Some NetBSD 2.0-RC1 builds for those how wants to try this RC1 for the i386 and sparc64. These are unofficial builds without extra patches, made by a NetBSD enthusiast/developer. UPDATE: Jan Schaumann of NetBSD writes:The NetBSD Releng Team has announced that the first Release Candidate for
NetBSD 2.0 (ie NetBSD-2.0_RC1) has been tagged. This is a major milestone
in the much anticipated release of NetBSD 2.0:
from now on, any pullups must address some form of show-stopping issue to
even be considered. The NetBSD Project encourages all users to test the
binary snapshots that will soon be available on the release engineering ftp server.
If no pullups are necessary, then the 2.0 release should
occur around the middle of October. Any fixes resulting in pullups will
cause a second RC cycle to begin and add approximately 1-2 weeks more to
the timeline.
The NetBSD Packages team
announced that a new
pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch was created, and the freeze on committing to the pkgsrc
trunk is now over. This branch, which includes a total of 4959
actively-maintained and supported packages, deprecates the last stable pkgsrc
branch (pkgsrc-2004Q2); all maintenance will take place on this new
pkgsrc-2004Q3 branch. Please see our online documentation of the
NetBSD Packages Collection for details.
Wheres the new logo!?
P.S. NetBSD rules. Try it if you haven’t.
-adam
Please be aware that these are unofficial builds, and are not endorsed by the NetBSD project! Official builds can be downloaded (as usual) from the release engineering servers and mirrors. The actual mirror list is available from:
http://www.netbsd.org/mirrors/
Is there any loose estimat on when 2.0 might be released ?
I’ve been trying some NetBSD 2.0-snapshots lately, and it’s looking very promising. I’m considering to switch from FreeBSD to NetBSD when 2.0 comes out.
Does anyone know about SMP support in NetBSD? Is there any? Is it good? Compared to FreeBSD’s?
2.0 will have SMP support for i386, amd64, alpha and sparc. I think there may also be support in macppc. This list is possibly not exhaustive. The SMP uses a big kernel lock, so it’s essentially like FreeBSD 4.x.
Didn’t FreeBSD get their SMP code from NetBSD and rename it SMPng?
As I understand it SMPng has been derived from BSDi source code.
No. FreeBSD’s SMP code is a completely different work. However, OpenBSD did import NetBSD’s SMP code.
Will 2.0 ship with gnome2.8 ?
gnome2.8 is in pkgsrc.
Please do understand that NetBSD does not work like a Linux distribution. Third-party software is not released as a part of a NetBSD release, but available through pkgsrc. Pkgsrc is continually being updated. Pkgsrc releases a stable tree every quarter, binary packages are built for these quarterly releases.
Yes, NetBSD 2.0 uses a giant lock for SMP, ala FreeBSD 4.x. This was done because it’s the easiest to implement. FreeBSD 5 does away with it….sort of. It’s still there unless you’ve got the right hardware. There’s still a good amount of hardware that’s not SMP-ng compliant.
NetBSD also still supports Alpha, which FreeBSD has dropped. I had a build of NetBSD 2.0 running on a four-way Alphaserver 4100. It seemed to actually perform better than FreeBSD 4.8.
I think that the logo was due to be announced some time ago, but all I can find about it are the official announcement ( http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2004/01/14/0001.html ) and one person’s entries ( http://www.outshine.com/bsdlogo/ ). I think that maybe NetBSD is waiting for its 2.0 release before making the announcement. I find it frustrating that, having waited so long, we can’t even see many of the entries.
I recall reading that they didn’t choose any of the submissions because they were all subpar. As surprising at that seems, I think that’s what happened.
> I recall reading that they didn’t choose any of the
> submissions because they were all subpar. As surprising at
> that seems, I think that’s what happened.
That’s the first I’ve heard of that, or indeed of any outcome of the competition (apart from http://mail-index.netbsd.org/current-users/2004/05/07/0016.html ). Not that I really ought to know, but I do follow the netbsd advocacy mailing list.
I suppose the new logo will be released together with NetBSD 2.0. At least it would be a great occasion.
I recall reading that they didn’t choose any of the submissions because they were all subpar. As surprising at that seems, I think that’s what happened.
Don’t believe every rumour you read
.
Pkgsrc releases a stable tree every quarter, binary packages are built for these quarterly releases.
Is there a pkgtool for checking the available pkgsrc updates using only binary packages? Or do I need to check out the package versions after every quarterly release of pkgsrc and seperately update every binary package that seems to have a higher version available? Some kind of automated pkgtool to keep apps up-to-date via binary packages would be a nice feature in pkgsrc. 🙂
I prefer to use binary packages and updating apps every three months suits me just fine. However, I find that the documentation in NetBSD web site could give more info on the option of using pkgsrc via binary packages. I guess that many other newbies, besides myself, would be interested in this option.
