The first version of NetBSD (0.8) dates back to 1993 and springs from the 4.3BSD Lite operating system, a version of Unix developed at the University of California, Berkeley (BSD = Berkeley Software Distribution), and from the 386BSD system, the first BSD port to the Intel 386 CPU. In the following years, the modifications from the 4.4BSD Lite release (the last release of the Berkeley group) have been integrated in the system. The BSD branch of Unix has had a great importance and influence in the history of this operating system, to which it has contributed many tools, ideas and improvements which are now standard in all Unix environments: the vi editor, the C shell, job control, the Berkeley fast file system, reliable signals, support for virtual memory and TCP/IP, just to name a few. This tradition of research and development survives today in the BSD systems (free and commercial) and, in particular, in NetBSD.

NetBSD operates on a vast range of hardware platforms and is very portable, probably the most portable operating system in the world. The full source to the NetBSD kernel and userland is available for all the supported platforms; please see the details on the official site of the NetBSD Project.

A detailed list of NetBSD features can be found at: http://www.NetBSD.org/about/features.html.

The basic features of NetBSD are:

These characteristics bring also indirect advantages. For example, if you work on just one platform you could think that you're not interested in portability. But portability is tied to code quality; without a well written and well organized code base it would be impossible to support that many platforms. And code quality is the base of any good and solid software systems, though surprisingly few people seem to understand it. The attention to architectural and quality issues is rewarded with the great potentiality of NetBSD's code and the quality of its drivers.

One of the key characteristics of NetBSD is not to be satisfied with partial implementations. Some systems seem to have the philosophy of “If it works, it's right”. In that light NetBSD could be described as “It doesn't work unless it's right”. Think about how many overgrown programs are nowadays sadly collapsing under their own weight and “features” and you'll understand why NetBSD wants to avoid this situation at all costs.

NetBSD supports over 50 platforms, including the popular PC platform (i386), Opteron system, SPARC and UltraSPARC, Alpha, Amiga, Atari, m68k and PowerPC based Apple Macintosh platforms. Technical details for all of them can be found on the NetBSD site.

The NetBSD site states that: “The NetBSD Project provides a freely available and redistributable system that professionals, hobbyists, and researchers can use in whatever manner they wish”. I would add that NetBSD is also an ideal system if you want to learn Unix, mainly because of its adherence to standards (one of the project goals) and because it works equally well on the latest PC hardware as well as on hardware which is considered obsolete by most other operating systems; we could say “to learn and use Unix you don't need to buy expensive hardware; you can reuse the old PC or Mac that you have in your attic”, still NetBSD will of course rock even more on modern hardware! Also, if you need a Unix system which runs consistently on a variety of platforms, NetBSD is probably your best (only) choice.

When you install NetBSD you have a rich set of programs and applications that you can install on your system. Besides having all the standard Unix productivity tools, editors, formatters, C/C++ compilers and debuggers and so on, there is a huge (and constantly growing, currently over 5,000) number of packages that can be installed both from source and in pre-compiled form. All the packages that you expect to find on a well configured system are available for NetBSD for free and there is also a number of commercial applications. In addition, NetBSD provides binary emulation for various other *nix operating systems, thusly allowing you to run non-native applications. Linux emulation is probably the most relevant example, lots of efforts have gone into it and it is used by almost all NetBSD users; you can run the Linux version of

NetBSD is also capable of emulating FreeBSD, BSDI, Solaris and other systems' binaries.

Differently from many contemporary operating systems, the NetBSD installation is rich in features, but not huge in size, because it strives to produce a stable and complete base system without being redundant. After the installation you get a fully working base system which can be tuned for various applications then, for example GNOME or KDE and a web browser and other productivity tools for a desktop machine, Apache for a webserver, PostgreSQL or MySQL for a database server, etc. - you have the freedom to decide which programs to install on your machine and the installation of new programs is very easy with the pkgsrc system.

Another advantage of this approach is that the base system will work without these applications; if you decide to upgrade your version of Perl you needn't be afraid to break some parts of your system. When you install NetBSD you don't find huge pre-packaged collections of applications; you may now see this as a disadvantage but when you start understanding the philosophy behind this you will find that it gives you freedom. When you install these software collections (which someone else has decided for you) you fill your hard disk with tons of programs, most of which will stay unused (and unknown) and only waste space (and possibly make the system less stable); this is something which the typical BSD user doesn't want to do.

