Articles about NetBSD

On this page you will find a list of articles referencing NetBSD. If you have such material that might be appropriate for this section, and would like to make it available here, please let us know!

Technical articles

Non-technical articles

Series of Articles


Technical articles

2020 - Before the BSD Kernel starts: Part One on AMD64

In this article, Maciej Grochowski will walk through the early NetBSD/amd64 kernel initialization process, defining the meaning of this term. System initialization is a broad topic that ranges from the platform’s hardware design all the way up to typical functions of an operating system such as handling I/O operations.

2020 - Backup and Restore on NetBSD

Putting together the bits and pieces of a backup and restore concept, while not being rocket science, always seems to be a little bit ungrateful. Most admin handbooks handle this topic only within few pages. After replacing their old Mac Mini's OS with NetBSD, e17i implemented an automated backup system, allowing them to handle it similarly to the time machine backups they'd been using before.

2012 - [German] pkgsrc Inkubator (about pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip)

An introduction into pkgsrc and how to create your own packages and publish them with the pkgsrc-wip project. Find Thomas Klausner's article in issue 5/2012 of the German FreeX magazine.

2012 - [German] NetBSD in the cloud

An article about using NetBSD/xen with Amazon's cloud servers. Find Hubert Feyrer's article in issue 5/2012 of the German FreeX magazine.

2009 - NetBSD install

This article was written by Patrick Pippen, and published in the Jan 2009 issue of BSD Magazine, pages 10-15. The article talks about how to go through the NetBSD 4.0/i386 installer (sysinst), including language and keyboard selection, selecting and partitioning the harddisk to install to, installing bootblocks, selecting the installation media, installing the base system, selection of the system password encryption algorithm, and setting the root password and shell. Beyond that, the article also gives help on getting started after the installation.

2009 - Play Music on Your Slug with NetBSD

This article was written by Donald T. Hayford, and published in the Jan 2009 issue of BSD Magazine, pages 54-60. A previous issue of the BSD Mag described how to install NetBSD on the Linksys NSLU2 (AKA slug), and this article explains how to set the system up so it can act as a web-based mp3 player that you can hook up to the stereo.

2009 - [German] File systems in the NetBSD user space

File systems in user space promise to connect kernel and applications, and the boundaries between data, files and file systems start to vanish. NetBSD offers an implementation for file systems in user space since 2005, and in the mean time it has reched full source code compatibility to the FUSE standard. The article also contains an interview with Alistair Crooks, developer of NetBSD's user space-based iSCSI implementation. Find Ulrich Habel's article in issue 1/2009 of the German FreeX magazine.

2008 - [German] Article on using Flash storage in an EeePC

Issue 5/2008 of the German FreeX magazine has an article by Ulrich Habel titled "Festspeicher statt Festplatte" ("hard storage instead of hard disk"). It illustrates how to replace your EeePC's 1.8" harddisk with a CF-card adapter, and install NetBSD on it.

2008 - [German] Article on installing NetBSD 4.0

Issue 2/2008 of the German FreeX magazine comes with a DVD that contains NetBSD 4.0 including more than 1.200 prebuilt binary packages for i386 and amd64. The magazine also has an article on installing NetBSD 4.0 by Jörg Braun.

2007 - [German] Two articles on pkgsrc on Solaris and Linux

Issue 5/2007 of the German freeX magazine has two articles on pkgsrc, one focussing on Solaris, the other one on Linux.

Ulrich Habel's article "Der Daemon und die Sonne" talks about pkgsrc on Solaris. He describes how to bootstrap the environment using a precompiled binary bootstrap that was made available as Solaris package, then continues on how to use pkg_add and other tools for using precompiled binaries that are available via www.sunpkg.de.

Dr. Heiko Herrman's article "Daemonic Tux: Linux mit pkgsrc" describes the situation where he gets to a new workplace that has Linux on the desktop, but that calls for some software maintenance. Instead of hunting down the system administrator, pkgsrc can be used to install everything pkgsrc offers into his home directory, and without root privileges. The article gives details on how to bootstrap pkgsrc by compiling, then explains how to compile packages via pkgsrc and gives some hints on pkgsrc's internals.

