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Chock Full o' NetBSD!
jschauma writes "While it's no Indigo
Espresso or a VAX Bar (though,
of course, there is NetBSD/sgimips and NetBSD/vax), at least you can log
in on a Mr.
Coffee. And while the JavaStation has been running NetBSD for a while,
full support is now completely in-tree:
NetBSD's Martin Husemann announced today
that he has fixed all outstanding issues with JavaStation support. This
means, that you can now run your JavaStation with a stock distribution of NetBSD/sparc. The JavaStation-NC
is a network computer class machine built on the microSPARC-IIep processor.
More information about the JavaStation can be found in the JavaStation
HOWTO, Martin's email to
the port-sparc mailing list and Valeriy E. Ushakov's paper 'Porting NetBSD to
JavaStation-NC.'"
I use a BSD system for my server, and I find that the ports collection is somthing that is extremely usefull for any system administrator that wants to save time.
I dont want to downlaod dependencies, I wan the computer to do it, and this is why it is so great.
thank you!
NetBSD's got my coffee maker on-lock, but it looks like my dishwasher will be safe for a little while longer. NetBSD should produce a full kitchen appliance set. I would buy it, just as long as I don't have to compile anything (recompiling your kernel on a blender takes surprisingly long).
I checked ebay, and i didnt find anything doing a search for the terms "mr coffee sparc". Also, the specs of these java machines is pretty poor, no better then most of the x86 boxes that were running around 95-96.
Lawyers, MBA's, RIAA? A jedi fears not these things!
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
49640+5012614
OSNews: By Eugenia Loli-Queru, submitted by Jan Schaumann
Slashdot: jschauma writes:
Not bad having your story submitted on both osnews and slashdot with just a half an hour apart:
Slashdot: 04:38AM
OSNews: 04:09:24
Don't use NetBSD myself, but I'm curious. What are the differences?
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
How can people say BSD is dying when it has a mascot like this?! Linux needs to get its act together if it's going to compete with the kind of hot chicks and gorgeous babes that BSD has to offer!
You just can't take Linux seriously when its fronted by losers like these. Would you buy software from them? I don't think so! You Linux groupies need to find some sexy girls like her! I mean just look at this girl! Doesn't she excite you? I know this little hottie puts me in need of a cold shower! This guy looks like he is about to cream his pants standing next to such a fox. As you can see, no man can resist this sexy little minx. I mean are you telling me you wouldn't like to get your hands on this ass?!
With sexy chicks like the lovely Ceren you could have people queuing up to buy open source products. Could you really refuse to buy a copy of BSD if she told you to? Come on, you must admit she is better than an overweight penguin or a gay looking goat! Don't you wish you could get one of these? Personally I know I would give my right arm to get this close to such a divine beauty!
Join the campaign for more cute open source babes today!
... read the topic as "BSD Chock Full o' NetBSD" and assume that, with the recent SCO/Linux issues, that NetBSD was going down the same war path as SCO but with BSD ?
[cartman] I feel as though SCO has warped my fragile little mind [/cartman]
chris at darkrock dot co dot uk
http colon slash slash www dot darkrock dot co dot uk
OSNews: By Eugenia Loli-Queru, submitted by Jan Schaumann
Even better is having your story posted by one of the hottest geek babes around.
-1 offtopic It's news content, not a work of art. Not everyone reads osnews.
I ran a benchmark on my quantum computer, now I can't find it anywhere!
It's always nice to see BSD being used in strange new ways. I like knowing that using it allows me to move to any platforms in the future without any difficulty. With uncertainty of the x86 platform and lack of portability of Linux distributions not to mention little drivers outside of the x86 realm, NetBSD makes a perfect platform. I'm not even going to mention the problems of the GPL license.
This is why BSD is so great. You have actual portability. It's truly open and free. Stable and secure. Much better code base then Linux with a better development group. The only area it's lacking is XFree86, but in time drivers will come around.
