Daemon News 199908 : BSD News

BSD News

News & Releases

NetBSD current snapshot

NetBSD now offers a daily updated snapshot of the current NetBSD release sources. This is currently the `netbsd-1-4' branch. The directory ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release contains the extracted sources plus weekly updated tar files. these files are created in a similar manner to those in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current directory.
A new sup collection called `release' has been created. inside this new collection are the same SUP releases you can find in the `current' collection, excluding the `doc', `pkgsrc' and `xsrc' SUP releases, as these source have not in the past been branched for a NetBSD release.
Furthermore has the NetBSD source tree now been made available via AnonCVS, in addition to the other distribution methods. The server supports CVS in "pserver" mode, as well as CVS via SSH, which catches NetBSD up to OpenBSD (which originated AnonCVS) and FreeBSD.

New JDK1.1.8 for FreeBSD

The JDK1.1.8 has been re-rolled in July to fix a couple of minor (but annoying bugs). First, the netpatch was incorporated into the build, and second an annoying Floating Point bug was found and fixed. The latter bug affected multi-threaded code that did floating point calculations and based on the code could produce completely bogus results.

FreeBSD joint RC5-64 effort

Team FreeBSD member stats can now be found on-line. Team FreeBSD is a distributed effort by FreeBSD supporters worldwide to crack the RC5-64 encryption code. The RC5-64 "Bovine" effort is coordinated by distributed.net. The "Bovine" RC5-64 client uses your CPU's idle time to compute and test keys. Do you have some spare CPU cycles while your computer is idling away you might consider joining them - unless your computer is looking for aliens :-) The NetBSD community are also cracking primes and looking for little green men.

NetBSD integrates IPv6 support from KAME

NetBSD now supports the emerging standard for IP version 6, AKA IPng. Code for this was imported from the KAME Project. To enable IPv6, compile a kernel from the GENERIC.v6 config file, or include "options INET6" for the bare minimum IPv6 support. For a listing of new programs available with this code integration, see the KAME web site. KAME Project is a joint effort of seven companies in Japan to provide a free IPv6/IPsec stack for BSD variants to the world.

Business Solutions Depot - BSDmall

The BSDmall has been established to serve the BSD/internet reseller community as the central source of products for Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Apache their applications and supported hardware. This site will become operational on August 1, 1999. This site will be marketing oriented and will have special promotions on various products regularly.

BSDi 4.0.1 available for evaluation

Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) is the commercial supplier of the BSD/OS originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley. They have now made evaluation CD's available for those who want to test their Internet Super Server in up to 60 days. You need to register at their site to recieve a CD as it is not available for download.

XFree86 3.3.4 and pre4.0 released

The last release of XFree86 was 3.3.3.1 back in January 1999. As planned, the source for 3.3.4 is now released. This release include some new hardware support and some bug fixes. The new hardware supported include: Intel i740 (from Precision Insight/Red Hat), SiS 530 and 620, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3, Trident Blade3D, S3 Trio3D. As no binaries are currently released you might want to wait for 3.3.5 which is slated for release within a couple of weeks as some late change which didn't reach the 3.3.4 in time will be incorporated
Furthermore a snapshot labeled 3.9.15 is made available for people who want to play around with the upcoming 4.0. This version is a complete rewrite of the XFree code including some new features such as support for TrueType Fonts (TTF), 3D and better performance.
The future release plans are now made public for those of you who are interested in following the development closely.
OpenBSD has already integrated Xfree86 3.3.4 in their X11 tree.

KDE in progress

Among the continuously progress made by the KDE Team an important step for wide acceptance has been made. Werner Trobin has implemented an OLE-stream decoder for KOffice. This is a big step towards decoding Microsoft Office documents and will be of great use to developers currently working on MS Office import filters. It will be a much easier task to convince users to go to another platform if they can preserve their documents and still be able to exchange them with other MS Office users--something that even Microsoft has a (deliberate?) hard time with when going between versions.

