Of course the Pi runs NetBSD

NetBSD
NetBSD, a rather good Unix-like operating system has released support for the Raspberry Pi Zero amongst other Raspberry Pi boards. Version 7.1 was made available on 11 March and can be downloaded from the NetBSD site. Instructions are also provided.

I first came across BSD years ago when a version was supplied on a magazine's cover disk for the Amiga. It started my absolute love of Unix, which culminated in my purchasing two Sun workstations (an Ultra 5 and Ultra 10) to run Solaris some years back. The FreeBSD project has a page that briefly covers the history of the various BSD operating systems and is worth a read.

What is very, very notable about Unix and BSD is stability: the release cycles are such that upgrades happen at a steady pace with very stable component packages. Oh, and to add: NetBSD supports a ridiculous list of computers. Scanning through that list I can see the Acorn Archimedes, Amiga (huzzah!), Cobalt Microservers (I owned a Sun Cobalt Raq 4 for quite a while), Psion PDAs (yes, really), Sega Dreamcast (yes, really really) and many more.

As NetBSD's tagline says: "Of course it runs NetBSD".

I am definitely going to be running NetBSD on one of my Raspberry Pi boards soon. If you are looking for an interesting alternative to Raspbian then do give NetBSD a try.
Comments