Anyone aware of any possible USB dongle supporting 5GHz wireless connection and supported by NetBSD? Or maybe a mini-PCIe for a Mini PC bought on AliExpress, the native one is WiFi5 and not supported by NetBSD. I'm using a USB 2.4GHz-only Realtek one š
Would this laptop be supported by NetBSD? And how good of performance would I get on it?
Hello NBSD fans!
ā
I'm new here, but here my first problem. I cannot change to Hungarian keys in NetBSD 9.3. Terminal only, no X.
I tried:
wsconsctl -k -w encoding=hu encoding -> hu
Still have no keys like: ÅúűÔà etc.
I found some forum tread, that it was a bug in 5.0 but fixed in 5.1
Also it cannot show letters like these in terminal apps, just "?" marks.
localhost$ sudo ifconfig vio0 create
ifconfig: clone_command: Invalid argument
ifconfig: exec_matches: Invalid argument
I use a Mac for the technical sales side of my work, for the uninteresting reason that I need Microsoft Office. The internal SSD was starting to get full, so I ran GrandPerspective to surface where the space all went.
Wait⦠thatās almost a quarter of a million folders! On a MacBook Air with a stingy SSD? Thatās more virtual folders than Iād suspect all but the largest physical archives in the world would have.
Itās at this stage I would lean back in my chair, fall over, pick myself up, then regale you all with tales of my childhood DOS days. Iād mention that I tried maintaining a clean directory structure, but would also limit the number of nested directories to a few dozen, given itād be tedious to traverse anything complicated on a command line. Iād contrast this to my modern FreeBSD desktop and laptops having orders of magnitude fewer folders than this Mac despite having full KDE Plasma desktops, or my classic NetBSD systems sporting Fluxbox. Then finally, Iād attempt to make a point about the state of modern computing, and the never-ending spiral of complexity, and whether even the metaphor of a folder is even meaningful anymore.
There are a bunch of reasons why, but it only reinforces my feeling of merely being a guest on macOS. In 2023, I could still tell you where almost everything is on a FreeBSD or NetBSD system (and even Linux, despite their best efforts of late). On a Mac? I wouldnāt have the foggiest idea of anything outside my home directory, /usr/local
, and /opt
.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-06-02.
I have a laptop and several 4G modems that work in linux I'd like to try out. Any pointers on where to begin and how to connect it? Is it even possible on NetBSD, I found very little online so far?
Hi all,
I can't build some packages, mostly p5- packages. I use bulk build without chroot.
System is:
NetBSD localhost 9.3_STABLE NetBSD 9.3_STABLE (GENERIC) #0: Mon May 15 10:26:43 UTC 2023 [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64
pkgsrc is pkgsrc-2023Q1.tar.xz
error from /mnt/bulklog/p5-Module-Build-0.42310nb3/configure.log:
`=> Bootstrap dependency digest>=20211023: found digest-20220214
=> Checksum BLAKE2s OK for Module-Build-0.4231.tar.gz
=> Checksum SHA512 OK for Module-Build-0.4231.tar.gz
The supported build options for p5-Module-Build are:
p5-module-build-dist-authoring p5-module-build-license-creation
You can select which build options to use by setting PKG_DEFAULT_OPTIONS
or the following variable. Its current value is shown:
PKG_OPTIONS.p5-Module-Build (not defined)
==========================================================================
=> Tool dependency mktools-[0-9]: found mktools-20220614
=> Tool dependency perl>=5.36.0: found perl-5.36.0
=> Tool dependency cwrappers>=20150314: found cwrappers-20220403
=> Tool dependency checkperms>=1.1: found checkperms-1.12
=> Full dependency p5-inc-latest-[0-9]: NOT found
=> Verifying /nonexistent for ../../devel/p5-inc-latest
make[1]: don't know how to make /nonexistent. Stop
make[1]: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/devel/p5-inc-latest
*** Error code 2
Stop.
