Announcing NetBSD 1.6.2

NetBSD 1.6.2 is a maintenance release for users of NetBSD 1.6.1 and earlier releases, and it provides the following updates relative to 1.6.1:

The NetBSD 1.6.2 distribution consists of the full NetBSD source, binary releases for 40 ports including the X Window System, and the NetBSD Packages Collection 1.6.2 release.

A complete list of changes are available in the CHANGES-1.6.2 file in top level directory of the NetBSD 1.6.2 release tree. Also, included later in this announcement is a list of the major changes in NetBSD 1.6.2.

Complete source and binaries are available at many sites around the world. You can download NetBSD via FTP, AnonCVS, SUP and other methods from a mirror site near you.

The NetBSD Foundation would like to dedicate the NetBSD 1.6.2 release to the memory of Erik Reid, who went missing and is presumed dead in a sailing accident on 18 February 2004. Erik's contributions to NetBSD included work on support for SGI MIPS R4000, integrating XFree86 Direct Rendering Interface (DRI), and managing the build lab. His death came as a shock, and he will be greatly missed by all of us. May he rest in peace.

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 52 different system architectures featuring 17 machine architectures across 11 distinct CPU families, and is being ported to more. The NetBSD 1.6.2 release contains complete binary releases for 40 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. The NetBSD Packages Collection contains over 4400 packages and binary package releases for a number of platforms are currently in progress.

More information on the goals of the NetBSD Project can be procured from the NetBSD web site at:

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:

More extensive information on NetBSD is available from the NetBSD web site:

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.

The NetBSD 1.6.2 release provides supported binary distributions for the following systems:

NetBSD/acorn26	Acorn Archimedes, A-series and R-series systems
NetBSD/acorn32	Acorn RiscPC/A7000, CATS, Digital Shark, EBSA-285, VLSI RC7500
NetBSD/algor	Algorithmics, Ltd. MIPS evaluation boards
NetBSD/alpha	Digital/Compaq Alpha (64-bit)
NetBSD/amiga	Commodore Amiga, MacroSystem DraCo
NetBSD/arc	MIPS-based machines following the Advanced RISC Computing spec
NetBSD/atari	Atari TT030, Falcon, Hades
NetBSD/cats	Chalice Technology's Strong Arm evaluation board
NetBSD/cobalt	Cobalt Networks' MIPS-based Microservers
NetBSD/dreamcast	Sega Dreamcast game console
NetBSD/evbarm	ARM evaluation boards
NetBSD/evbmips	MIPS-based evaluation boards
NetBSD/evbsh3	Evaluation boards with Hitachi Super-H SH3 and SH4 CPUs
NetBSD/hp300	Hewlett-Packard 9000/300 and 400 series
NetBSD/hpcarm	StrongARM based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/hpcmips	MIPS-based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/hpcsh	Hitachi SH3/4 based Windows CE PDA machines
NetBSD/i386	80x86-based IBM PCs and clones
NetBSD/luna68k	OMRON Tateisi Electric's LUNA series
NetBSD/mac68k	Apple Macintosh with 68k CPU
NetBSD/macppc	Apple Power Macintosh and clones
NetBSD/mipsco	Mips family of workstations and servers
NetBSD/mvme68k	Motorola MVME 68k SBCs
NetBSD/netwinder	StrongARM based NetWinder machines
NetBSD/news68k	Sony's 68k-based "NET WORK STATION" series
NetBSD/newsmips	Sony's MIPS-based "NET WORK STATION" series
NetBSD/next68k	NeXT 68k 'black' hardware
NetBSD/pmax	Digital MIPS-based DECstations and DECsystems
NetBSD/prep	PReP (PowerPC Reference Platform) and CHRP machines
NetBSD/sandpoint	Motorola Sandpoint reference platform
NetBSD/sbmips	Broadcom SiByte evaluation boards
NetBSD/sgimips	Silicon Graphics' MIPS-based workstations
NetBSD/shark	Digital DNARD ("shark")
NetBSD/sparc	Sun SPARC (32-bit) and UltraSPARC (in 32-bit mode)
NetBSD/sparc64	Sun UltraSPARC (in native 64-bit mode)
NetBSD/sun2	Sun 2
NetBSD/sun3	Sun 3 and 3x
NetBSD/vax	Digital VAX
NetBSD/walnut	IBM 405GP PowerPC "walnut" evaluation board
NetBSD/x68k	Sharp X680x0 series

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

NetBSD/amigappc	PowerPC-based Amiga boards
NetBSD/bebox	Be Inc's BeBox
NetBSD/cesfic	CES's FIC8234 VME processor board
NetBSD/mmeye	Brains' mmEye Multi Media Server
NetBSD/mvmeppc	Motorola MVME PowerPC SBCs
NetBSD/ofppc	Generic OpenFirmware compliant PowerPC machines
NetBSD/pc532	The NS32532-based PC532 computer
NetBSD/playstation2	SONY PlayStation 2

The complete list of changes can be found in the CHANGES-1.6.2 file in the top level directory of the NetBSD 1.6.2 release tree. Some highlights include:

And of course there have also been innumerable bug fixes and other miscellaneous enhancements.

Please note that at the moment, sysinst will not assist you in installing pre-built third-party binary packages or the pkgsrc system itself. See the NetBSD packages collection documentation:

Lastly, it should be noted that the X11 binaries shipped in NetBSD 1.6.2 for i386 and macppc are based on XFree86 4.3.0, cats is based on XFree86 4.2, and other ports on XFree86 3.3.6. You may at compile time pick which sources to build and install.

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 the people who make NetBSD happen is available at:

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. We would also like to thank the Internet Software Consortium and the Helsinki University of Technology for current colocation services.

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.

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Please also note our list of CD-ROM vendors.