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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.'"
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.
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
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
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.
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.
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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