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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
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
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.