Grex Systems Conference

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Grex Systems Item 6: The NetBSD item
Entered by cross on Sat Sep 16 19:09:59 UTC 2006:

The NetBSD operating system is a derived from the 4.4BSD-Lite2 distribution
of Berkeley Unix, free of AT&T copyrighted code.  It is a complete,
self-contained system that runs on numerous architectures and is mostly
targeted towards portability and experimentation.  If you have a piece of
hardware, there's a good chance that NetBSD will run on it.

More information on it can be found at:

http://www.netbsd.org/

15 responses total.

#1 of 15 by gull on Wed Nov 22 00:45:27 2006:

Here's an interesting article by one of the NetBSD founders about why 
the NetBSD project has effectively stalled.  There's some interesting 
insights here into why other projects that copied the NetBSD 
organizational model, such as FreeBSD and X.org, also stalled and 
eventually forked.

http://kerneltrap.org/node/7061

#2 of 15 by gull on Wed Nov 22 00:46:14 2006:

That should say 'such as FreeBSD and XFree86.'  X.org was the project 
that forked off after XFree86 stalled.

#3 of 15 by twenex on Wed Nov 22 01:29:05 2006:

FreeBSD has stalled?

#4 of 15 by cross on Wed Nov 22 03:38:55 2006:

Yeah, that one is a bit of a mystery, too.....  I guess I can kind of see it,
in a way.

#5 of 15 by ball on Wed Nov 22 04:31:56 2006:

'Stalled' or not, NetBSD works for me.

#6 of 15 by gull on Wed Nov 22 08:19:38 2006:

Re resp:3: Dragonfly forked over the glacial progress FreeBSD was 
making at properly supporting SMP, I think.

#7 of 15 by twenex on Wed Nov 22 13:28:04 2006:

I think it was more like Matt Dillon had serious disagreements over the *way*
SMP was being implemented, not the pace. Given the legendarily borked FBSD
5, if what has made 6 a success is a change to its SMP code, he was probably
right - but as I said, FBSD 6 has now redeemed the project.

#8 of 15 by cross on Thu Nov 23 12:30:38 2006:

Actually, there is a lot about the way all of these things are implemented
that is substandard.

#9 of 15 by sholmes on Thu Dec 14 07:16:45 2006:

#10 of 15 by naftee on Fri Dec 15 06:27:37 2006:

#11 of 15 by merkin on Fri Dec 5 09:33:25 2014:

Hello, My name is Marcin, and I came from Poland.

My first 'real' OS was a NetBSD 1.5; that I installed years ago on my
486/40Mhz box with 4 MB of memory. 
Linux Red Hat that I tried to run, was requesting to much disk space
[250 MB - that was my beloved hdd] so I was forced to seek replacement
for it. After some time I finally found it in NetBSD project.
For the first two-three years I doesn't use any X window manager instead
normal console work was done by me, programming in shell/C, do irc
botnet mange work, and some BSD research, and games :)

In Poland at that time when I've got this PC [in late 2001], Internet
connection was situated to 'kid user' at luxury level.
So I spend lot of time in local Library reading many books and articles
about the computer related stuff, especially I focused on Richard
Stevens TCP/IP Protoko y tom 1, [Protocols vol. 1], translated and
published in Poland in 1998 [the second edition was done by Helion in
2013... :)], these book become one of the first real deal publications
that I have read from the first to the last page, the next book that
gave me a thrill was published in 1999 Programowanie w  rodowisku
systemu UNIX, Advanced Programming in the Unix Environment, also written
by Stevens.

It is really sad that Such a great Mind has passed away...

NetBSD was the OS that helped me understand the basic ideas that were
stated in late 50'. of the XX century by the MIT professor Fernando Jos 
Corbat , whose Compatible Time Sharing System [CTSS] was the first ever
that shears the ideas of modern interactive computing. There is even an
proverb that says:
Before Corby: No Timesharing.
After Corby: Timesharing.
[based on multicians.org]

Today I still use NetBSD, mostly to learn kernel internals on my 'jet'
PowerEdge 750.

By the way, Jolitz, William F. and Jolitz, Lynne Greer: Porting UNIX to
the 386: A Practical Approach, 18-part series in Dr. Dobbs Journal,
January 1991 - July 1992 - these is a great story, about how the basic
system works, especially do to the xBSD family tree.

Greetings to All!

#12 of 15 by keesan on Sat Dec 6 23:57:54 2014:

Dzien dobry, Marcin.  I learned linux from a 2-floppy Basiclinux (expandable
to as big as you like) starting in 1999.  I installed it to my best 486 (and
also a 386 with 3MB RAM, only the nongraphical part worked).

#13 of 15 by ball on Sat Dec 13 21:08:53 2014:

Re. #11: Welcome to Grex Marcin, if you're new here.  I have
    been using NetBSD at home and in various jobs for a few
    years now. At the office I've used it to build graphical
    terminals for some users who run all their applications
    on MS Windows Server.

#14 of 15 by merkin on Tue Dec 16 00:23:09 2014:

Dzien dobry, keesan! :]
Hello ball! 

In home I use old noisy but reliable Dell Poweredge 750 with NetBSD
6.1_CURRENT; love to play with TOPS-20 and older versions of BSD's
designed for VAXen or PDPs [simh]

On daemonforums; I've [muflon] tray to published some bibliography
related to NetBSD project; 

http://daemonforums.org/showthread.php?p=52733#post52733

Salut!
Marcin

#15 of 15 by keesan on Sun Dec 21 01:26:21 2014:

I'm sorry that grex forums (bbs) are no longer very active.  I check in once
in a while to see if someone is still sending me email here.  Take a look at
sdf.org for another BSD-based free shell account.

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