Users Losing Faith In Netscape Browser?

According to ComputerWorld users are losing faith to Netscape. Corporate users should be more biased towards Microsoft Internet Explorer as it should give a more coherent integration on the Windows platform. Unclear signals from Netscape concerning the next release of their Communicator browser hasn't helped this situation. This might though just be some FUD as Netscape as of today still is the most widespread crossplatform webbrowser.

Java implementation of Active Server Pages (ASP)

Halcyon Software has released their new Instant ASP which brings ASP to virtually any platform. Though *BSD as of yet isn't on the Supported platforms list it should run on a BSD box without much ado as it is written in Java. Until now ASP has mainly been known as the "trademark" of the Microsoft Internet Information Server but this reign could be over with Instant ASP which delivers the same functionality and more to a wide range of platforms. As ASP has grown very popular there have been made several attempts to port it to Unix system but this would be the first unified framework across a large number of platforms.

BSD - In writing...

The Net's stealth operating system

In a MSNBC on-line article, Bob Sullivan looks at the four *BSDs and suggests that they may be on the verge of making "a Linux-like leap to the forefront". In making the inevitable comparison to Linux, Sullivan also mentions the flame mail Daemon News columnist Wes Peters raised with "A Tale of Two Systems" (Daemon News, July 1999). As usual with such articles conspiracy theories appear and suggest that it might just be an attempt to spread propaganda to splinter opposition to Microsoft. The religous shadow never seems to leave the "war" of Operating Systems.
After the artcile was published Jordan K. Hubbard wrote some corrections to the article which was released to the FreeBSD Advocacy mailing list.

Free OS? It' s as easy as BSD

Network Week has an article on FreeBSD which outlines some of the differences between FreeBSD, Linux, SCO and Solaris. Peter McGarvey who wrote this article has through the last couple of years been playing around with several different operating systems. He admits that FreeBSD is his favourite but with that in mind he still manages to give a fairly openminded comparison between the systems which is seldom seen. Are you considering to try out another operating system this article will be worth reading.

BSD on the FM dial

KAMU FM had a feature in The GigABytes Radio Talk Show on Linux and BSD in late June. Chris DiBona was interviewed on Linux and Jordan K. Hubbard on BSD. The rest of us also has a chance to listen to this show as it has been made available in RealAudio. A true BSD geek might have a hard time sitting through the Linux stuff but it's worth listening through to the end.

NetBSD names

Nathan Williams takes over from Gordon Ross, who was the sun3 port maintainer for several years. Jeremy Cooper will remain in his current position as maintainer of code related to the sun3x architecture.
NetBSD/alpha now supports the new generation of systems based on the 21264 CPU. Supported systems now include the 264DP, XP1000, DS20, and others. This work was supported by Alpha Processor, Inc.
Matthew Green has retired as the NetBSD security officer. From the 1st of July the officer has been Erik Fair.
Izumi Tsutsui has an experimental port to SONY's m68k based "NET WORK STATION" machines. Currently it will boot to multi user using serial console and diskless NFS root.
Jeff Rizzo has contributed documentation on using the Lucent WaveLAN IEEE wireless network care under NetBSD.

Embedded BSD

Berkeley Software Design's embedded edition of their commercial BSD is gaining recognition in the market. A very positive article has recently appeared on the Performance Computing website underlining the advantages in embedded BSD. It especially focuses on BSD's networking strengths and packet filtering. Read more in the article Embed Together: The Case For BSD In Network Appliances

CGI Benchmark

Chip Turner has done a little benchmarking between Linux 2.2.10 and FreeBSD 3.2. Though they are very close FreeBSD is better at flat html and lags a bit behind on cgi scripts. When looking closer into things it though appears this test used a local loopback adapter instead of separate client machines. The test scripts are available for download so you would be able to your own testing.

Yes! There is intelligent life beyond Linux

David Cartwright has asked himself in this NetworkWeek article whether there are any intelligent life outside the much hyped Linux community. In his column he admittedly often put much focus on Linux as it is the OS with most attention. In this article he softens this image a little by giving people a short introduction to FreeBSD.

