Changes and NetBSD News in 2005

Changes in other years

December 2005

November 2005

October 2005

September 2005

August 2005

July 2005

June 2005

May 2005

April 2005

March 2005

February 2005

January 2005

December 2005

30 Dec 2005 - NetBSD/amd64 binary packages for pkgsrc-2005Q4 available

Jan Schaumann has announced that pkgsrc-2005Q4 binary packages for the amd64 port are now available, and have been uploaded to ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/3.0/amd64/. Please use a mirror site close to you.

30 Dec 2005 - pkgsrc-2005Q4 has been branched

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2005Q4 branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches. As well as updated versions of many many packages, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support, and also for enhanced security. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2005Q4 branch.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

You can also use the pkgsrc-2005Q4 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2005Q4 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.

23 Dec 2005 - NetBSD 3.0 released

NetBSD 3.0, the eleventh major release of the NetBSD operating system, has been released with binary distributions for 53 architectures.

NetBSD 3.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for new platforms and peripherals.

NetBSD 3.0 now features PAM (OpenPAM), TCP SACK, TCP MD5, pf(4), IPsec ESP/IKE over NAT, IPv4 PIM, tap(4) and much more hardware support than before. Check the release announcement for more detailed information.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 3.0 distribution. Please try to use BitTorrent to retrieve the available ISO images. If you can't, then download the ISO file directly from the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you.

12 Dec 2005 - NetBSD 3.0 RC6 available

In a message to the netbsd-announce list, Matthias Scheler, member of the NetBSD release engineering team, announced the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC6 on the FTP server of the NetBSD project. This, hopefully, latest release candidate fixes and updates some drivers and some last-minute corrections. For a more detailed list of the latest changes please see Matthias Scheler's original announcement.

For downloads of NetBSD 3.0 RC6, please consider one of the mirrors of the release engineering FTP server.

06 Dec 2005 - Freeze of pkgsrc tree for pkgsrc-2005Q4

In a message to the tech-pkg mailing list Alistair G. Crooks announced that the NetBSD Packages Team will stop the development of non-essential changes for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q4. The freeze period will begin December 12th 2005 and is expected to last about two weeks. During this period, the developers will bring down the number of open problem reports and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

02 Dec 2005 - Changes to the Packages Collection in November 2005

The monthly summary of pkgsrc activities has been published by Alistair G. Crooks. At the end of November pkgsrc contained 5737 packages, an increase of 80 new packages from the previous month.

The “Package of the Month” award goes to emulators/gxemul, an emulator capable of running several different ports of NetBSD.

02 Dec 2005 - NetBSD 3.0 RC5 available

In a message to the netbsd-announce list, Matthias Scheler, member of the NetBSD release engineering team, announced the availability of NetBSD 3.0 RC5 on the FTP server of the NetBSD project. This latest release candidate solves some security issues and fixes a few driver problems. For a more detailed list of the latest changes please see Matthias Scheler's original announcement.

For downloads of NetBSD 3.0 RC5, please consider one of the mirrors of the release engineering FTP server.

In addition to the usual set of archive files there were also ISO images created for NetBSD 3.0 RC5.

01 Dec 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • John Nemeth (login: jnemeth) will be working on PAM and miscellaneous tasks.
  • Frank Kardel (login: kardel) will be working on time counters and ntp.

November 2005

29 Nov 2005 - Status of NetBSD 3.0 release

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has sent an update on the status of the release process for NetBSD 3.0 to the mailing list netbsd-announce. The fifth release candidate (NetBSD 3.0_RC5) has been tagged in the CVS repository. Builds of this version are expected to be available later this week.

24 Nov 2005 - New official “Powered by NetBSD” logo

After switching to a new official NetBSD logo some time ago, an official logo for websites running NetBSD was not available. Thanks to the artistic skills of Jacek Kutzmann, NetBSD is now proud to announce the availability of the new official “Powered by NetBSD” logo. It can be used for commercial and non-commercial products and web sites provided that they are powered by the NetBSD operating system or make use of the pkgsrc packages system.

