After some poking from users on here that they were having problems with their netbooks, I managed to get #PaleMoon working on an i586-class embedded CPU without SSE.

By the way, the 500MHz Geode feels significantly slower than the 400MHz UltraSPARC II which I usually use for testing. Megahertz myth, innit. #NetBSD

Alt...

NetBSD's default ctwm desktop showing a Pale Moon web browser with the default retro & spartan GTK2 theme loading the NetBSD.org web page. A terminal is visible showing the CPU information, which demonstrates that it's running on a 500MHz AMD Geode with MMX and 3DNow! but no SSE.

currently at wall time of 8m15s decompressing a 100MB tarball, looks like a pretty steady 1 to 1.3 MB/sec written to the SD card, but there's minimal 'user' CPU time and a ton of 'system' ... I wonder what that's all about.

it's probably mostly small random writes, I didn't invoke 'tar' with '-v' so I can't easily tell what exactly it's doing.

this seems unreasonably slow, even for a Pi 1. the SD card is modern, a high-quality industrial unit bought from Digi-Key, and should have half decent random write performance.

on the plus side, I learned about 'systat'. #NetBSD

A fellow from IRC channel #NetBSD has just updated his Sparc system to the recently released NetBSD11.

I also have a NetBSD system which is waiting to be updated.. and I have the Robotron EC1834 which is waiting to get repaired.

In #Japanese , we have the term 積読 (tsunndoku), "stacking up unread books".
We clearly need words for "Systems waiting for update" and "waiting for repair".
"technical dept" is not quite cutting it. And to long.
https://bsky.app/profile/herdware.bsky.social/post/3mvvuqf5njc2h

Alt...

herdware's sparc with NetBSD 11

Day 19

Worked on ~/.Xresources today. Set colours (Tokyo Night palette), typeface (Terminus), cursor (Adwaita), history and scrolling.

#X11 #40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

Saturday debug session. #retrocomputing #m68k #netbsd

#NetBSD on my Netbook

https://movq.de/blog/postings/2026-09-18/0/POSTING-en.html

📦 pkgsrc Is Cool // Wisellama

｢ Pkgsrc is NetBSD’s package manager, but thanks to NetBSD’s portability philosophy, pkgsrc is fully supported as a package manager on other Unix-like operating systems like Linux, Mac, and Solaris. It supports installing binary packages, but the reason I was interested in it is that pkgsrc supports building packages from source as well ｣

https://www.wisellama.rocks/posts/2021-12-23-pkgsrc-is-cool/

#pkgsrc #NetBSD #opensource

@rl_dane

Go and find whatever development kit (likely Petrikas's libsysinfo) has caused you to have a /usr/{local,pkg}/include/sys/sysinfo.h header on your system, and uninstall it. It has made the program's build system think that it is targetting a different operating system. Vanilla #NetBSD has no <sys/sysinfo.h>.

There's no libsysinfo in pkgsrc to be found, either. So you've managed to be quite resourceful in getting it onto your system. (-:

#VIMClassic

I also seem to have discovered a bug in cron with respect to how it processes changes to files in /etc/cron.d, but I don't have it well characterized enough to report anything at this point, and it could be user error or some little-known edge case.

#NetBSD really does give me the impression of late-90s Linux in terms of its development level, which could be a pro or a con depending on your perspective. (my perspective is fairly neutral in that I'm simply learning about it by attempting to deploy the OS for some light-duty use cases that a 700MHz single-core ARMv6 box can handle.)

@etchedpixels

I tracked through several layers of version control history just today to find that one array no bounds checking bug that had been sensationalized as 32 years old and magically having been somehow copied from GNU into #OpenBSD/ #FreeBSD/ #NetBSD, had actually been put there by the original BSD author of the code just after the entire idea had been invented in 1989.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49753214

@jackwilliambell @cstross
#BSD #Unix #telnetd

is it me or linking rust binaries on #netbsd is slower than expected?

Funny thing... I'm a free software person. Love the stuff. And I like all kinds of free software. But analyzing my preferences, I find myself invariably choosing permissively licensed projects over copyleft, be it GPL or CDDL.

Part of it is the behaviour of the different camps, with some (but not all) GPL fans twisting the meaning of "derivation" and doing nonsensical things like marking API interfaces "GPL-only".

