I am a Linux user. What would be a good reason for me to try out NetBSD? Honest question.
NetBSD for its portability. Try it on some used hardware :).
NetBSD 9.0
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#22I am a Linux user. What would be a good reason for me to try out NetBSD? Honest question.
Especially in the case of NetBSD and OpenBSD, it's nice to SSH into a system, run ps, and be able to identify on sight every single running process. It's easy to know what everything is, and more importantly, why it's there. That's a beautiful starting position for building other systems even when you're not trying to boot it on a toaster oven.
I'm unfamiliar with BSD. Are you saying there are significantly fewer processes on BSD to be aware of when looking through ps?
I had always assumed (probably ignorantly) that BSD basically runs all of the same or similar processes to a similarly featured Linux distro.
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#23Earlier quoted context omitted.
Especially in the case of NetBSD and OpenBSD, it's nice to SSH into a system, run ps, and be able to identify on sight every single running process. It's easy to know what everything is, and more importantly, why it's there. That's a beautiful starting position for building other systems even when you're not trying to boot it on a toaster oven.
I'm unfamiliar with BSD. Are you saying there are significantly fewer processes on BSD to be aware of when looking through ps? I had always assumed (probably ignorantly) that BSD basically runs all of the same or similar processes to a similarly featured Linux distro.
I’d say BSD (esp Net and Open, as mentioned above), just don’t run as many processes, by design. BSDs are *nix, like Linux, but with their own traditions. If you, familiar with Linux, sat down at a NetBSD box, you’d be able to easily get around like a little girl[0]. You wouldn’t find systemd, though, you’d see a “wheel” group, your login shell might not be bash. The BSDs just decorate their houses differently than Linux[1].
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#24I am waiting for NetBSD to be available in SourceHut CI[1]. We already use it for FreeBSD and OpenBSD jobs, missing only one major OS - NetBSD. [1] https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md
Please help! The image is almost complete:
https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/...
But I need a NetBSD expert to come in and put on the finishing touch: making the filesystem resize to fill the available space on the qcow2. Without this, the image cannot build a new version of itself which isn't smaller than the host image, leading to image shrinkage over time and eventual breakitude.
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Without going too far in to the politics of GNU/Linux, it's a bit messy. All the distros are different from each other, plus they're changing so rapidly that a book about one version is much less useful for managing another (think Ubuntu 14 -> 16, or Ubuntu 16 -> 18). Also, while GNU/Linux is generally portable, many of the things you learn about Ubuntu will be different on what you'd run on a Raspberry Pi, or an Ult…
Especially now that NetBSD can run on an RPi3. It was a bit embarassing that it could not.
RPi3 support was present in NetBSD 7.1 and 8.0. NetBSD 9.0 is the first release where you can run it in 64-bit mode.
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#26NetBSD is probably my favorite BSD. I like its focus on simplicity and portability. I also like pkgsrc a lot more than ports. I appreciate that pkgsrc is portable beyond BSD, too - Minix uses it. Nice work, folks :)
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm unfamiliar with BSD. Are you saying there are significantly fewer processes on BSD to be aware of when looking through ps? I had always assumed (probably ignorantly) that BSD basically runs all of the same or similar processes to a similarly featured Linux distro.
I’d say BSD (esp Net and Open, as mentioned above), just don’t run as many processes, by design. BSDs are *nix, like Linux, but with their own traditions. If you, familiar with Linux, sat down at a NetBSD box, you’d be able to easily get around like a little girl[0]. You wouldn’t find systemd, though, you’d see a “wheel” group, your login shell might not be bash. The BSDs just decorate their houses differently than L…
I'd say it depends on the Linux distribution. Things like Ubuntu would be much like mentioned [1], packing just about everything¹, while on something like openwrt you would probably recognize or easily find out the function of all userspace processes - I counted 13 on my router.
It doesn't help that linux (kernel and userspaces) tends to resemble chaotic patchwork more¹ than a reasonably designed system.
¹ exaggeration
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#28Force10 network switches (owned by Dell now) use NetBSD for their FTOS and have for quite some time. Just thought I'd throw that out there.
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#29I am waiting for NetBSD to be available in SourceHut CI[1]. We already use it for FreeBSD and OpenBSD jobs, missing only one major OS - NetBSD. [1] https://man.sr.ht/builds.sr.ht/compatibility.md
Please help! The image is almost complete: https://git.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/builds.sr.ht/tree/master/images/... But I need a NetBSD expert to come in and put on the finishing touch: making the filesystem resize to fill the available space on the qcow2. Without this, the image cannot build a new version of itself which isn't smaller than the host image, leading to image shrinkage over time and eventual breakitude.
It should be doable with the following rc.d configuration:
resize_disklabel=YES
resize_root=YES
* http://bxr.su/n/distrib/utils/embedded/files/resize_disklabe...
* http://bxr.su/n/etc/rc.d/resize_root
You can fetch it raw, it seems to work great:
cd /etc/rc.d/
ftp http://bxr.su/raw/NetBSD/distrib/utils/embedded/files/resize_disklabel
chmod +x resize_disklabel
P.S. BTW, you probably don't want to run `resize_root onestart` once the system is running multiuser — it passes `-y` to `resize_ffs`, which causes temporary filesystem corruption if the filesystem is running in `rw` mode.
Re: NetBSD 9.0
#30I am a Linux user. What would be a good reason for me to try out NetBSD? Honest question.
If you want a simpler system that is easy to understand, NetBSD is a pretty good choice. The source is almost entirely in a single repository for you to read, and you need a single command to build a boot-able release (you can even build it on other OSes and architectures). It's a level of familiarity with the inner workings of a system that is hard to express. It has pretty decent support for ARM boards so that's th…
> not-too-recent x86 hardware
I don't know much about system development, but aren't most x86 platforms extremely backwards compatible? Would an OS that is not adopted to the latest CPU not load at all, or just wouldn't use that CPU to the fullest potential?