BSDFreaks.nl

ReeceTarbert writes “If you wanted to try FreeBSD but didn’t have the right hardware, or enough time to make it useful on the desktop, VirtualBSD might fit the bill: it’s a VMware appliance based on FreeBSD 7.1-RELEASE and features the Xfce 4 Desktop Environment and a few of the most common applications to make it very functional right out of the box. If you’re curious you can have a look at the screenshots, or proceed to the download page and grab the torrent file right away. (Note: VirtualBSD also works in VirtualBox 2.x as long as you create a new virtual machine and select the virtual disk from the archive instead of creating a new one).”

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An anonymous reader writes “DragonFly BSD 2.2 is now available. The second release to feature the HAMMER (versioning, among other things) filesystem — now considered production-ready — it includes ‘major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration.’ Apart from the CD ISO, this release has a DVD ISO with ‘a fully operational X environment,’ as well as a bootable USB disk-key image.”

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Peter N. M. Hansteen writes “Once you’ve identified spam senders, OpenBSD provides all the tools you need to take one step further: exporting their addresses and publishing the evidence. You can even trap them yourself using known bad addresses. It’s easy, fun and good netizenship.”

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jschauma writes “Many sites are reporting that the next Sidekick LX 2009/Blade, from Danger (acquired by Microsoft early in 2008), is going to run NetBSD as their operating system, causing Microsoft’s recruiters to look for NetBSD developers.”

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Zadok_Allan writes “It’s a bit late but since many readers will remember the SGI O2 fondly this might interest a few. The gist of the story is — NetBSD now supports hardware accelerated graphics on the O2 both in X and in the kernel. We didn’t get any help from SGI, the documention available doesn’t go beyond a general description and a little theory of operation which is why it took so long to figure it out. The X driver is still has a few rough edges ( all the acceleration frameworks pretty much expect a mappable linear framebuffer, if you don’t have one — like on most SGI hardware — you’ll have to jump thorugh a lot of hoops and make sure there’s no falling back to cfb and friends) but it supports XRENDER well enough to run KDE 3.5. Yes, it’s usable on a 200MHz R5k O2. Not quite as snappy as a any modern hardware but nowhere near as sluggish as you’d expect and since Xsgi doesn’t support any kind of XRENDER support, let alone hardware acceleration, pretty much anything using anti-aliased fonts gets a huge performance boost out of this compared to IRIX.”

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The FreeBSD Project again received many high quality applications from students participating in Google’s Summer of Code program. This year 20 student proposals were accepted to work with the FreeBSD Project as part of this program. For those with projects that were not accepted this year, we’d like to note that 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.