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Of course it runs NetBSD!

Sorry, but that had to be done. Of course, I would be very surprised if someone didn't get NetBSD running on anything resembling a semi-modern x86-based system within a week. NetBSD is about portability and code correctness. A vanilla x86 with common peripherals, emulated or not, doesn't seem very exotic a place to which to port.

Why do the NetBSD hackers continue on? Everyone agrees that NetBSD is an abortion of an OS. Even its founding father has disowned it. If only the NetBSD dilettante dabblers would abandon their cult and instead build upon success, such as Linux. Linux won the open source OS war. We all need to realize that. Stop the wasted effort, NetBSD hackers.

i bet netbsd already has their sites on it.

Your post reminds me of one of the main reasons I don't use Windows: I don't want to deal with companies like Microsoft, Symantec, McAfee and Adobe.

My data is too valuable to become victim to the insecure software of Microsoft. My time is too valuable to be wasted trying to clear my system of malware.

My system's performance is too important to be hindered by anti-virus software, be it from Symantec, McAfee, or any other anti-virus software vendor.

I also do not want to use crash-prone software like Adobe Acrobat Reader, which often takes down the web browser when using it as plugin to view PDFs online.

I know there are many alternatives for the products put out by the big name companies. But again, I don't want to spend hours tracking down this software, and then dealing with any installation problems. That's why I use NetBSD. Between its solid core, excellent development team and pkgsrc, I can get easy and fast access to all of the software I need. And I don't need to install performance-degrading anti-virus software, nor do I worry about malware infections. Best of all, it just plain works.

"while it does not have the sheer number of applications that Linux has"

What the fuck are you talking about? The Linux binary compatibility of both NetBSD and FreeBSD is superb. If you have a Linux binary, there's a very good chance it'll work just fine on either system. With some effort, people have even been able to get Linux versions of VMware, which extensively uses kernel modules, to work under FreeBSD. In some cases it has even been found that some Linux binaries run faster on FreeBSD than they do on Linux!

But beyond that, most open source software has been ported to both. Between NetBSD pkgsrc and FreeBSD ports, you get access to basically every piece of open source software that runs on Linux.

It's naive and foolish to suggest that FreeBSD and NetBSD suffer from a lack of software. Please refrain from making that mistake again in the future, even if just for the sake of your own reputation.

"while it does not have the sheer number of applications that Linux has"

What the fuck are you talking about? The Linux binary compatibility of both NetBSD and FreeBSD is superb. If you have a Linux binary, there's a very good chance it'll work just fine on either system. With some effort, people have even been able to get Linux versions of VMware, which extensively uses kernel modules, to work under FreeBSD. In some cases it has even been found that some Linux binaries run faster on FreeBSD than they do on Linux!

But beyond that, most open source software has been ported to both. Between NetBSD pkgsrc and FreeBSD ports, you get access to basically every piece of open source software that runs on Linux.

It's naive and foolish to suggest that FreeBSD and NetBSD suffer from a lack of software. Please refrain from making that mistake again in the future, even if just for the sake of your own reputation.

What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 2 year-old Gentoo Linux installation? The BSD's have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Could someone enlighten me?

firs of all, nobody is trying to make you switch. the BSDs aren't out to conquer the world (AFAIK), they just try to make proper operating systems.

second, you get:

• totally sweet firewalling, with ipf and pf
• proper package management with pkgsrc (your beloved portage? that's where it gets its roots)
• the ability to run the same configuration on dozens of different archs (that might not sound like much, if you only run i386, but there's people with lots of different gear out there)
• a clean, small, stable base system which includes everything you need to get your server going in a few minutes (literally, NetBSD installs in 2 minutes, even on old hardware) -- you can build on top of that, with pkgsrc or prebuilt binary packages
• run your favorite proprietary applications through the emulation layer (compat Linux, compat WIN32, etc)

and many more. you can read in detail on the project's feature page. that being said:

