Submitted by “The NetBSD community announced last month the official release of NetBSD 4.0, the latest version of the Unix-like open-source operating system. Version 4.0 includes significant new features like Bluetooth support, version 3 of the Xen virtual machine monitor, new device drivers, and improvements to the Veriexec file integrity subsystem. NetBSD, which is known for its high portability, is capable of running on 54 different system architectures and is suitable for use on a wide range of hardware, including desktops, servers, mobile devices, and even kitchen toasters. To commemorate the NetBSD 4.0 launch, enthusiast Federico Biancuzzi communicated with 21 developers to produce this expansive interview with loads of insightful information about the NetBSD 4.0 development process.”
Talk about a cool, very technical interview. Since the BSD’s offer a complete operating system from CVS, it’s always pretty neat to hear about all the changes and updates in the entire OS stack. Same goes with the interviews with the OpenBSD and FreeBSD devs. Very technical and very cool.
I’m all for NetBSD publicity, but is it necessary for them to continually insult our intelligence with the toaster line? NetBSD runs on the board computer housed inside a toaster case. The toaster isn’t an architechure, it’s an implementation of it. Otherwise, embedded Linux could claim to be more portable than NetBSD, since they could claim portability to every individual device that runs it.
The fact that Linux is now probably the most ported OS doesn’t make it the most portable one.
That said, the toaster stuff annoys me, too.
Indeed, washing machines and toasters were fun for a while. It gives the impression that NetBSD is for obscure hardware and your old VAX, while it works great with a lot of modern hardware, from off the shelf AMD64 machines to Force10 switches.
Edited 2008-01-31 15:52 UTC
Household appliances are passé in the geek domain. You can’t wear a dishwasher to the local LUG meeting.
http://tinyurl.com/mb2qs
“Otherwise, embedded Linux could claim to be more portable than NetBSD, since they could claim portability to every individual device that runs it.”
But never from a single, coherent, and correctly engineered source tree.
It’s called humor. If you don’t like that kind of humor, fine but don’t overreact like this.
Nice to see technicals interviews like this, althoght it will take me some time to read them all.
XFree86 4.5 ???
NetBSD is not for the desktop
Are there any big NetBSD server installations out there?
If your graphics chipset is not supported by XFree86, X.org can be built through pkgsrc. Remember that NetBSD aims to provide the same experience for users of many platforms. XFree86 is integrated very well with NetBSD’s cross-platform build system (meaning that you can, say on amd64, compile NetBSD for all other supported supported platforms). Just introducing X.org without proper integration in NetBSD’s cross-build system would be a huge regression for a lot of platforms. This is why work is being done to add cross-build support to pkgsrc, and X.org specifically.
Remember, UNIX != {amd64, i386}!
Wrt. to your second question: sure. Have a look at Freeshell[1] or Panix[2].
[1] http://freeshell.org/index.cgi?faq?BASICS?02
[2] http://www.panix.com/panix/shellcommands.html
Edited 2008-01-31 17:04 UTC
Haven’t you tried it yet?
NetBSD is a very good OS and needs to have more publicity and more developers working on it.
Good work, NetBSD guys!
Does NetBSD 4.0 come with KDE? Gnome? XFCE?
I tried the live version and I liked it a lot but somebody told me that the regular version doesn’t have a desktop environment. Is that true?
Thanks….
Is there also a live version of NetBSD available now? I’ve used some earlier versions of NetBSD and I might use NetBSD also in the future, but currently I use DesktopBSD (that is a variation of FreeBSD).
Traditionally, a NetBSD installation has consisted of a very basic Unix system — just the kernel and the userland. The basic NetBSD system has a smaller footprint than the basic FreeBSD installation. This basic Unix system gives you a fully working CLI (command line interface) system and NetBSD also, optionally, adds to this basic system the X Window System, but no additional window managers or desktop environments. In the NetBSD installer, called “sysinst”, you can choose to install NetBSD with or without the X Window System.
Then you can install any third party programs (like Xorg, window managers, desktop environments, applications) that are not included in the basic NetBSD system via a package management system called “pkgsrc”. So the main idea is that the basic NetBSD system, that is developed by the NetBSD developers, is strictly separated from the third party applications. The primary use of pkgsrc is to build and install the third party applications from source, like in FreeBSD’s “ports system”, but there are also binary packages available, and these binary packages are built from the pkgsrc tree once every three months.
So you can use the ready-built binary packages to install KDE, GNOME, or XFCE after you’ve installed the basic NetBSD system. And you can upgrade your installed applications from the binary package repository that is updated four times a year or, if you don’t want to wait for the binary packages to be built, you can always get more up-to-date applications by building them from source directly via the pkgsrc.
There is an install CD with essential packages collected, which includes the KDE. You can read more about it here:
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-announce/2008/01/29/0000.html
I have an amd64 box with kdebase3 installed and it is running quite fine.
Once installed your base NetBSD system (with X server), you must download the latest stable pkgsrc source tree:
ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/pkgsrc-2007Q4/pkgsrc-2007Q4.tar.gz
install it into /usr
and then:
cd /usr/pkgsrc/x11/kdebase3
make install && make clean && make clean-depends
Thank you for the quick answers.
I will experiment with Netbsd this weekend. Let see what happens.
Thanks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!