NetBSD Archive

Jan Schaumann announced that the second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004 is now available online. It covers the major recent developments within the NetBSD project during April, May, June.

During the last few months Chuck Silvers has refined the support for non-executable mappings on NetBSD. Non-executable mappings make parts of the stack and heap non-executable when they are marked writable. This makes exploiting potential buffer overflows harder.

The NetBSD Foundation announced that it has registered the 'NetBSD' trademark...An official policy on the use of the NetBSD trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon.

Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.

James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun. At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end of May 2004. See James' message to the netbsd-announce mailinglist for details.

NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on my Sun Ultra 5. This will be the first in a series of operating system reviews for the SPARC platform. You can find the specifics of my evaluation machine here.

The NetBSD Project announced Monday that release 1.6.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. NewsForge interviewed Luke Mewburn of the NetBSD Core Group and asked him about the NetBSD project in general, the long awaiting release 2.0, and a lot of technical and organizational issues.

NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that The NetBSD Foundation Inc. now is classified as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) publicly-funded non-profit organization. Donations to the Foundation by US taxable entities are now fully tax-deductible. For more information about donations to The NetBSD Foundation, please see: http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/, Other contributions are, of course, also always welcome.

A detailed step-by-step HOWTO install NetBSD 1.6.1 on your iBook has been posted to the NetBSD port-macppc mailing list. More information about this port is available from the NetBSD/macppc website.

The NetBSD startup process is extensible, flexible, and a little daunting at first. This article looks at the configuration mechanisms used to enable or disable features, and compares NetBSD's startup procedures to those of other systems. The NetBSD Project has also announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. The cash prize is US $100 for the winning entry. Our Take: I hope the winning entry resizes well (see: it is clear enough) at 32x32pix, so we can update our NetBSD logo here at OSNews too.

NetBSD's Luke Mewburn announced today that it is now possible to cross-build XFree86 4.x on NetBSD-current using the "build.sh" framework, taking advantage of such features as: cross compilation, read-only source tree, unprivileged builds. You can find more details about the build.sh framework in Luke Mewburn and Matthew Green's paper and presentation on the topic at BSDCon 2003.

NetBSD's Christopher Sekiya announced on New Year's Eve that he committed the final bits for Indigo (IP20) support to the NetBSD/sgimips Port. Both NFS root and local root now boot multi-user. Please see his message to the port-sgimips MailingList for details.

While it's no Indigo Espresso or a VAX Bar (though, of course, there is NetBSD/sgimips and NetBSD/vax), at least you can log in on a Mr. Coffee. And while the JavaStation has been running NetBSD for a while, full support is now completely in-tree: