Announcing NetBSD 1.5

The NetBSD Project is pleased to announce that release 1.5 of the NetBSD operating system is now available.

NetBSD is widely known as the most portable operating system in the world. It currently supports thirty-one different system families and twelve different CPU families, all from a single source tree, and is always being ported to more.

NetBSD 1.5 continues our long tradition with major improvements in file system and memory management performance, major security enhancements (including integration of IPsec, SSH and Kerberos 5), and support for many new platforms and peripherals.

Complete source and binaries for NetBSD 1.5 are available for download at ftp://ftp.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-1.5/ and many of our mirror sites. A list of mirror sites is provided at the end of this announcement.

About NetBSD

The NetBSD operating system is a full-featured, open source, Unix-like operating system descended from the Berkeley Networking Release 2 (Net/2), 4.4BSD-Lite, and 4.4BSD-Lite2. NetBSD runs on thirty-one different system architectures featuring twelve distinct families of CPUs, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.5 release contains complete binary releases for twenty different machine types.

NetBSD is a highly integrated system. In addition to its highly portable, high performance kernel, NetBSD features a complete set of user utilities, compilers for several languages, the X Window System, firewall software and numerous other tools, all accompanied by full source code. We also support third party software (including the KDE and GNOME desktops) through our package system.

NetBSD is free. All of the code is under non-restrictive licenses, and may be used without paying royalties to anyone. Free support services are available via our mailing lists and web site. Commercial support is available from a variety of sources; some are listed at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/gallery/consultants.html
More extensive information on NetBSD is available from our web site at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/
NetBSD is the work of a diverse group of people spread around the world. The `Net' in our name is a tribute to the Internet, which enables us to communicate and share code, and without which the project would not exist.

System families supported by NetBSD 1.5

The NetBSD 1.5 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems:

Ports available in source form only for this release include the following:

Major changes between 1.4 and 1.5

It is difficult to completely summarize the extensive development between the 1.4 and 1.5 releases. Some highlights include:

Kernel

Networking

File Systems

Security

System administration and user tools

Miscellaneous

And of course there have also been innumerable bug fixes and other miscellaneous enhancements. Kernel interfaces have continued to be refined, and more subsystems and device drivers are shared among the different ports. You can look for this trend to continue.

Acknowledgments

The NetBSD Foundation would like to thank all those who have contributed code, hardware, documentation, funds, colocation for our servers, web pages and other documentation, release engineering, and other resources over the years. More information on contributors is available at:

http://www.NetBSD.org/contrib/
We would like to especially thank the University of California at Berkeley and the GNU Project for particularly large subsets of code that we use, and the Internet Software Consortium, Redback Networks and the Helsinki University of Technology for current colocation services.

Finally, we honor the passing of great pioneers in the fields of networking, operating systems and compression, including W. Richard Stevens, Phil Katz and Mike Muuss. Their contributions have greatly enhanced our lives and made our work possible.

About the NetBSD Foundation

The NetBSD Foundation was chartered in 1995, with the task of overseeing core NetBSD project services, promoting the project within industry and the open source community, and holding intellectual property rights on much of the NetBSD code base. Day-to-day operations of the project are handled by volunteers.

NetBSD mirror sites

[This section omitted. See our main mirror site list for online sites, and our list of CD-ROM vendors.]


Charles M. Hannum
President, The NetBSD Foundation


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