Please see the press release for more information, or see the NetBSD Logos webpage.

18 Nov 2005 - NetBSD 3.0 RC1 available

On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, Matthias Scheler has announced that the release process for NetBSD 3.0 has officially begun. The first release candidate is available for download from daily builds. (The list of significant source changes from NetBSD 2.0 to 3.0 is available here.)

The second Release Candidate is expected to be available on the FTP server in about a week, and we hope this will be the final release candidate. If all goes well the final release of 3.0 is only approximately three weeks away!

08 Nov 2005 - Donation Results

A few months ago, the NetBSD Project made a call for donations. This was widely publicized, and our community of donors responded extremely generously. Over the next few months, we received almost $30,000 of donations, including a number of donations of several thousand dollars each. As previously outlined, this money was earmarked for specific purchases, and the NetBSD Project would like to let our users know what in particular was bought from these generous donations.

Thor Lancelot Simon, who initiated the original call for donations and who has put countless hours into the entire process (including drawing up the specifications, installating the hardware and configuring the software), published this detailed summary, indicating exactly how the money was used. Many thanks to Thor and, again, all our donors!

02 Nov 2005 - NetBSD 2.1 released

NetBSD 2.1, the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, has been released with binary distributions for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.1 release announcement.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 2.1 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. In addition, we also encourage the use of net/bittorrent to retrieve all available ISO images.

Korean, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish language translations of the NetBSD 2.1 release announcement are also available.

02 Nov 2005 - New Security Advisories

Security Advisories 2005-003 through 2005-013 have been released on a range of issues. The NetBSD 2.1 release contains fixes for most of these issues, but special attention is warranted on the most recent three, which did not make it into 2.1:

  • SA2005-011 affects the ntpd timekeeping daemon. The default NetBSD installation is not affected, but those who run the daemon under customised user id's should take care to read the advisory.
  • SA2005-012 describes a denial-of-service kernel crash that may be initiated by unprivileged users, but only for kernels with optional DIAGNOSTIC kernel assertions enabled. Some kernels shipped in releases include this option.
  • SA2005-013 describes a potential privilege escalation attack against certain set-uid or set-gid programs that call exec. All kernels are affected, and must be upgraded to close the vulnerability.

All users of older versions are encouraged to upgrade to NetBSD 2.1 to collect the fixes for all known security issues prior to these. The forthcoming NetBSD 2.1.1 update will include the fixes for these remaining issues, which are available in source form from CVS now. Users tracking -current and 3.0_BETA are also encouraged to upgrade in accordance with these advisories.

Please check the Security Advisories page for full details of all advisories.

01 Nov 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Jed Davis (login: jld), who will be working on port-xen.

01 Nov 2005 - Changes to the Packages Collection in October 2005

Alistair G. Crooks has posted his monthly account of the changes to the Packages Collection in October 2005. By his calculations, at the end of October 2005, there were 5657 packages in the Packages Collection, up from 5558 the previous month, a rise of 99.

The Package of the Month award (jointly) goes to:

  • graphics/digikam, nominated by Simon Burge, who uses it to tag and organise photos really easily. Apparently Simon has more than 3000 photos, and with a click or two he can select really easily after they have been tagged. Simon also nominated:
  • sysutils/rsnapshot for backing up a large amount of data, a perl utility on the server, and rsync on the clients to be backed up.

Please read Alistair G. Crooks's message for details.

October 2005

22 Oct 2005 - Changes to the Packages Collection in September 2005

At the end of September 2005, there were 5558 packages in the Packages Collection. Please read Alistair G. Crooks's message to learn more details about the changes to the Packages Collection, including notable additions, updates and choosing the Package of the Month September: archivers/rzip.

21 Oct 2005 - New timelines for upcoming NetBSD 3.0

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the estimated timeframe for the upcoming release of NetBSD 3.0. NetBSD 3.0 is planned to be released in the second half of November 2005. As usual, this date is still subject to change.