I don't do windows

David S. Jackson has made a nice article on FreeBSD in the ComputerEdge Online. It's a good article which outline some of the advantages of BSD. It supposedly also covers some of the disadvantages of BSD but after reading the article you might have a feeling that he has been biased :-)

Daniel Sobral on Open Source

Daniel Sobral has written a very good discussion on BSD vs. Linux with a very good introduction on how to get started with BSD. Along with some good points he gives directions where to find information needed to install FreeBSD and how to avoid a few caveats. This discussion is especially useful to send to your Linux friends who might consider giving BSD a try.

Press Releases

FreeBSD delivering up 100 million hits per day!

pair Networks has just made a press release telling the world about how they have achieved their new milestone of hosting 60.000 Web Sites based entirely on FreeBSD. Their data center which supplies hosting services for more than 145 countries houses more than 2 Terabytes of storage. pair Networks is among others hosting such well known services as Tom's Hardware Guide and SimTel. The reason for running BSD is as they say: "which run the stable and powerful FreeBSD operating system in order to ensure maximum uptime and reliability.". With headlines like this should no executives have any problem integrating BSD in their corporate infrastructure.

Apache goes Inc.

The Apache Group well known for the Apache Webserver has made tighter bands with commercial world. The 30th of June they made a press release announcing the new Apache Software Foundation. Part of this foundation is several of the well-known companies and institutions who are known to have supported Apache in the past such as IBM Corporation, O'Reilly and Associates and University of California, Irvine.
The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects. Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and financial support, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source projects

SCO GPLs OSAR

It seems like release "genuine" original unix code to the Open Source Community. They have hired Starnix Inc. to clean out any proprietary code from the System V sar code. This will in a short while lead to the release of the OSAR Open System Activity Reporter code.
It will be split up into two parts. One part being libmas which will be a low-level stub which will be a kernel specific interface - and the other part sar as the actual portable software for use by users and other programs.

Conventions, Conferences and fairs

Usenix conferences

Berkeley, CA, USA - July 19 - The USENIX Association announced the call for papers for the USENIX 2000 technical conference and the Freenix track. The Freenix track is open to papers advancing the state of the art in free software. The deadline for submissions is November 29, 1999. The conference is to be held June 18-23 in San Diego, CA.
Another conference concerning security is held August 23-26, 1999 in Washington, DC, USA.

Articles

German c't magazine on ipsec and OpenBSD

The German computer magazine c't (16-1999) has just had an article dealing with ipsec in general and especially FreeS/WAN. A text box entitled: "Brothers and sisters - free VPNs besides Linux" had the following on OpenBSD: "OpenBSD - Another BSD-brand of Unix is OpenBSD. This operating system includes an IKE-implementation by default, which is also available in source code. You can learn more about it at www.openbsd.org.". To our knowledge this magazine is though only available in german.

Are portals slaves to Windows?

Java and JavaScripting is getting more widespread throughout the the web. There is though a tendency to go with more proprietary technologies. ActiveX has been a choice for many sites as Internet Explorer seems to be the most popular browser for the MS Windows platform currently. This c|net article though demonstrates that the portability of code between platforms is getting more into focus.

Is Microsoft interfering new OS development?

Consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader states in a c|net article that "Microsoft uses its market power to discourage PC manufacturers from offering computers with non-Microsoft products, including non-Microsoft operating systems," the letter charges. "There exist several promising non-Microsoft alternatives, including free software such as GNU/Linux or Free BSD, or new systems like BeOS.". This has made him send a letter to Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein urging the Justice Department to investigate "barriers to entry faced by alternative operating systems" other than Microsoft's Windows, including free software.

