NetBSD: Changes and News in 2004

December 2004

November 2004

October 2004

September 2004

August 2004

July 2004

June 2004

May 2004

April 2004

March 2004

February 2004

January 2004

December 2004

28 Dec 2004 - news.gw.com going offline

After ten years of NNTP access to mailing lists, the news.gw.com service is being shutdown. It will be taken offline at the end of December 31. Kimmo Suominen reported that he can't justify dedicating more resources to the service, given that there are other good public services.

23 Dec 2004 - anoncvs service unavailable until further notice

The anonymous CVS machine (anoncvs.NetBSD.org) is currently unavailable until a random memory corruption problem is resolved or a replacement machine is put in place. For more information, read the announcement to the announce mailing list.

20 Dec 2004 - pkgsrc-2004Q4 has been branched

The new stable pkgsrc branch is now pkgsrc-2004Q4. It includes support for OSF1 and DragonFly BSD platforms. The pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch is now deprecated. The pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch is maintained for security fixes. See the message in the tech-pkg mailing list archive for more information about the pkgsrc-2004Q4 branch.

16 Dec 2004 - New Security Advisory released

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-010 concerning insufficient argument validation in compat code has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

Please note, that NetBSD 2.0 is not affected by this advisory.

09 Dec 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 has been released!

NetBSD 2.0, the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, has been released, with binary distributions for 48 architectures. More information is available in the 2.0 release announcement.

NetBSD 2.0 continues our long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals.

The addition of a native threads implementation for all platforms and symmetrical multiprocessing (SMP) on i386 and other popular platforms were long-standing goals for NetBSD 2.0. Both of these goals have now been met—SMP support has been added for i386, SPARC, and PowerPC, the SMP support on Alpha and VAX has been improved, and the new port to the 64-bit AMD/Opteron also supports SMP.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 2.0 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. In addition, you may now for the first time use net/bittorrent to retrieve all available ISO images.

Bulgarian, Czech, Dutch, German, Korean, Lithuanian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swedish language translations of the NetBSD 2.0 release announcement are also available.

06 Dec 2004 - pkgsrc now frozen

As announced previously, the NetBSD Packages Collection is now frozen in preparation of the fourth stable branch pkgsrc-2004Q4.

Please see Alistair Crooks' announcement on the tech-pkg mailing list.

November 2004

29 Nov 2004 - pkgsrc will freeze for pkgsrc-2004Q4

Alistair Crooks announced today that the NetBSD Packages Team will start a freeze on the pkgsrc tree in order to prepare for the release of the fourth stable branch, pkgsrc-2004Q4. The freeze will begin on December 6th 2004, and will last for a maximum of 2 weeks, during which the developers will bring down the PR count and fix problems shown by the bulk builds.

See Alistair's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more details.

21 Nov 2004 - Old news items online

During the conversion of various webpages to XML, Jan Schaumann resurrected the old news items from previous years, which up until now were hidden. These news items make for an interesting read, as they cover a large chunk of NetBSD history, including the release of NetBSD 1.3.2, the announcement of NetBSD supporting USB as the first Open Source Operating System, the original publication of the NetBSD Guide, as well as the dates when various key-developers joined the project and when new ports where added.

To turn on the “Way-back-when-in-NetBSD” machine, browse through news items from 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002 and 2003.

20 Nov 2004 - pkgsrc documentation moved

The documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection, previously located in pkgsrc/Packages.txt has moved. After a lot of work, Hubert Feyrer and others have finally converted it to XML format and we are now able to generate the “pkgsrc guide” in HTML, PDF and PS formats. A plain text version is, of course, still available in pkgsrc/doc/pkgsrc.txt.

For more details, please see Hubert Feyrer's post to the tech-pkg mailing list.

19 Nov 2004 - NetBSD LiveCD runs Contest

NetBSD, frequently used at Stevens Institute of Technology, was used as the main platform for the ACM Greater New York Regional Programming Contest by means of a NetBSD Live CD to ensure a consistent and identical setup for all contestants.

