Submitted by From the announcement email: “On behalf of the NetBSD Release Engineering team, I am proud to announce that the first release candidate of NetBSD 5.0 is now available for download. Those of you who have been paying close attention will have noticed that
RC1 was tagged on Sunday. A few hiccups delayed the availability of binaries, but they can now be downloaded from here.”
Im too lazy to investigate for myself at this late hour.
Could someone more knowledgeable please give a quick overview of NetBSD’s strengths and weaknesses compared to other *nixes?
I know that it’s available for quite a considerable CPU architectures, but that’s about all I know of it.
Thanks in advance.
Reduces user’s lazyness by a 87%
Pros: Small and with minimalist defaults.
Cons: Small and with minimalist defaults.
=)
About the rest:
– it has all the standard unix tools.
– use pkgsrc system instead of “standart ports”.
– their userland tools are pretty streamlined (rarely has non-standard functionality that you find on GNU userland tools, but you can install then anyway).
– its one of few OSes that still use XFree86 instead of Xorg by default.
– use csh as his shell (although their install prompt you if you want. Beware! the “sh” listed is not bash).
– doesn’t ship with any sort of “wizard style” tools to configure it (i don’t really take sysinstall as a wizard).
Well, it’s one of these OSes that after installing it, you must make it usable manually, tailoring it to follow your tastes.
its one of few OSes that still use XFree86 instead of Xorg by default.
Actually, NetBSD 5.0_RC1 ships X.org by default for many platforms (including i386/amd64). XFree86 is still available for those platforms not sufficiently supported by X.org.
use csh as his shell (although their install prompt you if you want. Beware! the “sh” listed is not bash).
Beware: not everyone’s favourite shell is bash! NetBSD installs minimal sh/csh/ksh by default, but lets you install an additional shell from pkgsrc if you don’t like them. Personally, I use zsh.
This is understandable. UNIX’s standard scripting shell is the Bourne shell /bin/sh which is not a Bourne Again shell using another name (or symlink or the like). #!/bin/sh is standard in UNIX, while #!/bin/bash seems to be standard in Linux, with a “symlink workaround” to stay compatible to UNIX (/bin/bash@ -> /bin/sh). The philosophy in the background is: As long as you don’t use BASH specific functionalities, and as long as you want maximal interoperability for your scripts, declare it the UNIX standard way.
The C shell as a dialog shell has been chosen by other BSDs, too, such as FreeBSD.
BASH is installable on NetBSD (as an additional package) without any problems and you can use it, if you like, but not everyone wants to have BASH on the system.
Remember, when your system crashes and you have only ro access to /, you’ll be happy to have the standard scripting shell and an excellent dialog shell available.
That’s what “usable” is defined. 🙂 Instead of putting everything users could need onto the disk in one rush, the user is encouraged to define exactly what he will need. So he installs the system and gets exactly a system fitting his particular needs, instead a “one does everything” approach that causes problems. Personally, I prefer this “tailoring approach” over anything else, especially for server purposes. BUt that’s very individual, I think.
Thanks for the replies everyone.
I see my post has been modded down, just like most of my other posts.
Anti-semitism against us genuinely semitic people is alive and well here I see.
Why must religion be brought into everything? Your comment was voted down because it was lazy, nothing to do with race or religion. Post higher quality comments to avoid being voted down.
This is a tech site. Go to http://www.religioustolerance.org/ to talk and argue about religion.
Edited 2009-02-01 19:27 UTC
Anyone who has an anti-Israel (and in turn an anti J ewish (why the hell is that word censored?)) bias will always have an agenda of playing the victim card – no matter how stupid their posts maybe.
God knows how religion got dragged into this discussion (like you said) – But then again, I’ve seen it being done numerous times when jingoism’s are thrown around, be it ‘Islamophobe’, ‘Homophobe’ or some other -phobe to shut down the debate by dragging unsubstantiated claims of persecution into the discussion of which it has nothing to do with.
Edited 2009-02-01 22:12 UTC
Why bring religion into this?
You don’t even know my religion.
Edited 2009-02-01 23:16 UTC
When I view your profile stats I see this:
Number of Comments: 23 (11 voted up, 2 voted down)
Number of Comment Votes Applied: 4 (50% positive moderations)
Since you think the moderating system is a popularity contest between semitic people vs. the rest, your stats tell me:
– Most people (11/13) accept you as you are.
– You don’t accept 50% of the people because they are white.
//Sorry for being of topic
But what happened to hackathons?
Perhaps they never existed for this OS?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hackathon
NetBSD is struggling to survive because its niche is being pulled from under their feet. Hardware architectures are getting EOLed continuously and Linux works on the few that still remain.
If it is not in Wikipedia it does not mean it is false
. NetBSD has had its share of hackathons the past years:
http://wiki.netbsd.se/Hackathon
Please drop the drama
. NetBSD is doing quite fine, and has many top-notch developers that keep pushing it forward. For instance, see:
http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-6.0.html
http://www.netbsd.org/changes/changes-5.0.html
Of course, growing the user and developer base further would be good.
Edited 2009-02-01 14:59 UTC
Is this release going to include a desktop environment?
NetBSD already has just about every desktop environment you could want in its pkgsrc repository. If you are asking for a default desktop, then the answer is no and is always going to be. The base install is minimal by design, the idea being you taylor the system to fit exactly what you need it to be, and the NetBSD team doesn’t impose any choices upon you. If it helps, think of it as the Gentoo of the *BSDs–quite a bit of effort to get it exactly the way you want it, but rock solid once you do.
Well said… NetBSD still holds a special place on my boxes.
Yes, and if you’re just looking for something without all the new bells and whistles Linux (or FreeBSD) offers, it’s great. On an older notebook I own, I dual boot Debian and NetBSD, but use NetBSD most of the time. X.org + Fluxbox + GNUstep applications.
Firefox is getting kinda show these days, however.
BTW, I misread “darknexus” at first…read it as Dr. Lexus. :-p
http://control-h.org/fark/Dr_Lexus.jpg
I installed 5.0 RC1 on an old Poweredge 2450 with an 800MHz P3 and it feels really snappy. The best part is all I had to do was add “log” to the fstab options and now both FFS partitions (/ and /usr) are journaled. The machine has some 146GB SCA drives setup as a hardware mirror, and usually it would take awhile for NetBSD to fsck a volume of this size, but when I unplugged it today it came up immediately with the following in the log:
root on ld0a dumps on ld0b
/: replaying log to memory
root file system type: ffs
/: replaying log to disk
/usr: replaying log to disk
It seems kinda weird to be happy for something that most operating systems have had for years, but for someone who loves the compact and logical design of NetBSD, it is nice to be able to scratch this final thing off the wish list.