NetBSD 5.1_RC1 available

The first release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download at:

http://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-5.1_RC1/

Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC1 tag is available as well.

There have been quite a lot of changes since 5.0. See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the full list, or your platform's INSTALL notes for a summary.

Please help us test this and any upcoming release candidates as much as possible. Remember, any feedback is good feedback. We'd love to hear from you, whether you've got a complaint or a compliment.

Enjoy!

[4 comments]

 

Six NetBSD projects choosen for Google Summer of Code 2010

Google's Summer of Code project is intended to involve students in Open Source projects, and we are proud that the following projects are selected for this summer:

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Kernel Modules Autoload from Host in Rump

Since early 2009 NetBSD and rump has supported execution of stock kernel module binaries in userspace on x86 architectures. Starting in -current as of today, kernel modules will automatically be loaded from the host into the rump kernel. For example, when mounting a file system in a rump kernel, support will be automatically loaded before mounting is attempted.

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The pkgsrc-2010Q1 Release

The pkgsrc developers are happy to announce the new pkgsrc-2010Q1 release, which has support for even more packages than previous releases. Some major packages have also been updated in this release.

At the same time, the pkgsrc-2009Q4 release has been deprecated, and continuing engineering starts on the pkgsrc-2010Q1 release.

Some highlights of the new pkgsrc-2010Q1 release are:

• we have almost finished the transition to DESTDIR installation, where a staging directory is used to make a binary package, which is then managed by the pkg_install tools
• gnome has been updated to version 2.28.1, kde to 4.3.5
• we have started changing packages to default to KDE4 instead of KDE3. For now, the old packages are still available as *-kde3 e.g. amarok is the KDE4 package, and amarok-kde3 is the KDE3 one.
• the default python package is now python26
• squid 3.1.1 is now in pkgsrc, with some support for IPv6
• php 5.3.x has been added
• The conversion from the last teTeX distribution to texlive (currently 2009) is still in progress.
• many, many packages have been updated to newer versions, to take advantage of fixes and improved functionality. The following versions of packages are included in the
  pkgsrc-2010Q1 release:
  • apache-2.2.15
  • bzr-2.0.3
  • firefox-3.6.3
  • git-1.6.6.2 (the package is known as scmgit in pkgsrc)
  • gnome-2.28.1
  • kde-4.3.5
  • mercurial-1.5.1
  • mysql-5.1.44nb2
  • openoffice-3.1.1 and openoffice-bin-3.2.0
  • perl-5.10.1
  • postgresql-8.3.9nb2 and postgresql-8.4.2
  • python-2.5.4nb5 and python-2.6.4nb4
  • ruby-1.8.7.174nb4
  • samba-3.3.12
  • seamonkey-2.0.4
  • subversion-1.6.9nb1
  • wireshark-1.2.7
  • zope-3.3.1
• other notable changes include
  • we bid a fond thanks, and farewell, to some old favourites, such as php4 and related packages, the old vmware modules packages, sun's jdk and jre versions 1.4 and 1.5, the ISC dhcp 3.x packages, galeon, swing, typolight-2.6 and tcl-8.3
  • the addition of some interesting, pertinent, and shiny packages such as tn3270 (:-) - brought over from NetBSD's src archive), mingw, colordiff, easygit, monotone-el, swt, fuse-bindfs, php-5.3, samba-3.3, xymon, musca, and qt4-mng
  • notable updates to packages such as bsd and gnu tar, amarok, lame, mpg123, mysql, openldap, postgresql, sqlite, boehm-gc, boost, doxygen, fossil, glib, libev, libffi, memcached, nspr, nss, pango, pcre, rt3, readline, swig, xulrunner, vim, qemu, chicken, mono, parrot, openjdk7, python, php5, squeak, clamav, dovecot, fetchmail, getmail, gmime, linmilter, mew, sendmail, spamassassin, squirrelmail, thunderbird, octave, pari, calibre, dhcpcd, gupnp, nmap, rdist6, rsync, rtorrent, tnftpd, tor, transmission, unbound, aide, netpgp, openssl, bash, osh, tcsh, bacula, cdrtools, memtester, grub, pstree, rasqal, openbox, firefox, ikiwiki, lighttpd, mediawiki, nginx, squid, seamonkey, typolight, gtk2, xsnow
• the Package of the Quarter award is hereby awarded to qemu, nominated by Joerg Sonnenberger, and samba33, nominated by Matthias Scheler.

The list of platforms supported by pkgsrc is AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, HP/UX, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, QNX and SunOS (Solaris). Haiku support is almost ready to be added to pkgsrc. We are aware that support for some platforms is at a more mature stage than others, and would like to encourage feedback from users and developers on our more esoteric platforms.

• continuing engineering on the "stable" releases of pkgsrc continues to work well, and our release engineering team has done a marvelous job in pulling up changes to the stable release. Our thanks go to Matthias Scheler, Lubomir Sedlacik, Tyler Retzlaff, and S.P.Zeidler for all the hard work they do in sanity checking pullup requests, and managing the stable releases in pkgsrc.
• constant bulk building on a number of platforms has improved our ability to identify potential areas of concern, and to correct them sooner. It has also improved our ability to make binary packages available, and we are working on ways to improve this further. For more information, please refer to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list, archives available at http://mail-index.netbsd.org/pkgsrc-bulk/
• the number of packages has grown from 9100 to 9315; the number of supported platforms is currently 14. NetBSD, on all its supported architectures, is considered to be one pkgsrc platform.

