Archive for the 'Uncategorized' Category

Thank you so much

Published on March 4, 2010 in Uncategorized. 6 Comments

If there were no (regular) readers interested in this website, there would be no point for me maintaining it. Without readers and a community one may as well stop spending time and resources on maintaining a digital presence.

As you can see on the right hand side, there are now over 1800 RSS subscribers. This, for the first time ever.  Can you help us to get to 2000? Tell your friends about this site, mention it on Facebook or other social networks, tweet about it or submit to Stumble Upon)

Apart from readers there are also many website owners and maintainers that have linked to this site over the last 2 years. As a result, freebsdnews.net is now listed on page 1 (place 10)  on Google.com when you search for FreeBSD.

Thank you for all your regular feedback, the links to news articles / blog posts that you submitted, and your request to mention your BSD related products.

BSD releases: FreeBSD 7.3-RC1, PC-BSD 8.0-RC2 and FreeNAS 0.7.1

Published on February 19, 2010 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Over the last week we have seen new versions of FreeBSD, PC-BSD and FreeNAS:

FreeBSD 7.3-RC1 (link)

Ken Smith has announced the release candidate of FreeBSD 7.3, a new version of the project’s legacy branch:

“The second of the test builds for the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, 7.3-RC1, is now available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The schedule has slipped by about a week but so far it looks like we are on track for just having one more public test build (7.3-RC2) followed by the release itself. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list. There have been some significant changes to the ports that are not incorporated in this set of pre-built packages (e.g. the default version of Perl has been updated to 5.10). If you are using csup/cvsup methods to update an older system the branch tag to use is now RELENG_7_3. The freebsd-update(8) utility supports binary upgrades of i386 and amd64 systems running earlier FreeBSD releases.”


PC-BSD 8.0-RC2 (link)

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-RC2 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.5

PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

  • FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2
  • KDE 4.3.5
  • Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
  • Run in Live mode directly from DVD
  • Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
  • Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

FreeNAS 0.7.1 (link)

Changelog – download

Don’t miss any posts or news in 2010

Published on December 30, 2009 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

Did you know you can stay up to date with the news on this site without having to daily check  if I’ve added any stories? No? Subscribe and use RSS and/or Twitter.

There are many RSS desktop readers available for Win, Mac, Linux and FreeBSD. There are also many browser based readers, such as Google Reader etc.

Never used RSS? Here’s how Google Reader works


Now subscribe to my RSS or Twitter feed and never miss a post in 2010.

Using the Condensed DejaVu Font-Family Variant by Default

Published on November 11, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Keramidas talks about font substitution in Firefox and other GTK+ base programs.

The DejaVu font family is a very popular font collection for Linux and BSD systems. The font package of DejaVu includes a condensed variant; a variation of the same basic font theme that sports narrower characters.

The difference between the two font variants is very easy to spot when they are displayed side by side. The following image shows a small part of a Firefox window, displaying news articles as part of a Google Reader session:

Using the Condensed DejaVu Font-Family Variant by Default

Install Asterisk with GUI in FreeBSD in 5 easy Steps

Published on July 21, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

It is beyond the scope of this guide to teach you how to install the FreeBSD OS.

To make this tutorial even simpler, I remove the Digium PCI Card with 4 FX0.

Requirements:

  • Running FreeBSD OS (I’m currently using FreeBSD 7.2)
  • Root Access to install from ports
  • Basic Unix Commands
  • Win32 X-lite SIP Phone

Typography:
letters/words in red must be change
1. Install from ports
2. edit rc.conf to start asterisk on boot
3. Modify the Asterisk config files.
4. start asterisk service
5. browse

Full howto here (cebuitsolutions.com)

Monitis adds support for FreeBSD

Published on June 17, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

Monitis Inc., a leading provider of affordable easy-to-use enterprise-class systems management software as a service, today announces release of monitoring agent for FreeBSD.
Monitis monitoring agent is downloadable software, which runs on clients’ machines and collect performance and configuration metrics both for the machine on which they were installed as well as for the whole network. Monitis main application takes measures towards detecting and preventing agent failure. By regularly sending messages from the agents Monitis can determine whether or not there is a problem. If a problem exists, measures will be taken to correct it. Agents don’t ever use local storage, so any data that is collected is filed in a separate database on the main server.

