Researcher's operating system. Review on NetBSD

Dear reader,

You can find on the NetBSD homepage that if you want hype go somewhere else. I think that is true. I have read about people using even OpenBSD on the Internet but I don't recollect anybody saying that he runs NetBSD.

But wikipedia is all praise for NetBSD and google gives you lot of testimony to the innovations in NetBSD.

Unfortunately due to various reasons I have not played enough with the operating system. Still I am writing this review now because I can guess reasonably well what my experience is going to be. In case my guess is wrong I will update this review. So keep checking this page often.

The NetBSD byline is ''Of course it runs NetBSD.'' It means that even bread toasters run NetBSD. It is known as the most portable and ported operating system. But alas, there is no equivalent of ucLinux. It doesn't run on non MMU CPUs.

One thing you should understand. If a piece of software is known to run stably in multiple environments that software should be good because it truly is the beacon of the software's quality. Especially so if it is an operating system.

Without sound coding practices and solid architecture and design, it is impossible to maintain the toolchain for gazillions of processor architectures. This is where NetBSD truly excels.

And the design is so sexy that even portable device drivers exist. I think it is marvellous.

NetBSD's pkgsrc package management system though originally modeled after FreeBSD's /usr/ports system, is supposed to be the best of its kind. And interestingly this is also available in a wide variety of OSes.

If you want *BSD's ports semantics on Linux then I think the only choice for you is pkgsrc. I have not yet tried it on linux but I trust it should work seamlessly.

And along with portability comes emulation for various architectures and OSes. Like FreeBSD emulates linux binary layer, NetBSD emulates several more including FreeBSD and Linux.

And the story doesn't end there.

It supports the best of breed in everything got to do with the kernel. For instance it supports the best file system, the best networking subsystems and so on.

Apparently NASA uses NetBSD.

I think the wide availability on multiple platforms itself makes good reason for you to try NetBSD. Now of course you ask, ''but linux is also available on every platform''. True, but there is a difference. I leave it to you to figure it out yourself.

You might have heard of support for encrypted disks in Linux and FreeBSD. NetBSD is the last to implement it and it is called cgd. Apparently they claim that theirs is the most secure and their justification seems quite sound to me.