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The NetBSD Organization
A reader writes: "Stumbled across a nice article about how the NetBSD Project is organized and some interesting ways users can help out." Good stuff, for those who want to get involved.
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There is a NetBSD Live! CD, but I haven't tried it nor heard about it for a while.
Prescriptive grammar:linguistics
It's probably not as elegant or as well known as Beowulf clustering, but it has been done :)
- SMP support? Who cares? Not on the desktop at least. I'm deperately trying to get a dual system and no shop in my neighborhood is *willing* to deliver one!
- I give you that one
- Having both experience with Slackware and BSD (OpenBSD specifically), there is not much difference in configging the systems. Do some greps and you're on your way in no time. Don't forget that Slackware is the Linux that is closest to BSD (considering configuration).
- Granted... as a Java developper I am disappointed. Yes, my Mac OS X (a BSD after all) doesn't seem to have Java problems.
- Common problem with many companies... As if Windows support was great... Tsss... As you say "Whatever"
Look, I am far from a BSD fanatic. What I think is that the original parent poster was going for a +5, Funny. Unfortunately he was modded to Interesting. I think that BSD people are most of the time quiet in the back, while Linux people are yelling at about anyone they can (including the harmless BSD people in the back).What are some platforms that NetBSD runs on but Linux doesn't?
Mac68k! My Quadra 650's been running as NAT for a couple of years. Took over from my old IIci.
The closest thing to Linux on old Mac 68k hardware is MKLinux and that's really not being developed any more. NetBSD is current!
I drank what? -- Socrates
NetBSD is much, much more portable than 'Linux' if you refer to an Operating System, and not just a Kernal. 'NetBSD' represents a kernal and a complete base userland, all under one unified seamless source tree. Linux, on the other hand, is a kernal, and any number of different utilities and packages lumped together. There are dozens of versions of 'Linux' just for the x86, let alone the variations when you move from one architecture to another, whereas there is one NetBSD port for each platform, and all the NetBSD ports consist of base userlands compiled from the same source tree.
/etc directory from a NetBSD 1.6 Sparc machine and expand it into the /etc directory of any x86 or 68000 or MIPS or PPC NetBSD 1.6 machine and it will just work.
Hope this makes sense. What it means in the final analysis is that I can (almost) tar up the
Damn, got here late, this story was posted while I was at work, and now probably no one will even see this comment :P
:) For those that like KDE or Gnome, they run, in fact NetBSD had KDE 3 way before Debian ever did. So what's the fuss?
:)). If BSD wasn't around, alot of other operating systems would have gotten crappier TCP/IP stacks, OSX would probably be in much worse shape than it is (if it ever came to light at all), and many other things. So what if a vendor doesn't want to release their changes? They paid their people to write the code, let them have it. The original source will always be around.
:)
Some random thoughts:
I've run Linux for about a year and a few months, I've run Debian *only* for about a year, and recently I started running NetBSD on my desktop machine (yes, my desktop machine, not my server, router, or toaster). I don't see why people denounce the BSD's for desktop use. Mozilla runs, Xterm's run, irc clients run, Gaim runs, XMMS runs, MPlayer runs, damn, everything on my desktop runs
I moved from Linux to BSD for many reasons, BSD is much more tightly integrated. You don't get the "oh, that's Jim Bob Developer's fault, email him", etc. You don't get manual pages that state "This manual page is old and incomplete - please read the GNU info manual". Of course opinions differ, but I _like_ man pages. I don't like info manuals.
Another factor is the license and attitude of the community as far as licensing. I don't really like the GPL. Sure, in a perfect world, all software would be free, there would be no evil corporations, and everyone could sit around reading fine literature and hiking out in the mountains - BUT that's not going to happen. If people want to make a product and sell it, let them do it (as long as they're not breaking the law
BSD init is alot cleaner than Sys V init - no piles of symlinks with funny names - and NetBSD's rc.d system takes care of Sys V init-style init scripts (/etc/rc.d/named restart). In fact, NetBSD's rc.d system is being ported to FreeBSD.
ipf is, IMO, a hell of a lot nicer than IPTables.
The whole base system is consistant, well documented, well thought out, and easy to use as long as you know how to read. The userbase is *much* more intelligent and experienced, on average, however it is quite a bit smaller, than Linux's.
For software - there is pkgsrc, which is like Free/OpenBSD's ports system, or Gentoo's portage. pkgsrc is kept very up to date, I'm running Mozilla 1.2.1 from it right now.
As far as being a server or firewall/router, NetBSD runs any OSS Server stuff great, and I'm sure most Linux-only stuff would run fine under emulation.
Any other NetBSD users out there in the wasteland that is Slashdot? Speak up!