The NetBSD Release Engineering Team announced the release of NetBSD 4.0 RC1 today. The release candidate is directly available from the project’s FTP server. A list of significant changes and features can be found here. “The NetBSD4.0 release provides numerous significant functional enhancements, including support for many new devices, integration of hundreds of bug fixes, new and updated kernel subsystems, and many user-land enhancements. The result of these improvements is a stable operating system fit for production use that rivals most commercially available systems.”
Well, it’s quality software engineering in UNIX-style
who’s going to volunteer to tell all three NetBSD users that they need to upgrade?
never touch a runing system
I count ten users logged onto a public netbsd machine I help maintain.
In all seriousness, though, we moved this machine from freebsd to netbsd almost two years ago. The transition wasn’t perfect, but the system works fine for most everyone who uses it. Any problems we’ve had have been hardware-related. NetBSD is not fancy, and I’ve said before the first time I used it, I was underwhelmed (is this all there is?!). But it’s a nice, stable platform that works very well.
I am a bit concerned with the seeming dropoff in development, however. I’m glad to see that there’s an RC out now, but 4.0 is long overdue. Some of the delays may stem from the political infighting that occurred a few months ago — I hope that they’ve gotten most of those resolved.
The release process of 4.0 was stuck for a while.. However, there are really no drop offs in the development. So much of work is currently done in the -current. In past half of the year there was a drastic improvement of the system, mostly in SMP. Check out the source changes
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/source-changes/
Edited 2007-09-05 00:04
Is Google’s big linux penguin advertisement for a netbsd article
Aside from that, go netbsd! The more I try the BSD’s the more I like them. Haven’t tried netbsd in a while though, I think creating a vmware image might be in order for me tonight.
Try NetBSD… it really rocks!
I’m currently running FreeBSD 6.2 (STABLE) on one of my desktops using KDE 3.5.7 and XFce 4.4.1. Does NetBSD 4.0 ship with these desktop environments? If not, can they be downloaded, installed? Just curious, I ran NetBSD 3.0 some time ago:-)
No… it is not shipped, but you can download the packages from the 2007Q2 pkgsrc branch. I started with FreeBSD for a while and became curious with NetBSD and I really enjoy using the OS. Now my interest has peaked with OpenBSD and waiting for 4.2 to be officially released.
Enjoy.
“No… it is not shipped, but you can download the packages from the 2007Q2 pkgsrc branch. I started with FreeBSD for a while and became curious with NetBSD and I really enjoy using the OS. Now my interest has peaked with OpenBSD and waiting for 4.2 to be officially released.
Enjoy.”
Thanks for the reply, man:-) Interesting:-)
Welcome… hope everything goes well.
Same here. I run FreeBSD 6.2 but lately have been having problems with the Xorg transition – many broken ports stuff. How is NetBSD in terms of installing binary packages? I also need to run a Cisco VPN software but the only one available is for Linux. Can NetBSD run this under its Linux emulation mode?
Yes, and very well. FYI:
http://wiki.netbsd.se/Tutorials
Installing binary packages: pkg_add -v full name of package including the extension unless you export packages in your root directory, if so, then you type the name of the package. As for Cisco VPN… cd pkgsrc-wip/vpnc then type make install clean.
Hope this helps you on your venture to NetBSD.
The problem I have is running the Cisco IPSec application (from Cisco) that sets up the secure communication. After that I can run vpnc to establish a link. Cisco provides a proprietary software thats available for Linux bou not for *BSD.
Thanks.
Yes you can…it can be found in NetBSD manual on the site.
I once got a task of setting up an Enemy Territory server. I could’ve been a boring sod and go with Linux, but I ended up trying NetBSD on that.
I ran the ET server through NetBSD’s Linux ’emulation’, and it ran without a glitch for several months. Absolutely wonderful.
I’m curious as to what’s so great about NetBSD? FreeBSD is pretty up to date and has a big selection of ports, nice performance, and probably the biggest user group. OpenBSD is heavy on the security. But aside from all the odd platforms, hardware NetBSD runs on…what’s so great about it? Not trolling here…serious question.
A lot of things:
1. Is easy to install.
2. Is very light: Its footprint is quite small and the rest is reserved for your applications.
3. Its support for multiplatform is amazing! You can have an heterogenous network and all your machines will behave the same.
4. Its package management system [pkgsrc] is very well designed. It will allow you to install all your applications (in the same way than FreeBSD Ports or Gentoo’s Portage), but you can also use it on your Linux boxes, Solaris boxes or OpenBSD or FreeBSD boxes too.
5. It is very UNIX compliant.
6. Maybe biased, but, it has some “magic” when you use it
NetBSD was the first BSD, apart from 386BSD, for the PC. OpenBSD is a fork of NetBSD. And FreeBSD started just after NetBSD. So it’s an open source UNIX derivative and it supports lot of different platforms, even a toaster
I remember reading some rant about netbsd foundation, so is the code still open under BSD license?
>>I remember reading some rant about netbsd
>>foundation, so is the code still open under BSD
>>license?
Of course, I do not know what happened internally into the NetBSD foundation; but all the hype and noise produced by some e-mails and some posts on mailing lists about problems inside the NetBSD project have hurt all the project rather than benefit it.
NetBSD is a good Operating System, with a lot of potential, with a strong academical base and BSD licensed.
If NetBSD would not be BSD anymore, it should be called NetGPL or something like that