	BSD News News & Releases NetBSD current snapshot NetBSD now offers a daily updated snapshot of the current NetBSD release sources. This is currently the `netbsd-1-4' branch. The directory ftp.netbsd.org:/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release contains the extracted sources plus weekly updated tar files. these files are created in a similar manner to those in the /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-current directory. A new sup collection called `release' has been created. inside this new collection are the same SUP releases you can find in the `current' collection, excluding the `doc', `pkgsrc' and `xsrc' SUP releases, as these source have not in the past been branched for a NetBSD release. Furthermore has the NetBSD source tree now been made available via AnonCVS, in addition to the other distribution methods. The server supports CVS in "pserver" mode, as well as CVS via SSH, which catches NetBSD up to OpenBSD (which originated AnonCVS) and FreeBSD. New JDK1.1.8 for FreeBSD The JDK1.1.8 has been re-rolled in July to fix a couple of minor (but annoying bugs). First, the netpatch was incorporated into the build, and second an annoying Floating Point bug was found and fixed. The latter bug affected multi-threaded code that did floating point calculations and based on the code could produce completely bogus results. FreeBSD joint RC5-64 effort Team FreeBSD member stats can now be found on-line. Team FreeBSD is a distributed effort by FreeBSD supporters worldwide to crack the RC5-64 encryption code. The RC5-64 "Bovine" effort is coordinated by distributed.net. The "Bovine" RC5-64 client uses your CPU's idle time to compute and test keys. Do you have some spare CPU cycles while your computer is idling away you might consider joining them - unless your computer is looking for aliens :-) The NetBSD community are also cracking primes and looking for little green men. NetBSD integrates IPv6 support from KAME NetBSD now supports the emerging standard for IP version 6, AKA IPng. Code for this was imported from the KAME Project. To enable IPv6, compile a kernel from the GENERIC.v6 config file, or include "options INET6" for the bare minimum IPv6 support. For a listing of new programs available with this code integration, see the KAME web site. KAME Project is a joint effort of seven companies in Japan to provide a free IPv6/IPsec stack for BSD variants to the world. Business Solutions Depot - BSDmall The BSDmall has been established to serve the BSD/internet reseller community as the central source of products for Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDi), FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, Apache their applications and supported hardware. This site will become operational on August 1, 1999. This site will be marketing oriented and will have special promotions on various products regularly. BSDi 4.0.1 available for evaluation Berkeley Software Design, Inc. (BSDI) is the commercial supplier of the BSD/OS originally developed at the University of California, Berkeley. They have now made evaluation CD's available for those who want to test their Internet Super Server in up to 60 days. You need to register at their site to recieve a CD as it is not available for download. XFree86 3.3.4 and pre4.0 released The last release of XFree86 was 3.3.3.1 back in January 1999. As planned, the source for 3.3.4 is now released. This release include some new hardware support and some bug fixes. The new hardware supported include: Intel i740 (from Precision Insight/Red Hat), SiS 530 and 620, 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee and Voodoo 3, Trident Blade3D, S3 Trio3D. As no binaries are currently released you might want to wait for 3.3.5 which is slated for release within a couple of weeks as some late change which didn't reach the 3.3.4 in time will be incorporated Furthermore a snapshot labeled 3.9.15 is made available for people who want to play around with the upcoming 4.0. This version is a complete rewrite of the XFree code including some new features such as support for TrueType Fonts (TTF), 3D and better performance. The future release plans are now made public for those of you who are interested in following the development closely. OpenBSD has already integrated Xfree86 3.3.4 in their X11 tree. KDE in progress Among the continuously progress made by the KDE Team an important step for wide acceptance has been made. Werner Trobin has implemented an OLE-stream decoder for KOffice. This is a big step towards decoding Microsoft Office documents and will be of great use to developers currently working on MS Office import filters. It will be a much easier task to convince users to go to another platform if they can preserve their documents and still be able to exchange them with other MS Office users--something that even Microsoft has a (deliberate?) hard time with