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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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NetBSD is small, stable, and fast as hell. It is not really meant for use on the desktop, though many people do (including me). I mainly use it to build small, single purpose servers that I never want to have to look at again, and it's perfect for it.
It's also where a lot of neat code sees its first light of day in the *BSD systems; over the years NetBSD has lent parts of its code to the other two BSDs, and therefore (de-facto) to Windows, Linux, and OS X.
But no, it's probably not going to make you very happy as a desktop operating system.
The BSD daemon, "Beastie", is not the FreeBSD logo. It is the BSD mascot, suitable for all BSDs. Even some official NetBSD flyers use it.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
That's increasingly not the case. openbsd has the blowfish, netbsd the stupid flag and freebsd the devil.
When the occasional BSD lurker sees a devil, he thinks FreeBSD.
I can't think of anything to say. Of course, the "article" didn't really provide much to talk about.
Here's the Changelog. To summarise, there's a new 1:1 threading implementation, as the previous M:N one was too complex to maintain. Along with this change has come a considerable performance boost and improved scalability, especially on SMP machines. Impressively, most of this work has been down to one developer, Andrew Doran. The second most important change is a switch to Xorg on most platforms. This took so long because NetBSD had a large number of changes in their tree for more obscure platforms - changes that were not integrated back into XFree86 before the Xorg fork. There is also a journaled filesystem that essentially obsoletes the troublesome softdeps. Like ext3 in the Linux world, the new journal features were added to the existing ffs ("fast file system") rather than being an entirely new filesystem. Other changes include a plethora of new device drivers and updated third party applications.
Actually, it is decreasingly not the case. Beastie hasn't been the FreeBSD logo since 2005. They have a new logo now. Beastie is moving more towards being a BSD-in-general icon like he's supposed to be.