Debian NetBSD for Sparc

Dan writes "Matthew Garrett has demonstrated his success in building a Debian operating system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux. Folks working on the project say that porting Debian to the NetBSD kernel increases the number of platforms that can run a Debian-based operating system."

Comments

Genesis

[mirko]

In the begining
There was nothing
then God said :
apt-get install light

Re:Genesis

[Anonymous Coward]

thought it was apt-get install man,
packages required: light, water-land, animals, birds, fish, plants, earth, etc...
and he downloaded and installed for 6 days, on the 7th he said "oh, its finally done."

and now we wait for the day he types
>apt-get remove satan
>dpkg-reconfigure reality

Re:Genesis

[ajs]

thought it was apt-get install man,
packages required: light, water-land, animals, birds, fish, plants, earth, etc...
and he downloaded and installed for 6 days, on the 7th he said "oh, its finally done."

Hmm, I think there was something about crashing on the 7th day... Of course, I may be mis-translating ;-)

what makes it debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

i thought debian was a linux distro. if they make a distro for something other than linux, does that mean its done by the same people, with the same principle behind it, or something like that
or am i jsut really missing the point of what a distro is?

Re:what makes it debian?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you read the Debian homepage you will see that Debian is striving to provide a platform-agnostic, kernel-agnostic operation system environment.

As well as Debian GNU/Linux there is already Debian GNU/Hurd.

Debian/NetBSD is an effort to provide the NetBSD kernel with the Debian software utilities. I for one can't wait.

You're not missing the point of what a distro is, this is something the Debian folk want to do.

Re:what makes it debian?

[sydb]

Well, it's Debian GNU/Hurd when Hurd is the kernel, so I see no reason why Debian GNU/NetBSD is not acceptable when the NetBSD kernel is used.

There's no 'claiming ownership' of anyone's work involved in this naming convention. The slash is a separator between 'majority OS stakeholder' and 'kernel'.

Even if you don't agree that GNU is a 'majority OS stakeholder' in terms of lines of code, I would argue that they are 'majority OS stakeholder' in that they defined and promoted a philosophy on top of which a community of developers, a body of software and a community of users has been built.

You've got to admire these guys

[rf0]

NetBSD can run on more platforms than you can shake a stick at. Also with the ability to run IRIX binaries as well gives it a bit more depth/reach. Just shows what portable code can do. Anyway time to boot my Dreamcast :)

Rus

Re:You've got to admire these guys

[SuperCal]

"can run on more platforms than you can shake a stick at",

After shakeing a stick at my XBox, I can say without reservation, that while net BSD will run on many many systems, it will not run on more platforms than one can shake a stick at.


The previous sentence is preposition terminated.

Yes, more support...

[Jerk City Troll]

...for when I argue against "Debian sucks because it's Linux" *BSD people. Debian is a "universal" operating system (well, let's say "packaging system") -- it's is not strictly Linux. Debian != Linux

On this topic, I remember reading a while back about a Debian FreeBSD project. Anyone know the status of that?

Debian actually runs on sparc.

[rmadmin]

I had debian installed on my UltraAXI and it ran pretty good. NetBSD ran pretty good on it too. Not to get off topic, but UltraSparcs lack variety. Not many linux distros still support Ultra ports well (Redhat stopped at 6.2, MDK stopped at 7.1?, Debian is current!, Gentoo doesn't support X on Ultra (WTF, Idiots) Slack stopped at 6.x? and Splack just isn't bleeding edge). Back on topic, I'm glad to see progress. I'm not into OS flame wars, but I do like things about Debian (apt, dur), and NetBSD (mad portability), so I'm definately going to have to play with this. :-)

Re:Debian actually runs on sparc.

[spinlocked]

...but UltraSparcs lack variety. Not many linux distros still support Ultra ports well...

That's due to lack of demand, the general public can't afford new Sun hardware (except for the crappy SunBlade workstations and the sub $1000 servers, which are basically PC's anyway) and the enterprise needs proper support. A port of RedHat9 would be almost unusable on older SPARC boxes - it's slow enough on my 1GHz Athlon.

Would you run Linux on a brand new Apple PowerBook, or would you stick to MacOSX? - a nice looking, modern OS which is tuned for the hardware platform, supports all of it's features, comes with a bunch of decent apps and is well supported by the vendor. Ditto Solaris on Sun hardware. Once you get to know it Solaris is a beautifully elegant and technically excellent OS. Even more so on the mid-range and high-end boxes, where it's maturity and scalability really shine.

