This week on the show, it's all about Lumina. We'll be giving you a visual walkthrough of the new BSD-exclusive desktop environment, as well as chatting with the main developer. There's also answers to your emails and all the latest news, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.
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Portscout ported to OpenBSD
Portscout is a popular utility used in the FreeBSD ports infrastructureIt lets port maintainers know when there's a new version of the upstream software available by automatically checking the distfile mirrorNow OpenBSD porters can enjoy the same convenience, as it's been ported overYou can view the status online to see how it works and who maintains whatThe developer who ported it is working to get all the current features working on OpenBSD, and added a few new features as wellHe decided to fork and rename it a few days later***
Sysadmins and systemd refugees flocking to BSD
With all the drama in Linux land about the rapid changes to their init system, a lot of people are looking at BSD alternativesThis "you got your Windows in my Linux" article (and accompanying comments) give a nice glimpse into the minds of some of those switchersBoth server administrators and regular everyday users are switching away from Linux, as more and more distros give them no choice but to use systemdFortunately, the BSD communities are usually very welcoming of switchers - it's pretty nice on this side!***
OpenBSD's versioning schemes
Ted Unangst explains the various versioning systems within OpenBSD, from the base to libraries to other included softwareIn contrast to FreeBSD's release cycle, OpenBSD isn't as concerned with breaking backwards compatibility (but only if it's needed to make progress)This allows them to innovate and introduce new features a lot more easily, and get those features in a stable release that everyone usesHe also details the difference between branches, their errata system and lack of "patch levels" for securitySome other things in OpenBSD don't have version numbers at all, like tmux"Every release adds some new features, fixes some old bugs, probably adds a new bug or two, and, if I have anything to say about it, removes some old features."***
VAXstation 4000 Model 90 booting NetBSD
We found a video of NetBSD booting on a 22 year old VAX workstation, circa 1992This system has a monstrous 71 MHz CPU and 128MB of ECC RAMIt continues in part two, where we learn that it would've cost around $25,000 when it was released!The uploader talks about his experiences getting NetBSD on it, what does and doesn't work, etcIt's interesting to see that such old hardware isn't necessarily obsolete just because newer things have come out since then (but maybe don't try to build world on it...)***
Interview - Ken Moore -
[email protected]The Lumina desktop environment
Special segment
Lumina walkthrough
News Roundup
Suricata for IDS on pfSense
While most people are familiar with Snort as an intrusion detection system, Suricata is another choiceThis guide goes through the steps of installing and configuring it on a public-facing pfSense boxPart two details some of the configuration stepsOne other cool thing about Suricata - it's compatible with Snort rules, so you can use the same updatesThere's also another recent post about snort as well, if that's more your styleIf you run pfSense (or any BSD) as an edge router for a lot of users, this might be worth looking into***
OpenBSD's systemd API emulation project
This story was pretty popular in the mainstream news this weekFor the Google Summer of Code, a student is writing emulation wrappers for some of systemd's functionsThere was consideration from some Linux users to port over the finished emulation back to Linux, so they wouldn't have to run the full systemdOne particularly interesting Slashdot comment snippet: "We are currently migrating a large number (much larger than planned after initial results) of systems from RHEL to BSD - a decision taken due to general unhappiness with RHEL6, but SystemD pushed us towards BSD rather than another Linux distro - and in some cases are seeing throughput gains of greater than 10% on what should be equivalent Linux and BSD server builds. The re-learning curve wasn't as steep as we expected, general system stability seems to be better too, and BSD's security reputation goes without saying."It will NOT be in the base system - only in ports, and only installed as a dependency for things like newer GNOME that require such APIsIn the long run, BSD will still be safe from systemd's reign of terror, but will hopefully still be compatible with some third party packages like GNOME that insist on using it***
GhostBSD 4 previewed
The GhostBSD project is moving along, slowly getting closer to the 4 releaseThis article shows some of the progress made, and includes lots of screenshots and interesting graphical frontendsIf you're not too familiar with GhostBSD, we interviewed the lead developer a little while back***
NetBSD on the Banana Pi
The Banana Pi is a tasty alternative to the Raspberry Pi, with similar hardware specsIn this blog post, a NetBSD developer details his experiences in getting NetBSD to run on itAfter studying how the prebuilt Linux image booted, he made some notes and started hackingEthernet, one of the few things not working, is being looked into and he's hoping to get it fully supported for the upcoming NetBSD 7.0They're only about $65 as of the time we're recording this, so it might be a fun project to try***
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