FreeBSD fund raising drive – final plea

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Gerard

The FreeBSD Foundation has not reached its fund raising goal for 2009 yet ($46,000 short of their $300,000 goal). The Foundation is hoping to to double spending on development in 2010 and needs our help:

Why make a donation? Right now we’re putting together our 2010 budget. Our goal for next year is to double our project development spending, continue sponsoring BSD-related conferences, sponsor more developers to travel to these conferences, and spend more on needed equipment for the project.

I’ve made my donation this year.  You can too. You may donate to the Foundation here

Read the final plea here

The Foundation announced earlier this week it’s receiving a cheque for $500 from the Bad Code Offsets project. I’ve never heard of this project:

The project is a way to undo the bad code other people have written without actually replacing the bad code. Much like carbon offsets, money used to buy Bad Code Offsets goes towards open-source projects which not only produce good code, but produce software that helps developers build good software

Read the announcement

Posted in FreeBSD Foundation | Leave a comment

iredmail available for FreeBSD now

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Gerard

Zhang Huangbin and shake.chen contacted me to say that iRedMail is now also available for FreeBSD (working on Linux already)

iredmail is a

  • mail server solution supporting FreeBSD 7.x/8.x, support both i386 and x86_64.
  • a shell script set, used to install and configure all mail server related software automatically.
  • open source project (GPL v2).

The project’s page can be found on Google Code

Has anybody experience with iredmail, and how does it compare to other mail server solutions?

Posted in FreeBSD | 2 Comments

BSD hacker job available

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Gerard

Justin Sherill mentions on the DragonFlyBSD Digest that was contacted by a recruiter to see if he knew anybody who might be interested in a BSD hacker job:

My client right now is an established proprietary trading firm. That means that they use only their own capital, and don’t have any investors. They were founded in 2002 and currently have about 50 people. They focus on trading multiple asset classes with extremely high-frequency both in the US and abroad. The unique twist on this firm is that they don’t hire people with finance backgrounds. They are looking for the best talent they can find in both math and technology, and then let them come up with unique solutions of their own.

We’re currently looking for some top-notch systems programmers. People who are really great C++ hacks, and have experience using one of the versions of BSD are ideal for us. In addition, we like people who have experience programming in Perl, and working on network protocols or file systems. This place has a very flat organization, and is pretty casual in dress…jeans are the norm. It’s basically a dot.com that got transported from Silicon Valley to NYC.

Head over to the Digest for more info, required experience and Justin’s email address to get you in touch with the recruiter.

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Changing FreeBSD ISO filenames

Posted on December 31, 2009 by Gerard

People who collect ISO images from more than just the FreeBSD Project have been mentioning it would be nice if “FreeBSD” was part of the filenames for a while now.

Ken Smith has committed a change that will add “FreeBSD-” to the beginning of the filenames.

So for example 9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso becomes FreeBSD-9.0-RELEASE-amd64-dvd1.iso

Source: FreeBSD Current Mailinglist

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Don’t miss any posts or news in 2010

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Gerard

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.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment

BSD Fund sponsoring BSDCan 2010

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Gerard

bsdfundlogoThe BSD Fund announced that they have generated enough card revenue to be a BSDCan sponsor. BSD Fund is a Bronze sponsor of BSDCan 2010 using funds raised exclusively with the BSD Fund Visa.

The BSD Fund aspires to contribute to every major BSD event around the world as they play such a critical role in the community, but so far it’s been a chicken and egg problem: few cardholders because the card hadn’t supported anything yet. Things seem to be taking off.

About BSD Fund

BSD Fund is a United States 501(c)(3) non-profit organization whose mission is to assist and fund BSD-related events, development and initiatives around the world. BSD Fund raises money through direct donations and the BSD Fund Visa that supports BSD with every purchase. BSD or Berkeley Software Distribution is a family of open source licenses and operating systems that emphasize permissive redistribution and high technical standards.

For clarity, the BSD Fund is supporting the BSD family of operating systems, whilest the FreeBSD Foundation only funds FreeBSD related activities and projects.

For more info, visit http://bsdfund.org or listen to the podcast with Michael Dexter, manager of the fund.

Thanks, Michael, for contacting me and asking to mention your achievement. If you, my readers, have anything FreeBSD related to announce, why not contact me? We BSD’ers don’t tend to be as vocal as our Penguin brothers…..

Posted in BSD World | Leave a comment

FreeBSD Foundation end-of-year newsletter (2009)

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Gerard

FreeBSD foundation logoDeb Goodkin announced the publication of the annual FreeBSD Foundation’s End-of-Year Newsletter (2009).

Table of contents:

  • Letter From the President
  • End-of-Year Fundraising Update
  • New Console Driver
  • Flattened Device Tree Project
  • Improvements to the FreeBSD TCP Stack
  • Highly Available Storage Project
  • FreeBSD Developer Summit, Cambridge, UK
  • EuroBSDCon 2009
  • KyivBSD 2009
  • 2009 Grant and Travel Grant Recipients
  • FreeBSD Testimonial from iXsystems
  • Financials

The full newsletter can be read here.

Previous years’ newsletters: 2008 – 2007 – 2006 – 2005

Posted in FreeBSD Foundation | 1 Comment

FreeBSD and Linux (RootBSD)

Posted on December 30, 2009 by Gerard

rootbsd_bsd_hostingThe guys over at RootBSD have updated their blog with a post on the differences between Linux and FreeBSD; partly seen from a hoster’s perspective.

We thought it would be a good idea to help educate our current RootBSD users, and potential users, as to some of the differences between FreeBSD and Linux. We have nothing against Linux at all, we actually like it, however there are very noticeable differences in the two. Without turning this into too much of a religious debate, here are a few points we consider

Let’s start off by looking at, what we believe is, the biggest difference in the two.

First off, Linux itself is a kernel, not an OS! Distributions (Red Hat, Debian, Suse and others) provide the installer and bundle lots of other open source software. There are easily well over 300 different Linux distributions. While this gives you a lot of choices, the existence of so many distributions also makes it difficult to use different distros since they are all a little bit different. Distributions don’t just differ in ease-of install and available programs; they also differ in directory layout, configuration practices, default software bundles, and most importantly the tools and prorcedures for software updates and patches.

FreeBSD is a complete operating system (kernel and userland) with a well-respected heritage grounded in the roots of Unix development. Since both the kernel and the provided utilities are under the control of the same release engineering team, there is less likelihood of library incompatibilities. Security vulnerabilities can also be addressed quickly by the security team. When new utilities or kernel features are added, the user simply needs to read one file, the Release Notes, which is publicly available on the main page of the FreeBSD website.

The post carries on with looking at performance, security and software: FreeBSD and Linux

About RootBSD

RootBSD was established with one goal in mind: provide reliable, flexible, and supported BSD-based hosting services to professionals and businesses.

RootBSD gives you the power to innovate and scale on top of the BSD operating systems. Their services are rock solid; in fact, you could call them the BSD hosting solution.

Website: RootBSD

Posted in FreeBSD, FreeBSD vs Linux, X vs Y | Leave a comment