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NetBSD Quarterly Status Report
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD's Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most
important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided
to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports
on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the
activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is
now available online."
The new port Xen virtual machine monitor for i386 sure looks interesting. The guest OS has to be ported to the Xen architecture, though.
I've been 'spoiled' by the clean well-focused tightness of NetBSD going way back to 1.3.2, when I first installed it, over NFS, on my Toshiba 486 laptop. The laptop has only a floppy drive and PCMCIA slots, so an ethernet install was the only reasonable way I could see. At that time, in the Linux 1.2 kernel era, PCMCIA support in Linux was a 'hang a bag on the side' set of kernel extensions that one had to fool with to get working. With NetBSD, PCMCIA ethernet support was integrated into the kernel core and 'just worked' in the single boot floppy needed for the install.
/etc/ directory is common to all architectures.
The 'minimal, clean' philosophy extends all the way through NetBSD. A basic install for most architectures is an 80-100 MB set of gzipped tarballs you can easily download. This gets you a working system, with all the basic functionality, a C compiler, X11 with the basic Tab Window Manager (TWM), networking, etc. The installer lets you 'pare' this down even further if, say, you don't need X11 or dev tools. When you want to extend your system beyond this base, you turn to the packages collection, which is really a massive build script, with 'configuration-wrapper' scripts and patches that are applied over the standard source tarballs from whomever the package actually comes from. You can also applie the packages as binaries using the pkg_add command and a large repository of prebuilt packages available from the NetBSD ftp sites.
Because the base system is small and fully integrated, you can also compile the whole base userland from a set of integrated gzipped tarballs (*.tgz files). It's as simple as unpacking the source tarballs and issuing a top-level make command. The whole kernel and base userland can also be upgraded with CVS live over the network and rebuilt.
Once you learn how to admin and run with NetBSD on one architecture, you know most of what you'll need to for running it on different architectures. All the ports of NetBSD, for Mac68k, MacPPC, i386, Sparc, Sparc64, VAX, MIPs, etc. built from the same core source files. The structure of the
And NetBSD has adopted a philosophy of doing things right, one time, and keeping things that way. Most of the info you need to set up and admin a NetBSD system you can learn from the classic UNIX books and documentation. The O'Reilly X Window System documentation (the big 8 book set) tells you almost anything you need to know, for instance.
There isn't a cadre of people out there trying to make NetBSD 'easy to use.' Thus, there aren't a bunch of people muddying things up and producing all kinds of croft and layers of GUI stuff to do basic tasks. There isn't a perceived goal of 'win over OS foo' which eggs the developers on to misdirected goals of competitiveness. The excellence of NetBSD stands on it's own and is based in what it is, not how it 'compares' to other OS projects and products.
Anyway, I think NetBSD is cool, it gives the users who are interested in 'getting under the hood' the opportunity to explore along well-followed paths of classic UNIX, and also lets the computer enthusiast run a Common OS on his whole collection of machines. I've run NetBSD on a Macintosh SE/30, a Quadra 650, on various PC compatibles going from a 386sx laptop to a Quad PentiumPro server, on all the classic Sun Sparc machines (IPC, IPX, LX, Classic, SS2, SS5, SS10, Ultra1), and on an RS/6000 box with the PowerPC chip.
resigned