The NetBSD project announced their fifteen major release today! NetBSD 7.0 is officially released. This release has lots of improvements, bug fixes and new features. It also supports bunch of new hardware especially in ARM space (including multiprocessor support for them). There is also one new port, epoc32 (Psion EPOC PDAs). GPT support in sysinst, improvements on handling of disk wedges, DRM/KMS support for accelerated graphics on x86, multiprocessor support on USB subsystem are major highlights for this release for myself. Please read release announcement and full list of changes between 6 and 7 releases for more information. System can be downloaded from any of the mirrors and torrents.
I was expecting to write article on Mac mini late 2014 but unfortunately I still haven’t managed to install NetBSD on it. Though I have several tricks under my sleeves. Hopefully some of them will work. If I’ll have successful installation I’ll update on it.
It was also nice small article about what to expect in NetBSD 7.0 release but it’s not working for me now. If it will try to read it here (cached page)
Not the long after RC2 release we can enjoy the new RC3 release. The NetBSD project team expects it to be the last before official 7.0 release. The full list can be found CHANGES-7.0 file, highlights in the release announcement. Please test it and let’s make NetBSD 7.0 happen soon.
NetBSD 7.0 RC2 was released on 28 of July. It contains some software updates and bug fixes. You can read more about it in release announcement or you can peek at the full list in the bellow part of CHANGES-7.0 file (after “Welcome to 7.0_RC1!” line).
On personal note I was a bit unsuccessful to run RC1 on my current hardware. The main reason was disabled USB3 by default (experimental support still can be enabled by recompiling the kernel). Lately I wasn’t using NetBSD that much but I’ll try to find time to run it eventually.
NetBSD 7 branch was created about 10 months ago and it is closing to the final stage of development finally. NetBSD 7.0 RC1 release was announced yesterday by Soren Jacobsen. Release announcement highlights greatly improved AMD and Intel graphics support, numerous new compatible ARM boards, GPT support in sysinst (my favourite feature), Lua kernel scripting, multiprocessor USB stack, NPF improvements and GCC 4.8.4/LLVM/Clang 3.6.1 (optionally). Of course, there are much more improvements and bugfixes too (all changes can be found in downloads CHANGES file). You can download it from here. Of course, please try it and test it.
My blog is quite silent lately but it doesn’t mean that nothing happens in NetBSD world.
5.1.5 and 5.2.3 security and bug-fix updates were released in the November last year for 5.1 and 5.2 branches. More information can be found here. If you are using these branches, it is strongly recommended to update to the latest releases. After release of upcoming 7.0 version these branches won’t be supported anymore.
Lots of news coming about support of new boards (ARM and MIPS) and improvements for them lately:
Initial support Xilinx Zync (dual core Cortex-A9) based ZedBoard and Parallella boards. Hardware accelaration for Broadcom VideoCore IV GPU used in Raspberry PI.
Support for MIPS Creator CI20 (Ingenic JZ478 SoC with dual core MIPS32 cores and PowerVR SGX540 GPU) board reaches userland. Raspberry PI 2 (quad core Cortex-A7) support. Hardkernel ODROID-C1support (quad core Cortex-A5). First board with Cortex-A5.
Finally a work have been done on APC8750 board (ARM926EJ-S) support. Though it is not the official source tree currently.
I’m travelling right now but I noticed that the NetBSD Project announced NetBSD 6.1.5 and 6.0.6 security/bugfix updates of the NetBSD 6.1 and 6.0 release branches on 7th of October. As always it is strongly recommended to update to one of these releases. You can find more information in NetBSD 6.1.5 release notes or NetBSD 6.0.6 release notes. Download them from any mirror using FTP, torrent, AnonCVS or other services in http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.
I’m late as always but NetBSD 7 branch is already created on 11 of August. Official beta period for new release started. You can download latest builds for testing from the ftp server.
The NetBSD team recently announced that NetBSD-7 branch will be created on or about 26 of July. So it’s only week before next major release will enter beta stage. Please help to test system before that. All instructions can be found on the same e-mail from OS release engineer Jeff Rizzo. Thanks for hubertf’s NetBSD blog for sharing this information which I missed by myself.
Update (2014-07-28): new branch is postponed for the week or two.
I’m a bit late but the NetBSD Project announced NetBSD 6.1.4 and 6.0.5 security/bugfix updates of the NetBSD 6.1 and 6.0 release branches on 19th of April. I think the main reason for these releases was to fix OpenSSL heartbleed bug (5th branch is not affected). However, you can find some more security and bug fixes in these releases also. It is strongly suggested to update to one of these releases. You can find more information in NetBSD 6.1.4 release notes or NetBSD 6.0.5 release notes. Download them from any mirror using FTP, torrent, AnonCVS or other services in http://www.NetBSD.org/mirrors/.
CDE (Common Desktop Environment) is “classic” Unix desktop environment and was used in various Unix systems and OpenVMS as the default one. I also had a small experience with it in university studies (it had some Sun Solaris workstations) however I didn’t spend enough time to get used to it and have a objective opinion. KDE and Gnome projects replaced it in the most desktop environments many years ago, nevertheless CDE was open sourced in 2012 and it is actively developed since then. Last week project released 2.2.0 version of this desktop environment and besides other features/bugfixes NetBSD port was added. If you want to try it, the easiest way to do that by installing cde package from pkgsrc-wip.