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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
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.
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.
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
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
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
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/
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.
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