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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."
Is the port to a toaster
m .
It has long been regarded that the UNIX-like OS NetBSD is portable to every type of machine except perhaps your kitchen toaster. Just in time for the LinuxWorld Conference and Expo in San Francisco in August 2005, Technologic Systems, however, has conquered this last frontier. Using one of its rugged embedded TS-7200 single-board computers housed inside the empty space of a standard 2 slice toaster, Technologic Systems has designed a functional NetBSD controlled toaster. You can find more information on the NetBSD toaster at http://www.embeddedarm.com/news/netbsd_toaster.ht
Funny as hell
Bated breath, goddammit.
Not a dupe, but I do not quite understand the article classification.
First of all, cudos to the NetBSD crowd for maintaining an OS that can run even on a Dead Marmot. Over the years, I have run it on several Dead Marmots (TM) like MIPS 3000 DecStations (should not be mistaken with Dead Badgers which can run Linux).
What I do not understand is the article classification. Surely, the more popular of the BSDs should have gotten prime time coverage and the less popular coverage between headlines. What's the deal here? Or the FreeBSD people should port their OS to a Dead Lemming instead of dropping the support for anything pre-80486 alltogether?
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Well, there is http://www.netbsd.org/Foundation/reports/financial /2004.html if you want a comparison - I dont know when the end of the financial year is in Delaware (where the NetBSD Foundation is based) but I guess you would have to wait until after then at least.
> for-all-those-of-you-waiting-with-baited-breath
FYI: The spelling is bated.
Looks like the Mac OS X port needs some updating. It still requires a UFS disk image, even though HFS+ can be made case sensitive and the instructions are only updated to Mac OS X 10.2 (!). Someone needs to update the port install process and test it on newer systems.
CDE open sourced! https://sourceforge.net/projects/cdesktopenv/
In 10 words? Sorry, no.
FreeBSD and its fork Dragonfly focus mainly on high-performance production servers, a little like Linux.
OpenBSD focuses on the best-ever security on earth. This also includes clean code and good documentation (though even FreeBSD is quite good, IMHO compared to Linux/GNU).
NetBSD focuses on exceptionally clean code/architecture, excellent documentation, but also on interesting features, and of course awesome portability. This includes having very clearly-written, modular drivers, where other systems sometimes only have drivers for, say, a specific device when it's behind a specific bus, but not in general...
I like NetBSD, because it's fast enough IMHO, and very clean and well documented. If you want maximum performance, and maybe more multimedia drivers, get FreeBSD; if you're paranoid, use OpenBSD.
...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
Has there been any work on EHCI USB controllers, in combo with Mass Storage Devices... Last time I tried NetBSD it was a sad state in that aspect (the rest of the system completely rocked though) Basically, iPod Minis wont work if you have that combination (atleast USB2 that is) I was kind of shocked when I was trying to get support and the answer was "Buy a firewire card" right...cause thats not exactly a suitable solution considering how popular EHCI / Mass storage is. Id love to check it out again, is there any recent livecds available?
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
same derivation and similar aims but not the same realisation.
Funny.. they are porting it to the itanic if that counts as a Dead Lemming?
anyway, FreeBSD-6.* still works on 386.. check the mailling list archives.
/. is good for you.
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();
We got Q3/Q4 reports from both Free and NetBSD.
I somehow predict a yet another article soon...
No, sadly OpenBSD aren't releasing an annual report this year.
The problem is that they have been unable to find a text editor which has been sufficiently audited for security holes.
Apparently they are diverting 50% of their developer resource to work on a BSD licensed replacement for EMACS which should be ready sometime in 2012.
That's because there's no BSD section in the list on the menu to the left, they think it's self evident now.
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Why isn't there one on the left anymore? Is it because it may be low traffic compared to the other sections? Taco is going to phase this section out?
I've had to explicitly add it as a viewable section to the right in my logged in mode.
For a non Linux type could some one explain the USER difference in Fedora, SuSE and Mandriva in 10 word or less.
A Government Is a Body of People, Usually Notably Ungoverned
it's a standard part of -current nowadays, not the latest version though.
I like NetBSD, because it's fast enough IMHO, and very clean and well documented. If you want maximum performance, and maybe more multimedia drivers, get FreeBSD; if you're paranoid, use OpenBSD.
I think there is a lot more to OpenBSD though. I find it is very clean in layout and the documentation is great. OpenBSD also has some cool features and great WiFi support.
I love using them all BTW. I use OpenBSD whenever I don't need extreme speed. I really wish OpenBSD had unified buffer cache, I find NetBSD's UBC is hyper fast and I assume FreeBSD also has UBC because it is also that fast (a little faster). To test this, make a large file (must be larger than half your RAM size) and then write a script to read it over and over and couple thousand times. Perhaps insert an echo into the loop to show the current iteration number. FreeBSD and NetBSD are hyper fast, OpenBSD is much slower (the performance delta depends on the difference between RAM and disk speed) and the various Linux distros I've tried seem to be broken when trying this (ridiculously slow).
You should note that NetBSD and FreeBSD read the file off disk once (disk light activity seen) and then read the file over and over again from RAM (disk activity light out). With OpenBSD the disk activity light is constantly on for each iteration (Due to simultaneous caching AND buffering? Because more that half RAM size can't fit in RAM twice?). I thought Linux had UBC but it also has the disk activity light constantly on, yet it is MUCH MUCH slower than OpenBSD!
What's the story here? When I was testing this I was expecting newer distros of Linux (SuSE 10, Ubuntu) to be a little faster than FreeBSD.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
I was thinking some kind of port of Quake 3 and Quake 4 had come about! Now that would be a reason to switch from Ubuntu to NetBSD.
-----
Make Love not [Browser] War!
Free disk images, what are you on? Are you looking for free ISOs? Make your own. Looking for premade installs for VMWare? Do a netinstall.
The stuff is free to download, dumbass. CVS, FTP and HTTP are hard huh? Or is it that making an ISO is scarey?
I'm sick of following my dreams - I'm just going to ask them where they're going and hook up with them later.
Yeah right, insult me, call me dumbass, fuckhead.
Looking for free ISOs? Make my own? That's just what I was talking about, FYI. I don't care enough to somehow create my own iso, I simply download one and install it.
Oh, if that's sooo below your level of sophistication, go ahead. I only stated why I was perfectly happy with NetBSD, and convenience was a small factor too.
Looking for free ISOs? Make my own? That's just what I was talking about, FYI. I don't care enough to somehow create my own iso, I simply download one and install it.
Hi Ulrich.
I did a quick search for where you might be located, to point you to an appropriate ftp server if you ever change your mind and noticed that you're into some interesting languages, including assembler. So I wouldn't be calling you a dumbass. ; )
If at some stage in the future you might like to try making your own OpenBSD CD. It is quick and easy for i386.
From one of the ftp sites like ftp://ftp.de.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/3.8/i386 just download the files in that directory and use cdrom38.fs as the 2.88Mb boot floppy image as an El-Torito boot image. You should be able to do this no problem with mkisofs, I'm lazy and just use Nero from a Windows machine, but I should script it one day.
Typically your arch of choice will be about 150Mb. For stuff like sparc64 and macppc I use the appropriate cdrom38.iso image and then perform a network install or swap CD's when it comes time to copy files off the CD if you choose to install from CD.
There are some good guides for doing this.
War crimes, torture, lies, illegal spying... Would someone give Bush a blowjob, already, so he can be impeached?
Cool, thanks. I might try it out sometime.