The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root
Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote about the divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, where the V6 chown(2) manual page has the same word … ⌘ Read more

Haiku gets fixes for NFS4, improves its BSD driver compatibility layer
Another month, another activity report from the Haiku project. This past month, a lot of work went into the FreeBSD/OpenBSD network driver compatibility layer, opening the door to drivers using interfaces other than PCI or USB. Support for NFS4 took a bit of a hit with last month’s changes to VFS, and these have been addressed, and other aspects of NFS4 have been improved as well. On top of t … ⌘ Read more

smolBSD — build your own minimal BSD system
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Kea DHCP: Local Vulnerabilities in many Linux and BSD Distributions
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The length of file names in early Unix
If you use Unix today, you can enjoy relatively long file names on more or less any filesystem that you care to name. But it wasn’t always this way. Research V7 had 14-byte filenames, and the System III/System V lineage continued this restriction until it merged with BSD Unix, which had significantly increased this limit as part of moving to a new filesystem (initially called the ‘Fast File System’, for good reasons). You might wonder where this unusual … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft unveils Microsoft’s competitor to Microsoft’s winget
One of the ways in which Windows (and macOS) trails behind the Linux and BSD world is the complete lack of centralised, standardised application management. Windows users still have to scour the web to download sketchy installers straight from the Windows 95 days, amassing a veritable collection updaters in the process, which either continuously run in the background, or annoy you with update pop-ups when you … ⌘ Read more

Hacker Public Radio BSD Overview
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Canadian BSD Conference to Require Masks, Social Distancing
It’s 2025. ⌘ Read more

GhostBSD: from usability to struggle and renewal
This article isn’t meant to be technical. Instead, it offers a high-level view of what happened through the years with GhostBSD, where the project stands today, and where we want to take it next. As you may know, GhostBSD is a user-friendly desktop BSD operating system built with FreeBSD. Its mission is to deliver a simple, stable, and accessible desktop experience for users who want FreeBSD’s power without the complexity of manual set … ⌘ Read more

A brief history of the BSD Fast FileSystem
We’re looking at an article from 2007 here, but I still think it’s valuable and interesting, especially from a historical perspective. I first started working on the UNIX file system with Bill Joy in the late 1970s. I wrote the Fast File System, now called UFS, in the early 1980s. In this article, I have written a survey of the work that I and others have done to improve the BSD file systems. Much of this research has been incorporated into other … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Mainly the bsd.cafe ones. I like how the minimalist single column profiles look. Image embeds are full width and reading through threads feels nice (as in it doesn’t feel like pealing layers upon layers of a fresh onion).

Apple’s Darwin OS and XNU kernel deep dive
Apple’s Darwin operating system is the Unix-like core underpinning macOS, iOS, and all of Apple’s modern OS platforms. At its heart lies the XNU kernel – an acronym humorously standing for “X is Not Unix.” XNU is a unique hybrid kernel that combines a Mach microkernel core with components of BSD Unix. This design inherits the rich legacy of Mach (originating from 1980s microkernel research) and the robust stability and POSIX compliance of BSD. The … ⌘ Read more

Exploring the (discontinued) hybrid Debian GNU/kFreeBSD distribution
For decades, Linux and BSD have stood as two dominant yet fundamentally different branches of the Unix-like operating system world. While Linux distributions, such as Debian, Ubuntu, and Fedora, have grown to dominate the open-source ecosystem, BSD-based systems like FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD have remained the preferred choice for those seeking security, performance, and licensing flexibility. … ⌘ Read more

MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0 released
Late last year, the MaXX Interactive Desktop, the Linux (and BSD) version of the IRIX desktop, sprung back to life with a new release and a detailed roadmap. Thanks to a unique licensing agreement with SGI, MaXX’ developer, Eric Masson, has been able to bring a lot of the SGI user experience over to Linux and BSD, and as promised, we have a new release: the final version of MaXX Interactive Desktop 2.2.0. It’s codenamed Octane, and anyone who knows the … ⌘ Read more

NixBSD: an unofficial NixOS fork with a FreeBSD kernel
NixBSD is an attempt to make a reproducible and declarable BSD, based on NixOS. Although theoretically much of this work could be copied to build other BSDs, all work thus far has been focused on building a FreeBSD distribution. ↫ NixBSD GitHub page Look, it’s my job to make sure I use and am familiar with as many operating systems and related tools as possible. As much as you guys support OSNews on Patreon or Ko-Fi, it’s g … ⌘ Read more

[ANN] Monero Remote Node Monitoring project updates

Since my last post on Reddit in June 2024, there have been some major changes and new features.

* updated the license from GLWTS to a more widely recognized and permissive one (BSD-3-Clause)
* UI: switched from SvelteKit to Templ+HTMX to reduce external dependencies
* added support for monitoring both IPv6 and I2P nodes
* set up a Tor Hidden service for the web UI

Links:

• GitHub repository
  
• [Website](https://xmr.d … ⌘ Read more

Lunduke’s BSD Thoughts (as BSD Week ends)
Listen now (24 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Mar 1, 2023 ⌘ Read more

BSD Week Extended by an Extra Week!
Listen now (16 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Feb 20, 2023 ⌘ Read more

OpenBSD, HelloSystem, and BSD Rabbit Holes
Listen now (31 min) | The Lunduke Journal of Technology Podcast - Feb 19, 2023 ⌘ Read more

Funny BSD Pictures
AKA Funny Programming Pictures Part XXIV ⌘ Read more

The History of BSD - Part 1 (1974 - 1989)
PDP & VAX. Pascal & vi. DARPA & Google’s Erich Schmidt. The story of BSD is all over the place. ⌘ Read more

BSD Week begins at The Lunduke Journal of Technology!
Listen now (13 min) | An entire week devoted to everything BSD – both old and new! ⌘ Read more

8-Bit Week: The Grand Finale
Listen now (28 min) | Scheduled: BSD Week, Linux Games Week, Serenity OS Week, & Plan 9 Week! ⌘ Read more

Well, it was not a proper fix, more like a duck-tape mend, the right thing to do is to add a BSD branch and fix the calls to BSD’s awk and fmt so they produce the data in the way the rest of the code expects it. #txtnish #gnu #bsd

Fixed txtnish timeline formatting of hashtags on BSD by installing coreutils and replacing fmt with gfmt in the configuration file #twtxt #txtnish #gnu #bsd

I’m using mastodon again…. => https://bsd.network/@sh

@mdom@domgoergen.com: I’m using txtnish on FreeBSD and I had to switch it to gawk (not sure why BSD awk fails) and disable color. Just fyi. I didn’t look into it any further.