More details about the release schedule can be found in Matthias Scheler's message to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

16 Oct 2005 - Summer of Code Summary

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce the results of its participation in Google's Open Source program, the “Summer of Code”. After several weeks of hard work, all participating projects have been completed in time and according to the set goals and have subsequently been rated a success. For more details, please refer to the press release.

01 Oct 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Alan Barrett (login: apb), who will be working on the building process and syspkgs.
  • Jörg Sonnenberger (login: joerg), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

September 2005

26 Sep 2005 - pkgsrc-2005Q3 has been branched

The pkgsrc developers are very proud to announce the new pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch, which has support for more packages than previous branches (5551 packages supported on 13 platforms). As well as updated versions of many packages, the infrastructure of pkgsrc itself has been improved for better platform and compiler support, and also for enhanced security. At the same time, the pkgsrc-2005Q2 branch has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2005Q3 branch.

We would also like to thank the Dragonfly BSD project for adopting pkgsrc as their packaging system - this is the first pkgsrc branch since that announcement, and we have brought on board some Dragonfly developers specifically to look after issues related to that platform.

The source tar files for the new branch can be found at:

And of course, you can also use the pkgsrc-2005Q3 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Please see the detailed pkgsrc-2005Q3 announcement in Alistair G. Crooks's email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

25 Sep 2005 - NetBSD 2.1 RC5 available

The NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that NetBSD 2.1 RC5 is available for testing. (A security issue came up shortly after RC4 was tagged, so it was never announced).

NetBSD 2.1 RC5 is available in the “daily builds” section of The NetBSD Project's FTP site - ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-2-1-RC5/ (please use mirrors if possible).

We anticipate that this will be the final release candidate for NetBSD 2.1, barring any major issues or security problems, so we also highly encourage you to test it out and report any bugs using send-pr(1) utility.

For more information see Jeff Rizzo's email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

10 Sep 2005 - file system tmpfs added to NetBSD

Julio Merino has added the result of his summer project, a new memory-based file system written as a part of Google's Summer of Code (SoC) campaign, to the NetBSD source tree. A detailed description how to use the new file system can be found in Julio Merino's message to the mailing list tech-kern.

A report about the SoC projects related to NetBSD will probably be released in October.

08 Sep 2005 - pkgsrc tree frozen for pkgsrc-2005Q3

Today, Alistair G. Crooks announced in a message to the tech-pkg mailing list that the NetBSD Packages Team has frozen the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q3. The freeze period has begun September 8th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks. During this period, the developers will bring down the number of open problem reports and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

07 Sep 2005 - NetBSD 2.1 RC3 available

The NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the release process of NetBSD 2.1 has begun. NetBSD 2.1 RC3 builds are available at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/netbsd-2-1-RC3. NetBSD 2.1 RC1 and RC2 were not announced publicly because of build problems on some supported platforms.

For more information see Jeff Rizzo's email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

August 2005

31 Aug 2005 - pkgsrc will be part of DragonFly

Matthew Dillon, DragonFlyBSD founder and chief developer, announced that pkgsrc will be the official packaging system in DragonFlyBSD starting with the next release, scheduled for December 2005.

23 Aug 2005 - New timelines for upcoming releases

Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for an October 2005 release; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. As usual, these dates are of course subject to change.

For more information, read the announcement in the mailing list archives and see the release engineering websites for the NetBSD 2 and NetBSD 3 branches.

11 Aug 2005 - NetBSD ported to working toaster

It has long been regarded that the UNIX-like OS NetBSD is portable to every type of machine except perhaps your kitchen toaster. Technologic Systems, however, has conquered this last frontier. Using one of its rugged embedded TS-7200 single-board computers housed inside the empty space of a standard 2 slice toaster, Technologic Systems has designed a functional NetBSD controlled toaster.

03 Aug 2005 - New NetBSD Core Team

The NetBSD core team has been working together for two years in its present form, and, such are the stresses of the job, some changes have become necessary. We'd like to thank the members of the core team who have spent a lot of time and effort looking after the technical direction of the NetBSD project, and steering it to where it is today.