2007 - [German] Daten sicher löschen

The February 2007 issue of UpTimes, the magazine of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) has a (german language) article by Stefan Schumacher titled ``Daten sicher löschen'' (secure deletion of data). The article describes how data is saved on modern media and which steps are necessary to secure delete the data. It also contains a chapter about NetBSD/Schrubber, a NetBSD/i386 LiveCD created for the sole purpose of secure data destruction.

2006 - [German] Verschlüsselte Dateisysteme für NetBSD

The December 2006 issue of UpTime, the magazine of the German Unix User Group (GUUG) has an article by Stefan Schumacher titled ``Verschlüsselte Dateisysteme für NetBSD'' (encrypted file systems with NetBSD).

The german-language article introduces two ways to implement encrypted file systems under NetBSD. CGD is a NetBSD-specific solution which works on the disk-block layer, the other one is CFS, which uses the NFS server interface and works under BSD, Linux and Solaris. Thus, CFS can be used in heterogenous networks and on changable media to exchange data.

2006 - NetBSD: Not Just for Toasters

David Chisnall wrote this article for Informit.

Extract: "NetBSD has a well-deserved reputation for portability. Part of this reputation comes from the driver layer, which makes use of an abstraction layer known as the Modular Portability Layer (MPL). This layer enables a single driver to be easily used on all architectures by hiding details of exactly how the host talks to the hardware and dramatically reduces the amount of work needed to port it to a new architecture. It was a running joke for years that NetBSD was the OS to run on your toaster, and last year the team proved it by demonstrating a NetBSD-enabled toaster."

[ Link to Informit article]

2006 - Recent Security Enhancements in NetBSD

Elad Efrat wrote this article on security enhancements in NetBSD.

Extract: "Running on almost twenty different architectures, and easily portable to others, NetBSD gained its reputation as the most portable operating system on the planet. While that may indicate high quality code, the ever demanding networked world cares about more than just that. Over the past year, NetBSD evolved quite a bit in various areas. This paper, however, will focus on those aspects relating to security."

[Link to SecurityFocus article]

2006 - Interview with Jan Schaumann

Jan Schaumann was interviewed about using NetBSD as a desktop system. Questions asked include how pkgsrc works, why use NetBSD as a desktop system and how pkgsrc handle upgrades.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2006 - Interview on real-time backups with der Mouse

der Mouse was interviewed about his real-time backup system (originally presented at BSDCan 2005), where changes to your local filesystem are automatically propagated to a backup server. In this interview, der Mouse tells about his idea, how it works, and, of course, how cool it is.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2006 - Interview on Xen with Manuel Bouyer

Manuel Bouyer was interviewed about his work integrating the Xen virtual machine monitor with NetBSD. Questions asked include why Xen is so good, how it can be used and what kind of work Manuel had to do in order to get it running on NetBSD.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2006 - [German] Tips und Tricks zu OpenOffice.org

Besides many general tips & tricks for OpenOffice.org, there are details on how to teach OOo 2.0 (which is currently only available as Linux binary for NetBSD/i386) to use a German language user interface.

freeX 2/2006, pages 89-91.

2006 - [German] Wie man sich bettet

NetBSD works fine from Compact Flash storage, esp. in embedded environments, and the installation can be done from desktop machines. This article by Martin Laubach tells all the details.

freeX 2/2006, pages 8-11.

2006 - [German] NetBSD für Linux-Umsteiger

NetBSD has a good reputation. The kernel's design is considered clean and well implemented. This results in availability on many platforms. But when using NetBSD in a production environment, further facts are of interest: Are security updates available, and how easy is their installation? How to install and configure 3rd party packages? This article by Alexander Mayer answers these and further questions.

freeX 1/2006, pages 68-73.

2006 - [German] Verified Exec unter NetBSD

A feature to ensure integrity of data and to keep trojans away under NetBSD 2 is Verified Exec, short "veriexec". Soon NetBSD 3.0 will be available, and it will come with a number of changes at the veriexec subsystem. This article by Dennis Wecker gives an overview of the functions and applications.

freeX 1/2006, pages 62-63.

