How the FreeBSD Project’s Processes Help Companies Build Products
Posted by admin on Jan 5, 2010
George Neville-Neil has written the lead article for the January issue of the Open Source Business Resource (OSBR) and the FreeBSD Foundation is the sponsor for this month’s issue. The entire issue is available as a PDF and George’s article is also available in HTML.
From the article’s abstract:
The processes that open source projects use to produce new work and maintain the quality of their code base is a subject that comes up infrequently in discussions of open source. One reason for this is that engineers and programmers are usually loathe to deal with issues that are not directly related to the piece of code or technology that they are working on.
FreeBSD Project receives Bad Code Offset
Posted by admin on Jan 5, 2010
The Bad Code Offsets project of The Alliance for Code Excellence 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”.
The FreeBSD Project was recently added as a supported project and the FreeBSD Foundation will be receiving a check for $500. Thanks to those who suggested the FreeBSD project be added and to the Alliance for supporting good code!
Source: FreeBSD Foundation Blog
Interview with S.P. Zeidler (NetBSD Dev)
Posted by admin on Aug 27, 2009
Here’s the third edition of the “discussions with a NetBSD developer” series. This time, imil spoke to S.P. Zeidler, admin and member of pkgsrc-releng.
The questions:
- For the readers who don’t know you, can you shortly introduce yourself ?
- Why did you choose to run NetBSD ? How long have you been using it ?
- How did you become a NetBSD developer ?
- Do you have an idea of the time you spend working on the NetBSD project daily, weekly, monthly ?
- What is the job of a NetBSD admin ? How many admins are there ? How do you work alltogether ? How do you share the tasks you have to do ?
- What is the hardware infrastructure of the NetBSD project, in terms of hardware and software ? Where are they located?
- As part of the pkgsrc-releng team, can you tell us more about the way pkgsrc releases are organised ? How is a release tested / validated ?
- You told us there were no fun retro arch in the machines administered by the project. I’m wondering then how are pkgsrc releases built (if they are) for those retro archs ? Are the pkgsrc releases cross-compiled ? Provided by third-parties ? Not built ? Does it work the same way for NetBSD releases by themselves ? Are all
- the “fun retro” archs versions cross-compiled ?
- In your professional environment, do you work with NetBSD ? How do you think we should promote NetBSD for wider use within companies ?
For the answer for the above questions, go here (blog.netbsd.org)
- As a conclusion, can you tell us how you forecast NetBSD future ?
PC-BSD Workshop at COSECOL
Posted by admin on Aug 27, 2009
Dru Lavigne will be holding a 90 minute PC-BSD workshop during COSECOL on September 17.
COSECOL (South America) will be held from 14-17 September.
FreeBSD 8.0 Beta1 Released
Posted by admin on Jul 7, 2009
The first public test build of the FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE test cycle is now available, 8.0-BETA1. Through the next week or so more information about the release will be posted but here is the current target schedule for the other ‘major events’:
- BETA2: July 13, 2009
- BETA3: July 20, 2009
- RC1: July 27, 2009
- RC2: August 17, 2009
- RELEASE:August 31, 2009
People with the resources to do so (test machines…) are encouraged to give 8.0-BETA1 a try. At this point it is not quite ready for production systems but mostly because there is still some ongoing work in a few areas that may cause some changes in things like ABI/API. Debugging support (WITNESS, malloc debugging, etc.) are also still turned on and those tend to cause a performance hit. As far as we know there are no known issues that would cause data corruption or anything like that, just the issues with performance and potential for changes caused by ongoing work. If you find problems they can be reported through the normal Gnats based PR system or posted to the mailing lists.
More details van MD5 checksums can be found on the release statement
PC-BSD – Making FreeBSD on the Desktop a reality – Kris Moore
Posted by admin on May 16, 2009
FreeBSD has a reputation for its rock-solid reliability, and top-notch performance in the server world, but is noticeably absent when it comes to the vast market of desktop computing.
Why is this? FreeBSD offers many, if not almost all of the same open-source packages and software that can be found in the more popular Linux desktop distributions, yet even with the speed and reliability FreeBSD offers, a relative few number of users are deploying it on their desktops.
In this presentation we will take a look at some of the reasons why FreeBSD has not been as widely adopted in the desktop market as it has on the server side. Several of the desktop weaknesses of FreeBSD will be shown, along with how we are trying to fix these short-comings through a desktopcentric version of FreeBSD, known as PC-BSD. We will also take a look at the package management system employed by all open-source operating systems alike, and some of the pitfalls it brings, which may hinder widespread desktop adoption.
This talk was done at AsiaBSDCon 2009.
The OpenBSD foundation, two years later (interview)
Posted by admin on Apr 21, 2009
On July 25th, 2007 the OpenBSD Foundation was announced. Kenneth Westerback (krw@), one of the foundation directors, gave a talk at OpenCONabout the history of, reasons for and work done by the foundation. Undeadly spoke with him about the foundation.
In its almost two year history, the OpenBSD foundation has received a few large donations from well known companies as Google, HP and Mozilla. These donations are used to fund development in the broadest sense: they pay for hackathons, provide infrastructure (build machines etc.) and get developers’ hands on laptops or exotic machines and peripherals.
OpenBSD Network Stack Internals
Posted by admin on Mar 31, 2009
OpenBSD Network Stack Internals
Presentation by Claudio Jeker at AsiaBSDCon 2009
Sleeping Beauty – NetBSD on modern laptops
Posted by admin on Mar 31, 2009
Sleeping Beauty – NetBSD on Modern Laptops
Presentation by Jorg Sonnenberg at AsiaBSDCon 2009