> Luckily I still have my linux laptop (that NetBSD wouldn't even manage > to boot on), and a windows desktop (which NetBSD doesn't support half > the hardware in) to keep me on-net while my Mac is in the shop. Ummm, yeah. In my experience, NetBSD's claim of "runs on everything" is a complete joke. NetBSD may support a few obscure and/or stone age archs (anyone still running a VAX?) that linux doesn't, but Linux supports anything anyone is likely to actually have, and usually has better driver support. I recently tried booting Linux on a big pile of various m68k macs, and it ran with full driver support for everything but sound on every one of them. And I even got it running on a NuBus PPC. (Sadly the solid mac68k support is a decade too late at this point...) I've even run Linux on my Dreamcast... I gave BSD a try about a year ago. The victim: An old compaq 486 laptop with 8mb RAM. FreeBSD wouldn't even boot. So I tried NetBSD. Long story short, NetBSD is stone age. Stone knives and bearskins, and how! Its non-modular kernel is pathetic. The "stripped down" kernel still ate 6mb RAM for itself, leaving a useless 2mb left over for userspace and disk space. Not to mention it doesn't support SVGALib or an fbcon, so there's no way in hell to get graphics out of it short of running X. Which wasn't going to happen in 2mb! Oh, and its filesystem has no way of mapping out bad sectors, of which the drive in the POS laptop apparently had a few after getting dropped... And there's no tool to detect them out of the box. The manpages just babble on about some convoluted method of mapping out sectors on a PDP-11 RK-whatever diskpack. WTF? How anyone can claim NetBSD is at all suitable for embedded use, I don't know. Its absurd. I ended up giving up and putting Debian on it. Linux's dynamic module loading allows you to easily load just the drivers you need, no recompiling needed. The Linux kernel happily lives in 2mb RAM, leaving a much more useful 6mb for userspace. It supports fbdev and svgalib, and you can even squeeze X in 6mb RAM, thus I could play Doom and use it as a VNC terminal... And Linux has 'badblocks', which after a few runs was apparently able to convince the drive's firmware to map out the bad sectors, and the drive has worked fine ever since. I'm currently putting the finishing touches on my custom firmware for Belkin F5D7230-4 / F5D7231-4 802.11g wireless routers. Thanks to busybox, dropbear, uclibc, and squashfs, I have a full environment with ssh server/client, caching DNS server, DHCP server/client, NTP client, and HTTP server with CGI support, in 2mb of flash with space left over. I've still got over 1mb left to play with. Hmmm, OpenVPN, ipsec, ipv6 maybe... NetBSD is a pathetic stone age anachronism. -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://shadowknight.real-time.com/pipermail/tclug-list/attachments/20050216/f25b5d51/attachment.pgp