Matthew Garrett demonstrated his success in building a Debian system on the Sparc architecture on top of the NetBSD kernel. Additionally Joel Baker reported about significant work for the NetBSD/x86 port, such as dpkg and APT, that will work without additional patches. NetBSD runs on hardware unsupported by Linux.
Debian NetBSD for SPARC
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Eugenia Loli
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This is something way overdue, a distro taking advantage of the decent BSD kernels.
You’ll notice that Debian is also doing the same for FreeBSD and OpenBSD, linked from the Debian GNU/NetBSD home page:
http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/
There’s also people attempting to do the same from a Gentoo perspective:
http://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=49928&start=25
I remember this debated once on the freebsd mailing list too. I guess this project could be a canditate for the most unneccesarily wasted effort in the open source domain. I think the BSD userland is way better than the Debian one. Why Debianize the BSD ?
It’s not so Debianize BSD, as being able to run Debian on the 30-some architectures NetBSD runs on. I’d prefer to run BSD “the way the daemon intended”, but there’s a lot of linux monkeys out there.
what i would like is maybe a daemonised Linux, as for it being a waste of time, well that’s the beauty of opensource
Because they can .
Because they want to.
To see _if_ they can.
Why? In order to prove that Linux is only a kernel, of course. You can even replace it with a BSD kernel, and the Debian system will still live on.
> Why? In order to prove that Linux is only a kernel, of course.
But BSD is not and it cannot work as seamlessly without its regular userland. I remember the Debian developers had problems and it wasn’t easy. You need to pick something purely kernel for that purpose. Would HURD do it?
But BSD is not and it cannot work as seamlessly without its regular userland. I remember the Debian developers had problems and it wasn’t easy. You need to pick something purely kernel for that purpose. Would HURD do it?
I could be wrong, but maybe this is part of the reason. Debian plans to port to HURD When Its Ready(tm). Maybe porting to *BSD in the meantime could serve to start identifying and ironing out the kinks?
I’m not too much of a fan of where Linux is going these days, but I’m a big fan of Debian. I’m glad to see it trying to become more than just a Linux distro.
I can tell you the real reason why they are doing it, by using
NetBSD’s kernel, maybe they can avoid being named in a lawsuit by SCO. Or better yet, SCO will charge that by Debian’s actions they have improved and leaked IP into the *BSD source tree, contaminating all three BSD’s.
I find this to be an unlikely reason (to avoid legal liability) as the Debian/NetBSD project started way before the SCO lawsuit.
Try looking like three stories before this one. So No SCO admits that Linux the kernel is clear of Unix code.
http://osnews.com/story.php?news_id=3421