Archive for the 'FreeBSD' Category

Google FreeBSD Summer of Code 2008 results

Published
by
Gerard
on September 22, 2008
in FreeBSD and Google
. 0 Comments

The FreeBSD Project is proud to have taken part in the Google Summer of Code 2008. We received more high quality applications this year than ever before. In the end it was a very tough decision to narrow it down to the 21 students selected for funding by Google. These student projects included security research, improved installation tools, new utilities, and more. Many of the students have continued working on their FreeBSD projects even after the official close of the program.

The FreeBSD project has released an update on the (finished/continuing) work of the projects:

  • Implementation of MPLS in FreeBSD
  • TCP/IP regression test suite (tcptest)
  • Porting Open Solaris Dtrace Toolkit to FreeBSD
  • Adding .db support to pkg_tools –> pkg_improved
  • Porting BSD-licensed text-processing tools from OpenBSD
  • Multibyte collation support
  • VM Algorithm Improvement
  • TCP anomaly detector
  • FreeBSD auditing system testing
  • Dynamic memory allocation for dirhash in UFS2
  • Reference implementation of the SNTP client
  • NFSv4 ACLs
  • Enhancing FreeBSD’s Libarchive
  • Allowing for parallel builds in the FreeBSD Ports
  • Ports license auditing infrastructure
  • Improving layer2 filtering
  • Porting FreeBSD to Efika (PPC bring up)
  • Audit Firewall Events from Kernel
  • Create a tiny operating system from FreeBSD

All results here.

Bordeaux 1.6 beta 1 for FreeBSD and PC-BSD

Published
by
Gerard
on September 20, 2008
in FreeBSD and PC-BSD
. 0 Comments

Previously we mentioned that Bordeaux was coming to FreeBSD, but now this promising product (for those needing Windows software and yet wanting the stability and security of BSD) has been released by Tom Wickline:

Over the past month we have made some major progress on the BSD port of Bordeaux. Bordeaux for FreeBSD now has a .sh installer, the same one that we use on Linux, so you will need to have py-gtk installed for the installer to work properly.

We also have a newly built .pbi for PC-BSD 7, a big thanks goes out to the folks at PC-BSD for doing the packaging for us. If you use PC-BSD you will need to install Wine 1.1.4 from their PBI directory in order for Bordeaux to work, prior versions of Wine in the directory don’t have support for wineprefixcreate.

Some of the major changes in this build are activex, flash and java are automatically installed for you when IE 6 is installed. Now IE 6 should open most pages that require activex support. We have the back end of the new cellar-manager mostly done now, to see what changes are planed just run cellar-manager –help and you will see a list of all the planed features. This version also incorporates the newest winetricks script and the updates that have been made to it over the past couple months. and of course lots of tweaks and bug fixes.

If you’re a FreeBSD or PC-BSD user and need to run any of the software that we currently support on the Linux client you might be interested in helping beta test this build and future builds up to the final stable release. At this time we cant give away beta builds, but what we can do is if you decide to purchase a license from the store for FreeBSD (beta) or PC-BSD (beta) your support will last six months after the final build is released, so don’t worry you will get a full six months of upgrades and support on the final product. And by purchasing a pre release build you can submit your input and help support the development process. Users who buy the BSD (Beta) will have the option of downloading the tgz (sh file) or the .pbi file.

That’s cool news. Would like to try this out. Definitely!

Beta releases FreeBSD-6.4 and FreeBSD-7.1

Published
by
Gerard
on September 15, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 0 Comments

The final stage of the FreeBSD-6.4 and FreeBSD-7.1 Release cycle has begun with the first beta releases. The ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available for download on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites. We encourage people to test and report any outstanding bugs. Please find more information about these releases on the Release Engineering Information page.

Eric spotted the beta builds already last week. Thanks for reporting, Eric.

Google Chrome on FreeBSD 7.0 (howto)

Published
by
Gerard
on September 5, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 0 Comments

Chris Arnold has been able to get Google Chrome to run on FreeBSD 7.0 under Wine. He’s written up a step-by-step procedure how to get this done.

Well done, Chris, and thanks for dropping me a line.

Java JDK and JRE 6.0 binaries for FreeBSD

Published
by
Gerard
on September 4, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 0 Comments

Java JDK and JRE 6.0 binary installable packages for FreeBSD 6.x and 7.x on the i386 and amd64 architectures are available from the FreeBSD Foundation’s java website.

gmirror - recovering data from a failed hard disk

Published
by
Gerard
on September 4, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 0 Comments

Having a working RAID and data mirroring set up on your server/PC is great for when your one of your hard disks dies, but what to do when this really happens to you? How do you get that data back?

This article shows what to do to retrieve your data back on a FreeBSD system that uses gmirror

I like RAID. On my development server, I use both hardware and software RAID. For hardware RAID on FreeBSD, I like 3Ware. For software RAID, I tend to use gmirror, because I don’t need more than RAID-1.

Some time ago I added two 120GB HDD to this system. One was SATA, one was PATA. They were joined together via gmirror. Tonight I received some errors that one of the drives was failing. I replaced the drive, and recovered the mirror. I’ll show you what I did, mostly so I know what to do the next time it happens, but also so you can see what to do as well.

More…

Is FreeBSD a better choice for the desktop? (or dispelling myths)

Published
by
Gerard
on September 4, 2008
in FreeBSD and X vs Y
. 0 Comments

Last week we linked to an article on linsux.org why FreeBSD is better for the desktop than Linux.

