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NetBSD 1.6.2 Released

Posted by timothy on from the my-god-it's-full-of-archs dept.

kairi writes "NetBSD 1.6.2 has just been released, supporting over 40 architectures. See the release announcement! Be sure to use one of the many mirrors when you grab your ISO!" MobyTurbo adds "A preliminary source of bittorrents has been announced on the NetBSD users mailing list."

6 of 34 comments (clear)

  1. Dedication by JustinXB · · Score: 5, Interesting
    http://netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1.6.2 .html

    "Dedication
    The NetBSD Foundation would like to dedicate the NetBSD 1.6.2 release to the memory of Erik Reid, who went missing and is presumed dead in a sailing accident on 18 February 2004. Erik's contributions to NetBSD included work on support for SGI MIPS R4000, integrating XFree86 Direct Rendering Interface (DRI), and managing the build lab. His death came as a shock, and he will be greatly missed by all of us. May he rest in peace. "

    Just thought I'd point it out.

  2. Re:Geez by Endive4Ever · · Score: 5, Interesting

    I just installed 1.6.1 on my four-way PPro box (IBM PC Server 704) but have discovered I'm going to need to build NetBSD-current to get SMP support for it. I was hoping they'd finally merged SMP into the release branch, but maybe that's a 1.7 thing. This is a minor incremental release.

    Being as I have a well-maintained near-complete mirror of the 'distfiles' source tarballs for the Pkgsrc tree local now ('make mirror-distfile' is your friend for overnight bandwidth burning), I can't see ever moving to any other OS for main use. I have all the source for everything for almost any type of box I put into service.

    --
    ---
  3. Re:Tell me... :) by saintlupus · · Score: 4, Informative

    So, is there going to be a linux distro with something similar to ports (as I said, I only have experience with FreeBSD ports, and only assume here that pkgsrc is something similar).

    Yes, there is. Pkgsrc is remarkably similar to what Free and OpenBSD call Ports. It also works on a lot of OSes, including Linux, Irix, and (I think) Solaris.

    Check out the NetBSD page for info. It's pretty cool stuff.

    --saint

  4. Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? by bccomm · · Score: 5, Informative
    Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks. Is there an emulator for my x86 box that would allow me to get this done faster? BasiliskII can emulate my Mac much faster than it really is. I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited to the sub-100MHz range. Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
    You should be able to cross-compile the entire distribuiton from your x86 box using the build.sh frontend. It seems like it would be messy to build it and copy it over, but it's actually quite easy. The alternative would be to *not* build it yourself and instead just install the binary distribution---there really aren't many benefits of compiling it unless you need a custom kernel or -current sources.
    Also, is there a way to build the whole distribution via gcc-3.3.x? I'd like to see how well it performs against the gcc2-built system I used a while ago.
    The 1.6.x releases use gcc-2.95 for the basis of the toolchain. If you want to try gcc-3.3.x, this may be another reason to look at -current (just yesterday they updated gcc to v3.3.3). Current may be a better choice anyway: its faster, more feature-rich (think native threads), and more widely-used by the community.

    -Bruce
  5. Re:Geez by bccomm · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'd go with -current anyway, there are more features in it, and it's generally more widely-used by the community.

    PS: I believe the next NetBSD formal release will be 2.0. It will have kernel threads, SMP, ACPI, and all that other good stuff. (:

    -Bruce

  6. Re:Tell me... :) by pschmied · · Score: 4, Informative

    I really like NetBSD as a desktop OS. NetBSD's clean approach means that they often get cool new drivers and features before anyone else, including linux. Cases in point: IPv6 and USB Visor support, IIRC.

    Pkgsrc is a nice evolution of the ports. It has some neat additional features like a security audit.

    I've said it before: NetBSD gets a bum reputation as being only for obscure hardware. Not so! People alway make the connection that FreeBSD==server, OpenBSD==security and NetBSD==suitable for toaster. I'd posit that NetBSD should be considered for desktops.

    So, give it a shot on your desktops. I think you'll like it.

    -Peter

    --
    . Penguins Surely Ca