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

Original idea was Debian OpenBSD

[Anonymous Coward]

The original proposal was for Debian OpenBSD:

Debian OpenBSD topic

Debian OpenBSD txt

Re:Transition

[m_ilya]

Funny but I've switched my desktop OS in slightly different order:

RedHat -> Slackware -> FreeBSD -> Debian

For desktop OS I find Debian Linux more convient than FreeBSD for two reasons:

• Linux have better support for multimedia devices than FreeBSD
• Debian have more prepackaged software than FreeBSD and in general quality of debian packages is better than FreeBSD ports thanks for Debian strict packaging policy.

This is so shortsighted!

[2nd Post!]

What happened to the concepts of diversity, hybrid vigor, competition, and cooperation?

With Microsoft we get a monoculture.

Are you suggesting the same for all other OSes?

If nothing else this project encourages and explores compatibility issues, source examination, bug catching, performance tuning, and a bunch of other things, if only because a new, fresh, set of eyes (Debian) is looking at old things (BSD), and the other way around, BSD people looking at Debian things.

This cross pollination can have so many surprising and unexpected benefits too. Like the fact that if the kernal is BSD and the userland is Debian... it means you could, besides a little project called Fink, place an entire Debian OS layer on top of Apple's Darwin or Apple's OS X.

Then there is the ports system, which sounds very good to me. It's currently a BSD thing, but there's nothing stopping it from running on top of the Debian-netBSD distro, with work, and therefore stopping it from working on GNU-Debian with just a little more work, with 'work' and 'little more work' being subjective here.

These are just obvious speculations on my part. Many more advantages can be found, I'm sure, of this type of project.

Re:I would prefer the other way around

[dublin]

personally, I would like to see a BSD distro with ports and all, but with a linux kernel.

I agree. Although I think the BSD kernel is arguably superior, having a Linux kernel would allow the rapidly increasing number of commercial applications that run on Linux to work.

The big, ugly, problem for me (and almost anyone else that's really worked with and appreciated the real power of *real* Unix, as opposed to Linux) has always been the GNU utilities. They're acceptable, but just barely. GNU Documentation stinks when iut's there at all, at least partly because even most FSF-backers recognize that man pages are the expected form of OS docs and info pages are a hoppeless GNU-ism.

The GNU utilities insist on using their own hopelessly convoluted syntax, (especially the hideous "--" options, another perversity enforced by the gnazis that intentionally creates a gulf between the GNU wasteland and the civilization of the Unix/BSD world.

The BSD utilities are one of the best reasons to run BSD - they are orders of magnitude more stable and standard than their GNU hack counterparts. The code for many of these utilities is indeed old, but has not remained static: The BSD utilities provide a level of maturity that GNU will probably never reach, simply because structure and gols of their organization forces the BSD folks care about such things, while that of GNU seems to ensure that that level of care and attention will not be lavished on the code. In my mind, this is a distinction that is far too often overlooked.