SCALE 6x: BSD all over it

The "L" in SCALE may stand for Linux, but each of the three major BSD projects has a table at the Southern California Linux Expo. While the FreeBSD booth was giving away PC-BSD CDs (they still have about 500 left, so have at it, people), the OpenBSD booth was selling Version 4.2 CD sets for $45, and the NetBSD people were selling T-shirts for $15.

But it's not all about stuff.

I spent a lot of time talking to Kevin Lahey, a developer for NetBSD who is also a programmer for the Information Sciences Institute under the auspices of the University of Southern California. His organization does work for the Department of Homeland Security, and in the past Kevin has worked for the NASA Ames Research Center, and he told me that NetBSD has a lot of uptake in both government and university settings.

The NetBSD project began in May 1993, and is edging closer to its 15th birthday. It was nice to see Kevin's IBM Thinkpad running NetBSD with a GUI desktop. I've been impressed by the way NetBSD both looked and performed in the 2006-era live CD I tried on Friday, and while NetBSD is increasingly aimed at embedded applications, I think it's a great candidate for desktop use.

Kevin told me that NetBSD has over 200 active developers, most of whom do IT-related work for companies, many of which use NetBSD as part of their business.

As far as the desktop goes, NetBSD is getting better all the time at supporting the ACPI standard for power management -- something that will also see considerable improvement in the forthcoming OpenBSD release, as I learned at that booth. The NetBSD kernel also supports gigabit and even 10GB Ethernet, so it plays very well in many networked environments.

While OpenBSD encourages users to use the precompiled packages for the various architectures, NetBSD users rely on ports for adding applications. Also at the NetBSD booth was David Maxwell, and he told me that thera are about 16,000 ports for NetBSD. It always amazes me that there is so many applications available for the BSD operating systems.

I didn't quite get how NetBSD handles software updates, and Kevin tried to explain it to me, but there is some mechanism at work that can bring the needed updates down to your box as needed. It's something I'll have to look into more. Luckily, every one of the three BSD projects includes excellent, comprehensive documentation on their Web site.

As far as that documentation goes, David told me that NetBSD takes extra care to make sure its man pages are up to date.

Again, it's great to see a worthy project and the very smart people behind it.