make: stopped in /usr/pkgsrc/devel/p5-Module-Build
`
mk.conf:
`# Example /usr/pbulk/etc/mk.conf file produced by bootstrap-pkgsrc
.ifdef BSD_PKG_MK # begin pkgsrc settings
ABI= 64
PKG_DBDIR= /usr/pbulk/pkgdb
LOCALBASE= /usr/pbulk
SYSCONFBASE= /usr/pbulk/etc
VARBASE= /usr/pbulk/var
PKG_TOOLS_BIN= /usr/pbulk/sbin
PKGINFODIR= info
PKGMANDIR= man
CPUFLAGS+= -O2 -march=native
ALLOW_VULNERABLE_PACKAGES= yes
SKIP_LICENSE_CHECK= yes
PKG_DEVELOPER= yes
.endif # end pkgsrc settings
`
I use this manual [https://www.netbsd.org/docs/pkgsrc/bulk.html](https://)
sh pbulk.sh -n
/usr/pbulk/bin/bulkbuild
report:
NetBSD 9.3_STABLE/x86_64
Compiler: gcc
Build start: 2023-05-31 10:27
Build end: 2023-05-31 12:00
Full report: http://www.pkgsrc-box.org/reports/current/DragonFly-1.8/20230531.1027/meta/report.html
Machine readable version: http://www.pkgsrc-box.org/reports/current/DragonFly-1.8/20230531.1027/meta/report.bz2
Total number of packages: 663
Successfully built: 237
Failed to build: 94
Depending on failed package: 332
Explicitly broken or masked: 0
Depending on masked package: 0
Packages breaking the most other packages
devel/p5-Module-Build 126 [email protected]
devel/p5-Try-Tiny 107 [email protected]
textproc/libxml2 79 [email protected]
devel/p5-Data-OptList 78 [email protected]
converters/help2man 75 [email protected]
lang/python310 75 [email protected]
devel/libidn2 57 [email protected]
www/p5-HTML-Parser 56 [email protected]
security/libgcrypt 46 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test2-Suite 44 [email protected]
Build failures
converters/help2man 75 [email protected]
databases/p5-Apache-DBI [email protected]
databases/p5-DBD-SQLite 4 [email protected]
databases/p5-DBIx-DBSchema 2 [email protected]
databases/p5-Ima-DBI 1 [email protected]
devel/apr-util 8 [email protected]
devel/boehm-gc 1 [email protected]
devel/libidn 43 [email protected]
devel/libidn2 57 [email protected]
devel/p5-Algorithm-Dependency 8 [email protected]
devel/p5-Async-Interrupt 3 [email protected]
devel/p5-Bit-Vector 4 [email protected]
devel/p5-Cache-Cache 2 [email protected]
devel/p5-Cache-Memcached 1 [email protected]
devel/p5-Class-Accessor-Chained 6 [email protected]
devel/p5-Class-InsideOut 2 [email protected]
devel/p5-Class-ReturnValue 4 [email protected]
devel/p5-Class-Trigger 2 [email protected]
devel/p5-Clone-Choose 2 [email protected]
devel/p5-Data-OptList 78 [email protected]
devel/p5-Data-Section-Simple 8 [email protected]
devel/p5-Devel-Caller 34 [email protected]
devel/p5-Devel-FindPerl 1 [email protected]
devel/p5-Devel-StackTrace-AsHTML 5 [email protected]
devel/p5-EV 3 [email protected]
devel/p5-Exception-Class 33 [email protected]
devel/p5-Exporter-Lite 2 [email protected]
devel/p5-ExtUtils-AutoInstall 9 [email protected]
devel/p5-ExtUtils-InstallPaths 38 [email protected]
devel/p5-File-Find-Rule 11 [email protected]
devel/p5-File-HomeDir 12 [email protected]
devel/p5-File-Listing 20 [email protected]
devel/p5-File-ShareDir 35 [email protected]
devel/p5-IPC-Run 8 [email protected]
devel/p5-List-MoreUtils 6 [email protected]
devel/p5-Module-Build 126 [email protected]
devel/p5-Module-ScanDeps 4 [email protected]
devel/p5-Params-Coerce 7 [email protected]
