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Why link to freebsdforums when you can get the original announcement here?

He said non-MMU processor families such as the Coldfire, MIPS, or ARM.
If you look at netbsd's ports page you'll note that it says, "NetBSD should be portable to just about any 32bit or larger machine with an MMU. Machines without an MMU would be more work."
So while it is possible to port Netbsd to non-mmu machines it is a bit more work. It should be noted there are 7 Netbsd ports to arm, 11 ports to mips, and I think none to Coldfire's. They list further arm ports as being fairly trivial to do. They do not state how difficult ports to other MIPS would be. Coldfire is a subset of the 68k architecture of which there are many NetBSD ports for which could be used as a starting point. There does appear to be commercially available partial Coldfire port of OpenBSD from Stallion Technologies, so it is possible to do.
But what he was really asking was is there any bsd set up to be easily ported in general to platforms without mmu's the way uClinux is. The answer is currently no. Although that is one of NetBSD's future goals according to their 2002 USENIX Presentation.

Thanks for that,

My recollection (maybe wrong) is that BSD wasn't a full distribution and that it still used a lot of old AT&T code until the early 1990s. It wasn't until Net/2 and later UCB 4.4 BSD-lite was released that a fully free and usable distribution was made available. The latter is dated 1993 according to the NetBSD history

I seem to recall too that this only came about because of the growing Linux pressure. Linux 0.01 was released in 1991, but again, maybe I'm interpreting things. Overall BSD and Linux fed on each other, it's not clear what level of free Unix we would have today without either.

Also it would have been very hard for any of the BSDs to progress without a good, portable free C compiler, the one true crucial component that the FSF provided.

Look up trivia and then flame each other on /.?
In otherwords: SOP?

The NEC MobilePro is probably the most elite handheld PC I've seen. I don't understand why they aren't more popular. There are lots of them on ebay, and on the newer ones you can run NetBSD with X even (have a big CF card obviously.) The 770, 780, and 790 are the ones to look for. The 800 also runs NetBSD with X, but it's a larger laptopish form factor.

No, no, no, you have it all wrong. You need NetBSD for your multi-platform needs. They even have t-shirts for it.

Or install NetBSD. You can even use the current 1.6 release, as the basic NetBSD hasn't 'bloated out' as it's grown, like Linux distros, the 'packages' collection has just grown. The base install is under 100 megs and gives you X11 with the Tab Window Manager, the C compiler and libraries, all the core networking and Unix tools. Then you can selectively bring in other packages. I'd recommend, at most, adding in FVWM1 as a window manager for small machine like that.

It wasn't that long ago that the 'main' machines most of us were using were 486 machines. The richer of us had 16 megs with those expensive 4M 30 pin simms. The poorer had 8 MB in the smaller one meg simms. My Toshiba Laptop is a 486DX-2 50 MHz, though it has a 'bloated' maximum possible 28Meg of RAM in it. It runs NetBSD with FVWM and all the necessary goodies just fine.

You want to do things like tune your X by editing ~/.fvwm2rc. Create a virtual desktop that uses all your video memory (I like a 640x880, which uses up all 512K on my machine) so you can pan around your 640x480 'window' into your desktop easily. My Toshiba doesn't have a CD drive, but it's trivial to install NetBSD over NFS if you have a PCMCIA ethernet card and another box set up to serve out the distribution tgz files over NFS. The only 'installation media' you need is a pair of boot floppies from the images here, and the tarballs from here. The installation manual is here.

Everything you need to download to do a base NetBSD install totals to under 100 MB, so it's even a fairly casual download with a 56K modem.

Or install NetBSD. You can even use the current 1.6 release, as the basic NetBSD hasn't 'bloated out' as it's grown, like Linux distros, the 'packages' collection has just grown. The base install is under 100 megs and gives you X11 with the Tab Window Manager, the C compiler and libraries, all the core networking and Unix tools. Then you can selectively bring in other packages. I'd recommend, at most, adding in FVWM1 as a window manager for small machine like that.

It wasn't that long ago that the 'main' machines most of us were using were 486 machines. The richer of us had 16 megs with those expensive 4M 30 pin simms. The poorer had 8 MB in the smaller one meg simms. My Toshiba Laptop is a 486DX-2 50 MHz, though it has a 'bloated' maximum possible 28Meg of RAM in it. It runs NetBSD with FVWM and all the necessary goodies just fine.

You want to do things like tune your X by editing ~/.fvwm2rc. Create a virtual desktop that uses all your video memory (I like a 640x880, which uses up all 512K on my machine) so you can pan around your 640x480 'window' into your desktop easily. My Toshiba doesn't have a CD drive, but it's trivial to install NetBSD over NFS if you have a PCMCIA ethernet card and another box set up to serve out the distribution tgz files over NFS. The only 'installation media' you need is a pair of boot floppies from the images here, and the tarballs from here. The installation manual is here.

