NetBSD 1.6.2 Released 34
kairi writes "NetBSD 1.6.2 has just been released, supporting over 40 architectures. See the release announcement! Be sure to use one of the many mirrors when you grab your ISO!" MobyTurbo adds "A preliminary source of bittorrents has been announced on the NetBSD users mailing list."
Dedication (Score:5, Interesting)
"Dedication
The NetBSD Foundation would like to dedicate the NetBSD 1.6.2 release to the memory of Erik Reid, who went missing and is presumed dead in a sailing accident on 18 February 2004. Erik's contributions to NetBSD included work on support for SGI MIPS R4000, integrating XFree86 Direct Rendering Interface (DRI), and managing the build lab. His death came as a shock, and he will be greatly missed by all of us. May he rest in peace. "
Just thought I'd point it out.
bittorrent (Score:1)
Geez (Score:1, Funny)
1.6.1 downloaded (on dialup) and installed on my
laptop, this happens.
NetBSD Rules!
Re:Geez (Score:1)
Re:Geez (Score:1, Funny)
-krog, NetBSD user since 1.1 (about 40 years ago)
Re:Geez (Score:5, Interesting)
Being as I have a well-maintained near-complete mirror of the 'distfiles' source tarballs for the Pkgsrc tree local now ('make mirror-distfile' is your friend for overnight bandwidth burning), I can't see ever moving to any other OS for main use. I have all the source for everything for almost any type of box I put into service.
Re:Geez (Score:5, Informative)
PS: I believe the next NetBSD formal release will be 2.0. It will have kernel threads, SMP, ACPI, and all that other good stuff. (:
-Bruce
Re:Geez (Score:2, Informative)
Tell me... :) (Score:3)
Also, 40 platforms are great, but what are the differences in their support? I suppose NetBSD has some sort of port system as well. Is there a detailed list of what ports work on a specific architecture (I'm especially interested in PDAs, and in NetBSD as an OPIE replacement)?
Anyhow congrats to the the kings of portability
Re:Tell me... :) (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, there is. Pkgsrc is remarkably similar to what Free and OpenBSD call Ports. It also works on a lot of OSes, including Linux, Irix, and (I think) Solaris.
Check out the NetBSD page for info. It's pretty cool stuff.
--saint
Re:Tell me... :) (Score:3, Informative)
Weird that you ask that, since you answer it a few lines later. It's pkgsrc, thus called because "port" is NetBSD's term for a separate architecture on which it runs. Pkgsrc originally came from FreeBSD's ports system.
Re:Tell me... :) (Score:1)
Ironic that ports isn't portible enough...
Re:Tell me... :) (Score:5, Informative)
Pkgsrc is a nice evolution of the ports. It has some neat additional features like a security audit.
I've said it before: NetBSD gets a bum reputation as being only for obscure hardware. Not so! People alway make the connection that FreeBSD==server, OpenBSD==security and NetBSD==suitable for toaster. I'd posit that NetBSD should be considered for desktops.
So, give it a shot on your desktops. I think you'll like it.
-Peter
Workstation Hardware? (Score:2)
Links to where to buy would be cool also
THanks.
Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Is there an emulator for my x86 box that would allow me to get this done faster? BasiliskII can emulate my Mac much faster than it really is.
I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited to the sub-100MHz range. Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
Also, is there a way to build the whole distribution via gcc-3.3.x? I'd like to see how well it performs against the gcc2-built system I used a while ago.
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:3, Interesting)
It's really not all that bad. The first Unix box I ever had was a Quadra 700 running NetBSD -- the code base is _really_ tight. You could probably build the whole thing from scratch in a couple of days.
I know, that might sound like a lot, but it's a hell of a lot faster than a Sparc IPC can compile gcc from source. Don't ask me why I know that.
--saint
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:5, Informative)
-Bruce
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:1)
I was about to download the 1.6.2 tarballs to update my SE/30. I also wanted to update my gcc installation to 3.3.x for compiling MySQL and some other tools. How stable is -current? Perhaps I should look at that instead.
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:1)
-Bruce
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:1)
As of right now, it seems the last successful mac68k build was the one on March 3. So that's the snapshot I'd want to download. Is there a list of changes from 1.6.2 posted somewhere, so I can see if this is something I want to do, based on new features/fixes? Or is that something that's only provided with releases?
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:1)
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:1)
I'm subscribed to the mac68k list. Maybe I will ask there if anyone else uses -current and what their experience is.
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)
Cross-compiling not so bad.
I did exactly this for a slew of old Macs that I turned into useful machines by putting Linux on them. Compiling a 2.2 series Linux kernel would take a few days on the machines themselves, so I set up a cross-compiler on a fast machine.
The Linux kernel was easy to compile and move over, but userspace things were more difficult to compile as they tried to link to the wrong libraries (or perhaps the problem was that "make install" would never work since the library would end up in /lib on target machine and needed to be configured as such, but it needed to be in /opt/mac-cross/lib on cross compiler machine). Most documentation for setting up cross compilation is aimed at OS/compiler/embedded developers who build mostly static binaries and don't need to compile and link large sources with dependencies like gtk, so I don't know if many people do this.
I don't remember how I solved this (maybe chroot + hard links + copying stuff from target) so it must not have been too difficult. NetBSD has an nice integrated build system for everything, so this should be much easier for you (Linux was a third choice, NetBSD and OpenBSD had problems on those machines).
Go ahead and set up the cross compiler. It will take some reading and tweaking, but you'll save time in the end. I, at least, think it's far more elegant than using an emulator. Good luck.
Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)
> to the sub-100MHz range
Nowadays the release binaries for most platforms except i386 are crosscompiled.
> Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
Not with NetBSD (well, most platforms. There may be a few, which are not using the build.sh system).
Since the NetBSD build process bootstraps by building first a set of tools (make, binutils, compilers etc) and then uses this set to build the system.All you need is a bourne-shell compatible shell and a C/C++ compiler.That's why you can use a - say - solaris/sparc system to compile NetBSD/pmax.See the file BUILDING in the top directory of the source tree.