This porting effort has long been abandoned. It has had no updates since october 2002. The informations in this page are only for historical purposes.
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.
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)
- 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
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 https://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.
