The most exciting new feature in OpenBSD/sparc64 is SMP support. All supported systems should work, with the exception of the Enterprise 10000 (for which support was added after the 4.3 release was made). The release has still some stability issues on systems with more than 4 CPUs (most of these are already fixed in -current), but in general the sparc64 SMP kernel is remarkably stable. Snapshots have been built on a dual UltraSPARC-IIIi machine since November, less than half a year after Theo complained that his shiny new Sun Fire V215 only "half" worked.

FreeBSD 7 sports several new improvements in its file-systems and storage subsystems, including experimental support for ZFS and gvirstor, which can be used to create a large virtual disk image by simply adding physical disks as data on disk requires. This gives system administrators the ability to create volumes that far exceed the physical disk capacity and only add hardware as usage increases.

One of the reasons that made me exited about PC-BSD is that Compiz-Fusion is enabled by default and beside that Superkaramba is also installed by default. Now Ive been fooling around with Compiz and Beryl for quite some time and it was always a pain (pretty confusing) to properly set it up. Not anymore! The first time you fire up Compiz-Fusion, PC-BSD asks you whether you want to start it by default after bootstrap.

The first video in this pair shows you how to update all the software in your Ubuntu GNU/Linux installation in a single, big gulp. The second video shows you how easy it is to install and remove software with the Synaptic Package Manager.

When you update Ubuntu -- or, for that matter, any well-run Linux distribution -- you are not just updating the operating system, but all the software you originally installed along with it, plus any software you added later through your distribution's online software repositories.

Getting FreeBSD to act as a wireless access point involves the following steps:

• Make sure your installation includes hostapd and named (BIND)
  
• Recompile your kernel for pf support
  
• pf is not the only way to do this, but I strongly prefer pf to the ipfw/ipfilter and have written the How-To to use it
  
• Configure NAT (and any firewall rules)
  
• Install isc-dhcp3-server
  
• Configure daemons and start them

This Howto article is intended to be a practical example, and I will start my host system with FreeBSD 6.2-RELEASE. The Install will be of the "minimal" variety, and for the first part of this document, we will not update the system with buildworld. After a jail is created, we will then update the host, and then update the jail. This will demonstrate a practical example of how to build, and then maintain a jail thru critical security releases.

GNU/Linux is the most popular operating system built with free/open source software. However, it is not the only one: FreeBSD is also becoming popular for its stability, robustness and security. In this article, I’ll take a look at their similarities and differences.

PC-BSD is perhaps the best thing to come to the desktop BSD world in a very long time. But unfortunately, it looks as if this fantastic distribution is following the rest of the pack and will be trying to locate funds by competing with Linux for business customers. Why should this matter?

One of the first and most noticeable changes in version 1.6 is that it now contains a LiveCD option. While I wouldn't consider this to be a typical livecd, it certainly stacks up well against the large collection of other livecd's out there. Initially you're greeted with the standard Freebsd boot screen and bootup sequence. The first part of the livecd session starts out with a semi-graphical welcome screen that is keyboard driven.

PC-BSD, on the other hand, "has been designed with the casual computer user in mind. Installing the system is simply a matter of a few clicks and a few minutes for the installation process to finish. Hardware such as video, sound, network, and other devices will be auto-detected and available at the first system startup. Home users will immediately feel comfortable with PC-BSD's desktop interface, with KDE 3.5 running under the hood.

NetBSD with gcc 3.3.x doesn't compile as fast as FreeBSD, but NetBSD can compile itself easily for any platform NetBSD supports via build.sh. No such luck with FreeBSD; I had to boot FreeBSD to build FreeBSD. But with NetBSD, you can use the same framework to build under other OS's, even under Cygwin!