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If you can't put linux on a laptop, you can always install NetBSD.

BSD (it's not dead, after all!)

This shows a huge amount of ignorance. BSD is alive and fine, in several forms:
- FreeBSD
- NetBSD
- OpenBSD
- DragonFly BSD
These are probably the most important. Take a look at Freebsd Derivates. You'll see there are many commercial products derived from Freebsd too.

Also, there are initiatives of porting different Linux distros on top of the BSD kernel:
- Gentoo/*BSD
- Debian GNU/kFreeBSD
- Debian GNU/NetBSD (abandoned in 2002 it seems)

BSD was, is and will be alive for a long time.

"Of course it runs NetBSD ...", with NPF?

"Of course it runs NetBSD ...", with NPF?

Don't forget NetBSD! http://netbsd.org/

Are they hosting the website on an A500?

That I don't know.

But if they where (not on an A500 I suppose ...), what OS would they had used?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Unix
http://www.amigaunix.com/tiki-index.php

But of course it would had worked with more common stuff aswell:
http://www.debian.org/ports/m68k/
http://www.netbsd.org/ports/amiga/
http://www.openbsd.org/amiga.html

Oh, and this Google hit reminds of the days of doom:
http://www.amigahistory.co.uk/linuxchoice.html

Hmm. Replying to myself, I see I may have spoken a little too hastily:

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/#ports-by-cpu

http://www.openbsd.org/armish.html

USB internal keyboard not working on macbook: what to do?

Apparently there is.

http://www.netbsd.org/ports/vax/

We may soon need similar lessons here in the UK when we want to access those filtered sites suspected of potentially hosting copyrighted material. Damn, that sounds sad.

Hate to break it to you but most web sites you could ever even think of accessing will be hosting copyrighted material. That's right not just potentially hosting copyrighted material but actually hanging up copyrighted material for anyone to download.

To avoid getting copyrighted material, you'd have to find a country that did not sign the Berne Convention treaty, but even then the material might be under copyright. Alternately, even the countries in the Berne Convention treaty might have material online that has been made Public Domain either because the copyright expire or the rights holder (not the creator) put it into the public domain. Even then you'll have to download (and read) pages of copyrighted information to get at the PD stuff.

Alternately you can just download as much copyrighted material as you want. Try starting from these sites:

• SourceForge
• CreativeCommons
• Linux Kernel Archives
• arXiv
• Ubuntu
• Fedora
• NetBSD
• Oracle
• Sun
• Haiku
• Internet Archive
• and so on

And remember, there's more where that came from.

The porting of ZFS to NetBSD is in progress.

http://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/

NetBSD is also seeing work done on integrating DTrace, incidentally.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2010/02/15/msg007333.html

I'm not very familiar with DragonFlyBSD, but they have a different approach called HAMMER.

http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER_Filesystem_Design

The porting of ZFS to NetBSD is in progress.

http://wiki.netbsd.org/users/haad/porting_zfs/

NetBSD is also seeing work done on integrating DTrace, incidentally.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/tech-kern/2010/02/15/msg007333.html

I'm not very familiar with DragonFlyBSD, but they have a different approach called HAMMER.

http://kerneltrap.org/DragonFlyBSD/HAMMER_Filesystem_Design

It's not like there are any other OSs that they could have used.

They used Linux because it was easy. Changing the GPL is just going to make companies like Tivo stop using FOSS, they'll just move to a project that has licensing that fits their needs better.

Not only that, they're cleanly managed with apt and dpkg. Ports has grown so unwieldy that when I do use FreeBSD these days (admittedly, it's pretty rare), I don't build anything from ports, and use pkgsrc. On the rare occasion that pkgsrc doesn't have something I need, I'll just build it from source manually. But, but, but, but portsupgrade!!!1! It sucks compared to apt/dpkg and pkgsrc. 8, 10 years ago, maybe it was great. But notsomuch anymore.

I also use pkgsrc on Slackware, OpenBSD, and OS X.

Worse, they patented a *BSD classic application's function.

Check http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/games/wtf/

Yes, it is really the "wtf" command. They really need some heads up from BSD guys.

There is actually a command named "wtf" in my system (via fink) that does exactly the thing you/IBM mentions. Even with "over the net" update.

http://cvsweb.netbsd.org/bsdweb.cgi/src/games/wtf/

While it is tagged as "game", it is really useful especially if you are in a ssh session and someone used a weird acronym.

If it is a co incidence that this story has "wtf" icon, it is really amazing :) The command really does exactly what IBM says.

