The NetBSD Project has published the first ‘quarterly’ status report in 2007, covering the months January through June of 2007. “NetBSD is an actively developed operating system. With 54 different system architectures in total and binary support of 53 architectures in our last official release (NetBSD 3.1), our widely portable Packages Collection ‘pkgsrc’ and large userbase there is a lot going on within the project. In order to allow our users to follow the most important changes over the last few months, we provide a brief summary in these official status reports, released with irregular regularity. These reports are suitable for reproduction and publication in part or in whole as long as the source is clearly indicated. This status report summarizes the changes within NetBSD from January until June 2007.”
I noticed that they are attempting to port NetBSD to the Xbox.
Isn’t porting to a last generation console a lost cause?
Who uses the original Xbox these days? Its all about the Xbox 360 these days. I still have one but rarely use it.
The Xbox 360 is unfortunatly locked down, making booting another OS impossible unless an exploit is found.
I can imagine more people would be more willing to mod their xbox for use as a PC/Media centre because it is a last generation console and they aren’t using it for games anymore.
I actually plan to install a modchip in my original Xbox tommorow and try and install gentoo, amongst other things (XBMC, some emulators etc).
I got the box for next to nothing just last week, and have little interest in gaming. I’m just doing it for fun.
Who uses the original Xbox these days?
Me. I love my xbox. I just recently purchased GTA: San Andreas for cheap and I’ve been playing it all week. Prior to that its Tony Hawk’s Underground or Knights of the Old Republic II. And since the 360 came out I’ve noticed a drop in price on original xbox games. I also have the dvd remote to allow me to watch movies on it. This xbox has served me very well and I plan to keep using it. I haven’t modded it yet, and I really don’t know if I want to. I don’t know what advantages it will offer me.
XBMC, nuff said
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XBMC
“Who uses the original Xbox these days? ”
Everyone who bought one presumable have one and it’s not unlikely that they now want to use it for something else rather than just throwing it away.
>Isn’t porting to a last generation console a lost cause?
Why? People are using it. Linux/BSD aren’t about economical views, they are about community. If there is a need …
>Who uses the original Xbox these days?
Lot of people.
I don’t follow NetBSD’s development, but I always wonder why don’t they just focus on making the best server OS instead of fighting in many fronts.
I mean, if they have limited resources (as it seems they have), why try to make it a desktop OS too? That requires many resources, and still they can’t really compete with Windows, OS X or Linux. Not even with FreBSD. Probably not even with Solaris in the near future.
So wouldn’t it be worth to just drop X completely (and all X apps), wireless chips support, laptop support or any non-server hardware/architecture and just focus on a server oriented OS, with security, reliability, performance and features that can match the best in this field? Yes, I know it’s already a very good server OS, but it has a very low market share. If they’d put all their efforts into the server, maybe they could compete with Red Hat, Windows or Solaris in that field.
On the desktop it’s a lost fight, IMHO.
So wouldn’t it be worth to just drop X completely (and all X apps), wireless chips support, laptop support or any non-server hardware/architecture and just focus on a server oriented OS, with security, reliability, performance and features that can match the best in this field? Yes, I know it’s already a very good server OS, but it has a very low market share. If they’d put all their efforts into the server, maybe they could compete with Red Hat, Windows or Solaris in that field.
On the desktop it’s a lost fight, IMHO.
I think that one easy answer is that the people who do the development are scratching their own itch–they use laptops and X and wireless themselves. OpenBSD supports the same things for the same reason.
Also, I am not so sure a fight is being fought. The people using NetBSD have their reasons, and I don’t think they are looking for converts. As long as the users are satisfied, I would say that the project is successful.
Finally, I think it is pretty clear that a project needs serious corporate backing to be successful in the way you suggest. The big companies which needed an OS to fight their competitors with have already jumped on the Linux bandwagon. BSD has been more successful embedded inside of hardware, like EqualLogic and NetApp storage arrays.
They would lose even more users then. I use netbsd for a “laptop” and i love it. they don’t just support x, wireless, and laptop support on 1 arch. they support on a bunch of them. which is why i love it. it allows me to use the same os i do on my desktop on my old win ce tablet. with pretty much all the same apps.
>On the desktop it’s a lost fight, IMHO.
Against PR it’s always a lost fight and the term “ready for desktop” is just PR.
>but I always wonder why don’t they just focus on making the best server OS instead of fighting in many fronts.
Because it’s nonsense, they have their market share, foremost in Japan, especially as firmware for different devices.
>and still they can’t really compete with Windows, OS X or Linux. Not even with FreBSD
They don’t try it. Linux tries, *BSD stands just for very good UNIX-derivatives. Lot of people don’t even care about this couture-OS MacOS and the shiny bluescreen Windows.
>maybe they could compete with Red Hat, Windows or Solaris in that field.
You should have a look at netcraft, look for BSD.
>On the desktop it’s a lost fight, IMHO.
It will be a lost fight for every free OS, because they can only compete with quality against lies. And lies are the world of the commercial systems.
“I don’t follow NetBSD’s development, but I always wonder”
We can pretty much stop reading here. I’ve always wondered why people who do not follow a certain project nor is involved with it think they are qualified to suggest what decisions the project should make,
If you are really interested, you should go and read the mailing lists of the project. It’s pretty clear why they don’t drop support for such things.
NetBSD is not an big company, an enterprise which should focus on one thing or another. Linux isn’t too, altought the money of some companies makes some people think Linux has a focus. This is open source (free software if you want) and if people think something should be done, it will be done.
Correct me if i’m wrong but January to June is 6 months, so unless we are now having 24 month years (suits me having xmas once every 24 months) why is this quarterly?
You unable to read? They put it in quotes for a reason.
Yes, it’s in quotes. But I didn’t see any mention in the report of why there wasn’t a report after March. So it was worth pointing out.
I’m very pleased to see the announcement about www/nspluginwrapper which allows Flash to work with NetBSD native browsers. I’ve been running NetBSD on one of my desktop machines for a while and the inability to view Flash content has been my biggest complaint.
(Although it’s been convenient to not see flash advertisements.)
What is it with all these people going like “Why does system X even bother with the desktop?”
I mean, most open source systems are *nix, thus things like X11 and whatever else from the *nix world can just run fine on them.
Driver support? Big frickin’ deal, if your license is BSD compatible… (Guess where I’m suggesting to get the bits from.)
I’m running OpenSolaris, people ask whether I’m nuts. All of my hardware is supported with their hardware acceleration features, I’m running Gnome 2.18 on X11 and all sort of applications, all without a hitch. I don’t see a problem here. But hey, I however get native ZFS and Dtrace.
ZFS already ported to FreeBSD 7.0-CURRENT, so I think NetBSD can get it from FreeBSD which should be easier.
I wish to see Dtrace ported as well in FreeBSD, OBSD and NetBSD.