Larry the BSD Guy It’s a sad day at the FOSS Force office. Larry Cafiero says goodbye and walks off into the sunset. This weekend,…
Posts published by “Larry Cafiero”
Larry Cafiero is a journalist and a Free/Open Source Software advocate and is involved in several FOSS projects. Follow him on Twitter: @lcafiero
Larry the BSD Guy
Should UbuntuBSD be officially tied to the Canonical family of operating systems?
Our good friends at Softpedia reported last week that the fledgling UbuntuBSD variant could be seeking the imprimatur from Canonical and become an official Ubuntu “flavor.”
Jon Boden, the lead developer of UbuntuBSD, submitted a post on the Ubuntu developers’ discussion list to let them know that he would “like to contribute all my work to Ubuntu Community and, if you think it is worthy, make ubuntuBSD an official Ubuntu project like Xubuntu or Edubuntu.”
Larry the BSD Guy
While the entire BSD world has been buzzing over Ubuntu’s BSD release, the FreeNAS project has been busy releasing version 9.10 as a major precursor to version 10.
Most of the attention this week has been around the release of UbuntuBSD, which in and of itself is a noble effort for those who want to escape from systemd, as the developers have dubbed it according to Phoronix. This manifestation joins Ubuntu 15.10 Wile E. Coyote — sorry, Wily Werewolf — to the Free BSD 10.1 kernel.
To its credit, UbuntuBSD uses Xfce as its default desktop. It also joins a list of other marriages between Linux distros and the BSD kernel: Debian GNU/kFreeBSD, ArchBSD (now PacBSD), Gentoo/BSD and others along the FOSS highway. It’s worth a look and we’ll be giving it a test drive sometime soon.
But for now, there’s a more interesting and significant development in the BSD realm rising on the horizon.
Larry the BSD Guy
Sometimes you have to quit cleaning your code long enough to clean your room. The people at the FreeBSD Foundation have already been doing some spring cleaning. They’ve even called the decorator.
Drumroll, maestro…
There’s a new look at the FreeBSD Foundation, with a new logo and website. The changes are intended to highlight “the ongoing evolution of the Foundation identity and ability to better serve the FreeBSD Project,” according to the post announcing the changes.
Logo used with permission from the FreeBSD Foundation.
Larry the BSD Guy
The upcoming release of OpenBSD’s latest and greatest comes with plenty of upgrades and improvements — plus the sound of music….
First things first: My German isn’t great. In fact, it would be completely nonexistent except for the fact that it interests me that in the German version of Scrabble you could essentially get 238 points with one word without using a double-word score.
However, the German online publication Pro-Linux.de this week reported (in German, but Google Translate works wonders) that pre-orders are ready to be taken for OpenBSD 5.9, scheduled for a May 1 release.
Larry the BSD Guy
Now that it’s March, we can look for the first signs of spring. We can also take an early look at FreeBSD 10.3, due to be released later this month, through this beta release.
As far as I’m concerned, the best part of March is Spring Training, and chances are from time to time my undying love for the San Francisco Giants will come out on these hallowed pages.
That personal tidbit aside, another important part of March — especially this month — is that on the road to FreeBSD 11 sometime later this year, FreeBSD 10.3 is well along the way, with the third beta already available, according to a very detailed post by Marius Strobl on the FreeBSD Stable mailing list.
Larry the BSD Guy
The BSD devil resides in a penguin’s DNA.
After answering various calls for presentations to a few upcoming shows, it stands to reason that Tom Petty is right: The waiting is the hardest part.
Because I now use PC-BSD on a daily basis, the idea going forward is to pitch talks about the conversion from one side of the Free/Open Source Software street to the other; the uplifting situations and occasional hurdle such a conversion brings, and to outline the similarities (lots) and differences (few, but relatively significant) between Linux distros and BSD variants.
Larry the BSD Guy
The glibc security vulnerability that Linux developers have been scrambling to patch does not affect *BSD.
Much has been made about a vulnerability in a function in the GNU C Library. And searching far and wide over the Internet, there was little — actually nothing — I could find regarding how this affected BSD variants.
However, you can rest easy, BSDers: Not our circus, not our monkeys.
Dag-Erling Smørgrav, a FreeBSD developer since 1998 and a former FreeBSD Security Officer, writes in his blog that “neither FreeBSD itself nor native FreeBSD applications are affected.”
Larry the BSD Guy
The BSD licensed Lumina Desktop aims to release version 1.0 in July.
It appears the sun is rising on Lumina.
Ken Moore, the lead developer for the BSD-based Lumina Desktop Environment, announced that another step towards the release of a full-fledged desktop environment for BSD variants (and Linux distros, for that matter) has been achieved with the release of version 0.8.8 yesterday.
For those of you keeping score at home, the Lumina Desktop Environment — let’s just call it Lumina for short — is a lightweight, XDG-compliant, BSD-licensed desktop environment focusing on getting work done while minimizing system overhead. Specifically designed for PC-BSD and FreeBSD, it has also been ported to many other BSD variants and Linux distros. Lumina is based on the Qt graphical toolkit and the Fluxbox window manager, and uses a small number of X utilities for various tasks.
Larry the BSD Guy
I have to confess that I am still tying up loose ends from SCALE14X — the expo doesn’t end when the doors close for those of us who work the show. However, one interesting development popped up on my BSD radar this week that bears mentioning.
Ed Maste gives a detailed report on it in the FreeBSD Foundation’s newsletter, reporting that Bjoern Zeeb gets the nod for a project grant “to finalize and integrate the work done to make the VIMAGE network stack virtualization production ready.”
Larry the BSD Guy
As I may have mentioned during the SCALE 14x coverage, one of the disadvantages of the glorious burden of working for a great event such as SCALE is that I don’t get out of the media room enough. The fact is, I can’t — herding the cats known as the tech media and processing various social media posts around the event keeps me in the room.
But I do get to go fix things occasionally, and that’s when I make the rounds on the expo floor.
BSD had itself its own row of booths in the expanded expo hall — FreeBSD, the FreeBSD Foundation, and OpenBSD were all neighbors on the exhibit floor. As is common for all the conferences we attend, Dru Lavigne and I — she moreso than me — got to catch up on things, and I took the time to drop in on her “Doc Like and Egyptian” presentation (though, burdened with a radio, I was called away to put out a minor “fire,” rhetorically speaking, in the press room).