Yes, because there are no open source, non-GPL'd, kernels around. They'd obviously have to start completely from scratch.

You may be underestimating the penetration of products with BSD-derived code into the market. The difference is we get a slashdot story every time Linux is associated in any way with business (we even have the nifty penguin-briefcase icon), but BSD remains relatively hype-free, by design. But the real humor in your post is that both Linux and BSD on the desktop (which is what we're talking about in this thread) are essentially hobbyist operating systems. To pretend otherwise is like one hungry man gloating over another hungry man because he has a few more peas than the other in his soup.

No, Linux is used in technology companies as the main desktop environment quite a bit, average maybe 5%..10% in the companies I've worked in the last 10 years. Of course it's a tiny fraction of Windows desktops, but it's plenty enough to say Linux is not essentially a hobbyist desktop OS. On the other hand I don't remember anybody who used any flavor of *BSD as their primary desktop OS...

Btw, is there any *BSD-licenced desktop environment? I'm sure there are some window managers, but don't most *BSD desktops these days use GNOME or KDE, just like Linux?

On the general issue, I'm actually a bit curious why Linux is used instead of *BSD so much... I guess it's because some of the software will be GPL anyway, so it doesn't make much difference if entire system is GPL. Then the question becomes, why that useful piece of software was released under GPL and not under *BSD... And I think the reason is greed: those releasing GPL software don't want the fruits of their work to be used by somebody to make money without any kind of compensation, but consider adhering to GPL to be enough compensation.

You may be underestimating the penetration of products with BSD-derived code into the market. The difference is we get a slashdot story every time Linux is associated in any way with business (we even have the nifty penguin-briefcase icon), but BSD remains relatively hype-free, by design. But the real humor in your post is that both Linux and BSD on the desktop (which is what we're talking about in this thread) are essentially hobbyist operating systems. To pretend otherwise is like one hungry man gloating over another hungry man because he has a few more peas than the other in his soup.

Check the hardware support list, but looking at it, it supports DX2s/DX4s. AFAIK UNIX was never ported to i386 before the addition of the FPU, although I could be wrong about that.

The reason why I'm suggesting this is because, as well as being a particularly compact, high quality codebase, OpenBSD is, as you probably know, specifically oriented towards security. A firewall or software router is one of the only uses I can think of for a 486 these days.

If you were going to install NetBSD, you could possibly mess around with using the CPU as a controller for something weird, especially if you know how to actually rip the motherboard out and attach it to a robot chassis. ;)

OpenBSD's internal fork of X is probably very tight I'm guessing as well, so you will possibly be able to run that. You almost certainly won't be able to play mp3s on it, and personally I wouldn't even try Dillo on it, either; use links.

The DX4 was the first machine with video playback, if memory serves.

Good luck with it, and have fun. If you can find a tight enough system for it, you'd probably be surprised at the number of uses you could find for it. It'll run ash, ed/vi, sed, and grep, at least; and who really needs more than that anyway, right? ;)

NetBSD can be compiled with no FPU calls so that FPU emulation isn't necessary, and therefore defective LC040s can be used. I posted a set a few weeks ago:

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-mac68k/2009/10/13/msg000244.html

But to answer your question, yes, I have a full m68040 in my Quadra 605. The 250 gig hard drive is a laptop SATA drive in an Acard SATA-SCSI enclosure (ARS 2000SU). They're not cheap, but I suppose I was a bit sentimental, too. The only limitation that the ROMs and OS have is that the boot partition on a drive must be HFS, not HFS+, but you can run Mac OS 8.1 and use any size SCSI drive up to a full two terabytes. Or, as in my setup, you can use a small boot partition and the rest for NetBSD.

The memory is easy - 128 meg 72 pin SIMMs aren't very expensive. You can find them on eBay if you look for memory for Cobalt Raq2 systems. Since the Cobalt is a 1U machine, the SIMMs won't be very large and will fit just fine.

They may not run on the native OS, but it seems that you could get quite a number of packages to run on the system using the NetBSD VAX port.

They may not run on the native OS, but it seems that you could get quite a number of packages to run on the system using the NetBSD VAX port.

But will it run on my old Alpha?

here

That does not answer my question. It doesn't list any hardware requirements. The hardware requirements page says nothing about what CPUs it will run on. Okay, I had to search it and look at a number of pages but I finally found a page listing Alpha CPUs supported by NetBSD. Now I need to dig up the documentation I have on my Alpha to see what version it is.

