• 25th Anniversary for FreeBSD

  On June 19, 1993 the name FreeBSD was officially agreed on and has been used ever since. Find out more about how to celebrate this important day with us.

• June 19 Has Been Declared National FreeBSD Day, Happy 25th Anniversary FreeBSD!

  The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce today that June 19 has been declared National FreeBSD Day to celebrate the project's official name 25th anniversary.

  Exactly 25 years ago on this day, on June 19, 1993, David Greenman sent an email to one of the mailing lists available at that point in time to suggest "FreeBSD" as the name for the Unix-like operating system used by billions of people all over the world, which continues to have a positive impact on us every single day.

Recently I found a bit of time to poke around in the world of Linux and BSD distributions and possibly even get back in to the reviewing business now and then. NomadBSD seemed like an interesting project to try for somebody partial to the Slackware and BSD way of doing things, but still searching for a BSD that is actually working as a day to day OS while being reasonably responsive, i.e. not bloated and running well on old hardware. That means trim and fast, without the desktop environment and a browser gobbling up all the resources.

VirtualBSD was a fine piece but since its demise there hasn't been anything similar to dip your toes into FreeBSD to my knowledge, let alone the other flavors. I reviewed it here seven years ago. How many? Yes, time flies. To say it right away in order not to waste anybody's time, NomadBSD works, and it works beautifully. Well, with a small caveat in terms of connectivity, but we'll come to that.

As alluded to, "NomadBSD is a 64bit live system for USB flash drives, based on FreeBSD®. Together with automatic hardware detection and setup, it is configured to be used as a desktop system that works out of the box, but can also be used for data recovery" according to their website. It fits on a 4GiB USB flash drive and can be booted via BIOS and UEFI. Which is just as well as an old 4GiB Corsair Flash Voyager pen drive is all I had. Additional information on their Github account.

• FreeBSD Work (week #2)

  As I mentioned two weeks ago, I’ve transitioned into a new role at Intel. The team is very new and so a lot of my part right now is helping out in organizing the game plan.

  Last week I attended BSDCan 2018 as well as the FreeBSD dev summit. That trip in addition to feedback I got both here on my blog and twitter has helped me compile a decent list of things to do. Thank you all for the feedback so far. For the sake of soliciting possibly more feedback, here is the list. Do remember that I’m employed by Intel and that if you want to recommend something there should be at least some way to tie that back for being good for Intel’s product, and reputation.

• Some Of The Early Ideas For Intel's New FreeBSD Improvement Effort

  Two weeks back we shared the news that one of Intel's open-source Linux graphics driver veterans decided to change roles and is now focused on improving FreeBSD for Intel hardware. Ben Widawsky is working on FreeBSD improvements that can at least relate to Intel and it turns out the company has a new team of developers on the task.

  Ben Widawsky has published a second blog post about his new role at Intel. it turns out that "the team is very new", so it's more than just him working on refreshing the Intel FreeBSD support. He has shared a list of some of the early feedback collected for what Intel-related areas could be better improved on this BSD operating system.

• FreeBSD 11.2-RC2 Now Available

  The second RC build of the 11.2-RELEASE release cycle is now available.

• FreeBSD 11.2-RC2 Ships This Weekend With Various Fixes

  The second release candidate of FreeBSD 11.2 is now available for testing.

  FreeBSD 11.2 has been baking Spectre and Meltdown protection, various kernel improvements, and a wide variety of minor driver updates over 2017's FreeBSD 11.1 release. The bulk of the development work though has been heading into FreeBSD 12.0-CURRENT for release next year or so.