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NetBSD and FreeBSD are derived from the original UCB 4.3BSD via the Networking/2 release and 386BSD. OpenBSD forked from NetBSD around the end of 1995. The current release of NetBSD is version 1.6.2 ( March 2004).
NetBSD has been ported to a vast number of architectures; the NetBSD motto is "Of course it runs NetBSD." The binaries for the 58+ architectures are built from a single source code tree, so feature additions in machine independent areas benefit all platforms immediately, with no re-porting required. Driver development is also machine independent, with the driver for a specific card serving whether that card is in a PCI slot on an i386, Alpha, PowerPCPowerPC is a RISC microprocessor architecture created by the 1991 Apple- IBM- Motorola alliance, known as AIM''. The PowerPC was the CPU portion of the overall AIM platform, and is the only part to exist to date. History The history of the PowerPC begins, SPARCSPARC S calable P rocessor ARC hitecture) is a RISC microprocessor architecture originally designed in 1985 by Sun Microsystems. SPARC is a registered trademark of SPARC International, Inc. an organisation established in 1989 to promote the SPARC and to p, or other architecture with PCI buses. This platform independence helps greatly in developing embedded systems, especially starting in NetBSD 1.6, with the whole toolchain of compilerA compiler is a computer program that translates a computer program written in one computer language (called the source language into an equivalent program written in another computer language (called the output or the target language . Introduction and hs, assemblerThis article is about a computing term. See Assembler (disambiguation) for other meanings''. An assembler is a computer program for translating assembly language — essentially, a mnemonic representation of machine language — into object code. A cross asses, linkerA linker or link editor is a program that takes one or more objects generated by compilers and assembles them into a single executable program. In IBM mainframe environments such as OS/360 this program is known as a linkage editor''. On Unix variants thes, and other tools fully supporting cross-compiling.
NetBSD features its own collection of 3rd party software, the NetBSD Packages Collection or pkgsrc, which consists of more than 4,000 packages as of Jan 2004. Installing things like GNOMEGNOME is a computer desktop environment for UNIX and UNIX-like operating systems. It is the official desktop of the GNU Project. Origin The GNOME G NU N etwork O bject M odel E nvironment) project was started in August 1997 by Miguel de Icaza and Federico, KDE, the Apache server or Perl are just a matter of changing into the right directory and typing "make install". This will fetch sources, unpack, configure, build and install the package such that it can be removed again later. An alternative to compiling everything is to use a precompiled binary package. Either way, any prerequisites/dependencies will be installed automatically by the packages system, with no need for manual intervention.
Following its mantra of portability, the NetBSD Packages Collection ( pkgsrc) has been made portable not only across all the hardware platforms that run NetBSD, but also—with the help of an autoconf-based bootstrap system—on many other operating systems, such as Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD, Solaris, Darwin/ MacOS X, IRIX etc.
"NETBSD" is a registered trademark of The NetBSD Foundation as of April 20, 2004.[1]