devel/p5-Ref-Util 32 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-CheckDeps 7 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-ClassAPI 9 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-Exception 27 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-Memory-Cycle 8 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-MockObject 1 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-Output 7 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-SharedFork 6 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-Warn 11 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test-Warnings 39 [email protected]
devel/p5-Test2-Suite 44 [email protected]
devel/p5-Try-Tiny 107 [email protected]
devel/p5-Type-Tiny 21 [email protected]
devel/p5-Types-Serialiser 11 [email protected]
devel/p5-UNIVERSAL-moniker 1 [email protected]
devel/p5-capitalization 1 [email protected]
editors/vim [email protected]
graphics/tiff 33 [email protected]
lang/gcc7 5 [email protected]
lang/python27 3 [email protected]
lang/python310 75 [email protected]
lang/python38 [email protected]
lang/python39 [email protected]
lang/tcl 3 [email protected]
mail/p5-Email-Address-List [email protected]
mail/p5-MailTools 3 [email protected]
math/p5-Math-Int128 15 [email protected]
net/p5-IO-Socket-INET6 32 [email protected]
net/p5-NetAddr-IP 3 [email protected]
net/p5-Regexp-Common-net-CIDR [email protected]
pkgtools/pkgin [email protected]
pkgtools/x11-links 40 [email protected]
print/kpathsea 34 [email protected]
security/gnupg [email protected]
security/libassuan2 5 [email protected]
security/libgcrypt 46 [email protected]
security/p11-kit 28 [email protected]
security/p5-Crypt-OpenSSL-Random 4 [email protected]
security/p5-Crypt-Rijndael 7 [email protected]
security/p5-Crypt-X509 [email protected]
sysutils/p5-File-Copy-Recursive 10 [email protected]
sysutils/p5-Unix-Process 5 [email protected]
textproc/docbook-xml 41 [email protected]
textproc/intltool 29 [email protected]
textproc/iso8879 4 [email protected]
textproc/libxml2 79 [email protected]
textproc/p5-Pod-Coverage 7 [email protected]
textproc/p5-Text-Diff 8 [email protected]
textproc/p5-XML-SAX 13 [email protected]
time/p5-Business-Hours [email protected]
time/p5-Test-MockTime 7 [email protected]
time/p5-Test-Time 6 [email protected]
www/p5-CSS-Squish [email protected]
www/p5-HTML-Parser 56 [email protected]
www/p5-HTTP-MultiPartParser 6 [email protected]
www/p5-WWW-RobotRules 20 [email protected]
`
Thanks
Marcel
Spleen 2.0.0 has been released, with full support for CP437 (IBM PC) encoding in the 8x16, 16x32, and 32x64 versions.
It required a large effort and represents 135 commits since Spleen 1.9.3 which resulted in almost 90 new characters in the previously mentioned sizes.
A lot has happened since the 1.0.0 release back in September 2018:
Spleen's README now has a trivia section listing all the operating systems and programs where the fonts have been embedded or bundled in.
But let's go back to the newly announced release and focus on the recently introduced changes.
Here is a screenshot of the CP437 version of 16x32:
This is an important milestone as it allows nice things like having a DOS version of Spleen. It is implemented as a COM file changing the font to Spleen 8x16, and has been tested both in DOSBox and on FreeDOS.
Here is "L'Ćtranger" from Baudelaire using Spleen on an ASUS Eee PC running FreeDOS:
On top on that, Spleen is now also available in libansilove since version 1.4.0 and in Ansilove since version 4.2.0, making it possible to render ANSI art using a modern font.
