NetBSD Archive

The BSD family of Unix-like operating systems evolved from the last release of 4.4BSD, released by the University of California some years ago. This article discusses why you might want to run the -current branch of NetBSD, how you would go about it, and a bit of what could go wrong.

The NetBSD startup process is extensible, flexible, and a little daunting at first. This article looks at the configuration mechanisms used to enable or disable features, and compares NetBSD's startup procedures to those of other systems. The NetBSD Project has also announced that it has launched an international competition for the creation of a new logo. The cash prize is US $100 for the winning entry. Our Take: I hope the winning entry resizes well (see: it is clear enough) at 32x32pix, so we can update our NetBSD logo here at OSNews too.

NetBSD's Packages Collection aka pkgsrc now has support for an experimental new framework called ``pkgviews''. This framework, finally allowing multiple versions of one package to co-exist without conflicts (among other great features), was first proposed by Alistair Crooks at EuroBSDCon 2002 and has been integrated into pkgsrc by Johnny C. Lam, who just posted a User's guide to the tech-pkg ml.

NetBSD's Christopher Sekiya announced on New Year's Eve that he committed the final bits for Indigo (IP20) support to the NetBSD/sgimips Port. Both NFS root and local root now boot multi-user. Please see his message to the port-sgimips MailingList for details.

Andrew Brown has just committed a complete rewrite of the NetBSD kernel's sysctl infrastructure to the tree. More info here.

NetBSD Emmanual Dreyfus says that COMPAT_DARWIN is now able to run MacOS X's XDarwin (X11). Darwin is Apple's MacOS X core. A fully functional Darwin binary compatibility on NetBSD/powerpc & NetBSD/i386 will imply getting MacOS X libraries to run any MacOS X program, just like NetBSD is now able to run binaries from Linux, FreeBSD, Solaris, and many other OSes. In the meantime, a very interesting slide show was released about DragonFly, showing many aspects of the work Matthew Dillon and cia are working on.

NetBSD's Steve Woodford announces that he has committed various Xscale micro-optimizations to the NetBSD/arm ports. NetBSD/arm is a collective term for NetBSD running on systems based on ARM Ltd's ARM architecture. Also, NetBSD's Frank van der Linden announced that he has added gdb support to the tree, as a result the NetBSD/amd64 port is now completely crossbuildable. NetBSD/amd64 is a port to the AMD64 family of processors.

NetBSD's Alistair Crooks announced the appointment of a new NetBSD core team.

The GCC3.3.1 switch on NetBSD has happened for some of the popular platforms. Matthew Green announced that he has switched the Alpha, ARM, i386, sparc and sparc64 ports to use GCC 3.3.1 as the default system compiler.

Matthew Green says he is ready to switch Sparc, Sparc64, i386 & Alpha ports to using GCC3.3.1 by default. He's uploaded 4 snapshots, all cross compiled from i386-netbsd. However, there appears to be work involved with fixing approximately 193 broken packages, BSDForums reports.

"Of course it runs NetBSD". NetBSD is fantastically portable, but that doesn't make it supremely easy to install on oddball hardware like a Dreamcast or a palmtop computer. Michael Lucas demonstrates cross-installation with the HP Jornada 728.

After the recent announcement that the FreeBSD boot scripts in /etc have been replaced with the next generation version imported from NetBSD, I've wanted to learn more about the new system, but wasn't able to find much info.

Following the source and binary release of NetBSD 1.6.1, now the ISOs are up and ready for your downloading pleasure. Choose among almost 40 architectures.

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.6.1 of the NetBSD operating system is now available. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6 which provides the following updates relative to 1.6: