The interesting news is, that the DVD is actually a double-DVD, and that the second one contains four BSD distributions for installation: NetBSD, FreeBSD, DragonflyBSD, and OpenBSD. The DVD is bootable, and a boot selector (kudos to Oliver Fromme!) allows selecting which operating system to boot. For NetBSD, the CD can not only be booted on i386 systems, but there's are also 64bit (amd64) install sets and packages available on the CD.

The double-DVD can be ordered online at the JF Lehmanns bookshop for 7,50EUR for a limited time, and 10EUR later on.

I took the NetBSD-part for making the BSD-DVD, and working with Oliver Fromme to make a bootable DVD for several operating systems was pretty interesting: First I suggested using GRUB, but that can only boot NetBSD kernels and no OpenBSD and FreeBSD. As each operating system did provide a ISO9660 (CD)-bootblock, Oliver wrote a new CD-bootloader that allowed selecting which of the CD-Bootloaders stored in files on the CD to boot. That way, selecting the FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD CD-bootloader was a breeze. For NetBSD, actually several copies of bootxx_cd9660 were made that then booted different 2nd stage bootloaders (/boot), which in turn booted different kernels: i386/INSTALL, i386/INSTALL_LAPTOP, i386/INSTALL_TINY and amd64/INSTALL.

Update: English-language visitors can order the CD by finding the "Add to cart"-link on the Lehmanns page, the ordering process will be in english then.

[Tags: cd, lehmanns, linuxtag]