NetBSD
A Unix operating system built on the Berkeley Software Distribution code that was the first Unix freed from AT&T licensing. It comes with the BSDLicense, which historically only required that you disclose that you had adapted BSD code if you take it.
Other common BSD distributions include OpenBSD and FreeBSD.
BSD manual pages can be accessed online at http://www.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/man.cgi
NetBSD ( http://www.netbsd.org/ ) is an open-source UNIX-like operating system descended from BSD UNIX. Some key features of the BSD family of operating systems are:
- It is freely available under a very liberal license, and is highly portable.
- As of this writing, there are 53 architectures that NetBSD will boot from including i386, sparc, sparc64, powerpc, and alpha, to name some of the more common architectures.
- NetBSD is POSIX-compatible and will run virtually any unix software you can compile on it.
- This includes most linux software (excluding stuff that uses /proc or kernel specific calls or information) from source and something like 90% of Linux software via binary emulation (again, excluding binaries that rely on /proc or linux kernel specific calls or information).
- A large collection of software is available for NetBSD in binary form by ftp or in the form of a port: an automated process that will download, build, and install software with as little as a single command (make install).
- NetBSD sports the ipfilter and pf firewalls that, along with its small footprint and secure-by-default install, make it an excellent choice for firewalls or routers.
The current version of NetBSD is 1.6.1 which is starting to show its age compared to some linux distros and even FreeBSD and OpenBSD.
NetBSD 2.0 is expected shortly with much improved scalability with large amounts of memory, SMP, threading, and many improvements to its default filesystem UFS.
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