Slashdot Mirror
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."
To me this kind of thing really shows the strength of the open source community. I'm sure we've all seen the flame wars that start here over the difference in the licenses, but in the end, we all have a common goal, share the source!
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.
To me, this is promising. I like to see cooperation between the Linux world and the *BSD world. Both have their advantages, and it'd be great if both would learn from each other more often. Perhaps this is an instance where some exchange of ideas could come about? Those responsible deserve a pat on the back.
Kein Mitleid für die Mehrheit.
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.
- So how long before they declare that we have to start calling it GNU/NetBSD
How about GNUtBSD, for short?-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
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/
=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
Really, the convergence of Debian package management, GNU utils and NetBSD kernel isn't all that special and WILL NOT create a stronger, unified, easy-to-use UNIX variant.
Please, try Mac OS X; there's every advantage to it without all the traditional UNIX disadvantages.
My hope is that OS X will unify the BSDs into its proper place - at the top of the OS food chain. Many Free/Open/NetBSD users are coming to that conclusion as are many Linux users, beset with flaky kernels and horrible OS packaging.
Apple OS X and the *BSDs will be our answer to WinTel/Linux obsolescence.
how would you pronounce that? "nut-bastard?"
"Sanity is not statistical", George Orwell, "1984"
If you don't need third party application support or kernel threads, however, FreeBSD has a much more solid, reliable kernel.
It would be excellent if you could maintain different machines with different kernels as needed, but have everything on top of that be Debian (both because Debian is excellent, and because supporting a heterogenous OS environment is a pain best avoided if possible).
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
The beauty of the Debian approach is that sits a GNU system on top of a kernel. Source packages developed for Debian should build and run on any Debian system. The kernel is just a way of getting to the metal.
This is true of the kernel, but the kernel is not the whole deal. One of the major problems with Linux is *that* it's every yahoo for himself -- Cox and Torvalds and a few others do the kernel, the glibc people are a different bunch, the X consortium, the ISC, Apache Foundation, plus all those assorted little libraries, you know the type, it's a kinda neat library, but you've only found 1 app that needs it
So, where the BSD team is some 10-20 people who can all get in a room and hash out details and come out with a coherent ports system, or a standard place to put software (apache goes in
This is a weakness in the Linux system of cooperation. It's also a strength. Just as no one can take control of the whole thing and fix it, also nobody can break the whole thing. Even if Linux and Cox between them decided to sabotage Linux, they couldn't, whereas one guy with cvs commit privileges on cvsup.freebsd.org could give himself a root shell on every BSD box on the planet. (Okay I exaggerate -- he'd get caught, probably, but that's only because most of the people working on BSD are good guys.)
Their motivation is quite clear to me: have another choice of a kernel that is already robust and better than the Linux kernel in certain areas, and have the nice, organized and easily upgradable Debian on top of it. Come on, building *everything* from source is so much more trouble than apt-get dist-upgrade. Think XFree86, Mozilla, etc.
Debian is independent of kernels. We have Debian Hurd already to prove that, and hopefully, we'll have Debian NetBSD, which will kick ass :-)
The thing I've always really liked about the BSDs is that they're complete and separate systems that include everything from the kernel to the userland tools, all integrated by one team. Compare with the Linux world, where you have a bunch of different distros that many people pretend are all the same OS (in spite of the fact that file systems are arranged differently, boot sequences are different, configuration is different, package management is different, userland tools are often different, etc.) because they happen to use the same kernel. The BSD way has always seemed a lot cleaner to me. The idea of seeing a myriad of distros based on the BSD kernels really isn't one that I like. I believe it's a step in exactly the wrong direction. Open source Unix needs more standardization, not more fragmentation.
This space unintentionally left unblank.
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 :-)
http://saveie6.com/
Did they just port apt and dpkg, and put up some Debian-packaged NetBSD binaries? Or have they moved to a Sys V init system, ported the Debian administration and configuration tools, and all the other stuff that makes debian distinctive? They explicitly say that NetBSD doesn't support runlevels, and looking at the package list, it doesn't look like much of the debian tools have made it yet.
