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NetBSD 1.4.2 Poised For Release
Mike Lockwood writes: "I haven't seen a formal announcement yet, but the Releases page on the NetBSD Web site says, "The latest patch release, NetBSD 1.4.2, was released on March 19, 2000." Now that I have already downloaded a copy of the mac68k port and installed it on my Quadra 700, I figured it is safe to tell the rest of the world."
You only have 5k. X is painful below about 8.
:( ). Anyway, the big performance problem with X came from postscript fonts. Set applications to use non-postscript fonts, or at least set up xfs, so that single threaded X isn't tied up rendering and you can do other things.
About 4 years ago, I was using a IIci with 24-32 mb (it varied; there was 56 to split between it and the 486 linux box with 4 drives totaling about 1.4G).
Performance was acceptable, and it made a decent X terminal. It found a few bugs in the 1 bit version of lyx (note: lyx is about to [or already has] dropped support for 1 bit, as noone seems to be using it, and it's extra to maintain
About that time, someone discovered by accident that mosaic did indeed run on machines without math coprocessors--it's just that it took about 20 minutes to finish loading (it had been believed to hang and eat all cycles). He tried it, forgot about it when he went to do something else, and returned.
Anyway, more memory if you want X, and watch which fonts you use.
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-- Slashdot sucks.
NetBSD is probably the closest I'll get to running a decent Unix on my NeXT. However, although it has support for 68040 based machines, it explicitly doesn't support my Turbo Colorstations :-( The Linux port to NeXT hardware is still a long way from usability. Guess I'm stuck with NeXTStep/OpenStep for now.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
eh? Isn't OS X based on Next which is based on Mach 2.5 which isn't micro-kernel based? Or did they port up to Mach 4?
BZZZZT, thanks for playing.
Mach was microkernel from Mach 3 on.
You're right that the redhat installer tends to load up your system with crap. That only happens if you just let it take the defaults for packages to install, which is what a no-clue newbie would be best doing. If you know anything at all, you'll un-select all the stuff you don't need. Basically, BSD, and other Linux distros like Slackware and Debian, use an opt-in installer, where you have to ask for anything that you want, as opposed to redhat where you have to opt-out of stuff you don't want. :)
You are refering to the redhat way as the "linux way". Don't do that. Different distros have _very_ different flavours and philosophies. Give some others a try sometime. Stampede gives you a really raw system where you'll need to fix a lot of config files and stuff, but it's a learning experience to half-way roll your own system. AFAIK, slackware is most similar to the BSD package system (but BSD has some good stuff that slack doesn't, I think.) Debian is very concerned with having everything fit together well, and being well documented. Every package has someone specifically maintaining it, so things tend to be well set up for each other. It is also very concious of security, including out of the box security so you don't get cracked before you figure out how to pronounce "linux"
(BTW, I'm not calling you a newbie, but maybe you were when you installed redhat and had it litter your system with junk. Everyone is on their first install of any OS/distro.)
#define X(x,y) x##y
#define X(x,y) x##y
Peter Cordes ; e-mail: X(peter@cordes ,
Wow... 1.4.2... so refreshing to see such a low version number in today's climate of Slackware 7.0, RedHat 6.1, and so on :-)
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
Thats the OpenBSD "theory" or way of doing it. They don't want to include applications you won't use, and make you install the ones you do want. Its more minimalistic and tailored to your needs. This may improve security somehow by removing the extra applications you don't need which could have a security issue or something. Some people don't like that or agree with that style at all. Thats ok, but its how OpenBSD does it. Here's a qoute from the OpenBSD site. Maybe it will help give you an idea of their philosophy.:
OpenBSD is a fairly complete system of its own, but still there is a lot of software that one might want see added. However there is the problem on where to draw the line as to what to include, as well as the occasional licensing and export restriction problems. As OpenBSD is supposed to be a small stand-alone UNIX-like operating system, some things just can't be shipped with the system.
Anyway, do check out the ports section if you haven't already. Its an easy way to install applications you want. I found it convienent.
While your at it, check out the Blowfish shirt, one of the more "cooler" computer shirts around. Any OS can use blowfish crypto so even Linux-only folks will like it.
It would usually be silly to choose BSD if what you want is compatibility with desktop software (but that applies to Linux too). BSD has other strengths. For example, you can get FreeBSD to webserve happily on a 3MB 386/12, which is really a bit too small for Linux. To be specific to NetBSD, it is the most widely ported OS in the world, so depending on your hardware it may be the only free unix which runs on it. OpenBSD has been security audited line-by-line so is probably the most secure free unix available.
perl -e 'fork||print for split//,"hahahaha"'
isn't Linux much better than BSD? Plus, this is a Linux site. Let the BSD guys get their own forum...if there are enough of them.
