This is a BSDTalk interview with Peter N. M. Hansteen on the PF, Packet Filter, a firewall originally developed by OpenBSD. To find out more about the PF Firewall, check out “The Book of PF“.
BSDCan 2008, held in May, in Ottowa, has the initial call for papers out. They have space for informal talks and presentations too.
BSDCan is an enormously successful grass-roots style conference. It brings together a great mix of *BSD developers and users for a nice blend of both developer-centric and user-centric presentations, food, and activities.
BSDCan 2008 will be held 16-17 May 2008, in Ottawa.
The organisers are now requesting proposals for papers. The papers should be written with a very strong technical content bias.
There’s a new issue of the FreeBSD Foundation newsletter (Q4)/
The innovation of the past lives on in FreeBSD. From SMP and network scalability to innovations in security APIs and wireless networking, the technology of FreeBSD is making an impact on our world. What future piece of BSD technology will help foster a new public commodity like the Internet? I can’t say, but the past shows us that investing in open source OS development and its commercial use pays large dividends. The two testimonials in this newsletter from Isilon and Network Appliance show this process at work.
In this issue:
Volker Theile has announced the third and final beta release of FreeNAS 0.686, a FreeBSD-based operating system which provides free Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services.
This will hopefully the last beta to become stable.
Majors changes
Minors changes
And some bugfixes.
The lasted BETA can be downloaded from SourceForge.
Both licensing models have been around for a very long time. I don’t know which predates which, but it really doesn’t matter. The spirit behind both licenses is very similar: free software is good. But they realize this idea in different ways.
In the GPL license you have the four freedoms: to run the software, to have the source code, to distribute the software, to distribute your modifications to the software.
The BSD license is different, because it gives *you* the right to distribute the software, but it does not oblige you to make sure that the next guy has any such right.
Read this interesting article here
Jan Stedehouder has almost finished his DesktopBSD – the first 30 days series and the following are his observations with regards to how PC-BSD and DesktopBSD compare:
Today may be a good day to at least do a formal comparison between DesktopBSD and PC-BSD. I guess it can’t be avoided. Two FreeBSD-based open source desktops with similar goals, but finding different solutions.
The similarities between PC-BSD and DesktopBSD are there of course. Both use a graphical installer to assist the new user with getting FreeBSD on his/her system and both have chosen for the KDE desktop. DesktopBSD allows to boot into a live environment before actually dedicating it to your harddrive, while PC-BSD ships with Compiz Fusion.
The default software collections are different as well. DesktopBSD has chosen for Firefox, Thunderbird and Pidgin. A choice that makes sense as these applications are well-known and used on Windows and Linux. PC-BSD seems to stick more to KDE-based programs like Konquerer, Kontact and Konversation. However, these are minor differences.
DesktopBSD sets itself apart through the DesktopBSD tools and particularly the Package Manager. This graphical frontend for the packages and ports collection provides an easy tool for installing, upgrading and managing the software on your system. Working with Package Manager shouldn’t be a problem for Linux users that have experience with similar tools (Synaptic, Adept, Portage).
For PC-BSD the PBI’s are unique. The work on the PBI Build Server is progressing and that will result in a far larger collection of packages. This should contribute to a wider adoption of PC-BSD among people who used to work under Windows, since the PBI system emulates their “double-click-and-install” experience the most.
There is no need to try to figure out which one is better. I just marvel at both developments and I can see they both provide an answer to the needs of different groups of users. I can imagine a future where the DesktopBSD tools are enhanced to allow installing and managing PBI’s for FreeBSD-based systems, even if only for PC-BSD systems.
Ivan Voras has created a new (installable) LiveCD (version alpha 2) based on FreeBSD 7.0-BETA4. This release fixes most of the bugs present in earlier versions, and introduces only one new feature: file systems are created on glabel devices.
The ISO can be downloaded here and more information can be found here.
What’s new in FreeBSD 7.0?
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