Linux is maturing into a modern, fully featured UNIX which rivals Solaris in bloat. Lack of bloat was one of it's earlier strengths on low-end SPARC desktop hardware, there seems little point in using it these days, especially since there are so few SPARC/Linux applications.

Debian

[chevelleSS]

It is great to see Debian running on everything known to man.. However I have never understood why they are so far behind other distributions?

Stability

[rf0]

Debian is all about stability. The main branch, Woody, had old packages but they are know to work. You don't get a lot of crashes, things just work. You will find debian people put a lot of work into configs and such like, make sure things interact with each other.

For example say I install a new Apache Modules there are scripts that will automatically update my httpd.conf rather than just writing over it. To get a Debian system up and running is quick and easy as 99% of the tweaking has been done.

Even though things are old they do make sure they are secure. If there is an exploit you can upgrade your system by just doing

apt-get update
apt-get upgrade.

Thats it. Auto download and patch of affected programs

However there is also another unstable branch, Sarge IIRC, which has cutting edge stuff. Latest version of everything. However as implied by its name it could just get up and crash at any moment.

Hope that helps

Rus

Re:Stability

[blonde rser]

However as implied by its name it could just get up and crash at any moment.

This is a common misinterpretatioin of the branches in debian. When the 'sid' branch is refered to as 'unstable' it is referring to how stable the package is, not how stable systems that install the branch are. Namely a branch is stable/unstable depending on how often the packages change: in Woody you don't have to worry about things changing and upgrading very often. This is an advantage to a great amount of people. But a systems stability is measured by a variety of things: how often programs seg fault, uptime, performance bugs, etc. I would say more often than not the testing/unstable branches of debian make for more stable systems. For desktop one need only look at the XFree86 version offered in each branch to see this.

Yes I am aware that instability of code does have an effect on instability of a system due to less opportunity for testing and etc. But in general people greatly over value this effect. I think people do this for two reasons. The logic is easy to understand and people like to believe what they can understand. And the name leads people to a first conclusion and people like to stay with their first conclusion.

Re:Stability

[dasunt]

First of all, I must state that Debian isn't the most newbie friendly distribution out there, although, some non-newbie friendly aspects, such as dselect is slated for replacement in the next release.

That being said, Debian is one of the easiest systems to configure, *if* you know what you are doing. (If you don't know what you are doing, all operating systems are hard to configure - some just guess better at what you want). The packaging support is excellent, and as the OP said, the installation scripts are rather refined for the most part.

However, the OP has one thing wrong about Debian - there are usually 3, (sometimes 4) branches out there. First branch is the stable branch, and its codenamed "woody" in this release. The second branch is the testing branch, codenamed "sarge". The third branch is unstable, and is forever known as "sid" (after the boy next door in Toy Story who liked to break toys). Packages/updates first appear in sid/unstable, then, after a short period of testing to make sure nothing breaks, they move to sarge/testing. Sarge/testing tries to keep its numbers of bugs low, so its always a good release candidate. Woody/stable has no new packages or updates, save for back-ported bug fixes. (The Debian project is rather good at getting quick bug fixes, btw). When the Debian project is close to a release, sarge will be frozen, a new testing branch will be made, and for a short period of time, there will be four branches in existance.

Several complaints are frequently heard about debian. One of the most common ones is that the stable distribution tends to have older packages, which is very, very true. The goal for the "official" Debian stable release isn't to have the newest collection of packages, but the most tested and stable collection of packages. Another complaint is the selection of packages out there, and the Debian package requirements. A vanilla Debian install, with no non-free sources, tends to be a rather good example of FOSS. Again, this has to do with the Debian philosophy (and it makes the maintainance of packages easier). Complaining that Debian doesn't have Cool-Binary-Nonfree-Package-XYZ is like complaining that iptables doesn't run on windows.

Other then the package management, the one area where Debian really, truly shines (IMHO), is the wide collection of ports out there, and that Debian (unlike many other distributions out there) does not treat non-x86 users as lower-class citizens. Woody runs on (IIRC) 11 different hardware architectures. That impresses me. I can go out, right now, find an old Alpha, Sparc, m68k or a new Itanium, and can run the latest Debian release on it, and for the most part, it will act like the same release on my x86 laptop. When the AMD64 CPUs are widely available, I'm expecting that Debian will quickly jump over to supporting that architecture.

Oh, and Debian tends to have a wonderful user community. :)

How about BSD on Linux?

[david.given]

What I would love to see is a BSD userland running on a Linux kernel. The BSD userland is so elegant and modular --- I really love the way you can rebuild everything with just one command. OTOH, the Linux kernel has much better hardware support and has some nice features like an automatically sized buffer cache (which I was amazed to discover OpenBSD doesn't, or didn't, support).