when going between versions. Users Losing Faith In Netscape Browser? According to ComputerWorld users are losing faith to Netscape. Corporate users should be more biased towards Microsoft Internet Explorer as it should give a more coherent integration on the Windows platform. Unclear signals from Netscape concerning the next release of their Communicator browser hasn't helped this situation. This might though just be some FUD as Netscape as of today still is the most widespread crossplatform webbrowser. Java implementation of Active Server Pages (ASP) Halcyon Software has released their new Instant ASP which brings ASP to virtually any platform. Though BSD as of yet isn't on the Supported platforms list it should run on a BSD box without much ado as it is written in Java. Until now ASP has mainly been known as the "trademark" of the Microsoft Internet Information Server but this reign could be over with Instant ASP which delivers the same functionality and more to a wide range of platforms. As ASP has grown very popular there have been made several attempts to port it to Unix system but this would be the first unified framework across a large number of platforms. BSD - In writing... The Net's stealth operating system In a MSNBC on-line article, Bob Sullivan looks at the four BSDs and suggests that they may be on the verge of making "a Linux-like leap to the forefront". In making the inevitable comparison to Linux, Sullivan also mentions the flame mail Daemon News columnist Wes Peters raised with "A Tale of Two Systems" (Daemon News, July 1999). As usual with such articles conspiracy theories appear and suggest that it might just be an attempt to spread propaganda to splinter opposition to Microsoft. The religous shadow never seems to leave the "war" of Operating Systems. After the artcile was published Jordan K. Hubbard wrote some corrections to the article which was released to the FreeBSD Advocacy mailing list. Free OS? It' s as easy as BSD Network Week has an article on FreeBSD which outlines some of the differences between FreeBSD, Linux, SCO and Solaris. Peter McGarvey who wrote this article has through the last couple of years been playing around with several different operating systems. He admits that FreeBSD is his favourite but with that in mind he still manages to give a fairly openminded comparison between the systems which is seldom seen. Are you considering to try out another operating system this article will be worth reading. BSD on the FM dial KAMU FM had a feature in The GigABytes Radio Talk Show on Linux and BSD in late June. Chris DiBona was interviewed on Linux and Jordan K. Hubbard on BSD. The rest of us also has a chance to listen to this show as it has been made available in RealAudio. A true BSD geek might have a hard time sitting through the Linux stuff but it's worth listening through to the end. NetBSD names Nathan Williams takes over from Gordon Ross, who was the sun3 port maintainer for several years. Jeremy Cooper will remain in his current position as maintainer of code related to the sun3x architecture. NetBSD/alpha now supports the new generation of systems based on the 21264 CPU. Supported systems now include the 264DP, XP1000, DS20, and others. This work was supported by Alpha Processor, Inc. Matthew Green has retired as the NetBSD security officer. From the 1st of July the officer has been Erik Fair. Izumi Tsutsui has an experimental port to SONY's m68k based "NET WORK STATION" machines. Currently it will boot to multi user using serial console and diskless NFS root. Jeff Rizzo has contributed documentation on using the Lucent WaveLAN IEEE wireless network care under NetBSD. Embedded BSD Berkeley Software Design's embedded edition of their commercial BSD is gaining recognition in the market. A very positive article has recently appeared on the Performance Computing website underlining the advantages in embedded BSD. It especially focuses on BSD's networking strengths and packet filtering. Read more in the article Embed Together: The Case For BSD In Network Appliances CGI Benchmark Chip Turner has done a little benchmarking between Linux 2.2.10 and FreeBSD 3.2. Though they are very close FreeBSD is better at flat html and lags a bit behind on cgi scripts. When looking closer into things it though appears this test used a local loopback adapter instead of separate client machines. The test scripts are available for download so you would be able to your own testing. Yes! There is intelligent life beyond Linux David Cartwright has asked himself in this NetworkWeek article whether there are any intelligent life outside the much hyped Linux community. In his column he admittedly often put much focus on Linux as it is the OS with most attention. In this article he softens this image a little by giving people a short introduction to FreeBSD. I don't do windows David S. Jackson has made a nice article on