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NetBSD 2.0 Release Engineering Process Underway

Posted by Hemos on from the planning-the-release dept.

jschauma writes "James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun! At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end of May 2004. Please see James' message to the netbsd-announce mailinglist for details."

3 of 54 comments (clear)

  1. Great news! by LizardKing · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I've been running NetBSD -current (a bit like running Debian unstable for all you Linux types) since a little before the scheduler activations were merged in last year. I'd stuck with stable releases before that, but switched as -current got around some quirks in my oddball laptop that stable didn't.

    My intial experiences with scheduler activations (which has a pthread compatible library layered on top of it), were a bit disappointing. Complex applications like Mozilla and some other desktop applications broke, as they relied on less than POSIX compliant features in certain other OS'es. Once those wrinkles were ironed out, -current became as rock solid as the stable releases.

    The only thing NetBSD lacks once 2.0 is released is an ALSA compatability layer. Having read the scant, poorly written documentation on the ALSA website I'm at a loss to see what it really has that OSS doesn't, but that seems to be what Linux based MIDI and audio apps are migrating to.

    Chris

  2. Re:NetBSD-current by LizardKing · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If only there were a native pkg for OpenOffice (recent - the earlier port did not work at all under -current for me).

    The Linux binary package of OpenOffice runs perfectly on my laptop, as does the Linux version of Sun's JDK 1.4.2_04. If you've not tried running stuff under Linux emulation before, then give it a whirl. I run Java and the NetBeans IDE on a 256Mb NetBSD laptop where it is totally usable. On my desktop machine (same RAM, similar CPU), it crawls under Linux.

    In short, Linux emulation under NetBSD seems to be far more resource friendly than running native under Linux. Performance isn't noticably different, and anecdotal evidence suggests it's actually faster.

    Chris

  3. Re:My NetBSD Experience by bccomm · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Have you tried the sushi tool that comes with the base system? Admittedly, it isn't in widespread use, but it's good for quick configuration changes (esp. with networking).

    -Bruce
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    |\|3+85D: f0r +h3 r3a1 133+ h4x0r5. Those who know will attest! They will agree! They already use it! They won't use annoying hacker-esque stereotypes!