The LiveCD was created by NetBSD developer Jan Schaumann—see his message to the netbsd-advocacy mailing list or this webpage for more details.

12 Nov 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC5 tagged

NetBSD 2.0_RC5 has now been tagged. Changes since RC4 include fixes to various COMPAT_ emulations, IP Filter backward compatibility fixes, XFree86, pax(1), rsh(1), hp300 boot blocks, pthread fixes for amd64 and i386, documentation updates.

Binary snapshots of NetBSD 2.0_RC5 are available in the daily builds directory on the main FTP site.

01 Nov 2004 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Peter Postma (login: peter), who will be working on pf and the NetBSD Packages Collection.

October 2004

30 Oct 2004 - NetBSD has a new logo

The NetBSD Foundation has selected an official logo for identifying NetBSD. Over 400 logos were submitted by 238 artists for a NetBSD logo contest started early this year. The winning logo was submitted by Grant Bissett, a new media designer from Perth, Western Australia.

Members of the NetBSD Foundation voted for the new logo from a short-list of six submitted designs selected by the logo committee. Characteristics important for the new logo were simplicity, appealing form and color choice, and identification with the project. More details can be found in the official press-release.

15 Oct 2004 - New Port: NetBSD/iyonix

Gavan Fantom has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: iyonix. Iyonix is an ARM based PC. See http://www.iyonix.com/ for more details on Iyonix or join the port-iyonix mailing list.

08 Oct 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC4 tagged

A new release candidate RC4 of NetBSD 2.0 has been tagged. The changes since RC3 include fixes for IP Filter (concerning IPv6 and better backwards compatibility with existing configurations), checksum processing for bridge interfaces, support for the Adaptec AAR 2810SA raid controller, linux compatibility and changes to the pagedaemon in order to improve performance under heavy disk load.

To allow for testing of this new release candidate, the final release of NetBSD 2.0 is expected to be pushed back about 1-2 weeks. Binary snapshots will soon be available on the mirrors of the NetBSD release engineering ftp server.

05 Oct 2004 - Third Quarterly Status Report published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's third quarterly status report, covering the months July through September of 2004. Among many other things, this status report covers NetBSD version numbering scheme changes and of course upcoming release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at https://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2004Q3.html.

05 Oct 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC3 tagged (updated)

After tagging NetBSD-2.0_RC1 and NetBSD-2.0_RC2, there have been a few pullups that fix some issues with Linux emulation under NetBSD/i386 as well as some installation problems under some of the arm-based ports. This means that the final release of NetBSD 2.0 will need to be pushed back approximately 1-2 weeks to allow for testing of this Release Candidate.

As usual, binary snapshots will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server.

01 Oct 2004 - New Developer

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer:

  • Kouichirou Hiratsuka (login: hira), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection and bug fixing.

September 2004

30 Sep 2004 - NetBSD Version Numbering Scheme Changes

Christos Zoulas announced that the NetBSD Core Team ratified the proposed changes to the NetBSD version numbering scheme to clarify the relationship between “current” and “release” versions of NetBSD. The major version number will from now on be used to indicate a major release and the minor version number to indicate a minor release.

A detailed explanation of why these changes were necessary and how they are implemented can be found in Christos' message to the tech-kern mailing list.

30 Sep 2004 - NetBSD again sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record

NetBSD does it again: after the original Internet2 Land Speed Record set by NetBSD in 2004 May 3 was broken, NetBSD shines again: Once more researchers at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have broken the Internet2 Land Speed Record, using the upcoming version of NetBSD 2.0.

The new records are 124.935 Pbmps in a single stream (was 69.073 Pbmps), and 122.367 Pbmps in multiple streams. NetBSD was used once more due to the “scalability of its TCP code”.

