NetBSD 1.5.2 Released

KiwiSurfer writes "NetBSD 1.5.2 has been released. Check out the release announcement and the changelog from 1.5.1 to 1.5.2. Grab NetBSD 1.5.2 from ftp.netbsd.org or one of their mirrors."

Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Things only get better, I also believe FreeBSD 4.4 will be released today.

Re:Great!

[Jace of Fuse!]

From the FREEBSD.ORG [freebsd.org] site...

We will continue to bring you new releases from both our FreeBSD-stable and FreeBSD-current branches, both as developer's snapshots and as regular full releases. The next scheduled release on the -stable branch will be FreeBSD 4.4 on September 15, 2001. The first release on what is now the -current branch will be FreeBSD 5.0, scheduled for the fourth quarter of 2002.

So it looks like FreeBSD 4.4 will be tomorrow... but I suppose a day early is possible.

Re:Great!

[KiwiSurfer]

Either way, I'm still looking foward to 4.4-RELEASE it as it has been quite a while since 4.3-RELEASE.

Re:Great!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, works very well if doing so between major releases, but going from 2.8 to 3.1 was a major pain in the ass.

Read the handbook [freebsd.org] for more information, and of course the installation and upgrade notes of the actual release.

Cool

[rjamestaylor]

I loved NetBSD on my Workpad z50 and look forward to trying this new version on the Thinkpad 750 (486 DX with 8BM RAM and 350 MB HD) I just got from eBay. It's great to turn these "out of date" machines into powerful multiuser network servers.

Refreshing news.

NetBSD and IBM Z50

[bball99]

- one of my greatest pleasures is wiping out CE and booting NetBSD on this great little laptop..

- i've put up a quick mini-howto w/screenshots of the Z50 in action at:

http://www.tux.org/~bball/z50

- i use an Adaptec SCSI PCMCIA adapter and an external CD-ROM attached to the Z50 to install NetBSD onto a 1GB microdrive... (a 340MB microdrive, going for about $170 on ebay, is perfect, and will leave 110MB user space, even with a full NetBSD install!)

- the z50 is the most inexpensive wireless X11 terminal with a full keyboard and 640x480 (1280x960 if you use tvtwm!)... my favorite accessories:

D-Link DWL-650 wireless card
IBM microdrive(s)
Xircom CF Ethernet
Targus CF WWF card (serial i/o for my Moto StarTAC, so i can use the z50 for net access nearly anywhere in the U.S.)
Adaptec 1260D PCMCIA & Yamaha CDRW drive
192MB CF flash

i also keep a Linux distro on a 128MB CF card... unfortunately, while Linux supports the trackpoint, X, and audio, it will only use 16MB of RAM, even if 48MB is installed (4MB is a video hole)... on the other hand, the hpcmips port of NetBSD supports all installed memory (minus the hole), has trackpoint support, but no audio... right now, NetBSD is the best choice for this unit...

NetBSD now supports the TrackPoint pointer! use greg hughe's kernel at:

http://www.student.math.uwaterloo.ca/~gl2hughe/h pc mips/

(get the Aug. 17 kernel)

where else can you get a laptop with UNIX, wireless Internet connectivity that runs for 16 hours? (i use the extended battery; the 1GB microdrive actually seems to use *less* power)

Linux/BSD fans would be well advised to snap up one of these jewels before they're GONE!

"Rapid bug-fix"

[heyetv]

From the changelog:
"...Update versions to 1.5.2, leaving some references to 1.5.1 (as 1.5.2 is released as a rapid bug-fix release relative to 1.5.1)"

Rapid bug-fix... that pretty much sums it up. Lots of bug-fixes you shoulda already taken care of (telnet, sendmail, etc...) and the usual round of fixes.

Always nice to see the work on the BSDs continue...

Re:"Rapid bug-fix"

[Anonymous Coward]

*grumble*

About those Telnet and Sendmail bugfixes...

*grumble*

I leave one system almost totally wide opened but protected by a firewall. For a short time I left the firewall wide opened while I was dinking around... I figured? Whose going to find my box, and whose going to care enough to get in, right? Blah.

...some s'kid rooted the box.

Lame.

What OS?

[Captain Bonzo]

At the risk of starting a flamewar or being modded as OT or redundant, can anyone point me to a site where the relative merits of the various *BSD OSes are discussed. I've seen this sort of thing for Linux distros...

Re:What OS?

[Brilldon]

This is a good comparison of all of the common *BSDs. I hope this helps.
http://www.daemonnews.org/200104/bsd_family.html

Re:What OS?

[cant_get_a_good_nick]

In a nutshell:

FreeBSD - Balls out performance on x86

NetBSD - Ported to everything with 32 bits.

OpenBSD - Best on default security.

There are other differences obviously such as ported software and the like, but at a high level, these are the major diffs.