And with this out of the way, I can now start working on the next Spleen milestone, which I hope to be able to announce in a not so distant future... Stay tuned!
I'm new to using NetBSD but I've set it up on a VM and am currently in the process of running through a few package installations. From what I understand this is done via setting the PKG_PATH variable and then using the pkg_add utility, however I'm getting a "Forbidden" error message when I try to install any package.
$ PKG_PATH="http://cdn.NetBSD.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/$(uname -s)/$(uname -m)/$(uname -r|cut -f '1 2' -d.)/All/"
$ export PKG_PATH
$ pkg_add tmux
pkg_add: Can't process http://cdn.NetBSD.org:80/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64 /7.1/All//tmux*: Forbidden
pkg_add: no pkg found for 'tmux', sorry.
pkg_add: 1 package addition failed
I've visited the URL and the package does exist, also it does this for any package I try to install. From what I can tell the networking on the machine is fine so I'm a bit stuck as to where to go from here. Any suggestions?
NetBSD is famous for portability. Why it does not support IBM System Z?
I always add conditions to my Ansible playbooks to check the target OS and distribution. Until recently I did this:
- name: Install FreeBSD package (legacy)
community.general.pkgng:
name: "cowsay"
state: present
when: ansible_distribution == "FreeBSD"
This is also useful for differentiating between different distributions of the same OS, such as Debian or Fedora.
Reddit: Preferable to use ansible_facts or ansible_distribution?
According to akasivel on this Ansible thread, this will soon be formally deprecated in favour of ansible_facts:
- name: Install FreeBSD package
community.general.pkgng:
name: "cowsay"
state: present
when: ansible_facts['distribution'] == "FreeBSD"
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-05-24.
Thanks to all of you who reached out; Iāll admit I took Jimās passing, and some others in the extended family, pretty hard. Iāve lost important people in my life many times, but never a close friend like that. Iāve also had the flu which hasnāt helped!
My sister put it best when she said that by continuing to use his moral compass, and writing posts as though they were directed at him, heās still influencing the world. I really like that.
As I said in my farewell post, Iām still thinking of ways to remember him in a more permanent and fitting way. For now, Iāve added him to the dedications section of the About page.
About rubenerd.com
Goodbye Jim Kloss ā” 1956ā2023
While I didnāt feel up to writing (or more specifically, I didnāt feel like I could), I did a bit more plumbing work to hopefully make the site a bit more robust, and fixed a ton of legacy posts that were missing metadata. Iāve gone 18 years without a CDN, but Iām starting to look at what I can do to host cached versions in different places to speed up image-heavy posts. Iām also reviewing making a Gemini version of the site; hence the switch to links on their own lines over the last few months.
Thereās also a ton of cool stuff in the pipeline! I made a bunch of progress on some personal projects (albeit very slowly), thereās some FreeBSD and NetBSD stuff Iāve learned on cloud servers at work and on laptops, plenty of Commodore and DOS retrocomputing updates with hardware and software (and potentially some Atari!?), some anime and coffee reviews, and way more Japanese holiday stuff from our trips in March and November last year. I also owe many of you replies to email feedback.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-05-24.
I plan to implement my own version of OpenBSD's common address redundancy protocol (CARP) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Address_Redundancy_Protocol, an alternative to virtual router redundancy protocol (VRRP). Where to find its specification document for implementation?
Hello,
I am a relatively new user to NetBSD. I recently tried installing Barrier on NetBSD. It took me a while but I was able to get it through a lot of tinkering. The device is a Thinkpad T420s.
I am interested in learning how to package this if it is not in pkgsrc/pkgin.
Also, I recently got i2pd, the overlay network and I would like to add that too if possible.
https://github.com/debauchee/barrier
https://github.com/PurpleI2P/i2pd
I have been using Musescore from pkgsrc for a while. I also have a Debian machine (because it has an inbuilt video card that doesn't like NetBSD) with which I use an older version of Musescore (Debian package manager). That machine has an attached MIDI keyboard for score composition. (I don't like entering notes and especially chords with the mouse).