Even when you start knowing NetBSD, there is always something that will continue to amaze you, the extreme consistency and logic of the system and the attention to the details; nothing appears the result of chance and everything is well thought out. Yes, that's what quality is about and, in my opinion, this is the most distinguishing feature of NetBSD.

We could spend days arguing on the relative merits of operating systems (and some people like to do it) but if you don't try something seriously you can't really judge. I am convinced, because I saw it many times in the mailing lists, that if you try NetBSD you'll be conquered by the perfect balance between complexity and effectiveness; all problems have more than one solution; NetBSD is not happy with a solution but always tries to find the easiest and most elegant one. NetBSD is a tool that enables you to do your work without getting in your way. In this light it is an optimal tool; it's like using a pen; you work hard to learn how to use it but once you've learned you can write or draw and completely forget about the pen.

NetBSD is an Open Source operating system, and as such it's freely available for download from ftp.NetBSD.org and its mirrors.

There is no “official” supplier of NetBSD CD-ROMs but there are various resellers. You can find the most up to date list on the relevant page on the NetBSD site.

This is the checklist about the things that should be clear and on-hand now:

This chapter will guide through the installation procedure with sysinst, the NetBSD installation program. It describes the installation from CD-ROM, from an unmounted file system, and over the network via FTP or NFS. The concepts are the same for all types of installation; the only difference is in the way the binary sets are found by sysinst. Some details of the installation differ depending on the NetBSD release: The examples from this chapter were created with NetBSD 4.0.

The installation process is divided logically in two steps. In the first part you create a partition for NetBSD and you write the disklabel for that partition. In the second part you decide which distribution sets you want to install and extract the files in the newly created partitions. The distribution sets are the operating system.

At the end of the first part nothing has yet been written to the hard disk and you are prompted to confirm the installation. If you confirm, the installation goes on, else you are brought back to the main menu and the hard disk remains unchanged.

The NetBSD install program sysinst allows you to change the keyboard layout during the installation. If for some reason this does not work for you, you can use the map in the following table.

To start the installation of NetBSD insert the newly created installation floppy and reboot the computer, or boot from a prepared CD, memory card, USB flash drive, (etc.). The kernel on the installation medium is booted and starts displaying a lot of messages on the screen, most of which say something about hardware not being found or not being configured. This is normal as the default install kernel tries to detect almost all the hardware supported by NetBSD; you probably don't have all these devices in your machine.

When the boot procedure is over you will find yourself in the NetBSD installation program, sysinst, shown in Figure 3.1, “Selecting the language”. From here on you should follow the instructions displayed on the screen, using the INSTALL.* document as a reference. You will find the INSTALL.* document in various formats in the root directory of the NetBSD release. The sysinst screens all have more or less the same layout: the upper part of the screen shows a short description of the current operation or a short help message; the central part of the screen shows the current settings as detected by NetBSD; the bottom part displays a menu of available choices. To make a choice, either use the cursor keys, the “Ctrl+N” (next) and “Ctrl+P” (previous) keys, or press one of the letters displayed left of each choice, and confirm your choice by pressing the Return key.

Start with the selection of the language you prefer for the installation procedure.

The next screen Figure 3.2, “Selecting a keyboard type” will allow you to select a suitable keyboard type.

This will bring you to the main menu of the installation program (Figure 3.3, “The sysinst main menu”).

Choosing the “Install NetBSD to hard disk” option brings you to the next screen (Figure 3.4, “Confirming to install NetBSD”), where you need to confirm to continue the installation.

After choosing to continue with “Yes”, you select on which hard disk NetBSD shall be installed. If more than one disk is available, sysinst displays a list of disks from which you need to choose one. In the example given in Figure 3.5, “Choosing a hard disk”, there are two disks, and NetBSD will be installed on “wd0”, the first IDE disk found. If you use SCSI or external USB disks, the first will be named “sd0”, the second “sd1” and so on.

Sysinst will then ask whether you want to do a full, minimal or custom installation. NetBSD is broken into a collection of distributions sets. “Full installation” is the default and will install all sets; “Minimal installation” will only install a small core set, the minimum of what is needed for a working system. If you choose “Custom installation” you can choose which sets you would like to have installed. This step is shown in Figure 3.6, “Full or custom installation”.

If you chose to do a custom installation, sysinst allows you to choose which distribution sets to install, as shown in Figure 3.7, “Selecting distribution sets”. You will at least need a “Kernel” “Base” and “System (/etc)” for a functional installation.