Monitis Linux and Windows agents are widely used by large Monitis community (up to 50,000 users) and now with FreeBSD addition, users may monitor truly heterogeneous and distributed infrastructure. By combining the robustness of agent-based technology with the simplicity of agentless technology Monitis enables effortless systems management for its customers.

About Monitis Performance Monitor

Monitis Performance Monitor is industry leading comprehensive, affordable, scalable, fault and performance management platform. Monitis Performance Monitor monitors, collects and analyzes information from websites, servers, routers, switches, VoIP devices, DNS, databases, processes and any other IP devices providing users with a comprehensive view of their system health. Open sourced Monitis plug-in with powerful API’s allow users to extend Monitis powerful monitoring and management capabilities. Users can be assured of always on reliable service as Monitis Performance Monitor is deployed across the world providing resilient service.

About Monitis

Monitis is a leading provider of affordable performance monitoring and management solution. More than 50,000 customers spanning small businesses, Fortune 500 companies, government agencies and education institutions have chosen Monitis to reduce system downtime, improve IT administrator productivity, and reduce operational expenditure. Monitis is radically changing system monitoring and management landscape by providing easy to use, affordable, flexible (deployment configurations include: shared, internal cloud and external cloud), and simple to manage SaaS performance monitoring and management solution. For more information, visit http://www.monitis.com

Source (information-online.com)

FreeBSD News on Floss.pro

Published on June 16, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments

My friend Karl has added the FreeBSD News feed to his site Floss.pro.

Floss.pro is a blogging platform, based on the open-source engine Laconica. There are many micro blogging sites available such as Twitter, Jaiku etc, but Floss.pro is different in that’s set up to promote and blog about open-source software.

If you’re on Twitter you can find me and my feeds @gvanessen

ZFS on FreeBSD (videos)

Published on May 6, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

ZFS is a relatively new and exciting file storage system developed by Sun.

The features of ZFS include support for high storage capacities, integration of the concepts of filesystem and volume management, snapshots and copy-on-write clones, continuous integrity checking and automatic repair, RAID-Z and native NFSv4 ACLs. – Wikipedia

This page has some specific FreeBSD info relating to ZFS.

Interested to find out more about the strengths of ZFS? Have a look at the video’s below:


Link


Link


Link

Sun VirtualBox on FreeBSD

Published on May 2, 2009 in Uncategorized. 3 Comments

sun_virtualbox_logoAbout a year ago, shortly after if was taken over by Sun, Innotek announced it was looking for FreeBSD developers. Their labours seem to have borne fruit, as a FreeBSD version of Virtualbox has been announced.

VirtualBox is a general-purpose full virtualizer for x86 hardware. Targeted at server, desktop and embedded use, it is now the only professional-quality virtualization solution that is also Open Source Software.

FreeBSD is not (as yet) officially supported, but Sun developers have been working on aFreeBSD version in their spare time.

Though there are still a number of features yet to be implemented and a few known bugs and problems to be squashed, Sun is looking for anyone interested to test this version, give them feedback and/or give a hand improving VirtualBox for FreeBSD.

In the effort to make VirtualBox the most portable platform for virtualization we can announce that VirtualBox is finally running on FreeBSD. http://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Screenshots contains two screenshots of VirtualBox running on FreeBSD with a Windows and a Linux guest.

Even though the basic functions are working there are still a lot of things to do and we do not recommend to use it on production machines. Furthermore Sun does not officially support FreeBSD yet. This is a port done by developers in their free time. However if you are a developer or want to test it you can checkout the latest code and build VirtualBox yourself. 

  

Links:

Videos from DCBSDCon 2009 posted (youtube)

Published on April 21, 2009 in Uncategorized. 0 Comments Tags: .

Murray Stokely has uploaded 8 videos from the first DCBSDCon to the BSDConferencesYouTube channel. With help from Jason Dixon and Will Backman and open source software such as avidemux, mplayer/mencoder and audacity.