Slashdot Mirror
NetBSD 2.0 RC4 Tagged and Released
agent dero writes "According to recent news at NetBSD.org, NetBSD 2.0 Release Candidate #4 has been tagged and released to the release engineering server Check out the announcement for more info on changes since RC 3. Also note worthy, the final release has been pushed back a few weeks to allow for testing of RC4"
The release candidates require lots of testers to work the final bugs out. Slashdot has people that can do that, if they will. While it may be pedantic/boring/whatever to have each release candidate posted, if it catches one bug, then it's been worth it.
Since this is the *BSD section, it makes perfect sense to make the readers aware that a new micro/macro/mini/maxi/nano/mega/pico/giga-release is out.
Simple. NetBSD has infinitely higher quality and cleanliness. While it is reputed that Linux is now "more portable", not all of the ports are in the main source tree, not all are actively maintained and support all the features (let alone a userland, which NetBSD has for every arch). NetBSD's ports are, with few exceptions where things are just impractical on a device (e.g. Playstation 2 wouldn't really go far), all equally functional and stable, and all are in the main source tree, without needing to apply hacks and do unheardof installation procedures.
NetBSD's stability and cleanliness even put it ahead of FreeBSD, and leave Linux in the dust. Performance that stems from this same cleanliness and the developers' understanding of hardware and good software is pretty hardcore, especially in 2.0. SMP is supported but I haven't heard much about it.
Seriously, try it, you'd be amazed. NetBSD is not just for portability, that happens to be its edge against other BSDs (with OpenBSD close behind, for obvious historical reasons). It is the leader of cleanliness and code perfectionism, and hardware support is right up there (especially the way it handles USB devices is much better than FreeBSD and on par with Linux, albeit with less devices).
I got trolled, I have lost, I'm having a nice day, but at least I got that out there.
Fear this: http://netbsd.org/gallery/in-Action/ - and those were much older releases.
Sam ty sig.
Gosh, with all these delicious BSD releases about to happen, (nbsd 2.0, fbsd 5.3, dbsd 1.0) it makes it hard for a guy to decide which one to play with.
I need some more harddrives so i'll have a place to install them!
do() || do_not();
As far as I know, *BSDs are committed to technical excellence, and have an academic spirit that's light-years away from all the proprietary-hating political crap that infests (and sometimes, sadly, characterizes) the linux commmunity. :-)
Spreading FUD is a disgusting political act, and it has gone on for so long, and steadily, on this board. Clearly this "troll" has an agenda... But I don't think it's worth taking it personally: *BSD's play in a completely different class.
"Lifting" isn't too far off - the ULE scheduler was based at least in part on the O(1) scheduler, but without the problems (there were exceptional cases where the O(1) scheduler in Linux performed erratically, but ULE had much cleaner behavior). It had its own problems later, we know, but it doesn't really matter now.
What's your point though? Who cares if a BSD takes something from Linux? The number of things that Linux has taken from the BSDs is mind boggling. Early code bases didn't have network support until they ripped the BSD network stack ("lifted" definitely). They didn't do that right either - the new open BSDs continue to have infinitely better networking capabilities ("NetBSD 2.0 beats land speed record" twice, and there was that post regarding FreeBSD 5.x routing hundreds/thousands of times as much data over the network as Linux).
The only reason Linux rose to such glamor at all is media hype, certainly not technical merit. There was some geek romance in the notion of a kernel written for users who hate windows, more than for those who love UNIX. The BSDs couldn't care less about fighting off Windows, that's why their features are carefully planned and engineered (even at the cost of convenience for users), not just hacked on to make a cool headline and support pro-Linux evangelists.
Finally, I do not envy Linux. I have run it frequently with varying successes, and there was a time I used it exclusively with quite a bit of success. That's not the point - the point is I didn't know any better. At that stage I was happy mashing together tarballs and compilations into a sorta-working system, with no idea that there were systems out there that were Whole Operating Systems that fit together and did everything with attention to integration and cleanliness. Imagine my surprise.
Don't get me wrong, Linux has a lot of things that are persuasive towards its adoption. Just the options of file systems and curious drivers is enough for many users. But managability, reliability and good documentation? Go elsewhere. It's the equivalent of a group of casual engineers building a house while also putting in pieces (often entire rooms) that kids in their back yard built with Lego and mud, then having some entirely different party figure out how to live in the house and document it - often months out of date. Sometimes the lego and mud will be replaced by an engineer, maybe even well documented, but this will never apply to the whole thing.
Sam ty sig.