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NetBSD 5.0 RC1 Released

Posted by kdawson on from the while-it's-hot dept.

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."

12 of 158 comments (clear)

  1. Oh no! by yttrstein · · Score: 5, Funny

    FTP: too many connections!

    Haha just kidding.

  2. Wrong logo by pondermaster · · Score: 5, Funny

    Accompanying the article with the FreeBSD logo is slightly tasteless, no?

    I for one is laughing my devilish ass off.

    1. Re:Wrong logo by Brandybuck · · Score: 4, Informative

      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!
    2. Re:Wrong logo by pondermaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Wrong logo by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

  3. So, why should I care? by AuMatar · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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?
    1. Re:So, why should I care? by yttrstein · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:So, why should I care? by langelgjm · · Score: 4, Interesting

      If you have old or somewhat unusual hardware, NetBSD does quite well.

      I have a Sun Ultra 1, circa 1995, that I pulled out of the closet for fun recently. Debian installs on it, but 1) is sluggish, and 2) doesn't support certain hardware. My machine has a PCMCIA adapter in it, and I have an old 802.11b PCMCIA card, so I thought I'd be able to use wireless on this machine.

      Turns out no Linux drivers exist for the PCMCIA adapter, whereas in NetBSD they do. After a kernel recompilation, the Ultra 1 is up and running on the wireless network.

      --
      "Anyone who [rips a CD] is probably engaging in copyright infringement." - David O. Carson
    3. Re:So, why should I care? by CAIMLAS · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Here are some reasons:

      1) Linus "Testing is for someone else" Torvalds isn't running the show, and therefore you're more likely to get a properly tested kernel.
      2) You can download an official kernel and expect for it to not only build using your old configuration, but to not have a previously-working driver not work any longer.
      3) It has nice tools for doing #2, whereas in Linux, 'make oldconfig' has been seemingly abandoned in the name of progress and "let the distros handle it"
      4) Slower, more thorough release cycle which is still aware of "development" and "stable" branches
      5) You can still run a usable system on top of old hardware that only has 64Mb of RAM (or 32Mb, as I did recently with netbsd 4 - and yes, 32Mb is 'just barely' functional)

      --
      ~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
  4. NetBSD is awesome by wandazulu · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  5. But how green is it? by mangu · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I have a lot of hardware that would have been relegated to scrap if it hadn't been for NetBSD

    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.

  6. Re:Slow news day by LizardKing · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.