If and when I update Linux, I'll also need to see how to use Windows NT4's boot manager. I ordered it with 2 harddisks, one with NT4 and the other with Redhat. And it was setup to use NT4's boot manager to select the OS.

Falcon

But will it run on my old Alpha?

here

That does not answer my question. It doesn't list any hardware requirements. The hardware requirements page says nothing about what CPUs it will run on. Okay, I had to search it and look at a number of pages but I finally found a page listing Alpha CPUs supported by NetBSD. Now I need to dig up the documentation I have on my Alpha to see what version it is.

If and when I update Linux, I'll also need to see how to use Windows NT4's boot manager. I ordered it with 2 harddisks, one with NT4 and the other with Redhat. And it was setup to use NT4's boot manager to select the OS.

Falcon

But will it run on my old Alpha?

here

That does not answer my question. It doesn't list any hardware requirements. The hardware requirements page says nothing about what CPUs it will run on. Okay, I had to search it and look at a number of pages but I finally found a page listing Alpha CPUs supported by NetBSD. Now I need to dig up the documentation I have on my Alpha to see what version it is.

If and when I update Linux, I'll also need to see how to use Windows NT4's boot manager. I ordered it with 2 harddisks, one with NT4 and the other with Redhat. And it was setup to use NT4's boot manager to select the OS.

Falcon

here

I think that at this point it's getting unacceptable to have a gigabyte OS and it still doesn't do anything will out adding more software.

I know we're supposed to be used to ACs making dumb comments, but seriously. There are plenty of small or potentially bare bones FOSS operating systems available.

I can't comprehend why they'd be using anything other than NetBSD in space anywayz.

Once I got it I found out that the host development platform was MSwindows only.

To quote Dr. Emmett Brown, "You're just not thinking fourth dimensionally."

It's an ARM processor. Take a surf on over to our friends at NetBSD.org, and see if it's one of the ARM processors they know about. If it is, then with possibly a certain amount of extra hackery to get the disk formatted, you're in business.

If it isn't one of their identified processors, then fire off an email to them and tell them about it. They pride themselves on their system being able to run on every processor in the known universe, and so if you've got one that NetBSD doesn't run on, they're likely going to want to know about it.

Also, seeing as it is known as an ARM processor, chances are good that even on the offchance that NetBSD doesn't support that exact one, because it does support a good number of ARM processors, they might well be able to lash together something that will run on that one with fairly minimal effort; they might even just have to change a couple of minor things here and there, and have a workable port for it.

If you're someone who absolutely needs Linux, then there's not much I can say; although maybe the Linux portability people could possibly do something as well. Them I don't really know about.

The Vax 11/730 was 45 kg and 81 Liters; the 11/750, 182 kg and 588 L, and the Vax 11/780 larger still, at 1372 L and 492 kg.

source

Perhaps DEC was being clever, and concealed lead weights in a larger chassis?

Security, infinitely superior overall design, the ability to run rings around Linux in benchmarks, and still the only truly decent form of package management in existence.

I nearly forgot the single biggest fringe benefits; freedom from the megalomaniacal, cultic aspirations of Richard Stallman or his drone army, and a license that you truly *can* do whatever you want with.

What's not to love? ;)

Glib(sic) looks like preprocessor soup because it has to be portable and fast.

Then why does the libc in NetBSD not look like preprocessor soup - yet it still outperforms Linux?

Native Java on i386 and soon on amd64 http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/img8.html Anybody knows more about this?

That was my first thought too.

In fact, I may try out the Amiga port on my A1200 when the 68030 accelerator board I ordered the other day arrives in the post. :)

Here is a short presentation with some purty graphs comparing NetBSD 4.0, NetBSD 5.0, Linux and FreeBSD 7.1.
http://www.netbsd.org/~ad/50/img0.html
Done by Andrew Doran, one of the most prolific NetBSD developers.

This is at least a start:

http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/sites.html

A list of sites using NetBSD...

Seems strange that the amd64 iso is only 247Mb
ftp://iso.au.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/iso/5.0/
So hopefully will download while I sleep and I will try and remember to report back tomorrow (probably about 24 hours from this post).

I suspect the BIOS may be screwed for anything except Windows and there are no further BIOS updates from Asus. I spent some quality time (it was actually great) on IRC with the coreboot people, but trying the alpha version (of coreboot v3) with no way to restore a working BIOS isn't a good plan.

Do try NetBSD/amd64 and OpenBSD/amd64: both have excellent hardware detection and should be able to - at least - provide more information on what went wrong.

