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Announcements Operating Systems Software BSD

NetBSD 1.6.2 Released 34

Posted by timothy from the my-god-it's-full-of-archs dept.
kairi writes "NetBSD 1.6.2 has just been released, supporting over 40 architectures. See the release announcement! Be sure to use one of the many mirrors when you grab your ISO!" MobyTurbo adds "A preliminary source of bittorrents has been announced on the NetBSD users mailing list."
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NetBSD 1.6.2 Released More

NetBSD 1.6.2 Released

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  • Dedication (Score:5, Interesting)

    by JustinXB ( 756624 ) on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @09:20PM (#8447355)
    http://netbsd.org/Releases/formal-1.6/NetBSD-1.6.2 .html [netbsd.org]

    "Dedication
    The NetBSD Foundation would like to dedicate the NetBSD 1.6.2 release to the memory of Erik Reid, who went missing and is presumed dead in a sailing accident on 18 February 2004. Erik's contributions to NetBSD included work on support for SGI MIPS R4000, integrating XFree86 Direct Rendering Interface (DRI), and managing the build lab. His death came as a shock, and he will be greatly missed by all of us. May he rest in peace. "

    Just thought I'd point it out.

  • Geez (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Just when I finally got around to getting all of
    1.6.1 downloaded (on dialup) and installed on my
    laptop, this happens.


    NetBSD Rules!

    • Ya they seem to keep poping new versions out as soon as I get one downloaded.

      • Re:Geez (Score:1, Funny)

        by krog ( 25663 )
        Considering the speed at which NetBSD releases come out, you must be rocking 1200 baud!

        -krog, NetBSD user since 1.1 (about 40 years ago)

    • Re:Geez (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Endive4Ever ( 742304 ) on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @10:13PM (#8447894)
      I just installed 1.6.1 on my four-way PPro box (IBM PC Server 704) but have discovered I'm going to need to build NetBSD-current to get SMP support for it. I was hoping they'd finally merged SMP into the release branch, but maybe that's a 1.7 thing. This is a minor incremental release.

      Being as I have a well-maintained near-complete mirror of the 'distfiles' source tarballs for the Pkgsrc tree local now ('make mirror-distfile' is your friend for overnight bandwidth burning), I can't see ever moving to any other OS for main use. I have all the source for everything for almost any type of box I put into service.

      • Re:Geez (Score:5, Informative)

        by bccomm ( 709680 ) <mano155NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @11:30PM (#8448456) Journal
        I'd go with -current anyway, there are more features in it, and it's generally more widely-used by the community.

        PS: I believe the next NetBSD formal release will be 2.0. It will have kernel threads, SMP, ACPI, and all that other good stuff. (:

        -Bruce

      • Re:Geez (Score:2, Informative)

        by kivaapina ( 690008 )
        SMP will never go to 1.6 branch. You have to wait for 2.0 or use current. If you don't like to build current you can download it from releng.netbsd.org.

  • Tell me... :) (Score:3)

    by molnarcs ( 675885 ) <csabamolnar@gm a i l . com> on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @09:35PM (#8447521) Homepage Journal
    I've been using FreeBSD for some time, but I'm curious about NET, especially using it on the desktop. Any experience with it?

    Also, 40 platforms are great, but what are the differences in their support? I suppose NetBSD has some sort of port system as well. Is there a detailed list of what ports work on a specific architecture (I'm especially interested in PDAs, and in NetBSD as an OPIE replacement)?

    Anyhow congrats to the the kings of portability :) Also, there is this interesting newsbit if you scroll down in the release announcment:
    Pkgsrc included in Bluewall GNU/Linux (27 Feb) (top) Bluewall GNU/Linux has announced the release of a Linux distribution that includes the NetBSD pkgsrc distribution. One of the goals of the NetBSD Project's pkgsrc distribution is to be portable to other operating systems and we are pleased to see someone take advantage of that.
    So, is there going to be a linux distro with something similar to ports (as I said, I only have experience with FreeBSD ports, and only assume here that pkgsrc is something similar). ps - not interested in portage until it doesn't handle dependencies when you remove packages as well...

    • Re:Tell me... :) (Score:4, Informative)

      by saintlupus ( 227599 ) on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @10:38PM (#8448105)
      So, is there going to be a linux distro with something similar to ports (as I said, I only have experience with FreeBSD ports, and only assume here that pkgsrc is something similar).

      Yes, there is. Pkgsrc is remarkably similar to what Free and OpenBSD call Ports. It also works on a lot of OSes, including Linux, Irix, and (I think) Solaris.

      Check out the NetBSD page for info. It's pretty cool stuff.

      --saint
    • I suppose NetBSD has some sort of port system as well.

      Weird that you ask that, since you answer it a few lines later. It's pkgsrc, thus called because "port" is NetBSD's term for a separate architecture on which it runs. Pkgsrc originally came from FreeBSD's ports system.

      • Yeah, NetBSD uses pkgsrc instead of ports because ports isn't portible enough to run on 40 architectures, whereas pkgsrc is.

        Ironic that ports isn't portible enough...