David from UNIX Administratosphere wrote a reply to that article and there’s also a thread on the Linsux forum.

FreeBSD security advisories

Published
by
Gerard
on September 4, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 0 Comments

Running Google Chrome on FreeBSD

Published
by
Gerard
on September 4, 2008
in FreeBSD and Google
. 3 Comments

Since Google Chrome just recently launched and it unfortunatly only supports Windows I felt a little bit dissapointed. But hey that doesn’t stop me so easy. So i decided to check out what wine (a windows api emulator for linux and FreeBSD) could do for me.

So i downloaded chrome and tried to run ChromeSetup.exe with wine. No success, wine whined about a windows sytem call regarding http not implemented. So i googled around a bit and noticed that that call was implemented in the latest wine… Did i run the latest wine? no…

Read further: Part 1 - Part 2

Yesterday I mentioned that Google Chrome is released under the BSD License. Oliver suggested (in the comments) that the EULA is very restrictive and Chrome cannot be ported to FreeBSD. Google has changed the EULA now after a storm of protest. Ars Techica concludes that since Chrome is released under the BSD license, the EULA is unenforceable.

It’s worth noting that the EULA is largely unenforceable because the source code of Chrome is distributed under an open license. Users could simply download the source code, compile it themselves, and use it without having to agree to Google’s EULA. The terms of the BSD license under which the source code is distributed are highly permissive and impose virtually no conditions or requirements on end users.

Whatever the license restrictions, Chrome is open source and I’m sure the Wine team will get it to run without major hickups soon.

Embedded FreeBSD systems

Published
by
Gerard
on September 2, 2008
in FreeBSD
. 1 Comment

FreeBSD was developed with server use in mind. It’s rock solid and ultra stable, and therefore perfectly suited to be used where reliability is required. Since FreeBSD is a flexible operating system, it can be easily adapted for other uses as well; one of which is the use on embedded systems or systems requiring a stable but small-footprint OS.

There are three such small bare-bones versions of FreeBSD (as far as i’m aware): TinyBSD, NanoBSD and miniBSD.


TinyBSD is a set of tools and shell scripts, part of the FreeBSD base system (/usr/src/tools/tools), designed to make the development of embedded systems based on FreeBSD as easy as possible. The TinyBSD script can be used on FreeBSD 5.x, 6.x and 7.x and 8-CURRENT to created a mini FreeBSD version.

The installed FreeBSD generates an embedded system image which is about 20MB in size and is a very generic approach. It comes with support for a number of wired NIC support and also the most popular wireless support, divert, bridge, dummynet, firewall, etc; and CPU_ELAN (for soekris devices). If the “generic” system gets tightened up the final result can be as low as an 8MB embedded system.

The process (though not graphical) can in a way be compared to nLite, a freeware application that lets users customise and remove components from their Windows installation CD and create a new customised, slimmed down ISO.


NanoBSD is a tool that creates a fully working FreeBSD system image for embedded applications, suitable for use on a Compact Flash card (or other mass storage media). The objective is to get a FreeBSD-like environment running on a CF-card with no extras by stripping down and customising FreeBSD.

NanoBSD is created by compiling it from the FreeBSD source tree (/usr/src/tools/tools/nanobsd)  and it works with FreeBSD 6.x, 7.x and 8.0-CURRENT releases.

NanoBSD can be used to build specialised install images, designed for easy installation and maintenance of systems commonly called “computer appliances”. Computer appliances, e.g. routers and firewalls, have their hardware and software bundled in the product, which means all applications are pre-installed. The appliance is plugged into an existing network and can begin working (almost) immediately.

One of the advantages of NanoBSD is that it’s part of the FreeBSD base system and it is easy to create, customise and use.

The features of NanoBSD include:

  • Ports and packages work as in FreeBSD. Every single application can be installed and used in a NanoBSD image, the same way as in FreeBSD.
  • No missing functionality. If it is possible to do something with FreeBSD, it is possible to do the same thing with NanoBSD, unless the specific feature or features were explicitly removed from the NanoBSD image when it was created.
  • Everything is read-only at run-time
  • Easy to build and customise. Making use of just one shell script and one configuration file it is possible to build reduced and customized images satisfying any arbitrary set of requirements.


miniBSD is a project developping a set of scripts that shrinks a running FreeBSD system to a small sized distribution suited for mass storage media, such as USB memory sticks and CF cards.

The size of the distribution is generally about 12-15Mb and contains everything one needs to run a FreeBSD system comfortably.

The scripts collect the necessary binaries, libraries, configuration files on a running FreeBSD system (4.x, 5.x and 6.x) and creates a disk image that can be saved on a CF card or USB memory stick.

The project started with the goal to create a FreeBSD system that could be fitted on a small compact flash without loosing too much of a full FreeBSD system. miniBSD is in a way half way between TinyBSD and NanoBSD.

Being small and fully featured makes miniBSD an optimal choice to develop routers, bridges, firewalls and vpn gateways.

Core Team: Gianmarco Giovannelli, Paolo Pisati, Davide D’Amico, Riccardo Torrini
Website: http://www.minibsd.org or https://neon1.net/misc/minibsd.html

Notes:

  1. nanoBSD has replaced picoBSD, which is out of date and hasn’t been updated for a long time.
  2. A new embedded version of FreeBSD is being worked on: ShinyBSD. This project is still in an early stage of development.