BSD & Gaming

PCBSD 8.1 is now available for your desktop or laptop!! What are you waiting for? Go get yourself a copy now!

The PC-BSD Team is pleased to announce the availability of PC-BSD 8.1 (Hubble Edition), running FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE, and KDE 4.4.5

Version 8.1 contains a number of enhancements and improvements. For a full list of changes, please refer to the changelog. Some of the notable changes are:

• FreeBSD 8.1-Release
• KDE 4.4.5
• Numerous fixes to the installation backend
• Support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning
• Improved ZFS support
• Bugfixes to desktop tools / utilities

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]

FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE is available.

The FreeBSD Release Engineering Team is pleased to announce the availability of FreeBSD 8.1-RELEASE. This is the second release from the 8-STABLE branch which improves on the functionality of FreeBSD 8.0 and introduces some new features. Some of the highlights:

-zfsloader added
-zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14
-NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities
-UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support
-SMP support in PowerPC G5
-BIND 9.6.2-P2
-sendmail updated to 8.14.4
-OpenSSH updated to 5.4p1
-GNOME 2.30.1, KDE 4.4.5

Announcement – [LINK]

Release notes – [LINK]

Download via official BitTorrent – [LINK]

Download via FTP mirrors – [LINK]

Telstar Logistics reports that Hanger One could become a location for the Smithsonian. Pictures and full details on Telstar’s web site.

[LINK]

For those of you who haven’t found it yet, there is a really good Dieselpunk web site located at http://www.dieselpunks.org with tons of great information and picture galleries. Don’t waste any time go on over and take a look,  it’s really worth it !

In a New York Times article Amazon.com says it was selling 143 eBooks for every 100 paper copies and now sales are on the increase hitting 180 per 100. I can understand why sales are up from my own perspective. I love to read …and I love books! However years of lugging around tons of books every time I move has been a nightmare, being able to have all those hundreds of pounds of books on a few data disks…. it’s just too convenient.

It’s not an easy choice when you sentimentalize hard-copy books the way some of us do. Some books in my collection were gifts from people and those are especially hard to consider getting rid of. Every book holds a memory for me, not just the work itself…  where I was, what I was doing and experiencing at the time when I read it. That experience doesn’t hold for me with the digital editions. Getting rid of my hard-copy versions is something I’ve been contemplating for some time now but not a choice I’ve been able to make yet.

NYT’s story is here – [LINK]

WIRED had an article marking today’s anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon Landing. It got me thinking about a lot of things, mainly about where we have been as a country and where we are going in the future. It’s tough to see positive things when, as a nation, we are so dispirited. It was huge events like Apollo 11 that helped us to see we can do great things and we can reach outside of our petty worldly fears and selfishness for something bigger. I just hope in today’s apologetic rhetoric we don’t rush to rewrite history into a more politically correct version forgetting the accomplishments made and losing hard won lessons.

The knowledge gained from NASA’s work has affected everything from the clothes we wear, the food we eat, the homes we live in to the technology that goes into the cars, computers, phones, and every other gadget we love. Maybe the short sighted folks in D.C. will remember that and realize that while it may cost a little to keep it fed, NASA is the “golden goose” that pays us back a thousand fold everyday.

For WIRED’s article go here – [LINK]

The O’Reilly folks put out a nice little article covering PCBSD’s ease of installation. I myself used FreeBSD for years compiling everything by hand contending on occasion with “dependency hell”.

Today I am definitely a PCBSD convert. PCBSD’s simple gui installer makes upgrading or new installs a snap. I also love how easy it is to install new software or upgrade existing programs using the PBI system.

Read the article here – [LINK]

Get your July issue now! It’s becoming a free monthly magazine and you can download your copy in PDF format directly from their web site.

Get the July issue here – [LINK]

Back issues are available as well – [LINK]

I finally got around to typing up what I did to get STO running on my BSD laptop. It’s quick and dirty but covers the basics.

If you want to get the details just click on article #5 to the right or click on this – [LINK]

According to the mailing list and the News section on FreeBSD.org the final release candidate for 8.1 is out. Check out the two links for details.

[link1]

[link2]