EE Times reports that the Bluetooth Special Interest Group is drafting
high-speed versions of the short-range wireless specification that will run
at two and 10 Mbits/second and could be released by the end of the year.

– by Tina Gasperson –
Today is a good day to review Daemonnews.org. The brand new March issue is online, and editor-in-chief Brett Taylor is giving us a look at the future of the BSD-focused magazine.
I talked to Taylor briefly at LinuxWorld in New York City a month ago. He told me about DaemonNews’ move to paper, including the incredible amount of work involved in creating a print publication (hence the decision to start bi-monthly), hopes for circulation increases, the editorial intentions.

Taylor looks for contributors who can give readers nuts and bolts information about hands-on best use of BSD. Consider the online version’s table of contents for this month’s issue:

• Adventures in Firewalling
• FreeBSD Corporate Networker’s Guide, Chapter 8
• Review: FreeBSD Corporate Networker’s Guide
• Review: FreeBSD Handbook, 1st print edition
• OpenBSD bridge without IPs using IPF Tutorial
• Adventures in BSD: BSD in a Microsoft Office

Certainly, those are topics to sink one’s teeth into and come away with something of value. Taylor says that the print version contains even more features than the Web site. According to his editorial this month, “The current plan is to keep the magazine and the ezine separate, each with mostly their own stories and articles.”

That’s a wealth of BSD resources, and Taylor is looking for content from the BSD community, though he says that with the addition of staff they’ve been able to create a small backlog of articles, and are now paying for excellent BSD reporting and feature writing.

But the Daemonnews.org site is more than just the monthly e-magazine and the bi-monthly print publication. There is also a daily news update, a la Slashdot. There you’ll get rumors and tidbits about the culture, like “which BSD site is sending out spam?” or “In The Cocoon.”

Daemonnews also runs a full support forum where you can ask any burning questions about anything having to do with any version of BSD. Some petitioners have been waiting upwards of a week for answers, though, so if you’re a BSD expert I’m sure they’d appreciate your presence and your knowledge over there.

The site also hosts the BSD Mall, where shoppers can pick up the latest releases of stuff like Darwin, OpenBSD, NetBSD, DN Magazine, and more, like clothing, hardware, books, and posters.

And here’s something we bet you didn’t know: Daemonnews even has it’s own cartoon strip called Source Wars, loosely based on everyone’s favorite multiplayer game, Tradewars. You can pick up T-shirts and posters with the Source Wars characters emblazoned thereupon, as well.

Best of all, there’s a page full of links and resources specifically created for people who are new to BSD, with “tips for getting started,” “what to do after you get it installed,” “setting up email,” “setting up X,” and lots, lots more stuff. It’s very organized and definitely the site to keep up on the browser of your second computer while you fiddle with BSD on the first.

The Daemonnews.org newsfeed is free, and you’ll find information about that on the FAQ page, as well as clues on how to advertise and, well, other frequently asked questions.

Of course, Daemonnews links to all the other important and interesting BSD sites so you can “rabbit trail” to your heart’s content. Just make sure you leave some pebbles on the way so you can find your way back to Daemonnews.org.

If you know of a site that is worthy of the NewsForge spotlight, send us email.

NewsForge editors read and respond to comments posted on our discussion page.

The Boston Globe has an article on the “morality” of using Napster, with many university students arguing the service is a backlash to record companies continuously raising prices.

DaemonNews.org has the tutorial: “With OpenBSD and IP Filter, a bridge can be setup that filters incoming traffic. The bridge is not assigned an IP address on either
network card. The benefit of this type of firewall is that the sender of an incoming packet is entirely oblivious to the existence of an
intermediate bridge. This provides transparency and allows our firewall, which we maintain on the bridge, to securely filter
incoming packets and forward them without modification to the internal destination. This guide walks through two typical home
network connection setups (ADSL and cable modem) using OpenBSD 2.8.”

News.gnome.org has the speaker lineup for the Gnome GUADEC conference in Denmark April 6. Speakers include Miguel de Icaza and Andy Hertzfeld.

DaemonNews.org has the review: “The book in question covers quite a nice range of topics, from sharing the network with Windows machines to BSD advocacy, but the
main focus is FreeBSD in a corporate environment. Beginners to FreeBSD might be left behind on some of the topics at first, but the
author tries to keep a pace fast enough that most can keep up. Beware, there is a slight slant against Microsoft, which many people
won’t have a problem with.”

From news.gnome.org: “The GNOME 1.4 Release Team is proud to announce GNOME 1.4
Beta 2 “Hit Me Baby, One More Time”. This is only a beta and there
may be problems with compiling and running. However, if you are adventurous and
would like to help with testing, get it from your favorite GNOME mirror site in
/pub/gnome/stable/betas/gnome-1.4beta2.”

DaemonNews.org has chapter 8 of Ted Mittelstaedt’s book, this chapter focusing on print serving. “Printserving is a complicated topic. There are many different software interfaces to printers, as well as a wide variety of printer
hardware interfaces. This chapter covers the basics of setting up a print queue, using Samba to print, and administering print
queues and connections.”

Slashdotters talk about an interview at KDE Dot News with Richard Dale, the author of the code that adds bindings to KDE and Qt for Java. He’s asked, what do QtJava and KDEJava actually do? “They wrap most of the classes in Qt and KDE so that they can be used to write Java
programs, which look and behave identically to a C++ version. The Qt date, time, string and
list classes are replaced with their Java equivalents.”

DaemonNews.org has a story on one man’s efforts to use FreeBSD in his office setting. “A few months after I put FreeBSD/Apache to work, news came from upper management that there was an interest in employing the
use of intranets at all the remote field offices. Other web servers and content soon sprang forth and now we have a fully
functioning intranet in place and more and more of our employees are showing interest and becoming involved. We have more than
a few employees now who are acting as content publishers and are creating and maintaining sections of our intranet themselves.
There are also more than a few employees and co-workers who are now interested in the BSDs and wish to learn more.”