NetBSD: Bankrupt Software Distribution

Hot on the heels of their NetBSD 5.0.1 release, the NetBSD organization is gearing up for NetBSD 6.0, due in about half a year ("The sixth major release for the six month of 2010!").

To make that happen, NetBSD is asking its industry partners, users, and anyone with spare change to contribute US$60,000. Matt Thomas, of NetBSD's core group, says the money will allow for "network performance improvements and embedded and realtime optimization," meaning NetBSD can finally move onto specialized hardware, an area NetBSD has struggled with in the past.

But is the ultimate goal of $60,000 appropriate for the BSD family's middle child? Is NetBSD a good long-term investment of that kind of money? Is NetBSD even worth the nearly $8,000 raised so far? Why invest in a bankrupt operating system?

Time to Update the Ol’ LARP Résumé

Eric poured the first of his new bottle of Jägermeister into a glass tumbler, making sure not to spill any drops of the precious thick brown liqueur.

He was warm all over from drinking the last bottle and sweat formed like dew over the numerous crap lines in his forehead. He threw back the shot, slammed his glass down, and brushed a swatch of greasy orange hair out of his eyes.

"Time to get back to work," he said to no one in particular.

Linux 2012: The Real Disaster

Almost a decade after the Year 2000 Problem, in which two-character date fields threatened the existence of the human race, the computing industry is once again back to worrying about Windows upgrades, Mac one-upmanship, processor numbers, bloated Adobe updates, and the latest MMORPG expansion.

Despite the ease with which software makers updated their date fields and the general tenor of calm today, things are not nearly as stable as one might think they are. Another pitfall lurks around the corner, this time based on the proliferation of GNU/Linux, a free operating system programmed by a worldwide collective of hackers.

QNX Interface Lags Mac, Windows

I've been a QNX user since 2000, when QNX Software Systems released the new Neutrino-based QNX6 platform. This was a large-but-welcome upgrade: QNX finally had a 32-bit kernel with hard realtime capabilities that ran on multiple microarchitectures. Likewise, the Photon microGUI was much improved and was even impressive for its day.

Apple's Mac OS 9 was working with the Platinum interface introduced in 1997 and Windows, at the time, was still using the Chicago GUI from 1995. QNX took a couple pages from each company's interface book for Photon and the system had a cutting-edge look and feel. But the industry didn't stand still, and Apple and Microsoft both upgraded their graphical user interfaces significantly in 2001.

The GUIs were much improved: Apple's Aqua interface had been the darling of the industry since Mac OS X Beta was available, and debuted to a chorus of praise while Microsoft showed off their Fischer-Price scheme that wowed non-technical users and other lower rungs of society. But QNX stayed still.

QNX Ignores Desktop Standards, Security

Last May, QNX released a minor update to their flagship operating system, QNX RTOS. The tweaks and optimizations in 6.4.1 kick things up the proverbial "notch" and deliver some surprises too, so long-time users and curious, potential switchers have some things to pore over.

I installed QNX 6.4.1 on a Dell Precision T7400. The system sports eight 3.2 GHz cores and 12MiB L2 cache in two Xeon X5482 quad-core processors running 16GiB RAM. This machine is some serious, high-end iron. It whipped Windows 7 prereleases around like a wrestler with a newborn babe and Ubuntu similarly slid around like race-cars hitting oil on the track: there wasn't anything this colossus couldn't compute.

Likewise, QNX rushed through all but the most demanding tasks. I work at a 3D movie effects studio, which shall go unnamed in this review, and I was curious about QNX's realtime abilities and their effect on rendering. So I began the process of porting some of our in-house custom software to the little microkernel that could. Our software is POSIX-compliant, meaning it should port to any standard Unix, but here I hit my first snag. QNX is anything but standard.

My Unsettling Ubuntu Experience

I'd been using Ubuntu 9.04's LiveCD feature at work to migrate Windows profiles. Unlike Windows, which never properly migrates user directories no matter how you coax it, Ubuntu's simple drag-and-drop replacement from network backup makes user migration a piece of cake.

I simply booted, configured the network settings, logged into our network backup, and copied the old user directory over top of the new one (we're on a domain). When the user logged back in, their old stuff was all in place. It had really been a lifesaver, and I'd started reading up on it more and started to set up an Ubuntu workstation. But that's when I ran into some weird problems.

After installing and tinkering around on the GNOME desktop, I opened Terminal. After writing some scripts and creating user accounts, a new terminal window opened. I thought this very odd since I hadn't initiated a new session and none of my scripts would have either. As I was about to close it, I paused my mouse. The terminal session had printed something to the screen, seemingly by itself.

trollaxor@ubuntor:~$ *** DO U LIKE GUYS Y OR N ▌