10:49:47 (1.15 MB/s) - `i386cd-3.0.2.iso' saved [209747968]

What do I get by installing this that I can't get in a 2 year-old Gentoo Linux installation? The BSD's have always been a bit of an enigma to me. Could someone enlighten me?

firs of all, nobody is trying to make you switch. the BSDs aren't out to conquer the world (AFAIK), they just try to make proper operating systems.

second, you get:

• totally sweet firewalling, with ipf and pf
• proper package management with pkgsrc (your beloved portage? that's where it gets its roots)
• the ability to run the same configuration on dozens of different archs (that might not sound like much, if you only run i386, but there's people with lots of different gear out there)
• a clean, small, stable base system which includes everything you need to get your server going in a few minutes (literally, NetBSD installs in 2 minutes, even on old hardware) -- you can build on top of that, with pkgsrc or prebuilt binary packages
• run your favorite proprietary applications through the emulation layer (compat Linux, compat WIN32, etc)

and many more. you can read in detail on the project's feature page. that being said:

10:49:47 (1.15 MB/s) - `i386cd-3.0.2.iso' saved [209747968]

We do a lot of embedded linux projects - mainly custom boards, done around some sort of ARM chip with standard connectivity - LCD, ethernet, or wireless options.

NetBSD is also extensively used in similar situations, so it goes.

Also, it's FreeBSD ports. Not 'BSD Ports.' You have to look elsewhere if you want a general BSD package system.

( hint)

i wish i had mod points to help the grandparent out, but he was a little off the mark

fix #1 here
fix #2 here
fix #3 here

Why, yes. :)

Who doesn't use bash?

A fair number of those are bugs for other OSes, due to having pkgsrc issues included in the same bug database. pkgsrc runs on a dozen different platforms so the bug database ends up with a lot of issues not directly relevant to NetBSD. Right now, there are 1233 open bugs relating to pkgsrc, many of which are non-NetBSD issues.

As for the classification of other bugs, you can check out http://www.netbsd.org/Gnats/ for a table of how those are distributed. Quite a few are specific to just a single port.

OpenBSD is the new NetBSD?

perhaps you meant the old NetBSD? with 17 supported platforms (as opposed to 60) it aint king of portability.

As a bike rider myself the first thing I thought of was the death in March of Richard Rauch.

This is sad news. My sympathies to his family.

You can run Irix binaries on NetBSD/sgimips. See http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2002/08/08/irix.ht ml for more information, and check out the NetBSD port's page at http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/sgimips/.

does it run linux?

Of course

I'm seeing so many of these, assuming everybody is using X... if you're not, and you're using NetBSD (or OpenBSD?), you can set the console to read Capslock as Control (or Esc) via:

wsconsctl -w map+="keysym Caps_Lock = Control_L" (to map capslock to control), or
wsconsctl -w map+="keysym Caps_Lock = Escape" (to map to escape, as parent did)

This will take effect immediately, but not survive a reboot... if you like it and want to enable it all the time, you can add a line to /etc/wscons.conf like this:
mapfile /usr/share/wscons/keymaps/pckbd.c2c

which turns Capslock into a Control key... or you can make your own mappings...

Full list of keysyms (on NetBSD) at /usr/include/dev/wscons/wsksymdef.h

-yb

btw: NetBSD 4 is now in Beta... check The NetBSD site for an announcement coming soon...

The article says 'In applications such as telnet and remote desktop, a packet is sent every time a user presses a key' - is this the case with ssh too?

Far be it from me to question the article, but I had been under the impression that Nagle's Algorithm had been designed to concatenate small buffers—such as telnet—to prevent them from necessarily sending a packet with each keypress.

I am not a TCP stack guru (IANATCPSG?!), but it seems like, though this algorithm was designed to reduce congestion, it would upset a timing attack by having to wait for the ACK of the last packet—at least on high latency links.

