NetBSD 10.0 released

Version 10.0 of the NetBSD system has been released.

The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the long time it took for the development branch to get ready for branching, a lot of development went into this new release.
This also caused the release announcement to be one of the longest we ever did.

As might be imagined, there are a lot of changes; see the above-mentioned release announcement for the details.

From:		Martin Husemann <martin-AT-NetBSD.org>
To:		netbsd-announce-AT-NetBSD.org
Subject:		NetBSD 10.0 available!
Date:		Sun, 31 Mar 2024 08:08:04 +0200
Message-ID:		<20240331060804.GA23397@mail.duskware.de>
Archive-link:		Article

The NetBSD project is pleased to announce NetBSD 10.0, the eighteenth
major release!  See the release anouncement[2] for details.

The netbsd-10 release branch is more than a year old now, so it is high
time the 10.0 release makes it to the front stage. This matches the
long time it took for the developement branch to get ready for
branching, a lot of developement went into this new release.

This also caused the release anouncement to be one of the longest we
ever did.

If you want to try NetBSD 10.0 please check the installation notes[4] for
your architecture and download the prefered install image[5] from the CDN
or if you are using an ARM based device from the netbsd-10 builds from
the bootable ARM images[6] page.

If you have any issues with installation or run into issues with the
system during use, please contact us on one of the mailing lists[7] or
file a problem report[8].

The NetBSD release engineering team

[1] = https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-10.0/
[2] = https://www.NetBSD.org/releases/formal-10/NetBSD-10.0.html
[3] = https://wiki.NetBSD.org/releng/netbsd-10/
[4] = https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-10.0/amd64/INSTA...
[5] = https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-10.0/images/
[6] = https://armbsd.org/
[7] = https://mail-index.NetBSD.org/
[8] = https://www.NetBSD.org/cgi-bin/sendpr.cgi?gndb=netbsd

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 14:55 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (9 responses)

Already tried RC6 on a Thinkpad T23, with a 256k of RAM (32-bit architecture, of course). Was pleased how the installation had fixed some pain points I had when experimenting with earlier NetBSD:s. Choosing Finnish keyboard in the installer set it as default in the X11 session too (before it affected only console), and UTF-8 was finally in use. The limited memory I have means modern web browsers are impossible, the closest was Firefox 52 (both 52 and 102 available as binary packages, but 102 didn't even start). Probably one should also forget about LibreOffice, but there is Abiword. Nice time trip to a simpler age.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 17:05 UTC (Mon) by proski (subscriber, #104) [Link] (7 responses)

You probably mean 256M of RAM. 256k would be challenging even for MS-DOS, which was commonly used on systems with 640k (although systems with less memory existed).

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 17:41 UTC (Mon) by willy (subscriber, #9762) [Link]

T23 shipped with either 128MB or 256MB of memory:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_ThinkPad_T20_series

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 19:38 UTC (Mon) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

Yes, a silly mistake on my part.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 21:34 UTC (Mon) by atai (subscriber, #10977) [Link] (1 responses)

that mistake is not silly but one of 3 zeros order of magnitude

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 2, 2024 7:09 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link]

I guess my fingers were stuck in the past, where we allocated kilobytes whereas today a megabyte seems to be the smallest unit worth talking about. And gigabyte is the new megabyte... I wonder if any up-to-date Linux distribution is capable of doing even that much on this over 20 years old laptop. (The previous OS on this machine was a Mandriva 2008 distribution).

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 23:43 UTC (Mon) by Heretic_Blacksheep (guest, #169992) [Link] (2 responses)

Nah, period MSDOS would load fine off a floppy. Whether or not you could do anything with programs written towards the late 80s and later is a different question. But then, part of the retro experience is that quite a few useful programs at the time were written by the end users. MSDOS came with a limited form of Quick BASIC, remember. There were alternatives for other languages, all of which were just TUIs back then.

I distinctly remember I only started running into memory issues when it became necessary to load CDROM drivers, which were relatively huge for the time and took a special load sequence or you ended up with too little memory to load some programs. This was when optical drives were finally becoming commodity products in the 90s but before the release of Win 95.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 2, 2024 5:38 UTC (Tue) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

You're speaking about the latest versions shipping with QBASIC. I started with 1.25 which did not support directories, and later upgraded it to 2.11. By then 64k was quite sufficient and allowed me to start tons of programs, even the BASIC interpreter and the debugger. I had a game that couldn't start, and one day a neighbor offered me an extension to 256kB that allowed me to even run that game :-) So now when I see a server with 64GB of RAM, I know it is sufficient in itself to educate one million future developers to the basics of computing.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 2, 2024 16:23 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Qbasic — you youngster. I remember MS-DOS running off a floppy with a BASIC interpreter (one of IBM BASICA or MS GW-BASIC) and very little useful stuff, other than letting you program in BASIC. (Bill Gates' first claim to fame was writing the Altair BASIC interpreter, so maybe not surprising. His second claim to fame was writing that open letter to hobbyists...)

Our first home computer, when I was in high school, had a princely 1MB of RAM and two floppy disk drives. It could run the BASIC interpreter. And also the MS-DOS version of Rogue. And some edition of WordStar, as I recall. We upgraded the RAM to 2MB at some point, and later 4MB, and installed a hard drive, and were able to run Windows 3.1, and the MS-DOS version of Turbo Pascal, and even Aldus PageMaker.

NetBSD 10.0 released

Posted Apr 1, 2024 17:27 UTC (Mon) by wtarreau (subscriber, #51152) [Link]

I guess you meant 256MB of RAM, because for having run it long ago on 8MB machines it was already not capable of running on 256kB so I doubt it is now :-)