Below you will find some links to recent news articles and blog posts relating to FreeBSD, it’s development and future that I hadn’t linked to yet. If you’re anything else noteworthy, please let us know.
Google says ‘Go’ to new programming language
Binaries have been released for Windows, Linux, FreeBSD and OS X. Google announced the first stable release of its new programming language — dubbed “Go“. More.
HowTo: nForce2 sound on FreeBSD
I finally got around to replace the northbridge fan of my ABIT AN-7 powered desktop and with it boot its old FreeBSD 7.4-STABLE install. Though I have a Creative SoundBlaster Audigy 4 I wanted to make sure I could go by with just the motherboard’s nForce2 integrated sound system, so I’ll explain how to enable the nForce2 sound on FreeBSD.
Installing NRPE on FreeBSD 9.0
NRPE is an addon that allows you to execute plugins on remote Linux/Unix hosts. This is useful if you need to monitor local resources/attributes like disk usage, CPU load, memory usage, etc. on a remote host.
With FreeBSD, there are at least two advantages to installing NRPE from the official FreeBSD ports.
First, the source code file in FreeBSD ports is already modified to work with FreeBSD. Second, FreeBSD ports contains many FreeBSD-specific plugins that can be used with the FreeBSD version of NRPE. More
FUSE For FreeBSD Nearing Completion
Porting FUSE to a FreeBSD kernel module has been a long-time coming. The FreeBSD FUSE kernel module port originally began as a Google Summer of Code project, but it wasn’t successful. In 2011, work on the port was restored via another year with Google Summer of Code, but at the end of the summer the FreeBSD FUSE implementation was still unstable and suffered data corruption issues. Now it seems that FreeBSD FUSE is finally getting hacked into shape and may be committed in the coming days. More
Cambridge’s Capsicum Framework Promises Efficient Security For UNIX/ChromeOS
“Communications of the ACM is carrying two articles promoting the Capsicum security model developed by Robert Watson (FreeBSD — Cambridge) and Ben Laurie (Apache/OpenSSL, ChromeOS — Google) for thin-client operating systems such as ChromeOS. They demonstrate how Chrome web browser sandboxing using Capsicum is not only stronger, but also requires only 100 lines of code, vs 22,000 lines of code on Windows! FreeBSD 9.0 shipped with experimental Capsicum support, OpenBSD has patches, and Google has developed a Linux prototype.”
While the ACM’s stories are both paywalled, the Capsicum project itself has quite a bit of information online in the form of various papers and a video, as well as links to (BSD-licensed) code and to various subprojects. (via)
Debian: kFreeBSD 9.0 Kernel Competing Against Linux 3.2
The Debian GNU/kFreeBSD project has been quite interesting as one of the official Debian operating system ports. Debian GNU/kFreeBSD pairs the FreeBSD kernel with the Debian GNU user-land so that users can enjoy their traditional Debian applications while taking advantage of the FreeBSD kernel. With the recently released FreeBSD 9.0 kernel having worked its way into Debian Wheezy, how is the FreeBSD 9.0 kernel performance compared to the Linux 3.2 kernel? This Phoronix article provides those benchmarks and this one on OpenBenchmarks.
GhostBSD 2.5 Review
GhostBSD is a desktop distribution based on FreeBSD. It comes as an installable Live DVD image and is developed by Eric Turgeon and Nahuel Sanchez. The latest edition, GhostBSD 2.5, based on FreeBSD 9, is the project’s fourth release, and was made available for public download on January 24 (2012).
This article provides the first review of this distribution on this website, and it is based on test installations of the 32-bit version.
This article provides the first review of this distribution on this website, and it is based on test installations of the 32-bit version. The boot menu is shown below.
