NetBSD 1.6.1 Release Process Has Begun

jschauma writes "The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that NetBSD 1.6.1 has been branched and the release engineering process has begun. NetBSD 1.6.1 is a maintenance (or patch) release for users of NetBSD 1.6, not to be confused with NetBSD-current (which will become the next major release). As a patch release, it is not branched off the head of the CVS source tree, but instead includes all security fixes and patches applied to the 1.6 branch. A complete list of changes since 1.6 is available in src/doc/CHANGES-1.6.1 of the branch, which can be checked out by passing the -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 flag to the cvs command: cvs -rnetbsd-1-6-PATCH001-RC1 co src. Details on the release cycle and status information is available from www.netbsd.org/releng/releng-1.6.html."

Re:good lord

[Cheesy Fool]

What about the typical what's the difference between freebsd, openbsd and netbsd.

Re:good lord

[Dave2 Wickham]

Looks like someone saw you [slashdot.org] and decided to do something about it ;).

Comments?

[Dr. Photo]

Most... underrated.... OS.... ever.

Hearken unto me, O children of Slashdot:

End your torture at the hands of lesser OSes; try NetBSD today! (or whenever 1.6.1 is properly released ;)

Re:God NetBSD is dead - lol

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, almost the whole MCS School at Victoria University of Wellington [vuw.ac.nz] in New Zealand use it. And they have at least 150 Intel boxes running it. Thats where I first used it, and how I got into *NIX.

Re:God NetBSD is dead - lol

[Permission Denied]

Going by these comments it is as dead as OS/2.

Incorrect conclusion. Going by these comments, very few slashdot readers use NetBSD. In fact, I'm willing to bet that the majority of the slashdot GNU/hippies that rant on and on against Microsoft and fawn over Linux are all too happy to activate their Windows XP and click about in their MSIE. I make this judgment from the complete dearth of technical information in slashdot comment pages.

Of course, this is quite hypocritical of me as here I am adding no useful technical information. In all honesty, I've never had the chance to use NetBSD for any significant task. I know (and love) FreeBSD and OpenBSD inside and out I've only put NetBSD on esoteric machines that don't run the other BSDs quite as well (really old Macs and Sparcs).

Anyway, congratulations to the NetBSD folks. The next time I need to do something useful with strange hardware, I know where to look.

Re:God NetBSD is dead - lol

[beholder77]

Give it a try. It really doesn't matter what kind of machine you have, as long as it's 32 bit and supports an Memory Mapping Unit, it should work ;)

Re:God NetBSD is dead - lol

[jschauma]

...as long as it's 32 bit...

Or 64bit [netbsd.org]. Like the NetBSD/alpha [netbsd.org]-, NetBSD/sh5 [netbsd.org]-, NetBSD/sparc64 [netbsd.org]- or NetBSD/x86_64 [netbsd.org]-Ports.

Re: How many bits

[abs0]

Just to make a change from the usual 32/64 bit clique, a NetBSD port to the 36bit PDP10 is underway...
http://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-pdp 10/2002/09/19 /0000.html

Dead?

[mistermark]

Well, I'm surprised by the figures I read here. I use netBSD since september last year and it's been a good experience ever since. It gave me what I was looking for on Linux, a small footprint after the installation and I guess that's not what linux is about anymore, hence the 5-7 CD-set on most of the distributions. Burning just another set of iso's just to give another linux-flavour a try isn't my idea of efficiency. But hey, we all have fat pipes and fat systems, haven't we? So who cares about a small footprint and a 5 iso download? Well, I do... In the meantime I'll be happy with my netBSD bootfloppy and a ftp-install to match.

Re:Dead?

[Anonymous Coward]

"After all, you have no option to just install the parts that you need!"

No, on most distributions of Linux, you do *not* have that option. Everything is so freakin' interdependant for absolutely no god damned reason.

Take RedHat. I want the GiMP. Great. Or not - RH insists I need their 'gnome-libs' package. I dislike Gnome with a passion, but that's neither here nor there.

I can't install the gimp .rpm without gnome-libs. Thus, I have to include bloat and yet another package to watch carefully in regards to possible security vulnerabilities.