If its just a different package system, its pointless. Less work, and more immediately useful results, would be modifying apt to work with the current binary package system (which actually does support dependencies, etc.), and the large number of binaries in this format already available.
If not, its a more questionable proposition. Arguably, its not really BSD anymore...it runs NetBSD binaries and uses that kernel, but the userland is basically Debian, ie, just like any Linux distribution. And most people who want that should just assume use Debian with the Linux kernel, which is a far more mature combination. Yes, for VAXen, toasters, slide rules and other more arcane platforms this won't exactly work, but Debian-NetBSD doesn't seem to have package for these platforms anyway.
"(Man) tries to live his own life as if he were telling a story. But you have to choose: live or tell." --Sartre
I started using linux because it had the hardware support I needed, and support was 100x better. But it wasnt stable enough for my server, so I ran freebsd. But that was a few years ago. Ive always been able to explain to my friends who run BSD, that I need SMP support, so I run linux. But its also how linux has better configuration utilties and drivers. After using linux for years, I know where everything is, easy to setup and fix.
...' - Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992)
Now, Linux is rock solid, and I get to laugh at my friends who cant X setup on thier freebsd boxes. But then, by the time a good bsd distro will be out, newer and better linux kernels will be out, with new vm's and more features.
-
The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not 'Eureka!' (I found it!) but 'That's funny
Not too long ago, someone made the comment on slashdot about the general progression of Linux users. As a users becomes more experienced with Linux, they tend to shift from:
Mandrake/RedHat -> Debian/Slackware -> *BSD
It seems that Debian is going to make that last transition a little easier.
Go not unto/. for advice, for you will be told both yea and nay (but have nothing to do with the question)
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.
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.
As Richard Stallman has been saying all along, the OS is GNU, and the kernel it runs on, be it HURD, Linux, or now NetBSD, is just that: the kernel. Of course, Richard is now chorling at the thought of further showing the irrelevance of Linux, but if people call it the Debian Operating System (DOS???) instead of GNU, he'll quickly change his tune and go back to righteous indignation.
Even Slashdot wants to hide some things
What exactly is the ports system?
/usr/ports which is a whole tree of makefiles. So to install something, you just cd /usr/ports/category/WhateverYouWantToInstall/ && make && make install. All dependencies are taken care of automagically. The makefiles in these directories are smart enough to download whatever you need and then compile the source on your machine. So installing a new package doesn't take several hours of trolling newsgroups and searching for rpms.
More like, what are rpm users missing out on? With rpm -i package.rpm the user may or may not be able to install the intended software. There could be real dependency problems, as in kde2 needs qt2. There could also be bogus dependency problems since you may have compiled qt2 from source but rpm wouldn't know about it.
Enter FreeBSD and ports. A typical FreeBSD install creates a directory called
But you don't have to take my word for it. Check this out.
My experience is limited to Mandrake, Slackware, FreeBSD and OpenBSD. They each have their strengths and weaknesses, but when I need to get sh*t done, BSD, espescially FreeBSD is my first choice just because the ports tree contains nearly any software I'd want to run, eliminating the bottleneck that software installation sometimes turns into and letting me get to the task at hand.
As an aside, it seems like everything that Mandrake tries to be to "joe sixpack" who is just getting into trying linux on the desktop, BSD is to the sysadmin or programmer who needs to get a *nix platform up and running for a certain task. Compiling a custom kernel, installing software, modifying the init process, etc are at least as easy for the sysadmin on BSD as adjusting the screen fonts and changing the wallpaper are for a newbie in Mandrake.
The state is the great fiction by which everyone tries to live at the expense of everybody else. ~F. Bastiat
So it's basically the same thing which Sorcerer wants to achieve, right? Than maybe Sorcerer should just use FreeBSD ports instead of reinventing the wheel?
~shiny
WILL HACK FOR $$$
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.
Mandrake/RedHat -> Debian/Slackware -> *BSD -> Debian
;-)
The original proposal was for Debian OpenBSD:
Debian OpenBSD topic
Debian OpenBSD txt
In fact, the BSD world seems largely annoyed at these folks.
Really? We've got some BSD developers happily working with us. Nobody has yet actually made their displeasure at the situation known, other than some bitching on Slashdot-alikes. If they are annoyed, they're not annoyed enough to actually do anything about it.
