NetBSD |
NetBSD was the first of the freely redistributable, open source versions of the Berkeley Software Distribution Unix-like operating systems to produce a formal release, with NetBSD 0.8 in May 1993.
NetBSD and FreeBSD are derived from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Networking/2 release and 386BSD. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD around the end of 1995. The current release of NetBSD is version 2.0.2 (April 2005).
NetBSD has been ported to a vast number of computer architectures; the NetBSD motto is Of course it runs NetBSD. The binaries for the 54+ architectures are built from a single source code tree, so feature additions (which are not hardware specific) benefit all System platforms immediately, with no re-porting required. Driver development is also machine independent, with the driver for a specific card serving whether that card is in a Peripheral Component Interconnect slot on an i386, DEC Alpha, PowerPC, SPARC, or other architecture with PCI buses. This platform independence helps greatly in developing embedded systems, especially starting in NetBSD 1.6, with the entire toolchain of Compilers, Assemblers, Linkers, and other tools fully supporting cross compiler.
The NetBSD logo (a flag) is an abstraction of their [http://www.netbsd.org/images/NetBSD-old.jpg older logo], which was based on the famous World War II photograph Raising the Flag on Iwo Jima, and being criticised for that.
=Pkgsrc=
NetBSD features its own port system, a collection of 3rd party software that will install almost is just a matter of changing into the right directory and typing make install. This will fetch sources, unpack, configure, build and install the package such that it can be removed again later. An alternative to compiling everything is to use a precompiled binary package. Either way, any prerequisites/dependencies will be installed automatically by the packages system, with no need for manual intervention.
Following its mantra of portability, the NetBSD Packages Collection (pkgsrc) has been made portable not only across all the hardware platforms that run NetBSD, but also — with the help of an Autoconf-based bootstrap system—on many other operating systems, such as GNU/Linux, FreeBSD, DragonFlyBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris Operating Environment, Darwin (operating system)/Mac OS X, IRIX, Interix and others.
NETBSD is a registered trademark of The NetBSD Foundation as of April 20, 2004.[http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarrregser=serial&entry=78-025507]
PKGSRC is a registered trademark of The NetBSD Foundation as of July 6, 2004. [http://tarr.uspto.gov/servlet/tarrregser=registration&entry=2860236]
=See also=
=External links=
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