SSH, at least as of 2002, according to this e-mail, turns on TCP_NODELAY, which disables the algorithm to reduce latency of keypresses in a connection when it believes an interactive session has been started. Thus, SSH does indeed send a packet with each keypress.

I have not used NetBSD that much so I am not aware of it's current state.

That's fine, so end of story?

but seams to lag behind in terms of real world testing

First of all, "seams" are things you sew.

(many of the ports apparently consist of cross compiling code)

I see that as a strength of the build system and the codebase - built a release on a m68k, vax, hpcmips hardware recently, have you?

and also doesn't seem to have as many packages as Debian.

pkgsrc has 6110 packages (as at 2006Q1). Doubtless, Debian does have more packages. NetBSD has everything I have ever needed both on the desktop and servers. YMMV. For me, it's not the amount of third party apps that an OS has, it's if the *works* for me...

Overall it just looks less up to date then Debian or OpenBSD.

Whoa, there's one from left field. Up to *date*?

How does one measure that? With Features?

For example, is having Xen support up to date? e.g.
* NetBSD 3.x will run as Xen 2 dom0, or domU, or, Xen 3 domU.
* The -current version of NetBSD also runs as Xen 3 dom0.

And as for pkgsrc being up to date? From the recent 2006Q1 announcement:

* gnome-2.14
* kde-3.5.3
* opera-9.0
* perl-5.8.8
* postgresql-8.1.4
* thunderbird-1.5.0.4

Pkgsrc, of course, officially supports AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, and SunOS (Solaris).

Or is "up to date" about the versions of installed software in the OS?

One of my -current machines:

NetBSD XEN3FOO 3.99.23 NetBSD 3.99.23 (XEN3FOO) #1: Fri Jul 21 11:39:34 UTC 2006
* gcc version 4.1.2 20060628 prerelease (NetBSD nb2 20060711)
* OpenSSH_4.3 NetBSD_Secure_Shell-20060204, OpenSSL 0.9.8b 04 May 2006
* wpa_supplicant v0.4.9
* postfix/master[21663]: daemon started -- version 2.3.0, configuration /etc/postfix
* ipf: IP Filter: v4.1.13 (396)

If you really want to know what's happening with NetBSD, why not start here:

http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/changes-4.0.html.

And maybe next time, do some research?

I have not used NetBSD that much so I am not aware of it's current state.

That's fine, so end of story?

but seams to lag behind in terms of real world testing

First of all, "seams" are things you sew.

(many of the ports apparently consist of cross compiling code)

I see that as a strength of the build system and the codebase - built a release on a m68k, vax, hpcmips hardware recently, have you?

and also doesn't seem to have as many packages as Debian.

pkgsrc has 6110 packages (as at 2006Q1). Doubtless, Debian does have more packages. NetBSD has everything I have ever needed both on the desktop and servers. YMMV. For me, it's not the amount of third party apps that an OS has, it's if the *works* for me...

Overall it just looks less up to date then Debian or OpenBSD.

Whoa, there's one from left field. Up to *date*?

How does one measure that? With Features?

For example, is having Xen support up to date? e.g.
* NetBSD 3.x will run as Xen 2 dom0, or domU, or, Xen 3 domU.
* The -current version of NetBSD also runs as Xen 3 dom0.

And as for pkgsrc being up to date? From the recent 2006Q1 announcement:

* gnome-2.14
* kde-3.5.3
* opera-9.0
* perl-5.8.8
* postgresql-8.1.4
* thunderbird-1.5.0.4

Pkgsrc, of course, officially supports AIX, BSD/OS, Darwin (Mac OS X), DragonFly BSD, FreeBSD, IRIX, Interix, Linux, NetBSD, OSF1, OpenBSD, and SunOS (Solaris).

Or is "up to date" about the versions of installed software in the OS?

