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...everytime I remember how that Theo de Ass was kicked out from the NetBSD project for being an asshole. Funny, Niels Provos recently got tired of him and left OpenBSD to join the NetBSD camp.

Thank you,
ekrout

BSD, that's what OSX is. Linux is a Unix-type OS, it's a copy, an imitation.

Yes, I know GNU's not UNIX®, but neither is BSD. Neither is Mac OS X because the royalties for putting the UNIX mark on the product are quite expensive for an operating system marketed to home users.

Maybe the people at Mandrake should start thinking about making reforms, if they're having such a hard time staying business then don't stay in business. I can think of atleast one really good opensource project which puts out great software, lets you download ISO's and doesn't plead to people about forking over cash. Sounds harsh but..

Like other posters have noted before, Darwin/Mac OS X is actually based on BSD-licensed software, not GPL-licensed software. If you want Linux on PPC, there are other alternatives.

However, that kind of problems only points at a much greater problem. Namely, the fact that a commercial entity (Apple) is heavily using open source in their latest software offering, even though their behaviour clearly indicates they are not interested in the philosophy of open source.

Finally, honestly, what's the point of Darwin only on x86? If I want BSD-style operating system on Intel x86, I'll use FreeBSD, or one of the other two, not some sort of bastardized version, which does not offer the reliability, security, or portability for which the other versions are well-known.

Amen! I still use my 200MHz PPro (running NetBSD) to serve my personal web site. It runs the latest Apache, Tomcat and PHP4 just fine. (Well, mostly, there's no native JVM so Java apps have some quirks.)

Patches
are
available

Jesus, are people still bitching about that?

Did microsoft give people free upgrades from 98 to ME? Has there been some sort of "free upgrades until the end of time" precedent set by any other commercial operating system vendor?

If you want a free operating system, you know where to get it.

Has somebody told the NetBSD folks about this one? (Read 2nd line from the top center of the link if you don't get it.)

There will be a celebration to jointly celebrate it's 50th anniversary and it's completion of calculating pi to the 4th digit.

I wonder when will someone port Linux to it ;)

I would rather count on NetBSD. What CPU architecture does this phone use?

But ofcourse, NetBSD appeared before OpenBSD

they just run HP/UX or Linux

What model(s)?
NetBSD does have a port for 700 series.

OpenBSD has a port also for some PA-RISC systems.

Perhaps yours are unsupported? or did you mean you choose to only run Linux and HP-UX on these?

*coughsharder*NetBSD*coughsevenharder*

Seriously, there isn't anything you can't run NetBSD on, including alpha, x86, sparc, mips, ppc, your console, your cellphone, your calculator, your microwave, your fridge, your sofa, your chair, your bottle of beer, .......

Then in afterlife I'll have Alphas with NetBSD? I can't wait.

Spare me the smoke and vapor. Don't you remember the sad story of Mica, errr, NT on Alpha? Loudly proclaimed, quietly killed, that's why I think they are not there. If you consider the number of bugs and holes in 32bit M$ work, you might conclude they never arived anywhere.

In the mean time, you can get Linux and BSD on Alpha and other 64 bit platoforms:

• Debian
  
• Red Hat
  
• BSDs, free, net, open
  
• and plenty of others less well known.
  

Oh, it hurts so much to remember and think!

• Linux Kernel 2.2 (with low memory i would recommend 2.2..) or a really stripped-down 2.4 kernel, running a modern distro which is rather slick in itself, like Slackware or Debian. This will help you avoiding numerous security holes in older distros.
• There has been an article which focusses on small yet functional destop programs.
• If you want to go with really stripped-down distros, which are suitable (or optimized) for embedded computers, check this link.
• I have to agree with some of the other posters that one of the *BSD derivates can be and feel a lot smaller than full-featured, KDE3-based Linux distros...
• If security is not much of an issue for you, for whatever reason, you might want to go for an outdated Linux distro. Watch out for a 2.0 or 2.2 kernel, and libc5 instead of glibc2/libc6, or you might not gain much from the old stuff... Or even Minix? VSTa?

1) If you want the best performace with linux, you will propably have to re-compile everything. You can do all this by hand by following the procedures giving by the Linux from Scratch projet. If this is too much for you, you can go with source-type distributions.

2) If you don't want to go down the "compile-for-3-days" path, you can try modern distros of linux or BSD: FreeBSD, NetBSD or OpenBSD (there is a debian "port" of netbsd and one of freebsd that *could* make life easier). Most are compiled for i386 and can be used if you...

