I noticed that NetBSD 6 branch appeared on development ftp (nyftp.netbsd.org). So long awaited release is coming closer. However, it doesn’t mean that release will be soon. We will probably have to go through some beta period and several release candidates before the release. I would expect release not earlier than the summer but this is just my speculation. Still I’ll try to update my outdated netbsd-current (I didn’t updated it some time already) to that branch on my main computer.

NetBSD 5.1.2 released officially on February 11, 2012. You could find 5.1.1 and 5.1.2 folders on ftp for some time but official announcement was made only yesterday. This release is critical/security update for 5.1 branch.

I filed three bug reports yesterday (total count of my submitted bugs are 4 now) and I got a first fix this morning. It is actually the first code change to NetBSD repository caused by my bug report. That was fast but I hope other bugs will be fixed in less than a year contrary to my first bug report for which I made workaround myself and it is not fixed for almost 3 years. Though I don’t expect much as all of them related to specific hardware and its drivers problems. However, I am happy that my time spent on testing and debugging didn’t go wasted. If you want to fill a bug report you can use web interface for that (or NetBSD send-pr tool).

NetBSD is free and open source Unix-like operating system. It is one of major BSD flavors. I am not a member of NetBSD team and I am just one of this OS users. However this blog is intended to describe my experience with this OS and post some news about NetBSD or other BSDs. Posts won’t be frequent though.