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 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'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.
If you are familiar with FreeBSD, then the parallel answer to the others in this thread is that on FreeBSD there's the bootstrap pkg that you get in base and the pkg that's in the ports tree itself. It's not quite the same, but the general idea holds that there's a less featureful package installer in base and a more featureful one in the package system itself.
So you can also just use the second command and not set PKG_PATH, or atleast not for every session.
I prefer to do it that way since pkgin has its own repository config, and if I use pkg_add after installing pkgin it'll be to install packages from the pkgsrc and that might clash if PKG_PATH is set.
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.
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?
I like it. It’s cross platform, so you can recommend it to anyone. It prevents you from writing to system disks accidentally. It verifies the image after writing.
Who cares if it’s an electron monstrosity? It’s a portable executable, you run it once and then never again.
> It’s cross platform, so you can recommend it to anyone. It prevents you from writing to system disks accidentally. It verifies the image after writing.
USBImager likewise, cross-platform, stupid-proof, verifies write, decompresses on-the-fly, but it's multilingual too and does not collect your data like Etcher. All of that in just 300 kilobytes in a single portable executable.
> You usually don't even need dd, plain cat <iso >device is fine
Definitely not. In fact, even dd is insufficient unless you use os specific flags to flush the disk cache, otherwise your stick might be corrupted. Read about the fdatasync syscall.
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 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).
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 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.
It's not vim. It's Bostic's nvi. And in fact one of the things that vim users need to be reminded about is that the habitual :wqa and :qa are vim-isms and do not work in other clones such as nvi.
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 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
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).
I'm using a Class 10 card. Maybe a better card would speed things up.
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.
* https://man.freebsd.org/cgi/man.cgi?query=pkg&manpath=FreeBS...
* https://freshports.org/ports-mgmt/pkg/
Pkg_add simply installs binaries you ask it to and dependencies but can't do searches or broader package management like pkgin.
or is it just some special case?
With PKG_PATH set (he does it in the .profile in the blog post)
pkg_add pkgin becomes pkg_add https://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r | cut -d_ -f1)/All/pkgin
So you can also just use the second command and not set PKG_PATH, or atleast not for every session.
I prefer to do it that way since pkgin has its own repository config, and if I use pkg_add after installing pkgin it'll be to install packages from the pkgsrc and that might clash if PKG_PATH is set.
I know it seems contrived.
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/using.html
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.
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.
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?
Who cares if it’s an electron monstrosity? It’s a portable executable, you run it once and then never again.
USBImager likewise, cross-platform, stupid-proof, verifies write, decompresses on-the-fly, but it's multilingual too and does not collect your data like Etcher. All of that in just 300 kilobytes in a single portable executable.
https://bztsrc.gitlab.io/usbimager/
I prefer to recommend that instead to anyone.
Less of a chance of swapping if/of and destroying something unexpected.
Definitely not. In fact, even dd is insufficient unless you use os specific flags to flush the disk cache, otherwise your stick might be corrupted. Read about the fdatasync syscall.
That said, the more lightweight "Disk Image Creator" also gets around this problem without dragging in an entire self contained browser.
But the others do. They are all minimal GUI apps.
Admin/root superuser of rpi4: dd
Admin/root superuser of NetBSD, other BSDs, or linux: dd
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
https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/current/pkgsrc/index-all.h...
https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/linus-torvalds-p...
(Apparently that's too much gray area for some zealots)
https://man.netbsd.org/atto.1