3) Carefully choose your applications! Don't use Kde or Gnome unless it has been carefully stripped of all the surplus. Don't use Mozilla, try pheonix instead.

4) Try it! The best way to know if this is better than that is to try it out.

If it's still too slow or un-usable for you, you can try to give you computer a specific task... like X-terminal or even a router...

I did make some old machines working again with these simples guidelines but i think the most important thing is to...

5)Have fun! I know i did!

I recently installed NetBSD on a Mac SE/30 (16 MHz 68030) with 8 MB RAM. From the bit of tinkering I've done, it runs pretty well. It's also a pretty svelte installation.

No no no no, the solution is NetBSD!

BTW, anyone try consoling into a modern SPARC with USB ports, or are they only for peripherals?

I do just this on a quasi-regular basis; the console is a Rev. D iMac with a KeySpan serial thingy and cu(1) from Taylor UUCP, and the SPARC is a headless Sun Ultra 1 running NetBSD.

So I can avoid buying your products.

You are using a technically inferior and philosophically inferior OS for use in embedded products.

Switch to NetBSD and your problems are solved.

It's an old mailing list message, in which the author (Grant Stockly) says:

I've already created an IDE to Ethernet AISC for a mini www server, and thought it would be fun to see if I could use the base of it as a cheap way of throwing drives onto a system.

Anyhow, does anyone have information about this ASIC? If so, it sounds *exactly* like what we want here.

Let's not forget that the International Space Station also runs NetBSD. Take a look:

http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html#sams-i i

Yep. The daemon went to space before tux.

NetBSD certainly runs on some of the older Tadpoles, and on other USparc IIi boxes, so I wouldn't be surprised to see it on this laptop also.

Not that forth is dead by any means, but it has sort of lapsed into obscurity. Nice to see recent development is still happening, as forth always has been the best for what its designed for, controlling stuff. Probably always will.

The BSD community should take a hint and start gearing toward usability rather than "superior" security.

If usability is what you're looking for, try FreeBSD instead. One of OpenBSD's goals is to be Secure by Default. Whereas other BSD variants and most Linux distros take an approach of 'turn everything on and let the admin turn off what he doesn't need'

Say, for instance, I want to use the GNU readline library (it's the library that gives the text-interface to a lot of programs the same feel. bash, mysql text interface, and others.. ). It's GPL, not LGPL. But I don't want my program to be GPL'd. What do I do? I rewrite the functionality. There's absolutely no problem with doing this.

Result 2

Result 3

OpenBSD has systrace to restrict system calls, as does NetBSD and it is being ported to linux as well. there exists a systrace implementation on NetBSD which eliminates all setuid/setgid binaries - http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/2002/1 0/12/0006.html

it almosts seems that secure unix systems want to be capability systems.

"More hardware options for less dough?"!!!

Doesn't MicroSoft know that Mac OS X is based on BSD? !!! Hell, there aren't many things that BSD doesn't run on! Hell, my router runs BSD! Hence, I can run Mac OS X on my 386lx that I scrounged from the company's dumpster!

Those people at MicroSoft should get out more often and see what other people have been doing. I suspect they haven't done so since 1984!

There's a port of Linux/PPC for the BeOS

You can also run NetBSD on the BeBox (and it's not yet-another-fork like most Linux distros,) but *ahem* maybe that was already assumed.

The BeBox was PowerPC. It had dual 603s. Otherwise, NetBSD ported to the wrong system.

Give OpenBSD a try.

Performs very well on old and stripped down hardware, has a simple and quick instalation and the best documentation available on open systems. Take a look on their FAQ

NetBSD has more aplications available and can be installed
in many hardwares with very tiny disks, but I personally prefer OpenBSD.

Hey, Debian isn't bloated! :-)

NetBSD does rock though. They don't even have perl in the base system. I used to hate that, but then I realized... hey... I can install perl 5.8.0 or 6 without having to "hide" it from the system software (like I have to on FreeBSD -- PATH=/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin -- oops, wrong perl *barf* -- ::shudder::). Plus they include Postfix, how cool is that?

And to top it all off, they don't have Theo the Rat, unlike this supposedly "secure" OS.

NetBSD (at version 1.6 now) is a wonderful and lean operating system which can be tailored to specific needs quite easily. Unlike bloated Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE... basically everything but Slack) it installs only the bare necessities, and the rest can be installed via the kickass package system. You don't have to worry about security holes popping up every six days either -- everything just runs. I'm sure NetBSD could serve the poster's needs 100%.

