Editorial

Chris Coleman <chrisc@vmunix.com>

I spent the weekend in Oregon camping out in the wilderness. We drove nine hours to hike up in the forest and camp beside a large stream. It was an American holiday, so I finally decided to take some time off and get out of the office. It's almost been a year since I was laid off my previous job and started working full time for Dæmon News, and I hadn't taken any time off since then. We were meeting some old friends I hadn't seen in several years. I didn't even take my laptop, not that there was any power out there to charge it up. ;-)

As we hiked along the mountain ridges, I found I had quite a bit of time to think. Working your muscles leaves your brain pretty much idle. I spent some of those idle cycles thinking about the progress we have made promoting BSD. When we started the online ezine, we didn't realize how much work this would turn out to be. You put a lot more work into your own company compared to working for someone else. Not because you dislike working for someone else (well that may be true for some jobs), but because there usually isn't anyone else to do the work. These last few weeks have kept us very busy. We released NetBSD 1.5.3 on CDs, and included a third CD from Puget Sound Technology that has a few nice features. Below is the description of the CD:

The Live CD for NetBSD 1.5.3 from Puget Sound Technology is a stand-alone complete operating system that runs from memory. It includes XFree86 with various configurations for common video hardware and numerous software for demonstrating NetBSD and open source software, network troubleshooting, security auditing, and system and hard-disk recovery. The bootable CD can be used for surfing the web, presentations, teaching classes, and as a temporary web, FTP, mail, DNS, SSH, and DHCP server, IPv6 or SSL tunnel, and as a firewall and NAT router on uninstalled hardware. Some of the popular software includes AbiWord, thttpd, Ethereal, IceWM, Blackbox, The GIMP, Postfix, Ghostview, Perl, Ogg Vorbis, VNC, Mozilla (and Galeon), Links, Python, and a lot more. It needs over 28 MB of memory to be useful.

As we hiked and looked out at the jagged rocks and steep dropoffs, a second realization set in. Not only had I personally been putting a lot of time into the company, but the company as a whole has been doing an extreme amount of work with BSD products and services. I just mentioned the latest two products that we put to CD; however, we have been doing that almost every month. Either we add a new product/service to the mall, or we produce a CD run for a newly released BSD version. It's not that I didn't know we were doing this; I just hadn't really stepped back and thought about the magnitude of what we had accomplished in the past year. A year ago, we weren't really producing any of our own CDs, except Darwin, and now we are designing retail boxes for most of them. It's a very big change. It has taken a lot of work, but we feel it's important since in many cases we are filling in gaps that wouldn't otherwise get noticed.

It has made for quite a hectic office, but it's been a lot of fun and we really enjoy building up BSD and the business in the process. As I look into the near future, it doesn't slow down any. We have new services we are launching and more CD runs to produce.

Our goal is to provide all the services necessary for people to take BSD seriously in a corporate environment. This would also include most of the things necessary to use BSD as a desktop computer and for personal use. We have quite a way to go, but given our level of activity, we are certainly making progress. Basically, we are growing as fast as money, time and manpower allow.

So, expect more announcements from us in the next couple of months. We have a lot of good things in the works. As always, let us know your opinions, or better yet volunteer. ;-) Most of what we do is driven by volunteers.