One of my -current machines:

NetBSD XEN3FOO 3.99.23 NetBSD 3.99.23 (XEN3FOO) #1: Fri Jul 21 11:39:34 UTC 2006
* gcc version 4.1.2 20060628 prerelease (NetBSD nb2 20060711)
* OpenSSH_4.3 NetBSD_Secure_Shell-20060204, OpenSSL 0.9.8b 04 May 2006
* wpa_supplicant v0.4.9
* postfix/master[21663]: daemon started -- version 2.3.0, configuration /etc/postfix
* ipf: IP Filter: v4.1.13 (396)

If you really want to know what's happening with NetBSD, why not start here:

http://www.netbsd.org/Changes/changes-4.0.html.

And maybe next time, do some research?

The 'problem' with 4 disks is that you have (effectively) 3 data disks.
Since most times you're doing a 'power-of-two' write (e.g. 16K or 32K),
it's impossible to divide that power-of-two data by 3 and have a nice
full-stripe write. That leaves you with doing partial writes all the
time, and those are the ones that kill RAID 5 write performance.

Wait, it might not run on toasters.

It probably does, there's a NetBSD package...

Linux is an open-source version of Unix designed for Intel chips.

No, it's a clone of Unix, and it is no longer designed only for Intel chips. It was originally designed just for the 386, but now runs on anything, including your toaster.

Uh, just so you know: code in OpenBSD is frequently ported to other operating systems (including Linux), or is at least used as a reference when creating new driver implementations. It wouldn't surprise me if NetBSD's HiFN were a ported version of the OpenBSD driver (hmm, looks like it). Same for FreeBSD (check here).

I don't know if Linux's HiFN support is based on OpenBSD's code (hell, it's hard to tell if Linux even supports the HiFN chip from here-- are the Crypto API homepages at SourceForge? Kerneli.org? Is the Crypto API even where to look? Bah! Forget about it!). But I'd say it's better than 50-50 that the developers were at least referencing the OpenBSD (as is their right; the OpenBSD code is public and free).

Point is, OpenBSD's driver is being used in at least three operating systems (and has almost certainly been used as a reference for others). FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD users-- especially professional users-- constitute quite a chunk of HiFN's target market.

the binary packages you install with pkg_add

"NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement: http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/ "

NetBSD doesn't run on things like this http://handhelds.org/moin/moin.cgi/DellAximX50 It probably could be made to, but it doesnt. And gems such as this http://openwrt.org/ It might list the CPU on your page, but it just doesn't support the pieces of hardware I listed. Oh, and while I was looking around on that page on www.netbsd.org, the site went down, no more responses from the webserver. I'm serious, I could ping the site, but got no webpages from it, just that site others worked fine (and netcraft's 'refresh now' returned "We could not get any results for your selected site."). How about that as an example of reliability?

If BSD is so greatly designed, then why all the forks? Why isn't there a single BSD that is good at everything? Free/Net/Open... Needing so many forks is just a show of bad design. BSD is better engineered than Linux my butt.

"as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station."

Running an OS on a PC104 stack is not a port, it's just a (embedded) PC version. There is no PC104 or PC104+ SBC out there that doesn't run Linux.

But wanna boast about being in space? Your link says the NetBSD is to be launched in 2000... Debian Linux was on the STS-83 space shuttle mission back in April 1997.

http://linux.org.mt/article/space and http://www.faho.rwth-aachen.de/~matthi/linux/Linux InSpace.html

And this http://www.sheflug.co.uk/featuresoft.htm Linux flew a testflight on STS-80, and is intended to be used for something mission-critical as docking, not just gravity measurements. (http://www.linux-magazine.com/issue/12/Linux_on_t he_International_Space_Station.pdf)

NASA didn't do projects like http://flightlinux.gsfc.nasa.gov/ this just for fun... NASA chose Linux not BSD for Beowulf back in 1994 for a reason.

"Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC?"

I'm taking point with the statement that Linux was made by lowly 'PC hackers' while the BSD pedigree is made by the great 'Unix hackers'.

It's an example of the baseless elitist environment of BSD that shuns away so many.