2006 - [Japanese] Assembler programming

The February 2006 issue of the Japanese Interface magazine features articles about assembler programming. The supplemental CD-ROM contains a virtual machine image of NetBSD 2.1 for VMWare and VMWare Player. The image also has some small assembler example programs and Makefiles for BSD make and GNU make.

2005 - [German] Tips und Tricks für Anwender

The tips and tricks section of freeX 6/2005 contains several items of interest for NetBSD users, including how to save space using strip(1) and what the caveats are, using OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and Linux-RPMs with NetBSD.

freeX 6/2005, pages 86-97.

2005 - [German] NetBSD ohne Installation

freeX 6/2005 comes with a NetBSD Live CD. This article by Jörg Braun describes how to configure the CD to use its full power.

freeX 6/2005, pages 83-85.

2005 - [German] NetBSD 2 Live! 2005, eine neue runde Sache

Jörg Braun's article describes how the new feature of NetBSD 3.0 to handle compressed filesystem/disk images can be used to create a live CD full of useful software, similar to Knoppix. The article covers the filesystem hierarchy, packages put on the CD, integration with the NetBSD operating system to work in a (mostly) read-only environment, configuration of the X Window System and more.

freeX 6/2005, pages 76-82.

2005 - [German] VND gut komprimiert

NetBSD 3 can read and create compressed filesystem images. This article by Florian Stöhr and Hubert Feyrer gives an overview over the general problems encountered when compressing files, filesystems and images, and shows how compressed filesystem images can be created and used.

freeX 6/2005, pages 71-75.

2005 - [German] Die Zukunft: NetBSD

NetBSD Release 2.1 is planned for mid-September, Release 3.0 for October 2005. This article by Alexandre Wennmacher gives an overview of the important changes in NetBSD 3.0 and an outlook on what can be expected in NetBSD 4.0.

freeX 6/2005, pages 68-70.

2005 - [German] Package Sources für FreeBSD 6

FreeBSD has a mature ports system. The NetBSD pkgsrc system is equivalent on first sight, but not in detail. It has a number of advantages and can be used with FreeBSD, even with the latest versions of the operating system. In this FreeX article, Robert Schieder describes how it works, and addresses a number of problems.

freeX 6/2005, pages 64-67.

2005 - Wide Character Support in NetBSD Curses Library

Dr. Dobb's Journal published a series of articles on the projects of the Google Summer of Code. Part I covers the wcurses project by Ruibiao Qiu, who implemented wide character support in the NetBSD curses library as part of the Summer of Code.

2005 - NetBSD NDIS network driver

Part II of the Dr. Dobb's Google Summer of Code articles includes a story about Alan Ritter and his work on porting FreeBSD NDIS network driver (aka Project Evil) to NetBSD during the SoC.

2005 - [German] (Net)BSD auf SSH-Rootservern

FreeX magazine 4/05 contains an article by Florian Stöhr describing how to install NetBSD on a Linux box when only SSH access (not even a serial console) is available. Example installation is done with NetBSD.

2005 - [German] Everything is a file - auch das Audio-Device

FreeX magazine 1/05 describes how to use the audio device, which can be treated as a normal file following the Unix philosophy of "everything is a file". Examples use NetBSD, but should apply to all Unix-like systems.

2004 - [German] Das NetBSD Betriebssystem

In this german article, Matthias Petermann from the Dresden BSD Crew gives an overview of NetBSD, including historical background, characteristics (and differences to Linux), portability, hot features, the packages collection and answers to some frequently asked questions.

2004 - Understanding NetBSD 2.0's new technology

Federico Biancuzzi published an article and in-depth interview with several NetBSD developers shortly after the NetBSD 2.0 release.

2004 - pkg_comp (or: how I learned to stop worrying and build pkgsrc in a chroot)

The BSDFreak website has a short article explaining how to use pkg_comp to build packages under NetBSD in a chroot sandbox.

2004 - [German] NetBSD: Neue Pakete

FreeX magazine 6/04 Has an article in the "Tips & Tricks" section about using pkgsrc on OpenBSD, describing how to bootstrap pkgsrc on non-NetBSD and using it to install packages.

2004 - [German] NetBSD: Die Version 2.0

FreeX magazine 6/04 has an article describing features of NetBSD 2.0.

