A Linux kernel developer is working on porting FreeBSD's CAPSICUM security framework over to the Linux kernel.

In announcing his work at the end of June that's now being discussed amongst kernel stakeholders, David Drysdale wrote, "The last couple of versions of FreeBSD (9.x/10.x) have included the Capsicum security framework, which allows security-aware applications to sandbox themselves in a very fine-grained way. For example, OpenSSH now uses Capsicum in its FreeBSD version to restrict sshd's credentials checking process, to reduce the chances of credential leakage. It would be good to have equivalent functionality in Linux, so I've been working on getting the Capsicum framework running in the kernel, and I'd appreciate some feedback/opinions on the general design approach."

The third RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available
on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and
sparc64 architectures.

This is expected to be the final RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

We are pleased to announce today, July 4, that the Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 has reached Alpha stage and is available for download as Live DVD/USB images that can be installed.

Ubuntu MATE Remix 14.04 Alpha comes as a July 4 surprise to many who believed the controversial project would become reality sooner or later. It beautifully integrates the MATE desktop environment into the latest upstream Ubuntu release.

The distribution was developed by a few members of the Ubuntu community and provides users with an old-school graphical desktop environment, which reminds us of the good ol’ times of Ubuntu 10.04.

The second Release Candidate of FreeBSD 9.3, an operating system for x86, ARM, IA-64, PowerPC, PC-98, and UltraSPARC architectures, is now available for download and testing.

GhostBSD 4.0 continues moving along as the FreeBSD operating system focused around the MATE Desktop Environment.

GhostBSD 4.0 Beta 2 was released and it features various bug-fixes and other minor improvements over the earlier development versions.

The PC-BSD team is pleased to announce the availability of the next PC-BSD quarterly update, version 10.0.2!

The first RC build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and sparc64 architectures.

If you've been following along with our earlier articles on next-gen filesystems like btrfs and zfs, but wanted an easy way to get started without having to learn anything on the command line (or need an easy way to take advantage even though you're a Windows-only user), you're in luck. Today, we're going to look at two ready-to-rock ZFS-enabled network attached storage distributions: FreeNAS and NAS4Free.

This will (hopefully) be our last RC before releasing 10.0.2 officially sometime on or around the 23rd. We have addressed or fixed most tickets related to the 10.0.2 release, so if you are still running into any issues, please report them using our Trac database.

For some tests the performance doesn't deviate much between Debian GNU/Linux and Debian GNU/kFreeBSD given that both have a similar user-land. For our many source-based computational tests, the main factor to point out is that both GNU/Linux and GNU/kFreeBSD versions of 7.5 Wheezy have GCC 4.7 while the latest testing versions of these open-source operating systems are using the GCC 4.8 stable series.

Both Linux and the BSDs are free and open-source, Unix-like operating systems. They even use much of the same software — these operating systems have more things in common than they do differences. So why do they all exist?

There are more differences than we can cover here, especially philosophical differences about the way one should build an operating system and license it. This should help you understand the basics, though.

The third BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE release cycle is now available
on the FTP servers for the amd64, i386, ia64, powerpc, powerpc64 and
sparc64 architectures.

This is expected to be the final -BETA build of the 9.3-RELEASE cycle.

The image checksums follow at the end of this email.

ISO images and, for architectures that support it, the memory stick images
are available here:

ftp://ftp.freebsd.org/pub/FreeBSD/releases/ISO-IMAGES/9.3/

DragonFly, a distribution that belongs to the same class of operating systems as other BSD-derived systems and UNIX, has reached version 3.8.

DragonFly 3.8 is not as big as the previous release, but there are some very important features that have been added by the developers and it really warrants an update if you have an older version of this distro.

“DragonFly binaries in /bin and /sbin are now dynamic, which makes it possible to use current identification and authentication technologies such as PAM and NSS to manage user accounts. Some libraries have been moved to /lib to support this.”

The latest Linux 3.16 kernel pull request worth covering on Phoronix are the latest LLVMLinux patches for being able to compile the kernel with Clang rather than GCC.

With Linux 3.15 came the patch-set to come close to being able to compile under Clang and now with Linux 3.16 it's a bit closer. A set of five LLVMLinux patches are called for merging that affect ARM and Shash Crypto code.

One week after FreeBSD 9.3 went into beta, the second beta update is now available.

FreeBSD 9.3 is the next major FreeBSD 9 update due out that brings down some features from FreeBSD 10.0 like the Radeon KMS/DRM driver support, Xen HVM support, Apple MacBook trackpad support, disables hardware random number generators by default, and has a ton of other changes.

FreeBSD enthusiasts can find out more about the forthcoming 9.3 update via the tentative release notes. FreeBSD 9.3 is expected to be officially released in mid-July.

According to the developers, the distribution is based on FreeBSD 10.0-RELEASE, but it looks like that there is still room for improvements. The developers have made a few important changes and it’s recommended to update.

“In preparation for the next release we have been fine tuning some of the new features and making sure the loose ends are tied up. We were also able to close out a good amount of trac tickets this week and commit the fixes for 10.0.2,” reads the official announcement.

With it having been since late last year when trying out the Debian GNU/kFreeBSD variant that pairs Debian's GNU user-land with the FreeBSD kernel in place of Linux, I ran some fresh trials on one of our test-beds this week.

Binary dports packages for 3.8 have been built; they are available for download. (link goes to release versions of the packages.

FreeBSD developers haven't forgotten about the 9.x branch of their operating system, even if they have already released 10.0. This is a strange and not very common situation, where a development branch is actually lower in version than the latest stable.

This only shows the commitment of the developers to the people who are still using 9.x and who want to continue employing it. This means that several updates are needed and 9.3 Beta 1 is quite a big release.

Those interested in downloading FreeBSD 9.3 Beta or upgrading to it from an existing release can find all of the information via this mailing list announcement. FreeBSD 9.3 has many driver improvements, the hardware random number generators are disabled by default, the ZFS file-system support has been updated, and there's support for Xen hardware-assisted virtualization (XENHVM). FreeBSD 9.3 also supports Apple's MacBook trackpads and adds Radeon KMS, after the kernel mode-setting support was first found in FreeBSD 10.0.