Meeting Notes - Overview of FreeBSD, Wed 20 Oct 1999

Taken by David Kramer

Q and A

Announcements

November- Micro-optical wearable display.

December- network expert, intrusion detection. He's from the CIA originally. Maybe solmeone from Cisco too.

January- joint meeting with AIP.

Smplicity Java API- www.datarepresentations.com

Shirts

Next meeting they'll have some available for sale.

main meeting

Berkeley unix- 1975 on dec vax, PDP11

DEC hated that and fought it.

They hadc a fight with Unix Systems Labs/Novell over what USL considered proprietary code.

They resolved it by coming out with a final version in 1994 called 4.4 BSD-Light.

All BSD variants were allowed to have one last release with the code in question.

SUNOS spun off the very beginning of FreeBSD/USL UNIX.

Book: The quarter-century of UNIX

Peter H. Salus 0-201-54777-5

Book: The Complete FreeBSD Greg Lehey Walnut Creek

4 cd's 1-57176-246-9

Distributions

FreeBSD- Very stable 92.2.7 is a year old)

One distribution about every three months

It has a Linux library emulation mode to run ELF programs on FreBSD.

The daemon's name is "Chuck the Daemon".

Mosg gnu devel tools, but they recedntly went from gcc to ecgs.

kernel loadable modules over a monolithic kernel.

KDE 1.0, Gnome, Enlightenment.

OpenBSD www.openbsd.org

Made in Canada Theo Durat (also started NetBSD)

Very secure.

Works on many more platforms, incl sh3/arm/mips.

No US people can work on it because it has 128-bit cryptology.

They started with an audit of the entire kernel,

Buffer overflows

Pseudo-random PIDs

NetBSD

Really nothing special about it.