I personally don't see the reasons for this project, other than political
That's why I went to the bother of writing this page.
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
They're porting apt to NetBSD?
No, we're porting Debian to NetBSD. A distribution isn't just its installer and package management. There's the way the filesystem is laid out, the way the tools are configured by default and the philosophy behind the development.
I'm a bit confused here. Didn't the GNU community (what is pretty much what debian is) show it's openness to other kernels when it accepted the linux kernel while continuing on with the original GNU Hurd system? Even knowing it would slow down the progress of the Hurd?
I'm confused because the listy of reasons seem to suggest that it was in accepting the Hurd that states Debian is open to other kernels.
And even the Hurd is open to different micro-kernels! Mach and L4 are current micro kernel use efforts.
No more so than taking the work of the Linux team, shoving some debian/gnu stuff on top of it and calling it a GNU-based operating system. Linux is GPLed, but it's not part of the GNU project. If the GNU C library was being used, I don't think there'd be any real argument. As it is, I'm not so sure.
Just remember, Adolf Hitler was a socialist.
Yes, and your point? Timothy McVeigh (whatever) was a Christian, Oliver North was is a Republican and John Locke was an Anarcho-Syndicalist.
Uh, no... Debian sit's a GNU system on top of the GNU glibc library, just the same as any other Linux distribution.
The glibc library provides the userland interface to the kernel.
Guess how we ended up with so many different *BSD versions?
As the saying goes :
two great things come from Berkley, LSD and BSD
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
Does this mean that the "BSD is dyeing" guy is going to finally update his message to include Linux?
heuh? So does Python.
I once thought of making a Linux distro -- yeah, everyone has -- but short story shorter, I don't have that itch to scratch anymore, since I have sitting in front of me a box that's running just Win2k. I got cygwin, liked it for a while, and have grown to hate it. Slow, buggy, and now unreliable in config -- make stopped working, some weird interaction with shell quoting. Make is kinda important yunno. The DLL that every last damn cygwin program needs is also GPL'd, which ironically might violate the LGPL for a lot of binutils. Discouraging commercial apps from using cygwin might be A Good Thing anyway, since it's not a paragon of security (it uses a shm segment to keep state like fd's). So I'm switching to MinGW, which is much nicer in many ways, but it has an even worse system of distribution than cygwin's rather unimpressive kludgy installer (which for starters is impossible to use without a mouse)
... I would like to know if anyone else is working on such a thing for cygwin and/or mingw though.
So I am wondering, what about porting something like BSD ports or Gentoo's portage or Debian's apt to MinGW? They're all ostensibly architecture-neutral, right? Personally I am leaning toward ports, because it uses the right language for dependency checking (make), it doesn't require packages (great for embryonic distros that don't have everything in packages). Portage OTOH looks like it has transactional features ports does not. I don't want to get mired in trying to design The Package System To End All Package Systems
I've finally had it: until slashdot gets article moderation, I am not coming back.
true but those error messages are usefull to the developper, not the users. Some error messages will provide usefull information to crackers like a database name, the path to a file, etc. I believe that's why they choose to use try/catch.
I am not a NetBSD user, but I love FreeBSD like Madonna loves dick. Debian's pkgs are interminably behind the curve relative to the rest of Linux-land and this would only serve to slow down NetBSD's acceptance. As far as BSDs go, NetBSD aims for hardware-indpedence/multiple platform acceptance. It is already behind the curve as far as pkgs go. The Debian "keep it stable at the cost of progress" mentality might hurt NetBSD. Please keep these people away. They might come after FreeBSD and really dick up things. Luckily, OpenBSD has Theo -- who is just plain mean as shit -- to protect the very important security work that is done over there. I don't see Hubbard as such a crusader to stop the "everything-that-is-bad-about-linux" crowd from poking their heads in.
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
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.
GPL Deconstructed
How is the BSD license more restrictive? It allows for free and non-free use. It is actually more open than the GPL and probably better for students as it allows them the freedom to carry their work away from school. Does the GPL do this?
Comparing it to Windows will be a moot point, since El Dorado is going to have a 40% larger code base than XP.
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.