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.
From time to time other projects uses some parts of NetBSD in their systems (or even use NetBSD as a base for it). The latest news came from Genode project. They took an interesting approach to add support for NetBSD ffs, ext2 and other filesystems supported by NetBSD itself by integrating rump kernels which allow to load NetBSD subsystems and drivers on userland (kernel driver virtualization). Unfortunately I lack technical knowledge about rump kernels but it was developed to ease development and testing of drivers and various subsystems in NetBSD because you don’t need to reload or run full operating system for that. You can load and run rump kernel with specific modules on userland a use it independently from your running system. Genode used rump kernels to extend their support for filesystems and integrate them as Genode components. You can read more on Genode 14.02 release notes page.
NetBSD project released 6.1.3, 6.0.4, 5.2.2 and 5.1.4 security/bugfix versions. Release notes can be found here, here, here and here. You can download them from usual places: check out mirrors or torrents. 6.1.3 release torrents for amd64 and i386 can be found in linuxtracker.com too. Update is encouraged for those who uses prior versions. Just grab the newest version if you are the new user.
I also found that NetBSD 5.0 branch no longer receives security updates, so you need to upgrade to newer ones.