Awesome news. If anyone wants to try NetBSD today there's a public access UNIX system (est. 1987) called the Super Dimensional Fortress that runs NetBSD. I'm a lifetime member: http://jart.sdf.org/ Also any programs you build with Cosmopolitan Libc will automatically work on NetBSD. As an OS, it's managed to stay really close to the roots all these years. It has good production use cases as an operating system too, since of all the modern unix systems NetBSD probably has the most accurate rusage accounting.
I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore
Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still
I believe there may be a patch for the IDE drive mod for NetBSD somewhere about the net.
There is also the serial to SD card adapter but I dont know if there is a patch for that in NetBSD.
Of course you can't boot from either without a custom bios(for the ide mod. No booting from SD adapter period)
my favorite OS .. fond memories of resurrecting a sparc64, a sparc, a hppa, an i386 next to the amd64s, and feeling right at home with all of them at once.
...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D)
...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(
Are you sure about the HPPAs? When I had them, there was only Linux for them, also not any distro, but only Debian without too much fuss.
edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights:
- they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!]
- they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!)
- they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional")
and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :(
Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
The calculations back then placed OpenBSD as being less used than NetBSD. While neither of those two BSD seem to have die, or perhaps just wasn't informed of their demise, OpenBSD looks to have overtaken NetBSD in usage (and news coverage).
I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.
NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.
Aside from the obvious BSD things (clean separation of base and third-party software, very different networking stack, etc), notable NetBSD things include a lot more security and hardening features enabled by default, a powerful and versatile default package manager (https://pkgsrc.org/), very good support for ARM (all 'mainline', etc). The NPF firewall is also quite nice.
TL;DR: Odds are though if you installed NetBSD, once you got past the learning curve (less than a week) it is about as different from any Linux as Debian is from Fedora - enough things to be annoying, but not enough that you notice most of the time.
Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use.
If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there.
Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
[+] [-] jart|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] anthk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] IntelMiner|4 years ago|reply
I saw a while back that they had it running on Sega's Dreamcast of all things. Linux has a "dreamcast_defconfig" kernel option but as far as I know, no working bootloader anymore
Of course with 16 meg of memory and no local storage it's more of a toy for that but still
[+] [-] Grazester|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ephaeton|4 years ago|reply
...Portability exercises for students based on the "Fighting the lemmings" paper by Husemann. (have you ever truly considered endianness and alignment until you've ran i386-developed code on sparc64? :D)
...sadly my work demands a different OS usage from me :'(
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
edit: I mean besides HP-UX. I remember exactly because I'd really liked to have had the NetBSD option then. It ran on all my other systems at the time. (Between 2000 and 2004)
[+] [-] iJohnDoe|4 years ago|reply
A great OS that is very under appreciated, very under represented, and very under respected.
[+] [-] AJRF|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] akira2501|4 years ago|reply
https://www.google.com/search?q=die+hard+bsd+9.2
[+] [-] hansor|4 years ago|reply
https://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg
I love NetBSD, as it supports about 40+(?) different architectures - back in the they were all listed properly on the main web page (right side) - it was amazing for bragging rights:
https://web.archive.org/web/20030422140310/http://www.netbsd...
but then suddenly:
- they changed the website to "modern" ascetics(and they removed the list of supported architectures from main page so no more bragging rights on landing page!]
- they changed numbering systemem of new releases (why?!)
- they simplified LOGO (not COOL anymore - just "professional")
and suddenly NetBSD was going down [after 3.0 release IMO] in terms of popularity AND funding :(
Only hope is in Chinese development who are using it for projects in mainland China.
[+] [-] simondotau|4 years ago|reply
This announcement is clearly a mistake.
[+] [-] Mordisquitos|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mrweasel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medstrom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nix23|4 years ago|reply
It's called Irony, and it's a wildly misunderstood language concept here on HN.
[+] [-] frr149|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jmclnx|4 years ago|reply
I had a very old DOS formatted diskette and when I tried to mount it on Linux, FreeBSD and got a panic.
NetBSD just came out with rump and I did some reading and gave it a try. I was able to mount after a couple of attempts and copy about 90 % of the Text File (a large file). No panics except under rump, but main system was happily moving along.
[+] [-] washbear|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluGill|4 years ago|reply
Big is it runs on nearly anything. If you like odd/rare computers netBSD is probably the only modern operating system choice you have. Collectors like it. As do people who run an environment of mix computers [for whatever reason] as the common OS makes it easier to remember the obscure options of whatever program they use.
If you stick to the common x86-64 systems Linux is going to have better driver support and more optimizations (some of those optimizations would be a pessimization on something else - a tradeoff Linux can make but netBSD cannot), and of course Linux has the most mind share and so there are a number of programs that won't work though nothing very common. I would have put ARM in the list of ones Linux is better on because odds are you are interested in one of those - but ARM has lots of obscure variants and so there is a chance NetBSD works better there.
Long ago it was said that BSD is for those who love unix, Linux for those who hate Windows. While the tone has moderated a bit over the years, there is still some truth to the idea that BSD sticks closer to the unix roots (whatever they are).
[+] [-] LargoLasskhyfv|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unsungNovelty|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] medstrom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hulitu|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] phaemon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rjsw|4 years ago|reply