Please see Alistair G. Crooks's email to for more information.

The new NetBSD Core Team is listed at the corresponding group page.

01 Aug 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Antoine Reilles (login: tonio), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Hiramatsu Yoshifumi (login: hiramatsu), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • sam (login: sam), who will be working on ath and net80211.

July 2005

19 Jul 2005 - Call for donations -- status

The NetBSD project would like to thank all contributors for their generous response to the recent call for donations. In only one month, almost US $27K was donated allowing the NetBSD Foundation to purchase five new machines; three of those machines will be added to the nightly build infrastructure and two of those machines will become anonymous cvs servers.

For more information, including the detailed specifications of the hardware purchased, please see Christos Zoulas email to the netbsd-announce mailing list.

If you would like to join the number of donors and make a donation (tax-deductible in the US) using your credit card or PayPal account, please click on one of the buttons below or contact to make other arrangements.

12 Jul 2005 - Second Quarterly Status Report in 2005 published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's second quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months April through June of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers NetBSD's participation in Google's “Summer of Code”, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2005Q2.html.

08 Jul 2005 - New Security Note released

The NetBSD Security Note 20050708-1 regarding to the recent zlib buffer overflow has been released. The zlib in the NetBSD base system is not vulnerable, but pkgsrc had a vulnerable version.

01 Jul 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Rui Paulo (login: rpaulo), who will be working on NetBSD guide and website documentation.
  • Mike M. Volokhov (login: mishka), who will be working on russian translation and advocacy.
  • Greg Troxel (login: gdt), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, networking code and the building process.
  • Silke Scheler (login: silke), who will be working with admins.

01 Jul 2005 - pf from OpenBSD 3.7 updated on -current

Peter Postma updated pf(4) from OpenBSD 3.7 adding new features and bugfixes. For a list of changes see his email to -current users mailing list.

If you notice any problem please use the send-pr(1) tool to send a problem report.

01 Jul 2005 - Two New Security Advisories released

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2005-001 concerning to HyperThreaded CPUs and SA2005-002 concerning to a local DoS via audio device have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

June 2005

26 Jun 2005 - Announcing NetBSD and the Google “Summer of Code” Projects

When Google announced the “Summer of Code”, its program designed to introduce students to the world of open source software development, the NetBSD Project understood the value of this project and entered as a mentoring organization. Over a period of two weeks, students researched the list of possible projects and discussed their proposals on the public mailing lists and in private with developers and other users alike. After evaluating over 100 distinct applications, the NetBSD Foundation is now pleased to announce the list of projects that have been chosen. See the associated press release for all the details.

12 Jun 2005 - Help NetBSD help you!

In the past, NetBSD has been hesitant to appeal directly to its users for financial support. However, we have relied for too long on the generosity of a small number of regular donors. We can greatly improve the services we provide to all NetBSD users with your financial help. Please see Thor Lancelot Simon's call for donations for more details. You can make a direct donation using your credit card or PayPal account (click on the button below) or contact to make other arrangements. Donations are tax-deductible in the Unites States. Many thanks in advance!

02 Jun 2005 - pkgsrc will freeze for pkgsrc-2005Q2

Alistair G. Crooks announced yesterday that the NetBSD Packages Team will freeze the development of new features for pkgsrc to prepare for the release of the next stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q2. The freeze period will begin on June 6th 2005 and is expected to last two weeks at the most. During this time, the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

02 Jun 2005 - Summer of Code

The NetBSD Project is pleased to participate in Google's Summer of Code as a mentoring organization. A list of possible projects is available from this page. If you are interested in any of these projects or have other suggestions, please contact Jan Schaumann or post to the relevant lists suggested on the projects page.

01 Jun 2005 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Michael Lorenz (login: macallan) will be working on the macppc port, the sparc64 port, the sparc port and xsrc.