Fortress of Insanity
1. You can not play games on it.
There are games that are explicitly called BSDgames. Wanna play a game of hangman?
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
Why do you think that XFree86 does not run on netbsd? Hint: it does.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
That's just stupid. Hint: it does. And it runs on your kitchen sink, too.
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
No. Hint: there are binary packages. Lots of it.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
Bullshit. Netbsd has a Linux emulation layer.
10. It is dying.
The troll: It is lying.
Gotta go and spank the monkey. I really do have a geek-girl fetish...
Those run-of-the-mill silicone enhanced bimbos you see in net porn are just boring. I want a chick with brains, lots of booty and ordinary breasts.
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
Its stupid to compare like that. There are lots of versions of BSD just for the x86. NetBSD is a complete operating system package, so lets compare it to another orange. Take Debian for example.
Debain is a single, complete source tree, with probably as many architectures as NetBSD. And it works with more relevant ones such as Power4 and IA64.
Hope this makes sense. What it means in the final analysis is that I can (almost) tar up the
Yeah this obviously works with Debian as you'd expect. I don't see why you're touting it as anything special...
Why would one choose a particular one? And what differentiates BSD from Linux, and from Unix?
Use the BBC or Al-Jazeera.
hmmm. let's see... :-)
I have one of those lying down, unused... US$ 0.
ITX etc etc... US$ 200.
my bank account balance after paying household bills... US$ 0.
Which one?
Now THAT's insightful, informative and interesting.
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
Gentoo has had a similar system for quite a while already. Get with the times.
No need to read the parent. Another copy and past contributions that is years old. Fucking posting bots with too much time at hand.
You might want to check Ebay for Javastation rather than Mr Coffee. The latter was just the Sun code name for that particular Javastation (Krups being the other model IIRC).
The low spec is irrelevant on a machine like this, as it is nothing more than a thin client. I occasionally use a similar NCD ThinStar to login to one of the development servers at work. The client runs nothing more than WinCE and an X server, and all the apps are run on the server.
Chris
The first casualty on night 1 of Gulf War II was a Russian technician manning a Russian SAM radar installation for the Iraqis. IIRC, Bush even had a major strop at Putin half way through GWII about the crazy amount of Russian arms with *recent* dates of manufacture they were picking up from the bad guys.
I enjoy osnews and love alot of her writtings, but hot she is /not/. Way too greek looking, take that as you may.
*ducks*
Don't use NetBSD myself, but I'm curious. What are the differences?
Compared to Linux, there is only one NetBSD distribution. Companies like Wasabi Systems may offer branded copies of a release, but they contain the same software as the ISO images found on the NetBSD ftp servers. Another key difference is that the NetBSD project maintains an entire operating system, rather than Linus Torvalds and his loose knit team, who concern themseles almost exclusively with the Linux kernel itself. The NetBSD approach leads to a greater consistency and closer integration of kernel and userland. The downsides are that third party software which NetBSD relies on (gcc for instance), often takes a while to update to new releases while Linux'isms are worked out.
The NetBSD project is based around a core team, and peer review is encouraged before any changes are commited by non-core developers. This leads to a very consistent, clear code base that conforms to number of good coding practices. For instance, the NetBSD kernel drivers liberally use #defines for addresses and registers, while Linux doesn't frown on undocumented magic numbers. The Linux style makes supporting someone elses code a nightmare, unless you're very familiar with the hardware the driver is for.
The NetBSD project has a server farm dedicated to autobuilds, and it is easy for port masters (people concerned with NetBSD on a particular platform) to see when the development version has broken for their platform. In the Linux world, as long as x86 works the other platforms are considered secondary. This is why I run NetBSD on my non-x86 hardware - I got pissed off with Linux claiming fot support a platform when it had clearly been broken for months.
