Debian GNU/NetBSD

[Wally Balljacker]

I know Linc is a big fan of NetBSD, and I believe he has a SPARC machine running Debian. This looks like a cool combination. Anyone ever tried it? There's also a port to the FreeBSD kernel as well.

http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/

[Tsuroerusu]

The Gentoo guys is also doing something like this.

[Linc]

I know Linc is a big fan of NetBSD, and I believe he has a SPARC machine running Debian. This looks like a cool combination. Anyone ever tried it? There's also a port to the FreeBSD kernel as well.

http://www.debian.org/ports/netbsd/

I really dig my NetBSD and my Debian/Sparc server, but I don't believe I'd put them together. They are both, however, well worth doing on their own.
My NetBSD server is a NFS(file)/DHCP/NTP(stratum2)/DNS server running NetBSD 1.6.1 still, on an old Dell P200 with 64 megs of ram. Looks kind of wierd to have such a low version of NetBSD still running but you have to understand this machine is rock solid stable and *very* fast at it's tasks. And with uptimes in excess of 200 days (only reboots are from extended power failures) and you'll understand why I love NetBSD. I have also had occasion to run NetBSD on my desktop and really like it there as well, but my heart belongs to Slackware on my desktop I have run NetBSD on i386, Sparcstations, Vaxes, Decstations, Alphastations, Macintoshes and probably a few archetectures I am forgetting at the moment. That's one of the big things it has going for it, you can run the exact same system, the exact same way on anything. The other thing is it's **Real Unix(tm)** and it handles that way. Functional, Reliable, Secure and Blazingly Fast.
Now my Debian/Sparc server, that's a different story. When I got my Sparcstation, my very first Ultra 1, my intentions were to run NetBSD on it, just as I had done with many previous Sparcstations I owned (and still own). I think this was around the beginning of NetBSD 2,0 release and after the install I set about to config the U1 the way I wanted. I wanted to run an AMP/mail server on it. The AMP being Apache/MySQL/PHP. Well, I had a small timeframe to get things the way I wanted and it seems that at the time the MySQL package(port) was broken on NetBSD (new release remember). So as I was running out of time to get things going I took a drastic measure and started looking for a Linux with a working MySQL to stuff on this sparc box. The first one I came across was Debian, so on it went. I was so impressed with the ease of install (since the rewrite of their old crappy installer) that I decided to keep it on there. It really is quite pleasent to work with on sparc archetecture and the fact that it's the older stable branch of software doesn't bother me a bit because I am running it as a server.

[Tsuroerusu]

I have run NetBSD on i386, Sparcstations, Vaxes, Decstations, Alphastations, Macintoshes and probably a few archetectures I am forgetting at the moment. That's one of the big things it has going for it, you can run the exact same system, the exact same way on anything.

You're basically saying that NetBSD is portability on steroids

[thetza]

anyone ever try pkgsrc on slackware? its pretty awesome if you can deal with not-quite-so-bleeding-edge versions of software.