May 2005

31 May 2005 - Downtime for ftp.fi.NetBSD.org

Due to a relocation of the server hardware, ftp.fi.NetBSD.org will be down on June 1st, 2005, and possibly on June 2nd, 2005, depending on how well the move goes. Hosting for ftp.fi.NetBSD.org is kindly provided by the Finnish University and Research Network (FUNET).

29 May 2005 - pkgsrcCon 2005 presentations online

Most of the presentations given at this year's pkgsrcCon are now available online.

25 May 2005 - Remote User Access VPN Documentation

Emmanuel Dreyfus recently added detailed documentation on how to set up a Remote User Access VPN under NetBSD.

21 May 2005 - AnonCVS outage

The anonymous CVS server will be unavailable for much of May 21 2005, while we rework and simplify its configuration. Among other less immediately obvious benefits we hope this will allow us to begin offering anonymous CVS access over IPv6.

09 May 2005 - Sun Hardware Donation for pkgsrc work

The NetBSD Foundation is pleased to announce the generous donation of two machines from Sun Microsystems for the purpose of advancing the development of The NetBSD Packages Collection under Solaris.

“Sun is looking forward to working with the NetBSD Project, and certainly wants to support the pkgsrc efforts,” commented Alan DuBoff, a member of Solaris Engineering at Sun.

For more information, read the press release here.

09 May 2005 - Changes to the Packages Collection in March 2005

At the end of March 2005, there were 5377 packages in the Packages Collection. Please read Alistair G. Crooks' email in the mailing list archives to read about the changes to the Packages Collection in March 2005, including notable additions, notable updates, and choosing the Package of the Month.

02 May 2005 - Prospective timelines for upcoming releases

The release engineers announced the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for a late July 2005 release; NetBSD 2.1 planned for a late June 2005 release; and NetBSD 1.6.3 is planned for an August or September 2005 release.

For more information, read the announcement in the mailing list archives.

When 2.1 is released, netbsd-2-0 will be shutdown. Possibly a 2.0.3 update may be done before then.

02 May 2005 - Daily builds available for public again

James Chacon announced that the regular daily builds for NetBSD have begun again and are available for public consumption at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/. See the announcement in the netbsd-announce mailing list archives for more information.

02 May 2005 - Software maintenance for cvsweb.NetBSD.org

This week, cvsweb.NetBSD.org (pigu.iri.co.jp) will be down at times for software maintenance. You are welcome to use one of the cvsweb mirrors during the outage.

This also affects the Japanese mailing lists (@jp.NetBSD.org) and the following Japanese mirror services

  • cvsup.jp.NetBSD.org
  • cvsweb.jp.NetBSD.org
  • www.jp.NetBSD.org

01 May 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Sean Boudreau (login: seanb) will be working on kernel, utilities, libc and networking.
  • Elad Efrat (login: elad) will be working on veriexec, kernel and security.

April 2005

28 Apr 2005 - Belgian NetBSD mirrors out of service (updated)

Due to hardware failure, the following mirror servers

  • anoncvs.be.NetBSD.org
  • cvsweb.be.NetBSD.org
  • ftp.be.NetBSD.org
  • www2.be.NetBSD.org

are unavailable at the moment.

As it is not clear at this time how long the downtime will be, please use one of the nearby European mirrors.

Note

Since 2005-05-09 the Belgian mirrors are online again.

14 Apr 2005 - NetBSD 2.0.2 released

James Chacon has announced that update 2.0.2 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 2.0.2 is the second security/critical update of the NetBSD 2.0 release branch. This represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical in nature for stability or security reasons. More details are available in the NetBSD 2.0.2 Release Announcement.

08 Apr 2005 - First Quarterly Status Report in 2005 published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's first quarterly status report in 2005, covering the months January through March of 2005. Among many other things, this status report covers the addition of TCP/SACK and PAM support, the opening of the Foundations Online Store, the new stable pkgsrc branch and various port-specific items. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2005Q1.html.