2004 - Debugging Kernel Problems (BSD)

While not NetBSD specific, Debugging Kernel Problems by Greg Lehey is a good introduction to debugging BSD kernels..

2004 - [German] NetBSD im Eigenbau

Everyone knows KNOPPIX, the CD-based Linux distribution. The 5/04 ``freeX'' issue includes a Live CD based on a prerelease of NetBSD 2.0, which provides a comfortable demo- and rescue-system. The article describes how the Live CD was created.

[Link to FreeX article]

2004 - [German] NetBSD 2 direkt von CD

If you're curious about the NetBSD Live-CD distributed with the 5/04 ``freeX'' issue, this article describes how to use it.

2004 - [German] NetBSD auf dem neuesten Stand

Want to get a NetBSD system that's includes today's latest changes? No problem using the NetBSD-current source-tree. This article, published in the 5/03 ``freeX'' issue, describes how to update a system based on NetBSD-current.

[Link to FreeX article]

2004 - [German] RAID mit NetBSD

This article, published in the 3/03 ``freeX'' issue, gives an overview of general RAID concepts, describes how NetBSD's RAIDframe implements them and how to use RAIDframe.

2003 - Cross-building Explained: Cross compilation on NetBSD

This article describes the benefits of the NetBSD cross build system, as well as challenges and future work.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2003 - Building tiny systems with embedded NetBSD

In an article for BSDnewsletter.com Brian Rose talks about building very small systems with NetBSD for use in embedded applications.

[Link to BSDnewsletter article] [20030903]

2003 - Doing Java on NetBSD

Java has been hailed as the language in which one can write a program once, and run it everywhere. There is another version of this assertion in which the phrase "debug everywhere" appears. Graham Jenkins has decided to try out some Java programs on a basic NetBSD machine, and gave a report.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2003 - Move Over Mini-ITX, Here Comes The gigaQube

"Since there's been a lot of interest lately in Mini ITX based servers I thought the Slashdot crowd might enjoy checking out Project gigaQube. The gigaQube is a modified Cobalt Qube 2 server appliance with 240 Gigabytes of storage running NetBSD's Mips R5000 based Cobalt port. Cobalt Qube's are quiet, cool looking little (7.25 x 7.25 x 7.75 inch) servers that when modified, make a powerful home server solution. They also seem to have achieved 'fetish' status in Japan..."

[Link to Slashdot article] [20031118]

2003 - [German] Systemaktualisierung bei NetBSD

In this article, published in the German FreeX magazine, Walter Justen describes the process of updating a system to NetBSD-current.

[Link to FreeX article] [20030501]

2003 - Managing Third-Party Software Installation with pkgsrc

Jan Schaumann, a NetBSD developer, describes the use of NetBSD's Packages Collection for efficient third-party software management.

[Link to SysAdmin Magazine article] [20030501]

2003 - Updating your NetBSD Real-Time Clock Offset without Recompiling

If you dual-boot NetBSD and Windows, you'll need to correct your RTC to account for Daylight Savings Time. Bill's article shows how you can do it without recompiling your kernel.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2003 - NetBSD is "Ready for IBM Technology"

IBM's Microelectronics Division validates NetBSD on IBM's PowerPC 405GP evaluation platform and is entitled to use the "Ready for IBM Technology" mark.

[Link to BSDnewsletter article] [20030122]

2002 - How To Properly Partition a Disk for NetBSD

An article written by Grey Wolf for Daemon News. It describes how to layout your systems partitions during the installation, how much space to allocate approximately for each partition etc.

[Link to Daemon News article] [20020909]

2002 - [German] Solaris-Programme in NetBSD/sparc nutzen

In this article, published in the German FreeX magazine, Walter Justen describes how to use Solaris programs under NetBSD/sparc, using COMPAT_SVR4.

[Link to FreeX article] [20020201]

2002 - Testdriving -current

An article written by Hubert Feyrer for Daemon News. It describes on how to testdrive NetBSD-current without actually installing it on a life system, using chroot instead.

[Link to Daemon News article] [20020104]

2000 - 6to4 IPv6 Explained or: Flogging a Dead Horse

6to4 is an easy way to get IPv6 connectivity for hosts that only have a IPv4 uplink. It can be used with static as well as dynamically assigned numbers, e.g. as found in modem dialup scenarios. This article by Hubert Feyrer explains 6to4 IPv6, including details on configuration in NetBSD 1.5.

