NetBSD

Zafer Aydogan wrote me that his NetBSD-based "Jibbed" live-CD has reached status of a first release candidate. As a very special thing, there is a version of the CD for 64bit machines which is based on NetBSD/amd64. The CD itself follows the ... [More] netbsd-5 branch, uses X.org, recent Firefox (3.0.6) and thanks to vnd compression, it's only 400MB in size. See the Jibbed homepage for more information including screenshots, download links, and a FAQ. Be sure to mail your experiences back to Zafer to make the CD even better! [Less]

Manuel Bouyer runs french mirrors for FTP, WWW, SUP, AnonCVS and rsync for NetBSD under {ftp,www,sup,anoncvs,rsync}.fr.netbsd.org. From my personal experience, the services are very stable, fast, and well connected. So far, they all ran on a PIII ... [More] with 1GHz of CPU, 1GB RAM, a bunch of SCSI disks plus more disks in a SCSI-to-PATA RAID enclosure. Now, there's a hardware upgrade, and the new system is a Dual Athlon64 CPU, 4GB RAM and 3 SATA disks behind an ICP RAID Controller. Manuel writes that ``The thing is of course running NetBSD/amd64 5.0_RC1 in SMP modehis mail to netbsd-users@ for the full announcement. Update: My thanks for this great service doesn't only go to Manuel, but also his employer who makes this possible, the Laboratoire d'Informatique de Paris 6. [Less]

Pierre-Philipp Braun has written articles about NetBSD configuration and pkgsrc configuration. The NetBSD configuration article talks about basic setup for networking, ssh, the Message-Of-The-Day, NetBSD's central rc.conf config file, syslog ... [More] , crontabs, time synchronization, basic system security and package management. Following that, he talks about updating the system from binary snapshots, and outlines further tweaks like softdep, silencing IDE drives, using CDroms and wscons, changing your shell, installing a new bootloader and some others. The last part covers building NetBSD from source. In pkgsrc configuration, Pierre-Philipp shows how to install packages from binaries and sources (the main part), and also covers pkgsrc security and bulk builds. [Less]

I've found this gem via Symlink (great guys, great German language geek site - check it out!): on saturday Feb 14th 2009 it's not only valentine's day, but the Unix time will switch to the 1234567890 seconds since the epoche, too! The exact time ... [More] depends on your timezone, you can use the date(1) command to find it out for your and your friends' time zone, too: % date -r 1234567890 Sa 14 Feb 2009 00:31:30 CET % % env TZ=US/Eastern date -r 1234567890 Fr 13 Feb 2009 18:31:30 EST % % env TZ=US/Pacific date -r 1234567890 Fr 13 Feb 2009 15:31:30 PST Oh and btw, for those not following recent development in NetBSD: The overflow of the Unix time in 2038 due to integer overflow in time_t won't affect NetBSD any more, as time_t was moved to a 64bit data type a few weeks ago. [Less]

Jan Schauman announced that ``Recently, Google announced that there will be another instance of their popular ``Summer of Code'' program in 2009. The NetBSD Project hasparticipated in this program as a mentoring organization since its conception in ... [More] 2005, and hopes again to be fortunate enough to takepart in this year's iteration. As part of our preparation for the Summer of Code 2009, we have begun reviewing and updating our list of suggested projects and would like toinvite all interested students to likewise begin their research and start discussions with the possible mentors as well as on our public mailing lists.'' While talking about Google's Summer of Code - I'm a bit embarassed to announce this that late, but it seems everyone dropped the ball on what happened in the 2008 Google-SoC WRT NetBSD, there's a status report now, finally. Go have a look and see what stories of success (and failure...) we've seen! [Less]

NetBSD 5.0 is progressing towards a release, and a first release candidat was released this week. Probably the two most significant improvements in NetBSD 5.0 will be journalling for UFS (nore more fsck, yai!) and the move from XFree to X.org. ... [More] Download now, or have a look at the changes in 5.0 if you need more reasons to check it out. While talking about NetBSD 5, Izumi Tsutsui has updated his Restore CD for MIPS based Cobalt machines, see his email to the port-cobalt@ list for more details. [Less]

There's news on Boygeniousreport, Hiptop3, and Engadget that the Sidekick LX 2009 will use NetBSD as native operating system. What's a Sidekick? Wikipedia knows that ``The Danger Hiptop, also re-branded as the T-Mobile Sidekick, is a luxury ... [More] GPRS/EDGE smartphone manufactured by Danger Incorporated. '' See the image on the right for more details and features. After Danger was bought by Microsoft in 2008, one would expect that their upcoming models will run Microsoft's embedded operating system Windows CE as operating system. Apparrently that's not the case, and the new Sidekick will rather run NetBSD as operating system. It seems Danger did too much work that they didn't want to throw away. :-) So where's the actual news from on those websites? Besides some "internal sources", there were some job posts by Microsoft seeking a NetBSD programmer in several places. I guess we'll have to wait for the final product to hit the store to confirm this, unless we get hold of someone at Danger^WMicrosoft to tell us what's going on. Nevertheless, NetBSD and its BSD license can be used fine in a commercial product like the Sidekick, it gives the company full protection of investment. I guess when time comes by, we (NetBSD) will see how we can cooperate to support development and code maintenance, and also get the word out about another major company using NetBSD. [Less]