FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE Available

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 7.3-RELEASE. This is the fourth release from the 7-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 7.2 and introduces a few
new features. There will be one more release from this branch to allow future improvements to be made available in the 7-STABLE branch but at this point most developers are focused on 8-STABLE.

Some of the highlights:

• ZFS updated to version 13
• new boot loader gptzfsboot supports GPT and ZFS
• hwpmc(4) enhancements including support for core2/i7 processor and pmcannotate(8)
• new mfiutil and mptutil tools for widely used RAID controllers
• NULL pointer vulnerability mitigation
• bind updated to 9.4-ESV
• Gnome updated to 2.28.2
• KDE updated to 4.3.5
• Perl updated to 5.10

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Taking a look at PC-BSD 8.0

Toward the end of 2009 I took FreeBSD 8.0 for a test drive on an old PC. The experiment went so well that I was immediately looking forward to trying out PC-BSD, a desktop variant of the popular FreeBSD operating system. Unfortunately for me, the new version of PC-BSD wasn't to arrive for several weeks. Like a penniless child with his nose pressed up against the window of a candy store, I went over to the project's website.

The PC-BSD site maintains a very similar look and feel to its FreeBSD counterpart. That is to say, it's well crafted, easy to read, painless to navigate and filled with lots of useful information. The installation documentation especially is a well-done piece of work. Open source projects, and their developers, often take flak for putting so little effort into the user manual. This is not the case with PC-BSD. While browsing, I read the teaser for the upcoming release - and good things were planned. New features include better ZFS support, a live DVD, improvements to the package updating system, the ability to run 32-bit applications on a 64-bit system and better binary support for Linux programs.

It felt like a long wait, but in February the PC-BSD team released their latest offering, version 8.0, and I downloaded their live DVD. It's a hefty image, weighing in at just over 3 GB. There's also a USB image file for people who like to carry their operating system in their pocket. For my PC-BSD test drive I used a desktop machine (2.5 GHz CPU, 2 GB of RAM), my HP notebook (dual-core 2 GHz CPU, 3 GB of RAM) and a virtual environment, provided by VirtualBox.

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FreeBSD 7.3-RC2 Available!

The third and what should be last of the test builds for the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, 7.3-RC2, is available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The target schedule as well as the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

The schedule has slipped by a bit over a week so the actual target for the release announcement is really about a week and a half from now. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list.

There are known issues with the Radeon video driver that have caused some people problems. The problems have been nebulous enough that we have decided to not hold up the release due to that specific issue. At the point that driver has stabilized it will be handled as an Errata Notice. So far that is the only big problem we've been tracking as part of the release that has not been resolved in one way or another.

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PC-BSD 8.0 Released

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.5

PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

1. FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2
2. KDE 4.3.5
3. Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD
4. Run in Live mode directly from DVD
5. Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly
6. Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

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XHP: Inline XML For PHP

Anyone developing with PHP quickly learns that PHP’s ability to generate HTML is both a blessing and a curse. While PHP supports the ability to generate dynamic websites and HTML, it often creates kludgy and difficult code. Facebook, one of the world’s largest consumers of PHP and fresh off their announcement of HipHop, has noted this problem as well, and decided to try and solve it by introducing XHP.

XHP, in a nutshell, is designed to augment the syntax of PHP to allow for inline XML to be included in PHP code. More simply put, XHP permits PHP to understand HTML syntax, eliminating the need for quotation marks, concatenation, escaping and all of the other headaches associated with including HTML directly into PHP code.

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Compiling HipHop-PHP on Ubuntu 9.10 64bit

Facebook recently open-sourced their new software, HipHop-PHP. HPHP compiles PHP source to very efficient C++, which is then compiled to an executable binary. After a few hiccups, building HPHP is surprisingly easy. HPHP must be compiled on a 64bit platform. If you only have a 32bit platform and you really want to play with it, set up a VM at Slicehost or Linode and compile it there (if you have a 32bit platform, you can’t install a 64bit VM). I eventually used my Linode account and built it there.

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HipHop for PHP finally released

An initial release of HipHop for PHP, Facebook’s PHP-to-C++ transformer, is finally available for download from Github.

