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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."
lol, NO COMMENTS?
it's been like several hours. one would think there would at least be an fp, bsd is dying...something...
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 ;)
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD 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 has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
Going by these comments it is as dead as OS/2.
How many people use it? 100 worldwide?
So sad, and soooo funny.
Well, I'm surprised by the figures I read here. I use netBSD since september last year and it's been a good experience ever since. It gave me what I was looking for on Linux, a small footprint after the installation and I guess that's not what linux is about anymore, hence the 5-7 CD-set on most of the distributions. Burning just another set of iso's just to give another linux-flavour a try isn't my idea of efficiency. But hey, we all have fat pipes and fat systems, haven't we? So who cares about a small footprint and a 5 iso download? Well, I do... In the meantime I'll be happy with my netBSD bootfloppy and a ftp-install to match.
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."
Guess all the NetBSD users out there are too busy at work
to bother making any postings here. Oh well, for them, I'll
write this:
NetBSD Rulz!!!!!
When it supports processors faster than 100 MHz
Nice, small, clean system, which is consistent across loads of architectures. Love it.
Anyway, if anyone is reading this page, will there be any improvements to Sushi? That's the little setup tool for NetBSD -- nice boxes/windows/text-based affair, but it was full of bugs and glitches in the first 1.6 release.
Something smells like a corpse. Better bury it quick. It is stinking up the place.
What version of XFree will this release ship with? I need 4.3 for my video card (radeon 9000) and would love to switch to netbsd from freebsd (i'm using the 4.2.99.4 binaries now).
People tend to think of NetBSD as only good for obscure architectures and not for any serious systems. In my experience this is far from true.
/usr/pkg for package placement, making it very clear what is built from pkgsrc or installed as a package. This leaves /usr/local available for you for packages build and installed outside of the package system.
My experience with NetBSD has actually only been with i386 platforms, and I've been very impressed. It is actually my preferred UNIX (over Open/FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris). I find the default install to be nice and minimal, and the packaging system layout to be very clean and effective.
I like the way NetBSD uses
Upgrades of NetBSD are also very smooth, both binary and source, with security patches released nearly instantly.
A lot of the innovation in the BSD's is actually originated by NetBSD (which has a team of excellent developers), then incorporated in by the other BSD's, taking much of the credit from their less popular counterpart.
Anyways, after that rant, give it a try, you won't be disappointed!
I have a 386DX-20 with an 80MB hard drive and 4MB of RAM. It's an IBM PS/2, meaning it has an MCA bus, and all the parts on it work just fine (most of the time. The disk drive (only input into the system other than mouse+kb) flakes sometimes). It'll run DOS 5 and works just fine with Windows 3.1 too.
Needless to say, this is not good enough. I'm convinced that this will run some sort of *nix, and have been looking for a while on what to (attempt to) put on it. I've heard accounts of NetBSD being put on a system this small, but have never read where anyone actually did it. Anyone have success putting it on a system this small?
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.
NetBSD is for people who love how Unix is suppose to work; Linux is for people that hate Microsoft.
Just to make a change from the usual 32/64 bit clique, a NetBSD port to the 36bit PDP10 is underway...p 10/2002/09/19 /0000.html
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-pd