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

Re:bsd

[alan_d_post]

I believe you have been trolled . . . .

It is time to take a deep breath, relax, and install NetBSD.

Re:Have the init scripts been fixed yet?

[flynn_nrg]

Please, take your time to study how the NetBSD rc system works. It has all the advantages of sysV style init scritps, but none of the disadvantages. Let's say I install apache via the pkgsrc system. Now all I have to do is add apache=YES in my /etc/rc.conf file and the system will automagically start apache at boot time. Of course I can start or stop it manually should I have the need to do so with a simple /etc/rc.d/apache [start|stop]

FWIW, FreeBSD 5.0 will feature this same system, Gordon Tetlow and others are working on a port of NetBSD's script system to FreeBSD.

"Supported" systems

[00_NOP]

Not wanting to start a religious war and all that... but although NetBSD lists the Dreamcast as supported. the support is pretty poor: no sound, no lightgun, no rumblepak, no mouse, no X windows, no vmu. All of these are supported in LinuxDC.

The 'real' easy answer.

[Anonymous Coward]

NetBSD is the one without any ported desktop applications

OpenBSD is the one that can't do SMP.

FreeBSD is the one Mac users and fags (usually one in the same) flock to.

Heh. NetBSD actually has a surprising number of ports- or 'packages,' as they call both make skeletons for source builds and binary tarballs; I just installed NetBSD (and upgraded today, whee) for my own sick reasons, and was surprised to discover how much software was available; the 'pkgsrc' tree works not only on every NetBSD architecture, but Solaris and Darwin as well- rather surprising, coming from FreeBSD. It also has sane update/upgrade targets, something FreeBSD's only just copied with portupgrade.

The nice thing is that NetBSD installs package files to /usr/pkg, or a configurable path (/usr/local/pkg would really make more sense), freeing up /usr/local/bin and the like for sysadmin tweaking. FreeBSD users will know what a mess /usr/local/bin becomes with a reasonable load of software, and how annoying it'd be to install a homebuilt binary there and forget about it.

NetBSD also tends to attract features from all-comers, meaning it gets some nifty stuff- USB support, new filesystems, various RAID features first. It also means NetBSD users end up risking stability with these first. ;)

As OpenBSD was forked from NetBSD, neither have SMP just yet. OpenBSD is "the one you install if you want a reasonable guarantee of security for the first hours of configuration." Now that all BSD distros have adopted some of the basic tenets of the OpenBSD mindset- turning off unnecessary services in the base install- it's less of an issue, but even with the recent OpenSSH holes, there's something to be said for the audited kernel and userland. OpenBSD is what you run on your router/NAT/VPN-service box, don't bother with it as a desktop unless you Need To Be L33t. (It does make a good learner's system, given its relative adherence to simplicity, but that's supposed to be NetBSD's department, and it probably would be less painful.)

FreeBSD is 'the one everyone uses.' It's a descendent of 386BSD, the first post-AT&T-lawsuit project to take a stab at a free BSD distribution. (NetBSD followed shortly, and the release of new sources brought both to the same underpinnings.) Today, it's a mishmash of features from the other two, but while NetBSD's goal is "Run on Everything, Try out Everything," and OpenBSD's is "Secure by Default," FreeBSD tries (with varying success) to be a sort of stable and predictable platform for the average user. Given the 386BSD history, x86 has always been the platform of choice, and the kernel features some tweaks in that direction which the other BSDs may have missed. It's the One That Supports SMP, and The One That Will Support SMP Much Better with the upcoming release of 5.0.

Each BSD works on a different development cycle, and each's kernel evolves with the distribution, rather than separately. NetBSD goes on a two-year cycle, if I understand correctly, with each release branch frozen immediately (barring security patches, which can occasionally inspire point releases, as seen with 1.5.1, 1.5.2, 1.5.3); OpenBSD sticks to a release every 6 months- 3.0 was just 'what happened after 2.9.' FreeBSD forks on major version numbers, running an evolving -STABLE branch (4.0, 4.1 .. 4.7, 4-STABLE) with features getting rolled back and forth between those trees and the development sources; major architectural changes are saved for version jumps, as seen in the huge improvements between 3.x and 4.x, and the introduction of KSE and SMPng for 5.x)

Darwin is the bastard child maintained by Apple, using a Mach kernel, FreeBSD userland, NetBSD pkgsrc, and whatever else is deemed to best suit OS X. It's 'fun' for a certain class of developer, but the mention of Mach should prove it's best left to the insane. If you'd want Darwin, you may as well buy a Mac and enjoy the benefits of the Quartz graphics system.

Re:The 'real' easy answer.

[Fweeky]

FreeBSD users will know what a mess /usr/local/bin becomes with a reasonable load of software, and how annoying it'd be to install a homebuilt binary there and forget about it.

echo "LOCALBASE = /usr/pkg" >>/etc/make.conf

Just be prepared to uncover the odd LOCALBASE cleanliness bug.

lost in the noise

[g4dget]

The *BSD kernels may be a little more reliable and simple, and the Linux kernel may support more drivers, but it seems to me the differences are pretty much lost in the noise.

I think Jobs had the right idea when he picked Mach as the basis for NeXTStep: he wanted a kernel that looked like UNIX from the outside but that was much more componentized than the UNIX kernels of the time, or BSD/Linux today. I don't know whether Mach/Darwin is the best choice for that, but in general, I think it's where open source needs to go.

