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NetBSD 1.6.1 Release Process Has Begun
jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been branched
and the release engineering process has begun. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance
(or patch) release for users of NetBSD 1.6, not to be confused with
NetBSD-current (which will become the next major release). As a patch release, it is not branched off the head of the CVS source tree, but instead includes all security fixes and patches applied to the 1.6 branch. A complete list of changes since 1.6 is available in src/doc/CHANGES-1.6.1 of
the branch, which can be checked out by passing the -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 flag to the cvs command: cvs -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 co src.
Details on the release cycle and status information is available from www.netbsd.org/releng/releng-1.6.html."
Hearken unto me, O children of Slashdot:
End your torture at the hands of lesser OSes; try NetBSD today! (or whenever 1.6.1 is properly released ;)
In the above, it should read 'NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged', not branched. Sorry for the confusion.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
Or 64bit. Like the NetBSD/alpha-, NetBSD/sh5-, NetBSD/sparc64- or NetBSD/x86_64-Ports.
-- "Tradition is the illusion of permanence."
In my computing experience, I have used NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. I can't stand FreeBSD's installation process. I always end up going in a loop with assigning disks or labels. The ports collection works most of the time, but is damn annoying when it doesn't. OpenBSD's installation is fine, but post-install it's a pain getting everything up to the point of functionality. NetBSD strikes a good balance between the two, with the purely text-based installer but also a functional post-install.
I am also happy knowing that all my non-SMP servers can be running the same OS, no matter if they are Intel, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, VAX, or otherwise. Hardware age doesn't matter, either. I use an old 486DX with 32MB of RAM as a DNS/DHCP/SMTP/IMAP/LDAP server for a network, and it handles the load beautifully.
I remember I once had an errant Perl script that kept on spawning itself, sucked all the available memory, and pegged the CPU load average to around 70. It was slow, but I managed to log in, kill all the Perl scripts, and everything returned to normal instantly. No crash, no fallout. I'd like to see Windoze 2000 (or even Linux) do that!
As another anecdote from my work at my school, I have a professor who, while on our FreeBSD 4.6.2 server, forgot to grep for nfsd in an awk script when he was trying to kill and restart NFS. This killed all the processes on the server, and left it without init, basically in an unusable state. I can recall doing that in NetBSD, and it appears that there is a kernel function that checks that init is still running and will respawn it if it dies, and then place the machine in single-user mode. I would still have had to run over to the science building and get things going again, but our uptime would have been preserved, and I would have been able to do administrative work immediately.
It's a pity that NetBSD doesn't have more users than it does. It has got to be one of the most capable open-source OSs, and I certainly prefer it over some commercial UNIXs such as AIX.