More information about this record including the NetBSD configuration can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR3-s/ for single stream and http://proj.sunet.se/LSR3-m/ for multiple streams. And the website of the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition is located at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/.

29 Sep 2004 - NetBSD happily Hosted@ISC

The NetBSD Project has had a number of servers hosted at ISC for a while. In the recent press release “Hosted@ISC”, the Internet Systems Consortium cites Christos Zoulas and other Open Source representatives on how this program has helped the many projects using their service. Thanks, ISC!

27 Sep 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 RC1 tagged

The NetBSD Releng Team has announced that the first Release Candidate for NetBSD 2.0 (ie NetBSD-2.0_RC1) has been tagged. This is a major milestone in the much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0: from now on, any pullups must address some form of show-stopping issue to even be considered. The NetBSD Project encourages all users to test the binary snapshots that will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server.

If no pullups are necessary, then the 2.0 release should occur around the middle of October. Any fixes resulting in pullups will cause a second RC cycle to begin and add approximately 1-2 weeks more to the timeline.

22 Sep 2004 - Hardware failure on www.NetBSD.org

The server hosting www.NetBSD.org and mail-index.NetBSD.org suffered a serious hardware failure and is currently offline. The NetBSD Admins team is working on getting the machine up and running, but in the mean time www.NetBSD.org was switched to one of our mirrors. The mailing list index remains temporarily unavailable, but our news gateway at news.NetBSD.org may provide a viable, temporary alternative. The NetBSD Project apologizes for the downtime.

20 Sep 2004 - New pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch

On behalf of the pkgsrc team, Alistair G. Crooks announced today that a new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch was created, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes a total of 4959 actively-maintained and supported packages, deprecates the last stable pkgsrc branch (pkgsrc-2004Q2); all maintenance will take place on this new pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch. Please see Alistair's message to the tech-pkg mailing list and our online documentation of the NetBSD Packages Collection for details.

August 2004

17 Aug 2004 - New Security Advisory released

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-009 concerning a ftpd root escalation has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

01 Aug 2004 - New Developers

The NetBSD project is pleased to welcome the following new developer(s):

  • Simas Mockevicius (login: symka), who will be working on website documentation.
  • Takehiko NOZAKI (login: tnozaki), who will be working on i18n.
  • Ian Lance Taylor (login: ian), who will be working on toolchain and the building process.

July 2004

27 Jul 2004 - NetBSD 2.0 status report

James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailing list. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed.

This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs.

17 Jul 2004 - French BSD Book reaches 2nd Edition

The second edition of NetBSD developer Emmanuel Dreyfus' book entitled “BSD - Coll. Cahiers de l'Admin” has been published. Information on the book (including some chapter preview) is available from the publisher's website.

06 Jul 2004 - Second Quarterly Status Report published

Jan Schaumann published the NetBSD Foundation's second quarterly status report, covering the months April through June of 2004. Among many other things, this status report addresses the NetBSD Logo Contest and the upcoming release of NetBSD 2.0. It is available online at https://www.NetBSD.org/foundation/reports/2004Q2.html.

01 Jul 2004 - New Developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Adrian Portelli (login: adrianp), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.
  • Ben Elliston (login: bje), who will be working on the toolchain.
  • Brian Ginsbach (login: ginsbach), who will be working on libc_r.
  • Steve Rumble (login: rumble), who will be working on the sgimips port.
  • John R. Shannon (login: shannonjr), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

June 2004

18 Jun 2004 - UltraSPARC III Hardware Donations Wanted

In order to make further improvements to the sparc64 port, we would like to solicit donations for UltraSPARC III and III+ hardware. If your company or an educational or research institute wants to buy or has a spare system like a Sun Fire V210 dual 1GHz, fully equipped Sun Fire 15000 or similar UltraSPARC III or III+ equipped desktop or server machine, donating it to The NetBSD Foundation to support operating system research would be very welcome. Being a volunteer project with no government or commercial backing, The NetBSD Foundation depends on the support of its users.