BSD would get a lot more acceptance if the fans and developers would come from cloud nine back down to earth.

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-clo1.htm

postfix has been included for quite some time now. i s'pose it'll default to that in the next releases.

With Linux supporting many more non-PC platforms than the BSD's

NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/

It's just a matter of who has more people working on it there. I have no doubt that linux has more ports in the end, but they've got more people porting it.

not that it means any particular thing, as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station.

Even granting that Linux supports more platforms than BSD, how exactly does that affect that claim? Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC? As the wikipedia article appropriately notes: not originally intended as a portable operating system.

You'll have better luck disputing the BSD side of that, actually. If you go to the roots of BSD, it was originally developed for the same hardware that commercial unix was running at the time, because the original BSD was a hacked version of Unix, essentially. Modern BSDs, however, were the reworking of this for the PC. Which again, brings us to the claim you're disputing here. The BSDs really do have a closer tie to the original Unix, for better or worse. I don't think that gets them any particular innate superiority, but it's a fairly accurate claim.

Besides all that, since when has OS advocacy been equal to flamebait? This seems fairly well intentioned to me. The writer acknowledges his biases, and tells the reader to make up their own mind. Seems fair enough to me in that regard.

By the same interest in fairness, my biases: I like BSD on a philosophical level. Both BSD and Linux are fine solutions, and I'm not opposed to proprietary systems either.

With Linux supporting many more non-PC platforms than the BSD's

NetBSD will you a run for your money with that statement:
http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/

It's just a matter of who has more people working on it there. I have no doubt that linux has more ports in the end, but they've got more people porting it.

not that it means any particular thing, as an aside I'll also note that among NetBSD's ports, there's the International Space Station.

Even granting that Linux supports more platforms than BSD, how exactly does that affect that claim? Are you taking this fact to mean that Linux wasn't originally developed for the PC? As the wikipedia article appropriately notes: not originally intended as a portable operating system.

You'll have better luck disputing the BSD side of that, actually. If you go to the roots of BSD, it was originally developed for the same hardware that commercial unix was running at the time, because the original BSD was a hacked version of Unix, essentially. Modern BSDs, however, were the reworking of this for the PC. Which again, brings us to the claim you're disputing here. The BSDs really do have a closer tie to the original Unix, for better or worse. I don't think that gets them any particular innate superiority, but it's a fairly accurate claim.

Besides all that, since when has OS advocacy been equal to flamebait? This seems fairly well intentioned to me. The writer acknowledges his biases, and tells the reader to make up their own mind. Seems fair enough to me in that regard.

By the same interest in fairness, my biases: I like BSD on a philosophical level. Both BSD and Linux are fine solutions, and I'm not opposed to proprietary systems either.

Another summmer of work on BPG - "An OpenPGP Privacy Toolkit for NetBSD" would have been nice. BPG is a BSD licensed implementation of the OpenPGP standard. In this time of global surveillance this project makes a lot of sense. We do have GPG, but choice is good in security applications.

Of course I'm to lame to look up if the same project can be accepted twice :-). BPG was in last years batch of NetBSD Summer of Code projects.

>And I am pretty sure that Linux is the most ported OS in existence.

Actually, I think that honor might go to NetBSD.

But your point is taken. Certainly by that time the Intel platform was well entrenched, though clearly not as well as today. Gateway was a power, as was Dell and Compaq. The Intel platform was wonky, but spreading rapidly. Apple was in the middle of being both great and stupid, and various workstation vendors were falling over due to an inability to compete with Sun and SGI.

At the time it seemed like Sun and SGI were going to divide up the workstation market, Apple was going to hold artsy stuff, and Intel was going to be all about Windoze and the office.

But this was also the time of the rise of Linux, and the BSD's, all of which worked well on intel. And NetBSD was clear proof that an OS could be portable and good.

Sorry, forgot to add link.

Assuming you want to do it on PCs running Windows 2000 or later, have a look at this Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Protocol Security (IPSec).

