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."

Comments

I would prefer the other way around

[horster]

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

[metalhed77]

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.

Re:Gentoo linux

[cymen]

Ports is a collection of applications that can easily be compiled for your operating system. Basically for FreeBSD you have /usr/ports. That directory contains various subdirectories dividing applications into www (apache, mod_php4, etc), lang (ruby, etc), mail (mutt, exim, etc), and so forth. Each directory for a specific application contains a number of files. Some of these are patch files that are applied to the source code of the port. See the ports tree doesn't contain the actual code of the application - it only contains enough logic to get the regular .tar.gz release (usually from the developers home site) and the patches to build it properly (particular distribution preferences on file structure, libraries, etc).

Every couple days I use cvsup to suck down the modifications to the ports tree to my FreeBSD box. Then I happen to use a relatively new tool not in the base system (portupgrade, written in ruby) to check if my currently installed packages are up to date. If they aren't, I can instruct portupgrade to upgrade them or go to each directory individually and do a "make install". Oh yeah, each directory has a Makefile :).

It's sort of like why distribute the source code if it is just going to get out of date (plus you'll be getting the source for all kinds of crap you never end up using). Of course now each application must be compiled but if you don't want to do that you can use the packages (precompiled binaries that can be added with pkg_add, etc).

Another benefit is ports can be on any version of the operating system because it is independent of the base system. Look at RedHat and you'll see compiled packages for RedHat 6.2, 7.2, etc (of course, before someone knee jerks a reply, RPMS are out there but I'm trying to make a point here). Ports avoids this. The price is compilation. A trade off. You make the call.

Hope that helps. Here is the FreeBSD handbook section for ports: ports-using.html (it contains a better description of what files are in a ports directory).

Re:the kernel? my god man

[tao]

Why on earth why would you want a linux kernel in BSD userland? Do you really want a horribly broken VM system and every yahoo who can type hello world submitting patches? Thats why I like BSD. Theres a core group in charge of what goes and what stays. Who has the final say so in the linux kernel?

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.

Debian is not Linux

[CatherineCornelius]

To me, this is promising. I like to see cooperation between the Linux world and the *BSD world.

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.

Try these

[Arker]

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/

Re:how is it GNU-based if it has a _BSD_ kernel?

[CatherineCornelius]

I don't see how you can refer to Debian as an "operating system". I mean, they do nice work, but an OS without a kernel is just a bunch of applications and utilities.

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.

Re:how different (from standard netbsd) is it?

[Fluffy the Cat]

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.

Re:What came first, the GNU kernel or linux?

[ceswiedler]

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..."

Re:how is it GNU-based if it has a _BSD_ kernel?

[Dahan]

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.