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NetBSD Ported To MIPS-Based Cobalt Machines
After our earlier story about this, hubertf writes: "Soren S. Jorvang has done a port of NetBSD to the Cobalt Networks
MIPS-based Qube and RaQ Microservers which is now available.
Originally the Cobalt machines ship with a custom version of Linux,
and now everyone can run his favourite Open Source operating system
on it." More information from the NetBSD/cobalt ports page.
It's good to see publicity for this little-known and under-appreciated OS, which, despite it's relative obscurity, was the originator of the other two BSDs.
Right now, about the only thing NetBSD doesn't run on is my HP48, but I hear someone's working on it. That's the truly great thing about NetBSD: it'll run on anything. The moment you get your new Internet-enabled refrigerator, NetBSD will be waiting for you as Linux developers scramble to produce working code. But I think the relationship between NetBSD (and BSD) in general and Linux is a friendly one, with each sharing ideas and (most importantly) applications. Sure, there are some idiotic zealots on both sides, but they're restrained to making fools of themselves on Slashdot, so no real harm is done.
But just keep in mind that that next gizmo you buy may well carry a Daemon inside...
This is good news! The Cobalts (Qubes at least, I haven't worked with a RAQ) use a forked version of a really old kernel, and have some wierd limitations. For example, according to Cobalt tech support, thier version of the kernal can only support 256 open file descriptors. Because of that, Samba is set up to only allow 100 simultanious open files. That's fine if your only using it to serve up Word and Excel files, but their are many programs that need that many files open for even 1 user. (almost any Cobal program, for example, including 3 accounting packages I've tried to install on Qubes).
The Qubes are really cool little devices. I'd love to see Cobalt integrate support for thier hardware into the main stream Linux kernel so that Qube users could more easily upgrade to greater functionality. This NetBSD port at least provides one good option for Qube users who are outgrowing the cute little web-interface and need a little more flexibility that what comes "pre-packaged" in the Qube. I'd rather be able to update them to a newer Linux kernel, or better yet a new version of a fairly stock Linux distro, but this is pretty darn good.