Slashdot Mirror
NetBSD 2.0 Released
Quique writes "NetBSD 2.0 is the tenth major release of the NetBSD Operating System, and has just been released. It can be downloaded from one of the mirror sites.
NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports fifty four different system architectures, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more.
NetBSD 2.0 continues the long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements, and support for many new platforms and peripherals." The release announcement is also available.
does it support SMP efficiently yet?
Are you intolerant of intolerant people?
Not to flame, but I've often wondered how true this statement is. It seems as if a whole bunch of the archs are "quasi-archs". Meaning the under-lying core is still based on a fairly standardized CPU arch. An example is hpcram, which is based on the StrongARM cpu ...
Also, the offical release says 48 archs, not 54 as in the slashdot story
And finally, some asshole named Zafer Aydogan stole my NetBSD Toaster dmesg. Real original can be found at the NYCBUG *BSD dmesg project. (Very funny read!)
Cool, enough random crap from me, heh
Sunny Dubey
It's just as secure as OpenBSD, not more. I can't think of anything more secure then OpenBSD at the moment though.
"It's just as secure as OpenBSD, not more."
:)
No, it's not.
-a great deal less of the privsep stuff
-no propolice
-no W^X
A number of vulnerabilities common to NetBSD and OpenBSD were mitigated by ProPolice on OpenBSD. That was 1.6... but I didn't see anything about propolice on the 2.0 release page.
"I can't think of anything more secure then OpenBSD at the moment though."
There are special cases where other OSes can be more secure, IMO. For example, on a big system where you have to let people in with permissions to do something interesting, rather than a firewall or a server spewing pages, the FreeBSD jail facility can make it more secure in practical terms.
There's usually a better OpenBSD way to do it, but that way is sometimes enough of a PITA that it doesn'thappen. For example, you can give someone root in a FreeBSD jail and just let them do their thing rather than screwing around with systrace on an OpenBSD machine. Jails are a very blunt tool, but they're very effective.
Apart from localized advantages such as that, OpenBSD is the most secure. I just didn't want anyone to think I was a zealot blind to the advantages of other OSes.
I rarely criticize things I don't care about.
Never fear. As of this afternoon I was running 1.6.2 too and tonight I'm on 2.0 with minimal effort.
I used bittorrent to download the new 2.0 ISO image, I checked the MD5 sig, I burned a CD, I booted the CD, I choose "upgrade existing install", and I hit the enter key through a few minor dialogs... and voila! With less than an hour total effort (I didn't stay to watch the install) I'm back up and running with no noticeable glitches (YMMV). And, all that with absolutely no reading of any documentation whatsoever on my part. Amazing. Simply simple. Gotta love NetBSD.
OBSD has developers enough to get things done. Where else would OpenSSH, OpenBGPD, PF, OpenCVS, etc. come from? You don't think Theo himself wrote all that? :)
Sure maybe some people don't have good manners, but hey look at slashdot. Anything you post here is just asking to get picked up and thrashed or moderated into negative infinity. I just care how the OS is and for me it's the best choice (BTW, NetBSD is a close second) for many reasons I don't want to ramble on about here.
Maybe BSD doesn't looks as hip, trendy and cool as Linux, but that's just superficial. I used Linux for a long, long time and finally switched to OpenBSD when I realized it could fulfill my needs better (both on servers and as desktop).
What could I expect in terms of driver support on NetBSD?
With NetBSD's design I doubt they have a lot of headaches even with many archs. If there's a bug in a chipset driver probably all archs using it are affected and there's only one place to fix it.
The main advantage of having 48 archs is not to actually run NetBSD on each and every one of them productively. It's to abstract your code to such levels that a Realtek NIC is using the very same source on i386 as it does on alpha or sparc. A Realtek on an ISA bus is probably using the same source as one on PCI. And an equal PCI chipset on i386 and alpha is using the same source again. Everything is held together by well-designed glue APIs. Independent of 32bit, 64bit, big endian, little endian, etc. Try to compile your Linux app of the day on something else than 32bit i386..
Really, it's beatiful, you can compile the whole system natively or for a completely different arch by just specifying -m to the build.sh script. It boostraps a self-contained (cross-)compiler environment on any decent POSIXish system. And in the parts that are native to NetBSD you don't get a single compiler warning. The imported GNU utils on the other hand...
'nuff said, try NetBSD!
Of course it runs NetBSD. BTC: 1NT7QvbetmANwaMzhpVL6
OpenSSH, PF, the TCP/IP stack that founded the internet... you're right, nothing out of BSD.
If anything, nothing comes out of Linux. BSDs are breeding grounds for world-changing software. Unless you mean to tell me that Linus and his buddies write all the software instead of getting it from GNU and other devs, GNU/Linux is much more of a hand-me-down collection than any given BSD, the latter containing some source that started in BSD and continues to be in BSD. Even some GNU tools (indent, for instance) were forks of BSD tools.
Sam ty sig.
Is NetBSD sufficiently similar in structure to FreeBSD that I can use this book to set up and understand my machine? Or is there just to much difference?
If anyone can point me to printed documentation on NetBSD, that would be very welcome indeed.
z i n k p u t (a t) h o t m a i l . c o m
!ERR: Signature not found.
Unfortunately no G5 support yet. I figured it would support that before Linux. Oh well. Now it's a race between OpenBSD and NetBSD to see who gets it first.