Matthias Scheler of the NetBSD Release Engineering team announced an update to the prospective timeframes for upcoming NetBSD releases. NetBSD 3.0 is planned for October 2005; NetBSD 2.1 for the middle of September 2005. These dates are of course subject to change.
How is NetBSD looking these days, and what is it good for? I know OpenBSD is for security and unfortunetly, FreeBSD is the only one with some real popularity, I know it seems to be for functionality, or am I wrong on that? But how is Net coming?
NetBSD is good for everything. A huge misconseption (sp?) is that its only good for obscure hardware (one that I had myself a few years back). NetBSD is small, secure, clean, etc. Pkgsrc is super nice. I love that everything is installed to /usr/pkg/*. Makes for being clean. It takes a little configuring to get started for a desktop, although, not more than say Crux Linux or similar. For a server, well I setup mail/web/ssh/ftp servers with NetBSD in under an hour including compile on a reasonably new machine.
If you are unsure and havent tried NetBSD ever because “its portable” and you only have i386, try it. You will like it. Portability is a primary goal of NetBSD, but it has alot of benificial side affects (clean code, small base, cross compiling, etc).
.adam.
I follow NetBSD fairly close (my favorite OS), but I apparently missed something if 3.0 is coming out in October 2005. I know the number scheme changed but that seems kinda wierd. Someone inform me please. I mean it took 10 years to get to version 2 and now like 10 months to get to version 3?
Anyway, keep up the good work.
NetBSD RULES!
I install Netbsd from time to time for various reasons. What i like about NetBSD is thing like the NetBSD install ISO fits on a 3″ CD-R and it free from bloatware. Most every service is disabled by default so you only enable what you absolutly need. It has a mature package management system that is very easy to use. It runs on a plethora of platforms. I have in the past run it on Alpha , Sparc and of course x86. I personally think it is the cleanest most useful version on BSD.
I migrated to NetBSD for my personal system in 2000 not because I had obscure hardware per se, but because it was the only free OS to have stable cardbus support for my Dell laptop at the time. Both linux (I had used slackware and debian previously for home) and FreeBSD were lagging in this area.
I quickly learned that more hardware and platform support means that it can provide a much more configurable system. What other OS allows you to take a sun quad card and plug it into a PC AND take a 3com card and plug it into Sun hardware and have everything work the same?
I also like the NetBSD idealology. “Do it right” opposed to “Doing any kind of way”. Maybe because of the clean design, they can survive and make headway with a fraction of developers that some organizations have.
Sorry for getting off-topic, but did they ported OpenBSD’s pf to NetBSD? I am investigating the BSDs for replacing my Linux router. FreeBSD would be okay, but I would prefer something that is lighter and NetBSD seems to fill the bill. I could use m0n0wall but I want to do the stuff myself.
Are you talking about ipf? that is intergrated into NetBSD pretty much.
He is talking about OpenBSD’s native pf. Its currently in -current and scheduled for the 3.0 release. I’ve used it a bit on a 3.99 current system and it fits my needs as an ipfilter replacement.
Nah, pf (http://www.openbsd.org/faq/pf/index.html). It looks like it was integrated in NetBSD 3.0. Now, I have to admit that I never used ipf but pf makes more sense to me, at least on paper.
is in pkgsrc as an LKM. Works fine for me with ~70 users behind a 2.0 P4 doing NAT/Transparent Squid.
I really probably ought to get around to registering one of these days, huh?
How is the USB2 support in this release
Could anyone explain (as objectively as possible) the strengths and weaknesses of NetBSD as a desktop, compared to FreeBSD? Thanks in advance.
Differences between NetBSD and FreeBSD:
As a desktop; almost nothing. You will probably run exactly the same software on it (KDE or whatever), and you will not notice any difference.
As a UNIX: some differences. NetBSD is all about consistency and logical layout, where FreeBSD is more about features and performance. If you install your OS to play with it alot (and not only to surf the web), you may very much appreciate NetBSD.
FYI: NetBSD 2.1_RC1 has been tagged.
NetBSD 2.1_RC2 has been tagged.