Besides support in hardware, monetary support as well as other ways are always welcome, please donate via [email protected] or see our contributions page at https://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/ for further information how organizations as well as individuals can help.

Please contact [email protected] to arrange donations and shipping of hardware.

07 Jun 2004 - pkgsrc freeze

Starting Monday, June 7th, 2004, the NetBSD Packages Collection is frozen in order to stabilize pkgsrc on the various supported platforms. See Alistair Crooks' message to the tech-pkg mailing list for details.

03 Jun 2004 - New Security Advisory released

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-008 concerning a heap overflow in the CVS server has been released.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

May 2004

28 May 2004 - pkgsrcCon 2004 report

Hubert Feyrer wrote a report of pkgsrcCon 2004, the first pkgsrc conference that was held from April 30 to May 2, 2004 in Vienna, Austria.

21 May 2004 - Non-executable mappings update

During the last few months Chuck Silvers has refined the support for non-executable mappings. Non-executable mappings make parts of the stack and heap non-executable when they are marked writable. This makes exploiting potential buffer overflows harder.

Since there seems to be some confusion about which platforms support non-executable mappings, we have added a separate page with detailed information about the current state of non-executable mappings.

12 May 2004 - New Security Advisory released

NetBSD Security Advisory SA2004-007 has been released. The affected component is Systrace (kernel) and affects only users of -current and the netbsd-2-0 branch with sources prior to 2004-04-17.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

03 May 2004 - NetBSD sets Internet2 Land Speed World Record

Researchers at the Swedish University Network (SUNET) have broken the Internet2 Land Speed Record using two Dell 2650 machines with single 2GHz CPUs running NetBSD 2.0 BETA. SUNET transferred around 840 Gigabytes of data in less than 30 minutes, using a single IPv4 TCP stream, between a host at the Luleå University of Technology and a host connected to a Sprint PoP in San Jose, CA, USA. The achieved speed was 69.073 Petabit-meters/second. According to the research team, NetBSD was chosen "due to the scalability of the TCP code".

More information about this record including the NetBSD configuration can be found at: http://proj.sunet.se/LSR2/
The website of the Internet2 Land Speed Record (I2-LSR) competition is located at: http://lsr.internet2.edu/

03 May 2004 - New pkgsrc-bulk mailing list

A new pkgsrc-bulk mailing list has been created. As the name suggests, this list will receive reports and build logs of pkgsrc bulk builds under NetBSD's various architectures as well as under other operating systems.

Subscription is via Majordomo as per the mailing list information.

April 2004

26 Apr 2004 - NetBSD trademark application completed

The NetBSD Foundation is proud to announce that it has registered the “NetBSD®” trademark. The foundation would like to thank Jay Michaelson (Wasabi Systems) for filing the application and providing answers to the US Patent Office, and Carl Oppedahl (Oppedahl & Larson) for giving advice and keeping the Foundation informed about the process. An official policy on the use of the NetBSD® trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon.

21 Apr 2004 - Two New Security Advisories released

NetBSD Security Advisories SA2004-005, SA2004-006, have been released. More details, including information on solutions and workarounds, are located in each individual security advisory.

More information on previous Security Advisories is available in the NetBSD Security pages.

16 Apr 2004 - ftp.NetBSD.org disk failure (updated)

The master FTP site, ftp.NetBSD.org experienced several disk failures on April 13, shortly before 03:00UTC. All data was immediately backed up, replacement disks added to the RAID set, and data restored. The system was back in full service with data recovered on April 16 at 15:00UTC, many thanks to our excellent admins team.

The NetBSD Project apologises for any inconvenience caused, and thanks our users for their understanding during this period.

08 Apr 2004 - First Quarterly Status Report

Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.

04 Apr 2004 - New Port: NetBSD/xen

On March 11th, Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/Research/SRG/netos/xen/ for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.