06 Apr 2005 - Binary packages for 2005Q1 available

Hubert Feyrer has uploaded a total of about 10GB of binary packages built for NetBSD 2.0/i386 and NetBSD 1.6.2/i386 from the pkgsrc-2005Q1 branch to ftp.NetBSD.org. To install the binaries, set your PKG_PATH for pkg_add as follows:

Some of the highlights:

  • apache-2.0.53
  • gnome-2.8.3
  • mysql-4.1.10a
  • openldap-2.2.20
  • openoffice-1.1.4
  • perl-5.8.6
  • postgresql-8.0.1
  • ruby-1.8.2
  • xentools-2.0.3

Updated 2005-04-09: Jan Schaumann uploaded binary packages for NetBSD-2.0/amd64 and IRIX64-6.5, and Manuel Bouyer uploaded binary packages for NetBSD-2.0/sparc, all including PGP signed checksum files to:

04 Apr 2005 - ipsec-tools included with NetBSD

Emmanuel Dreyfus has been working on integrating NAT Traversal and recently replaced the KAME based racoon in NetBSD with the feature-enhanced “ipsec-tools” version. NetBSD can now be setup to replace Cisco 3000 VPN concentrators, while Cisco VPN clients can still be used, talking to NetBSD instead.

Many more changes come with the ipsec-tools, including dead peer detection, privilege separation, IKE mode config, IKE and ESP fragmentation, configurable path to certificate authority, and hook scripts. See Emmanuel Dreyfus' mail in the current-users mailing list archives for a more complete list.

04 Apr 2005 - IP Filter upgraded to 4.1.8 on -current

Martti Kuparinen upgraded IPFilter to the latest version (4.1.8) on NetBSD -current. For information about the changes, and recompiling the kernel and the ipf tools see the email in the current-users mailing list archives.

01 Apr 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Michael van Elst (login: mlelstv), who will be working on IEEE 1394 and miscellaneous tasks.
  • Jeff Rizzo (login: riz), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection, port-i386 and networking.
  • Kentaro A. Kurahone (login: kurahone), who will be working on TCP/IP stack, scalability and performance and ACPI.

March 2005

31 Mar 2005 - GNOME 2.10.0 available in pkgsrc

Julio Merino finished updating the GNOME packages in pkgsrc-current to 2.10.0, the latest stable version. Around 80 packages have been updated and some new ones have been added.

24 Mar 2005 - pkgsrc branch 2005Q1 created

Alistair G. Crooks announced the availability of the new stable branch pkgsrc-2005Q1 of the NetBSD Packages Collection. The former branch pkgsrc-2004Q4 is now deprecated.

10 Mar 2005 - bouyer-xen2 merged into HEAD

Manuel Bouyer has merged the bouyer-xen2 branch into NetBSD-current. This means that support for Xen 2.0 (both in privileged and unprivileged mode) will be part of NetBSD 3.0. See Manuel's email to the port-xen mailing list for details.

07 Mar 2005 - pkgsrc now frozen

The NetBSD Packages Collection is now frozen for a duration of 2 weeks in preparation of the first stable branch in 2005, pkgsrc-2005Q1. During this time, no new packages will be imported in pkgsrc, and the NetBSD Packages team will focus on fixing open PRs and stabilizing the infrastructure.

Please see Alistair Crooks's announcement on the tech-pkg mailing list.

07 Mar 2005 - Changes to pkgsrc in February 05

Alistair G. Crooks has posted his monthly account of the changes to the Packages Collection in February 2005 to the tech-pkg mailing list. According to Alistair, there were 5377 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 5331 the previous month, a rise of 47 with many notable updates as well. An important change in the pkgsrc infrastructure was made due to the recent announcement that collisions have been found in SHA1: pkgsrc now supports multiple digest algorithms and distpatches and all the distinfo files in pkgsrc have been updated, where possible, to use multiple checksums. More details, including the Package of the Month Award, can be found in Alistair's email.

