Installing OpenBSD: A Beginner's Guide (Mac PPC)
by Brad Schonhorst

The OpenBSD website is contains an extermely thorough FAQ and manual that should be any OpenBSD user's primary resource. Below I will go through a basic installation of OpenBSD 3.5 to clarify some points that might be confusing to a new OpenBSD user.

There are many ways you can get OpenBSD up and running on your machine. I will assume you are using the official OpenBSD CD set because if you aren't, you should be. The official CD's are one of the few ways to support the OpenBSD community financially.

A few things you should consider before beginning: Read More

FreeBSD 5.x and the Future
by Scott Long

The release of FreeBSD 5.3 signals the true kick-off of the 5-STABLE and 6-CURRENT series. We are very excited about this, both because 5.3 is a good release, and because 6.0 will give us a chance to, erm, redeem ourselves and our development process.

5.x was a tremendous undertaking. SMPng, KSE, UFS2, background fsck, ULE, ACPI, etc., etc., etc. were all incredible tasks. Given that many of these things were developed and managed by unpaid volunteers, the fact that we made it to 5-STABLE at all is quite impressive and says a lot about the quality and determination of all of our developers and users. However, four years was quite a long time to work on it. While 4.x remained a good workhorse, it suffered from not having needed features and hardware support. 5.x suffered at the same time from having too much ambition but not enough developers to efficiently carry it through. Read More

Interview with Hubert Feyrer
by NetBSD-PT Group

The NetBSD-PT Group did an interview via e-mail with a NetBSD developer. You can find more information about him at http://www.feyrer.de.

Hubert lives in Regensburg, which is located in Bavaria, southern Germany. He studied computer science at the University of Applied Scienced (Fachhochschule) Regensburg, then continued working there, first in a project about electronic libraries, later on as system administrator maintaining a cluster of Sun workstations with some additional work on machines running Irix, NetBSD and Windows. Besides doing system administration, he started giving lectures on "System Administration" and "Open Source". Read More

Keeping FreeBSD Applications Up-To-Date
by Richard Bejtlich

An important system administration task, and a principle of running a defensible network, is keeping operating systems and applications up-to-date. Running current software is critical when older services are vulnerable to exploitation. Obtaining new features not found in older applications is another reason to run current software. Fortunately, open source software offers a variety of means to give users a secure, capable computing environment.

This article presents multiple ways to keep FreeBSD applications up-to-date. I explain how to install and upgrade several applications on a FreeBSD 5.2.1 RELEASE system. In my previous article "Keeping FreeBSD Up-To-Date," I described how to patch and upgrade the FreeBSD operating system, beginning with FreeBSD 5.2.1 and ending with FreeBSD 5-STABLE. Taken as a pair, these two articles will help system administrators keep their FreeBSD OS and applications current and defensible. Read More

Daemon's Advocate
by Poul-Henning Kamp

When I hear somebody like Robert Watson complain about not being able to find features and options in OpenOffice, I am reminded of my own introduction to UNIX: "I'm sure there is a way to do this, but I wonder what the program is called...".

As the deadlines made me older I came to know the contents of /usr/bin by heart, and it now feels like my organised but cluttered workshop where I can almost always find a gadget and thingmajic which can be used to solve the problem at hand.

Over time new things have appeared in /usr/bin but that has not been a problem for me, because it did not rename the old commands so all the tricks I learned on System III still work. Read More