BSD
Linux vs. BSD: Everything You Need to Know
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 22nd of January 2021 09:27:18 PM Filed under

BSDs are free and open-source systems that are very popular among old-school admins. They are direct descendants of the traditional Unix system and offer many rock-solid features. However, despite their robust performance, BSD systems do not enjoy the widespread popularity of Linux. So many users wonder if switching from Linux to BSD is a good idea. This guide aims to shed some light on this.
BSDs are a group of POSIX-compliant operating systems derived from the original Unix. They follow proven development strategies and focus on stability and performance. When talking about BSDs, we generally refer to one of the three main BSD distributions: FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD.
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Netgate Announces pfSense Plus With Greater Divergence From pfSense
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 22nd of January 2021 01:15:55 AM Filed under

Netgate has announced pfSense as a rebranded and improved edition of this popular BSD-based firewall/network OS platform.
The pfSense Plus offering is based on the existing pfSense Factory Edition and with that a greater divergence is forming between pfSense Community Edition and this commercial offering,
Moving ahead, pfSense Community Edition and pfSense Plus will diverge but with Netgate continuing to "donate features" to the community project. pfSense Plus will be made available to Netgate customers and will be installed on all Netgate appliances.
Original: Announcing pfSense® Plus
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Audiocasts/Shows: CLI, BSD Now, Coder Radio and TLLTS
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 21st of January 2021 08:17:13 PM Filed under


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The REAL Reason Linux Users Love The Command Line
Doing everything in a terminal window isn't just about speed or feeling empowered.
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BSD Now 386: Aye, 386!
Routing and Firewalling VLANS with FreeBSD, FreeBSD 12 VNET jail with ZFS howto, pkgsrc-2020Q4 released, FreeBSD on Raspberry Pi 4 With 4GB of RAM, HardenedBSD December 2020 Status Report, and more
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Electron Ennui | Coder Radio 397
Is performance the ultimate requirement? What amount of compromise are we comfortable with?
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The Linux Link Tech Show Episode 890
free as in beer rhel, alpine linux, repair, arcade cabinets, pi, suse
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BSD: WireGuard in pfSense and PulseAudio in FreeBSD
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Wednesday 20th of January 2021 05:04:51 AM Filed under
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WireGuard Is Now Available For pfSense - Phoronix
The domination of the open-source WireGuard secure VPN tunnel not only on Linux systems but BSDs too... WireGuard is now available on pfSense, the FreeBSD-based firewall/router focused software platform.
Netgate announced today that WireGuard is now available for pfSense. Following FreeBSD mainlining WireGuard support at the end of November, initial support for WireGuard has been brought to pfSense Community Edition 2.5 snapshots.
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PulseAudio Lands Much Better Support For FreeBSD - Audio Now Plays Correctly - Phoronix
While 2021 may be the year that some desktop Linux distributions begin using PipeWire by default as the next-generation replacement to the likes of PulseAudio and JACK, for upstream PulseAudio this week it's finally seeing better/restored support for FreeBSD. PulseAudio has merged a set of patches long available via FreeBSD Ports and the like to improve the BSD audio experience.
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GhostBSD 21.01.15 Release Notes
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 16th of January 2021 09:22:28 PM Filed under
I am happy to announce the availability of the new ISO 21.01.15. This new ISO comes with a clean-up of packages that include removing LibreOffice and Telegram from the default selection. We did this to bring the zfs RW live file systems to run without problem on 4GB of ram machine. We also removed the UFS full disk option from the installer. Users can still use custom partitions to setup UFS partition, but we discourage it. We also fixed the Next button's restriction in the custom partition related to some bug that people reported. We also fix the missing default locale setup and added the default setup for Linux Steam, not to forget this ISO includes kernel, userland and numerous application updates.
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FreeBSD October-December 2020 Status Report
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Saturday 16th of January 2021 09:20:00 PM Filed under
This report covers FreeBSD related projects for the period between October and December, and is the fourth of four planned reports for 2020.
This quarter had quite a lot of work done, including but certainly not limited to, in areas relating to everything from multiple architectures such as x86, aarch64, riscv, and ppc64 for both base and ports, over kernel changes such as vectored aio, routing lookups and multipathing, an alternative random(4) implementation, zstd integration for kernel dumps, log compression, zfs and preparations for pkg(8), along with wifi changes, changes to the toolchain like the new elfctl utility, and all the way to big changes like the git migration and moving the documentation from DocBook to Hugo/AsciiDoctor, as well as many other things too numerous to mention in an introduction.
This report with 42 entries, which don't hold the answer to life, the universe and everything, couldn't have happened without all the people doing the work also writing an entry for the report, so the quarterly team would like to thank them, as otherwise, we wouldn't have anything to do.
Please note that the deadline for submissions covering the period between January and March is March 31st.
We hope you'll enjoy reading as much as we enjoyed compiling it.
Daniel Ebdrup Jensen, on behalf of the quarterly team.
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Screencasts and Shows: Garuda KDE, RISC V and BSD Now
Submitted by Rianne Schestowitz on Friday 15th of January 2021 12:15:54 AM Filed under


