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BSD Operating Systems

NetBSD 1.5.3 Released, 1.6 On The Way 80

Posted by timothy from the runs-on-hearing-aids-toasters-thermostats dept.
djcdplaya writes: "The highly portable NetBSD has reached a new milestone. OSNews.com is reporting that NetBSD 1.5.3 has been released. 1.5.3 was released correcting some bugs and adding some additional security. It also has improved device driver support." Part of the same announcement: "Please note that a new major release of NetBSD, version 1.6, is currently in beta test and should be released within a few weeks.
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NetBSD 1.5.3 Released, 1.6 On The Way More

NetBSD 1.5.3 Released, 1.6 On The Way

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  • I read about a Dreamcast port of NetBSD a while back. Can anyone fill me in on the current status of it? Is it incorporated into this current release (1.5.3) or the upcoming release (1.6.0)?

    How well does NetBSD work on Dreamcast... is it worth buying a Dreamcast to run NetBSD on it?

  • Changelog (Score:3, Funny)

    by tps12 ( 105590 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @06:58PM (#3934037) Homepage Journal
    New ports added include:
    • Atari 2600 and 5200
    • GE appliances
    • Nintendo Game&Watch products
    • Boeing 747
    • Deep Blue, and
    • NuBus PowerPC
    • NuBus PowerPC

      Hell, I'd be happy if my PowerMac 7200 worked. The thing is even PCI - but since it has a PPC601, it can't run Net or OpenBSD, so I'm stuck with YDL.

      --saint
  • I had ssaid that a few days ago .... -> http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=36307&cid= 3913089

    One more thing to note is that the web site stil has not bee updated and some of these binaries are about a month old... guess I'll upgrade tomorrow afternoon... something to do at work ;-)

  • i guess regular users of netbsd will wait till 1.5.6 for a full upgrade? after all this is supposed to be an incremental release is'nt it?

  • Lets Thank All the Developers! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Cardhore ( 216574 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @07:11PM (#3934099) Homepage Journal
    I have had NetBSD for about 6 months now, and all I can say is that the software is brilliant. I am genuinely stunned by how good this is. And I am genuinely thankful to all the people who made this possible. I know it is a little unfair to mention anyone by name but;

    Richard Stallman; I think you are a genius.

    Linus; many thanks for making your magnificent kernel available to us all forever via the GPL. If I had ever written anything this good, I would have been reluctant to part with it, but you gave it away. I hope you are soon rich as well as famous.

    ESR; what can I say, keep up the good work I guess. Try not to take everything that is said too personally. Like all the others, I don't agree with everything you say, but I think your contribution is overwhelmingly positive. And I think you write well. This is something not all good programmers can do, or want to do.

    So far I have NetBSD running on 3 machines. I have the complete home LAN going with IP masquerading and all that. I have never had a crash, but to be honest sometimes I have screwed up my systems so badly the best way to recover was just to reboot and start again. Quicker than reading the manual if you know what I mean, just hit it with a bigger hammer. I have a real talent for screwing up routing tables.

    I would guess that Linux has saved me at least USD$5,000-00, and maybe USD$10,000-00. I base this estimate on the software savings (the missing BLOATware), hardware savings and over priced upgrades to both that I can now permanently avoid. My gateway/server box is a P75 for instance, with an 8 gig drive. Intra-LAN pings take 0.5 milliseconds on 100 meg PCI cards with a 10 meg hub. Me, I can wait 0.5 microseconds for a packet. Especially when it puts 10 grand in my pocket.

    There was an 'astroturfed?' thread here a while ago about everyone who uses Linux having a ton of books and CD's lying around essentially as papers weights with no useful system to show for it. In my case, I have 4 distributions already, but I also have a very useful system. I will try an explain... I have all these distributions because they are so cheap, and because whenever I want some new component for the system, like StarOffice 5.1 for instance, the download is too big and if you buy it from StarDivision (here in Freemont) they want $39-00. If you go to Fry's (the local electrical store) you can find a complete distribution containing the single thing you want, plus upgrades for all the others for $24-95. I am thinking of Caldera 2.2 here. So why not just take the whole thing? So invariably, I do.

    In summary, it is difficult to believe that something this good could be produced in such an unusual way. If I had not seen it with my own eyes I would not have believed it.

    My advice to anyone is just try it. You will save a small fortune, learn a lot, have a lot of fun.

  • NetBSD for workstations? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pschmied ( 5648 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @08:05PM (#3934359) Homepage
    Wow, am I ever pleasantly surprised! I'm running a recent beta snapshot of NetBSD 1.6. What has really impressed me is the ownership the pkgsrc (similar to the ports, but with some extra goodies) people have taken of their ports.

    The pkgsrc version of KDE 3.0.1 is _very_ high quality. Everything works as expected (except ksirc in the kmenu which must have the path specified).

    Seriously folks, if you haven't looked at NetBSD because you wondered what its niche is, try it for your workstation. A lot of people recommend FreeBSD for workstations and servers, OpenBSD for firewalls, and NetBSD for your toaster that should be running *BSD. Don't believe it. NetBSD is a very comfortable workstation.

    Some other things that have impressed me with NetBSD:

    • The new init system. Starting services is logical and a snap
    • How much better disk performance is than I remember it.
    • /usr/X11R6/bin/xf86cfg. NetBSD is one of the few distributions that has really configured this to work. This program autodetects all of my hardware. All I need to do is set what screen resolutions I want. (right click on the monitor in the "screen" section.
    • The very high quality of the pkgsrc collection. Everything that I have built has gone off without a hitch.
    • ...there's a lot more folks.
    NetBSD has really impressed me with this version (1.6), and it isn't even fully released. I strongly recommend it to anyone interested in a robust, easily maintained workstation.