March 2004

29 Mar 2004 - New pkgsrc-2004Q1 branch

On behalf of the pkgsrc team, Alistair G. Crooks announced today that a new pkgsrc-2004Q1 branch was created last night, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc trunk is now over. This branch, which includes some 4518 actively-maintained and supported packages, introduces a self-hosted pkgsrc infrastructure as part of the ever growing support of even more operating systems as well as a number of other goodies. Please see Alistair's message to the netbsd-announce mailing list for details.

28 Mar 2004 - 2.0 Release Engineering process started

James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun! At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end of May 2004. Please see James' message to the netbsd-announce mailing list for details.

23 Mar 2004 - pkgsrc-bugs mailing list now active

Thomas Klausner today announced that as of PR number 24866, PRs for the pkg category are now sent only to the new pkgsrc-bugs list, not to the netbsd-bugs list as before.

Please subscribe the pkgsrc-bugs mailing list if you are interested in getting pkgsrc bug reports.

12 Mar 2004 - Interix (Windows) support added to pkgsrc

Preliminary support for Interix, a UNIX-like environment for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, has been added to pkgsrc. The support is still new and incomplete, but it is now possible to bootstrap pkgsrc and install simple packages. Interix is part of Microsoft's Windows Services for UNIX package. See Todd Vierling's email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.

11 Mar 2004 - Upcoming release of NetBSD 2.0 - how you can help

The NetBSD Project is gearing up for a new release, the much anticipated NetBSD 2.0. You—yes, you—can help make it the best release yet by donating some of your time and attention to it. See Allen Briggs' email to the netbsd-users mailing list for details.

09 Mar 2004 - First pkgsrcCon announced

pkgsrcCon is a technical conference for people working on the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc), focusing on existing technologies, research projects, and works-in-progress in pkgsrc infrastructure. Developers, contributors, and users are all welcome to attend. The conference will be held on April 30 to May 2, 2004 in Vienna, Austria.

For more information, including how to register and how to submit a presentation proposal, please visit http://www.pkgsrcCon.org/.

05 Mar 2004 - XFree86 4.4.0 imported

Matthias Scheler has announced that he has imported XFree86 4.4.0. Various important fixes are scheduled to go into the tree shortly. If you encounter problems with XFree86 4.4.0 you can use the "v4-4-0_beforeimport" tag in "xsrc/xfree" and "src/x11" to downgrade to XFree86 4.3.0. See Matthias' mail to the current-users mailing list for details.

04 Mar 2004 - NewsForge interviews Luke Mewburn

Luke Mewburn has been interviewed by NewsForge, discussing the upcoming 2.0 Release as well as some more general, technical and organizational aspects of his role as a Core member.

03 Mar 2004 - Status update: Logo competition closes

We would like to note that the time for submissions to the NetBSD logo competition is over now, and that the NetBSD Executive Committee for Communications will take its time to evaluate the many hundred submissions. Thank you VERY much! Please watch this space for the results.

01 Mar 2004 - NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released!

NetBSD 1.6.2 has been released, with binary distributions for 40 architectures. More information is available in the 1.6.2 release announcement.

This is an update to NetBSD 1.6 and 1.6.1, and we strongly recommend users of NetBSD 1.6.1 and previous releases upgrade their systems, as many security issues and other bugs have been fixed.

Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.6.2 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. In addition, you may now for the first time use net/bittorrent to retrieve a few select ISO images. The torrents are available here.

Czech, Dutch, German, French, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian and Spanish language translations of the NetBSD 1.6.2 release announcement are available.

01 Mar 2004 - The Annual NetBSD Status Report

The NetBSD Foundation held its annual meeting, during which the developers discussed, among other things, how NetBSD progressed over the last year and what is planned for the coming year. The Annual NetBSD Status Report summarizes the meeting.

