NetBSD used to be my operating system of choice. I used NetBSD from version 0.8 when it first came out, and have been an avid (rabid?) supporter until around 8.0. I was a devloper for a long time, and was portmaster for the PReP port, and the ofppc port. Additionally, I imported the rs6000 port, which is the first ever port of a free operating system to the IBM RS/6000 MCA based machines.
My primary interest in NetBSD is PowerPC machine support. I originally signed on to do pkgsrc work, but have since changed my focus.
Machines I have ported NetBSD to:
- IBM 7024-E20 (prep)
- Motorola Powerstack E1 (prep)
- IBM 7025-F30 (prep)
- IBM 7025-F40 (prep)
- Motorola MTX604 (prep)
- IBM 7006-41T (rs6000)
- Genesi/bplan Pegasos II (ofppc)
- IBM 7044-270 (ofppc)
- IBM 7046-B50 (ofppc)
Projects I worked on in the past for NetBSD:
- NetBSD Mail Archives on the Web
- Porting packages to NetBSD/alpha
- The NetBSD Package System
- Parallelism on NetBSD
- The envsys version 1 API.
- Environmental monitors for the Tadpole 3GX
- VIA ATA RAID support
- Complete rewrite of ofppc port
- ppcoea-renovation branch, which cleaned up all the powerpc ports of NetBSD
I truly love NetBSD. However, over the years, it has become more difficult to keep working the way I want. Sadly Linux has won the war. The emulation just isn't good enough.
All that being said, I still thing the kernel code for linux is a ghastly hack. I will likely never hack the linux kernel in any capacity. If I get the itch again to fiddle with kernel code, I will absolutely fire up an old PowerPC and hack on NetBSD. At the end of the day, I still feel that NetBSD does things right and linux is crazypants, but I also kinda want things to just work sometimes, and not fight with gcc for hours to try and compile shotwell on NetBSD.
This makes me deeply sad.