Released just a few days ago, GNOME 3 is the latest major version of the GNOME desktop environment. If you are currently running a GNOME-based Linux or BSD distribution, you are probably using version 2.30 or 2.32, but that should change in the upcoming release cycle when many of the distributions will be shipping with GNOME 3 as the default.

Theo de Raadt has made public an email sent to him by Gregory Perry, who worked on the OpenBSD crypto framework a decade ago. The claim is that the FBI paid contractors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD's IPSEC stack. Mr. Perry is coming forward now that his non-disclosure agreement with the FBI has expired.

PC-BSD is a free, open-source operating system based on rock-solid FreeBSD. 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. Also brings: numerous fixes to the installation backend, support for creating dedicated disk GPT partitioning, improved ZFS support

A new issue of the BSD Magazine is available as free PDF: Embedded BSD (issue 2010-02)

Stefan Rinkes, a big fan of OpenBSD, had decided to make an effort and create something that is now common in the Linux world, but which had not been done in OpenBSD - an OpenBSD-based live DVD with automatic hardware detection which would boot into a popular graphical desktop and which would also have a point-and-click graphical system installer. The result was a "distribution" called GNOBSD.

Linux is just a kernel." It's a commonly heard refrain amongst the arguments put forward by BSD Unix aficionados, and it is a true statement, but it is all too often abused to try to make a fallacious point.

A major release of an operating system typically brings significant changes that require users to learn new skills. But backers of the open source FreeBSD 8 operating system say that's not necessarily going to be the case with its next major version.