For (Net)BSD, there's the IPSec FAQ

http://netbsd.org/Documentation/kernel/uvm.html

http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1 .6.html

Zero copy by avoiding *both* the FreeBSD copy on write, AND the Linux vmsplice().

Instead, one piece of code "loans" the pages to another. It disappears from the first ones
address space (or is marked r/o), and appears in the seconds address space. When the second one is done with it, it hands the pages back.

This avoids *all* copies, include the one that Linux still has. The only cost is that
the original user can't write to the pages while the other one is accessing the pages.

But see the release notes on "page loaning". This is true *zero* copy for pipes and
tcp/udp data. No copies. Ever.

http://netbsd.org/Documentation/kernel/uvm.html

http://www.netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1 .6.html

Zero copy by avoiding *both* the FreeBSD copy on write, AND the Linux vmsplice().

Instead, one piece of code "loans" the pages to another. It disappears from the first ones
address space (or is marked r/o), and appears in the seconds address space. When the second one is done with it, it hands the pages back.

This avoids *all* copies, include the one that Linux still has. The only cost is that
the original user can't write to the pages while the other one is accessing the pages.

But see the release notes on "page loaning". This is true *zero* copy for pipes and
tcp/udp data. No copies. Ever.

Do BSD variants run as much hardware & drivers for as many varied equipment types as Windows 2000/XP/Server 2003?

NO??

*snort*

netBSD refutes you troll.

NetBSD/vax is far more complete than Linux for VAXen. It supports many more machines, more devices, and it's overall more complete and "polished".

NetBSD is once again going to be a mentoring organization. A number of project ideas is available here, though applicants can (and should) of course also come up with their own ideas.

NetBSD is once again going to be a mentoring organization. A number of project ideas is available here, though applicants can (and should) of course also come up with their own ideas.

What do you mean? NetBSD _does_ run on these macs.

But there's apparently a good chance it will run, maybe even with native EFI support

What do you mean? NetBSD _does_ run on these macs.

But there's apparently a good chance it will run, maybe even with native EFI support

Everyone speaks about OpenVPN, which is a good piece of software, but software diverisity is desirable, especially in the field of security. It's better if all the Internet is not hacked through a single buffer overflow. IPsec-tools is an alternative to OpenVPN: different implementation, different protocol. A bunch of IPsec extensions have recently been added to cope with NAT, automatic configuration, and user authentication, so it is now really usable for remote user access, which was not the case in the past.

Check Emmanuel Dreyfus' paper on Remote user acces VPN with IPsec presented at EuroBSDCon 2005 for the background about it. There is also a how-to configure it for NetBSD (most of the document apply to Linux).

And you can also check IPsec-tools home page

My short list:

Anything by VanDyke software. This stuff just bleeds "professional": http://www.vandyke.com/

Now, how to turn Windows into a fully armed and operational battlestation:

Download Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, aka Interix:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/d ownloads/default.asp

Install using the NetBSD pkgsrc guide for Interix:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/platfor ms.html#interix

Now patch it (a necessary step):
http://www.duh.org/interix/hotfixes.php

Now, download and install the latest Interix bootstrap binaries from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/bootstrap -pkgsrc/

Grab pkgsrc-current from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current

Now go to town!

(Just don't forget to ALT-ENTER your C Shell terminal, with green on black text, natch)

My short list:

Anything by VanDyke software. This stuff just bleeds "professional": http://www.vandyke.com/

Now, how to turn Windows into a fully armed and operational battlestation:

Download Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, aka Interix:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/d ownloads/default.asp

Install using the NetBSD pkgsrc guide for Interix:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/platfor ms.html#interix

Now patch it (a necessary step):
http://www.duh.org/interix/hotfixes.php

Now, download and install the latest Interix bootstrap binaries from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/bootstrap -pkgsrc/

Grab pkgsrc-current from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current

Now go to town!