After all, we don't recompile Bash or dynamically load libraries into Bash every time someone comes out with a new command line program. We shouldn't have to do that either for a new file system type, networking protocol, or driver. And expending much time on a BSD/Linux rivalry isn't going to address such issues.

Re:lost in the noise

[g4dget]

No, but you could, if you needed it to be a shell builtin for performance or other reasons.

Indeed. When I do need the performance, it would be nice to be able to load modules dynamically. But for something like IPsec, PPP, UFS, ISO9660, CMOS, etc., I don't need the performance; maybe you do on your big server, but I don't, on my little laptop. As for "other reasons", there shouldn't be any reason other than performance to load something dynamically.

You still have to write and compile something - why not a kernel module?

Because, empirically, kernel modules seem to end up being very dependent on kernel versions; if they weren't, distributions like Debian wouldn't ship with different collections of most kernel modules for each kernel, they would ship with one kernel module per package for each function/driver, without much of a notion of a "kernel version".

Another reason is that one bug in one kernel modules brings down the whole thing. That's unnecessary and makes driver development a huge pain.

Not that OS X is actually a microkernel OS!

I made no claims about what it is or even whether it is a good architecture. What I claimed was that Jobs correctly identified a problem and tried to address it as best as possible with the software available at the time.

And I think he actually succeeded much more than Linux did in this particular regard: kernel extensions on OS X work much better than on Linux.

(Jobs also correctly identified the problem with C/C++ GUI toolkits and his solution, Objective-C with DisplayPostscript, probably also was the best technical compromise at the time, but I think that choice hasn't turned out as well as his choice for kernel--OpenStep and Cocoa ended up with most of the same problems as other GUI toolkits.)

Re:lost in the noise

[be-fan]

Actually, Darwin is about half as fast as Linux on the same hardware for basic kernel operations (mmap, open, etc). And its subsystems (especially the VM) aren't anything to brag about in comparison to their counterparts in FreeBSD and NetBSD.

The Secret to BSD Trolls

[dirtyhippie]

I just figured it out!

The Secret to BSD Trolls! ...Is that they are actually written by BSD users themselves, in an effort to keep lamoid linux users from making statements on their mailing lists like:

- FreeBSD is my favorite linux distro!

- How do I copy stuff under BSD? I tried clicking
all over the place, but I don't see a cursor or
anything.

- I know the install was completely self
explanatory and all, but I really prefer
Mandrake/Redhat's GUI installation. Can you
give me pointers on porting it? Oh yeah, I want
that little penguin, errr, i mean daemon screen
on boot too. Who needs kernel messages?

- When I try to build a port, and it says
checksum mismatch, how do I override it?

- OpenBSD is elite. No one can hack me! Oh yeah.
I also forgot my root password, can someone
help? My IP is x.x.x.x...

- I just installed NetBSD on my { insert old or
obscure hardware here }, but I can't play Doom
under an i386 emulator running linux emulation
of wine. Why?

- How will running "rm -rf /*" fix my problem
again?

Keep up the good work, guys! :-) Hope I'm not giving away your secret!

Peace,
DH

Yeehaw! Time to lose some karma!

Re:*BSD is dying

[Gordonjcp]

It's official; Netcraft confirms: "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying

One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered "*BSD is dying" trolls community when IDC confirmed that "*BSD is dying" trolls market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that "*BSD is dying" trolls has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. "*BSD is dying" trolls are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last [samag.com] in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.

You don't need to be a Kreskin [amazingkreskin.com] to predict "*BSD is dying" trolls's future. The hand writing is on the wall: "*BSD is dying" trolls faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for "*BSD is dying" trolls because "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying. Things are looking very bad for "*BSD is dying" trolls. As many of us are already aware, "*BSD is dying" trolls continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.

All major surveys show that "*BSD is dying" trolls has steadily declined in market share. "*BSD is dying" trolls are very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If "*BSD is dying" trolls are to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. "*BSD is dying" trolls continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, "*BSD is dying" trolls are dead.

Fact: "*BSD is dying" trolls are dying.

Learning about Unix.

[saintlupus]

I think that NetBSD is possibly the best system for a newbie who really _wants_ to learn Unix, if only because it's so bare-boned that you have to figure out the whole thing to get any work done.

My first experience with it was on an old Quadra 700 Macintosh, which I installed NetBSD 1.4.something on to try and get used to using a command line. Outside of the sun boxen at the college I attended, I hadn't used a shell prompt before, but I wanted to figure out how to get things done before OS X came out.

Well, NetBSD isn't what I'd call "user friendly," especially the installer for the Mac68k port. But I managed to figure it out, and by bothering the hell out of the local Linux and Solaris geeks, I managed to get everything up and running properly.

By the time OS X came out, I wasn't prepared to give up the BSDs I've come to appreciate - so I've got a NetBSD box, one for OpenBSD, and one for FreeBSD on my network. They're all hand-configured to the purposes I need them for. And all that time meant that I have a much better grasp of how my systems fit together than any of the l33t haX0rs at work with their Mandrake installs and their deep fear of the command line.

In short, if you want to learn a particular distros tools, install some flavor of Linux and use the administration stuff that comes with it. But if you want knowledge that bridges between Unix variants, give NetBSD a shot. You'll be pleasantly surprised.

--saint

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.