NetBSD 5.0 Released

kl76 writes "The NetBSD Project have announced the release of NetBSD 5.0 after two years of development. Highlights of the seven million new lines of code in 5.0 include a new threads implementation, kernel preemption, a new scheduler, POSIX real-time scheduling, message queues and asynchronous I/O, WAPBL metadata journaling for FFS filesystems, improved ACPI support, UDF write support, X.Org instead of XFree86 (on some platforms — at last!) and lots of driver updates. Binary distributions for 53 different platforms are provided."

Comments

Re:BSD is compelling

[afabbro]

BSD is one of those things that I've been interested in doing, especially early on. It is arguably more secure than Linux, is definitely older and potentially more secure.

OpenBSD is - not BSD in general.

2) Although they had similar backgrounds and technologies, the differences were enough that it was almost a complete re-learn. RPM didn't work. Init was totally different. Commands such as ps, at, etc. had different options.

You name three things that one would expect to be different, even without installing OpenBSD:

• BSD does not use the RedHat Package Manager. Now there's a shock.
• rc.X-style init vs. BSD init is one of the archetypal differences between BSD and SysV systems...so what did you expect?
• GNU vs. non-GNU utilities have different arguments. Again...why the surprise? I suppose if Linux is the only Unix you've ever used, then perhaps you think the whole world works in a GNUish way. AIX, Solaris, HP-UX, and dozens of others have long had their quirks.

I guess I don't see why your experience surprised you so much. If you're going to switch Unices, particularly from a (mostly) SysV-based system like Linux to a near-purely BSD-based system like OpenBSD, you should expect that some things are going to be different. It's one thing to say "hey, I tried OpenBSD, found that security is indeed the inverse of convenience, and decided I liked Linux better because it was more familiar to me". But saying that you were surprised to find that RPM didn't work leaves you vulnerable to "well, duh" comments. Like this one ;-)