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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 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
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
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.
I have an identical pair of SPARCstation IPX's that I picked up on eBay for $10 each about a year ago. From what I can see everything is an original part in these machines, one even still had a copy of SunOS 4.1.1 on it. I installed NetBSD/sparc 1.6 on them and they now run BIND and act as my nameservers. They are plenty powerful for serving DNS and with NetBSD they are very secure. Much faster disc accessing than under Linux/sparc because NetBSD seems to have better support for the SCSI chipsets.
I've never had one fail due to a hardware problem, they run for months at a time without a reboot. They're geographically and network seperate so, barring some world catastrophe, the DNS for some 40 domains is always available. Sun hardware is very reliable, and the older hardware is almost always faster than its Intel counterpart from the same vintage.
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
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
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.