Data Circle

NetBSD 3.0 is officially released! via #NetBSD Community Blog

The third version of the NetBSD operating system has been officially announced and is now available for download. Amongst the changes include support for Xen 2.0, lots of new supported devices and support for PAM framework.

NetBSD supports an impressively large number of different architectures, with everything from the popular i386 to the less well known Sharp X680×0 series and even the Playstation 2. It’s also the only member of the *BSD family that I’ve actually managed to get installed on my x86 laptop (FreeBSD refused to even boot the install CD last time I tried it).

I don’t use NetBSD much myself as I’ve never really had chance to play around with it and there’s always other things requiring my attention, but I’ll probably give it another whirl at some point over the Christmas period and see how it shapes up.

More Information

• NetBSD v3.0 Released via Slashdot

(N.B. I wrote this article a while ago, when the FreeBSD site was first updated, but have only just got around to finishing it and hitting the ‘publish’ button).

The official FreeBSD web site has recently received a makeover as part of Google’s Summer of Code programme. As with most redesigns nowadays, the old site was a hideous collection of tables and HTML that lacked any form of semantics, whereas the new site uses CSS for the layout and styling (although I should point out that the old site did validate as XHTML, so it wasn’t as bad as some people might think).

As someone who has been using FreeBSD for some time, I’ve been a regular visitor to the web site so here’s what I think of the new design compared to the old one. First of all, the front page looks a lot cleaner, there’s less clutter and more whitespace. A lot of the marketing blurb about “what is FreeBSD, what is it good for etc.” has been moved off the home page and now the central content is dominated by news, events and media stories. Personally I think this is a big improvement, because when I go to the home page of any web site I’m generally looking for something specific, so I’d rather be greeted by some well organised links that point me to where I want to go rather than a page of text that doesn’t contain anything of interest.

Overall, I think the new design is a lot better, although I still feel a certain fondness for the old one, which always looked somewhat old school – a bit like FreeBSD.

Debian GNU/Linux 3.1 updated (r1) via Debian – Latest News

The popular GNU/Linux distribution, Debian, has released its first update to the current stable branch of packages, codenamed “Sarge”. It’s mainly a bunch of security patches, so if you already update from security.debian.org on a regular basis you have probably downloaded and installed the changes by now. I run Debian on a Bytemark Virtual Machine to provide secondary DNS and mail services for some of my domains (including datacircle.org) and I haven’t noticed any updates recently, although I only have a very small number of packages installed so that limits potential changes anyway.

If you’re running Debian Sarge on any of your machines and haven’t updated, now’s the time to check to see if you need any of the patches. Most installations will add security.debian.org to your sources list anyway so you shouldn’t have to do anything other than run apt-get update && apt-get upgrade to download and apply the updates. There is also a list of packages which were accepted or rejected should you be interested in further details.

XFS (read-only) support committed to CURRENT via FreeBSD News

Support for XFS, the native filesystem for SGI systems, has been added to FreeBSD, although it is limited to just reading files at the present moment in time. Being a 64 bit filesystem means that theorectical file limits are raised to 9 million terabytes, should you have that amount of disk space on your BSD server farm.

XFS has been available in Linux kernels since the 2.4 series, so it’s good to see the BSD chaps catching up at last.