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Debian GNU/NetBSD

Debian GNU/NetBSD is a port of the Debian Operating System to the NetBSD kernel. It is currently in an early stage of development - however, it can now be installed from scratch.

Download experimental install floppies (last updated 6th October 2002)

Why Debian GNU/NetBSD?

How to install

Download the floppy images from the above link. For laptops, use the laptop images - for all other machines, use the normal ones. Write these images to floppies. Boot off the first disk - you will be prompted to swap disks. Once the menu system has appeared, follow the instructions that you are presented with.

TODO

Packages that need to be produced

any of the libs in /lib or /usr/lib that aren't currently packaged need to be
base-passwd is desperately unhappy
UPDATE: We now have a basically working base-passwd for FreeBSD and NetBSD (modulo a segfault). Thanks to Nathan and Matthew.
equivalents of console-tools/data need to be produced
UPDATE: Packages that provide the basic functionality have been produced
netbase needs to be rebuilt. This is probably one of the more awkward ones - we have source for the BSD versions of ifconfig et al, but the semantics are somewhat different. If we stick with BSD semantics, we have to deal with any scripts that assume Linux-style semantics. Does the Hurd follow Linux-style semantics, and if not how have they dealt with this?
UPDATE: Marcus Brinkmann from the Hurd Team clarified this a bit and sketched possible solutions. The current approach is to use the NetBSD tools and modify ifupdown in order to provide the same interface to the user.
procps (probably best to just provide the BSD versions)
sysklogd (we can probably use msyslog instead)
UPDATE: msyslog works on NetBSD (modulo some hickups related to paths of files)
sysvinit (BSD init doesn't support runlevels. We can hack it to work like Debian with a single runlevel without too much trouble)
UPDATE: sysvinit is up and running, Matthew has managed to boot natively into Debian GNU/NetBSD on i386! There are still some glitches wrt. boot scripts, but it's an important step towards a fully working system.
fakeroot
UPDATE: Fakeroot now works.
XFree86 (Nathan is having a go at this currently, and discovered that ed is needed, which segfaults. Several people are investigating on this issue.)
UPDATE: ed works when building with libed.a. Also, quoting Joel: X11 is in a workable state! It's not packaged properly, but it works. Expect packages soon.
gcc-3.0 (Neither gcc-3.0.1 nor gcc-current are in a usable state for NetBSD at the moment. Joel has a working version of gcc-current and posted the results of the test suite. libstdc++ is still very unhappy.)
UPDATE: gcc-3.0.4 has been released and now supports NetBSD ELF systems (at least for the x86 target).

Resources

Debian
NetBSD
Matthew's apt-gettable package archive
Joel's apt-gettable archive of packages for FreeBSD and NetBSD
Another FreeBSD chroot tarball and kernel with ext2 support, both built by Robert Millan.

There is a Debian GNU/*BSD mailing list. Send email to debian-bsd-request@lists.debian.org with subscribe as the subject in order to join. Archives are available at http://lists.debian.org/debian-bsd/.

To contact the Debian GNU/NetBSD team, send email to debian-bsd@lists.debian.org. Comments, questions, or suggestions regarding our section of Debian's website are also welcome at that address.