I've been dealing with NetBSD on VMs and my desktop lately and it's really lovely. By far the fastest install and boot of any OS I've tried on my system
I really love the amd64 "live" .img they provide too. It's a disk image you just write to a disk and on its first boot it expands the image to the full size of the disk, reboots, and your system is ready to go
For anyone curious to try, do note that EFI boots significantly faster than BIOS. I forget exactly why but BIOS boots requires an unpacking step every boot that EFI boots do not
The one thing keeping it from my daily driver on my desktop was my GPU is not yet supported. I do love the OS though. PkgSrc is nifty
I set it up on an Arm SBC last year and I have to say it did not seem as involved a process as that blog post. I hope it hasn't become more complicated.
I've been trying NetBSD 11.1 on an RPi1 these last few days.
It takes a long time to install anything and I don't expect to surf the web on it, but it's nice to have this OS as an option.
I wanted to try out openconnect-saml on it, but the install failed because of lack of RAM/swap. I have managed to run xfreerdp over openconnect on it though (FreeBSD had better performance).
NetBSD noob question: what’s going on with this command? Is pkg_add not a package manager? If you already have pkg_add why do you need pkgin? I am familiar with `pkg` on FreeBSD, and `pkg_add` on OpenBSD, but they are both perfectly good enough on their own, I never wanted to install another package manager.
I think the biggest problem with many of the non-Linux open source kernels these days is high idle CPU consumption — on both real hardware, and under virtualization.
Did latest OpenBSD & Haiku recently under KVM. Idle OBSD was using around 20% CPU to do nothing. Haiku, 30%. And it’s not just a virtualization thing. Thinkpad battery test yielded similar results.
That's the blocker for me too. I'd love to roll NetBSD, OpenBSD or Haiku.. but how well does it work with hardware, energy consumption and resource management? It's really just the mainstream OSes or nothing, sadly.
Your retort is ableism. Some people have vision problems such as myself and I find reading the cute yet blocky font to be very uncomfortable. Thankfully, reader mode fixes this.
Read the original gemini version then. I have not looked at it, but gemtext has no support for setting fonts at all, so it can not use a font you dislike unless you set that up in your gemini client.
I see in the list of NetBSD packages that the parts for a fairly good Pi-Hole replica seem to be there. This writer seemed to need WiFi and a desktop, but of course neither is necessary for a Pi-Hole type of host.
He's got me thinking I could recreate something that looks like 4dwm and put my NetBSD Pi into a defunct O2 case. A "good" O2 from 96-97 would have been 200MHz w/ 256MB of RAM and a 1600SW display (1600x1024).
You lost me there. Why are ppl still using this electron monstrosity when there are so many better alternatives? (Like dd, WIN32Imager, USBImager, DiskImager, etc.)?
I mean, Etcher is bigger than the entire NetBSD image, what the hell?
This is one of those things that SystemD can make more complicated. When you DD a disk image on something it rewrites the disk header, which can cause SystemD to reparse the header and do some weird stuff with the device that causes the write to fail or get corrupted. Etcher works around that problem.
That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.
I find it hilarious that the author deliberately chooses to talk the novice user through the use of Vim (including how to quit it) rather than suggest something simpler such as pico or nano.
They're probably commenting on Linus Torvald's decision to accept commits that may or may not have been assisted with agentic coding in part or whole, getting accepted/rejected on a merit basis instead.
(Apparently that's too much gray area for some zealots)
I've been dealing with NetBSD on VMs and my desktop lately and it's really lovely. By far the fastest install and boot of any OS I've tried on my system
I really love the amd64 "live" .img they provide too. It's a disk image you just write to a disk and on its first boot it expands the image to the full size of the disk, reboots, and your system is ready to go
For anyone curious to try, do note that EFI boots significantly faster than BIOS. I forget exactly why but BIOS boots requires an unpacking step every boot that EFI boots do not
The one thing keeping it from my daily driver on my desktop was my GPU is not yet supported. I do love the OS though. PkgSrc is nifty
As the saying goes. Of course it runs NetBSD.
They have a nice wiki page around running on Arm which might be helpful (and subpages for the main boards).
https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/evbarm/
I set it up on an Arm SBC last year and I have to say it did not seem as involved a process as that blog post. I hope it hasn't become more complicated.
I've been trying NetBSD 11.1 on an RPi1 these last few days.
It takes a long time to install anything and I don't expect to surf the web on it, but it's nice to have this OS as an option.
I wanted to try out openconnect-saml on it, but the install failed because of lack of RAM/swap. I have managed to run xfreerdp over openconnect on it though (FreeBSD had better performance).
