Recently, I traveled overseas to a tiny island about 5,000 miles East of California. I know, long flight. We landed in London, took two trains, a cab, and arrived at our destination: Cambridge University.

College town?! Sweet, that means college chicks, college parties, and kegstands!

We attended EuroBSDCon 2009 to volunteer at the FreeBSD Booth and demonstrate PC-BSD in all its glory! It was great to see the European BSD community’s interest in PC-BSD. I love seeing developers gather ’round the FreeBSD booth asking questions about PC-BSD. Kris Moore sat down with the port maintainer of firefox and worked out the printing problems, apparently CUPS support wasn’t enabled, oops! Now enabled, the iXsystems offices rejoice and printing has never been better….

PC-BSD Hubble Edition 8.0 is coming out soon, possibly by the end of the year or early 2010. I am pretty excited for the new integrated software updater/installer which installs programs from pbidir.com in 1 click. Also, we no longer have 2 localbases separating system packages with user-installed ones; the new solution is having a ports tree contained within a jail. This should be fun! I’ll die a happy man not having to remember to type in ‘runports’ ever again.

Download the latest alpha here: ftp://ftp.pcbsd.org/pub/alpha-iso/x32,

Join the testing list here: http://lists.pcbsd.org/mailman/listinfo.

Please complain!

Here’s a few pictures from Cambridge and London. I’ll have these organized in an album later

The eighth European BSD conference is a great opportunity to present new ideas to the community and to meet some of the developers behind the different BSDs. — http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/

EuroBSDCon is being held at Cambridge University from September 18-20th.  I can’t wait, it will be my first time to the UK.  Kris Moore will be speaking on “Making FreeBSD on the Desktop a mainstream reality”, which I’ve experienced firsthand while using PC-BSD.  I’m also interested in hearing about “Long Distance Wireless” at Sam Leffler’s talk and Rui Paulo’s talk on “Wireless Mesh Networks”.   For a complete and more detailed list of talks, go to http://www.ukuug.org/events/eurobsdcon2009/talks/.

I will be giving PC-BSD demos on the iXsystems Invincibook, an incredibly resilient and James-friendly laptop.  I’m not sure the laptop can handle the Steam Game demos I normally do, but I have a few tricks up my sleeve to keep things interesting.