Preliminary support for Interix, a UNIX-like environment for Microsoft Windows 2000, XP, and 2003, has been added to NetBSD’s Packages Collection. The support is still new and incomplete, but it is now possible to bootstrap pkgsrc and install simple packages. Interix is part of Microsoft’s Windows
Services for UNIX package. See Todd Vierling’s email to the tech-pkg mailing list for more information.
I installed NetBSD 1.6.2 for the first time a week ago. It’s not bad. It took a bit of getting used to the different package system.
It didn’t feel quite as refined (from a useability perspective) as the FreeBSD ports/package system. For example, if I wanted to do easy remote installs of packages, I had to define a PKG_PATH variable to point to the NetBSD server (I sure didn’t expect this). Where as on FreeBSD I could just use “pkg_add -r” and everything was just sorta auto-configured out of the box.
I also managed to break a number of installed packages (not sure how) by trying to install packages that caused others to upgrade. I was under the impression that package views (if that’s what they call them) were supposed to fix a lot of the strange package conflicts.
NetBSD was nice, but just didn’t feel as responsive as FreeBSD. I suppose I’ll wait until 2.0 before I make too many judgements.
This is great news for SFU users. Thanks to the NetBSD team!
> For example, if I wanted to do easy remote installs of
> packages, I had to define a PKG_PATH variable to point to
> the NetBSD server (I sure didn’t expect this).
I installed 1.6.2 me too few days ago and by doing:
pkg_add ftp://ftp.netbsd.org/etcetc
PKG_PATH was set up automatically
I didn’t find thunderbird on the NetBSD 1.6.2 package collection, did you find it ?
/Andrea
Off Topic:
I was thinking to find mount_smbfs (it was imported from FreeBSD) there while I read that only it will be available with the 2.0, or current
Interop Systems ported pkgsrc a while ago and all their packages for Interix now comes in pkgsrc format.
This version is very stable.
an update: The Interop systems version appears to be derived from the OpenBSD/FreeBSD implementation – not the NetBSD version.