FreeBSDNews.com

BSD Magazine goes free

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The announcement published by Michal Gladecki, the new Editor-in-Chief of BSD Magazine on the FreeBSD announcements mailing list earlier today read as follows:

“We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter atwww.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox. Also, you can now download any of the previous issues from our website. The first online issue — 2/2010 — is coming out in February. Please spread the word about BSD Magazine.”

I’m glad to see BSD Mag go free.  Hopefully, more people will read BSD Mag now and become interested the BSD branch of operating systems. However, on the other hand, if there’s little income (ads etc), how can this be maintained?

This reminds me of a Linux PDF magazine that I used to get back in 2005-06: Tux Magazine. This was very a popular online Linux magazine, but it died a sudden death due to no subscription income.

Many thanks to Lee J. Imner (www.imber.com – Secure | Reliable Networks) for notifying me.

pfSense 2.0 Beta 1

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pfsense-logoChris Buechler has announced the availability of the first beta release of pfSense 2.0, a FreeBSD-based firewall system.

Our Christmas gift to the community is the 2.0 release reaching the beta milestone. The release is feature complete, with no new features being added, and should stay relatively stable throughout the remainder of the development process.

That’s not to say it’s production-ready though, most of our developers are using it in production and have been for months, but unless you have a solid understanding of the underlying system and can manually verify the configuration, 2.0 is not yet for you. If you have a non-critical environment where you can try it out, you can find the latest build on the snapshot server.

Read the complete release announcement for further details and known issues

FreeBSD 6.3 EoL – 31 Jan 2010

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eol-end-of-lifeOn January 31st, FreeBSD 6.3 will reach its End of Life and will no longer be supported by the FreeBSD Security Team. Users of this release are strongly encouraged to upgrade to a newer release before that date — more conservative users will probably wish to upgrade to FreeBSD 6.4 or FreeBSD 7.1 (which are both extended-support branches), while others will probably wish to upgrade to FreeBSD 7.2 or FreeBSD 8.0.

The freebsd-update(8) utility can be used to upgrade i386 and amd64 systems from 6.3-RELEASE (or 6.3-RELEASE-pX for some X) to 6.4-RELEASE using binary updates (i.e., without compiling from source) as described in the 6.4-RELEASE
announcement; given an adequate internet connection, this process usually takes 15 minutes or less.

Source

Miscelaneous FreeBSD Links (Updated)

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FreeBSD 8: an evolutionary release of the unknown giant

FreeBSD 8.0 is a major release of the free UNIX descendant. Support for ZFS, jails and USB have been improved, but the release also adds new features, such as NFSv4 and Xen DomU support and some new kernel-related tools. The release notes detail these and other changes that appear in the latest FreeBSD.
Continues here

VirtualBox 3.1.2 for FreeBSD

Call for testers. and here take #2

Most Reliable Hosting Company Sites in December 2009
FreeBSD again at number 1

In the final month of 2009, Swishmail, iWeb Technologies and WestHost had the most reliable hosting company sites. All three sites responded to all but one of Netcraft’s requests throughout December.

This is Swishmail’s second consecutive appearance at the top; last month, it shared the glory with Verio. Swishmail’s website is served by nginx on FreeBSD. This New York based company specialises in business email hosting, but also offers several web hosting plans, all of which include access to a webmail client and shared calendars.

Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009
Brooks Davis recently reported on his trip to the Google Summer of Code Mentor Summit 2009.

KOffice2 for FreeBSD available

The KDE FreeBSD team is proud to announce the release of KOffice2 suite for FreeBSD.
Source

KOffice-freeBSDD

Install Zabix (howto)

Zabbix is an enterprise-class open source distributed monitoring solution. Installation instructions can be found here (translated with Google Translate)

How the FreeBSD Project’s Processes help companies build products

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George Neville-NeilGeorge Neville-Neil has written the lead article for the January 2010 issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) and the FreeBSD Foundation is the sponsor for this month’s issue. The entire issue is available as a PDF and George’s article is also available in HTML.

From the article’s abstract:

The processes that open source projects use to produce new work and maintain the quality of their code base is a subject that comes up infrequently in discussions of open source. One reason for this is that engineers and programmers are usually loathe to deal with issues that are not directly related to the piece of code or technology that they are working on.

Successful businesses know that good processes lead to continued success. The attributes that attract a business to an open source project are stability, reliability, and longevity. Stability gives a business the confidence to invest time into developing products on the project’s platform, safe in the knowledge that the next incremental step in development won’t be torpedoed by some unforeseen change. Reliability is often not associated with open source and many projects are perceived as being too cutting edge for a business to build upon. Longevity is of value as many businesses are inherently conservative in their approaches, attempting to reduce the risks of adopting any technique or technology. One way to reduce risk is to work with an open source project that has a proven track record of delivering quality products, on schedule.

This article attempts to dispel the myth of the perceived tension between a formally run business and the apparently less formally run open source projects with which a business interacts. We describe how one particular open source project has developed processes which provide its users, customers, and partners with a product that is stable, reliable, and long lived.

Read George’s articlle in full

Released: PC-BSD 8.0-BETA

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pc-bsd logo 100x100Kris Moore announced on New Year’s day the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (Hubble Edition).

Version 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

  • FreeBSD 8.0-Release
  • KDE 4.3.4
  • Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
  • Run in Live mode directly from DVD
  • Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
  • Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

Version 8.0-BETA of PC-BSD is available for download from our mirrors, and will be available shortly as bittorrent from www.gotbsd.net.

In order to prepare for 8.0-Release, please report any bugs to the Trac Database! Discussion regarding testing etc are taking place on the testing mailinglist.

Links

Dru Lavigne has finished the first draft of the Definitive Guide for PC-BSD. This book is based on PC-BSD 8 and is written for the novice user. Will keep you posted when the final paper version is published.

Happy New Year

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I wish you all, regular readers and visitors of this website, a happy and prosperous 2010.

Hopefully, we will be seeing a stronger and bigger open source software c0mmunity in general this year and an increase in the use and adoption of FreeBSD. I’m looking forward to PC-BSD 8.0 with KDE 4.4 as well (going beta very soon).

Let’s see how FreeBSD 9 is shaping up at the end of the year. Ivan Voras has started a new page with all the new stuff finding its way into FreeBSD 9 (just like he did with FreeBSD 7 and 8): What’s cooking for FreeBSD 9.

FreeBSD fund raising drive – final plea

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The FreeBSD Foundation has not reached its fund raising goal for 2009 yet ($46,000 short of their $300,000 goal). The Foundation is hoping to to double spending on development in 2010 and needs our help:

Why make a donation? Right now we’re putting together our 2010 budget. Our goal for next year is to double our project development spending, continue sponsoring BSD-related conferences, sponsor more developers to travel to these conferences, and spend more on needed equipment for the project.

I’ve made my donation this year.  You can too. You may donate to the Foundation here

Read the final plea here

The Foundation announced earlier this week it’s receiving a cheque for $500 from the Bad Code Offsets project. I’ve never heard of this project:

The project is a way to undo the bad code other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software

Read the announcement

iredmail available for FreeBSD now

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Zhang Huangbin and shake.chen contacted me to say that iRedMail is now also available for FreeBSD (working on Linux already)

iredmail is a

  • mail server solution supporting FreeBSD 7.x/8.x, support both i386 and x86_64.
  • a shell script set, used to install and configure all mail server related software automatically.
  • open source project (GPL v2).

The project’s page can be found on Google Code

Has anybody experience with iredmail, and how does it compare to other mail server solutions?