Recently I did some rearranging and connected an old NetBSD machine (Pentium 4) to a better-suited piano, for score composition. Now I can get MIDI events by other software, but not Musescore. I had to rebuild Musescore with ALSA support just to get the MIDI Note Input option to turn on. I also tried Jack, which sees the piano, and Musescore, but I still get no MIDI events in Musescore.
Has anyone else gotten this to work? I hate to have to resort to Debian again.
Hi! Sorry for my bad English...
I recently received from China a Morefine M9 Mini-PC with Intel SoC AlderLake-N N100. It works quite successfully under FreeBSD 13.2, but I also decided to test it under NetBSD 10.0_BETA.
NetBSD: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=d6f92a5ecc
FreeBSD: https://bsd-hardware.info/?probe=926ab149ae
The following problems were identified under NetBSD:
Currently, the Morefine M9 has FreeBSD installed and works fine, I will do a more detailed investigation of the problems with NetBSD closer to version 10.0-RC.
I try to set up a connection to a openLDAP server running on NetBSD 10 via TLS and SASL. When I try ldapsreach -Y EXTERNAL
I get
ldapsearch: not compiled with SASL support
and
ldd /usr/bin/ldapsearch
shows also no info about sasl-Libs. This site says, that NetBSD has its own SASL-implementation for openLDAP, but I guess this will not fix the "not compiled whith SASL" thing (and until now, I'm unable to find the docs for this implementation). Any ideas, to get me back on track? Where to start?
Iām glomming all BSD and not-BSD into these roundup posts.Ā I donāt think they need to be separate.
I have a very old AirPort Extreme, the A1408. Is it possible to install Linux on it, using the AirPort functionally as a hard disk, and then boot from that? I have also heard that AirPorts run NetBSD. Can you boot into that and run commands?
In my "Capturing text screens on modern operating systems" article published back in 2013, I mentioned finding a very promising program called Qodem. It has since reached maturity and version 1.0 was released in 2017. I have been enjoying it on a regular basis to reminisce about the glorious days of using Terminate and Minicom in the nineties, and even packaged it in both OpenBSD and NetBSD.
Qodem has built in support for SSH, and also lets you spawn a local shell and SSH from there, which allows authentication using SSH keys.
For the purpose of this article, I used two Fedora machines and installed the ckermit and lrzsz packages to handle the Kermit and ZMODEM protocols respectively. There is a qodem package as well, but it only bundles the X11 binary. I prefer to use the curses version, so I built it from source.
And from there, let the fun begin:
C-Kermit 9.0.302 OPEN SOURCE:, 20 Aug 2011, for Linux (64-bit)
Copyright (C) 1985, 2011,
Trustees of Columbia University in the City of New York.
Type ? or HELP for help.
(/home/fcambus/) C-Kermit>send NetBSD-9.3-amd64.iso
Return to your local Kermit and give a RECEIVE command.
KERMIT READY TO SEND...
9 S~/ @- SENT: [/home/fcambus/NetBSD-9.3-amd64.iso] To: [netbsd-9_3-amd64.iso] (OK)
(/home/fcambus/) C-Kermit>
Here is our Kermit transfer in action:
For transfering files using ZMODEM, we use sz from the lrzsz package:
sz NetBSD-9.3-amd64.iso
And here is our ZMODEM transfer in action:
There is something quite special about seeing ZMODEM transfers reach speeds close to 600 MBit/s. It's hard to explain.
For the record, I used the following script to take screenshots in burst mode and then create an animated GIF:
while true; do
gnome-screenshot -w;
done
Lastly, if you enjoy watching those glorious progress bars, you might also enjoy my "File transfers via the parallel port on DOS using LapLink" post from last year, which served as the inspiration for this one.
