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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."
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.
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.
Finally, it's the GNU/BSD distribution!
Am I a hipster-doofus?
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.
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.
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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
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)
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
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
How quickly we forget that stability is how many of us have sold Linux and *BSD to our employers, and that sudden rash changes and stability problems can leave those who require stability out in a lurch.
I see Debian's methodical approach to "current" as a good thing. Debian is about choice: if you want to be on the bleeding edge, please run unstable, we need the beta testers. If that's not your game, here's the stable tree. If you're really anal (or demented), here's the last version with security patches.
Sounds like a win for everybody. NetBSD gains more users (those who happen to get off on apt-get), Debian gets to work on porting to other kernels (a major cornerstone of the Debian project's defined goals), and everybody gets more choice.
Stay away from system administrators who think that the "latest" is always the "greatest."
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
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..."
My experience with STABLE and Debian GNU/Linux is that it is an outdated tree. FreeBSD pkgs, again in my experience, are right where they need to be, not outdated versions of common apps.
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.