Benedikt Meurer JavaScript Engine Hacker and Programming Language Enthusiast.

Setting up KDE 3 on NetBSD

Like most other Unix(TM)-like operating systems, the K Desktop Environment (KDE) is also available for NetBSD. KDE is a powerful graphical desktop environment based upon Trolltech's QT library, and is similar to other desktop environments available for Unix(TM) workstations, such as the Common Desktop Environment (CDE) or GNOME. It tries to combine ease of use, contemporary functionality, and outstanding graphical design with the technological superiority of the Unix operating system. Like NetBSD itself, KDE is also an Internet project and is licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL), and is therefore open source software.

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How to use hardware monitors with NetBSD

Today, there are various environmental sensor ICs available on modern mainboards, which are able of monitoring fan speed, cpu and system temperature, and voltage for example. NetBSD currently supports the National Semiconductor LM78, LM79 and compatible hardware monitors (the lm(4) device), the VIA VT82C686A hardware monitor (the viaenv(4) device) and ACPI aware hardware monitors (the acpi(4) subsystem) through its Environmental Systems API. These devices are not enabled by default, you need to recompile your kernel with the following additional lines in your kernel config file:

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Why NetBSD?

During the last years, I used to install a lot of different operating systems, looking for the system that fits my needs best. For example, I tried Microsoft Windows NT (3.51, 4.0 and 5.0 and had a quick look at 5.1), several Linux distributions (e.g. SuSE Linux, RedHat Linux, Debian GNU/Linux and Mandrake Linux), FreeBSD and OpenBSD. We also tried to write our own operating system (we named it "Socratix"), but soon we noticed, that it was an impossible task for us to write a whole operating system (from scratch).

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What BSD gives to the world

Today I read an interesting article on BSD and what it gave (and still gives) to the world, you can find it here, this is probably the best article about BSD, Unix and Linux, I ever read. Also the changes to du(1) have been commited to NetBSD-current, so we'll get the long awaited feature with 1.7 ;-).

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NetBSD 1.6

NetBSD 1.6 is finally at RELEASE.

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BSD multimedia

Today I read a very interesting article on how to turn your BSD box into a powerful multimedia workstation. Although it was written with FreeBSD in mind, it might also be useful to read for a NetBSD user interested in enjoying multimedia on its NetBSD machine.

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NetBSD 1.6RC3

NetBSD 1.6 Release Candidate 3 available. Interesting article at BSDnewsletter.com: Taking MicroBSD for a test run (MicroBSD aims to be a hardened OpenBSD derivate). And finally agc explaining changes to pkgsrc in August 2002.

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Setting up sendmail with Milter support on NetBSD

Note that if you are using NetBSD 1.6T or better, the system sendmail already supports the Milter library. And pkgsrc supports sendmail installation (for 8.12.x, 8.12.9 at this moment) linked with Milter library. See mail/libmilter and mail/sendmail (use make USE*MILTER=yes command to build the last one). *(Thanks to Mishka for pointing this out)_

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IRIX Binary Compatibility

Emmanuel Dreyfus published the second part of IRIX Binary Compatibility with NetBSD.

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