This sounds like a troll, but what the heck, I don't have anything else to do so I'll reply.. :-)
Since when has Slashdot been "a Linux site"? Slashdot is "news for nerds" imho. Linux is just a part of it.
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It has to work - rfc1925
From what I hear, the main advantage of NetBSD over FreeBSD or OpenBSD is that it is ported to a huge number of architectures. So you get the whole BSD thang and all that's good with that, but it's more portable than the other BSDs and so you can use it on many more architectures.
Chris Hagar
"The price of freedom is eternal vigilance." - Thomas Jefferson
That's strange. I have two FreeBSD machines and one Linux machine at home and both are running nearly the same set of software.
What software were you looking for on your OpenBSD machine that you couldn't find?
You do realize that after installing the base system, you need to go to the "Packages" installation portion and tell it what extra software above and beyond the base system you want to install, right? This is already-built software for your machine that you shouldn't have to compile. Not installing all these packages by default is a philosophical difference between Linux and the BSD's. Linux (RedHat) tends to put a lot of extra software on your machine by default at installation time. The BSD's tend to lay down just a bare Unix install and figure that you will use the package installer to add whatever you want. I personally prefer the BSD way of doing things (which is why I tend to favor BSD systems anyway) because it allows me to manage my disk space much more closely by not installing software that I don't use by default. Others like the Linux way because they want to get a lot of stuff on their machine right up front.
Choice is good.
NetBSD/alpha, for instance, is using ELF.
NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/sparc have been switched from a.out to ELF in -current, and will switch to ELF in the 1.5 release.
The other process is at about 95% completed, so it'll try probably in the next half hour or 45 minutes.
;-)
Update - it uploaded it's completed work unit and downloaded another, so I'm still going on my NetBSD 1.x seti@home client!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
Well, seeing as the Seti folks stopped allowing 1.x clients yesterday, you are in trouble now :(
Well... they said that it would happen on 3/6 and it didn't!   I'm looking at (switching between) both my NetBSD processes right now and one is at 6% completed (meaning it uploaded its work unit and downloaded a new one maybe in the past hour?).   The other process is at about 95% completed, so it'll try probably in the next half hour or 45 minutes.
Initially I thought their statement about not upgrading certain 1.xs meant that this would effectively kill them but then I began to get the impression that it may have meant not porting them to the newer 2.x version but still accepting the results.
Well... I'll let 'em keep going as long as they can... I just wish that seti's software team would allow some "outside" (and "seti-blessed") OSSers to port 2.x for NetBSD!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
I don't mean to be disrespectful or anything, but can anybody tell me a single reason why I should choose BSD over Linux or Windows?
I did it as a learning experience.   I felt that it was probably closer "in structure" to commercial Unix than Linux, and since I had little or no experience with Unix, I thought that it would make a nice transition from Linux -> *BSD -> Unix.
I've never once seen BSD software advertised or shrink-wrapped. Does that mean all software would have to be downloaded over the internet?
I believe that places like CheapBytes offer the usual $2 CDs.   I also believe that each of the *BSDs offer CDs from their sites as well.
Is it only good for hobbyists or ISPs, or am I missing something here?
Probably good for both but being a sysadmin (and supervisor of sysadmins) it's been a GREAT learning experience!   Admining NT teaches you nothing, IMHO, whereas admining one of the *nixes is truly fascinating and makes you think in a truly organized fashion!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
See the list in the right-hand column on www.netbsd.org
Porting NetBSD is so easy that even we developers lose track of how many ports have been checked in to the master sources..
I have a single x86 NetBSD 1.4.1 box amongst my Linux boxen.   Once I got it installed and compiled me a new kernel (wow... how easy!), I haven't had much chance to get back to foolin' around with it.   Now's my chance.
:-(.
;-)
I have to say that when I was trying to determine which *BSD to try, it really boiled down to FreeBSD vs NetBSD.   Reason why I picked NetBSD was because of their low-key, no hype profile and a pledge to "release no code before its time".   It's just a nice, all around good system and I got 2 processes of seti@home running on it too, although the seti folks have ceased supporting the netbsd version of their software and have no plans to upgrade it to the 2.x version...  
What was good was that it came with instant support, no questions asked, for all of my hardware (including ESS Solo-1 sound chip) plus it had USB support before Linux did, by the way!  
Look forward to trying the upgrade!
-- Win2k: "It's not so much that it's only 65,000 bugs, it's just that they stopped at 65,535 to prevent an overflow."
We use slightly different terminology -- a NetBSD "port" is a port of NetBSD to a particular platform, and we install into /usr/pkg by default instead of /usr/local, to leave /usr/local free for truly local software, but if you're familiar with the FreeBSD ports collection, it should look very familiar to you..