Everything you need to download to do a base NetBSD install totals to under 100 MB, so it's even a fairly casual download with a 56K modem.

Or install NetBSD. You can even use the current 1.6 release, as the basic NetBSD hasn't 'bloated out' as it's grown, like Linux distros, the 'packages' collection has just grown. The base install is under 100 megs and gives you X11 with the Tab Window Manager, the C compiler and libraries, all the core networking and Unix tools. Then you can selectively bring in other packages. I'd recommend, at most, adding in FVWM1 as a window manager for small machine like that.

It wasn't that long ago that the 'main' machines most of us were using were 486 machines. The richer of us had 16 megs with those expensive 4M 30 pin simms. The poorer had 8 MB in the smaller one meg simms. My Toshiba Laptop is a 486DX-2 50 MHz, though it has a 'bloated' maximum possible 28Meg of RAM in it. It runs NetBSD with FVWM and all the necessary goodies just fine.

You want to do things like tune your X by editing ~/.fvwm2rc. Create a virtual desktop that uses all your video memory (I like a 640x880, which uses up all 512K on my machine) so you can pan around your 640x480 'window' into your desktop easily. My Toshiba doesn't have a CD drive, but it's trivial to install NetBSD over NFS if you have a PCMCIA ethernet card and another box set up to serve out the distribution tgz files over NFS. The only 'installation media' you need is a pair of boot floppies from the images here, and the tarballs from here. The installation manual is here.

Everything you need to download to do a base NetBSD install totals to under 100 MB, so it's even a fairly casual download with a 56K modem.

I totally agree. I often go look at other os's man pages to see if maybe they have an example when the linux one doesn't. Freebsd, Netbsd ,Openbsd, and others

Linux spends almost no money in R&D and Sun spends like 2 billion. Stop ripping their shit off and come up with your own stuff or Unix will die.

Sorry, but ... what the fuck? So free Unix-alikes are "ripping shit off" of Sun, now? I guess the fact that real talent contributes code to Linux doesn't excuse the fact that Linux is based around the "everything is a file" concept. So reading information in public Usenix papers is ripping off of Sun? Please. For example, the anticipatory i/o scheduler seems to be based on information that's been freely published. Not information hidden away under proprietary NDAs. Futexes and the O(1) scheduler are other examples of information that wasn't ripped-off shit. (I could be wrong, but I'm pretty sure about this.)

If Sun is spending two billion dollars in R&D and the linux people aren't, why hasn't Solaris managed to totally blow Linux out of the water? Oh wait, it does. On big (as in many processors) systems. It doesn't do as well on commodity hardware, but everybody knows Linux just doesn't scale well to 64-node machines these days. (People are working on it, but we're not there yet.) Even in the days of secure, portable, light reimplementations with wide hardware support, propietary Unix still has its niches. Besides, part of the appeal of Sun is a "total-package" deal - kind of like Apple.

Look, I appreciate that you might actually care about this, but if you don't give examples of what you're talking about you're going to look like you're talking out of your ass. Even on Slashdot. :3

The new GNU binutils adds support for hppa...
Call me ignorant, but what exactly does this mean for hppa (officially hp700)? From perusing this page it appears that the NetBSD/hp700/hppa port is about as far along as OpenBSD/hppa. Which is to say that installation and booting must be done over the network (I think.) Since I'm not a PA-RISC hacker, just a guy with a couple of PA-RISC boxes who would like to run *BSD on them, how are things looking?

NetBSD just imported XF 4.3.0. See the cvs repository and the posting to current-users.

NetBSD just imported XF 4.3.0. See the cvs repository and the posting to current-users.

NetBSD just imported XF 4.3.0. See the cvs repository and the posting to current-users.

Or, rather than replace all the hardware in your Mac SE (if it's an SE 30), you could install NetBSD. That's right, a modern unix OS running on your piece of ancient Apple hardware. Neato!

Or hopefully you could use your old PC box as a server with any of these relatively new operating systems as well: FreeBSD, NetBSD, Debian =P

Hopefully I can use my old PC box as a server with this

And if that doesn't work, you might want to take a look at FreeBSD, Linux, NetBSD, amongst others. I understand they're fairly popular.

NetBSD comes to mind, their motto is, have 32-bit processor, will port.

But this would make no sense, as NetBSD runs fine on ARM: they could've used BSD-licenced code. Why use Linux GPLed code then? Naivity?

your right, it has to be modd'd to run NetBSD instead!

