Dec 24, 2005
NetBSD 3 released
NetBSD 3.0 is officially released! via #NetBSD Community Blog
The third version of the NetBSD operating system has been officially announced and is now available for download. Amongst the changes include support for Xen 2.0, lots of new supported devices and support for PAM framework.
NetBSD supports an impressively large number of different architectures, with everything from the popular i386 to the less well known Sharp X680×0 series and even the Playstation 2. It’s also the only member of the *BSD family that I’ve actually managed to get installed on my x86 laptop (FreeBSD refused to even boot the install CD last time I tried it).
I don’t use NetBSD much myself as I’ve never really had chance to play around with it and there’s always other things requiring my attention, but I’ll probably give it another whirl at some point over the Christmas period and see how it shapes up.
I’ve never got past the installation of any of the *bsds (unless you count OSX) and while i’m tempted for the educational aspect, i’m not so sure why I would want to? Can you sell it to me?
I know friends who swear by OpenBSD for a rock solid router/gateway box. However, I don’t really have any problems with my linux gateway box.
I was going to take a look at FreeBSD for my fyp because dummynet was similar to stuff I wanted to do. But I never got round to it.
Why bother with BSD?
I think in most cases it’s just personal preference, rather than *BSD being technically superior to Linux or vice versa. I like it because all the init scripts and configuration files are in standard places – unlike Linux where they can be all over the filesystem in some distributions – and the package management is both easy to use and rock solid.
OpenBSD has the pf utility for packet filtering, which is supposed to be one of the best available, so it might be better for routers than Linux, although iptables is probably just as good for most people.
If Linux works for you though, there’s little point in fiddling about with *BSD unless it has something particular that Linux doesn’t (I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, except perhaps the pf utility that I’ve already mentioned). I’ll probably post a Linux vs BSD article in the near future once I’ve read around the issue a bit.