FreeBSD in the ComputerEdge Online. It's a good article which outline some of the advantages of BSD. It supposedly also covers some of the disadvantages of BSD but after reading the article you might have a feeling that he has been biased :-) Daniel Sobral on Open Source Daniel Sobral has written a very good discussion on BSD vs. Linux with a very good introduction on how to get started with BSD. Along with some good points he gives directions where to find information needed to install FreeBSD and how to avoid a few caveats. This discussion is especially useful to send to your Linux friends who might consider giving BSD a try. Press Releases FreeBSD delivering up 100 million hits per day! pair Networks has just made a press release telling the world about how they have achieved their new milestone of hosting 60.000 Web Sites based entirely on FreeBSD. Their data center which supplies hosting services for more than 145 countries houses more than 2 Terabytes of storage. pair Networks is among others hosting such well known services as Tom's Hardware Guide and SimTel. The reason for running BSD is as they say: "which run the stable and powerful FreeBSD operating system in order to ensure maximum uptime and reliability.". With headlines like this should no executives have any problem integrating BSD in their corporate infrastructure. Apache goes Inc. The Apache Group well known for the Apache Webserver has made tighter bands with commercial world. The 30th of June they made a press release announcing the new Apache Software Foundation. Part of this foundation is several of the well-known companies and institutions who are known to have supported Apache in the past such as IBM Corporation, O'Reilly and Associates and University of California, Irvine. The Apache Software Foundation provides organizational, legal, and financial support for the Apache open-source software projects. Formerly known as the Apache Group, the Foundation incorporated as a membership-based, not-for-profit corporation to ensure that the Apache projects continue to exist beyond the participation of individual volunteers, to enable contributions of intellectual property and financial support, and to provide a vehicle for limiting legal exposure while participating in open-source projects SCO GPLs OSAR It seems like release "genuine" original unix code to the Open Source Community. They have hired Starnix Inc. to clean out any proprietary code from the System V sar code. This will in a short while lead to the release of the OSAR Open System Activity Reporter code. It will be split up into two parts. One part being libmas which will be a low-level stub which will be a kernel specific interface - and the other part sar as the actual portable software for use by users and other programs. Conventions, Conferences and fairs Usenix conferences Berkeley, CA, USA - July 19 - The USENIX Association announced the call for papers for the USENIX 2000 technical conference and the Freenix track. The Freenix track is open to papers advancing the state of the art in free software. The deadline for submissions is November 29, 1999. The conference is to be held June 18-23 in San Diego, CA. Another conference concerning security is held August 23-26, 1999 in Washington, DC, USA. Articles German c't magazine on ipsec and OpenBSD The German computer magazine c't (16-1999) has just had an article dealing with ipsec in general and especially FreeS/WAN. A text box entitled: "Brothers and sisters - free VPNs besides Linux" had the following on OpenBSD: "OpenBSD - Another BSD-brand of Unix is OpenBSD. This operating system includes an IKE-implementation by default, which is also available in source code. You can learn more about it at www.openbsd.org.". To our knowledge this magazine is though only available in german. Are portals slaves to Windows? Java and JavaScripting is getting more widespread throughout the the web. There is though a tendency to go with more proprietary technologies. ActiveX has been a choice for many sites as Internet Explorer seems to be the most popular browser for the MS Windows platform currently. This c\|net article though demonstrates that the portability of code between platforms is getting more into focus. Is Microsoft interfering new OS development? Consumer-rights advocate Ralph Nader states in a c\|net article that "Microsoft uses its market power to discourage PC manufacturers from offering computers with non-Microsoft products, including non-Microsoft operating systems," the letter charges. "There exist several promising non-Microsoft alternatives, including free software such as GNU/Linux or Free BSD, or new systems like BeOS.". This has made him send a letter to Assistant Attorney General Joel Klein urging the Justice Department to investigate "barriers to entry faced by alternative operating systems" other than Microsoft's Windows, including free software.