Or, I could go an alternate route. I could simply install the GTK .rpm (which naturally, is needed by the GiMP itself), and compile and install the GiMP myself. Hey - look! No need for Gnome libs!

The problem is, compiling from source defeats the purpose of binary distribution. Ease of use and installation is immediately thrown out the window. Easy upgrading is gone as well.

So, you can either play along and install crap you don't want or need, or waste days of post-install time compiling everything from source.

NetBSD apparently doesn't have this problem. Good for them, I think I'll be sending them some cash for a disc or two in the near future.

Re:Dead?

[mistermark]

Sure, I'm a retard... when your goal is a 50mb system, I would rather start off with one floppy then with 6 CD's... I tried to emphasize on the starting point after installation... But sure, be my guest and go find all the options you don't need, then I'll look for what I do need...

clarification

[jschauma]

In the above, it should read 'NetBSD 1.6.1 has been tagged', not branched. Sorry for the confusion.

First NetBSD Rulz Post!

[Anonymous Coward]

Guess all the NetBSD users out there are too busy at work
to bother making any postings here. Oh well, for them, I'll
write this:

NetBSD Rulz!!!!!

NetBSD is a brill OS

[Anonymous Coward]

Nice, small, clean system, which is consistent across loads of architectures. Love it.

Anyway, if anyone is reading this page, will there be any improvements to Sushi? That's the little setup tool for NetBSD -- nice boxes/windows/text-based affair, but it was full of bugs and glitches in the first 1.6 release.

Definitely Underrated

[Anonymous Coward]

People tend to think of NetBSD as only good for obscure architectures and not for any serious systems. In my experience this is far from true.

My experience with NetBSD has actually only been with i386 platforms, and I've been very impressed. It is actually my preferred UNIX (over Open/FreeBSD, Linux, Solaris). I find the default install to be nice and minimal, and the packaging system layout to be very clean and effective.

I like the way NetBSD uses /usr/pkg for package placement, making it very clear what is built from pkgsrc or installed as a package. This leaves /usr/local available for you for packages build and installed outside of the package system.

Upgrades of NetBSD are also very smooth, both binary and source, with security patches released nearly instantly.

A lot of the innovation in the BSD's is actually originated by NetBSD (which has a team of excellent developers), then incorporated in by the other BSD's, taking much of the credit from their less popular counterpart.

Anyways, after that rant, give it a try, you won't be disappointed!

NetBSD compared with other open-source BSDs

[Door-opening Fascist]

In my computing experience, I have used NetBSD, FreeBSD, and OpenBSD. I can't stand FreeBSD's installation process. I always end up going in a loop with assigning disks or labels. The ports collection works most of the time, but is damn annoying when it doesn't. OpenBSD's installation is fine, but post-install it's a pain getting everything up to the point of functionality. NetBSD strikes a good balance between the two, with the purely text-based installer but also a functional post-install.

I am also happy knowing that all my non-SMP servers can be running the same OS, no matter if they are Intel, MIPS, SPARC, Alpha, VAX, or otherwise. Hardware age doesn't matter, either. I use an old 486DX with 32MB of RAM as a DNS/DHCP/SMTP/IMAP/LDAP server for a network, and it handles the load beautifully.

I remember I once had an errant Perl script that kept on spawning itself, sucked all the available memory, and pegged the CPU load average to around 70. It was slow, but I managed to log in, kill all the Perl scripts, and everything returned to normal instantly. No crash, no fallout. I'd like to see Windoze 2000 (or even Linux) do that!

As another anecdote from my work at my school, I have a professor who, while on our FreeBSD 4.6.2 server, forgot to grep for nfsd in an awk script when he was trying to kill and restart NFS. This killed all the processes on the server, and left it without init, basically in an unusable state. I can recall doing that in NetBSD, and it appears that there is a kernel function that checks that init is still running and will respawn it if it dies, and then place the machine in single-user mode. I would still have had to run over to the science building and get things going again, but our uptime would have been preserved, and I would have been able to do administrative work immediately.

It's a pity that NetBSD doesn't have more users than it does. It has got to be one of the most capable open-source OSs, and I certainly prefer it over some commercial UNIXs such as AIX.