Also of interest to you: NetBSD was the first Open-Source OS with USB support, so there is hope a correct ICH7 driver is included.

In the worst possible case, you can probably make sure some functions are de-activated if they crash the kernel. See here for an example - it uses OpenBSD, but the procedure should be very similar in NetBSD.

Hope this helps!

NetBSD is often used for research. See http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/research.html for the most important ones.

I'm in a business where we welcome GPL-licensed apps with open arms. Of course, we don't sell software, we sell services and expertise.

Well, many people sell service and expertise and they use non-GPL products. For instance, the URLs below will take to people who sell services and expertise in *BSD systems.

http://www.freebsd.org/commercial/consult.html
http://www.openbsd.org/support.html
http://www.netbsd.org/gallery/consultants.html
http://www.ixsystems.com/

I wish more people would know about and use pkgsrc. This is the single reason that pkgsrc is better than all of the other alternatives, security/audit-packages:

http://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/using.html#vulnerabilities

NetBSD recently cut across to 64-bit time_t and its shaken out quite a few 32 bit assumptions.

http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2009/01/05/msg007024.html

The interesting part is not converting across to 64-bit time_t, its providing compatibility so all the previously 32-bit time_t compiled binaries and library keep working (at least until 2038 :)

dev_t was converted to 64-bits at the same time (two flag days for the price of one)

It involved versioning every function/system call that uses time_t, struct timeval, struct timespec, struct itimerval, struct itimerspec, struct rusage, struct stat, dev_t, struct ppasswd, struct utmp, struct utmpx, and ensuring the system can read both old and new versions of utmpx etc...

Certain bits of code which were using time_t to hold time offsets rather than absolute values were converted to using a normal 32 bit value (a good example might be anything in space constrained boot blocks)

I expect we'll be seeing a *lot* of patches in pkgsrc as the 64bit time_t application issues are fixed...

Hi zogger long time no see ;)

You can run gnome or kde on netbsd but a lot of the nice integrated tools like user management probably won't work. I run ubuntu on my laptops because all those things do work there but I also have a unix workstation which I use for quietly plugging away on development or administration. I mainly run standard X tools, though GTK applications run fine, I just have to remember to start dbus as a daemon, and I have to pull in a lot of packages.

For me the best thing about netbsd is that I can get a machine going very fast. I can install a server in five minutes, and have it doing useful work in ten minutes.

You can get heaps of stuff from pkgsrc but you might occasionally run into things which don't work because they need to be ported rather than just compiled and made available.

I haven't used either of the BSDs for some while now so I may not be up to date but classic advantages has been BSD license obviously, clean reusable and easy to read code and (maybe therefor?) portability.

Though nowadays Linux probably runs as many or more platforms, which don't mean NetBSD runs on few:
http://netbsd.org/ports/
http://netbsd.org/about/portability.html

I haven't used either of the BSDs for some while now so I may not be up to date but classic advantages has been BSD license obviously, clean reusable and easy to read code and (maybe therefor?) portability.

Though nowadays Linux probably runs as many or more platforms, which don't mean NetBSD runs on few:
http://netbsd.org/ports/
http://netbsd.org/about/portability.html

I can't think of anything to say. Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.

Here's the Changelog. To summarise, there's a new 1:1 threading implementation, as the previous M:N one was too complex to maintain. Along with this change has come a considerable performance boost and improved scalability, especially on SMP machines. Impressively, most of this work has been down to one developer, Andrew Doran. The second most important change is a switch to Xorg on most platforms. This took so long because NetBSD had a large number of changes in their tree for more obscure platforms - changes that were not integrated back into XFree86 before the Xorg fork. There is also a journaled filesystem that essentially obsoletes the troublesome softdeps. Like ext3 in the Linux world, the new journal features were added to the existing ffs ("fast file system") rather than being an entirely new filesystem. Other changes include a plethora of new device drivers and updated third party applications.

Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.

It's NetBSD. It's 100% Hype Free!

They don't believe in hype. Hence, for the 'article', you get nothing more than "We released 5.0 RC1".

Will it run *BSD?

Well, some might think thats funny but the Panasonic BL-C10 does apparently contain some NetBSD, and there are many products that run BSD with no need for fanfare. That a camera uses Linux is perhaps interesting, but not really news on its own. Does the camera have no other redeeming features?

Linux isn't just a good choice, it's the ONLY choice.

Have you met NetBSD recently? I think you'll find that it runs on more stuff than Linux does, or at least just as much.

All those are either GPL or LGPL.

Open your mind. Try libc. No taint and truly, you're welcome.