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Pawel Dawidek first ported ZFS to FreeBSD from OpenSolaris in April of 2007. He continues to actively port new ZFS features from OpenSolaris, and focuses on improving overall ZFS stability. During the introduction to his talk at BSDCan, he explained that his goal was to offer an accessible view of ZFS internals. His discussion was broken into three sections, a review of the layers ZFS is built from and how they work together, a look at unique features found in ZFS and how they work internally, and a report on the current status of ZFS in FreeBSD.

At the 2006 JavaOne conference, Sun announced plans to open source Java. This wasn’t exactly a surprise to those of us working on Java at Red Hat, given that there had been rumblings before. But this was a real announcement. We were immediately interested in learning exactly which license Sun would choose. Even if it was a legitimate open source license, it still might not allow us to combine our code with Sun’s.

On Wednesday, DeviceVM, the company behind the distribution, said the hardware manufacturer would be putting Splashtop — which Asus calls "Express Gate" — into a million motherboards a month. Splashtop includes a Firefox-derived browser and the Skype internet-telephony application.

Cleaning up the mess left by the OpenSSH vulnerability in Debian and Debian-based distros (including Ubuntu) is easier than I thought. For those who haven't heard about the problem, I refer you to my recent entry, or invite you to Google it. I've had my Etch box -- which has both OpenSSH-client and OpenSSH-server installed -- turned off for the past few days. I'm using it as a Web server on the local network, and yes, I've been SSHing into the box for weeks now. Here's what I did ...

Peter Hintgens, writing at Freesoftware Magazine, explains why the adoption of Microsoft's OOXML as an ISO standard is a dreadful development. More importantly, he tells us what can be done to combat such things. You can read more about it here

Everyone who surfs the Net is eminently trackable. Internet data packets include not only the actual data being sent, but also headers with routing information that is used to guide the packages to their destinations. Even if you use encryption for extra safety, the routing information -- which cannot be encrypted -- can reveal details about what you're doing, who you're talking to, what services you're connecting to, and what data you're accessing. Intermediaries (authorized or not) can also see that data and learn about you. If you want a higher level of anonymity, TorK can do the job. It uses The Onion Router (Tor) network to provide you with a safer way of browsing.

John Calcote has written a very detailed article on the GNU Autotools and you can read it all at the Freesoftware Magazine website.

Discover Broadband Transmission-line Characterization Using Short-Pulse Propagation, a software toolkit that contains an advanced 2D field solver and signal-processing facility for extracting broadband transmission line properties. Furthermore, become familiar with its two key components, CZ2D and Gamma-Z.

Andrew Min gives you a taster of the open source goodies being developed at Google's Summer of Code: a GUI for Aptitude, a GUI for Grub 2, search based menu browsing for GIMP and Audacity file import/export with FFmpeg amongst others. You can read (and/or listen) to the full article at

The recent advent of Mac OS X systems for Intel has been a welcome reward for those of us that need Windows compatibly.

BSDCan 2008 officially started this morning at 9AM with an opening talk by the event's organizer, Dan Langille. However, in reality the event has already been running for two days, with the FreeBSD tutorials having started on the 14'th. After arriving in Ottawa yesterday afternoon and finding my room in a 20 story University of Ottawa residence, I wandered down to the Royal Oak Pub for early registration, meeting several dozen BSD hackers from all over the world.

Linux on the desktop has yet to gain any real market presence. Despite the unrest over Microsoft Windows Vista, the companies that focus on Linux as a business have yet to deliver a go-to-market proposition that is compelling for the consumer, for the retailer, distributors, and original equipment manufacturers. Author John Terpstra continues his look at the challenges facing the desktop and server markets, with a close examination of current market dynamics.

The FreeBSD, GNU/Linux, Solaris, and Windows operating systems have kernels that provide comparable facilities. Interestingly, their code bases share almost no common parts, while their development processes vary dramatically. We analyze the source code of the four systems by collecting metrics in the areas of file organization, code structure, code style, the use of the C preprocessor, and data organization. The aggregate results indicate that across various areas and many different metrics, four systems developed using wildly different processes score comparably. This allows us to posit that the structure and internal quality attributes of a working, non-trivial software artifact will represent first and foremost the engineering requirements of its construction, with the influence of process being marginal, if any.

Potential conflicts and overlap between the first update to HTML in a decade by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and XHTML has been addressed by the standards body. The group, meanwhile, has also acknowledged vendors are - once again - pushing their own platform-specific technologies, this time on RIA, with the standards process unable to keep up. This poses a problem on interoperability.

As has been widely reported, the maintainers of Debian's OpenSSL packages made some errors recently that have potentially compromised the security of any sshd-equipped system used remotely by Debian users. System administrators may wish to purge authorized_key files of public keys generated since 2006 by affected client machines. Simply using a Debian-based machine to access a remote server via SSH would not be enough to put the machine at risk. However, if the user copied a public key generated on a Debian-based system to the remote server, for example to take advantage of the higher security offered by password-free logins, then the weak key could make the server susceptible to brute-force attacks, especially if the user's name is easily guessable.

Are you still begging Red Hat to offer Linux on consumer PCs? Here are five reasons why that's a terrible idea, according to The VAR Guy.

With autossh, you can monitor your SSH connections and restart them if they stop sending traffic or SSH exits abnormally. This makes autossh perfect for keeping secure port forwarding available. Some readers will be familiar with the TCPKeepAlive, ServerAliveInterval, and ServerAliveCountMax options to SSH itself. TCPKeepAlive causes TCP keepalive messages to be sent to the server, allowing SSH to detect if it can no longer contact the server. ServerAliveCountMax and ServerAliveInterval cause the SSH client to send traffic through the encrypted link to the server, and can be used both the avoid a connection being closed due to inactivity and to have the SSH client exit if traffic cannot be returned from the server for a specified amount of time.

Microsoft has announced an agreement with One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) that will make Windows XP available on the non-profit's low-cost laptops for third-world children. Thank goodness third world children will no longer have to struggle to learn Linux, one tongue-in-cheek commentator observes.

After months of tinkering with my Asus Eee PC, I decided on eeeXbuntu (Ubuntu with XCFE). Here's a recap of my journey so far, and where I might be heading next -- potentially with Ubuntu.

BIOSLEVEL.com looks at one of the latest USB 5.1 headsets in both Windows and Linux. Are the latest round of gaming headsets ready for Linux usage?