If only if it had rotate and multiply instructions...
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-sparc/2003/01/30 /0004.html

Will they run NetBSD?

i dont understand why anyone cares. netbsd is where it's at anyway. the most portable of all bsds...or OSs in general. i think the only architecture that cant handle a netbsd port now is a coke can :)

I don't see this as being any different from when Theo De Raadt was removed from netBSD. In the long run, it is only good for the community - Dillon can now dedicate his time to starting DillonBSD, a new, ultra stable, secure, free (as in Iraq)OS. I can't wait to see it!

NetBSD/spacestation.

...as long as it's 32 bit...

...as long as it's 32 bit...

...as long as it's 32 bit...

...as long as it's 32 bit...

...as long as it's 32 bit...

I guess you could say, we are working on things more significant and important than making sure OpenBSD works on crusty old PDP-8s and Nintendos

Well don't lose sleep over it, I pretty sure NetBSD tied up those loose ends LOOOOONG ago. :P

NetBSD did have a booth there. Check out the info over here. My favorite quote is:

Interest in the NetBSD Project was certainly high, and we received numerous curious questions, ranging from the unavoidable ``So, ugh, what kernel version does your distribution include? 2.4?''

NetBSD was in fact the only BSD at LW03 in New York. A short review is available online. Considering that we were stuck way in the depth of the .org pavillon, it was still quite a success, with many interested people stopping by.

NetBSD was in fact the only BSD at LW03 in New York. A short review is available online. Considering that we were stuck way in the depth of the .org pavillon, it was still quite a success, with many interested people stopping by.

Search the NetBSD mailinglists for ``linux pkgsrc'' (Google powered NetBSD searches are here). One helpful message should be this one.

Search the NetBSD mailinglists for ``linux pkgsrc'' (Google powered NetBSD searches are here). One helpful message should be this one.

I'm running 1.6 stable with all the patches, but I suggest NetBSD-1.6-release, which is basically the formal 1.6-stable release, but with all the patches already applied for you. The link I gave you is for the most recent daily snapshot, which is probably what you'll want.

I think NetBSD wins the award for "Most Underrated Operating System"....

IMHO it's really worth a try, and it's a shame that it's gone so largely unrecognized, at least here in the States. I for one, have fallen in love with the clean and elegant design, and with the general philosophy that keeps it that way. This plucky little OS deserves to win.

So, get the spare parts out of the closet, cobble together a working system, and set up a webserver or something, dag-nabbit! :)

Yes, it works beautifully. There have even been reports of a Linux installation that is _entirely_ managed by pkgsrc (that is, including the base system, glibc, kernel etc.). Certainly beats rpm, apt and the like.

Furthermore, pkgsrc also works under Darwin, FreeBSD, IRIX, OpenBSD and Solaris. See http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/software/packa ges.html#bootstrap for details.

I didn't see anything for OpenBSD, but OpenBSD developers and users can feel free to pipe in on this matter.

I'll bet NetBSD beats them to it.

"Of course my vacuum cleaner runs NetBSD."

nowadays most companies do not sell used systems anymore.. Since a simple format is not enough to protect sensitive data.

Where I work we generally destroy then throw away the entire computer when we no longer need it, the only thing part we keep is the monitor.

You're looking for NetBSD

Platforms supported:
acorn26 acorn32 algor alpha amiga amigappc arc arm32 atari bebox cats cesfic cobalt dreamcast evbarm evbmips evbppc evbsh3 evbsh5 hp300 hp700 hpcarm hpcmips hpcsh i386 luna68k mac68k macppc mipsco mmeye mvme68k mvmeppc netwinder news68k newsmips next68k ofppc pc532 playstation2 pmax pmppc prep sandpoint sbmips sgimips shark sparc sparc64 sun2 sun3 vax x68k x86_64

Hmm, what's wrong with it? Why won't it run OpenVMS, Tru64, or NetBSD?

• Unsupported Apple machines.
• IBM RS600 machines.
• BeOS machines.
• PowerPC-based evaluation boards.
• Motorola MVME PowerPC SBCs.
• PowerPC-based Amiga boards.

I suppose that if Mac OS X can run acceptably on one of those beasts, it will make sense to port darwin directly to it - in order for instance to use things like IO/Kit, but until then, it means people will be able to experiment and play. Heck! imagine if such a compatibility layer existed for Linux, you could run Mac OS X of an AS/400...

It brings up an interesting use for having source though, even if you don't code. Before buying a particular bit of hardware it might be interesting to read the driver comments to see what the programer thought of the thing at the low level.

go to netbsd.org and they're all listed on the right. There are quite a few systems that linux does not run on.

SMP is in NetBSD-current. And it's working quite nicely - I'm using it on several servers.

There is a NetBSD Live! CD, but I haven't tried it nor heard about it for a while.