FreeBSD is hoping to move beyond the server and desktop market by tackling wireless devices.

FreeBSD 5.2-RELEASE is the third major 5.x release for the next generation of the FreeBSD Unix system (release notes). For the last few years I only used the 4.x stable releases, waiting for a mature 5.x release to come out before trying it. I felt that the time had come with 5.2, but has it?

Many near-religious-level debates revolve around which GNU/Linux distribution is "best." However, we are blessed with two free platforms for desktop usage, the other being BSD. If you can deal with text-based installation and a few post-install commands at the command line, you can install and use FreeBSD 5.1. I got FreeBSD fully installed on a 450MHz AMD K6-III+ system with 512MB of SDRAM and a 36GB 10Krpm SCSI hard disk in just under an hour.

There are several players in the Unix world, but few are as complete and refined as FreeBSD. It installs easily, scales well, updates without a hassle and holds Netcraft records for uptime.

The FreeBSD Project is proud to announce the availability of the second Developer Preview snapshot of FreeBSD 5.0 (5.0-DP2). This snapshot, intended for widespread testing purposes, is the latest milestone towards the eventual release of FreeBSD 5.0-RELEASE, currently scheduled for mid-December 2002.

We\'ve discussed sharing filesystems via SMB a few times. SMB lets you access files shared by a Windows system after jumping through only half a dozen loops. Sharing files with another Unix system is much, much simpler. FreeBSD supports the Unix standard Network File System out of the box. NFS intimidates many junior system administrators, but it\'s really quite simple once you know what\'s going on.

You like Linux, you love freeBSD. Now you want to have both on your new ix86 box. If you are not a purist and you can spare a little MB on your disk, read on.

Many people say FreeBSD has a very good virtual memory manager. Now, with the new VM engine in Linux as of 2.4.10, things might look different, so I prepared a new test environment for the benchmark.

For the past seven years, Hubbard has worked as a FreeBSD CD's product manager and FreeBSD evangelist for Walnut Creek CDROM, BSDi and WindRiver Systems. Part of Hubbard's new job will be helping Apple strengthen its relationships with other open source projects.

dnsupdate can create the DNS tables from a hosts file and its own configuration file. It can maintain them too. One can use dnsupdate to add or delete hosts, aliases, nameservers, forward and reverse zone. MX records are also added. Tested for Solaris and FreeBSD.

Freeware under GPL.