[Link to Article] [200012]


Non-technical articles

2021 - Interview with Abhinav Upadhyay, NetBSD contributor and machine learning software developer

A quick Q&A with Abhinav about his life-changing journey with NetBSD, getting started with ML and FLOSS community, and his daily workflow, published by nixCraft.

2009 - Interview about NetBSD WAPBL

This interview with Simon Burge, Antti Kantee and Greg Oster was led by Federico Biancuzzi, and published in the Jan 2009 issue of BSD Magazine, pages 62-64. Federico Biancuzzi asks the NetBSD developers who worked to get journaling into NetBSD about what it is, how it is integrated in the current file system implementation, what features there are, benchmark results, ideas for future improvements, how to set it up, space requirements, interaction with backups. Furthermore, the development and testing process with its interaction with the RUMP subsystem is discussed, and finally under what license the implementation is available.

2009 - [German] Article on mile stones in NetBSD 5.0

Not every software major release has a noteworthy list of features. This is different for the NetBSD 5 release - not only does it include a number of security-relevant changes, but there are substantial changes in the kernel. Find Markus Illenseer's article in issue 1/2009 of the German FreeX magazine.

2007 - Open Source Jahrbuch 2007

The ``Open Source Jahrbuch 2007'' is published by Bernd Lutterbeck, Matthias Bärwolff, Robert A. Gehring, it discusses a number of aspects of Open Source today. On pages 315--326 it contains an article titled ``NetBSD - Das portabelste Betriebssystem der Welt'' (``NetBSD - the world's most portable operating system'') by Hubert Feyrer, Stefan Schumacher and Mark Weinem that talks about NetBSD and pkgsrc, their project structure, commercial applications and licenses.

The Project's homepage is at http://www.opensourcejahrbuch.de/ where the ``Open Source Jahrbuch 2007'' can be downloaded directly. The book was also published by JF Lehmanns, ISBN is 978-3-86541-191-4.

2005 - One student's experience with Google's Summer of Code

Article about Alan Ritter's Summer of Code project: "He spent the summer working on a code which makes Windows network drivers adaptable to the NetBSD operating system."

[Link to BSD Newsletter.com article] [20051105]

2005 - Recording CDs and DVDs with NetBSD

A short article about recording CDs and DVDs under NetBSD.

[Link to mrEriksson.net article] [20050312]

2005 - [German] Sushi statt Fugu-Fisch

A short overview about new features introduced with NetBSD 2.0, like N:M-Threads, UFS2, ACPI, cgd and SMP support.

[iX 2/2005, p. 16] [200502]

2005 - My workstation OS: NetBSD

An article about the merits of NetBSD on your workstation compared to Linux.

[Link to OSDIR] [20050114]

2004 - Report of the pkgsrcCon 2004

The NetBSD pkgsrc developers met at end of April 2004 in Vienna, Austria, for a technical meeting. The report describes what happened on that weekend.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2003 - Creating an IDE for embedded NetBSD

Ross Harvey and Bruce Woodson of Wasabi Systems talk about Wasabi Workbench, an IDE for embedded NetBSD.

[Link to EeTimes article] [20030912]

2003 - Wasabi Systems VP Interviewd

Jay Michaelson, the Vice President of Wasabi Systems, was interviewed by Topics discussed were embedded NetBSD and licensing.

[Link to Article] [20030408]

2003 - Getting into NetBSD - How to Help

This article discusses the different groups within the NetBSD Project and the variety of ways virtually any user can help the project out.

[Link to Daemon News article]

2002 - [German] Freies Unix zum ausprobieren - ohne Installation

The `NetBSD Live!'' CD made it into the Austrian Press!

[derStandard.at] [20020624]

2002 - NetBSD in 2001 - A Report

A report on the NetBSD project's progress in 2001, covering ports, people, products, technical advance on the development branch and other project related events and facts.

[Link to Daemon News] [20020104]

2001 - The Big *BSD Interview

Eugenia Loli-Queru interviewed Matt Dillon (of FreeBSD), Jun-ichiro "itojun" Hagino (of the NetBSD Core Group), and Theo de Raadt in an article for OSNews.