HipHop comes with a number of rather specific requirements, including cmake 2.6 or higher, and several patches that need to be applied to libcurl and libevent in order for the project to compile against them.

Facebook employee (and core PHP contributor) Scott MacVicar announced the availability of the package through a post on the project’s Google group, adding that “while we’re running HipHop in production it might not yet be stable for you.”

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HipHop for PHP: First look

Just this tuesday Facebook announced a ambitious project called “HipHop for PHP”, if you missed it general opinion says you have been coding PHP in a cave. As I write this review no code has been posted yet, but Facebook has made a great move to open source the project so we can all get our hands on it, use it and contribute to it. So since the code is not out there yet, this is literally a first impression article based on the presentation made by Facebook and various posts from core PHP developers who got a first look at the technology before the release.

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FreeBSD - "The unknown giant"

FreeBSD is the most accessible and popular of the BSDs, has code at the heart of Darwin and Apple's OS X, and has powered some of the more successful sites on the Web, including Hotmail, Netcraft and Yahoo!, which before the rise of Google was the busiest site on the internet.

FreeBSD rose from the ashes of 386BSD, the original effort to port BSD to the Intel chip, and claims a code lineage that reaches back to Bill Joy's Berkeley Software Distribution of the late seventies. The 386BSD port was begun in 1989 by Bill and Lynne Jolitz, and was destined to be the original free Unix-like operating system for the IBM PC. The first public release of 386BSD (Version 0.0) was on St. Patrick's Day, 1991, accompanied by a series of articles in Dr Dobbs journal, which documented the process.

The first functional release of 386BSD was Version 0.1, which was released on Bastille Day, 1992.

FreeBSD emerged in 1993, after the self-imposed task of supporting 386BSD on their own had proved too much for Bill and Lynne Jolitz. The patchkit which had been the underpinning for the BSD port to the 386 was revived and became the basis for the first FreeBSD release.

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7.3-BETA1 Available...

7.3-BETA1, the first test build of the 7.3-RELEASE cycle, is now available for amd64, i386, pc98, and sparc64 architectures. The target schedule along with the current status of the release is available here:

http://wiki.freebsd.org/Releng/7.3TODO

For now we plan on BETA1 being followed by two Release Candidates, then the release itself. If you notice problems you can report them through the normal Gnats PR system or on the freebsd-stable mailing list.

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PC-BSD 8.0-RC Released

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-RC (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2, and KDE 4.3.4

PC-BSD 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements over the 7.x series. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

* FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE-P2

* KDE 4.3.4

* Brand new System Installer, allows the install of PC-BSD or FreeBSD

* Run in Live mode directly from DVD

* Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and installing applications directly

* Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA drivers on amd64

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Accepting Travel Grant Applications for AsiaBSDCon 2010

Calling all FreeBSD developers needing assistance with travel expenses to AsiaBSDCon 2010.

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 at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/documents/TravelRequestForm.pdf by
January 29, 2010 to apply for this grant.

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BSD Magazine goes free!

Hello everyone!

We are happy to announce that BSD Magazine is transforming into a free monthly online publication. The online version of BSD Magazine will stay in the same quality and form. It will look like the BSD magazine one is familiar and comfortable with. Please sign up to our newsletter at www.bsdmag.org and get every issue straight to your inbox.

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FreeBSD Security Advisories

FreeBSD-SA-10:01.bind
FreeBSD-SA-10:02.ntpd
FreeBSD-SA-10:03.zfs

FreeBSD Errata Notice

Since FreeBSD 8.0 was released, several stability and performance problems have been identified. This Errata Notice describes several fixes judged to be of particular importance, but low risk, to users with specific workloads or using specific features that trigger these problems.

Areas where problems are addressed include NFS, ZFS, Multicast networking, SCTP as well as the rename(2) syscall.

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PC-BSD 8.0-BETA Released

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.0-BETA (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.0-RELEASE, and KDE 4.3.4

Version 8.0 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

 * FreeBSD 8.0-Release

 * KDE 4.3.4

 * Brand new System Installer, allows the install 
   of PC-BSD or FreeBSD

 * Run in Live mode directly from DVD

 * Updated Software Manager, allows browsing and 
   installing applications directly

 * Support for 3D acceleration with NVIDIA 
   drivers on amd64

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