Finally, there is the pkgsrc collection. This allows me to install all the software I need, confident that it has been tested (and patched if necessary). The dependency tracking of pkgsrc makes the much vaunted Debian Linux look very ho-hum in comparison.
Chris
the last link is booby trapped with some kind of weird thing.
"Weapons sold during Gulf War II" You didn't even read the articles you linked too, did you? Read the article here and see that the U.S administration activly denies that the Governments of France, Germany, Russia or anyone else ever supplied weapons to Iraq after 1990.
OK, they've got NetBSD up on the JavaStation. This is no real suprise, "Of course it runs NetBSD".
A friend of mine just recently came into a bunch of Sunrays... Has anyone figured out if they're good for anything unless you've got a Sparc to hang them off of?
my sig's at the bottom of the page.
yeah, way to go, you really headed them off at the pass.
The question is not why you would install it, the question is why anybody would spend time making the port. The hardware has no future, and the only thing that makes it interesting from a geek point of view is that it is running JavaOS.
Couple hundred thousand corpses would disagree with 'legitimate' in this context.
Nothing occured in Iraq that shouldn't have happened in Europe in the 1930s.
Neville Chamberlain, go home.
Why don't you mindless trollbots not even recognize that this article is about NetBSD!
Vote for Bush and Cheney in 2004 !
Tell that to Ronald Reagan, who virtually sucked Saddam's cock back in the 80's. Fucking idiot Americans.
Some minor points...
FreeBSD is used on many many servers around the world. Sure it's not as popular as Linux, but it has quite a big share of installed systems.
BSD is hardly dying - where do you think userland in OS/X comes from? There is money being poured into BSD development, just no where near as much as Linux, and it doesn't get the headlines.
NetBSD also runs on machines like Dreamcast or Playstation -- and I doubt anyone at a serious enterprise would consider running his/hers business using game consoles. Why does NetBSD community does that? Because it is fun, because people do have unused hardware, which becomes great when it has unix installed, because they _can_.
Porting software to NetBSD's pkgsrc collection brings also a great deal of _learning_ - if you introduce patches, you cannot think just about one platform, you have to think about 52 platforms - your patches must be portable and they cannot break builds on other operating systems.
I recommend NetBSD. Give it a try, not to mention it is very stable operating system, it has a great Linux emulation layer, which runs - among others - latest VMware, Intel C Compiler or Kylix.
And you can do the same for Redhat Linux 9 to any machine and it will work too. Nice try. Being open source, both BSD and Linux suffer from the too many choices syndrome. Does that /etc work on OpenBSD, FreeBSD and NetBSD? I am ignorantly asking, if you'll forgive me.
/etc would be platform specific and would break on other platforms. Maybe if it contained microcode updates for a specific processor; but, hey, you did say "(almost)", so I would assume this still qualifies.
When we look at SuSE vs Redhat vs Debian, etc., we must remind ourselves the myriad of BSDs out on the market as well. I'm still trying to connect exactly what aspects of
Anyway, the whole Linux vs BSD thing doesn't work, just like Emacs vs VI. Just wanted to point out a few things... (I like VI BTW)
Who else thought some nut had finally ported NetBSD to a kitchen appliance for real?
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Not really. I run NetBSD on a Sparcstation 4
and I'm about the same as I was yesterday, not
really happy or sad about it. But that's life.
I thought Red Hat discontinued Red Hat Linux?
Debian is Slow, Worse, Expensive
/lib/modules, as you are going to need it.
Open source may be good, but there is one example that sticks out like a sore thumb as a problem with open source. Debian gnu/Linux. It is offically the Worst Linux Distribution ever made.
First of all, Debian has the most out of date software packages of any major mainstream distros. Even in the unstable version, is KDE 2.2 and Gnome 2.0, with Xfree86 4.1 (A version that really sucks). There are literally years that pass between each update of Debian.
