On Wednesday, 25th February 2004, the FreeBSD team announced the release of their latest New Technology Release: 5.2.1.

View the FreeBSD 5.2.1-RELEASE:

• Announcement
• Installation Guide
• Release Notes
• Hardware Notes
• Errata
• Early Adopter's Guide

Pre-orders for the <a href="http://www.OpenBSD.org>OpenBSD</a> project's latest release, 3.4, are now being taken. This release will ship around November 1st.

Significant enhancements have been made in this release, including i386 switch to ELF executable format, further W^X improvements for i386, ld.so on ELF platforms now loads libraries in a random order for greater resistance to attacks, inclusion of a static bounds checker to the compiler for basic checks on functions which accept buffers and sizes, strcpy/strcat function audit to replace with safer strlcpy/strlcat, ProPolice stack protection in the kernel, further manual page cleanups, large number of bug fixes and optimizations to the packet filter (PF) including packet tagging, stateful TCP normalization, passive OS detection, SYN proxy, and adaptive state timeouts, and many other improvements to the rest of the system.

Order a CD from the OpenBSD store:
http://www.openbsd.org/orders.html

For information on this release including new features:
http://www.openbsd.org/34.html

For a changelog between 3.3 and 3.4:
http://www.openbsd.org/plus.html

Ordering a CD helps support the project, as a bonus you get cool stickers, artwork, and an audio track!

FreeBSD 5.1 is now out! Read the release notes here.

If you've got a fast connection, you can grab it from a local mirror or BitTorrent, otherwise, I've got CDs available for + postage for the 2 CD set (installation & rescue disc).

PostgreSQL Global Development Group Announces Version 7.3

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group proudly announces the
release of version 7.3 of the PostgreSQL object-relational database
management system (ORDBMS). PostgreSQL, the world's most advanced
open source database, provides solutions for many of the most demanding
applications in use today, saving businesses and governments millions
of dollars each year.

FreeBSD 5.0 Developers' Preview 2 is now available. See the release notes and the annoucement.

What is BSD? If you ask a typical computer "expert," he or she is likely to reply (incorrectly!) that it is "an operating system." The correct answer, however, is more complex than that. BSD is -- among other things -- a culture, a philosophy, and a growing collection of software, most (though not all) of which is available for free and with source code.

For more information, click here.

The EU is very active in supporting Open Source development by providing financial aids to European projects of interest, like OpenEvidence that was approved to be realized by a consortium of technology providers and users from 4 countries: Belgium, France, Italy and Estonia.
In this contest C&A is very proud to announce its OpenEvidence participation, integrating its Time Stamping technology, to this 'evidence creation and validation system' of electronic documents and activities.

The technology developed by the project can be used as basic building blocks to support such services as non-repudiation of electronic business transactions, property right protection and notarisation.
Implementations and demonstration services using the protocols defined in RFC 3029 (DVCS) and RFC 3161 (TSP) will be provided as initial activity.
A version of time stamping service can be also be tested on the C&A web site.

To learn more about OpenEvidence:
http://www.com-and.com/openevidence.html

FreeBSD 4.6.2-RELEASE is now out. I should have CDs available within a week.

Along with the obligatory bug fixes, theres better support for wireless NICs,a much improved ATA driver which allows for on-the-fly rebuilding of ATA RAID devices, and updates for OpenSSH (to 3.4p1), Bind (8.3.3) and Sendmail (8.12.3).

The full release notes are included below.

Theres a big PostgreSQL vs MySQL debate going on at Slashdot right now.

Personally, I think the difference between PostgreSQL and MySQL is the difference between *BSD and MySQL - what do you think?

Thanks to the new .AU domain policy, I've been able to register bsd.net.au, so the site is now at www.bsd.net.au, please update your bookmarks.

We've also upgraded to the latest version of Geeklog. If you have some graphical ability, please read on to find out how you can help us.