Re:Try 1.5 beta 2 also :-) (Score 1)

I disagree, unless you want netbsd on a CPU that is not supported by 1.4.x , the reason 1.5 is not a complete os yet. It still has quite a few bugs to work out . I would only recomend useing 1.5beta2 if you dont have to worry about loseing any important things on your harddrive.

Oh, I'll have to disagree here; NetBSD 1.5 (even in the beta2 incarnation) is most definately a complete OS, and unless you start using the more experimental bits (unfortunately LFS still falls into that category), the risk of data loss due to file system corruption is miniscule and comparable to the risk of running NetBSD 1.4.3 or any of the other BSDs.

Perhaps a word or two about the difference between NetBSD 1.4.3 and NetBSD 1.5 is in order. The former (1.4.3) is first and foremost a bugfix release. Please note that the code branch was created quite a while ago, and even though some features have been imported from the main development branch, far from all features have received this treatment. NetBSD/i386 and sparc still use a.out as object format in 1.4.3.

On the other hand NetBSD 1.5 includes all the new features developed since the NetBSD 1.4 release was created, about May 1999. As with almost any piece of software, bugs are bound to exist, and there are obviously higher risk of finding bugs in the first version of a major release number (as with NetBSD 1.5), so if you wanted to be super-conservative you'd hold on until 1.5.1 was released. In NetBSD 1.5 the i386 and sparc ports have been converted to using the ELF object format.

In fact, the "beta" designation in NetBSD's releases really means "we think this is ready to ship, please test for any remaining minor glitches, so that we may fix those before the release goes out the door." (I'd still recommend to upgrade to the release version once it becomes available if you decide to test any of the beta versions.)