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NetBSD 5.0 RC1 Released
jschauma writes "The first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download from the NetBSD FTP site. Here is the Release Engineering status of 5.0."
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FTP: too many connections!
Haha just kidding.
I can't think of anything to say. Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
BSD is dyi.. umm no.
Accompanying the article with the FreeBSD logo is slightly tasteless, no?
I for one is laughing my devilish ass off.
What advantage does NetBSD give me over Linux? Other than avoiding monoculture, of course. People must obviously think it brings some set of advantages if they continue working on it and using it, I'd like to hear what they are.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
It is now official. Netcraft confirms: *BSD is dying
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered *BSD community when IDC confirmed that *BSD market share has dropped yet again, now down to less than a fraction of 1 percent of all servers. Coming on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that *BSD has lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. *BSD is collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be the Amazing Kreskin to predict *BSD's future. The hand writing is on the wall: *BSD faces a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for *BSD because *BSD is dying. Things are looking very bad for *BSD. As many of us are already aware, *BSD continues to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
FreeBSD is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time FreeBSD developers Jordan Hubbard and Mike Smith only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: FreeBSD is dying.
Let's keep to the facts and look at the numbers.
OpenBSD leader Theo states that there are 7000 users of OpenBSD. How many users of NetBSD are there? Let's see. The number of OpenBSD versus NetBSD posts on Usenet is roughly in ratio of 5 to 1. Therefore there are about 7000/5 = 1400 NetBSD users. BSD/OS posts on Usenet are about half of the volume of NetBSD posts. Therefore there are about 700 users of BSD/OS. A recent article put FreeBSD at about 80 percent of the *BSD market. Therefore there are (7000+1400+700)*4 = 36400 FreeBSD users. This is consistent with the number of FreeBSD Usenet posts.
Due to the troubles of Walnut Creek, abysmal sales and so on, FreeBSD went out of business and was taken over by BSDI who sell another troubled OS. Now BSDI is also dead, its corpse turned over to yet another charnel house.
All major surveys show that *BSD has steadily declined in market share. *BSD is very sick and its long term survival prospects are very dim. If *BSD is to survive at all it will be among OS dilettante dabblers. *BSD continues to decay. Nothing short of a miracle could save it at this point in time. For all practical purposes, *BSD is dead.
Fact: *BSD is dying
I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD. Hmm...can I still do anything useful with that Mac SE/30? Sure, I'll run a small mail server for internal use so I can learn how Postfix and Sendmail work. And the multitude of bots trying to hack my Internet-facing machine wouldn't know what to do with a Vax-based NetBSD machine even if they got in.
That said, of course these machines are outrageously slow by today's standards; the Vax alone has been relegated to the basement 'cause it's so freaking loud. But hey, I happened to have the hardware, and since of course it runs NetBSD, it's a learning experience if nothing else.
Recycling is good, of course. But is it worthwile? How much power do all those old computers drain, compared to a new server with the same processing capacity?
Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
I keep my monitor's contrast low, and it hurts my eyes :(
My 0.02 cents
would probably buy you an entry-level modern PC.
http://www.xkcd.com/518/
The topic is a BSD variant, which gets the BSD category on Slashdot. BSD's logo is a red demon, so the color scheme for this category is red.
I'm a proud NetBSD user for sure. I still use 3.1 on an old HP Omnibook 800ct. It works wonders on that Pentium 133 with 16mb of RAM. Boots in about 30 seconds or so, and WiFi works too. Not only is a great learning tool for aspiring people wanting to learn a good Unix, but it has a lot of good factors that experienced users look for in a good OS. Pretty decent driver support, a super small and quick installation, powerful security, a great list of binary packages, a large /usr/pkgsrc similar to /usr/ports, not to mention an excellent community of developers that are always willing to help a brotha out. Thanks to the dudes on Freenode and the NetBSD mailing lists for all their help. I'm looking forward to this release.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Trolling in Slashdot makes you feel like... a man?
Give it a rest. NetBSD is not dying and it deserves publicity.
It certainly is. They should be using
the proper, official, globally accepted and widely lauded BSD logo.
>NetBSD is not dying
Because having 3 users and 2 developers means you're not dying ...but dead.
Seriously -come to grips already, even midnightbsd has a broader developer and user base than NetBSD has -and you could count the number of people involved with midnightbsd on your fingers and toes!
My toaster, pocketcalculator and my wristwatch desperatly need an update.
I've never used it, but am wondering, what does it lack on the desktop? Does it have a browser, chat clients, email stuff, office applications, etc? Skip games, besides that, why is it disappointing?