04 Mar 2005 - NetBSD and Xen

The NetBSD Foundation has published a press release reporting on the benefits of the NetBSD/xen port, initially committed by Christian Limpach as previously reported. Since then, much progress has been made, and the NetBSD Project is now using NetBSD/xen internally. See the press release for further details.

01 Mar 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • KIYOHARA Takashi (login: kiyohara), who will be working on ieee1394 and OpenBlockS266 (evbppc).
  • Roland Illig (login: rillig), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Georg Schwarz (login: schwarz), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

February 2005

27 Feb 2005 - PAM enabled on HEAD

Christos Zoulas announced today that most programs that perform authentication will be using PAM, including login(1), su(1), xdm(1), ftpd(8), telnetd(8), ppp, and others. Please see his email to the current-users mailing list for details.

20 Feb 2005 - NetBSD/amd64 running on Intel EM64T

Release 2.0 of NetBSD/amd64 has been confirmed to run successfully on Intel x86 CPUs with 64-bit extension EM64T.

20 Feb 2005 - ipf 4.1.6 imported

IPFilter in NetBSD-current has been updated to the latest version (4.1.6). You must recompile your kernel and the ipf tools to use the new version. See Martti Kuparinen's email to the current-users mailing list for more details.

19 Feb 2005 - Maintenance period for cvsweb.NetBSD.org

cvsweb.NetBSD.org (pigu.iri.co.jp) will be down from Sat Feb 19 13:00 GMT to Mon Feb 21 00:30 GMT due to a shutdown of power for building maintenance. You are welcome to use one of the cvsweb mirrors during this outage.

This also affects the Japanese mailing lists (@jp.NetBSD.org) and the following Japanese mirror services

  • anoncvs.jp.NetBSD.org
  • cvsup.jp.NetBSD.org
  • cvsweb.jp.NetBSD.org
  • iso.jp.NetBSD.org
  • rsync.jp.NetBSD.org
  • sup.jp.NetBSD.org
  • www.jp.NetBSD.org

15 Feb 2005 - Japanese FTP mirror out of service

The Japanese mirror ftp.jp.NetBSD.org, operated by the Japanese NetBSD users group, is out of service at the moment due to broken harddisks. It is expected to be available again in early March. In the meantime you can use one of the other NetBSD mirrors in Japan.

09 Feb 2005 - Changes to pkgsrc in January 05

Alistair G. Crooks has posted his monthly account of the changes to the Packages Collection in January 2005 to the tech-pkg mailing list. According to Alistair, there were 5331 packages in the NetBSD Packages Collection, up from 5266 the previous month, a rise of 65 with many notable updates as well. More details, including the Package of the Month Award, can be found in his email.

08 Feb 2005 - ipf 4.1.5 imported

Martti Kuparinen announced today that he upgraded IPFilter to the latest version (4.1.5) on NetBSD -current. You must recompile kernel and the ipf tools to use the new version. See Martti's email to the current-users mailing list for more details.

04 Feb 2005 - The Annual NetBSD Status Report

The NetBSD Foundation held its annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what is planned for the coming year. The Annual NetBSD Status Report summarizes the meeting.

January 2005

28 Jan 2005 - NetBSD online store

Jeremy C. Reed of the NetBSD Communication Executive Committee announced that NetBSD now has an online store selling various products to help raise funds at http://www.cafepress.com/NetBSD/. Items currently on sale include shirts, sweatshirts, a mug, wall clock, mousepad, logo magnets, and tote bags.

All profits from this online store will be used to directly fund NetBSD, such as hardware, promotion, legal and accounting fees, and other expenses.

Please visit http://www.NetBSD.org/donations/ for more information on how to donate to the non-profit NetBSD project.

26 Jan 2005 - NetBSD 1.5 EOLed

James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced that, in keeping with NetBSD's policy of maintaining only the current (2.0) and most recent (1.6) release branches, the release of NetBSD 2.0 marks the end-of-life for NetBSD 1.5. This means that the netbsd-1-5 branch will no longer be actively maintained.

