DragonFlyBSD v3.4 has been released ! Here is the official announcement

 

This new version brings :

 

• DPorts, FreeBSD ports on DragonFly, which seems to integrate better than pkgsrc
• New default compiler : GCC 4.7
• New USB stack
• Better CPU performance
• Better tmpfs performance (nearly +800% if I rememeber well)
• Lot of fixes

 

 

OpenBSD 5.3 pre-orders have started ! OpenBSD 5.3 is scheduled for May 1th 2013.

A new version of DragonFly BSD is available on their git repository.

I wanted to share my experience with my operating system choice. I am a bsd / linux user and when it comes to choose your distribution, it is not always as easy as we could think.

ISOs are available on PC-BSD mirrors to try the new rolling release of PC-BSD.

I see from my stats that most of the searchs leading to this website are about OpenBSD on a raspberry pi...

I just want to make a reminder of how to boot OpenBSD from Lilo (this is certainly useful for some Slackware users like me still using lilo).

I made a little comparison between all the BSD operating system, Linux and OpenIndiana virtualization hypervisors. It could be interesting for some people looking for information about what can be done on each system.

We will see in this article how to install the latest Xfce (4.10) on OpenBSD 5.2. Xfce is a lightweight desktop with a lot of advanced utilities, it's not only a window manager !

Kris Moore, the founder and a developer of PC-BSD, wrote en email to the PC-BSD testing mailing list outlining the his unexpressed frustrations with getting updates out and what work has been done and will be done to shift towards going to a rolling release. You can read the full email here.

Just a short blurb about FreeBSD on the Raspberry Pi followed by some wise words from Peter Salus at BSDCan2011.

File Info: 8Min, 4MB.

Ogg Link: http://cis01.uma.edu/~wbackman/bsdtalk/bsdtalk222.ogg or MP3.

The phoronix test suite, a tool embedding a lot of benchmark has enhanced its BSD support in the latest version:

Official announcement : http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=news_item&px=MTI4Nzk

Quick News !

 

The website DistroWatch.com has published a very-favourably review of PC-BSD 9.1.

Go to the Review !

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This new edition is fully rewritten and contains the latest details about key OpenBSD features such as the PF packet filter, network VLANs and trunks, packaged software, building your own releases, diskless installs, and more, more, more. Absolute OpenBSD goes into depth on the features that set OpenBSD apart from the crowd of free UNIX-like operating systems. It beyond explaining what to type, and instead takes the reader into why things work that way.

Pre-Order the Book Now! Get BOTH the physical book and the ebook (in several DRM-free formats) from the publisher, immediately upon the book’s release. Use coupon code ILUVMICHAEL for a special Official Book Web Site Discount of 30%. Not only does this cost you a little less, but a wee bit more of your money goes to support the author’s bad habits. (Online orders are handled by No Starch Press.) You can also pre-order Absolute OpenBSD from online retailers such as Amazon and B&N.

If you like FreeBSD / PC-BSD, you should really consider making a little gift to the FreeBSD Foundation.

 

http://freebsdfoundation.org/

 

The FreeBSD Foundation is an association in Canada, its goal is to pay developers to get things done in FreeBSD and make events to spread FreeBSD. Actually, someone is paid to port the KMS intel driver, another one is paid to port a future netbook ARM-based so it works completely with FreeBSD.

 

OpenSource is about contributing (by writing some code for the most part), but people are doing it "for fun", and do what they want to do. Sometimes, you need to pay developers to do things that no one is interested in working on in their spare time, or where you lack manpower.

 

Even if you give only $10, your $10 will permit to achieve something!

PCBSD 9.1 has been released !

You can find an official mirror here

This hasn't been announced officialy yet! But some people here are seeking ftp with some magics scripts ;)

I added a "raspberry pi" category because most of the visitors are coming on this website looking for informations about "Raspberry pi" on *BSD.

Things are moving forward slowly. FreeBSD and NetBSD are the only one targeting the Raspberry Pi. As I said before, OpenBSD isn't interested in supporting this platform, and DragonFly is x86 only.

I will try to stay informed about the state of the Raspberry support on both operating systems and relay it on this blog.

I'm following PC-BSD since a long time. I'm regularly testing each release, but those days, all my computers are equipped with "Intel HD graphics", the GPU which comes with Intel core i{3,5,7}, and FreeBSD wasn't compatible at all.

Today, I tried PC-BSD 9.1-RC3 and hurray ! My computer is fully working ! I can even play Minecraft with the same FPS as I can get on Linux, where X would not even ran in the previous release.

I want to thank all the developers who did participate in this, this is awesome ! I don't want a world with Windows and Linux, we need the BSD !

Finally, OpenBSD boots on this computer, but the developers stripped out everything related to 2D/3D acceleration in order to get it working, so you can get X on OpenBSD, but everything is a bit... sluggish. It's a matter of taste, for some people it might be very well, while others could find it very boring.

Hello

 

OpenBSD 5.2 ISO's are available since a few hours.

 

You will find all the information you need like the changelog or the mirrors to download on this page : OpenBSD official announcement

 

Here is the summary of the biggest changes

• pthreads modifications bring SMP performance improvements
• hibernation support for i386 with pciide and wd disk
• nginx is now in the base system with apache 1.3
• Gnome 3.4.2
• Xfce 4.10
• Kde 3.5.10
• Postgres 9.1
• a lot more !

I plan to do a short review of this release soon

Hi visitor !