(Just don't forget to ALT-ENTER your C Shell terminal, with green on black text, natch)

My short list:

Anything by VanDyke software. This stuff just bleeds "professional": http://www.vandyke.com/

Now, how to turn Windows into a fully armed and operational battlestation:

Download Microsoft Windows Services for UNIX, aka Interix:
http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserversystem/sfu/d ownloads/default.asp

Install using the NetBSD pkgsrc guide for Interix:
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/pkgsrc/platfor ms.html#interix

Now patch it (a necessary step):
http://www.duh.org/interix/hotfixes.php

Now, download and install the latest Interix bootstrap binaries from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/bootstrap -pkgsrc/

Grab pkgsrc-current from ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current

Now go to town!

(Just don't forget to ALT-ENTER your C Shell terminal, with green on black text, natch)

Here's an alternative.

You obviously don't understand the BSD world. The BSD projects aren't different because they are better at different things; they're different (and better at different things) because they have different priorities and goals that are largely incompatible. FreeBSD targets high-stress server environments where performance and reliability are paramount, so FreeBSD can do some bizarre stuff to improve performance--a while back someone did a benchmark between Linux and the three main BSDs, and the socket() graph shows you the kind of hacks FreeBSD does to improve performance.

NetBSD makes a clean, clear codebase a top priority, and its portability is kind of a feedback loop that both results from that decision and motivates it. NetBSD also tries to be very research friendly, and its high-performance networking stack is frequently used to set Internet2 records. They are also the least vociferous about software Freedom, as they were the last of the major BSDs to adopt X.org, and the only one to still use the "four-clause" version of the CSRG license.

OpenBSD also strives for clear code, but places much greater emphasis than the others on security and strong cryptography. OpenBSD periodically audits code, checks for bugs proactively, and the same kinds of bizarre hacks FreeBSD uses to improve performance are used in OpenBSD to improve security (such as making structuring vm pages out of order to prevent malicious buffer overflows. OpenBSD is also the most strongly advocating Free Software, as they spearheaded (along with Debian) the campaign to dump Xfree86, maintain a version of Apache 1.3 because the 2.x license was less free, and include no binary drivers or otherwise unfree in the base distribution. They're kind of like a BSD version of the FSF.

DragonFly[BSD] is the newcomer of the bunch, a fork of FreeBSD. So far the over-arching goals are to improve modularity and to replace bulky structures and processes with lighter, quicker versions. The plan to replace the usual syscall table with a messaging api (apparently like a lightweight Mach-type thing, but evidently not microkernel design) make it very different from its cousins.

It's important to note that these are not just the result of a few random patches to the system approved by a czar, as in Linux, but explicit decisions by the core developers to follow a particular blueprint, to make a particular improvement, or to support (or not) an obsolete API/ABI. If you want to submit a patch out of the blue, you certainly can, and if it's competently coded it will probably be accepted, but the overwhelming majority of code contributions come from the core developers following architectural guidelines. If you tried to combine all 3-4 codebases, the incompatibility of several design decisions would end up combining a stable OS, a lightweight OS, a portable OS, and a secure OS into something that managed to preserve none of these features.

That said, however, because of the similar licensing requirements, the BSD projects all share code extensively, and are frequently source (if not binary) compatible with each other. So it's not like Linux, where packaging systems are completely different but the OS features are all the same (because they use the exact same codebase). In an odd way, the members of BSD family are both more closely related and more different from one another than the various Linux distros are.

NetBSD - A BSD distribution based on optimizing Network Configurations
[Please correct any of that so I personally can understand the flavors of BSD better]

No, it's net as in 'developed across the internet'. NetBSD's primary aim is portability though clean code.

See the NetBSD 'about' page.

Okay why don't the individuals from all three get together and create AllBSD?

Because they have different design philosophies: it's impractical. But they do merge code between each other as and when.

Also, how exactly did "NetBSD did it"? As is stated here: http://www.netbsd.org/Misc/history.html the version numbering is clean.