Second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004
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.
NetBSD Archive
NetBSD Non-executable Mappings Update
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.
Implementing Linux emulation on NetBSD
NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK. Read the rest of the article here.
NetBSD Trademark Application Completed
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.
First NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004
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.
Of course it runs NetBSD: NetBSD/xen
Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See here for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.
NetBSD 2.0 Release Engineering Process has begun
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.
OS Review: NetBSD 1.6.2 on SPARC64
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.
NetBSD Packages Collection on Interix
Preliminary support for Interix, a UNIX-like environment for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, has been added to NetBSD's Packages Collection. The support is still new and incomplete, but it is now possible to bootstrap pkgsrc and install simple packages. Interix is part of Microsoft's Windows
Services for UNIX package. See Todd Vierling's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.
Interview with NetBSD’s Luke Mewburn
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 Released
NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.
NetBSD in 2003 – Annual NetBSD Status Report
On February 7th, The NetBSD Foundation held it's annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what things are planned for the coming year.
NetBSD now officially 501(c)(3) non-profit
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.
Guide to install NetBSD 1.6.1 on your iBook
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.
Getting and installing NetBSD-current
The BSD family of Unix-like operating systems evolved from the last release of 4.4BSD, released by the University of California some years ago. This article discusses why you might want to run the -current branch of NetBSD, how you would go about it, and a bit of what could go wrong.
A daemon-writer’s Guide to NetBSD’s rc.d system; Logo Contest
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 allows cross-build of src/x11
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 Packages Collection gets (experimental) “pkgviews”
NetBSD's Packages Collection aka
pkgsrc now has support for an experimental new framework called ``pkgviews''.
This framework, finally allowing multiple versions of one package to co-exist
without conflicts (among other great features), was first proposed by Alistair
Crooks at EuroBSDCon
2002 and has been integrated into pkgsrc by Johnny C. Lam, who just posted
a User's
guide to the tech-pkg ml.
IP20 (Indigo) support for NetBSD/sgimips
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.
Chock full o’ NetBSD
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:
