NetBSD 2.0 RC5 Tagged 74
ulib writes "NetBSD 2.0_RC5 has now been tagged. Changes since RC4 include fixes to various COMPAT_ emulations, IP Filter backward compatibility fixes, XFree86, pax(1), rsh(1), hp300 boot blocks, pthread fixes for amd64 and i386, documentation updates. Binary snapshots of NetBSD 2.0_RC5 are available in the daily builds directory on the main FTP site."
Re:Still XFree86 and not X.Org? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Still XFree86 and not X.Org? (Score:5, Informative)
It's a _very_ good reason if you don't accept the new license. As it is, NetBSD accepted the new XFree86 license. OpenBSD did not, and has recently imported X.org into -current.
Re:1 comment? (Score:5, Informative)
The difference comes in when you look at how bloated the software itself is. All the BSDs have libcs that are tiny (a couple of minutes to compile on even my slowest machines) and do everything a C library should, including full networking and everything. The GNU libc, which you'll find on every Linux system by default (there's a diet libc out there, but it isn't recognized), is a HUGE package that takes a very long time to compile and results in a hefty binary in the end. What does all this bloat go towards? Most say it's all because of its attempt at being completely internationalized, but this is hardly enough to warrant about a 10x size increase.
The same idea applies to all other software that wasn't imported from GNU. If you can do the same things smaller and more efficiently, do it that way. There's no point in having 90% of your source appeal to minor features few people will ever use. There's also a strict adherence to tradition where possible - nvi is kept instead of some stripped-down vim-alike (which would have more convenient features, for instance) because people coming from a BSD system a decade ago won't get culture shock. But all the same modern software is a 'make install' away on any of the BSDs.
The bloat difference in the Linux kernel and BSD kernels isn't even worth discussing. It's just not funny any more. Linux has inflated a LOT in recent times. I remember back when some 2.4 was about 25 megs tar.bz2, now look at it - 2.6.9 weighs in at 35 meg. Is it really 40% more functional? Nowhere near. If anything it should be getting smaller, since they insist they're refining to simpler algorithms that should work faster and take less code.
The NetBSD 2.0RC5 src/sys source compresses (bzip2 -9) to 20M, smaller than Linux 2.4 was. Compared to 2.6, it includes most of the same drivers, the same functionality (plus good security), the ability to run Linux binaries natively (and FreeBSD, SVR4, and some others I forgot), a network stack known to be better than Linux', and oh so much more. This source INCLUDES the ports of NetBSD for which Linux needs EXTERNAL patch sets to run on, meaning that this source tree is even more portable. We all know it's more stable, too. Where is the gargantuan (~175%) size of Linux going? It's all pure bloat. And I challenge even one person to come up with something Linux does that NetBSD can't do, and that takes up 15 meg when bzip2-9'd.
Re:How does NetBSD compare to OpenBSD? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Why use NetBSD? (Score:3, Informative)
A lot happened to make 2.0, and given it's edging NetBSD out of 'old slow deprecated system' into 'holy sh*t-fast modern system', getting the first release Right is well worth the wait. The functional difference is about as much as FreeBSD 4 into FreeBSD 5 (sans some things like Project Evil), but with a performance gain instead of performance loss. You really have to try it to believe it.