NetBSD may be the greatest thing since sliced bread(?) – but the big problem is that everything in NetBSD world seems to develop and happen sooo slooowly… Now it seems that not only new releeases but even this new logo… AFAIK they were quite serious about getting a new logo, and it was to be released months ago. But still no news about it.
I recall reading that they didn’t choose any of the submissions because they were all subpar. As surprising at that seems, I think that’s what happened.
I wonder if the submissions were that much worse than the current logo? Hardly.
Besides, I don’t really even know what is the old/current NetBSD logo? It can’t be Beastie which is a FreeBSD logo. Is it the complicated and odd picture on their front page? Or the flag with text NetBSD written on it?
Maybe people just haven’t agreed on which would be the best choice for a new logo? Or – maybe it’s proven to be more time consuming than was expected to port the new logo to all those dozens architectures that NetBSD supports… 😉
I haven’t seen any logo submissions except these ones http://www.outshine.com/bsdlogo/ mentioned above here. But even any of those thre logos could work ok.
Of those three I would vote for Bob the Orca
http://www.outshine.com/bsdlogo/orca/
It has nice kinship with the OpenBSD blowfish logo too, and the two BSD flavors are closely related as everyone knows. Besides, having some mascot (instead of a dull abstract logo only) would be a nice idea.
Well, Bob the Orca logo doesn’t look subpar in any way. My guess is that we’ll get a very nice new NetBSD logo once 2.0 is released. All that is needed is little patience…
It also seems that NetBSD is not as hectic as some less mature OSS alternatives, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing. What you get in NetBSD is a very stable and well-designed base system with very up-to-date pkgsrc on top of that. So what’s there to complain about? 😉
a very stable and well-designed base system with very up-to-date pkgsrc on top of that.
So what’s there to complain about? 😉
Maybe nothing at all… Just can’t wait to see the new logo… ;-D
But isn’t it just a fact that supporting all those architectures (more than any other OS probably) means that the development of new NetBSD releases, with all the latest stuff, support for hardware etc., often tends to get slower than with FreeBSD or Linux distros that usually run only on one or a couple architectures? But superb portability is, of course, also the big strength of NetBSD.
But isn’t it just a fact that supporting all those architectures (more than any other OS probably) means that the development of new NetBSD releases, with all the latest stuff, support for hardware etc., often tends to get slower than with FreeBSD or Linux distros that usually run only on one or a couple architectures?
Supporting many architectures obviously makes development slower but it can also make code faster, cleaner, stabler, and the whole OS generally more streamlined and better designed. Porting software to other architectures can also be considered as a kind of bug tracking procedure. So, portability has both good and bad aspects — but mostly good. 🙂
alpha/ 28-Sep-2004 16:18
amd64/ 28-Sep-2004 16:19
i386/ 27-Sep-2004 19:58
mac68k/ 28-Sep-2004 10:24
macppc/ 28-Sep-2004 11:10
sparc/ 27-Sep-2004 22:10
sparc64/ 27-Sep-2004 19:58
At this moment, more archs may be coming, but for new we’ve extended the set with these archs, readily available at http://netbsd.student.utwente.nl/NetBSD-2.0_RC1-iso/
Metic
> Besides, I don’t really even know what is the old/current
> NetBSD logo? It can’t be Beastie which is a FreeBSD logo.
My understanding is that Beastie is a mascot for all of the BSDs.
> Is it the complicated and odd picture on their front page?
Yep. That’s the one.
> Of those three I would vote for Bob the Orca
Orcas eat penguins you know.
> Besides, having some mascot (instead of a dull abstract
> logo only) would be a nice idea.
Many posts on the advocacy mailing list suggested new mascots, but this one ( http://mail-index.netbsd.org/netbsd-advocacy/2004/01/14/0027.html ) argues that the mascot might remain the same.
A huge thanks to Karsten Kruse for making these ISO’s available. Certainly makes installing and testing NetBSD 2.0 RC1 a lot easier.
Have managed to get a little time to install onto a cruddy old P166 single CPU, so haven’t (yet) been able to look at the SMP stuff, but the threading libs look all there, installed onto UFS2 filesystems no probs, but haven;t been able to find out how to get fsck to run in the background (a feature reported to be available in UFS2).
Hope to test the SPARC64 version in the next couple of days.
NB: The installer is a little different than earlier versions of NetBSD (pre 2.0), but pretty straight forward nonetheless
thanks again….
Check this:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20040928
St.
Didn’t notice that blog.
I noticed this:
http://www.feyrer.de/NetBSD/blog.html#20040922
Just printing it!
Binary security updates are a welcome idea (I think that FreeBSD already has something similar). I’ve understood that Daniel is currently working on NetBSD documentation, so mentioning these tools for managing binary updates might be a useful addition to the existing documentation.