February 2004

27 Feb 2004 - Pkgsrc included in Bluewall GNU/Linux

Bluewall GNU/Linux has announced the release of a Linux distribution that includes the NetBSD pkgsrc distribution. One of the goals of the NetBSD Project's pkgsrc distribution is to be portable to other operating systems and we are pleased to see someone take advantage of that.

24 Feb 2004 - sh3 Ports switched to gcc3

Valeriy E. Ushakov recently announced that sh3 ports have been switched to gcc3. This means sh3 ports (such as dreamcast, hpcsh and evbsh3) have shared libs. Thanks to Nick Hudson who did the work on libgcc.

18 Feb 2004 - Four new Security Advisories released

The following security advisories have been issued:

10 Feb 2004 - NetBSD now officially 501(c)(3) non-profit

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that The NetBSD Foundation Inc. now is classified as an Internal Revenue Code 501(c)(3) publicly-funded non-profit organization.

Donations to the Foundation by US taxable entities are now fully tax-deductible.

For more information about donations to The NetBSD Foundation, please see:

https://www.NetBSD.org/donations/

Other contributions are, of course, also always welcome.

10 Feb 2004 - New French web forum for NetBSD

The NetBSD-fr team is pleased to introduce a new web forum for French NetBSD users in order to support the NetBSD community.

06 Feb 2004 - Regional-de mailing list

A new mailing list has been created to further support the NetBSD community in Germany and other german-speaking countries; regional-de.

Subscription is via Majordomo as per the mailing list information.

01 Feb 2004 - New Developers

The NetBSD Project is pleased to welcome the following new developers:

  • Daniël de Kok ([email protected]), who will be working on the NetBSD Guide and website documentation.
  • Jochen Kunz ([email protected]), who will be working on device drivers, hppa and rs/6000.
  • Soren Jacobsen ([email protected]), who will be working on the NetBSD Packages Collection.

January 2004

25 Jan 2004 - Regional-pt mailing list

A new mailing list has been created to further support the NetBSD community in Portugal; regional-pt.

Subscription is via Majordomo as per the mailing list information.

16 Jan 2004 - NewsForge article on installing NetBSD

NewsForge has published an article on getting and installing NetBSD-current. This article discusses why you might want to run the -current branch of NetBSD, how you would go about it, and a bit of what could go wrong.

15 Jan 2004 - Regional-ca mailing list

A new mailing list has been created to further support the NetBSD community in Canada; regional-ca.

Subscription is via Majordomo as per the mailing list information.

13 Jan 2004 - NetBSD Logo Design Contest

The NetBSD Project announced today that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. There is a cash prize of US $100.00 for the winning entry. The successful logo will also have wide exposure, featuring in all NetBSD material including, but not limited to; the NetBSD.org web site, software media, apparel, and business systems. The competition will close on February 29, 2004. The rules of the competition, submission information and the design brief can be found in the official announcement, which has already spawned some discussion on the netbsd-advocacy and current-users MailingLists.

08 Jan 2004 - Cross-build of src/x11 now possible

Luke Mewburn announced that it is now possible to cross-build XFree86 4.x on NetBSD-current using the build.sh framework, taking advantage of such features as

More details can be found in Luke's message to the current-users MailingList.

06 Jan 2004 - JavaStation update: snapshots now available

NetBSD-current now includes everything needed to run the sparc port on the Sun JavaStation network computer, aka. Mr. Coffee. Daily builds are available and the installation notes include JavaStation-specific information.

06 Jan 2004 - pkgsrc gets experimental “pkgviews”

The NetBSD Packages Collection aka pkgsrc now has support for an experimental new framework called “pkgviews”. This framework, finally allowing multiple versions of one package to co-exist without conflicts (among other great features), was first proposed by Alistair Crooks at EuroBSDCon 2002 and has been integrated into pkgsrc by Johnny C. Lam, who just posted a User's guide to the tech-pkg MailingList.