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Debian NetBSD
bXTr writes "Interesting project over at SourceForge. Quoting from the website, 'Debian NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development and cannot currently be installed from scratch. Instead, a tarball of the current envionment is available and can be extracted into a handy directory on a NetBSD system.' Check out the reasons why they're doing it and some interesting commentary at DailyDaemonNews on this."
personally, I would like to see a BSD distro with ports and all, but with a linux kernel.
I just installed FreeBSD recently and have to say i was blown away with how professional the installer was, very simple and powerful - not to mention the ports system.
debian is nice, apt-get is a great program and the net install is awesome, but I can't say I have much love for dselect. I think debian shows the most promise of any linux distro right now, but in terms of polish, I have to give it to FreeBSD so far.
Gentoo Linux has that, www.gentoo.org , it uses a ports style system, i'm not sure if it's a direct port of ports, or their own deal.
Photos.
If you check out the mailing list archives, you can see the project has been ongoing (or at least discussed) since May 1999. It just until now to get it to the point where it actually sort of works.
Ever heard of Linus Torvalds? Oh, and for the v2.4 kernel it's Marcelo Tosatti, for v2.2 it's Alan Cox. For v2.0, it's yours truly. It's hardly like anyone can get their code into the kernel. Anyone is free to submit patches though. That doesn't mean it'll get in.
As for the VM, yes, there have been problems (mostly with corner-cases, though), but v2.0.xx has a stable VM, v2.2.xx has a stable VM now, v2.4.xx has a stable, if somewhat unoptimal VM now, and v2.6 will hopefully have Rik van Riel's VM, which shares a lot of similarities with the VM from FreeBSD, but with some Linux-specific adaptments.
So please, don't spread FUD.
Well I agree with you that it's promising, but do remember that the Debian project is not Linux, but a GNU operating system. There is Debian GNU Linux, and there is Debian GNU HURD, and now (apparently) Debian GNU BSD.
Slackware, the daddy of em all - still alive and kicking. Very BSDish install, similar package handling, BSD init. No ports system last I checked :( but a very friendly system otherwise for compiling from source. http://www.slackware.com
Gentoo, a newcomer, to oversimplify a little the idea seems to be Slack+Ports. Haven't used it yet, heard some great things, sure looks promising. http://www.gentoo.org
Also another similar project that was just recently reported here - sorcerer linux. Don't know enough about it to differentiate it from gentoo, the ideas seem very similar unless I'm missing something (quite possible, haven't had the time to try either.) http://sorcerer.wox.org/
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
In the BSD world, we not only have the ports collection, we have the packages collection, too. So there's no need to compile everything from ports :-)
Your complaints about NetBSD are a result of your experience with FreeBSD? These are completely different *operating systems* (not kernels, full operating systems).
Windowmaker is not BSD. If you have a problem with Windowmaker, go complain to them.
Which parts of tuning require five years of experience and/or a CS degree? I switched from Linux to NetBSD after I'd been using computers for about two years altogether, and have always found it easier to work with. Why? Because it's a whole operating system. If stuff goes into the kernel, it's released with userland support, all at the same time.
NetBSD is, IMO, the cleanest system out there today. Everything works, and moving forward is easy. Doesn't come with bash? So what? I don't use bash, so I'm pretty happy to not see it. I do like the standard bourne shell it comes with for running my scripts. I do use tcsh, so it's typically one of the first things I install from pkgsrc on a new machine.
``But pkgsrc is hard! You have to build the stuff yourself,'' you say? A ``make package'' at the top level will create binary packages for the current platform for all packages your configuration suggests you're licensed for. Port maintainers typically do this and provide binary packages for most things people would want. In fact, when NetBSD releases ISOs, they release pre-built package ISOs for i386, just to make it a bit quicker (it certainly can't be any easier).
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
This would be a pretty big step backwards. The NetBSD startup stuff is far superior to SysV. They wanted to move to a similar model for a while, but anyone who's ever used SysV startup on a real system understands the problems.
