m0n0wall 1.234 has been released

The release of m0n0wall 1.234, a minimalist firewall distribution based on FreeBSD has announced. m0n0wall is a project aimed at creating a complete, embedded firewall software package that, when used together with an embedded PC, provides all the important features of commercial firewall boxes (including ease of use) at a fraction of the price (free software).

m0n0wall is based on a bare-bones version of FreeBSD, along with a web server (thttpd), PHP and a few other utilities. The entire system configuration is stored in one single XML text file to keep things transparent. m0n0wall is probably the first UNIX system that has its boot-time configuration done with PHP, rather than the usual shell scripts, and that has the entire system configuration stored in XML format.

"I've decided to create one more release in the 1.2x stable branch to add source port randomization (for both NAT and the DNS forwarder). This is a recommended upgrade for all 1.2x users, no matter whether you're running a DNS server behind m0n0wall with NAT or not. Changelog: added source port randomization for ipnat; updated Dnsmasq to 2.45 (source port randomization); updated PHP to 4.4.9; bumped MFS size for firmware upgrades to 10 MB; changed ZoneEdit update server name to dynamic.zoneedit.com." said Manuel Kasper, the developer.

Some of changes in this release are:

• added source port randomization for ipnat
• updated Dnsmasq to 2.45 (source port randomization)
• updated PHP to 4.4.9

You can get this new version of m0n0wall by downloading at Here.

DragonFly BSD 1.12 Has Been Released

DragonFly is an operating system and environment originally based on FreeBSD. DragonFly branched from FreeBSD in 2003 in order to develop a radically different approach to concurrency, SMP, and most other kernel subsystems.

Now, DragonFly 1.12 release is available. This release is primarily a maintenance update. A lot of work has been done all over the kernel and userland. There are no new big-ticket items though we have pushed the MP lock further into the kernel. The 2.0 release is scheduled for mid-year.

DragonFly belongs to the same class of operating system as BSD and Linux and is based on the same UNIX ideals and APIs. DragonFly gives the BSD base an opportunity to grow in an entirely different direction from the one taken in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD series.

From 2003 to early 2007 the DragonFly project focused on rewriting most of the major kernel subsystems in order to support the second phase of the project. This involved a great deal of work in nearly every subsystem, particularly the filsystem APIs and kernel core. During all of this the development team said they have managed to keep the system up-to-date with regards to the third party applications and base system utilities that are needed to make any system usable in production. They have also adopted the PkgSrc system for management of all non-base-system third-party applications in order to pool its resources with other BSD projects using the system.

You can download this release of DragonFly at Here.

FreeBSD 6.3 Is Out

Engineering Team of FreeBSD has released FreeBSD 6.3. This release continues the development of the 6-STABLE branch providing performance and stability improvements, many bug fixes and new features.

Highlights of this Release:

1. KDE updated to 3.5.8, GNOME updated to 2.20.1, Xorg updated to 7.3
2. BIND updated to 9.3.4
3. Sendmail updated to 8.14.2
4. lagg(4) driver ported from OpenBSD/NetBSD
5. unionfs file system re-implemented
6. freebsd-update(8) now supports an upgrade command

More info about this release to alpha, amd64, i386, pc98, powerpc and sparc64 platforms can bee seen on this page.

You can get ISO of this FreeBSD release at here, and here if you want to use torrent.

Damn Small BSD is Available

Damn Small BSD (DSBSD) is a small (50mb or less) FreeBSD live-CD desktop environment geared toward developers and system administrators, but we also include applications that the average user may find handy.

DSBSD comes with everything you need in a basic desktop environment. We include the fluxbox window manager, firefox, xmms, and many other applications. We also include tools to help you get work done, such as an ssh server, a mini httpd, xvncviewer, and more.

The goal of this project is to be able to run on older hardware with little memory, as well as modern machines, while providing a responsive desktop. DSBSD support both SMP and uniprocessor machines.

You can download this Damn Small BSD at here.

DesktopBSD 1.6 Has Been Released

DesktopBSD, an operating system based on FreeBSD and the FreeSBIE live CD has announced the availability of DesktopBSD 1.6 final. This release is the first stable release of the 1.6 branch and comes with a great number of new features and improvements.

It is based on the second release candidate of FreeBSD's upcoming production release 6.3 and provides the user with an enhanced KDE 3.5.8 desktop environment.

The most notable new features are:

• FreeBSD 6 as a modern and reliable base system
• X.Org release 7.3, improving support for modern graphics hardware
• Live CD/DVD feature for testing the system without installation to a hard-drive
• Revised installer supporting upgrades from 1.0 and previous 1.6 release candidates
• Improved package manager usability and performance
• Many enhancements and bugfixes for the DesktopBSD tools
• Support for multiple processors and multi-core CPUs
• Inclusion of the NVIDIA graphics driver for hardware 3D rendering
• DesktopBSD build servers as an up-to-date source for precompiled packages

You can download it for 32 bit and 64 bit version at here.

FreeNAS 0.686 Stable Has Been Released

FreeNAS 0.686, a FreeBSD-based operating system which provides free Network-Attached Storage (NAS) services, has been released. It is FreeNAS 0.686 stable out. As said on its site, changes and bug fixes have done: Refactor port makefiles; upgrade netbsd-iscsi (iscsi-target) to 20071221, fusefs-ntfs to 1.1120; disable firmware upgrade via WebGUI for 'full' installations, use the 'full' upgrade mode from live CD instead.

