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Operating Systems Software BSD

NetBSD Quarterly Status Report 49

Posted by CowboyNeal from the recent-haps dept.
An anonymous reader writes "NetBSD's 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."
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NetBSD Quarterly Status Report More

NetBSD Quarterly Status Report

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  • NetBSD 2.0 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Halfbaked Plan ( 769830 ) on Friday April 09, 2004 @02:39AM (#8813034)
    I, for one, am looking forward to the upcoming NetBSD 2.0 release. Just installed NetBSD-current on a new four-way server and it's running great with SMP. Looks like the 2.0 release is scheduled in the next several months.

  • Cool (Score:3, Insightful)

    by theapodan ( 737488 ) on Friday April 09, 2004 @03:24AM (#8813173)
    I'm glad that NetBSD seems to have a strong roadmap that is going somewhere soon. Since I've started fiddling with FreeBSD, I've thought that NetBSD didn't have the drive and commitment that FreeBSD did. Bully for them, putting out an optimistic showing for v 2.0. I wonder what the new logo will be.
    • You defintly should start fidling with NetBSD as well :-)
      Its much cleaner, and more stable than any other OS's I've tried.

      • Re:Cool (Score:5, Interesting)

        by Halfbaked Plan ( 769830 ) on Friday April 09, 2004 @02:54PM (#8818392)
        I've been 'spoiled' by the clean well-focused tightness of NetBSD going way back to 1.3.2, when I first installed it, over NFS, on my Toshiba 486 laptop. The laptop has only a floppy drive and PCMCIA slots, so an ethernet install was the only reasonable way I could see. At that time, in the Linux 1.2 kernel era, PCMCIA support in Linux was a 'hang a bag on the side' set of kernel extensions that one had to fool with to get working. With NetBSD, PCMCIA ethernet support was integrated into the kernel core and 'just worked' in the single boot floppy needed for the install.

        The 'minimal, clean' philosophy extends all the way through NetBSD. A basic install for most architectures is an 80-100 MB set of gzipped tarballs you can easily download. This gets you a working system, with all the basic functionality, a C compiler, X11 with the basic Tab Window Manager (TWM), networking, etc. The installer lets you 'pare' this down even further if, say, you don't need X11 or dev tools. When you want to extend your system beyond this base, you turn to the packages collection, which is really a massive build script, with 'configuration-wrapper' scripts and patches that are applied over the standard source tarballs from whomever the package actually comes from. You can also applie the packages as binaries using the pkg_add command and a large repository of prebuilt packages available from the NetBSD ftp sites.

        Because the base system is small and fully integrated, you can also compile the whole base userland from a set of integrated gzipped tarballs (*.tgz files). It's as simple as unpacking the source tarballs and issuing a top-level make command. The whole kernel and base userland can also be upgraded with CVS live over the network and rebuilt.

        Once you learn how to admin and run with NetBSD on one architecture, you know most of what you'll need to for running it on different architectures. All the ports of NetBSD, for Mac68k, MacPPC, i386, Sparc, Sparc64, VAX, MIPs, etc. built from the same core source files. The structure of the /etc/ directory is common to all architectures.

        And NetBSD has adopted a philosophy of doing things right, one time, and keeping things that way. Most of the info you need to set up and admin a NetBSD system you can learn from the classic UNIX books and documentation. The O'Reilly X Window System documentation (the big 8 book set) tells you almost anything you need to know, for instance.

        There isn't a cadre of people out there trying to make NetBSD 'easy to use.' Thus, there aren't a bunch of people muddying things up and producing all kinds of croft and layers of GUI stuff to do basic tasks. There isn't a perceived goal of 'win over OS foo' which eggs the developers on to misdirected goals of competitiveness. The excellence of NetBSD stands on it's own and is based in what it is, not how it 'compares' to other OS projects and products.

        Anyway, I think NetBSD is cool, it gives the users who are interested in 'getting under the hood' the opportunity to explore along well-followed paths of classic UNIX, and also lets the computer enthusiast run a Common OS on his whole collection of machines. I've run NetBSD on a Macintosh SE/30, a Quadra 650, on various PC compatibles going from a 386sx laptop to a Quad PentiumPro server, on all the classic Sun Sparc machines (IPC, IPX, LX, Classic, SS2, SS5, SS10, Ultra1), and on an RS/6000 box with the PowerPC chip.
        • I wish I had mod points.

          Very nicely summarized.

          PS, what port did you use for the RS/6000? I couldn't find one a few months ago.

          • Re:Cool (Score:4, Informative)

            by Halfbaked Plan ( 769830 ) on Saturday April 10, 2004 @02:16AM (#8823214)
            The RS/6000 that I ran NetBSD on was one of the PREP boxes. So it had a PowerPC processor, ISA and PCI slots, an S3 video chip, and used PS/2 keyboard and mouse. In all regards except for running on a PPC, it was a PC. I ran NetBSD/PREP on it. Not all RS/6000 boxes are as 'PC compatible' as that machine (a 7248 box). I now have an absolutely ancient box, one based on the Power1 processor, that I seem to be limited to running AIX on. Though I will be checking on that before long.

            • The RS/6000 that I ran NetBSD on was one of the PREP boxes. So it had a PowerPC processor, ISA and PCI slots, an S3 video chip, and used PS/2 keyboard and mouse. In all regards except for running on a PPC, it was a PC. I ran NetBSD/PREP on it.

              I found one thrown out in a residential area. With "PowerPC" written on the front and RS/6000 I had to have it (BTW, it was built like a main battle tank! So bloody heavy for such a little box!). When I got it home, I found it had no HDD (which I would assume would b
      • >Subject: Announcing the New NetBSD logo
        >To: None
        >From: Hubert Feyrer
        >List: netbsd-advocacy
        >Date: 04/01/2004 00:15:39

        Lets take a look at the Date header again ;)

        • I know that. I thought the part about it being a highly portable LINUX system, and the Linux Torvalds announcement were funny.

  • Virtual machine monitor : Xen (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Homology ( 639438 ) on Friday April 09, 2004 @09:41AM (#8814583)
    The new port Xen virtual machine monitor [netbsd.org] for i386 sure looks interesting. The guest OS has to be ported to the Xen architecture, though.

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