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<img src="http://parcom.pro-networks.org/PROneT-News/News2/news.gif" align="right" alt="OpenBSD 4.0 Released">OpenBSD 4.0 Released
By Ryan Paul
November 1, 2006

OpenBSD 4.0 was officially released this morning. OpenBSD is an open source operating system released under the BSD license. Used by approximately 30 percent of BSD users and recognized as the second most popular BSD operating system, OpenBSD's security enhancements and built-in cryptography and firewall support are of interest to the computer security community despite the operating system's limited relevance on the desktop.

The 4.0 release features new drivers for a variety of network hardware devices, improvements to integrated IPsec functionality, and processor frequency scaling support for Intel SpeedStep and AMD PowerNow. The release also includes GCC 3.3.5, and X.org 6.9.0. X.org 7 is a prominent feature in recent Ubuntu and Fedora releases, but it is not included in the OpenBSD 4.0 release.

Matthieu Herrb told the O'Reilly Network that the OpenBSD developers "were not ready in time to include the new modular X in [OpenBSD] 4.0," but plan to "switch to the new modular X shortly so that there's a full release cycle to find and fix remaining issues."

Available for x86, AMD64, PPC, and a number of other platforms, OpenBSD 4.0 can be ordered online or downloaded for free from one of the FTP mirrors. As usual, the OpenBSD folks have some propaganda to go with the release, including the official OpenBSD 4.0 song "Humppa Negala" and a comic featuring OpenBSD advocacy critters Pufferix and Bobilix.

<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/source.jpg"> Ars Technica
<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/view.jpg" border="0"> <a href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061101-8123.html" target="_blank"> complete article</a>
<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/downloadnow.jpg" border="0"> <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/ftp.html" target="_blank"> FTP Mirrors</a>
<img src="http://www.pro-networks.org/forum/images/smiles/moreat.jpg" border="0"> <a href="http://www.openbsd.org/plus40.html" target="_blank"> list of changes</a>