I would like to know how i could log SSH command lines a user is using on a server. For exemple, if the user Alex on my server is doing the following set of commands :
$ cd /tmp
$ touch myfile
$ ssh [email protected]
$ ssh [email protected]
$ vim anotherfile
$ ssh [email protected]
I would like to log the ssh commands used on the server in a file which looks like :
[2014-07-25 10:10:10] Alex : ssh [email protected]
[2014-07-25 10:18:20] Alex : ssh st[email protected]
[2014-07-25 11:15:10] Alex : ssh [email protected]
I don't care what he did during his ssh session, i just want to know WHEN and TO WHERE he made a connection to another server.
The user is not using bash and i would like to avoid manipulating .bash_history anyway as the user can modify it.
Any clue on this ?
Thank you :)
edit : to be more specific :
a user connects to a server A and then connects from the server A to server B. I want to track down to which server he connects through ssh from server A.
This is the seventh post in my toolchains adventures series. Please check the previous posts in the toolchains category for more context about this journey. There was no Q4 2022 report as there wasn't really anything worthwhile to write about, only some usual Pkgsrc and OpenBSD toolchains related ports updates.
In Pkgsrc land, I updated binutils to the 2.40 version, mold to the 1.9.0, 1.10.0, 1.10.1, and 1.11.0 versions, patchelf to the 0.17.2 version, and finally pax-utils to the 1.3.6 and the 1.3.7 ones. I also updated the NetBSD system call table in GDB to add the eventfd(2) and timerfd(2) syscalls which were added back in 2021.
Regarding OpenBSD, I updated binutils to the 2.40 version and enabled the build of gas, for which I also pushed support for ARM upstream. While there, I added support upstream for the PT_OPENBSD_MUTABLE segment type to readelf. Lastly, I packaged and imported pax-utils into the ports collection.
In early February, I attended FOSDEM 2023 in Brussels and had the opportunity to attend some talks in the LLVM devroom as well as some toolchains related ones in the RISC-V and Binary Tools devrooms.
Lately, I've been exploring using alternative linkers in Pkgsrc. By default, the host system default linker will be used, which happens to be GNU ld on NetBSD and most Linux distributions.
Thanks to work done by pho@ and the instructions he posted on the tech-pkg mailing list, it was already possible to use mold within Pkgsrc, by adding these directives in the etc/mk.conf configuration file:
LD= /usr/pkg/bin/mold
LDFLAGS+= -Wl,-L/usr/lib
CWRAPPERS_PREPEND.cc+= -B/usr/pkg/libexec/mold
CWRAPPERS_PREPEND.cxx+= -B/usr/pkg/libexec/mold
I wanted to also try using LLD (the LLVM linker), and modified the devel/lld package to add a symlink in ${PREFIX}/libexec so that it can be used in Pkgsrc.
While mold can be used as a linker when using both GCC and Clang, for LLD one must use Clang as a compiler, using the PKGSRC_COMPILER directive. The reason for this is that LLD does not support the -dc and -dp options.
The following directives must be added in the etc/mk.conf configuration file:
PKGSRC_COMPILER= clang
LD= /usr/pkg/bin/lld
LDFLAGS+= -Wl,-L/usr/lib
CWRAPPERS_PREPEND.cc+= -B/usr/pkg/libexec/lld
CWRAPPERS_PREPEND.cxx+= -B/usr/pkg/libexec/lld
Verifying that a binary was produced by mold or LLD can be done using readelf.
On the mold binary linked with mold itself:
readelf -p .comment mold
String dump of section '.comment':
[ 0] mold 1.10.1 (compatible with GNU ld)
[ 25] GCC: (NetBSD nb1 20220722) 10.4.0
[ 47] GCC: (nb1 20220722) 10.4.0
And on the lld binary linked with LLD itself:
readelf -p .comment lld
String dump of section '.comment':
[ 0] clang version 15.0.7
[ 16] Linker: LLD 15.0.7
[ 29] GCC: (NetBSD nb1 20220722) 10.4.0
As usual, Iāve also been busy reading different material, and adding new resources to toolchains.net.
