NetBSD 1.6 Released

BSD Forums writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty two different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6 release contains complete binary releases for thirty nine different system architectures. The thirteen remaining are not fully supported at this time and are thus not part of the binary distribution." hubertf adds some important notes: "Many of the FTP Mirrors are now carrying the NetBSD 1.6 distribution. Please try to use the NetBSD FTP Mirror Site closest to you. ... Czech, German, French, Japanese, Polish, Portugese , Russian, Spanish and Swedish language translations of the NetBSD 1.6 release announcement are available." The NetBSD packages collection now includes over 3000 pieces of software, including KDE3, OpenOffice and many more of the usual suspects.

Comments

I r dumb :-/

[Zakabog]

I was just wondering, what's the difference between OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD? I have FreeBSD on one computer (just wanted to learn a new OS and I already have linux on a bunch of my computers). When I picked which BSD I wanted I just figured I'd go with FreeBSD since I hear about it alot. Now I'm beginning to wonder, what's the difference (really, I don't have a clue.) Sorry that this is a bit off topic I just don't want to be kicked from some #bsd channels for asking such a stupid question.

Ignorant question

[Anonymous Coward]

OK, I could Google for this, but could someone with wisdom enlighten me with a summary or some well chosen links ...

How does NetBSD compare with Linux in terms of:

• Everyday use - ie command line syntax, configuration...
• What it's good for - in particular, is it good for desktop use(since it runs KDE)?
• Advantages and disadvantages

Re:Ponderances

[GigsVT]

You can technically make a beowulf cluster out of anything that supports openssh that you can compile the pieces of your program for.

A simple beowulf cluster is just a shell script that does some sshing to each client and compiling and running the job to be run, combine that with another trivial script to scp files over, and that's it.

clusterrun.sh:
ssh cluster@192.168.0.1 $1
ssh cluster@192.168.0.2 $1 ...
ssh cluster@192.168.0.n $1

clustercopy.sh
scp $1 cluster@192.168.0.1:$2
scp $1 cluster@192.168.0.2:$2 ...
scp $1 cluster@192.168.0.n:$2

$ ./clustercopy.sh mysource.c '/home/cluster/work'
$ ./clusterrun.sh 'gcc /home/cluster/work/mysource.c'
$ ./clusterrun.sh '/home/cluster/work/a.out'

Anyway, that's all there is to it.

Here are the differences...

[Cadre]

I was just wondering, what's the difference between OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD?

TedU recently posted in comp.unix.bsd.openbsd.misc the answer to this question:

"What's the difference?" doesn't count as a specific question.

FreeBSD has tcsh installed as /bin/csh. OpenBSD and NetBSD don't. NetBSD runs on a Cobalt Qube2. OpenBSD and FreeBSD don't. OpenBSD can encrypt swap. NetBSD and FreeBSD don't.

I hope that explains the differences you were interested in.

Re:Learning about Unix.

[dohcvtec]

Indeed, NetBSD is quite bare-boned, at least that's what I've noticed from the few installs I've done. Everyone says how bare-bones OpenBSD is, but it's actually quite full-featured compared to the other BSDs and Linux distributions. With OpenBSD, you really have a full-featured general-purpose server right out of the box (just edit rc.conf to suit) whereas NetBSD does require more in-depth configuration. But it's a great learning experience, and once you're done you know exactly what's on the machine and what it's doing. By the way, I find NetBSD to be a screamingly fast OS. Even more so than FreeBSD. Given the similarity among the BSDs, it's surprising that performance differences are so noticeable.