Monthly Archive for February, 2009

DesktopBSD; what’s happened?

Published on February 28, 2009 in DesktopBSD. 7 Comments

It’s been quiet around DesktopBSD the last few months. It’s been a looooong time since the last stable release, and many months since the last publicly available snapshot. There aren’t any blog updates and the svn.desktopbsd.net subdomain is dead.

The forums are quite quiet; not as busy as they used to be.

I emailed Peter Hofer, the founder of the project,  but have not heard from him since. Others are complaining about this too.

Anybody aware of what’s happening with DesktopBSD? Please let us know in the comments.

FreeBSD 7.1 on VMware Workstation 6.5 (howto)

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD. 3 Comments

Last week we wrote about VirtualBSD, a pre-configured vmware appliance that can be used in VMware Workstation or the VMware Player.

If you want to use another window manager, for instance, or want to install a minimal installation, why not do create your own virtual FreeBSD in VMware?

This howto (ptankov.wordpress.com) shows step-by-step with screenshots how to install FreeBSD 7.1 on VMWare Workstation.

Thanks, Edmondas, for reporting.

FreeBSD Foundation update – February 2009

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD Foundation. 0 Comments

FreeBSD foundation logoThe FreeBSD Foundation has issued today the following update:

Accepting Project Proposals

Do you have a great idea for improving FreeBSD? Do you need funding to get the job done? We are currently accepting project proposals until March 10. We will consider work relating to any of the major subsystems or infrastructure with the FreeBSD Operating System. A budget of $30,000 was allocated to fund multiple development projects. Click here to find out more.

Conference Travel Grants

Do you want to attend AsiaBSDCon or BSDCan, but don’t have the funds? Take advantage of our travel grant program. We have allocated $22,000 this year for providing travel grants for FreeBSD developers and contributors to attend the various FreeBSD related conferences. Click here to find out more about our travel grant program. If you do want financial assistance for attending AsiaBSDCon, please submit your application soon!

Foundation Provides USB Analyzers

The foundation provided two Beagle 480 USB Analyzers to FreeBSD developers. We are very grateful to TotalPhase for donating one of the analyzers to us. The board believes the analyzers will be a useful tool for our developers to use in diagnosing problems and doing performance analysis.

The analyzer will be used for not only developing the USB framework, including the NEWUSB and USB device drivers, but also debugging problems found by users,

commented Weongyo Jeong, FreeBSD developer.

The Foundation grant for a USB analyzer will help me provide better support for existing devices, profile the USB stack to ensure the bus is fully utilized, and make it easier to add drivers for new hardware,

said Andrew Thompson, FreeBSD developer.

Conference Sponsorship

We were a sponsor for DCBSDCon in February and are a sponsor for AsiaBSDCon in March and EuroBSDCon in September. We allocated $30,000 towards conferences and meetings this year. If you’re planning a conference or meeting, like a FreeBSD developer summit, then you need to submit a grant request application to be considered to receive funding.

Fundraising Update

We set our 2009 fundraising goal to $300,000. This is an ambitious goal considering the economy right now. But, we want to continue the same level of support to the project that we’ve provided for the last few years. One way of achieving our goal is to approach more companies that use FreeBSD. If you know of a company that uses FreeBSD that we should approach please let us know. A contact would be very helpful too.

To make a donation, click here

Thanks again for supporting the Foundation and FreeBSD!

OpenBSM 1.1 beta 1

Published on February 24, 2009 in OpenBSM. 0 Comments

openbsm-logoRobert Watson has announced the release of OpenBSM 1.1 beta 1; this is a test snapshot of OpenBSM 1.1. The following are the change notes from the OpenBSM NEWS file included with this release:

  •  The filesz parameter in audit_control(5) now accepts suffixes: ‘B’ for Bytes, ‘K’ for Kilobytes, ‘M’ for Megabytes, and ‘G’ for Gigabytes. For legacy support no suffix defaults to bytes.
  • Audit trail log expiration support added. It is configured in audit_control(5) with the expire-after parameter. If there is no expire-after parameter in audit_control(5), the default, then the audit trail files are not expired and removed. See audit_control(5) for more information.
  • Change defaults in audit_control: warn at 5% rather than 20% free for audit partitions, rotate automatically at 2mb, and set the default policy to cnt,argv rather than cnt so that execve(2) arguments are captured if AUE_EXECVE events are audited. These may provide more usable defaults for many users.
  • Use au_domain_to_bsm(3) and au_socket_type_to_bsm(3) to convert au_to_socket_ex(3) arguments to BSM format.
  • Fix error encoding AUT_IPC_PERM tokens.

OpenBSM releases and snapshots can be downloaded from the OpenBSM project web page.

This test release is known to build and run (to varying degrees) on FreeBSD 5.x, 6.x, 7.x, 8.x, Mac OS X Leopard, Mac OS X Snow Leopard, and OpenSuse Linux.

FreeBSD wallpapers galore

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

Feeling like your FreeBSD desktop needs a facelift?

Well, now thanks to Randy Belk (active member of the FreeBSD Forums who goes by the nickname rbelk) we have almost every FreeBSD related wallpaper known to man in a single place: http://picasaweb.google.com/randy.belk/FreeBSDWallpaper#

So .. get in there and beautify your desktop at will !