Secondly, its a pain in the goatse to set up, first of all, you are forced to use Kernel 2.2, which is horribly hacked with "backports" to get any use on any modern machine (Read, made after 1999). Good luck memorizing all the *.ko files in
Configuring XFree86 is hell! If you don't have a Thick X11 orilley book, and a list of your horizontal sync values from your monitor's intruction manual (if you even have one), BOOM! There goes your monitor.
Even then, good luck getting anything over 640x480@16 colours.
The most common response to help questions on the Debian mailing list is "n00b, READ THE FUCKING MANUAL, you idiot, go back to WINDOWS XP if you can't learn to use dselect", true too, search the archives if you think I'm lying. Other distros give you comprehensive PRINTED MANUALS, PHONE SUPPPORT and/or freindly forums where repling RTFM gets you banned!
Debians support for any decent hardware, including USB mice, scanners, Sound cards, heck even Serial devices struggle. If you can even get 80x25 text mode with PS/2 input devices you are really lucky.
Apt-get has many flaws. First of all it uses a non standard package format (the rest of the world uses RPM, deprecate the DEB format!), has broken respetories, and out of date software to install. All this combined with the kludgey dselect user interface make package management a nightmare.
And if you think I'm joking about this, find out why THOUSANDS of Debian users are switching to REAL distributions Debian is falling to pieces, if it is to survive any market share it will be through its superior forks (Xandros, Lindows, K/G-noppix) and unoffical package respetories.
Of course, while all this is going on, the only thing the Debian maintainers do is argue about politics on the mailing lists. The distribution decays while its creators argue over inane details like software licensing and the virtues of Marxism. Please! Spare me the political rhetoric and just give me a working distro!
Don't get me wrong, I love Linux, and I'm happily using distros such as Mandrake, SuSE, Gentoo and Fedora. But I'm sick to death of zealots that push obsolete Distros on me EVERY FREAKING TIME linux is mentioned. I'm speaking from real world experiance here.
The GPL is a non-Free license, because it restricts the freedom of what users can do with the software.
uhg. Oops. Should have been less ambiguous. I meant what are the differences to /etc between platforms (namely i386 and SPARC)? I don't use NetBSD, but I used to (1.6.1, stopped using it because that box died) and I currently use OpenBSD. I'm considering purchasing some SPARC hardware* for another OpenBSD system.
I'm assuming OpenBSD will have some more weird differences because of all the security.
I agree about the pkgsrc/ports thing. I used it on NetBSD and I use it now on OpenBSD. I also use Gentoo and it beats the crap out of Portage.
* - Before anyone says anything, yes I know I'll get more bang for my buck on x86, AMD64, POWER, PowerPC, and quite possibly Itanium.
When someone might yell at me, it has to be OpenBSD.
They both forgot to mention this page...
Manipulate the moderator system! Mod someone as "overrated" today.
Who cares. As long as existant and future versions of NetBSD are available, what do I care if there is an SCOBSD or MSBSD that I will never use.
Case in point: M$ used BSD code in their TCP/IP stack. Oddly enough, the world didn't come to an end, there are still several freely availible BSD releases, and Slashdot users have yet another year of "BSD is dead" and "BSD isn't free" trolls.
What it means in the final analysis is that I can (almost) tar up the /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
NetBSD doesn't use fstab?
XF86Config is portable to different videocards/monitors?
Not being a NetBSD user, I didn't gain any understanding of what I am missing from that statement. Could you please elaborate.
A Usenet Troll Triumphs on Slashdot
What are you talking about? FreeBSD has never been certified as C2, and that's all that NT has been certified at (remeber to remove the floppy and network card). Check for yourself at http://www.radium.ncsc.mil/tpep/epl/index.html.
BSD users too are dooming thier own OS. As a group, they are a very vocal and rowdy bunch. No real help is given to new users and such an elitest attitude is suicide.
Hasn't slowed down Slashdot, or the anti-BSD trolls that live there.
