Articles about BSD

An "incorrect command-line parameter validation" vulnerability in X.Org server makes it possible to escalate privileges as well as overwrite files. The problem affects Linux and BSD distributions using the open source X Window System implementation.

The vulnerability has been present for a couple of years, but has been brought to light by security researcher Narendra Shinde. Unpatched system can be exploited by non-root users if X server is running with elevated privileges.

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When many people think of Linux, they incorrectly assume it is an operating system. Actually, Linux is merely the kernel which many operating systems leverage. An actual operating system is compromised of many things, including a user interface -- after all, users need to interface with their computer!

Most computer users will obviously want a graphical UI nowadays, and for BSD and Linux-based operating systems there are many such desktop environments from which to choose. One of the most popular environments is GNOME. Not only is GNOME a DE, but it has evolved into much more, such as a collection of apps and design rules (Human Interface Guidelines). Today, GNOME is celebrating a very important milestone -- it is an impressive 20 years old!

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Microsoft continues to embrace not only Linux but BSD too, as it just revealed that Azure has added support for OpenBSD. The latest move comes more than two years after the cloud platform officially started to support FreeBSD virtual machines.

The OpenBSD support in Azure comes as a result of a collaboration between Microsoft and network security vendor Esdenera, which also sees the release of an OpenBSD-based firewall in the Azure Marketplace.

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Fans of the Sidekick, who have fretted over the smartphone's fate since the purchase of manufacturer Danger, Inc. by Microsoft, apparently don't have Windows CE in their favorite handset's future. Instead, Microsoft's looking for... NetBSD programmers?

Danger had been rumored for years to be reworking their product line to run OpenBSD, but the status of that effort had been unclear since Microsoft's purchase of the company a year ago.

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The FreeBSD Project on Friday heralded the 6.0 release of its venerable Unix based operating system. FreeBSD 6.0 brings to the table a number of improvements over version 5, including a multithreaded filesystem to speed up disk access, and expanded support for wireless networking and the WPA protocol.

"This release is the next step in delivering the high performance and enterprise features that have been under development in the FreeBSD 5.x series for that last several years," said developer Scott Long. FreeBSD 6.0 is available for a number of different platforms including Intel, AMD64 and, for the first time, Power PC.

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The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team announced on Friday availability of the first beta release of FreeBSD 6.0. The open source UNIX-based operating system is popular for server environments, and version 6.0 is expected to bring incremental improvements over the FreeBSD 5 branch, rather than dramatic changes.

"These changes include streamlining direct device access in the kernel, providing a multi-threaded SMP-safe UFS/VFS filesystem layer, implementing WPA and Host-AP 802.11 features," FreeBSD developer Scott Long said in the announcement. "32bit application support for AMD64 is also greatly improved, as is compatiblity with certain Athlon64 motherboards." FreeBSD 6.0 is also expected to bring the first support for Apple Mac systems using a G3 or G4 processor.

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The FreeBSD Foundation, funded largely by donations from the devoted community around its open source UNIX operating system, received some bad news shortly before Christmas. Sun Microsystems has announced it is revoking FreeBSD's SCSL license, which permits the project to ship Java support with the OS.

The SCSL, or Sun Community Source License, is a combination of proprietary and open source licenses. In order to distribute the Java runtime environment in FreeBSD, the project signed an initial agreement with Sun in August 2003.

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Members of the FreeBSD UNIX team have been porting FreeBSD to the Sun Ultra Sparc platform for the past few months, and first booted a machine into 'single' user mode on the 18th of October. Single user mode supports all the basic functions of FreeBSD aside from actually multi-user support.

Even though other UNIX Operating systems such as OpenBSD have had this support for sometime, they lack the program and commercial base that FreeBSD currently enjoys. As the core of Apple's new OS X and now steady on the path to Sun compatibly, FreeBSD is beginning to surface as an open source alternative to Linux or Windows based systems.

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Despite the company's bitter campaign against open source software, Microsoft continues to use FreeBSD to power important functions of its Hotmail free e-mail service. Much to the chagrin of the folks at Redmond, FreeBSD and Apache continued to run Hotmail for several years after it was purchased in 1997. Microsoft publicly claimed to have removed all traces of FreeBSD last summer, and even published a case study documenting its experiences. Microsoft told BetaNews that solutions such as FreeBSD are in use throughout its IT infrastructure. A spokesperson also clarified the the software giant's position on OSS technologies, and views on GPL licensing.

Microsoft maintains however, that it is migrating to its own proprietary software and any delays are meant to ensure a positive experience for its customers.

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The BSDi supported FreeBSD Project has announced the availability of 4.3-RELEASE, the first since November of last year. Many security issues were corrected, as well as a myriad of bug fixes and updates made. FreeBSD is a very popular UNIX operating system based on 4.4BSD. Built around advanced networking, performance, security, and compatibility, FreeBSD is one of the best and most economical choice for any server - including the ones powering BetaNews.

FreeBSD also supports some of the latest desktop functionality, running thousands of applications available in ports. You can download the latest ISO images for free via FileForum, or read the installation guide. If you have never tried FreeBSD, the setup is a lot less complicated than it seems and you will definitely learn a lot, so create a new partition and give it a whirl. For more information, read the 4.3-RELEASE announcement and peruse the release notes.

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Last week the NetBSD Project formally announced the availability of NetBSD 1.5, its extremely portable operating system. According to the Web site, NetBSD currently supports 31 system families and 12 processor families from a single source tree. The entire operating system is open source and free of charge. NetBSD.org touts the operating system as highly integrated, featuring a "complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools." For more information visit NetBSD.

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FreeBSD fans should be starting up the wave, as a new version of FreeBSD, 4.2-RELEASE, is now available! There is not a slew of new features in this release but many bugs were fixed, important security issues were dealt with, and a conservative number of new features have been added. See the release notes for more information. You can download ISOs for i386 and Alpha or just visit the FTP server and browse.

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Thanks to a BetaNews reader for pointing us to a new site on the net that helps you BSD-based system owners find applications for virtually anything you need. The new site, BSDSearch.com, has everything organized into categories for easy navigation if you are unsure of the exact application name. It also features the latest headlines from around the net regarding BSD and other tech information. Check it out at www.bsdsearch.com.

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Jordan K. Hubbard, of the FreeBSD project announced this morning that FreeBSD 4.1.1-RELEASE is now available. Since the release of 4.1, the RSA has released their code into the public domain and a number of other security enhancements were made possible through the FreeBSD project's permission to export cryptographic code from the United States. These changes were all rolled into 4.1.1-RELEASE making it one of the most secure "out of the box" releases of FreeBSD ever completed.

The FreeBSD crew also took the opportunity to include support for new features
like IDE ATA100 support, drivers for additional Gigabit Ethernet cards and hardware watchpoints in gdb.

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The 4.1-RELEASE of FreeBSD is now available for i386 and alpha in "FTP installable" form, and can be installed directly over the net using the boot floppies or copied to a local NFS/ftp server. ISO images will also be provided August 1st. Following the release of FreeBSD 4.0 in March, 2000, many bugs were fixed, important security issues dealt with, and quite a few new features added. Please see the release notes for more information.

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