The first important step of the installation has come: the partitioning of the hard disk. First, you need to specify if NetBSD will use a partition (suggested choice) or the whole disk. In the former case it is still possible to create a partition that uses the whole hard disk (Figure 3.8, “Choosing the partitioning scheme”) so we recommend to select this option as it keeps the BIOS partition table in a format which is compatible with other operating systems.

Figure 3.9, “fdisk”The next step shows the current state of the MBR partition table on the hard disk before the installation of NetBSD: There are four primary partitions and as you can see this disk is currently empty. If you do have other partitions you can leave them around and install NetBSD on a partition that is currently unused, or you can wipe out a partition to use it for NetBSD.

Deleting a partition is simple: after selecting the partition a menu with options for that partition will appear (Figure 3.10, “Partition options”), change the partition kind to “Delete partition” to remove the partition. Of course, if you want to use the partition for NetBSD you can set the partition kind to “NetBSD” right-away.

You can create a partition for NetBSD by selecting the partition you want to install NetBSD to. The partition names “a” to “d” correspond to the four primary partitions on other operating systems. After selecting a partition, a menu with options for that partition will appear, as shown in Figure 3.10, “Partition options”.

To create a new partition the following information must be supplied:

Choose the partition type “NetBSD” for the new partition (using the “type” option). The installation program will automatically try to guess option “start”, by starting after the end of the preceding partition. Change this if necessary. The same thing applies to the “size” option; the installation program will try to fill in the space that is available till the next partition or the end of the disk (depending on which comes first). You can change this value if it is incorrect, or if you do not want NetBSD to use the suggested space.

After you have set up the partition type, start and size, it is a good idea to set the name that should be used in the boot menu. You can do this by selecting the “bootmenu” option, and filling in how NetBSD should appear in the bootmenu, e.g. “NetBSD”. It is a good idea to repeat this step for other bootable partitions: so you can boot both NetBSD and a Windows system (or other operating systems) using the NetBSD bootselector. If you are satisfied with the partition options, you confirm your choice by selecting “Partition OK”. You choose the same option in the fdisk interface to finish the partitioning of the disk.

If you have made an error in partitioning (for example you have created overlapping partitions) sysinst will display a message and suggest to go back to the fdisk menu (but you are also allowed to continue). If the data is correct but the NetBSD partition lies outside the range of sectors which is bootable by the BIOS, sysinst will warn you and ask if you want to proceed anyway. This may eventually lead to problems on older PCs.

If the data is correct, sysinst will offer to install a boot selector on the hard disk. This screen is shown in Figure 3.11, “Installing the boot selector”.

At this point, the first part of the installation, the disk partitioning, is over.

The BIOS partitions (called slices on BSD systems) have been created. They are also called PC BIOS partitions, MBR partitions or fdisk partitions.

Some platforms, like PC systems (i386), use (DOS-style) MBR partitions to separate file systems. The MBR partition you created earlier in the installation process is necessary to make sure that other operating systems do not overwrite the diskspace that you allocated to NetBSD.

NetBSD uses its own partition scheme, named a disklabel, which is stored at the start of the MBR partition. In the next few steps you will create a disklabel(5) and set the sizes of the NetBSD partitions, or use existing partition sizes, as shown in Figure 3.12, “Editing partitions?”.

When you choose to set the sizes of the NetBSD partitions you can predefine what partitions you would like to create. The installation program will generate a disklabel based on these settings. This installation screen is shown in Figure 3.13, “Setting partition sizes”.

The default partition scheme of just using a big / (root) file system (plus swap) works fine with NetBSD, and there is little need to change this. Figure 3.13, “Setting partition sizes” shows how to change the size of the swap partition to 600 MB. Changing /tmp to reside on a RAM disk (mfs(8)) for extra speed may be a good idea. Other partition schemes may use separate partitions for /var, /usr and/or /home, but you may use your own experience to decide if you need this.

The next step is to create the disklabel and edit its partitions - if necessary - , using the disklabel editor Figure 3.14, “The disklabel editor”. If you have predefined the partition sizes in the previous step, the resulting disklabel will probably fit your wishes. In these case you can complete the process immediately by selecting “Partition sizes ok”.

There are two reserved partitions, “c”, representing the NetBSD partition, and “d”, representing the whole disk. You can edit all other partitions by using the cursor keys and pressing the return key. You can add a partition by selecting an unused slot, and setting parameters for that partition. The partition editing screen is shown in