| gabriel rosenkoetter on Mon, 20 May 2002 17:42:02 -0400 |
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On Mon, May 20, 2002 at 02:18:14PM -0400, Jeff Weisberg wrote: > and the impending release of NetBSD 1.5.3 Hrm. 1.5.3 won't do nearly as much for the world as 1.6 will. (But I actually care about that since we get nathan_sa mainlined in -current after 1.6 hits release, and I want my LWPs. ;^>) > why NetBSD? I have similar reasons... > a) multi-platform. Way-back-when I had a collection > of assorted sun3 and x86 hardware, (now assorted > sparc and x86 hardware). running the same OS on > everything is, well, convenient. ... only but for me it was mac68k (which nothing else booted on at the time, excepting Mac OS which doesn't count for obvious reasons), sparc (which was nowhere near as useable under an other OS, excepting OpenBSD, which doesn't count since it was effectively NetBSD at the time), and macppc (which Linux booted on at the time, but only by way of MACH, and I'm not much of a microkernel fan). > b) at the time I had a friend running NetBSD > who swayed me in the right direction. I had a friend running Slackware at the time. But the lack of anything but NetBSD on mac68k trumped him. :^> > c) inertia has kept me running NetBSD. All of its > peculiarities are burned into my head, and I don't > handle change well... Well, being as I've got two NeXTStep boxes (partly to work on the next68k port, but in the long run I'd rather keep the turbocube running NeXTStep), wish I still had a Mac OS box (may get a new iMac... they're so shiny; anyhow, I miss my Adobe apps and Marathon), will hopefully be buying an Indy and running Irix on it some time soon, will probably pick up a Sun Blade 100 as my workstation at home (and run Solaris 8), and loathe the fact that I actually own any IA32 hardware, I don't think I can plead to that. :^> Otoh, I'd like to add that the community around NetBSD (with the notable exception of the port-i386 mailing list, where there are just too many morons) is really great. The real reason I stuck with NetBSD after that mac68k where it was the only thing running was that the folks on the port-mac68k mailing list were quite helpful, while subtly impressing the "RTFM first" principle. (By which I mean that I never got flamed for anything, but I felt plenty guilty for wasting people's time.) > I've always seen OpenBSD as "Theo's version of NetBSD", and that > the most significant difference is just "Theo". And if you've ever tried to talk with (or, heaven forfend, collaborate with!) Theo... > if you're looking to run on a vax or amiga (etc) then FreeBSD is right out ... shark, mvme68k, sh3 (usefully), atari, acorn... Or, if you've got an app that needs to be cleanly portable against various endianties (ppc/i386) or bit-lengths (i386/alpha) without a lot of localization pain, then coding on NetBSD gets you that mostly for free. > if you've got a multi-processor box, you won't be happy with NetBSD Yet. That's another post 1.6 issue for which there's a code branch right now. > otherwise, the most important question might be: > "what do more of my friends use?" Or "what do I get more street cred for?" ;^> -- gabriel rosenkoetter gr@eclipsed.net Attachment:
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