Don't post FTP URLs please

[Matthew Luckie]

Nik is stupid for posting a URL to an FTP server.
I thought slashdot had learnt their lesson on this one.
Can a karma whore please post the changelog so that the ftp server does not get overwhelmed from all the slashbots.
DO NOT DO THIS AGAIN

Re:Don't post FTP URLs please

[KiwiSurfer]

Good point, but the the only changelogs for 1.5.1->1.5.2 I could find were the ones on the FTP servers.

The FTP link was also linked from the release announcement which leads me to beleive that the NetBSD developers intended to have people check out the Changelog via FTP.

Re:BSD _is_ dying

[fluedke]

Things told dead are living longer :)

I think that *BSD will never die, because
I know of many commercial software products
(mostly firewalls) which use some edited
*BSD as a operating system.

I am using linux since 0.9, I've tried
FreeBSD about 2 years ago, but I was not
very happy about it (I used it as a firewall,
but I had lots of problems on desktop with it :).

I've downloaded the 1.5.1 about 2 or 3 months
ago and I think that it is a *lot* faster than
my linux. Besides of that, I am currently
running the 1.5.1 on my second system,
X11 with AfterStep, two mozilla windows,
three terminals and GKrellM and it's only using
61 MB of memory :))

Re:BSD _is_ dying

[dadragon]

Not so much. They will probably still be legal in Canada, Europe, Mexico, everywhere else.... The US can't kill it on its own.

Good point, reminds me of Linux.

[Penguinoflight]

It seems that some people have been saying that Linux is dieing for quite some time. BSD didn't take long to catch up. Fact is, they wouldn't be so insistant on it if it was true, who cares if it's dieing if it really wasn't any threat in the first place?

Your point on NetCraft was good. Though *BSD isn't used on Webservers much (all that netcraft can determine), I have friends who use BSD for routing quite a lot, and due to the good ipv6 support I might use it for routing also if I had a spare box. Mostly I just don't have time to fool around with getting stuff working "desktop-like" on my machine, and my mom wouldn't appreciate it. :-)

Re:Good point, reminds me of Linux.

[Penguinoflight]

I was not intending to downsize BSD.
much of what you say is true, though Apple is also based on Mach os.

My point was that Linux really started taking off after it was declared "dead", and so did the slackware distribution.

I'll use BSD once it can compete with Linux in the workstation department, or when I get a hold of a extra server.
btw, it's kinda hard to look you up when you post ac.

Ho, hum... (Re:hey asshole...)

[bXTr]

*bsd is FUCKED.
Same bullshit, different hole

i first started runnning it back in july 1995, 2.0.5. i'll tell you right now, *IT'S SHIT*.
You were six then, right? I suppose the first Leeeeeeeeeeeeenux kernels were "SHIT" too.

what this guy is saying is true, but you bsd lewsers refuse to admit it.
The only thing I'll admit to is that I can't tell which of you the bigger retard.

(Remainder of post snipped 'cause it's sofa king lame)

Re:The Toad Enlightenment Program

[wabb1t]

YHBT. YL. HAND.

(You Have Been Trolled. You Lose. Have A Nice Day.)

Please do not feed the trolls! Thank you.

Trolling for wabbits

[bXTr]

Kill the wabbit,
kill the wabbit,
kill the wabbit,
kill the wabbit

-- performed to the music of Ride of the Valkyries by Richard Wagner

That's great

[MadCamel]

But will it run on my ti85 calculator yet? :)

Re:That's great

[windi]

No, because the ti85 isn't 32bit and how much RAM/ROM does it have again?
I don't think you can put NetBSD on there, and somehow, I can't imagine bash on a calculator.

Re:That's great

[jandrese]

I can't imagine bash on a calculator.

But I got ZShell [ticalc.org] on my TI85.

Re:That's great

[Teferi]

What about on my 89?
:)

CHANGES-1.5.2

[Daeron]

Apparently SlashDot can't handle posts that provide NetBSD-Changelogs ... because of their stupid (doesn't work anyway) Lameness Filter.

It won't allow me to post the contents of the CHANGES-1.5.1 file that contains the changes from 1.5.2 compared to the 1.5.1 Release.

Re:Death to Muslim Pigs. Destroy Islam. Kill Arabs

[dadragon]

If you really believe that, why don't you post it like a man, as a non-AC? Right now you sound like a racist white american. (Note the non-capatalised "american". It's a sign of disrespect of this incdividual, non all Americans)

Why so many "ports"

[Tet]

One of the things I've always wondered about NetBSD is why they have so many ports. Not that NetBSD supports so many machines, but why it's structured the way it is? For example, when the first 68k port was in place, why did the next one start a new port, rather than integrate into the existing one? As it stands, we have mvme68k, news68k, next68, amiga, atari etc., when I suspect the community would be better served by having a single NetBSD/68k port. The same goes for MIPS (cobalt, hpcmips, pmax) and other architectures. Having separate trees just opens the door to disparity between ports. If a change is made in the amiga tree, for example, my guess is that it's not automatically picked up by the other 68k ports.