    -Peter

    • getting x running has been a 3 step process for me with all OS's (slack, Free, and Open) since 4.2.0 came out.

      step 1) X -configure
      step 2) edit the XF86Config it gives to to set my default color depth and resolution
      step 3) there is no step 3!

      It just works. Really, the XFree86 people have done a ton of work making it usable right off the bat.
    • I can echo this experience on an hp omnibook 6100, and a friend with his sony - both 1400x1050. Xfree86 4's autodetection is dream compared to earlier versions, and the NetBSD version is setup just right. My SO is quite please to have KDE3 and ogle Just Work on her machine at home so she can watch he DVDs :)

      On the server front I've just converted two of the www.formula1.com servers and our firewall across from 1.5.3 to 1.6_BETA and setup complete mirrored filesystems with raidframe. The webservers done remotely without needing access to the console (though velocet were kind enough to daisy chain serial consoles between the machines in case they were needed :)

      We still have a few linux servers, but since I started using pkgsrc on them it became a lot easier to administer all the software...

      Top of my wishlist would probably be a native 1.3 or 1.4 jvm. I'm running the sun-jdk13 under linux compatability and have to say I've not have a problem with it, but I'd just prefer to have the code native...
    • I've been using NetBSD 1.5.X for my workstation for about 18 months, and it's been great. Other than lpd, everything has been bulletproof. Previously, I ran Debian, and had periodic troubles with NFS and with ypbind, particularly when the LAN was flaky. No such problems with NetBSD.

      While I'm at it, I'll plug gmane [gmane.org] as well -- it's a lurker's delight!
    • What about watching divx on a NetBSD machine ?
      I heard there was some problemes with running mplayer on NetBSD but I don't know at all if it's true or not.
      Has anyone tried ?

      And what about playing games like Quake3 or RTCW ?

      I you tell me this is ok, I see no reason to keep running linux on my workstation instead of NetBSD :)
  • No links to netBSD from slashdot. I guess that's why MY submission of the story was rejected.

    Here ya go, click and drool:

    netbsd.org [netbsd.org]
    ftp.netbsd.org [netbsd.org]
    official text of the release [netbsd.org]
    Mirror listing, for when the ftp server gets slashdotted [netbsd.org]

    • Re:Well, that's an intelligent story (Score:4, Insightful)

      by jschauma ( 90259 ) on Monday July 22, 2002 @10:45PM (#3935002) Homepage
      Also, FreeBSD's new scheduler gets on the main page, every semi-serious release of Debian-, Slackware-, Mandrake-, and Foo-Linux get on the main page, premature announcements of *any*thing get on the main page, but a long awaited release of the most portable operating system in the world does not get on the main page.

      I wonder if 1.6, when it is announced, will be considered worthy.

  • Despite beeing a Redhat user, I find NetBSD very nice, and occasionally play around with it. So, you Linux guys beeig thinking about testing FreeBSD? Try NetBSD as well.
    • I agree. I started out on Linux, moved to FreeBSD, and ended my search for the "right" OS with NetBSD. I found that even somewhat mainstream hardware wasn't supported on FreeBSD, while NetBSD already had every problem worked out.

      Net also just seems higher quality. FreeBSD ports would shove stuff all over my system, but NetBSD has a very well laid out tree where files go. FreeBSD seems to be quick to jump on the bandwagon, but NetBSD seems to do it right.

      Just my 2 cents. I never tried out NetBSD until FreeBSD didn't work. Since then, I've installed it on all my boxes, even those that are supported by FreeBSD.
  • Will NetBSD work on a machine with ez-drive hd? The last version I tried (1.5.0) didn't... Also, there doesn't seem to be a lot of info regarding dualbooting NetBSD + other OSen w/ GRUB. Is it possible to boot it from non-first hd?
    • Also, there doesn't seem to be a lot of info regarding dualbooting NetBSD + other OSen w/ GRUB.

      GRUB has support on i386 for booting NetBSD kernels directly, or at least that's what the GRUB documentation claims.

      • GRUB has support on i386 for booting NetBSD kernels directly, or at least that's what the GRUB documentation claims.

        Yes, and I tried the method in the docs. My computer hangs at the boot process (probably because the kernel is not at (hd0,*)).

        • You can easily chainload the NetBSD drive/partition.

          An entry from my GRUB menu:

          title NetBSD - 1.5.2
          root (hd3,0)
          chainloader +1

          Simply enough :-)

    • Re:Ez-Drive (Score:3, Informative)

      by josepha48 ( 13953 )
      I installed NetBSD on a machine that has windows and it recgonized the windows partition and allows me to boot of that partition.

      I also have netbsd installed on what used to be the windows d drive so I'm sure it is possible to boot from the non-first hd.

      lastly you'd be best off visting the netbsd.org web site and seeing if there is support for the hard drive you mention. I'd suspect it would work, unless there is something really weird about the drive.

      • astly you'd be best off visting the netbsd.org web site and seeing if there is support for the hard drive you mention.

        No, ez-drive is a "bios upgrade" (residing at MBR) that allows computers with old bios access large disks. The disk itself is a normal ide drive.
        • Just to remind anyone in that situation (old BIOS which hangs while probing large disks), to check for a BIOS update from the motherboard manufacturer. They are not always available, but frequently they can fix the problem.

          Otherwise - I've run NetBSD/i386 on a couple of systems with BIOSes too old to work with larger (60GB) disks. In both cases I was adding additional space to an existing system which had a small enough boot drive, so I was able to disable the other drive in the BIOS and boot from the small drive, then NetBSD would see the large drive and use it without problems. Its quite possible I could have told the BIOS the large drive was smaller, but I needed the systems up quickly (and the one I still have has had the aforementioned BIOS upgrade since, so I can't test :)
  • An install ISO would be nice.

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