Building NetBSD Under Cygwin on Windows XP, PPC

Dan writes "John Gordon has completed a set of changes to the NetBSD build infrastructure that allows him to build at least two architectures (i386 and ibmnws platform, a PowerPC box) under Cygwin/Windows XP Home Edition and PowerPC. He has made a CVS patch for Cygwin, and provides instructions on the required configuration of Cygwin to avoid a problem with directory name clashes due to the case insensitive file system on Windows."

Re:*BSD IS DYING

[cheesekeeper]

THE most popular *nix on the planet is a *BSD.

OS X has Darwin underneath, and Darwin is a relative of FreeBSD. And guess who is the largest distributer of *nix in the world? Apple. Their market share may even be growing (although slowly). And if you're concerned about servers, keep in mind that every time an OS X user checks the "Personal Web Sharing" box in their preference panel, another *BSD box running Apache goes live for the world.

I know it's not what you meant, but just keep in mind that *BSD is

Re:Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

Think like an embedded systems company that wants to take advantage of NetBSD's excellent support for platforms like Hitachi Super-H, StrongArm, MIPS, and embedded PowerPC, but are themselves a Windows shop, and you'll see why this is a win...

Remember that there are a lot of prototyping and testing tools out there that are currently windows-only, and it's thus a lot easier to sell some of these shops on OSS as a target OS than as a desktop platform...

This may well change, but we aren't there yet...

Re:Why?

[vesamies]

One reason I can think of is that, if you have fast Windows XP box and some weird machine running NetBSD which is not so fast, then using the latest and greatest sometimes requires compiling... Another reason is that in principle NetBSD should compile on any POSIX platform, I was not enough brave to dig into details why this was not possible earlier...

Re:Why?

[matts.nu]

if you have fast Windows XP box...

I have a VM [vmware.com] on my fast XP gaming machine just for this reason, to compile stuff for my BSD server.

Re:Why?

[wolrahnaes]

Next time you want to ask that question, remember: This is slashdot. We do things because we can. In this case, as some of the other replies have pointed out, there are some practical uses. One that hasn't been pointed out is building under cygwin to run under bochs. Just because you wouldn't do it doesn't mean someone else can't.

Re:Call me.

[override11]

Can't call, its busy!
Will try again later... Ohhh, BSD's.... I'm lonely too!!!

Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC!

[axxackall]

He forgot to mention that on his PPC with OSX he was running Virtual PC, which was running Windows XP, which was running Cygwin, which was building NetBSD. Or man, some people are doing very crazy things to their computers!

I wonder, why not run just Gentoo Linux PPC on that box? Just run it. No building of NetBSD even will be required - you will be happy emergeing Gentoo packages already!

Re:Virtual PC? Gentoo Linux PPC!

[Bert64]

I would imagine NetBSD would build just fine under OSX natively anyway!

Speaking as an XP user

[RLiegh]

I think this could be neat if:

A)if this could be used to set up, create and manipulate ufs/ffs partitions on your computer. (I know, highly unlikely)

B)If the next step was to create windows binaries of the NetBSD system (to replace their GNU counterparts)

Hell, it's neat regardless! Next, we need to have the guys at LFS add cygwin compatibility so I can truly build a linux from scratch!

Re:Speaking as an XP user

[ocelotbob]

Creating *BSD binaries is already possible, even without this patch through tools such as pmake, or even building them without the use of a makefile. My system is a hybrid of BSD and GNU - the BSD utilities are usually smaller and faster, so I've installed the tools that provide the functionality I need yet are much quicker. Yeah, maintenence is a bit harder, but I'm tough enough and I'm geek enough to do it.

As far as accessing UFS/FFS partitions goes, this patch isn't needed there. What you need to find o

Re:Speaking as an XP user

[Anonymous Coward]

You can create populated ffs file-system images on NetBSD using my /usr/sbin/makefs, even as a non-root user (i.e, create a file system with setuid files, devices, etc, as contents). In fact, this is how all of the ffs file system images for the install media (miniroots, ffs-inkernel-ramdisks, etc) were created for the NetBSD 1.6 (and later) releases.

I know that this is not the same thing as *accessing* pre-existing ffs file systems directly on Windows NT/2000/XP, but it does cater for at least one reason

Re:whats the point?

[Jellybob]

seti@home, also a great use of your Windows box.

How about helping to cure cancer first?

You know what really sucks about windows?

[drinkypoo]

Even with cygwin you cannot create or properly handle a file with a reserved name, such as aux, nul, com1, con, et cetera. So when you try to extract the "aux" dir, or files like aux.h or aux.c which are fairly commonly used names in source trees apparently, tar chokes and fails to extract the file. In order to compile some software I've had to extract files like aux.h as winaux.h (arbitrary filename I chose) and then edit makefiles, cfiles which include it, etc.

Uh, MS "Services for UNIX 3.0" ... demo available

[UNIBLAB_PowerPC]

I was about to mention SFU3 and noticed that an AC beat me to the punch -- but only because it was an insert in this month's Sysadmin Magazine (which totally threw me for a loop -- MS bought the centerfold spread and paid for a demo CD -- I sure hope they ended up picking up the entire tab for this month's production costs). One thing I noticed on the SFU3 CD jacket -- and bear with me because didn't see any fine print and haven't actually looked at the CDs contents yet -- is that it appears that MS is sell

Re:You know what really sucks about windows?

[Mistah Blue]

It works on both W2K Pro and WinXP Pro. My source is the MS website for SFU (sorry don't have link handy).