 

I'm not writing this post because NetBSD 6.0 is out, I should but I don't want to say the same thing as all the others blogs.

I'm writing about the state of the Raspberry PI on NetBSD. You should have seen in the 6.0 release notes that there is a support for it. YES, it may boot your PI, but you can only get a serial connection to your device and type some commands. Tere is a lot more work to do, but this seems promising !

 

Please find this thread from netbsd mailing list port-arm, there is a link to download a bootable image of netbsd for raspberry pi !

 

If you are interested about FreeBSD on raspberry pi you should follow this blog made by someone who wants to port FreeBSD to the PI. He made U-boot boot on the PI and boot FreeBSD, but the support seems a bit behind NetBSD.

For OpenBSD, no port planned. And DragonFly doesn't exist on ARM.

 

Extra : I know this is not BSD, but you can run RISC OS on the Raspberry PI (I tried and it works wonderfully !) The forum thread is here

 

 

PC-BSD 9.1 RC2 has been released last day.

 

What changed from the last Release Candidate :

• Fixed multiple bugs where mice freeze or behave incorrectly.
• Fixed language selection to be displayed as native language.
• Compatibility improvements for PS2 mice.
• Fixed time-out issues with External DVD Drive / USB Drives.
• Updated system proxy paths and functionality.
• Updated sound detection functionality.
• Added mp3 / ogg encoders to CD rippers.
• Added detection for NVIDIA Optimus systems.
• Added options for cups-base, to fix an issue with many printers printing blank pages when using ghostscript for pdftops conversion.
• Improved sys-manager to only update ports tree if it already is checked out.
• Improvements to the wardens functionality and stability.  Improved jail importing functionality.
• Added "Update All" button for AppCafe.
• Graphical enhancements for EasyPBI.

Click here for the announcement

 

I don't have any opinion about this 9.1 release as it doesn't work on any of my laptops. I can install it but once I boot it the first time, X crash and the computer reboot, and there are nothing in the logs.

OpenBSD 5.2 will be released soon. You can pre-order it now on this page.

Here is a small list of the most significant changes :

• pthreads modifications bring SMP performance improvements
• hibernation support for i386 with pciide and wd disk
• nginx is now in the base system with apache 1.3
• Gnome 3.4.2
• Xfce 4.10
• Kde 3.5.10
• Postgres 9.1
• a lot more !

The full announce and changelog can be found here.

The PC-BSD system has released a first release candidate for its future 9.1 version.

You can find a mirror on this link : http://www.pcbsd.org/getmirrors.php?url=9.1-RC1

I don't know much about the differences between the beta and the release candidate as the PC-BSD blog doesn't have announced this yet.

Happy testing !

One developper of the NetBSD team has successfully ported NetBSD to the Raspberry PI board. As you can see in this changelog NetBSD 5 -> 6 the support has been merged into the source tree.

I don't really now if it works well, from a "dmesg" posted on their mailing list it seems to work, at least in console mode.

 

On the FreeBSD side, it seems to works only with a serial console, from what I understand. (link)

If you are running Minecraft with craftbukkit on a FreeBSD system, you have certainly noticed that the server isn't working with the latest version 1.3.

If you have a message in the console "Invalid argument" when someone is trying to connect, you can fix this by adding the parameter "-Djava.net.preferIPv4Stack=true" to your java command line.

 

I'd like to tell you a story.

I'm running a Minecraft server for a community since nearly two years, and we have been facing a lot of problems during this long time.

For those who don't know Minecraft, it's a game where there is no real goal, you can play in multi-player, break things and make the world as you want with blocks. It's fun, and special.

The bad thing in Minecraft is that it's all coded in Java, even the server side. Minecraft server eat all your memory, your disk bandwidth, your disk space, your network and ONE CPU (yeah, it doesn't run on multiples CPU).

First, we had a tiny RPS (Real Private Server, which was a real machine with a network disk). We could barely have one Minecraft server with more than twenty players. One day, without warn, we had a crash with our Ext4 /home. It was difficult to backup because a Minecraft Map could make a few gigabytes split in thousands of files. We were doing backup by ftp at a slow speed to reduce the server disk usage. It was a pain!

Then, we switched the server to a new one, quad core, sixty gigabytes of ram and two terabytes of disk. This time, I chose FreeBSD because I knew that it would work greatly ! Linux could have worked too, maybe we could have more performance, but it would not be as easy to manage as our FreeBSD box.

With ZFS snapshots, we backup our map every hour. In case of BIG CRASH, we can restore everything quickly. Java is working very fine on the server side, the server never crashed, even with two Minecraft server on (each server is using 7 Gb of memory). We are also using compressed ZFS pools for the maps, it reduces the load drastically.

I just can't imagine how to do this with another system. How could I save the map without disk latency on our server? We are also running a lot of daemons like "Mumble" for multi-player VO-IP, lighttpd as web server with php-fpm and lisp web server.

We were also available when the leap-second bug occurred the 2th of July, where a lot of Linux systems were overloaded due to a bug causing Java or Mysql to take all the cpu.

With FreeBSD, we don't know any software limitation for the things we need.

Dear reader,

This is the first post on Planet-BSD portal.

We will try on this website to keep you informed about the news of the differents BSD projects. I hope you'll even find some tutorials on BSD systems soon here.

The design of this website will stay clear, I may add some images later, maybe, but if you want to read this from a text based browser, you'll see that it's as readable as a man page !

Our hosting is OVH, the server is in France and is powered by FreeBSD. The website is coded in LISP and run with the SBCL compiler.