Their current system allows you to drop files in a directory for startup that contain no special file names. They may list internally what service they provide, and what service they require and they will be sequenced properly. If you run two things that require network and don't provide anything that anything else requires, they'll get run after the network portion of the startup runs. There is no special shell scripting based on requested command (i.e. how many SysV startup scripts have you seen that implement ``start'' but not ``stop?''). Best thing is they're tiny, and they grow with the system. You define a couple variables and then do ``run_rc_command "$1"''
I think it's cool that people are trying different things, and I don't care as long as it's not wasting me money, but they'd probably be better off learning from a system rather than trying to assimilate the kernel while throwing away the other good stuff.
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
That's perfectly correct--the Debian system is aiming to independent of the kernel, so it seems to be developing into a portable userland (not a word I had encountered before, but suddenly everybody seems to be using it!) on top of whatever kernel you like.
Incidentally I notice that there was some debate on the Debian-BSD list as to whether to use the GNU name here, since unlike HURD they don't have libc6, and it's been argued that many essential parts of Debian aren't GNU anyway. And they might want to give the sysadmin the option of building a more BSD-like system (since the BSD userland is there for that kernel). The consensus so far seems to be Debian NetBSD.
FreeBSD has kernel level security options. Once you set a security level you cannot set it at a more relaxed level without rebooting. With features like that in place, it becomes very hard for a cracker to gain complete control over your server. Reboots are pretty dawg-gone noticable, don't ya think?
--Roy
Apt and dpkg have been ported. We're working on porting the administrative and configuration utilities. The idea is not to just package NetBSD binaries - the idea is to build the Debian source packages on NetBSD except in cases where that's impossible, and in those cases to produce packages that provide as much of the same functionality as possible.
Less work, and more immediately useful results, would be modifying apt to work with the current binary package system
I'd argue with the "less work", but anyway. Connectiva have ported apt to work with RPMs - that doesn't make it Debian. We're not trying to produce a NetBSD varient using Debian packaging tools. We're trying to produce Debian running on top of the NetBSD kernel.
Arguably, its not really BSD anymore
By some values, this is probably true.
Debian-NetBSD doesn't seem to have package for these platforms anyway
Yet. Once we're running on one architecture, this ought to happen.
Linus's kernel and the GNU project are two seperate things. GNU predates the Linus's kernel and was always meant to be a complete Unix implementation - both user tools such as gcc, glibc, emacs, tar, ftp, etc, etc, and the kernel HURD. The timing of it was that the GNU project was pretty much complete excepting HURD while in parallel and independently Linus had started his kernel project and it had got to the point of being usable.
My history is a bit shaky here, but I think it was the Slackware team which first made the unholy alliance of the GNU tools and Linus's kernel, and released it as a Unix distibution. I think Linus may have coined the name "Linux" a bit earlier for the combination of his kernel and a small set of GNU tools.
I think that Debian is more of a Linux distribution than a GNU project - even though the GNU project is what make Linux possible, they've never actually put out distributions of their OS themselves. But of course Stallman would like them to get credit for the fact that the only part of Linux that is Linus's is the kernel (a miniscule part of what's in a "Linux" distribution).. hence the GNU/Linux and GNU/HURD pedantry which is quite reasonable apart from Stallman's initially obnoxious way of handling it.
Well, no, it was Linus himself who first paired the kernel with GNU tools. He developed it using GNU development tools on Minix and then Linux itself once it was usable, and ASAP he had the standard GNU toolset compiled and running on his own box.
Perhaps Slackware did indeed release the first distribution; but from the start, GNU was used on Linux. I imagine that the 0.1 release had some mention of "BTW, if you want to actually DO anything, go get the GNU stuff..."
Actually, it runs perfectly fine. Nothing in gnusrc is critical, and depending on what you want to use the system for, gnusrc might be completely useless. The only thing GNU I have on my Compaq IA-1 is grep, and it's running NetBSD without any problems at all. If I really wanted to, I could probably ditch grep and replace it with awk to be completely GNU-free. But I deleted the GNU stuff (and a bunch of BSD stuff too) for space reasons, not anti-GNU reasons.