NetBSD Review

[jlc]

NetBSD

 

If you want to break out from Linux and try a differnt *nix, Most I think will recommend FreeBSD, but not me, NetBSD all the way!

 

I've just got back into NetBSD over the past week and It just kind of brings me back to some "old school" feelings

 

The reason I would choose NetBSD over FreeBSD, is the package selection and the use of PKGSRC

 

 

Now pkgsrc if available for many flavors of *nix including Free/OpenBSD and Linux, but I figure why not run in it on what it was created for, I would think if you ran it for instance on FreeBSD, that you could run into duplicate packages from FreeBSDs package db too, I could be wrong but hey.

 

If you like that compile everything from scratch feeling (gentoo users will love it) then NetBSD is for you! I left for work today finishing some Gnome-2.8 packages compiling. And it will take care of dependency's, so don't get to scared.

 

For instance, this is all i did to build xorg.

 

cd /usr/pkgsrc/x11/xorg-server

make fetch-list | sh

Finds deps/vunrablilites and downloads software. This isn't nesacery, but if your leaveing for a big compile, it's nice to know your software is downloaded first, Just like "emerge -f xorg" for gentoo"

make && make install

Makes and Installs :)

make clean &&  make clean-depends

Cleans up the dir and removes the builds.

 

Now there is some work, getting pkgsrc installed and updated, but it's not hard at all.

 

Keep in mind, none of this is needed, you can simply install the Binary's instead.

pkg_add ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/packages/<os_release>/<arch>/<type>/<package>

 

 

Another thing that people like Gentoo for is it's Documentation, I agree that it has good Doc's, but you haven't seen Great Doc's until you open up Net/FreeBSD documents, they tell you everything you should ever need to know about using BSD.

 

Main Document

 

I'm currently running NetBSD 2.0 RC_4. You can use there latest stable branch 1.6.2 if you want to.

 

Linux Emulation

 

The NetBSD port for i386 can execute a great number of native Linux programs, using the Linux emulation layer. Generally, when you think about emulation you imagine something slow and inefficient because, often, emulations must reproduce hardware instructions and even architectures (usually from old machines) in software. In the case of the Linux emulation this is radically different: it is only a thin software layer, mostly for system calls which are already very similar between the two systems. The application code itself is processed at the full speed of your CPU, so you don't get a degraded performance with the Linux emulation and the feeling is exactly the same as for native NetBSD applications.

 

Linux Emulation just adds to the loving you can have with NetBSD!

 

 

Anyway, thats just my short intro to NetBSD and why it might be a good alternative to using over Mandrake Linux.

[Gowator]

How about installation: I heard it can be a bit different to linux.

I had a couple of FreeBSD installs but they were real scary because of the disk partitioning being unfamiliar etc.?

[jlc]

It's probably still scary

 

However, there is an installer that the DragonFly BSD team is working on, looks interesting.

 

http://www.bsdinstaller.com/

[jlc]

Looks like the FreeBSD live cd is now using it too, (think this is the article I actually read about it) ;)

 

http://www.livebsd.com/5_X/

[Gowator]

yep I have a dragonfly install CD but I was holding off for now...

 

if anyone tries then besure to post back here!