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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."
I, for one, am looking forward to the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release. Just installed NetBSD-current on a new four-way server and it's running great with SMP. Looks like the 2.0 release is scheduled in the next several months.
resigned
Why is it that every time something happens in the FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, et al. communities (or, at least, when it gets on slashdot) some Linux zealot (AC) has to go touting the problems of FreeBSD (note only one)? ALL OSes have problems! IMHO, all of the BSD derivatives (NetBSD for me) suck less than any of the other 73(!) OSes I've ever tried. Also, this wasn't even about FreeBSD: I hate it when people like you treat the BSDs as if they're all the same, with FreeBSD being the ringleader and the only one with commercial support (ever hear of Wasabi Systems?). If you don't like the BSDs, why would you waste your time on BSD slashdot? Do you seriously think you're going to magically make us care?
Now, I, like most other hackers, am a libertarian in most ways: I believe you have the right to express an opinion. But seriously, what the hell are you trying to prove? Mod me flamebait if you will, but I for one am tired of all the supposedly-unbiased BSD-against-Linux crap. This is not meant to offent anyone (besides the parent AC), but really, why can't Linux and BSD users just stop pissing each other off?
*Storms away*
PS: I do use Linux (Debian and Slack at school, at home I run a multiboot system with 4 different Linuxes and 9 other systems) on occasion and find them nice for some things (like good binary packages).
PPS: Debian has many packages (and is a good all-around distro), but I'll need to see some lists *without* virtual packages, dummy packages, meta packages, stubs, and a zillion different libraries that are normally bundled with their respective reverse-dependancies before I will believe that FreeBSD's collection isn't larger. Also, Woody still has less than FreeBSD, and you really shouldn't (at least, I wouldn't) use Sid on a server
-Bruce
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|\|3+85D: f0r t3h r3a1 133+ h4x0r5!!!!!1 Those who know will attest! They will agree! They already use it! They will not use annoying hacker-esque stereotypes!
Regrettably, however, there is truth in a lot of what you say. There was a time when FreeBSD was clearly a superior solution to Linux in every department, but today Linux has better SMP support, far better hardware support, and better software support too. FreeBSD 5.x is still not really "stable", 4.x is very stable but has lagging hardware support and poor SMP and threading, and the linuxulator can handle most but not all Linux binaries.
As for NetBSD, some of the above applies to it too. Its hardware support is often a bit better than FreeBSD (or even Linux -- NetBSD was the first free OS to have USB support, for example). But the smallness of its userbase means it will always lag linux in some hardware support and some usability aspects at the very least.
Nevertheless, after a year or so with Linux, I switched back to BSD (specifically, to DragonFly, a FreeBSD fork). Why? For the learning experience. The BSDs take their documentation seriously: not just commands and function names, but entire kernel subsystems are carefully documented in the manpages. And the source code is much cleaner. These things didn't matter to me earlier but I'm doing more and more programming now and find BSD a much nicer environment. You also learn a lot lurking on the lists. The linux kernel list is just too chaotic for me, this is not my primary focus in life. FreeBSD has the sense to use separate lists for separate topics (-current, -stable, -hackers, -mobile, -arch, -hardware, and most crucially -chat for the "offtopic" stuff), and DragonFly is still small enough that its lists are quite clean.
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