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Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107 overview | performance & beauty.
In this video, I am going to show an overview of Garuda KDE Dr460nized 210107 and some of the applications pre-installed.
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What Is RISC V: Should You Even Care
RISC V gets thrown around a lot but what is it and how does it differ from what we're already using on our desktop and mobile systems.
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BSD Now #385: Wireguard VPN mesh
Description: History of FreeBSD: Early Days of FreeBSD, mesh VPN using OpenBSD and WireGuard, FreeBSD Foundation Sponsors LLDB Improvements, Host your Cryptpad web office suite with OpenBSD, and more.
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From Unix to Linux: Key Trends in the Evolution of Operating Systems (Part 3)
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 14th of January 2021 06:11:10 AM Filed under


The developers and intense users of the BSD distributions I’ve talked to paint a complex portrait of BSD's dilemma, with as many angles as a cubist still life. Warner Losh, a former member of the FreeBSD core team, said in his comments on this article that he believes BSD had a healthy environment under its original developers, the Computer Systems Research Group (CSRG). That team finished its work and disbanded in 1995 with the intention that further development would take place in the BSDi company. Fragmentation started after that.
The leadership started making decisions that other contributors found arbitrary. Forming cliques, team members could not always recognize which contributions from outsiders were worth including. 386BSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD—one by one, a small team of discontented developers would split off and create their own fork. The Linux community was immature by comparison, but kernel development stayed relatively united and the participants found their way forward to stability.
One might accept the proliferation of different BSD variants as a gift to users. Each variant had its own strengths—so the argument goes—and users could choose what was right for them. But the forks left none of the variants, except possibly FreeBSD, with a large enough critical mass to thrive. Anyone who wanted to develop for BSD needed to choose one of the variants or do a lot of porting. From the standpoint of the publishing industry, I can attest that putting out a book about BSD was nearly impossible. We couldn't cover all variants, and covering a single variant left us with too small an audience to make a profit.
McKusick points out that three separate distributions are a fairly small number for a historic operating system and seem like nothing compared to the fecund proliferation of GNU/Linux distributions. Not only do the utilities in the GNU/Linux distributions differ in important ways—such as the tools used to build and install software packages—but their underlying kernels are different.
This is all valid and worthy of discussion. But it's natural for distributions to build different kernels frequently. The Linux development repository has managed to remain unitary. And GNU/Linux enthusiasts will back me up in saying that one can reasonably learn enough utilities to expertly manage all the well-known distributions. Mick Bauer, who wrote Building Secure Servers with Linux for O'Reilly in 2002 (Linux Server Security in a later edition), confirms my point in his review of this article. He writes, "I was surprised at how easy it was to cover Red Hat, Debian/Ubuntu, and SuSE for all my topics. Knowing just a few utilities (mainly package managers) and config-file locations was all it took."
Bauer also attributes the burgeoning of GNU/Linux to two distinguishing traits: the strength of its distributions and the license under which it was developed. Regarding distributions, he says: "From very early on users could choose between militantly free distributions like Slackware and Debian, commercial distributions with structured training and support programs like Red Hat and SuSE, and all points between. But this diversity hasn't (yet) led to any disruptive schisms in Linux kernel development. Early in Linux's evolution, this combination of commercial support contracts and kernel-development stability helped make Linux a viable choice for hosting network services for large corporations."
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KDE: Krita, Other KDE Software, Calamares/FreeBSD
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Friday 1st of January 2021 04:45:42 AM Filed under


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Krita in 2020
The last year of the day… So, let’s look back a bit. First off: none of the Krita developers has died this year. It feels strange to write that, but it might reassure some of our readers. Some of us have had some extended periods of down time, or have been less productive, both because of the effect of the different pandemic measures all over the world, and because it was at times really hard to stay motivated and find the energy for coding. That shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone. It feels surreal to think we actually had a real, physical development sprint — in February.
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Highlights from 2020
2020 was not an amazing year for most of us, but it sure was for KDE and people who use KDE software! Despite the inability to travel and meet for sprints, conferences, and Akademy in person, we kept busy.
I’d like to highlight some of my favorite improvements throughout KDE! Keep in mind this is not even a small fraction of everything that went on. To keep this post from ballooning a hundred pages long, I’ve had to leave out many smaller features, all of the performance and bugfixing work, and tons of KDE apps that I don’t closely follow, including big important ones like Krita, Kdenlive, Digikam, and GCompris. You can find more news at https://planet.kde.org/.
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Year end blowout!
Calamares is a distro- and desktop-independent Linux installer. I keep intending to extend it to do FreeBSD installations as well, but get side-tracked by bugs and features on the Linux side instead.
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BSD Now 383 and OpenBSD News
Submitted by Roy Schestowitz on Thursday 31st of December 2020 08:45:41 PM Filed under
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BSD Now 383: Scale the tail
FreeBSD Remote Process Plugin Final Milestone achieved, Tailscale for OpenBSD, macOS to FreeBSD migration, monitoring of our OpenBSD machines, OPNsense 20.7.6 released, and more
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OpenBSD: Following -current and using snapshots
Similar to how audio recording is handled, recording has been disabled by default in video(4). It may be reenabled like this: [...]
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