The NetBSD-PT Group did an interview via e-mail with Hubert Feyrer.
He has been a NetBSD developer for years and we wanted to know his views on NetBSD, his projects and some personal questions.
"In NetBSD's sweet spot are organizations looking for a slim, lightweight, highly stable, and capable operating system to run the latest server applications on modest or specialized hardware."Read the article at ServerWatch.
"I've always been comfortable using the command line interface to get specific tasks done. I already knew that I could do pretty much anything from the command line if I was willing to sit down, read manual pages, and learn -- or if I really had to. To prove it, recently I forced myself to use only the CLI for a week. I ended up learning a lot more than just a few command line arguments." Read the article at NewsForge. Jeff also writes: "I used Lynx as my browser; I don't really like Lynx, but what else is there?" May we suggest eLinks 0.10.x, Links and w3m? They all have way better rendering than Lynx!
Gavan Fantom of NetBSD, has imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree, the new NetBSD/iyonix port.
The IYONIX pc is an ARM-based desktop machine. It offers virtually silent operation, low heat, and all the other odds and ends offered by a modern PC. NetBSD is one port closer to a
NetBSD/toaster port.
A new release candidate RC4 of NetBSD 2.0 has been tagged. The changes since RC3 include fixes for IP Filter (concerning IPv6 and better backwards compatibility with existing configurations), checksum processing for bridge interfaces, support for the Adaptec AAR 2810SA raid controller, linux compatibility and changes to the pagedaemon in order to improve performance under heavy disk load.
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:
James Chacon of the NetBSD release engineering team has sent a report covering the status of the NetBSD 2.0 branch to the netbsd-announce mailinglist. The report contains a schedule for the release cycle, and a list of 2.0-specific bugs that need to be closed. This is still a good time to help us making this the best NetBSD release ever, by trying out the latest snapshots, and reporting bugs.
Jan Schaumann announced that the second NetBSD Quarterly Status Report for 2004 is now available online. It covers the major recent developments within the NetBSD project during April, May, June.
During the last few months Chuck Silvers has refined the support for non-executable mappings on NetBSD. Non-executable mappings make parts of the stack and heap non-executable when they are marked writable. This makes exploiting potential buffer overflows harder.
NetBSD's Linux emulation doesn't run a Linux kernel on a virtual machine; it runs Linux binaries on a NetBSD kernel. Linux emulation let you run plenty of useful programs that won't run natively under NetBSD, such as Sun's 1.4 Java Runtime Environment and JDK. Read the rest of the article here.
The NetBSD Foundationannounced that it has registered the
'NetBSD' trademark...An official policy on the use of the NetBSD trademark is currently being drafted and will be made public soon.
Jan Schaumann announced today that, in order to provide a summary of the most important changes over the last few months, the NetBSD Foundation has decided to follow the example of other projects of releasing official status reports on a regular basis. The first quarterly status report, covering the activities within the NetBSD Project during the first three months of 2004 is now available online.
Christian Limpach imported a new port into the NetBSD source tree: NetBSD/xen. Xen is is a virtual machine monitor for x86 that supports execution of multiple guest operating systems with unprecedented levels of performance and resource isolation. Xen is Open Source software. See here for more details on Xen or join the port-xen mailing list.
James Chacon of the NetBSD Release Engineering team has announced that the Release Engineering process for the much awaited NetBSD 2.0 release has begun. At this time, the expected final release is scheduled for the end
of May 2004. See James' message to the netbsd-announce
mailinglist for details.
NetBSD is the king of operating system portability, running on 40+ different hardware platforms, including x86, MIPS, and even the Sega Dreamcast. So it comes as no surprise that among the supported platforms, NetBSD runs on my Sun Ultra 5. This will be the first in a series of operating system reviews for the SPARC platform. You can find the specifics of my evaluation machine here.
