了解NetBSD

　　The default installation of NetBSD, however, is quite thin. Not only is it configured with most services turned off, it has few packages installed, period. The kernel, compilers, network services, XFree, and standard UNIX utilities are all that's included in the base distribution. To install packages you're used to finding in a UNIX-like operating system (such as MySQL or PostgreSQL), use thepkg_addcommand to extract and install software (from local disk, CD/DVD, or over the network). If you're installing an x86 system, you can use /cdrom/packages/i386/All/ on the i386pkg-3.0.iso CD. Packages installed through thepkg_addcommand are installed in /usr/pkg/ and do not interfere with the core components of NetBSD.

　　For non-native applications, NetBSD can transparently run binaries from a variety of UNIX-like operating systems with a negligible impact on performance. While most of the popular open source applications have been ported to run natively on NetBSD, some commercial applications, such as Matlab and Mathematica, cannot be ported by the user community because the code is proprietary. This is where binary emulation becomes important for NetBSD users. The emulation process is streamlined because the binaries are native to the underlying architecture of the system. Don't confuse binary emulation with the CPU-hungry process of hardware emulation, which is not at play here. Binary emulation is often suitable for running processor-intensive applications in a production environment.