NetBSD 5.0, OpenBSD 4.5 arrive in same week

The open source, Unix-like NetBSD operating system reaches version 5.0

The April-May 2009 cusp has been a big week for open source BSD operating systems with both OpenBSD 4.5 and NetBSD 5.0 released to the public.

Renowned for its security, the OpenBSD project claims only two remote holes in the default install of its operating system in more than 10 years.

OpenBSD is also improving its mobile device support with initial ports to the xscale-based gumstix platform and the ARM-based OpenMoko mobile phone.

Like the previous 4.4 release, 4.5 has had significant improvements to its hardware support, including network devices (wired and wireless) and RAID controllers.

Along with OpenBSD 4.5 comes version 5.2 of its flagship remote access software, OpenSSH. This release add a number of security enhancements and fixes a few bugs.

For third-party software OpenBSD has more than 5500 “ports”. Notable updates to the ports collection are OpenOffice 3.0.1, PostgreSQL 8.3.6 and Perl 5.10.0.

For a list of what has changed between OpenBSD 4.4 and 4.5 see http://www.OpenBSD.org/plus45.html.

Over at the NetBSD project, version 5.0 has been under development for two years and introduces many changes.

There's new SMP code for improved performance, and multi-threaded applications can now efficiently make use of more than one CPU or core.

Other enhancements include X.Org instead of Xfree86, a new power management framework for laptops, and support for the Xen 3.3 hypervisor.

For a list of changes in NetBSD from the 4.0 version, see http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.html|the version 5.0 release notes|NetBSD 5.0 release notes]].

During the past week the NetBSD has also launched a blog at http://blog.netbsd.org/.

Both projects have their own Twitter feeds at http://twitter.com/NetBSD and http://twitter.com/openbsd respectively.

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