There will be no more pullups to the branch (even for security issues). There will be no security advisories made for 1.5. And the 1.5 releases on ftp.NetBSD.org have been moved to /pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-archive.

14 Jan 2005 - anoncvs back online

As reported earlier, the project's anoncvs server suffered from some hardware failure and had to be taken out of service temporarily. Christos Zoulas announced today on behalf of the NetBSD Systems Administration Executive Committee that anoncvs.NetBSD.org is now back in service, after the hard work of S.P.Zeidler, Tracy Di Marco White, Jason Thorpe and Thor Lancelot Simon.

For more details refer to Christos Zoulas' message to the current-users mailing list, in which he reminds users of the opportunity to donate to the project to help improve the reliability of our services.

13 Jan 2005 - NetBSD branches explained

James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team explains the NetBSD naming scheme to explain future releases and upcoming changes. Please see his message to netbsd-announce for details.

12 Jan 2005 - Binary packages from pkgsrc-2004Q4 available

After the last stable pkgsrc branch was cut, many developers started off their bulk-builds to provide binary packages from this branch. The first results are now available (as posted to our pkgsrc-bulk mailing list), and binary packages have been uploaded to the ftp server.

The binary packages available so far are: NetBSD-1.6.2/m68k (softfloat), NetBSD-2.0/powerpc and NetBSD-2.0/vax (uploaded by John Klos), the NetBSD-2.0 mipseb ports (evbmips, mipsco, newsmips, sbmips, and sgimips) and NetBSD-2.0/sparc (uploaded by Jan Schaumann—PGP signed checksums are available for these files in the respective directories) and of course the NetBSD-1.6.2/i386 and NetBSD-2.0/i386 ports (uploaded by Hubert Feyrer).

11 Jan 2005 - Fourth Quarterly Status Report published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's fourth quarterly status report, covering the months October through December of 2004. Among many other things, this status report covers the publication of the new NetBSD Logo, the new pkgsrc branch, the new NetBSD/iyonix port and of course the release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at http://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2004Q4.html.

11 Jan 2005 - Intel donates hardware to the NetBSD Project

The NetBSD project would like to express its gratitude for the fact that the department of application engineering at Intel, who provide design-in support for the XScale based I/O processors, has donated hardware to the NetBSD project.

Two Xscale boards (IOP321, IOP315) have been donated to a developer of the NetBSD project. The boards will be used for maintenance and development of the NetBSD/ARM port, as well as enhancing and completing the support for Thumb code on NetBSD. Furthermore, the boards will also serve for testing and developing the GCC compiler used by the NetBSD operating system.

As a non-profit, volunteer organisation with no commercial backing, the NetBSD Project depends on support from individuals and companies to continue development of the world's most portable operating system and packages system. Due to its 501(c)(3) status, monetary donations are fully tax deductible. Information on supporting the NetBSD project via money or hardware can be found at http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/.

07 Jan 2005 - XFree86 3.3.6 has been EOLed

Matthias Scheler has announced that XFree86 3.3.6 has been officially EOLed in NetBSD-current as of January 7th, 2005:

  • Its sources have been removed from “xsrc”. They are of course still available via CVS.
  • Support for creating XFree86 3.3.6 distribution sets has been removed from “src”.
  • bsd.own.mk now sets USE_XF86_4 to yes unconditionally.

All NetBSD ports will use XFree86 4.x based X11 bits in future as they already do in the NetBSD 2.0 release.

04 Jan 2005 - NetBSD/evbarm ported to TS-7200

Jesse Off has announced that he has integrated support for the TS-7200 into the NetBSD/evbarm port over the christmas holidays. The TS-7200 is a low-cost mass-produced PC/104 embedded single board computer intended as a general purpose core for real embedded applications. More information can be found at http://www.embeddedARM.com/~joff/.

01 Jan 2005 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Stephan Uphoff (login: ups), who will be working on smp and threads.
  • Susanne Petra Zeidler (login: spz), who will be working on administration, Documentation and odds & ends.