Changed boot splash screen and WebGUI logo images; try to fix AFP Time Machine problem; fix bug in 'full' upgrade / install routine (live CD); do not delete log files during boot process on 'full' installations; it is not possible to format a SoftRAID disk with MSDOS FAT16/32; it is not possible to encrypt a disk partition, only complete disks are supported.

You can download this stable release at here.

pfSense 1.2 Release Candidate 3 has released

pfSense 1.2 Release Candidate 3 has released. pfSense is a small, FreeBSD-based firewall and a m0n0wall-derived operating system. It uses Packet Filter, FreeBSD 6.x (or DragonFly BSD when ALTQ and CARP is finished), ALTQ for excellent packet queuing, and an integrated package management system for extending the environment with new features.

Here are just a few of the new improvements and features that have made their way into this new version:

* IPSEC Carp rules cleanup
* IPSEC stability worksarounds for > 150 tunnels
* Only reload webConfiguration from System -> Advanced when cert changes
* Increase net.inet.ip.intr_queue_maxlen to 1000 which is the IP input queue.
* Do not allow sticky connection bit to be set if pppoe is enabled. Ticket #1319
* Disable firmware upgrade for embedded and cdrom and suggest using the console option to upgrade. Ticket #1433
* Recompile MPD with MSS/dial-on-demand patches (also fixes idle timeout bug) Obtained-from: http://svn.m0n0.ch/wall/tags/release-1.3b3/build/patches/packages/mpd.patch
* Fix CP not sending Acct-Session-Time to Radius during accounting update Ticket #1434
* Work around heavy network activity issues. [20070116, update 20070212] Systems with very heavy network activity have been observed to have some problems with the kernel memory allocator. Symptoms are processes that get stuck in zonelimit state, or system livelocks. One partial workaround for this problem is to add the following line to /boot/loader.conf and reboot: kern.ipc.nmbclusters=”0″
* Bump lighttpd to 1.4.18
* Show wireless nodes regardless if we can deterimine BSS value.
* IPSEC tunnel endpoint highlighting in system logs
* Show the IPSEC interface as a option for the traffic graph.
* Add RRD Settings page.
* Make it possible to disable RRD graphs. Bump config so it’s on by default if it wasn’t already.
* Correctly set reflection timeout for all protocols.
* Restart snmp services after LAN IP changes Ticket #1453
* Bump miniupnpd version to RC9 -add multiple interface support
* Speedup ARP page by using diag_dhcp_leases.php page code for parsing the dhcpd.leases file
* Relax the ip address check and allow duplicate ip address entries which allows fr example a wireless card and a ethernet card on a laptop to share the same ip address
* Do not allow DHCP server to be enabled when DHCP relay is enabled, and vice versa Ticket #1488
* IPSEC keep alive pinger using the wrong source IP address Ticket #1482
* Failover DHCP Server in 10 seconds as opposed to 60 seconds

You can download pfSense and/or its live CD at here.

Is PC-BSD a Linux based?

PC-BSD, the first desktop-oriented operating system based on FreeBSD, is rapidly becoming a viable open source alternative to Linux on the desktop.

Last weeks, InternetNews published a brief article covering the release of PC-BSD 1.4 and giving space to project founder Kris Moore.

What are the major improvements in the new version?

"Our new GUI tools will greatly assist in setting up networking, such as wireless connections, something which had been rather difficult in the past. The X.Org GUI tool also allows the user to easily set their screen resolution, and driver with 3D support on the first boot." On the subject of future plans, Moore has this to say: "We try to have a new release out every six months or so. With 1.4 it took closer to nine months, with several of those months going towards implementing a whole new build process. Now that it's in place, the next release may be closer to the six-month mark, depending upon the release schedule of FreeBSD 7, and KDE 4 of course."

At the desktop we have a full KDE 3.5.7 decorated with a nice gradient blue wallpaper with a white PC-BSD logo in the lower right corner. It's a tidy arrangement with only a few icons on the desktop, three icons in the quick launcher, and we had five icons in the system tray. The applets in the system tray consist of Klipper, Kalendar, Kmix, Network Manager, and for me a battery monitor.

The quick launchers include Show Desktop, System Menu, and Konqueror. The window decoration used is Crystal and the style is Lipstik. All together we have a pretty and tidy desktop. Primarily KDE applications occupy the menu, but there are a few other entries such as the tools in the Settings menu and whatever extra components chosen during install. There seemed to be a bit of lag in the menu operation sometimes, but most applications opened in average or above average time.

Some of the applications found include Kcalc, Kate, KSpaceDuel, Kview, Kopete, Kontact, Amarok and Kaffeine. The Firefox version available for easy installation is 2.0.0.6, Opera 9.23 is available, and the OpenOffice.org version is 2.2.1. Under the hood we find X.Org 7.2 and GCC 3.4.6. As shipped, PC-BSD multimedia support is very good.
We could watch Google videos, Apple Quicktime trailers, and other Flash movies, although streaming DIVX didn't work. We could enjoy various file formats stored locally such as .avi, .bins, .mp3s, and .mp4s, as well as watch encrypted DVDs and listen to audio CDs.

Btw, you can try this release by download it here.