Thatās all for now, happy Spring 2023 everyone!
binutils and GDB commits:
2023-03-23 | 80251d4 | Add support to readelf for the PT_OPENBSD_MUTABLE segment type |
2023-03-17 | 152d9c4 | Update the NetBSD system call table to add eventfd(2) and timerfd(2) |
2023-01-20 | 2e17538 | Add OpenBSD ARM GAS support |
LLVM commits
2023-03-19 | 8510cf9 | [compiler-rt] Add missing #else clause to fix the build on NetBSD |
2023-03-16 | 245f26a | [docs] Document "PGO" (Profile-Guided Optimization) in the lexicon |
2023-03-15 | d8df871 | [compiler-rt] Point UndefinedBehaviorSanitizer link to its own page |
2023-02-10 | 5cec69b | [clang] Update Clang version from 16 to 17 in scan-build.1 |
$ hp-setup -i HPD83AB7Ā
Traceback (most recent call last):
Ā File "/usr/pkg/bin/hp-setup", line 48, in <module>
Ā Ā from base import device, utils, tui, models, module, services, os_utils
Ā File "/usr/pkg/share/hplip/base/device.py", line 42, in <module>
Ā Ā from . import status
Ā File "/usr/pkg/share/hplip/base/status.py", line 33, in <module>
Ā Ā import cupsext
ImportError: /usr/pkg/lib/python3.9/site-packages/cupsext.so: Shared object "libunistring.so.2" not found
Memory fault (core dumped)
Does FreeBSD, NetBSD, or OpenBSD have an encryption feature like Linux's dm-crypt? And will it work for a system partition?
About a dozen of you emailed and posted on social media in response to my question about FreeBSD and NetBSD laptops, thanks!
Overwhelmingly the recommendation was the Framework, which Iāve looked at before but completely forgot. Their website doesnāt make it easy to find the display resolution, but other sites report it as 2256Ć1504, which is excellent.
The FreeBSD wiki has a page about it, and itād be cool to do some testing on NetBSD to add to their wiki too.
It probably wonāt be in the budget for a while, but Iām keen to try. Ping me if you have any experience with running BSD on this laptop, Iād love to hear about your experience.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-03-14.
NetBSD neutron 9.3 NetBSD 9.3 (GENERIC) #0: Thu Aug 4 15:30:37 UTC 2022 [email protected]:/usr/src/sys/arch/amd64/compile/GENERIC amd64 |
I love my tiny Japanese Panasonic Letās Note RZ6 subnotebook, but the keyboard is just small enough that I canāt type with speed. Itās a perfect āon callā machine, but Iād love something I can write longform stuff on.
The problem is, Panasonic and Apple have spoiled me with their 2Ć HiDPI displays. I love how images look, the higher fidelity of fonts in documents, and the ability to crank text down to smaller sizes when tailing logs. People saying these are silly luxuries were writing into PC Magazine saying 8-bit colour was sufficient in the 1990s, and that you donāt need double-density floppy disks because in my day we used punch card libraries, dagnabit!
This would be my wish list:
My instinct is to buy a second-hand ThinkPad and be done with it, as is tradition in the BSD community. Iāll have to see if anything fits.
By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2023-03-13.
I didnāt know what Moonlight and Sunshine are, but Moonlight at least is on NetBSD.
FOSDEM took place last week-end, as an offline-first event again for the first time since 2020. It was located as usual at the university campus of the ULB in Brussels. It was packed with developers, users, passionate and professionals of Open Source software, and while NetBSD did not have a booth this year, its presence could be felt on Saturday morning at the BSD DevRoom thanks to the many developers who made it to the conference.
