From the NetBSD Blog: “The fourth (failing further faults, final) release candidate of NetBSD 5.1 is now available for download. Those of you who prefer to build from source can continue to follow the netbsd-5 branch, but the netbsd-5-1-RC4 tag is available as well. See src/doc/CHANGES-5.1 for the list of changes from RC3 to RC4.”
Are we still building Xorg from source ???
Bradley
Where is the problem?
You can build it from source but binary packages are also available since as long as I can remember, through pkg_add package. Trolling fail much?
Yes, of course. What else would it be built from?
Or is this some failed attempt at spreading the misinformation that NetBSD does not ship binary X?
Tell me… why is it so difficult to simply answer a question without this age old war of putting down an operating system. I’m a type “A” personality – we don’t like to wait.
I use FreeBSD, but happen to like NetBSD better. All I wanted to know is do you still have to compile xorg??? If so, I don’t have that kind of time.
Bradley
Nope, haven’t had to do that since NetBSD 4.0, maybe even earlier than that. You certainly can, but there’s no need to. Desktop environments however may be a different story especially obscure ones that may not be compiled or are compiled without features you want. GNOME and KDE are obviously compiled and packaged up as are most others, but there may be some that aren’t.
Does NetBSD fit a particular niche, or is it used as a general purpose *nix like the other BSD’s and Linux?
It’s highly portable, apart from that, I don’t see any artificial borders while using it.
So there is no single feature that distinguishes it from another UNIX then?
Some people consider its extreme portability and the fact that supports more legacy systems than any other free OS as actual distinguishing features.
That’s kinda what I always thought about it but I could have sworn I saw some quote not so long ago that Linux now had it beaten for portability.
That’s always debatable, really, visit their website or try using the system.
Their last count is 57 ports, 16 processor types: http://www.netbsd.org/ports/
As for distinguishing features, every OS has their own, even if not immediately obvious.
It’s downloaderising as we speak. I might even have a play around at getting it to run on my old Franken-Amiga if I get time.
I used to use NetBSD, but I settled on using OpenBSD. It is a nice, high quality system like most of the BSDs.
I really like them both, and actually NetBSD and OpenBSD are quite similar in many respects (closer than either one of them are to FreeBSD at this stage). I use OpenBSD for servers or router/gateway/firewall setups, but typically use NetBSD for desktops given its much larger range of supported hardware and much more extensive library of ports and packages (pkgsrc absolutely rocks).
Last time I recall this conversation coming up, it was agreed that Linux runs on a somewhat wider hardware range, BUT NetBSD is the only operating system that runs on so many architectures from a single unified codebase (including both kernel and userspace). Linux is much more fractured in that regard.
Being the most-ported OS [Linux] does not mean that it is designed thinking on portability [NetBSD]; as far as I know, Linux has been ported to more architectures and platforms than NetBSD (given its huge marketshare in comparison to the latter one), but if you would want to port an OS to a new architecture, NetBSD will be far easier to port than, say, Linux or FreeBSD, given its primary design goal.
Other interesting feature on NetBSD is that it can be used as a Xen dom0 paravirtual machine.
Edited 2010-09-29 19:52 UTC
Honestly, linux seems to have no issue whatsoever being ported to newer stuff. However, most people I know who use NetBSD do so for (as I pointed out in my earlier post) the broad support current every new release of teh OS has for “legacy” systems.
In many cases NetBSB really is the only option for a relatively modern, current, and actively developed OS for lots and lots of old systems. Linux tends to support the newer stuff, and many old architecture/system have been dropped from the kernel tree altogether.
True enough about the kernel, but often different architectures in Linux have a different userland (uclib vs glibc, ipkg vs apt/dpkg/rpm, etc). The nice thing about NetBSD is that regardless of the architecture you run it on it’s still NetBSD, no odd userland quirks to watch out for nor new package management facilities to learn. Linux is a kernel, *BSD are complete operating systems.
*BSD is in my opinion a term for extraordinary quality 🙂
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Edited 2010-10-01 10:29 UTC