Open Source Operating Systems with Fall Release Dates

This fall will see the release of upgrades to several open source operating systems I use. First, FreeBSD 5.3 is currently scheduled to be released on 17 October. Over the weekend a sixth beta was cut and a seventh and final beta will be produced this weekend. The following week a release candidate (RC) will arrive. Although no second RC is planned, I expect to see one. The arrival of FreeBSD 5.3 RELEASE will mark the 5.x tree as STABLE. The current STABLE tree, 4.x, will go into maintenance mode. The 6.0 tree is already marked as CURRENT; that's where cutting edge developments are introduced before being "merged from CURRENT" (mfc) to the STABLE tree. I recommend anyone interested in trying FreeBSD for the first time wait until 5.3 is released in mid-October. FreeBSD 5.2.1, the latest in the 5.x tree, arrived in February 2004.

On Monday RC1 for NetBSD 2.0 was announced. NetBSD 2.0 has been several years in the making. The last version, 1.6.2, was a patch release that arrived in March 2004. The last major version, 1.6, was released in September 2002.

If you like regular releases, you can't beat OpenBSD. OpenBSD 3.6 will begin shipping 1 November 2004. OpenBSD 3.5 started shipping in May 2004.

Finally, I'm not much of a Linux user, but I am looking forward to the long-awaited next release of Debian, called sarge. The last discussion of a timetable suggested a September release, but it looks like October or even later is more realistic. The last stable Debian version, woody, arrived in July 2002.

At first glance it seems that upgrades to some of these operating systems, especially NetBSD and Debian, have been few and far between. Then I visited the Microsoft server timeline and desktop timelines. These reminded me that the last desktop release, Windows XP, arrived in October 2001. We got a serious upgrade in XP SP2, but that took 3 years to materialize. On the server side, we have to wait until 2006 for Longhorn. The open source OSs are interesting because they are both client and server operating systems, and still beat the three year Microsoft development cycle.

Comments

Anonymous said…
Well we shall look
9:40 AM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

MITRE ATT&CK Tactics Are Not Tactics

Image
Just what are "tactics"? Introduction MITRE ATT&CK  is a great resource, but something about it has bothered me since I first heard about it several years ago. It's a minor point, but I wanted to document it in case it confuses anyone else. The MITRE ATT&CK Design and Philosophy document from March 2020 says the following: At a high-level, ATT&CK is a behavioral model that consists of the following core components: • Tactics, denoting short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack; • Techniques, describing the means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals; • Sub-techniques, describing more specific means by which adversaries achieve tactical goals at a lower level than techniques; and • Documented adversary usage of techniques, their procedures, and other metadata. My concern is with MITRE's definition of "tactics" as "short-term, tactical adversary goals during an attack," which is oddly recursive. The key word in the tacti...
Read more

Zeek in Action Videos

Image
This is a quick note to point blog readers to my Zeek in Action YouTube video series for the Zeek network security monitoring project .  Each video addresses a topic that I think might be of interest to people trying to understand their network using Zeek and adjacent tools and approaches, like Suricata, Wireshark, and so on.  I am especially pleased with Video 6 on monitoring wireless networks . It took me several weeks to research material for this video. I had to buy new hardware and experiment with a Linux distro that I had not used before -- Parrot .  Please like and subscribe, and let me know if there is a topic you think might make a good video.
Read more

New Book! The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4

Image
  I've completed the TaoSecurity Blog book series . The new book is  The Best of TaoSecurity Blog, Volume 4: Beyond the Blog with Articles, Testimony, and Scholarship .  It's available now for Kindle , and I'm working on the print edition.  I'm running a 50% off promo on Volumes 1-3 on Kindle through midnight 20 April. Take advantage before the prices go back up. I described the new title thus: Go beyond TaoSecurity Blog with this new volume from author Richard Bejtlich. In the first three volumes of the series, Mr. Bejtlich selected and republished the very best entries from 18 years of writing and over 18 million blog views, along with commentaries and additional material.  In this title, Mr. Bejtlich collects material that has not been published elsewhere, including articles that are no longer available or are stored in assorted digital or physical archives. Volume 4 offers early white papers that Mr. Bejtlich wrote as a network defender, either for technica...
Read more