I've been a Linux enthusiast for a few years now, but I decided it was time to expand my operating system horizons and try something new to me.I had run Windows 98 and Linux on my little old laptop, but both were too greedy in terms of hard drive space, RAM, and processing power. I considered FreeBSD, but it also seemed too large for my purposes.
Then I turned to NetBSD. It's designed to run on almost any kind of computer or embedded hardware, even obscure, older machines I've never even heard of. Of course, it also runs on common hardware like Intel-compatible machines, Macs, SPARC ... even Dreamcast and Playstation 2.
To begin my NetBSD experience, I visited its official Web page (http://www.netbsd.org). I decided to download a CD image (ISO), burn it to a CD-R, and boot and install from that. To my surprise, the ISO file was a mere 95 MB, less than one-sixth the capacity of a CD.
The installation went smoothly. NetBSD doesn't have a slick graphical installation program as most Linux distributions do, but its text-based menus made the task fairly trivial. It had no trouble detecting my hardware, including my integrated sound card and PCMCIA ethernet adapter.
Despite its low disk space requirements, NetBSD comes with everything you need for a basic Unix system, including the X Windows System.
On the other hand, NetBSD comes with essentially no applications -- but its package system makes it easy to install pre-compiled binaries. Netbsd.org even maintains an archive of almost 3,000 common packages compiled for each platform.
You can compile and run most open source programs under NetBSD, but almost no proprietary programs exist. Fortunately, you can run Linux binaries. I tested this functionality using a "Hello World" program I wrote in C and compiled on my Linux box. It ran perfectly under NetBSD.
One other thing I like about NetBSD is that by default server functionality is largely disabled, making it incredibly secure out of the box.
So far, my trusty laptop loves NetBSD. With the base install plus several applications, I still have over 600 MB free on its 1 GB hard drive.