NetBSD (at version 1.6 now) is a wonderful and lean operating system which can be tailored to specific needs quite easily. Unlike bloated Linux distros (Red Hat, Mandrake, SuSE... basically everything but Slack) it installs only the bare necessities, and the rest can be installed via the kickass package system. You don't have to worry about security holes popping up every six days either -- everything just runs. I'm sure NetBSD could serve the poster's needs 100%.

See this page for a good family tree...

As for timeline, I believe both FreeBSD and NetBSD forked their own branches of the BSD tree in 1993...

If you want a secure OS, use NetBSD

Also, don't forget that Theo de Raadt is asshole

When will the Dreamcast Port get it?

I really want to try this out on my quad-proc Dreamcast.

</sarcasm>

The rest of the world *does* exist you know.

I've been a longtime x86 user, and if it wasn't for BSD this would be enough to get me to switch to Mac

How about NetBSD or OpenBSD?

Heck you can even run Linus' OS (I forget the name) :)

Actually, the confusion is a testament to the versatility of Linux. What other OS could be used so easily in both desktop and digital appliance environments as to make necessary the clarification?

Actually, the confusion is a testament to the versatility of Linux. What other OS could be used so easily in both desktop and digital appliance environments as to make necessary the clarification?

Let's look at NetBSD 1.6

gnusrc.tgz 55949 KB 09/11/02 18:51:00
pkgsrc.tgz 9259 KB 09/15/02 10:04:00
sharesrc.tgz 3573 KB 09/11/02 18:51:00
src.tgz 27433 KB 09/11/02 18:51:00
syssrc.tgz 22535 KB 09/11/02 18:51:00
xsrc.tgz 81411 KB 09/15/02 09:21:00

Only the X11 source set is larger than the GNU set. Maybe it is GNU/NetBSD.

The early model G3's shouldn't have any problem with the kind of network loads required (the cable/DSL bandwidth is going to top out before the CPU, disk or memory bandwidth becomes a problem) and should only cost about $400. Add in some extra RAM and a copy of OS X, and you're looking at no more than $650. If you go with Darwin, NetBSD, or one of the PowerPC Linux distro's, and you can get by with just the base system price.

If you really want a deal, and feel up to a bit of hardware hacking, you could look for a dead iMac. So long as the logic board is Ok, you should be able to hack together a power supply (if/when you need a monitor you can use any VGA style monitor with a Mac/VGA converter). The only real issue with an iMac would be support for a second hard-drive, but you might be able to make due with an external drive on a USB or Firewire port.

I don't know what a dead iMac goes for these days, but I can't believe you'd have to spend more than $300.

Sun needs a transition plan to make migration from the low end Linux/x86 based desktops and servers to their Solaris/Sparc based high end workstations and enterprise servers. Otherwise they will not be able to bring as much sales up to the higher tier. There are two ways to do this. One is to run Solaris on x86 hardware as the middle tier. The other is to run Linux on Sparc hardware as the middle tier. One of these approaches leaves Sun subject to the whims of another CPU maker, which has it's own plans for 64-bit domination. The other leaves Sun subject to the whims of a huge open source software community and a few choices in Linux distributions (such as Debian, Mandrake, and SuSE) as well as FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD. Which way do you think would be better for Sun?

OpenBSD's other strength is that it is rapidly gaining on NetBSD where being able to run on many different hardware platforms is concerned.

Considering OpenBSD and NetBSD are closely related, there's plenty of cross-pollination between the two. NetBSD may have hpcmips, but OpenBSD has mvme88k. it really is a shame both sides couldn't come to some kind of agreement and make up for past behavior, but until then, the CVS trees on both sides are world-readable. :)

Actually, SMP on i386 is still on a CVS branch--if you download the released 1.6, it'll only use one of the processors. However, 1.6 does support SMP on some architectures, such as alpha, vax, and sparc. And PowerMacs will have SMP support in the next release.

Installing tcsh as csh is just wrong!

Apple MacOS X made this terrible mistake too.

If you must have tcsh, it's in NetBSD pkgsrc and trivially installed.

Oh the irony!

Hmmm. Did I miss something big?

There's no mention of new SMP in the INSTALL document... but yes, it seems to be in there.

Of course, I was just trying to summarize the best use for each BSD, and I hope we can agree that FreeBSD SMPng (coming in 5.x) will blow away all things previous; the new NetBSD support sounds equivalent to what FreeBSD's had going for years (if only on x86), though it's certainly much better than nothing.