It is my humble opinion that either NT or Solaris be used for any significant work
Oh...I get it. You're retarded. My bad...
The troll posted the cid and sid he stole it from for God's sake!
i d= 5012614
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=49640&c
The Original Post did qualify that statement with (almost). NetBSD does use fstab and XF86Config would need to be tuned for different video cards. I run two NetBSD systems without X (qube2's as servers), so that wouldn't be a concern for me. The fstabs between any two boxes depends less on the processor/NetBSD version than on the size of the disk and the partition layout.
The key with NetBSD is that the configuration differences apply only to the limited area being configured. fstab would need to be changed to deal with differences betwen filesystems on two systems, not CPUs.
Using the same Linux distro on two different architectures may give the same sort of 'constancy', but typically you can't get one linux distro that runs on all the architectures supported by some linux distro.
Awesome furniture, accessories and cabinetry in Santa Rosa, CA: http://humanity-home.com/
Apart from fstab and the network bits in rc.conf, all the files in /etc that I edit after an install are identical on my SPARC, Vax and x86 machines. There might be minor differences in files that describe devices, but all the files I'm likely to actually edit have the same format regardless of the machines architecture.
Chris
It does use fstab, but the device names may be different.
/dev/sda1 on a sparc machine but /dev/wd0a on an x86.
/ may be on
Network device names are different as well le0 on sparc versus fxp0 on x86.
Just in case someone's reading this crap:
/usr/pkgsrc (including stuff I might actually play like quake 3 arena). Any Linux based game should work as well on x86. I wouldn't really know, though.
1. You can not play games on it.
I don't really play games (well, I do sometimes on my playstation or game cube or whatever), but I don't really see where this is coming from. On my old 1.6 box, there's something like 170 games in
2. It cannot be used by my grandma.
It has, in fact, been used by my in-laws who have no computer experience at all (which would make them my kids' grandma and grandpa). Login, click here for a web browser, go!
3. It lacks a GUI of any note.
Said web browser was running in X. You should probably consider looking at something before trying to tell other people about it.
4. There is no support available for it.
Yeah, there is. See wasabi systems.
5. It is an assortment of fragmented OSes.
Wait, are we talking about NetBSD, or Linux? NetBSD is a single, solid, clean OS that looks the same on many different hardware platforms. Linux is many different operating systems that have very little to do with each other.
6. It cannot be run on the x86 platform.
This is supreme ignorance. The laptop used by the in-laws was a thinkpad (which is x86 based).
7. You have to compile everything and know C.
I don't believe I compiled Mozilla (I never compiled the Netscapes I used before that, but if I did compile Mozilla, it certainly wasn't significant enough for me to remember it).
8. Support for the latest hardware is always poor.
This statement is true regardless of platform. The things that are important to people vary by platform. I seem to recall significant hardware support reaching NetBSD before Linux in the past as well.
9. It is incompatiable with GNU/Linux.
Well, BSD and other Unixes were here first, so of GNU/Linux has incompatibilities, it isn't the fault of the BSDs.
This, however, is my #1 reason for not using Linux in general. It doesn't work like any other system I use (on my LAN: MacOS X, Solaris 8, SunOS 4.1.4, NetBSD (various versions), IRIX 6.2, IRIX 6.5, probably some others). There are things I can expect to work a certain way in all of those places (i.e. netstat).
10. It is dying.
Wait a second, so is Apple, and this Apple's running a BSD, does that mean it's a double negative?
-- The world is watching America, and America is watching TV.
Goddamn, you're an idiot.
This is a direct copy (plagerism) from an osnews article. Please give credit where credit is due!
This means, that you can now run your JavaStation with a stock distribution of NetBSD/sparc.
Hey, that's cool. I was actually looking at Javastations a while ago as a candidate to add to my "what the hell is that?" hardware collection.
Unfortunately, they seem to be pretty hard to come by on eBay. Anyone know of a surplus house or anything that's selling off the Javastations at a reasonable price?