That said, with the Linux port apparently stalled, NetBSD is currently the closest I have to getting a free Unix on my NeXT black hardware. It doens't work yet, because mine are the Turbo model, but it's the closest of the bunch...

Re:Why so many "ports"

[drazi]

If a change is made in the amiga tree, for example, my guess is that it's not automatically picked up by the other 68k ports.

Your guess is wrong. There is only one source tree. The different ports are all built from the same codebase. It is typical in NetBSD that the addition of a device driver adds support for that hardware to *all* the ports.

Re:Why so many "ports"

[bluGill]

Yeah, what the other guy said. :)

The different ports are becuse the hardware is different enough that the same port can't be used for all versions. Efforts are constantly made to restructure the ports to make them more intigraded, but the only code that isn't the same between ports is code that doesn't apply to anything but the one platform.

Re:Why so many "ports"

[gr]

If a change is made in the amiga tree, for example, my guess is that it's not automatically picked up by the other 68k ports.

Fortunately, that's utterly false. The majority of port-specific stuff is Makefiles and things that really are specific to a given platform. (The booter on mac68k is wildly different from that on amiga, for instance... and don't even get me started on various vendors' proprietary hardware buses.) The vast majority of the code works fine, especially as regards peripheral support. (If a "mac-only" Firewire card gets supported, it gets supported on everything with a PCI bus.)

That said, with the Linux port apparently stalled, NetBSD is currently the closest I have to getting a free Unix on my NeXT black hardware. It doens't work yet, because mine are the Turbo model, but it's the closest of the bunch...

I have that same motherboard in a cube, and I hope to be hacking on it within a few months. Drop me a line at gr at eclipsed dot net if you'd like to help (or just subscribe to [e-mail] and contribute).

Re:Why so many "ports"

[benedict]

Because there's more to an architecture than the CPU. Busses, booting strategies, chipsets, etc.

Not that anyone uses this ... but there are CPUs that can run in little-endian or big-endian mode. So you could conceivably have two architectures with the same CPU that don't even have the same endianness.

Mirrors are clogged

[saider]

I went to the ISO mirrors and all the sites are either denying access or do not have the 1.5.2 directory set up yet. You may want to give it a couple days before trying.

Perhaps the crew at slashdot can create a temporary mirror site where they cache a site before they post the article. Then they can have an option on the page to either go to the referenced site or to view the cached site. Granted this would take up some space, but they would only need to do it for a couple, maybe three days, then they could retire the cache and refer everyone to the original site. This would keep the slashdot effect to a minimum. Of course I am not sure about the legal ramifications of this.

Re:Mirrors are clogged

[fluedke]

Announcing NetBSD 1.5.2

"CD images (ISOs), bootable on some platforms, will be available as of Sunday, 16 September 2001. Also included are three binary package CD images identical to those distributed for NetBSD 1.5.1."

Re:*BSD is dying

[pHDNgell]

Just because you don't hear about it doesn't mean it's not happening. The BSDs have historically been put into place and have just worked.

I've noticed a lot of Linux users care more about the public opinion of their OS than how well it works for them. I've got at least nine heavily active BSD machines working in my house at all times. All of my corporate mail is filtered through two NetBSD machines. We've got NetBSD IDS machines in various places. NetBSD application servers, web servers, DNS servers. It'd take me a while to make an inventory, but I think we should all do our part to keep you better informed at what people are doing with their computers so you won't feel so bad about making a non-technical choice.

Did you consider that the reason you don't see as much usenet activity for things like NetBSD as you do for things like Linux is that NetBSD is very clearly documented and pretty much always Just Works? That's been the case in my usage, anyway. I've had nearly no trouble with the OS in the six or so years I've been using it (would've been around 1994 or 1995). When I have had a problem, a web search or usenet search would turn up the answer usually. Outside of that, there are the mailing lists. Did you look at those for activity?

Well, anyway. It's alive as long as one person wants to use it. Even if that's just me.

upgrading.

[saintlupus]

Well, damn, there goes my uptime.

Many thanks to the netbsd developers for such a wonderful product -- as I've said before, I always point friends who want to "learn about Unix" to NetBSD, or occasionally OpenBSD. They've all come back to thank me.

Keep up the good work.

--saint

DOS, er Slashdot thier FTP Server?

[rsimmons]

Why on earth would you post links to their main ftp server here on slashdot. Wasn't linking to their list of mirrors enough? Their ftp servers are pretty much unreachable.

Why?

[Cro Magnon]

Is there any reason to use NetBSD on a i386? I'm not asking this to troll, I just heard that FreeBSD is better on that platform and I wondered if that was true.

Re:Why?

[bugg]

This is a debated topic. If you don't need SMP and you don't need high-end SCSI performance (from FreeBSD's cam) NetBSD is a choice you should at least consider.

The biggest hamper that keeps most of the "mainstream x86 BSD" users on FreeBSD is ports versus pkgsrc- pkgsrc is engineered well, but has fewer packages. Hopefully openpackages [openpackages.org] will change this.