[linux] GAG promotion + RE: NetBSD

[Garrett Cooper]

Interesting. Did they actually start supporting firewire on OpenBSD since I
last looked at it? That was the peculiar thing about Mac OS X. Ran on
Darwin, but had firewire support hacked in... heh.
    As for boot managers, I have been using GAG on and off for the past
couple months (http://gag.sf.net). Albeit, it is a limited boot manager, but
it is simple to setup, it's open source, and it supports a lot of OS boot
signatures. This was especially handy when I installed Windoze a couple
months back and was running FreeBSD; I didn't have time to install the
FreeBSD boot manager or tweak with it, and wanted to be able to boot up
FreeBSD at my own luxury instead of Windoze with its writing over the MBR by
default (curses MS... :p). So, I've come to the conclusion that this is very
nice for as a tool for tweaking with OSes, and it's nice rollback
(uninstall) feature and password protection (pre OS or for MBR admin
options) is very handy as well. It does beat out lilo and Grub, but I just
prefer lilo because you have to install a boot manager in the leading
partition block in order to boot from GAG still-in Linux at least.
    Enough of that shameless promoting :p. I suppose I will have to try out
NetBSD some time on a test box when I have the chance =)!
-G

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Doug McLean" <dougmc at u.washington.edu>
To: "Linux/Unix Users Group at the UW" <linux at u.washington.edu>
Sent: Friday, July 09, 2004 4:50 PM
Subject: NetBSD [ was Re: [linux] The great OS debate ]


> Hi Garrett,
>
> Before using OpenBSD, I was really into NetBSD.  I have an SGI R4600 (it's
> a cool little 'blue pizza box' looking computer).  The machine had no OS,
> and no CD-ROm, so I was really in a pinch to use it for something.
>
> I tried out NetBSD for sgimips architecture, and created a diskless
> installation from another NetBSD system (sparc 5) I have.  It worked
> great.  The install worked, and I had a full functioning operating system
> on there.  Unfortuantely, some peculiarities with SGI systems makes NetBSD
> hard to use on there (I found out it happens to any non-IRIX OS on SGI
> machines).  FOr example ctrl-C kills the NetBSD process itself (it kills
> NetBSD), and a couple other quirks.  It also crashes on some NFS related
> stuff, and that's a bug in NetBSD itself I am sure.  Either that, or I may
> have bad memory in this SGI.
>
> NetBSD on my sparc worked just perfect.  It was really good stuff.  I
> later switched to OpenBSD just for the security perks, but I enjoyed using
> NetBSD.
>
> My point, long-winded as it is, is that NetBSD is really great for niche
> systems that you have lying around, like Sparc64 machines, or SGIs, that
> you want to install a 'free' OS onto.  NetBSD ports to MANY MANY
> architectures.  Just look at their website.  It's impressive.
>
> THe catch is that NetBSD spreads itself thin as a result, and with little
> resources, things can be unstable.  Still, in some cases, it really is
> worth its salt.
>
> For PCs, I still go with FreeBSD, or better yet OpenBSD (OpenBSD's
> hardware support really is pretty good, but it's dual booting ability
> sucks).  For non-PCs, I give NetBSD a good look.
>
> On other thing I really liked about NetBSD is that it's SMALL.  The ISO
> files are really easy to obtain, and contain a full OS, unlike OpenBSD
> which gives an install CD ISO, but you still have to download the rest.
> If you are on a dial-up, the NetBSD install disk will be much friendlier.
>
> Anyhow, give it a try.  I enjoyed it and consider it time well spent.  :)
>
> Doug McLean
> CSS Systems Administrator
> University of Washington, Bothell
> http://staff.washington.edu/dougmc/pgp.html