[Link to OSNews article] [20011008]

2001 - [German] NetBSD 1.5.1 erschienen

NetBSD-1.5.1 status report,

[iX 9/2001, p. 36] [200109]

2001 - Interview with NetBSD's Luke Mewburn

There's a short interview with NetBSD Core Group member Luke Mewburn available in the European Unix Platform e-zine. The interview was conducted by Daniel de Kok.

2000 - Beyond Windows and Linux: Discovering the BSDs

A positive article on the *BSD variants by Paul Hoffman for Network World. "But where the BSDs really tend to really shine is in networking"... "This has caused a number of network hardware vendors to use customized versions of BSDs, particularly NetBSD, as the internal operating systems of their commercial products."

[Link to Network World article] [20001120]

2000 - [German] NetBSD for the Mac at Comdex

3sat Online has an article about Comdex Fall, including information about NetBSD for the Mac. There's also a video report available in RealVideo, which features NetBSD coverage at 23m:43s.

[Link to 3sat Online Comdex report video] [200011]

2000 - BSD OSs Offer Unix Alternatives to Linux

There's an article at Byte, by Bill Nicholls, which provides a good overview of the *BSD variants. Bill lauds NetBSD as "the most broadly available OS of the BSD group" and gives a nice nod to the NetBSD packages collection.

[Link to Byte article] [20001002]

2000 - [Italian] NetBSD: la qualità senza compromessi

The Italian magazine Login has published in the July/August 2000 issue (N. 23) an article on NetBSD by Federico Lupi. The title (more or less) translates to "NetBSD: quality without compromises".

The article has the following sections:

  • History of BSD
  • Features of NetBSD
  • Ports
  • Applications and emulations
  • The philosophy of NetBSD
  • Why to use NetBSD
  • Getting started with NetBSD
  • Releases
  • Conclusion

It also contains a link to the Italian version of the NetBSD Guide.

The article is available at the following places:

1999 - NetBSD as a Windows CE competitor

NetBSD is mentioned as a potential competitor to Microsoft's Windows CE operating system in this BBC news article by Tim Weber.

[Link to BBC article] [19991209]

1999 - [German] NetBSD mit neuer Version

NetBSD-1.4 status report,

[iX 9/1999, p. 22] [199909]

1999 - BSD Community Welcomes Apple's New Open Source OS

NEWS RELEASE Concord, CA, June 7, 1999: Today, at the start of the UNIX development community's annual Usenix convention, operating system influentials embraced Apple Computer's Darwin (www.apple.com/darwin) as a new member of the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) operating system family.

[Link to Press Release] [199906]

1999 - Better look out, Microsoft: Here comes free software

Could NetBSD be considered "mom-ready"? Linda Seebach finds a 'Windows-free' laptop set up by her son very much so.

[Link to Article] [199904]

1999 - The Oldest Free OS

Explains that the Berkeley Software Distribution (BSD) Unix variants are the oldest free operating systems around. Mentions that NetBSD supports the most platforms.

[Link to ZD Net article) [199904]

1999 - Microsoft Windows NT Server 4.0 versus UNIX

The choice of server platforms can be difficult for managers who do not have highly specialized training in systems and network administration. In this paper, Microsoft Windows NT Server is compared to UNIX, a large family of commercial and non-commercial operating systems with a common heritage and many similarities. The main focus of the comparison is on the areas of functionality, reliability, system management, and performance. This paper is about servers, not workstations.

Mentions that NetBSD will run on practically everything.

[Link to Unix vs NT Organization article] [199904]

1999 - Old Workstations Never Die

Brian Jepson looks into the options when purchasing an older model workstation, and how you can end up with a very useful system. Explains differing architectures, such as alpha, sparc, mips, choosing an OS, where to obtain machines, and possible warranties.

[Link to Unix Review article] [199903]

1999 - The return of BSD

In this overview of BSD variants, Greg Lehey runs down the history of the different BSD projects, describes their characteristics, and considers why you might run BSD on your Sun machine or even choose BSD over Linux.

