I was telling my wife about the big 3 BSDs yesterday. I said the NetBSD guys come off like the ones who are having the most fun, since it mostly seems to I, an outsider, like they just want to port NetBSD to as many platforms as possible.<p>OpenBSD is what I have landed on ultimately to start learning, but man, I can't even get it running in Virtualbox correctly. Gonna try QEMU today.<p>EDIT: I got it working in VB after all! For anyone who stumbles across this and is on a Dell XPS, try switching the chipset in Settings > System to ICH9. Now time to write up a little checklist of little projects to try on it.
I want to like the NetBSD project... but I see it as something for hobbies.<p>I can't see myself using it for serious production stuff.<p>Maybe it's not fair, maybe if I had spent as much time on it as I've spent on Linux, FreeBSD, OpenBSD... I could be a little bit more confident about it.<p>For example, I'm not confident about security work. I know, the less mainstream, the less botnets targeting it... but I'm not worried about botnets mainly.<p>Even for a minimal system, as the title say, I'm more confident building it in one of the operative systems that I'm more familiar with.<p>Still, I think that (Free|Net|Open)BSD, are something every systems engineer, should use and learn, at least for one year, at least once in life (if it's more, much better). It's like learning programming language B, even if everyday you use programming language A... It's like traveling... It is enriching and opens your mind.
NetBSD is pretty cool, can still remember someone porting it to the Dreamcast game console [1] way back. Still in awe for such a feat!<p>[1] <a href="http://www.netbsd.org/ports/dreamcast/" rel="nofollow">http://www.netbsd.org/ports/dreamcast/</a>
That's one conservative software selection; almost the entire article could have been written in 2000. Configuring cdparanoia brings back memories!