Close, but from what another poster said, the red articles are ones that have just become visible to non-subscribers, and for whatever reason it doesn't pull the red styling off until some random time later.
Anyway, it's not like anyone would credit the Slashdot web devs with making a masterpiece here. Why don't we have a public discussion about how Slashdot trying to embrace "Web 2.0" is actually giving the site a really difficult to understand interface and honestly, makes the site seem schizophrenic at times.
The tagging is horribly broken.
Firehose (nice name... not.) is largely broken and unused.
The new styling system is jarringly inconsistent with the new "Web 2.0" style elements and there seems to be no attempt to reconcile them.
Etc.
Honestly, I preferred Slashdot circa 3 years ago. The only feature I like is the AJAX comment submission, and even that is inconsistent and still doesn't permit many HTML entities or, god forbid, unicode.
What the hell? Slashdot is removing my link. It's never done that before.
BSD articles ARE red.
For example, see this article which is also red.
Or any article that's on BSD.slashdot.org.
I for one like the red color much better than the green :)
You know, when I first heard they were doing a remake of Battlestar Dalactica, I thought it would totally suck. But it turned out to be pretty awesome! I love BSD!
Wait, what?
Read my blog.
To the mod who tagged this troll: What part of "I" did you not understand? This is personal opinion, which I'm fully entitled to. I've also quoted the exact text in the official OpenBSD FAQ that I'm referring to.
Learn to moderate with some objectivity please, or have the decency not to pretend you're serving the community.
Would be very nice I agree.
you had me at #!
Just sayin'
you had me at #!
It's damn hard to imagine a BSD system going anywhere these days without gcc, autotools, GNU make (especially)... OS X certainly wouldn't be OS X without GNU.
you had me at #!
Where I work, we replaced a couple of PDP-11 computers with PCs for the energy savings alone, even if there was a cost associated with migrating the software.
Especially since your phone probably has more power than a VAX, if not I/O capacity.
It depends what you mean by IO capacity. DEC machines (PDP-11s, VAXen, Alphas) had fantastic IO capacity in their extensible backplanes. These days you would use an external multiplexer. With a DEC machine you just load up the bus with devices.
...and so on
How does that go? Ah yes.
Bus address, then interrupt vector
160010 400
160020 410
160030 430
160040 440
160050 450
160060 460
160070 470
160100 500
160110 510
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Weird, as I'm viewing this comment thread, everything is in green again.
I <3 my VAX-11/750
you had me at #!
Which OS makes your computer easier to get your work done?
Only it's not the official release! How about some useful information, like a link the release notes?
But what does it look like if you go here ?
Doesn't it seem a little inconsistent when the same content is served with a different scheme because you chose an arbitrary route to reach that content?
I mean, it's not like I'm specifically asking for a stylesheet, instead there are multiple arbitrary paths to identical content that result in a different appearance.
Thanks for enlightening me though, I understand now why my profile page seems to change color every once in a while. I'm clicking through to it sometimes while in a specially themed Slashdot page, and that carries on to my profile.
Oddly, it doesn't do it with the BSD one. But there have been numerous occasions when my profile page has been yellow/tan.
I cannot begin to describe my feelings with the comments here. The same people touting about "monoculture" and how bad Windows is can't seem to graps what NetBSD is about. Instead all the same questions about "Why not use Linux" "How does it compare to Linux" pop up.
It's a simple as: people love to do different things. NetBSD has been around forever. NetBSD first set the TCP/IP speed records, long before Linux even had the framework to have and use different congestion algorithms. NetBSD runs on more architectures than you kids have EVER got your hands on.
I'm excited - a lot of work went into that release, a lot of brainpower and concepts. Let's see how it works out. ;)
Only thing I don't like: BSD userland, GNU's is so much better
Solaris had an N:M threading model and drop it in SunOS 5.9(?) and FreeBSD did the same, in its 7.0 release. Now NetBSD follows the same path.
There is nothing stopping you from forking OpenBSD and having your own policy on ISO distribution. But my opinion is that OpenBSD is nothing without Theo, it's not that great of an OS (it's not fast) and it suits only a narrow purpose (running a secured system without much effort on the admin's part). It seems popular for name servers, which are attacked frequently, yet is not very performance sensitive.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Really, time put into NetBSD or OpenBSD is wasted, nowadays. The traditional, historical benefits are all marketing smoke and mirrors.
NetBSD is a hobby OS now, and nothing more.