    • Re:Tell me... :) (Score:5, Informative)

      by pschmied ( 5648 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @02:54PM (#8454240) Homepage
      I really like NetBSD as a desktop OS. NetBSD's clean approach means that they often get cool new drivers and features before anyone else, including linux. Cases in point: IPv6 and USB Visor support, IIRC.

      Pkgsrc is a nice evolution of the ports. It has some neat additional features like a security audit.

      I've said it before: NetBSD gets a bum reputation as being only for obscure hardware. Not so! People alway make the connection that FreeBSD==server, OpenBSD==security and NetBSD==suitable for toaster. I'd posit that NetBSD should be considered for desktops.

      So, give it a shot on your desktops. I think you'll like it.

      -Peter
      • I am planning on developing some QT applications and using netbsd for the os. I was leaning twards a AMD dual atholon but was wondering if anybody had recommendations for soemthing else (say 64 bit)?

        Links to where to buy would be cool also :)
        THanks.

  • Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by MarcQuadra ( 129430 ) * on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @10:09PM (#8447870)
    Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks.

    Is there an emulator for my x86 box that would allow me to get this done faster? BasiliskII can emulate my Mac much faster than it really is.

    I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited to the sub-100MHz range. Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.

    Also, is there a way to build the whole distribution via gcc-3.3.x? I'd like to see how well it performs against the gcc2-built system I used a while ago.
    • You can cross-compile anything with NetBSD. I've never done, there are some instructions on the website though.
    • Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks.

      It's really not all that bad. The first Unix box I ever had was a Quadra 700 running NetBSD -- the code base is _really_ tight. You could probably build the whole thing from scratch in a couple of days.

      I know, that might sound like a lot, but it's a hell of a lot faster than a Sparc IPC can compile gcc from source. Don't ask me why I know that.

      --saint

    • Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:5, Informative)

      by bccomm ( 709680 ) <mano155NO@SPAMgmail.com> on Tuesday March 02, 2004 @11:23PM (#8448411) Journal
      Alright, I've got a hankering to build 1.6.2 from scratch for my Mac Quadra (25MHz 68040), but I KNOW building the whole thing would take weeks. Is there an emulator for my x86 box that would allow me to get this done faster? BasiliskII can emulate my Mac much faster than it really is. I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited to the sub-100MHz range. Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
      You should be able to cross-compile the entire distribuiton from your x86 box using the build.sh frontend. It seems like it would be messy to build it and copy it over, but it's actually quite easy. The alternative would be to *not* build it yourself and instead just install the binary distribution---there really aren't many benefits of compiling it unless you need a custom kernel or -current sources.
      Also, is there a way to build the whole distribution via gcc-3.3.x? I'd like to see how well it performs against the gcc2-built system I used a while ago.
      The 1.6.x releases use gcc-2.95 for the basis of the toolchain. If you want to try gcc-3.3.x, this may be another reason to look at -current (just yesterday they updated gcc to v3.3.3). Current may be a better choice anyway: its faster, more feature-rich (think native threads), and more widely-used by the community.

      -Bruce

    • Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Permission Denied ( 551645 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @01:43AM (#8449262) Journal
      Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.

      Cross-compiling not so bad.

      I did exactly this for a slew of old Macs that I turned into useful machines by putting Linux on them. Compiling a 2.2 series Linux kernel would take a few days on the machines themselves, so I set up a cross-compiler on a fast machine.

      The Linux kernel was easy to compile and move over, but userspace things were more difficult to compile as they tried to link to the wrong libraries (or perhaps the problem was that "make install" would never work since the library would end up in /lib on target machine and needed to be configured as such, but it needed to be in /opt/mac-cross/lib on cross compiler machine). Most documentation for setting up cross compilation is aimed at OS/compiler/embedded developers who build mostly static binaries and don't need to compile and link large sources with dependencies like gtk, so I don't know if many people do this.

      I don't remember how I solved this (maybe chroot + hard links + copying stuff from target) so it must not have been too difficult. NetBSD has an nice integrated build system for everything, so this should be much easier for you (Linux was a third choice, NetBSD and OpenBSD had problems on those machines).

      Go ahead and set up the cross compiler. It will take some reading and tweaking, but you'll save time in the end. I, at least, think it's far more elegant than using an emulator. Good luck.

    • Re:Mac68K build-from-scratch in emulation? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by T-Punkt ( 90023 ) on Wednesday March 03, 2004 @08:37AM (#8450753)
      > I'm sure this is a problem on a lot of the 40 architectures, some of them are way old and limited
      > to the sub-100MHz range
      Nowadays the release binaries for most platforms except i386 are crosscompiled.

      > Cross-compiling seems like a hairy mess.
      Not with NetBSD (well, most platforms. There may be a few, which are not using the build.sh system).

      Since the NetBSD build process bootstraps by building first a set of tools (make, binutils, compilers etc) and then uses this set to build the system.All you need is a bourne-shell compatible shell and a C/C++ compiler.That's why you can use a - say - solaris/sparc system to compile NetBSD/pmax.See the file BUILDING in the top directory of the source tree.

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