One of Linux' big problems is a lack of modularity. Building an entire Linux system, from scratch, is an incredible pain; you have to buy books to explain how. This is particularly annoying when, say, you're building a Linux appliance and want to tweak things. You want to compile with -m686? On BSD you just change one setting, run one makefile and everything rebuilds. On Linux you have to configure a zillion packages independantly.

OTOH, one of BSD's big problems is hardware. I have a Hauppauge Nova-T DVB card. Is it supported under BSD? Need you ask? (Although, surprisingly, BT8x8-based TV cards are supported by OpenBSD.) I have a long-term project to build a PVR. If I could use BSD, I'd go for it like a shot --- it's just so much easier to configure. As it is, I have to go for Linux, which is so much of a pain that I haven't been able to muster the energy to get started yet...

Will this make "GNU/Linux" more acceptable?

[renehollan]

As greater mixing and matching of operating system (minus kernel) and kernel happens, perhaps designations like GNU/Linux will be more acceptable, for their technical precision.

However, then, it wouldn't be "Debian/NetBSD" but rather "Debian GNU/NetBSD" (Debian, at least, having already accepted the GNU/Linux moniker).

I really think there are practical advantages to distinguishing between 1) kernel, 2) "everything else", i.e. portable packages ported to run on that kernel, and with each other, and 3) who did the porting/distribution bundling.

Of course, when there is only one varient of one of those three components, i.e. the bits and pieces of what would be GNU, we tend to leave it out, as cumbersome, redundant, and unwieldly, RMS protests of the need to pay hommage (or at least use terminology that conveys GNU roots) notwithstanding. Thus, "Red Hat Linux": there is no other kind of "Linux" packaged by Red Hat (and since they did the bundling, they get to call it pretty much whatever they want (personally, I would have preferred "Up Yours, MS"/OS, but anyway...)), and no techical need for a "Red Hat GNU/Linux" designation.

RMS may want to see us embrace a phisosophical basis for free software, but, without the economic benefits that open source exemplifies, I doubt free software would have the contributions it does. Similarly, without a technical argument for "GNU/Linux", the moniker will likely not be popular. It would be nice, though, if the technical argument were there, so the philosophy and history could get some recognition and representation in common use.

I expect that might come in niche markets: where Linux is combined with severly scaled down portions of GNU, and non-GNU software, particularly in the embedded market: look at BusyBox -- a combination of utilities in a single executible for space reasons. We are seeing attempts to standardize "Linux" for the desktop (LSB), as well as for the embedded space. I, for one, wouldn't mind seeing LSB (Linux Standard Base) become GSB (GNU Standard Base), with LSB dealing solely with a kernel standard, in this vein.

O.K. ObGNU/Linux rant over.

Distros vs kernels

[robbo]

Are we beginning to see kernel-independence in the major distros? Wouldn't it be cool if at install time we could select our kernel from a pull down menu:

• Linux
  
• Open/Free/NetBSD
  
• AIX
  
• OS/2
  
• Win2k
  
• DOS
  
• etc,etc.
  

Come to think of it, on many levels GNU/FSF has led the charge. Look at how many GPL'ed programs already run on several OS'es. I mean, all that really matters is that nethack works on your os of choice, right?

I wonder how long before we see RedHat XVII for windows..

switching kernels

[munro]

Maybe this will make people stop and think about what "linux" actually is, and where else credit might be due. If you switch out that component, what do you have?

Of course the marketing machine likes the word linux quite a lot, it's catchy, it has panache, it sells, which is why people say things like "wow, how did you get that linux software running on MacOS?" when refering to things like bash, gcc or gnome apps.

I've noticed a trend...

[k03 kalle]

Everyone always complains and bitches about what OS is better, whos has the l33ter OS, who is running the most current kernel, and then proceed to get in bitter flame wars over which OS is better.

This guy has created a product to satisfy one thing for him, which is his curiousity. Isn't that good enough these days? A project based on curiousity should be respected on general the general premise that something creative is being done in the name of innovation.

Maybe if we stopped wasting time arguing and insulting each other about what OS we run, and spend all that time doing something productive like this man has done, we will actually accomplish every goal we set.

Just a thought.

-kalle

Re:BSD is just as equally a hodgepodge

[LizardKing]

You'll find quite a bit of GNU software on a default FreeBSD install

Yes, but not so much in a NetBSD install. To take your example of tar(1) for instance, that's now handled by NetBSD's pax(1). The way things are going, the toolchain will be the only GNU software on Net eventually.

Chris