Go get it at http://killasmurf86.lv/en.html (Beastie Sources) and set your creative spirit free to fly!

Just remember .. the original BSD Daemon is Copyright 1988 by Marshall Kirk McKusick.

Many thanks to Gonzalo Nemmi for reporting this.

If you know of any other FreeBSD/Beastie wallpapers not listed on Randy Belk’s Picasa page, please let me know in the comments below.

FreeBSD/arm for Samsung S2C24xx

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD. 1 Comment

Work has been undertaken to make FreeBSD run on the Samsung S2C24xx CPU. This page describes FreeBSD support for the Samsung S3C24xx CPU’s

FreeBSD is already running on the OpenMoko handset.

Upgrade to KDE 4.2 on FreeBSD

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

As mentioned before, KDE 4.2 is now available for FreeBSD.

To upgrade KDE 4.1.4 to the latest and the greatest, enter the following:

Ensure your ports directory is up-to-date and you’re su (superuser)

# pkg_delete -f kde\*4.1.4\* automoc4-\* 
# portupgrade -a 
# cd ${PORTSDIR}/x11/kde4 && make config && make install clean

OpenJDK on FreeBSD

Published on February 24, 2009 in FreeBSD. 3 Comments

Ivan Voras writes (19/02/2009) that he’d love to rewrite his finstall project (FreeBSD GUI Installer) in Java, which may result in license issue. OpenJDK would be  a much more preferable option:

OpenJDK looks like it might “soon” be ported to FreeBSD (though judging by the progress it looks like the official FreeBSD Java crowd is working on OpenJDK 1.7 which has not been released yet, instead of OpenJDK 1.6, which is).

Well, as of today, OpenJDK is available for FreeBSD.

For those unacquainted with OpenJDK, OpenJDK is an open-source implementation of the Java Platform, Standard Edition. Much of the OpenJDK code is licensed under the GPL version 2 with the Classpath exception. The Java Hotspot virtual machine source code is licensed under the GPL version 2 only.

This is a small step, but may have far reaching benefits.

(Free)BSD links round up (week 8)

Published on February 21, 2009 in (Free)BSD links wrap-up. 0 Comments

Welcome to the (Free)BSD leftovers for week 8. In this post we have a mix of news snippets, links, howto’s  ’n software/package update. Just a roundup of those little things I saved up throughout the week. Previous roundups can be found here.

 

(Free)BSD News

  1. Desktop NetBSD Project
    An interesting discussion was started by Andrew Doran on the NetBSD mailing list regarding the ease of install of a “modern” desktop for users.The primary goal for the Desktop NetBSD project is:
      

    Given a NetBSD CD and a reasonably modern x86 computer, make it possible to install a useful desktop system in under 15 minutes, responding to only a few prompts in the process. 

    Announcement |  Project website

     

     

  2. New FreeBSD USB2/ USB4BSD  Stack

    “We are in the final stages of bringing in the new usb stack. Features include: SMP, better device support, speed increases.We hope to make it in for 8.0. It will really take a unified effort to make this all work and I look forward to all contributors input.

    We have a few large steps ahead of us and I wanted to lay out the schedule so that people understand what is coming and what to expect.

    At this point we expect there to be no style or changes in usb2 that are not bugfixes until Phase 3 “Hand off”. The reason for this is to prevent bugs from creeping in and allow the maintainer to focus 100% on bugs and feature parity with the oldusb stack.”

    Here is the plan and timeline

 

Releases

  1. OpenBSD turns 4.5-BETA
    Miod Vallat has tagged OpenBSD 4.5-BETA. Snapshots should be available soon for testing, check the mirrors for availability.  

    OpenBSD Project Page  |  Read the full commit message

  2. DragonFly 2.2 released
    The DragonFly 2.2 release is here! The HAMMER filesystem is considered production-ready in this release; It was first released in July 2008. The 2.2 release represents major stability improvements across the board, new drivers, much better pkgsrc support and integration, and a brand new release infrastructure with multiple target options.
    DragonFlyBSD Project Page  |  Release Announcement 

 

New FreeBSD committers
The following people have been awarded with update rights this week:

  • Andriy Gapon (Source)

 

Guides ‘n howtos

  • Stopping HTTP brute force attacks with BruteBlock & IPFW (Chris Buckley)
    Chris Buckley writes about how to stop HTTP brute force attacks using BruteBlock and ipfw.n
    Link to howto (thanks to Edmondas)
     
  • Machine backups using tarsnap (Tim Bishop)
    “I’ve got a dedicated server that I’ve been backing up for the past few years. My crude backup system involved taring everything to local disk and then rsyncing it to a remote server. It worked well at first, but as the amount of data grew it was taking half a day to run. Add to that the amount of disk space being used by the local copy and I had to find a better solution…..”
    Link to howto (thanks to Kevin) 

New FreeBSD videos on BSDConferences YouTube channel

Published on February 21, 2009 in FreeBSD. 0 Comments

Recently a few more (Free)BSD related videos have been added to the BSDConferencec Youtube channel. These videos were taken at last years AsiaBSDCon: