NetBSD 1.5.3 Released, 1.6 On The Way

djcdplaya writes: "The highly portable NetBSD has reached a new milestone. OSNews.com is reporting that NetBSD 1.5.3 has been released. 1.5.3 was released correcting some bugs and adding some additional security. It also has improved device driver support." Part of the same announcement: "Please note that a new major release of NetBSD, version 1.6, is currently in beta test and should be released within a few weeks.

Comments

NetBSD for workstations?

[pschmied]

Wow, am I ever pleasantly surprised! I'm running a recent beta snapshot of NetBSD 1.6. What has really impressed me is the ownership the pkgsrc (similar to the ports, but with some extra goodies) people have taken of their ports.

The pkgsrc version of KDE 3.0.1 is _very_ high quality. Everything works as expected (except ksirc in the kmenu which must have the path specified).

Seriously folks, if you haven't looked at NetBSD because you wondered what its niche is, try it for your workstation. A lot of people recommend FreeBSD for workstations and servers, OpenBSD for firewalls, and NetBSD for your toaster that should be running *BSD. Don't believe it. NetBSD is a very comfortable workstation.

Some other things that have impressed me with NetBSD:

• The new init system. Starting services is logical and a snap
• How much better disk performance is than I remember it.
• /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86cfg. NetBSD is one of the few distributions that has really configured this to work. This program autodetects all of my hardware. All I need to do is set what screen resolutions I want. (right click on the monitor in the "screen" section.
• The very high quality of the pkgsrc collection. Everything that I have built has gone off without a hitch.
• ...there's a lot more folks.

NetBSD has really impressed me with this version (1.6), and it isn't even fully released. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in a robust, easily maintained workstation.

-Peter