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NetBSD Archive

NetBSD Gets New Machines After Donations

The NetBSD project would like to thank all contributors for their generous response to the recent call for donations. In only one month, almost US $27K were donated allowing the NetBSD Foundation to purchase five new machines; three of those machines will be added to the nightly build infrastructure and two of those machines will become anonymous cvs servers. For more information, including the detailed specifications of the hardware purchased, please see Christos Zoulas' email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

New NetBSD-Office Released

"The NetBSD-Office Project is an approach to provide NetBSD users a common, preconfigured and ready to use Office Environment. The installation CDROM is a modified NetBSD 2.0 installation CD-ROM, which installs the Operating System and a set of preselected third party programs in one step, including preconfiguration for an easy startup. Or short: install - reboot - start using KDE." A new release with KDE 3.4.1 as well as screenshots is at the side project's website.

NetBSD Project Requests Donations For New Hardware

Thor Lancelot Simon wrote to the NetBSD-Advocacy Mailing List: "There are many upgrades we'd like to make to the NetBSD project infrastructure, but which we cannot make because, to be blunt, our project is poor. Not poor in innovation nor poor in developer resources nor poor in features -- poor in cold, hard cash, the kind we need in order to buy hardware that would let us better serve our users."

NetBSD pkgsrc frozen for new stable branch

The NetBSD Packages Team has frozen the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period began on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds. See Alistair G. Crooks's message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

NetBSD branches pkgsrc-2005Q1

NetBSD's Alistair Crooks has announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the NetBSD Packages Collection (aka pkgsrc). This branch includes all the updates to the thousands of existing and additions of hundreds of new applications since the hereby obsoleted pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch. Some noteworthy infrastructure changes applicable to all 13 operating systems for which pkgsrc is available include the support for multiple digests to check the integrity of the distribution files as found on the Internet (triggered by the recently-found problems with the SHA-1 algorithm) and the so-called alternates framework.

NetBSD enabled PAM

Christos Zoulas announced recently that as of 2005-02-27, NetBSD has PAM enabled for all applications that perform authentication. Support for PAM, which is specified in the X/Open Single Sign-On standard, was originally imported into NetBSD-current on December 12th, 2004. This means that NetBSD 3.0 will ship PAM-enabled per default; users following -current should take care to update their systems using etcupdate and/or the '/etc/postinstall' script. See Christos' email to the current-users mailinglist and the OpenPAM website for more details.

NetBSD 2.0 Rendezvous

In December 2004, the NetBSD Project released the feature-rich NetBSD 2.0. Even after such a masterpiece, developers kept working on improvements, new features, and new ports following the new development roadmap. Federico Biancuzzi recently interviewed them to find out what they are working on and how they plan to promote their project in the near future.