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NetBSD Q3/Q4 Status Report Published
Anonymous Reader writes "The NetBSD Foundation published its first quarterly status report in 2006, covering the months July though December of 2005. Among many other things, this status report includes the release of both NetBSD 2.1 and NetBSD 3.0, a summary of the NetBSD Project's participation in Google's Summer of Code and the release of two stable pkgsrc branches."
...despite their relatively small developer and user community.
The Q3/4 status report indicates what seems to be the modus operandi for the NetBSD team: consistent incremental gains.
I have an immense amount of respect for the NetBSD project. OpenBSD drives the BSDs (and Linux) to be more secure. FreeBSD traditionally has shown us what a great administrative user experience should be like. NetBSD continues to show us the way with respect to proper system architecture.
For example, NetBSD and FreeBSD (and OpenBSD?) natively support the same wireless hardware that Linux does. The difference? I can configure WEP and/or WPA through the exact same ifconfig that I use to configure a wired ethernet interface. No madwifi drivers. No 'download' wpa_supplicant. No difference that I'm setting up "different" network hardware. It's all just network hardware.
In my opinion Linux's weakest point is its kernel. The userland is great for the most part, but the kernel and the parts of the userland that deal directly with the kernel seem to be its major flaw. To follow the networking example: because the underlying wireless system is so fragmentary in Linux, NetworkManager (a good attempt at a friendly gui network profile configurator) feels like a bit of a bubblegum and bailing wire solution. This isn't NetworkManager's fault, it's Linux's for not providing a consistent system API for wireless. In NetBSD (FreeBSD & OpenBSD?) this isn't the case.
Alas, Linux (and it's collection of cool features like boot splash screens, polished user interfaces and installers, good binary OpenGL video drivers, great hardware detection utilities, commercial support on the server side, native Sun Java support, etc.) enjoys ubiquity while well architected systems like NetBSD languish in relative obscurity.
The cool Linux features often feel hackish (have you ever built an isolinux splash screen? NetBSD has always struck me as a natural choice for building a user-oriented/workstation distribution. Some of the little features are missing in NetBSD, but they could be added easily by a team focused on such a task. If a Mark Shuttleworth style billionaire pulled an Ubuntu with NetBSD, I think the world would generally be a better place.
-Peter
. Penguins Surely Ca
I'm just now giving NetBSD a serious try. I half-heartedly installed it on one of my little-used machines some time ago (1.6.1 iirc), but didn't really spend a lot of time with it. My main workstation is Fbsd 6.0, but i'm having an issue with a series of bugs or quirks in sysinstall and glibs in the ports collection. Maybe I'm just thick or something, but after a couple of months of googling, mopish hacks and/or otherwise trying to resolve these I'm running out of motivation. (There are open bug reports on most of these issues but they don't affect everyone so they're not being followed up on. Fbsd devels are busy with more important things, and I appreciate that).
So for now I've decided to upgrade that little 1.6.1 machine to 3.0 and try that out for awhile. Take a break from my issues above. So far I like it. I had the assumption that nbsd would be "all business no fun" (like obsd) but I'm pleasantly surprised. pkgsrc seems no less comprehensive than FreeBSD's ports selection (well duh), or at least I'm finding all the stuff that -I- use in there.
I still feel like I'm running away from my problems but at the moment nbsd seems like a nice umbrella to stand under for the time being.
do() || do_not();