Together with Rodrigo Osorio of the FreeBSD project, I had the pleasure to help manage the DevRoom, have a front seat for the talks, and even start the session by introducing the BSD Driver Harmony initiative.
The staff and respective speakers are currently busy uploading slides and reviewing videos, so keep in mind to check again for new content in the coming few days and weeks if you missed anything or need to dig further into any event from this awesome conference!
Finally, I would like to thank the NetBSD Foundation for sponsoring me to manage the room and attend the GSoC meet-up.
Is it possible to swap to the NetBSD kernel in FreeBSD?
As stated in the title, I would like to change the kernel of my Unix build from FreeBSD to NetBSD, as I prefer the philosophy of the rump kernel to that of a monolithic, but prefer the lexicography and semantics of FreeBSD's system applications. The current build is fresh, with only sudo, neovim and git installed. It is running in a VM, so I don't think any additional drivers are installed, if that is optional during the install process. (I've installed OS's so many times that it is practically subconscious for me) Sorry if this question seems a tab bit junior to you, I'm an idiot with limited SysAdmin skills. My question is this: is it possible to swap to the NetBSD kernel in FreeBSD? If so, I will build the kernel from source and swap it.
TL;DR The driver I need is in the Linux kernel. I would like to go about rewriting\porting it to NetBSD. I also would like to use some kernel module service so that I don't have to compile the entire kernel to test the driver.
New to BSD, coming from Linux. My laptop (Asus FX706LI) uses the MediaTek MT7921. Although I've never installed linux on this laptop, I know the driver is in Linux 5.12 and subsequent kernels. I am to the point that I'd like to try modifying the driver to work with BSD. I currently have NetBSD running on a QEMU virtual machine, and I'd like to find a service that will allow me to add kernel modules so I don't need to rebuild the kernel for every attempt. Any documentation and whatever you may consider useful is welcomed.
As mentioned in my "Customizing NetBSD boot banners" article, it's really easy to customize NetBSD boot banners using the boot.cfg configuration file.
In a previous life, I used to draw ASCII art (mostly in the pre-2000 era) and more precisely a type of ASCII art referred as newschool ASCII in the artscene. By taking advantage of the extended character set (the 128 to 255 range) of the IBM PC's code page 437, it was possible to achieve great detail and really smooth curves. Some examples can be found at the bottom of my online gallery.
Attempting to draw the NetBSD flag in ASCII and use it when booting in both NetBSD/i386 and NetBSD/amd64 in BIOS mode was thus too tempting, so here we go.
The NetBSD flag in full glory, loaded in TheDraw:
And here is a screenshot of the NetBSD x86 bootloader:
And this is how it could look like with colors and a customized VGA palette:
Unfortunately, the extended ASCII characters do not display correctly when booting in EFI mode, at least on the machine I tested on, but I suspect it will likely be the case on other implementations as well.
As specified in the Human Interface Infrastructure part (33.2.7.2 subsection) of the UEFI specification, UEFI requires platform support of a font containing the basic Latin character set. So extended ASCII support is not mandatory, and there is no guarantee that the characters would be the same between fonts used by different EFI firmwares anyway.
The boot.cfg configuration file can be downloaded here. Enjoy!
NetBSD continues using the FFS file-system by default while itās offered ZFS support that has been slowly improving ā in NetBSD-CURRENT is the ability to use ZFS as the root file-system if first booting to FFS, for example. There may be another modern file-system option soon with an effort underway to port DragonFlyBSDās HAMMER2 over to NetBSD.
The GitHub repository has the code if youāre up for contributing.
I want to implement a hello world system call in NetBSD. I am following the NetBSD documentation where I am able to make add system call in src/sys/kern/syscalls.master list. But the documentation says you need to rebuild libc and reboot with a new kernel. I am not able to understand how to rebuild libc and then reboot. Can someone please help me how to rebuilt libc and reboot.
Also how shall I test my system call with the new kernel loaded.