BSD News 07/22/13

Last week in BSD

FreeNAS release - FreeBSD events - FreeBSD Foundation and EuroBSDCon - FreeBSD news - GhostBSD status - DragonFly BSD and KMS - OpenBSD book

Releases

FreeNAS-9.1.0 Release Candidate 1 is available for download

FreeNAS-9.1.0 Release Candidate 1 is
available for download from: http://sourceforge.net/projects/freenas/files/FreeNAS-9.1.0/

For full releases notes click here.

FreeBSD: April-June, 2013 Status Report

This report covers FreeBSD-related projects between April and June 2013. This is the second of four reports planned for 2013.
The last three months have been very active for the FreeBSD developer community, including events such as BSDCan and the FreeBSD Developer Summit collocated with it (covered in a separate report, see the BSDCan Developer Summit Special) and BSD-Day 2013. It has also seen improvements from the top to the bottom of the FreeBSD system. Desktop users will be pleased to note work on improving the state of AMD GPUs and making the console interaction with kernel mode setting — required for recent xorg drivers — cleaner and from continued work to make binary packages easier to use. Developers will note continued improvements to our toolchain, with a new debugger being prepared for integration. Server users will benefit from various improvements to virtualization support and scalability in the kernel. Of course, the FreeBSD system is nothing without applications to run atop it, and this quarter has seen some tireless work by members of the ports team to ensure that users have a wide choice of desktop and development environments, with highlights from the GNOME, KDE, Xfce, and Haskell teams in this report.

FreeBSD CURRENT/STABLE Snapshots and Virtual Images 

Each Monday, Glen Barber from the FreeBSD release engineering team announces the availability of new versions of the testing ISOs and virtual images. These snapshots/images are available for:

• 9.1-STABLE: new drivers and enhancements introduced since 9.1-RELEASE
• 10.0-CURRENT: the “bleeding-edge” of FreeBSD development where all new changes first enter the system

Testers are encouraged to test these images and to use the PR system to report any found bugs.

 

Accepting Travel Grant Applications for EuroBSDCon 2013 

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to EuroBSDCon 2013.

The FreeBSD Foundation will be providing a limited number of travel grants to individuals requesting assistance. Please fill out and submit  the Travel Grant Request Application by August 19th, 2013 to apply for this grant. Instructions can be found in the announcement.

This program is open to FreeBSD developers, kernel hackers,  documentation authors, bugbusters, and system administrators, etc.  In some  cases, we are also able to fund non-developers, such as active community members and FreeBSD advocates.

If you are a speaker at the conference, we expect the conference to cover your travel costs, and will most likely not approve your direct request to us.

The travel grant program is one of the most effective ways we can spend money to help support the FreeBSD Project, as it helps developers get together in the same place at the same time, and helps advertise and advocate FreeBSD in the larger community.

July/August FreeBSD Events

FreeBSD will be represented at several conferences in July and August. There is also a FreeBSD Developer Summit planned for August. The events are as follows:

OSCON: Portland, OR, July 23-25. There will be a FreeBSD booth in the expo area. There is a $25 expo-area fee for non-OSCON attendees. The booth will be giving away FreeBSD swag and brochures as well as accepting donations for the FreeBSD Foundation.

Indiana LinuxFest: Indianapolis, IN, July 28-29. This conference is free to attend. There will be a FreeBSD booth in the expo area, presentations on PC-BSD and FreeNAS, and donations to the FreeBSD Foundation will be accepted.

FOSSCON: Philadelphia, PA, August 10. This conference is free to attend. There will be a FreeBSD booth in the expo area, a presentations on FreeNAS, and donations to the FreeBSD Foundation will be accepted.

Cambridge DevSummit: Cambridge, UK, August 25-28. This invitation-only summit is for FreeBSD committers (src, docs, ports). More information will become available at its website.

More upcoming events are available from the BSD Events calendar. There is a submission form if you know of an upcoming conference with FreeBSD related presentations or booths. 

FreeBSD Foundation at Indiana LinuxFest

Indiana LinuxFest will be held at the Wyndham Indianapolis West Hotel in Indianapolis, IN from Friday July 26 to Sunday July 28. Registration is free for this event.

There will be a FreeBSD booth in the Expo area on Saturday, July 27 from 8:00-18:30. Stop by to say hi, discuss the Foundation's work, or to donate to the FreeBSD Foundation. 

PC-BSD at Indiana LinuxFest

There will be a BSD booth in the Expo area on Saturday from 8:00-18:30. We will be giving out PC-BSD DVDs, FreeNAS CDs, and other cool swag, as well as accepting donations to the FreeBSD Foundation.
Ken Moore will present “Getting Started with PC-BSD” at 10:30 on July 27. Kris Moore will present “Automating the deployment of FreeBSD & PC-BSD systems” at 13:00 on July 27.
The BSDA certification exam will be held at 11:00 on July 28. The cost for the exam is $75.

Digital version of Book of PF now included with physical book 

Austin Hook(austin@) wrote to misc@ to let us all know about a new offer for purchasers of The Book of PF:

The main OpenBSD orders website is pleased to announce that the digital version of The Book of PF will now be made available for free whenever the physical version is ordered.
We are grateful to Peter Hansteen and No Starch Press for this additional feature.
Our view is that it is nice to have the portability of the digital version of these kinds of important reference books, and still a pleasure to have the comfort of that volume sitting on the shelf, handy to your main work station when needing a quick reminder about a technical point.
For all those who have previously ordered The Book of PF from us we are going to send out copies next week. If you don't see it, let us know if the email address has changed.
Enjoy!

And Peter Hansteen chimes in from the fjord country that "I'm not sure who came up with the idea originally, but my own take once it came up was that anything that helps produce goodwill and if possible revenue for OpenBSD, I'm for it. So I told them to please go ahead. And the good folks at No Starch Press agreed with that sentiment."

 DragonFly BSD: Intel KMS support coming soon 

Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly.  This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.

GhostBSD June 2013 Reports 

GBI(GhostBSD installer) 1.3 is almost ready for mass testing, Eric is doing some final test on GBI. Mate 1.6 is fully functional ready to be added to GhostBSD. Mate, Xfce and Lxde/Openbox Theme for 3.5 is not fully completed, but you will see a stable development release soon. When FreeBSD 9.2 beta will be out GhostBSD 3.5 will be in debugging mode only we will stop implement new feature.

Fish will be the default shell for terminal console of the live cd and will be the default choice on the installer.  Fish is a smart and user-friendly command line shell with autosuggestion. Fish suggests commands as you type based on history and completions, just like a web browser.  Fish natively supports term256, the state of the art in terminal technology. You'll have an astonishing 256 colors available for us fish is fully scriptable, and its syntax is simple, clean, and consistent.  you can set your colors and view functions, variables, and history all from a web page. Other shells support programmable completions, but only fish generates them automatically by parsing your installed man pages. Fish will delight you with features like tab completions and syntax highlighting that just work, with nothing new to learn or configure.

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JH

software developer - guitar player - poetry lover