OS development

FreeBSD 6.4-RELEASE is now available. Please be sure to check the Release Notes and Release Errata before installation for any late-breaking news and/or issues with 6.4.

More information about FreeBSD releases can be found on the Release Information page.

From MacRumors: "Apple's Director of Engineering of Unix Technologies Jordan Hubbard spoke at LISA '08 last week.

[...] This year's conference invited Apple's Jordan Hubbard to speak about the evolution of Mac OS X from large servers to embedded platforms".

The presentation slides (PDF), besides generally interesting info on Mac OS X, feature a table that shows a release date of Q1 2009 for OS X 10.6 Leopard.

The FreeBSD project is finally, after much work, pleased to announce the availability of an official FreeBSD web based discussion forum.

It is our hope that this forum will serve as a public support channel for FreeBSD users around the world and as a complement to our fine mailing lists.

Yesterday, Parallels unveiled Parallels Desktop 4.0. The virtualisation tool for the Mac. Parallels allows you to run several operating systems 'on top' of Mac OS X, similar to VMware, Qemu, and other similar tools.

Version 4.0 comes packed with new features and improvements.

The July - September, 2008 Status Reports are now available with 14 entries.

The second Release Candidate for FreeBSD 6.4 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are available for download on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

FreeBSD 6.4-RC2 should be the last of the public test builds for the FreeBSD 6.4 release cycle, therefore we encourage people to test and report any outstanding bugs as soon as possible.

New committer: Konrad Jankowski (src). Konrad participated in Summer Of Code 2008. He will begin his work in the i18n area, specifically in bringing his SoC code (UTF-8 collation) to the coming releases.

The second beta release of FreeBSD 7.1 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures can be found on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.

Even though Snow Leopard is supposed to be all about tweaking and performance, AppleInsider claims to have some information regarding new features coming in Snow Leopard.

They claim Apple is working on bringing Exchange support to iCal, Address Book, and Mail, a feature called ImageBoot, and - insert drum roll - a new Finder written in Cocoa.

Testers also claim that other bundled applications are written in Cocoa. This isn't all that weird seeing Carbon doesn't come in a 64bit flavour.

The first release candidate of FreeBSD 6.4 is now available. ISO images for Tier-1 architectures are now available on most of the FreeBSD mirror sites.