--saint
Seriously. The BSD trolls only exist because they know that people like you will take time out of your life to "correct" them, as if they will actually be influenced by what you say and go "Golly jeeze, You're Right!".
Have you been paying attention at all or did you just sleepwalk through the past year and a half?
Adam stated he was told by three Mayan Elders, one of which was Carlos Barrios, that they "believe" Nostradamus was a student, and this is were he learned his technique of "water and a tripod". It is said using a bowl of water on a tripod is called "scrying". It is a technique used by those trained to "see/view" other places without being "seen" by those they are "viewing" (spying on), or to help them foretell the future.
Since last night's interview, I have been told this technique was used by man! y cultures long before Nostradamus discovered it and put it to his own use. Nothing about Nostradamus studying with the Mayans can be more erroneous or incorrect.
One must use common sense when dealing with any form of information, Nostradamus traveled all over Europe carrying his books and belongings on the back of a donkey. Cars, trains and planes were not yet available and a trip by sea to take a study to Guatemala with some Mayan Elders would have been very expensive and time-consuming for the doctor who was very much in demand for his services against the plague affecting Europe during his existence. I know for a fact that Nostradamus spoke a few languages and I do not know about the Mayan dialect.
Mr. Al Shaef, people with your talents do not need to sink to the levels of propogating propaganda on Slashdot.
I've read the SunRay ROM and disassembled the begining 1st startup, PCI enumeration, etc. When I got distracted I sent materials to Uwe (the BSD guy), he completed the disassembly of the 1st stage, and, I think, uncompressed the 2nd stage with the actual software. It was too tedious to continue. SunRay has only 8MB or RAM. Also, debugging without a serial port is a bitch. So we gave up on it.
In fact, Zaitcev (Linux @JS guy) and Uwe (NetBSD @JS guy) are friends, Zaitcev helped Uwe with some elements of the port.
This really makes all "BSD Rulz" zealots look silly. While they whail, real hackers help each other across the Linux/BSD boundary. What is it in OS for a hacker? Linux and BSDs come and go, hackers remain forever.
I should know too, I created it.
What it demonstrates is the zealot nature of BSD users. They can't resist replying to such an obvious trolls. They think that it is a serious post.
Oh God I'm laughing so hard now.
but, I have NetBSD i386 machines with sd* (scsi isn't rare) and le* (damn old compaq servers).
apt-get remove moron
jschauma is an sysadmin at my school... besides being responsible for all 75 NetBSD machines, he's also a NetBSD developer. I'm not surprised that he can submit his stories anywhere he wants to...
[o]_O
This is because you forgot to include typical BSD zealot phrases such as:
'Oh it just rocks'
'I love it'
Interesting how an offtopic post it not touched, but a reply to the offtopic post IS.
BSD moderators not biased? Haha!
Offtopic? What about the grandparent? He replied to a damned troll for God's sake!
You moderators are a disgrace.
Just to prove this, this very post will be modded down but the grandparent will not!
Hypocrisy lives.
Yet another example of biased BSD moderation.
This post *is* worthy of being modded down, but the grandparent should have been too! Its saying basically the same thing, just targeted towards different people.
Grow up folks. If this keeps up, I'm going to start emailing this crap to CmdrTaco/et. al.
how does it feel to be a dumbass?
Hi Amit.
This crutch and vacant stool have become orphans, not unlike the now dead *BSD. No longer will *BSD hobble about on its cripple's crutch. Like the empty hearth, and the vacant stool, *BSD lies cold and still. *BSD's corpse, lifeless beneath frozen earth and December snows, will see no more Christmas cheer. No, there will be no Christmas ever again for *BSD, for *BSD is dead.
Goodbye, *BSD. The pain of life forever stilled, sleep for all eternity in that long winter's nap. Fade gently into Earth's frozen bosom where in dreams even cripples walk and blind men see.