NetBSD report, too

The NetBSD quarterly report (that seems to cover a half instead of a quarter; July – December 2005) is out. It covers their new logo, their new releases, new developers and ports, etc. Also, DragonFly’s adoption of pkgsrc is mentioned, along with the fact that Joerg Sonnenberger is more or less responsible for over 3,000 of the successful pkgsrc builds on DragonFly.

FreeBSD Q4 status report out

The fourth quarter Status Report for FreeBSD is out. Among other items of interest, the report contains links to two recent presentations at EuroBSDCon: New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0 and Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack (both links are PDF files). Also, OpenBSD’s dhclient has replaced ISC’s dhclient, and efforts to port DragonFly’s variant symlinks.

For entertainment value, there’s also the FreeBSD/XBox port, which is close to having network support. There’s now a FreeBSD list of available work for volunteers; there’s a number of DragonFly items on there.

Update: PDF links fixed, thanks to Joe “Floid” Kanowitz.

Upgrading pkgsrc

From recent discussion on the users@ mailing list: pkg_chk is a known method for upgrading pkgsrc packages; the problem with it is that it removes existing packages, builds the new versions, then installs them. It has problems; this leaves a system without software for the length of the build time, and if a build dependency fails, the previously installed software is not restored. There are other solutions. There’s pkgmanager, or using a jail/chroot environment to build binary packages and then install using those, which the not-yet-ported pkg_comp can help with.

Live BSD CDs

“Haidut” kindly send along news of the NeWBIE project, where a NetBSD CD is used as a bootable end-user system, similar to FreeSBIE (which also uses the BSD Installer, same as DragonFly). He also sends word that he’s working on a DragonFly version of that same CD.

Links, and a milestone

informit.com has the typical BSD overview article: BSD: The Other Free UNIX Family. (Seen on hubertf’s site) Shadow Development has an article about FreeBSD as a desktop; topical after this previously-linked DragonFly review. There’s some interesting material about the Intel Macs on there, too. (From BSDnewsletter.com, via Liam Foy’s BSD Portal.

Also: this is the 1,501st post on this blog! I am curious to see how this volume stacks up to the other BSD sites out there…