NetBSD 2.1 Released

jschauma writes "NetBSD for everyone! Lots of news regarding new NetBSD releases: On October 31st, 2005, NetBSD 2.0.3, a source-only security update of the NetBSD 2.0 release, was announced. Since many people are still somewhat confused by the new versioning scheme used in NetBSD, this release was preceeded by an explanation of the NetBSD branches. Only two days after the 2.0.3 announcement, on November 2nd, 2005, NetBSD 2.1 was released. NetBSD 2.1 is the first maintenance release of the netbsd-2 release branch, and was announced with binary distributions for 54 architectures. Primary means of distribution include bittorrent." jschauma continues, "Not entirely by coincidence, a number of security advisories was released almost simultaneously, which for the most part have been fixed in these two latest releases. However, since the release engineering process could not be delayed even further, there are three advisories that affect even NetBSD 2.1 -- a security update on this branch (ie NetBSD 2.1.1) is expected to be released very soon as well. Finally, the NetBSD release engineering team also released an update of revised estimate for the release date of NetBSD 3.0, the next major release which will bring a number of new features. Please consider making a tax-deductible (in the US) donation to support NetBSD."

Comments

...but does it run on Playstation2 Linux Kit? Yes!

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.netbsd.org/Ports/playstation2/

compared to linux?

[johansalk]

I'm a linux newbie, I'm still learning bash and gnu/posix; what's the advantage of netBSD/BSDs over linux?

Re:compared to linux?

[fyoder]

For servers I can install a minimalist FreeBSD setup very quickly and administer it from the command line. The main OSS server stuff installs on FreeBSD with little if any problem. Perhaps there is a 'Lean Linux' distro that would be similarly suitable. I prefer a popular linux distro like Fedora or Mandriva for the desktop.

Re:NetBSD over FreeBSD?

[laffer1]

NetBSD is very fast for certain operations and is often used in networking research (internet2, ipv6, etc). If you don't have an SMP box or hyperthreading its quite fast and in my opinion the best os on sparc architectures. The ports system is a bit different. They have something called pkgsrc thats portable across operating systems. All bsds have a twist on the ports collection really. Its a big factor in choosing.

I'm a FreeBSD user primarily and I think NetBSD has some good points like major portability. I think they do more testing and its generally a more stable OS. FreeBSD 6.0 release should fix most of the recent problems. Think of NetBSD like a continuation of FreeBSD 4.x more. There are a lot of differences, but mostly small things. FreeBSD 5 and 6 are attempts to improve dual core, SMP, and hyperthreading based computers in the long haul.

NetBSD and FreeBSD people don't tend to get along simply becuase there's real competition lately between the two projects. Both are great operating systems and I think both are good at different tasks. If you plan on running a bsd on non ia32 hardware, definetely check out NetBSD. It might be worth trying it just to see if there are any unique features. If you are a programmer and like freebsd more, you can help out and add some of the great netbsd features to freebsd or vise versa.

Re:*BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Weird, NetBSD holds the land speed records :D

http://lsr.internet2.edu/

I'm talking about *now*, not a year and a half ago.

NetBSD is indeed more portable than linux.

No it isn't, Linux runs on far more CPu architectures.

Sure, linux claims to support more architectures, but the vanilla kernels often fail to compile on non-i386 machines (PPC wasn't compilable by default until like 2 years ago), and hmm.. getting the machine to work only up to single user mode is not what I would quality as running linux.. NetBSD on the other hand fully supports all the architectures it claims to support.

Again, I'm talking about now rather than years ago. I take a recent kernel and I can compile it and run it on my i386, x86-64, ppc64 G5, and ia64 systems no problems. NetBSD runs on half of these. I'm just speaking from experience, but I have no evidence to believe that support for obscure architectures on Linux is any less stable than NetBSD and neither do you it seems.

> "lean and mean"
They are.

Maybe, but not in comparison with their peers, which makes the statement misleading.

Stop being such a fanboy, who seems to be using linux because EVERYTHING ELSE sucks, and not because linux is good.

I wasn't. I was rebutting the BSD zealots who think BSD is better than EVERYTHING ELSE ESPECIALLY LINUX.

Gross Misrepresentation of GNU

[amightywind]

So you see the linux system is flawed in one sense.. the kernel is not tied to the userland (software that you run).

You don't know what you are talking about. Both BSD and Linux interface with 'userland' the same ways, through device drivers and the C library.

There's an effort among the BSD zealots to replace every GNU program with a BSD licensed replacement.

Such people are in the minority. The GNU Core Utilities are generally regarded as superior to their BSD counterparts. Indeed it was the builtin limitations of BSD utilities motivated many of the standards to which GNU software is written. May I also point out that BSD uses the GNU compiler stack. It won't be easy to purge BSD of that, unless you still fancy programming in old style C on the PDP-11.

Its a big pissing match. You can love linux and not like the GNU and i think most people fall into this category that give kudos to linux.

The only ones left pissing are the BSD fanboys. The GNU/Linux folks are too busy.

If this weren't true, everyone would be working on GNU/Hurd right now.

Stallman himself has said that he wouldn't have pursued Hurd if the Linux kernel has been available when the Hurd project was launched. There is no controversy.