As always, we'd like to encourage users of the packages collection to audit for security problems at least every day using pkg_admin audit - this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to exploit. pkg_admin is part of the pkg_install tools.

The pkgsrc-security team do a marvelous job in tracking notifications of vulnerabilities in packages, and disseminating this information, and our sincere thanks go to them for this essential work.

We'd also really appreciate it if people would install the pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script for us. This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating system. The results will be kept confidential, but the output will help us analyse the packages that are most used.

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

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.gz
or

ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2010Q1/pkgsrc.tar.bz2

You can also use the pkgsrc-2010Q1 tag to check it out yourself from anoncvs.NetBSD.org or any of the mirrors.

Alistair Crooks
On behalf of the pkgsrc developers

[0 comments]

 

Postfix 2.6.6 imported into NetBSD-current

Postfix 2.6.6 was imported into NetBSD-current today. The following bugs have been fixed since version 2.6.5:

• postmulti -p command did not skip disabled instances.
• In the multi_instance_wrapper parameter, the expansion of $command_directory and $daemon_directory was broken.
• The address_verify_poll_count parameter value was not made stress-dependent by default. This defeated the purpose of making other settings stress-dependent by default with Postfix 2.6.
• Milter applications would hang up after receiving an unexpected SMFIC_HEADER (mail header) command. This problem happened with Milters that (legitimately) do not send replies for SMFIC_RCPT (recipient address) or SMFIC_DATA (start of message) commands.
• Core dump while an printing error message for a malformed %<letter> sequence in LDAP, MySQL or PostgreSQL lookup table configuration.
• Mail with zero recipients was forever stuck in the queue. This happened when postsuper -r was run after all the recipients of a message were delivered (or bounced), but before the message was deleted from the queue.
• With hostnames such as 1-2-3-4, the valid_hostname() fuction did not recognize the - as a non-numeric character, causing a legitimate name to be rejected as invalid.
• The VRFY command did not accept a mailbox address inside <>.

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Spend a great "Summer of Code" with NetBSD!

This announcement is for anyone interested to implement a Google Summer of Code project with NetBSD.

April 9th 2010 (19:00 UTC) will be the deadline for student applications.

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Participate in Summer of Code 2010

Taking part in Google's Summer of Code provides a great opportunity for students to get paid to hack on NetBSD, learn about contributing to a major open source project and to become part of an exciting community.

So if you interested in devoting your coding skills as well as your summertime to the improvement of NetBSD, you will find detailed information on the NetBSD Summer-of-Code Projects webpage.

The NetBSD community will appreciate your contribution!

[0 comments]

 

Solutions Linux 2010 - 16-18th March, Paris Porte de Versailles

For the 11th year, was held the "Solutions Linux and Opensource" event in Paris Porte de Versailles, from March 16th to 18th.

NetBSD has been running a booth for the 2nd year in the "Associations' village", where visitors could find most of the active Free and Open Source Software associations: April, {Ubuntu,Mandriva,Fedora}-fr, as well as FreeBSD-fr and BSDFrance, among many others.

4 NetBSD developers were present on the event:

• Emile "imil" Heitor
• Antoine "tonio" Reilles
• Jean-Yves "jym" Migeon
• Guillaume "gls" Lasmayous

Several other active members of the french NetBSD community were also present to man the booth.

Even though this event is primarily business-oriented, the vast majority of questions were "end-users" oriented questions, the most common one being: how does NetBSD compare to Linux/Ubuntu ? However this year, we had a number of more technical questions, mainly from people willing to run embedded NetBSD.

We distributed something like 150 Jibbed live CDs, 250 NetBSD stickers, and 25 "Powered by NetBSD" case badges.

Next French events where NetBSD will be present:

• Rencontre Bretonnes du Logiciel Libre, on May, 15-16 in Rennes.
• Journées Méditérranéennes du Logiciel Libre on November 26-27 in Nice/Sophia-Antipolis.

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NetBSD in GSoC 2010

Google has published its list of organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code, and NetBSD has been chosen to benefit this year again (the sixth consecutive year).

If you are a student and don't have plans for the summer yet, head here and pick a project to apply for (or define your own).

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NetBSD runtime linker gains negative symbol cache

The NetBSD runtime linker now has a negative symbol cache. In a nutshell, this has reduced the startup time of the Evolution mail client from around 5 minutes to 3 seconds on my QuadCore amd64 machine. Not many applications have a lot of plugins with a large amount of links to external libraries and I doubt many other applications will gain such a drastic speed bump, but the GNOME desktop as a whole now loads small bit quicker. I would imagine that KDE will now load faster as well.

[8 comments]

 

NetBSD 5.0.2 released

On behalf of the NetBSD developers, I am pleased to announce that NetBSD 5.0.2 is now available for download. NetBSD 5.0.2 is the second critical/security update of the NetBSD 5.0 release branch. It represents a selected subset of fixes deemed critical for security or stability reasons. All users are encouraged to upgrade.

For full details, please see the 5.0.2 release notes.

To download 5.0.2, see http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.

[2 comments]

 

New Security Advisory: NetBSD-SA2010-003 azalia(4)/hdaudio(4) negative mixer index panic

A new NetBSD security advisory has been published affecting the azalia(4) and hdaudio(4) drivers.

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