[Link to SunWorld article] [199901]

1998 - [Italian] NetBSD: un potente sistema Unix gratuito multipiattaforma

A five page article written by Dante Profeta, entirely on NetBSD (p. 36-40). The title translates to "NetBSD: a powerful free multiplatform Unix system".

It is split into the following sections:

  • Modern Unix Systems
  • The NetBSD project
  • Portability
  • Memory management
  • Binary compatibility
  • Conclusion

It contains a link to the NetBSD site as well as the NetBSD logo, the BSD family tree and a picture of NetBSD running X with WindowMaker and WordPerfect for Linux in emulation.

NetBSD is also mentioned on the cover (along with BeOS and WinCE). Byte (italian edition)

[Byte 12/1998, p.36-40] [199812]

1998 - [German] MCNTP: News über Multicast-NNTP verteilen

The MultiCast News Transfer Protocol was developed on NetBSD.

[iX 10/1998, p. 90] [199810]

1998 - [German] NetBSD 1.3.2 als Multiplattform-Unix

NetBSD-1.3.2 status report.

[iX 8/1998, p.42] [199808]

1998 - The Free Hardware Foundation

Computer reincarnation via The Free Hardware Foundation - from dumpsters and donations to usable NetBSD systems. Reported by CANOE, CANadian Online Explorer for the Financial Post.

[Article no longer online] [1998]

1998 - Daemon Lager

The special occasion Daemon Lager beer, brewed by Banff Brewery for Canada Connect Corporation. Reported by FFWD magazine, a Calgary news and entertainment weekly.

[Link to FFWD article] [1998]

1996 - [German] Gleiches für vieles

NetBSD-1.1 status report.

[iX 5/1996, p.110] [199605]

1994 - [German] NetBSD als Unix-Alternative

A brief history and review of NetBSD.

[iX 11/1994, p.82] [199411]

1994 - [German] Wine: das Freeware-Wabi für FreeBSD, NetBSD und Linux

A report about Wine, the free Windows emulator for Unix.

[iX 7/1994, p.122] [199407]


Series of Articles

2006 - NetBSD: decine di piattaforme per un solo sourcetree

The italian magazine "Linux&C." published in the first 2006 issue (#50) a short intro (four pages) about NetBSD portability by Fabrizio Soppelsa. This article describes the power of the NetBSD portability layer showing how simple can be porting the system to another platform recycling device drivers thanks to bus_space and bus_dma frameworks. Without forgetting to mention the code elegance the article summarize answering the question: how is possible mantain 55 platforms with only source tree? (from Fabrizio Soppelsa)

A short intro, in Italian, can be found at http://www.oltrelinux.com/home.php?num_riv=50.

2004 - [German] SMP und Unix [Three-part series]

The German magazine ``freeX'' has published in its 1/04 issue Lex Wennmacher's first (out of three) article on SMP support in NetBSD. It gives an overview about the required changes to make the NetBSD (or rather: a Unix-kernel) SMP aware. A detailed description on SMP hardware found in modern systems is included as a complement.

The next article (in freeX issue 2/04) goes into the details of the NetBSD's SMP implementation. It will also cover the native thread implementation based on scheduler activations (which is largely independent of SMP).

Finally, the third article (in freeX issue 3/04) concentrates on the integration of scheduler activations with SMP.

2003 - [German] Nomadic Computing ohne ActiveSync[Two-part series]

Ignations Souvatzis describes in the 2/03 and 3/03 ``freeX'' issues how a serial cable connects a HP Jornada 820 or other handheld-PCs with a NetBSD host. The second part of the series describes applications that can use the serial or alternatively an ethernet connection.

2002 - [Italian] Il boot di NetBSD [Two-part series]

The Italian magazine "Dev" has published in the April 2002 issue (N. 95) an article on NetBSD by Frederico Lupi. The title is "Il boot di NetBSD" which translates to (more or less) "How NetBSD boots". This article is split in two parts; the next will be in the May issue.

The article is four pages long, with the following sections:

  • What is NetBSD
  • Booting and partitins
  • The Master Boot Record
  • Fdisk and hard disk geometries
  • The NetBSD boot selector
  • How to install the NetBSD boot selector
  • BIOS partitions and NetBSD slices