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The NetBSD Organization

Posted by Hemos on from the how-to-become-part-of-it-all dept.

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.

2 of 163 comments (clear)

  1. Re:*BSD clusters? by questionlp · · Score: 5, Informative
    Nik Clayton of the FreeBSD project has a page with links to resources on clustering FreeBSD. Some of the links are dead, but the ones that work should give you enough information about clustering FreeBSD (and possibly other BSD operating systems).

    It's probably not as elegant or as well known as Beowulf clustering, but it has been done :)

  2. NetBSD! by mackstann · · Score: 4, Informative

    Damn, got here late, this story was posted while I was at work, and now probably no one will even see this comment :P

    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 :) 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?

    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 :)). 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.

    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! :)