I have started to share news and information on the Google+ social network. I find the Google+ interface nicer and easier to update and follow than Facebook’s and Twitter’s. And, the privacy settings are more transparant and better than Facebook’s.
Anyway, if you’re on Google+ you can follow me at gplus.to/gvanessen. If you want to join G+ and want an invite, drop me a line.
Below some links to some FreeBSD resourses that you guys may be interested in, and other BSD related items I’ve come across.
FreeBSD
DragonFlyBSD
OpenBSD
As a company we are very dedicated to what we do because we are “forced” to use our operating system of choice and we want our customers to be as happy as we are at using it :-)
So our paid job is hacking on and deploying, maintaining, supporting… OpenBSD installations. We are also required to hack on things that can be merged back into OpenBSD itself and when it’s not possible, then we change what we did so that it can be. Of course some developments are very specific to what we do and have no place in the project’s CVS tree.
So, amongst other services, we set up and maintain several 100% OpenBSD-based infrastructures (going from the entry site firewall to the secretary’s workstation) and this is what I’m going to talk about here. Continues
BSD Certification
The BSD Certification Group (BSDCG) announced today that it has partnered with Schroeder Measurement Technologies (SMT) to increase the geographic availability of BSD certification exams. Through its sister company, Iso-Quality Testing (IQT), SMT maintains a testing center network of carefully selected partners, including college/university testing centers and computer-related businesses to provide testing services in a secure, proctored environment. Testing centers are available in over 300 cities in 19 countries. (full press release)
Google has announced today that the following FreeBSD related projects have been accepted for the annual Google Summer of Code (2011).
With 17 approved projects, FreeBSD is one of the Top 10 supported projects.
Well done, to everyone who got in.
As most of you will be aware, BSDCan is one of the major annual BSD conferences, and Google sponsors development of the 5 big BSD’s each year in the Summer of Code. More info with regards to these events below.
BSDCan 2011
BSD Talk has a 15 minutes interview with Dan Langille, the organiser of BSDCan 2011, wherein they chat about the upcoming BSDCan conference: BSDTalk 203 – BSDCan and PGCon with Dan Langille
The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit the (PDF) Travel Grant Request Application by April 15, 2011 to apply for this grant.
This program is open to FreeBSD developers of all sorts (kernel hackers, documentation authors, bugbusters, system administrators, etc). In some cases we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates. Read further
Google Summer of Code 2011
Google Announces Summer of Code Accepted Projects
Google has announced the accepted projects list for its 2011 Google Summer of Code (GSOC) Program. Accepted Projects can be viewed on this page. FreeBSD is among them. If you want to take part, check out the FreeBSD GSoC ideas page.
Grazer Linuxtag 2011
FH Joanneum Graz, Graz, Austria –
The Grazer Linuxtag is a one day event (09 April 2011, FH Joanneum Graz, Graz, Austria) on Linux and free software in general. Besides a FreeBSD booth and the possibility to take the BSDA certification exam there will also be a BSD Bootcamp with live workshops covering different FreeBSD topics. More information can be found here.
Shortly after Google Chrome was released, I was excited to find out that Ben Laurie was porting Google Chrome/Chromium to FreeBSD. This is in my opinion the best web browser available (I know, it’s subjective). It’s light-weight, secure and extendible.
The only thing that has cast a bit of a shadow on the Chromium porting project was thehybrid licensing model, where paying subscribers have access to the latest builds, and non-paying individuals can download an older/out-of-date version.
In itself there’s nothing wrong with this licensing model, but you’d expect that more with closed source and proprietary software. Chrome/Chromium is free and therefore any ported versions should be free too, IMO, as long as Google’s EULA is adhered to.
Due to some issues a new port (www/ports/chromium) maintainer has been appointed, i.e. Rene Ladan.
“However complete and obstinate disregard to the security vulnerabilities of the version in the ports tree, including refusal to even document them contradicts the idea of maintainership as the community understands it and as it is documented.” (source)
We wish Rene the best and we hope to see Chromium 8 that was released last week ported to FreeBSD (current version in ports is version 6).
FreeBSD 6.4 and 8.0 EoLs coming soon
On November 30th, FreeBSD 6.4 and FreeBSD 8.0 will have reached their End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Since FreeBSD 6.4 is the last remaining supported release from the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch, support for the FreeBSD 6.x stable branch will also cease at the same point. Users of either of these FreeBSD releases are strongly encouraged to upgrade to either FreeBSD 7.3 or FreeBSD 8.1 before that date.