Then again, things like slop acceptance in FreeBSD puzzle me. I know it's a while back, but surely there are still people who remember Net/2 and 4.4 Lite and the whole mess around that. You can't handwave away copyright issues. Tell me how this is different...?

I know it's Oracle, but the FAQ here is pretty compelling:

https://openjdk.org/legal/ai

#freebsd #netbsd

Day 18

Upon login on the first console, I configured ~/.profile to auto-start an X session. Upon exit, the user is logged out of the console:

if [ -z "DISPLAY" ] && [ "(tty)" = "/dev/constty" ]; then
exec startx > "$HOME/.xlog" 2>&1
fi

#X11 #40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

"What is BSD? Come to a conference to find out!" https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html (or tracked https://bsdly.blogspot.com/2025/11/what-is-bsd-come-to-conference-to-find.html) has been updated with dates and locations for 2027.

@eurobsdcon @bsdcan #eurobsdcon #bsdcan #asiabsdcon #bsd #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #unix #unixlike #freesoftware #libresoftware

If you were unable to attend EuroBSDCon 2026 in Brussels, or had to choose between parallel sessions, you can now see the talks directly from the talk descriptions on the program page https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2026/schedule/ or peertube: https://exquisite.tube/c/ebc2026/videos

@eurobsdcon #eurobsdcon #bsd #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #unix #unixlike #freesoftware #libresoftware

Not sure how many more they have available, but RamHost is back in stock with their Tiny KVM offerings:

https://my.ramhost.us/clients/cart.php?a=add&pid=69

- 512MB RAM
- 10 GB Dedicated Disk Space
- 1 CPU Core - AMD EPYC System

Best of all, they natively support #OpenBSD #FreeBSD and #NetBSD

If you have nothing better to do on an autumn Friday afternoon, try updating your #netbsd /etc/rc.conf with a string where you forget one quote.
You will exercise your sysadmin skills.

Some notes on my previous post "Linux, what has become of you?": The Linux kernel (and GNU/Linux) was never a one man thing, nor a Big Tech creation. It was the result of a community, it was made with the time, talent and effort of thousands of mostly ad-honorem volunteers.
Then, the take-over started: "Microsoft loves Linux", systemd, IBM, Github, the Linux and Agentic AI Foundations, Meta, Amazon... and now omarchy, fascists and cryptobrothers.
After decades supporting the original project, we have all the right to feel betrayed and discussed. We will put the energy and commitment in those communities aligned with the philosophy and ethics a Free Software project should never let go. This commitment goes beyong coding, bits and bytes. It's a commitment with the future of our societies.
#noAI #RunBSD #NetBSD

Alt...

Sticker on a laptop cover showing "beastie" in back and red with the message "RUN BSD. STOP FASCISM"

Some notes on my previous post "Linux, what has become of you?". The Linux kernel and GNU/Linux was not a one man thing, nor a Big Tech creation. It was made with the time, talent and effort of thousands of invidivuals, many ad-honorem volunteers.
Then, the take-over started: "Microsoft loves Linux", systemd, IBM, Github, the Linux and Agentic AI Foundations, Meta, Amazon... and now omarchy, fascists and cryptobrothers.
After decades supporting the original project, we have all the right to feel betrayed and discussed. We will put the energy and commitment in those communities aligned with the philosophy and ethics a Free Software project should never let go. This commitment goes beyong coding, bits and bytes. It's a commitment with our society.
#noAI #RunBSD #NetBSD

Alt...

Sticker on a laptop cover showing "beastie" in back and red with the message "RUN BSD. STOP FASCISM"

Day 17

Installed the VLC media player. On first launch it runs OK. Subsequent runs immediately exit with a segmentation fault.

Tracked the crashes down to this file: ~/.local/share/vlc/ml.xspf.

Delete it and VLC will run OK, but re-creates the file.

Created a one-liner script:

rm ~/.local/share/vlc/ml.xspf ; vlc

... and launch 'myVLC' using rofi.

#40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

@thomasadam mdgclock working on #NetBSD

Alt...

Screenshot with terminal (running uname -a command) and mdgclock application

CTWM almost like a green screen terminal

#NetBSD #ctwm

Alt...

