Given Linus Torvalds‘ recent quote that the OpenBSD team’s approach to security made them look like a gang of masturbating monkeys, I thought it might be a good time to start up an idea I’ve been considering for a while: operating system of the week.

BSD, in case you don’t already know, was developed at the University of California, Berkeley from 1977 until the mid-90s. It started on the classic DEC PDP-11 as an add on to Sixth Edition Unix, and in its second release added my favourite text editor, good old vi (well, vim‘s actually the one I use, but that’s a side issue.)

In June 1994 came the first truly “open” version of BSD: 4.4 BSD-Lite, which contained no code from AT&T, and therefore wasn’t “encumbered” (which was the name of the version that did include AT&T code). A final release – 4.4BSDLite-2 – was made in 1995, and since then, development has continued with various distributions diverging from it since then: DragonflyBSD, FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD being the most common today (I’ll cover them at a later date).

You can still get hold of 4.4BSD-Lite release 2, however, despite its long being discontinued as a maintained system (well, by the University of California, anyway). So, for your delectation and delight, here is the download link (to Japan):

• ftp://ftp.sra.co.jp/pub/os/4.4BSD-Lite/

I’ve downloaded it myself, and might well be covering running it in a virtual machine at some later date.

For the mean time, enjoy this little look back at the way things used to be.

It’s always nice, when using a new operating system in a virtual machine, to have some apps to look at in it.  So I thought I’d compile a list of some, where to get them, and the usual suspects: OpenOffice.org, Firefox, Thunderbird and Opera.  Here, then, after a quick scan through my bookmarks is all that I can find.  Use and enjoy. (more…)