MirBSD #9 review

MirBSD originated as a patch set against OpenBSD-current, an ultra secure operating system and NetBSD derivate, and has since also in

License: BSD License File size: 5K Developer: Benny Siegert

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MirBSD originated as a patch set against OpenBSD-current, an ultra secure operating system and NetBSD derivate, and has since also incorporated changes from NetBSD, a 4.4BSD-derived ultra portable operating system.

It features bugfixes, code removal for the sake of simplicity, and feature enhancements over stock OpenBSD as well as a much more up-to-date GNU toolchain, careful integration of patches from other projects (such as KAME), and many improvements.

MirBSD OS works on the Intel Pentium and some 80486 machines with more than 32 MiB RAM and the SPARC, and a port to the PowerPC Macintosh is in preparation.

MirOS #8semel runs on the i386 platform only. To use MirOS BSD on a sparc platform (32 bit), please download MirOS #7quater. You can use MirOS #8semel on the amd64 platform in 32-bit mode without any curtailing.

MirOS BSD #8/i386 requires at least an Intel Pentium or compatible processor, although formally an 80486DX or 80487SX will also work (a numeric coprocessor is required). We have not tested working with less than 32 MiB RAM. Installation requires much more memory than normal operation, but the GENERIC kernel takes up 10 MiB RAM plus a minimal buffer cache.

You need some kind of console, either a Hercules/MGA, MDA, CGA, EGA, VGA or compatible graphics card and PC/XT, PC/AT or IBM PS/2 keyboard, or a serial console.

To install MirOS, you need (as told above) lots of main memory, and some means of booting the ramdisk kernel and transferring the sets. This requires a bootable CD-ROM drive or a 3?" High Density floppy drive (for the floppy8.fs set) or network boot (e.g. via PXE).

A minimum installation of MirOS (kernel, BSD base system, configuration files and GNU base system) requires about 150 MiB hard disc space, although running without the development tools installed is discouraged; you need about 325 MiB then.

Although the ports8.ngz set is very small it expands to about 80 MiB of hard disc space expanded on standard block size, more if your partition is very large (remember to plan in space for distfiles, packages and temporary compilation which can take several Gibibytes for ports like jdk, firesomething, and openoffice).

The X-Window system requires about 111 MiB of additional hard disc space. Remember that these values depend on the block size used by the filesystem which may vary depending on its size; the values given are calculated quite conservatively.