What I have been wondering about is the lack of BSD for the Nokia Internet Tablets.

Why choose the easy road? Why BSD and not Solaris? =)

AS/400 port anyone?

Sorry: iSeries port.

Hey, don't dish it outright; it would at least solve the recompile-after-firmware-update issue. And for those worrying about multiple users on their Itablets: Your worries would be over.

The possibilities are limitless, just like Pi... owwwwww headaches.....

well I still think BSD would be a fun start for an alternative OS (you know there are other LINUX os's but im not lookin for that).

Why? Most of the BSD ARM ports (heck, most of the Linux ARM ports) are fairly weak. If you want a good alternative OS, see johnx's Debian port.

Ever read the GNU manifesto? A GNU (/Linux) system shouldn't be different from BSD in any meaningful way.

Ever read the GNU manifesto? A GNU (/Linux) system shouldn't be different from BSD in any meaningful way.

Would that it were so. I confess I'm not certain whether this is a wishful speculation, or a sardonic commentary.

Spend a few minutes with the internals of the TCP/IP stack, and I think you'll see that nothing could be farther from the truth.

A little of both, actually. Depends what meaningful means.

I'm aware that kernel level stuff is somewhat different; and a lot more people seem to hate Linux for kernel details than BSD, which probably says something about which is worse. Personally, I'd heard more of that to do with SCSI than networking, but I don't think it's isolated.

In userland (which is where I live), however, isn't it pretty near true? (It is AFAICT; not running a BSD system, but continually running against BSD-centric directions, man pages, etc. in online searches.) Don't know if scumgrief anticipates doing much kernel stuff, anyway...

I suppose that's a fair statement. Your insight matches my experience. For purposes of bulletproof server-class SCSI and networking, BSD really tends to be more mature, though Linux is finally getting some attention from the likes of IBM to fix or finally implement certain things that were lacking.

(Lest I be accused of religion or Linux-bashing - go back and look at how long it was before slow-start and congestion control were implemented in the Linux TCP/IP stacks. I hear that even Microsoft decided to poach parts from BSD 4.4lite's IP stack. It just worked.)

From the perspective of application support, the installed base of Linux applications is impressive and growing, probably more quickly than other Unices, and there are compatibility modes in Solaris and some BSD variants to let you run them anyway.

I'd love to see a BSD on the Internet Tablets. My guess is that NetBSD would be the easiest port, simply because there are all sorts of wacky processors to which it's been ported. FreeBSD was intel-centric for some time, but has now branched out some as well. There was also some good handheld support for things so I'm betting that touchscreen drivers may be out there.

There was an OpenBSD port for the Zaurus C3x00, so this isn't without precedent. You'd still have a lot of device driver writing to do, with limited documentation, and in some cases limited source...