What's the boot time like with that setup?
2 to 3 minutes.
I'm using a Class 10 card. Maybe a better card would speed things up.
> pkg_add pkgin
NetBSD noob question: what’s going on with this command? Is pkg_add not a package manager? If you already have pkg_add why do you need pkgin? I am familiar with `pkg` on FreeBSD, and `pkg_add` on OpenBSD, but they are both perfectly good enough on their own, I never wanted to install another package manager.
If you're familiar with Debian tools pkg_add is like dpkg in this case it's used to install the package containing pkgin which is like apt.
Pkg_add simply installs binaries you ask it to and dependencies but can't do searches or broader package management like pkgin.
how does it find pkgin then? it’s not pkg_add ./pkgin but presumably downloads it?
or is it just some special case?
I think the biggest problem with many of the non-Linux open source kernels these days is high idle CPU consumption — on both real hardware, and under virtualization.
Did latest OpenBSD & Haiku recently under KVM. Idle OBSD was using around 20% CPU to do nothing. Haiku, 30%. And it’s not just a virtualization thing. Thinkpad battery test yielded similar results.
That's the blocker for me too. I'd love to roll NetBSD, OpenBSD or Haiku.. but how well does it work with hardware, energy consumption and resource management? It's really just the mainstream OSes or nothing, sadly.
The pixel art font is so bad I can only read the code snippets
It looks like a pretty standard bitmap font to me. Very legible to my eye. What’s wrong with bitmap fonts?
> Very legible to my eye.
Your retort is ableism. Some people have vision problems such as myself and I find reading the cute yet blocky font to be very uncomfortable. Thankfully, reader mode fixes this.
Reader view in Firefox does the job.
Yeah, exactly. I gave up very quickly.
Read the original gemini version then. I have not looked at it, but gemtext has no support for setting fonts at all, so it can not use a font you dislike unless you set that up in your gemini client.
I read this before opening the page, and I figured it couldn't be that bad. I instantly felt my eyes straining to read the introduction.
But it's not AI slop! /s
yes, the irony
funny, most people, when they free up a Raspberry Pi, install Home Assistant or Pi-hole.vThis guy installs NetBSD 11.
He spends half the tutorial getting Wi-Fi working, then installs a modern desktop environment styled after a desktop environment from 1993.
next level nostalgia
I see in the list of NetBSD packages that the parts for a fairly good Pi-Hole replica seem to be there. This writer seemed to need WiFi and a desktop, but of course neither is necessary for a Pi-Hole type of host.
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/index-all.h...
He's got me thinking I could recreate something that looks like 4dwm and put my NetBSD Pi into a defunct O2 case. A "good" O2 from 96-97 would have been 200MHz w/ 256MB of RAM and a 1600SW display (1600x1024).
EMWM would have been far better and lighter than NsCDE, even if compiled from mainline releases with everything: emwm, xfiles, ximaging...
"Get Balena's Etcher (if you don't have it)"
You lost me there. Why are ppl still using this electron monstrosity when there are so many better alternatives? (Like dd, WIN32Imager, USBImager, DiskImager, etc.)?
I mean, Etcher is bigger than the entire NetBSD image, what the hell?
You usually don't even need dd, plain cat <iso >device is fine, or pv if you want to be fancy and want progress bars.
Less of a chance of swapping if/of and destroying something unexpected.
This is one of those things that SystemD can make more complicated. When you DD a disk image on something it rewrites the disk header, which can cause SystemD to reparse the header and do some weird stuff with the device that causes the write to fail or get corrupted. Etcher works around that problem.
That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.
dd and Etcher do not exactly have the same target audience.
Given the topic, I'd say the target audience preference would likely be thus:
Admin/root superuser of rpi4: dd
Admin/root superuser of NetBSD, other BSDs, or linux: dd
I find it hilarious that the author deliberately chooses to talk the novice user through the use of Vim (including how to quit it) rather than suggest something simpler such as pico or nano.
Or the newly released atto(1)
https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1
Afaik pico and nano aren't installed by default on NetBSD but vi is
Can one point me to the lines of code in the Linux kernel that contain AI slop?
Sure:
...will show you the names of all 6,251 tainted files. You can `git blame` them at your leisure."tainted". Can you point to something in any of those 6251 files that is "slop"?
They're probably commenting on Linus Torvald's decision to accept commits that may or may not have been assisted with agentic coding in part or whole, getting accepted/rejected on a merit basis instead.
(Apparently that's too much gray area for some zealots)
Are they in the room with us right now?