Desktop screen with CTWM configured like a green screen terminal

Linux, what has become of you? What started as a great community, is now becoming slopware and safe haven for fascists and tech oligarchs 💔 . Time to #RunBSD #NetBSD.
https://stopomarchy.neocities.org/
#omarchy #AI #fascism #noAI

@atax1a Well, well, welll…
At least #NetBSD has it's own implementation of ZFS, hope they will not switch to OpenZFS in future, like FreeBSD did

He-he, my file/kitchen server project is going well Finally, I assembled all necessary wiring to connect 5V/12V from PSU to the external HDDs, bough SATA<->eSATA cables and assembled the storage for 4 3.5" disks.

And it all even powered up and system tried to boot from a connected single disk (unsuccessfully, because disk still doesn't contain NetBSD )

Next step — somehow buy a 4th HDD (hope, a gas for delivery trucks will exist at that moment, and this is not even the biggest problem), setup RAID 1 for NetBSD's root and cgd+RAID1+FFS (or ZFS) for files.

#NetBSD #selfhosting #homelab

Alt...

Front view of homemade file server. There are ITX case with Intel Atom inside, the plastic gray box for electrical wiring on top of it and two 3D-printed black frames for 4 HDDs with 1 HDD installed and a fan connected. The system is powered up and tge fan is spinning. The power source on the background shows 12V on the display.

Alt...

The back view of homemade server. There are ITX case with 4 eSATA ports and one aviation grade connector for power, the gray box with power wirings, power connectors for HDDs and a frame for 4 HDDs with 1 HDD installed, on the background.

Alt...

The top view of homemade server. The ITX black case on the bottom; gray box with wires and 1HDD in frame for 4 HDDs on the top. Everything connected with standard colored cables from PC PSU, also there is a pink eSATA<->SATA cable on the top right corner of the photo.

Okay, looks like I’ll never graduate after all!
I’ve been trying to avoid Zig for quite a while now, but there are just too many things I’m trying to avoid.
Sooner or later I’ll have to give in to something, right?
I know, I know!
I’ll study tomorrow, I promise, but tonight I’m going to play just a little bit more.

https://codeberg.org/ziglings/exercises/

#zig #ziglings #programming #unix #netbsd

Alt...

Zinglings running on NetBSD (alacritty terminal emulator on i3wm)

Just donated a bit:

https://www.netbsd.org/donations/

#NetBSD is really a lovely system! If you use it and like it and can afford it: spent a few bucks, too!

Day 16

Continued tweaking Openbox's rc.conf file. Pretty happy with the result. Installed i3lock for the lockscreen and suspend/resume works (on Thinkpad T480s).

2-finger scrolling on the elantech touchpad is not working. I poked at it for a bit but no joy. Will revisit the issue in the future when I have a better understanding of NetBSD.

Onward!

#40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

I went into my laptop BIOS and flipped the switch on virtualization so I could install #GNOME Boxes in #Debian Stable to test #NetBSD 11.

I was able to install the system and add #Xfce without much trouble. I don't remember it going that well in the past.

The one roadblock I did hit was a lack of dark themes in Xfce. Something to work on. I don't think I've ever installed an Xfce theme from outside the native packaging system, but there's always a first time.

I'm working as a freelancer, which means I'm a business. I can not easily give to the BSD foundations [well I could but it would make sense to do it as a business] (#FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #OpenBSD) because I'd need an invoice.

Can someone help a fellow out here? How do companies do it? I'm based in Germany in case that matters.

Ah yes, an #introduction is definitely in order after a yearish long hiatus followed by a switch in instance!

We're DECSystem10, though sinza is a convenient singular entity that we tend to use I as. We are a #plural collective who has grown increasingly disillusioned with generative AI (and is in fact a huge part of why I switched instances).

I enjoy #retrocomputing and find that #NetBSD is awesome! In general I prefer #BSD to Linux actually.

I enjoy getting old computers to talk to each other, as well as alternatives to the web where possible like #Gopher . #Gemini, and #Spartan!

#GeminiProtocol #PluralGang

@nina_kali_nina this is awesome #NetBSD 🚩

Well, I have thoroughly failed to do anything #NetBSD-ish with my dinky little #Vortex86 machine. Even if I attach a real VGA monitor nothing appears on the screen so I can't even check BIOS settings. Gonna relegate that to a rainy winter day project.

@murble I don't suppose you remember doing anything funky to get it working when you had it do you?