83: woN DSB

Coming up this week on the show, we'll be talking to Kamila Součková, a Google intern. She's been working on the FreeBSD pager daemon, and also tells us about her initial experiences trying out BSD and going to a conference. As always, all the week's news and answers to your emails, on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Major changes coming in PCBSD 11

The PCBSD team has announced that version 11.0 will have some more pretty big changes (as they've been known to do lately with NTP daemons and firewalls)
Switching from PF to IPFW provided some benefits for VIMAGE, but the syntax was just too complicated for regular everyday users
To solve this, they've ported over Linux's iptables, giving users a much more straightforward configuration
While ZFS has served them well as the default filesystem for a while, Kris decided that Btrfs would be a better choice going forward
Since the FreeBSD kernel doesn't support it natively, all filesystem calls will be through FUSE from now on - performance is Good Enough
People often complain about PCBSD's huge ISO download, so, to save space, the default email client will be switched to mutt, and KDE will be replaced with DWM as the default window manager
To reconfigure it, or make any appearance changes, users just need to edit a simple C header file and recompile - easy peasy
As we've mentioned on the show, PCBSD has been promoting safe backup solutions for a long time with its "life preserver" utility, making it simple to manage multiple snapshots too
To test if people have been listening to this advice, Kris recently activated the backdoor he put in life preserver that deletes all the users' files - hope you had that stuff backed up ***

NetBSD and FreeBSD join forces

The BSD community has been running into one of the same problems Linux has lately: we just have too many different BSDs to choose from
What's more, none of them have any specific areas they focus on or anything like that (they're all basically the same)
That situation is about to improve somewhat, as FreeBSD and NetBSD have just merged codebases... say hello to FretBSD
Within a week, all mailing lists and webservers for the legacy NetBSD and FreeBSD projects will be terminated - the mailing list for the new combined project will be hosted from the United Nations datacenter on a Microsoft Exchange server
As UN monitors will be moderating the mailing lists to prevent disagreements and divisive arguments before they begin, this system is expected to be adequate for the load
With FretBSD, your toaster can now run ZFS, so you'll never need to worry about the bread becoming silently corrupted again ***

Puffy in the cloud