The FreeBSD Ports Management Team wishes to remind users that November 30 is also the end of support for the Ports Collection for both FreeBSD 6.4 RELEASE and the FreeBSD 6.x STABLE branch. Neither the infrastructure nor individual ports are guaranteed to work on these FreeBSD versions after that date. A CVS tag will be created for users who cannot upgrade for some reason, at which time these users are advised to stop tracking the latest ports CVS repository and use the RELEASE_6_EOL tag instead. (source)
FreeBSD at GSoC Mentor Summit
As in previous years, Google held a “Mentor Summit” to bring together representatives from the open source organizations that participated in the Google Summer of Code to share experiences of what worked, what didn’t, and generally learn from each other about shepherding students through the program. The mentor summit is always run Unconference-style and it is a great opportunity to meet, learn, and socialize with the many other open source organization… continues (Murray’s FreeBSD Notes)
FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love
“The good news, however, is that the FreeBSD Foundation is willing to finance a developer to work on bringing kernel mode-setting and Graphics Execution Manager support over to the FreeBSD kernel.”
Source & full story: FreeBSD Will Pay for Some KMS, GEM Love (phoronix.com)
Why I Love Unix
I love Unix because of all the wonderful things that I can do on the command line. When I first used Unix in 1983, it was love on first sight. With a list of the most basic commands by my side, I quickly discovered how much I could accomplish with several command strings strung together. Unix was nothing like what I’d been using up to that point in my brief data processing career. It was clever, modular and logical. With tools like grep and languages like awk, it was quite a bit of fun to discover how easily I could make the system do my bid. My ability to capture sequences of commands easily into scripts made it possible for me to encapsulate my clever commands, even share them with coworkers. The Unix culture seemed innovative, inviting my participation in creating an environment that really worked for me.
Full blog post: Why I love UNIX (itworld.com)
Other BSD related news
Ruben from the FreeBSD Chromium porting team emailed me to say that for this week only the latest Chromium 7.0 for FreeBSD subscriber builds will be available for free (excluding HTML 5 video).
The subscriber builds are largely open source and funded by a hybrid model. If you like what you see, you may consider subscribing to the weekly builds and fund further development on this port.
Download Chromium 7 for FreeBSD 8 (i386 – amd64) or FreeBSD 9 (amd64)
Chromium is an open-source browser project that aims to build a safer, faster, and more stable way for all users to experience the web. This site contains design documents, architecture overviews, testing information, and more to help you learn to build and work with the Chromium source code.
Edwin Groothuis created a FreeBSD iPhone app that provides general information about FreeBSD, news, upcoming events, videos from YouTube (BSD conference) and so on. May be useful if you have an iPhone.
But the FreeBSD community is larger than just a map of the committers. There is a Newsflash on the website so you can see what is happening inside the project, there is a list of events related to (Free)BSD on the website, there is of course Planet FreeBSD, an aggregator of the various blogs of people related to the FreeBSD Project and there are videos of conferences on YouTube.
Put all together in a small app which collects all that data and presents it to the person holding the iPhone et voila, the FreeBSD Project app is here. (source)
Personally I don’t like the iPhone (concept), and I’m looking forward to a Android alternative ;-)
When Google first unveiled its WebM project, there were quite some concerns over its license. This license was incompatible with version 2 and 3 of the GPL, and was effectively a new license, causing unnecessary confusion. Google has now cleared everything up by switching to a regular BSD license.
The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone. The WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Adobe, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors.
The original license for the WebM project had a clause that if you brought patent action against Google, the patent license was terminated. This isn’t unusual in open source licenses (the second Apache license and version 3 of the GPL have something similar), but the WebM license had an additional problem.
“The twist was that ours terminated ‘any’ rights and not just rights to the patents, which made our license GPLv3 and GPLv2 incompatible,” explains Google’s Chris DiBona, “Also, in doing this, we effectively created a potentially new open source copyright license, something we are loath to do.”
They’ve resolved the issue by decoupling patents from copyright, meaning the copyright part is now a pure BSD license. They’ve used “patent language borrowed from both the Apache and GPLv3 patent clauses” for their own patent clause. They’re no longer creating a new license, and the patent clause can stand on its own. Additionally, they have updated the patent grant language to make it clear that it includes the right to modify the code and give it away to others.
It’s good to see that Google is making the internet more open and making multimedia patent free.
(via)
The FreeBSD Project received many applications from students wanting to participate in Google’s Summer of Code program. This year 18 student proposals to work with the FreeBSD Project were accepted as part of this program.
For those with projects that were not accepted this year, the FreeBSD Project is always willing to help mentor students so they can learn more about operating system development through our normal community mailing lists and development forums. The FreeBSD Foundation can also be approached for project funding.
Read the official announcement (FreeBSD GSoC) for more information. The complete list of student projects selected for funding can be found in the FreeBSD Summer of Code wiki.