop operating system funded by iXsystems.

Lavigne says that the PC-BSD Users Handbook makes it easy to get up to speed.

“A whole chapter of the User Handbook is dedicated to the various ways one can get started contributing to the project,”

she says. If documentation is your thing, simply create a wiki account, and get started.

“Editors review and discuss changes to help the writer clearly explain the concepts they are writing about,”

Lavigne explains.

If you’re not ready to dive right in to PC-BSD yet, the forums and IRC channel can help you get familiar with the project community.

“The project and its regular contributors work hard to keep the atmosphere friendly, nip inappropriate behaviour in the bud, and provide an area where users are comfortable helping each other,”

Lavigne says.”

It’s great to see PC-BSD shortlisted. Read the whole article here:

7 open source projects to cut your teeth on (and the ones to avoid) (itworld)

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freebsdnews.net: 6 years today

Posted on May 17, 2013 by Gerard

freebsdnews.net started exactly 6 years ago on 17 May 2007 with the post What is cooking for FreeBSD (7)?

I had never thought the site would make it 6 years, but thanks to feedback, suggestions and contributions from quite a number of you readers, I’ve been encouraged to keep it up and as a result it’s still here.

It has been a good journey so far and it has been great to see FreeBSD develop so much over these years, from 7.0 to 10-current.

Let me know how the site can be improved (I’m thinking of a new theme) or if you have any other suggestions.

Posted in FreeBSD | 1 Comment

F# on FreeBSD

Posted on May 16, 2013 by Gerard

F# (pronounced F Sharp) is an open source, functional-first programming language which empowers users and organisations to tackle complex computing problems with simple, maintainable and robust code. It was released by Microsoft and is used in a wide range of application areas and is available across multiple platforms.

F# has recently been made F# more readily available on FreeBSD:

Since my original post, I’ve been contacted by a few people who wanted to try F# on FreeBSD but didn’t know how to set it up (or who ran into trouble when they tried). So, I spent a couple of hours last weekend writing up detailed instructions for installing Mono 3.0, F# 3.0, and emacs on FreeBSD, and they’re now available on fsharp.org.

I tested the instructions on a fresh installation of FreeBSD 9.1-RELEASE (32-bit) in VirtualBox on 64-bit Windows 7, and everything worked as it should. If you try the instructions — and you should :) — and run into problems, please start a new thread here on the mailing list and I’ll help you get it fixed. (In this case, conversing on the mailing list is preferable so the solution is available to everyone.) (src)

If you’re interested in installing and using F# on FreeBSD, have a look at the F# FreeBSD page with all the steps you need to take.

I had never heard of it till today. But I’m not a programmer ;-) More information on F# can be found here :

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FreeBSD Status Report – 2013-Q1

Posted on May 13, 2013 by Gerard

The FreeBSD Project has released its first status report for 2013 (January to March 2013). It comes with 31 entries and gives a nice insight on what developers have been working on.

From the table of contents:

Continue reading →

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