The 'ls' command on NetBSD does not provide colour output.

Instead of immediately installing 'colorls', I'm using the command with the '-F' option. This allows me to distinguish files from directories from executables at a glance.

I'm finding I don't miss colour output at all.

```
$ type l
l is an alias for: ls -aFhl
```

#NetBSD #RunBSD

@da_667 @cR0w

I'm not going to pretend that running BSD is a cakewalk, but particularly for #FreeBSD, there are lots of really helpful folks on the #fediverse.

Also, the FreeBSD handbook is amazingly good.

--Sent from my nearly ten year old hand-me-down inspiron running #NetBSD ;)

More notes for folks looking at how to set up NetBSD with useful storage settings:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/root_on_zfs/
https://gnats.netbsd.org/60679

I've not yet gotten to anything that combines CGD with RAIDframe or ZFS, but maybe that'll happen tonight.

#netbsd

Day 3

After entering a username and password, the NetBSD default login generates multiple lines of output, some of it more useful (Last login) than others (copyright dates).

https://www.dwarmstrong.org/netbsd-login/

#40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

I've updated the instructions on Caddy Ninja to include the option of running everything #NetBSD

https://caddy.ninja

Bonus: That site is now hosted on NetBSD running #Caddy 😛

@traumweh I’ve been running #NetBSD servers since the ‘90s, having settled on NetBSD after Linux started becoming less and less what could be used from O’Reilly books, further away than even AmigaDOS.

I run several colocated servers that host a good number of dynamic sites (WordPress, Drupal), DNS for hundreds of domains, hundreds of email users, services like SearXNG, Akkoma, various virtual machines, plus shell accounts for many users for all kinds of programming languages.

There are plenty of things others want to run that I don’t want to, but I haven’t found anything I’ve wanted to run that it can’t run.

Since not all the world’s an amd64 system, I only run binaries I compile myself, plus several of my servers are non-x86.

As others have pointed out, NetBSD can be quite boring in good ways, which is really wonderful once you realize how much time that leaves for other things.

Run #NetBSD 🚩

#noai #antiai #nollm #debian

@oscarjiminy Well, I'm looking at various docs for how to do RAIDframe installs and CGD installs, and none of them consider that you might want to do both. There's the notion from CGD of booting from an unencrypted boot partition, and having a ramdisk (analogous to initramfs) on it that has the cgd config and such.

For this, though - and I'm not looking at ZFS yet - I'd one one ESP per disk, one boot partition per disk, and a kernel and ramdisk per boot partition. Then I have big GPT partitions for the rest. I get RAIDframe config into the ramdisk, and then also (details when I figure them out) have CGD atop the RAIDframe virtual device. Then I partition that into at least root and swap, and go for it.

Challenges:

1. No docs cover combinations of these things.
2. The main docs talk about setting up a single-disk system for RAIDframe and then cloning it into a RAID. The challenge here is that I plan for my CGD to sit on RAIDframe, so there is no notion of the system ever not having RAIDframe running. Maybe I can start off by having RAIDframe on a single disk, CGD on it, and then migrate to two-disk RAID-1? Got to figure this out.

ZFS should theoretically be similar, but instead of RAIDframe with CGD atop, I'll have each disk doing CGD and ZFS mirroring across the two CGD virtual disks.

It all comes down to figuring out how to get these things going with a potentially custom ramdisk.

Some links talking about the disparate parts:

https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/custom_cgdroot/
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-cgd.html
https://wiki.netbsd.org/security/cgdroot/
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-rf.html#chap-rf-install

I'll get on the mailing lists and ask for help if I get stuck. Last time I ran NetBSD, I used neither RAIDframe nor CGD, but since I've run LUKS and GELI and gmirror and md-raid and ZFS and LVM and everything else for the last quarter century, the underlying concepts are all going to be familiar.

#netbsd

Hey kids! It's the start of the Fall semester, and I'm again teaching "Advanced Programming in the UNIX Environment".

The syllabus and all course materials including all code examples are available here:
https://stevens.netmeister.org/631/

As usual, we'll be using #NetBSD as our main platform. All video lectures are public and available for free on YouTube:
https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL0qfF8MrJ-jxMfirAdxDs9zIiBg2Wug0z

I'll be posting individual lecture videos and related links in this thread throughout the semester.

#programming #unix #apue

...jetzt kann ich mich in Ruhe mit #NetBSD beschäftigen...für den Fall, dass #Debian Richtung #slop drifftet...

New Game : Rock Paper Scissor Debian NetBSD

Rock beats scissors
Scissors beat paper
Paper beats rock
#NetBSD beats #debian

#runbsd

Has anyone here played with GUI program in #go on #netbsd? I have tried #tk and #fyne. They both fail the hello world test, I tried on my newly installed #netbsd11, and with the same negative result on the other laptop's #netbsd10.
#tk lacks some eval functions.
#fyne lacks some #wayland related header files.
(I don't do wayland :)

#NetBSD seems to be maintaining stouter opposition to corruption by LLM sludge, but #FreeBSD supports my Nvidia RTX 3070 card which I can't replace right now as much as I want to. If I stick with FreeBSD I can fully use my 3440×1440 widescreen monitor. If I use NetBSD I'm stuck with a lower-resolution framebuffer. Should I:

Hey #ctwm / #NetBSD peeps,

How can I make ctwm's alt-tab behavior work like other desktops/wms, switching back and forth between the most recently used windows, instead of always going in one direction through the window list and requiring me to alternate between alt+tab and alt+shift+tab to alternate between two windows? :E

[blush] Ahem... This is *tomorrow* Thursday the 3rd, not the 2nd for the random #London #NetBSD meet up

I spend half my life fighting timezone issues in code, and the first time I post about a date without computer assistance I get and off-by-one error

(I think maybe the referenced ${beverageOfChoice} may need to be of higher proof than initially specified)

David

First BSD thing of any kind that I've heard of actually in the U.K. for a long time. (#EuroBSDCon has not been in the U.K. since half a decade *before* Brexit.)

Bit of a commute to inside the London ULEZ at 3 hours's notice, though. (-:

The 2nd of September is today. That might have been a typo.

https://mastodon.sdf.org/@abs0/117201860802391427

#NetBSD

Jay 🚩 boosted

abs(in)the » 🌐 2026-09-02 / 2026-09-02
@abs0@mastodon.sdf.org

Just on the offchance

Anyone around #London tomorrow (3rd Sep) fancying meeting random #NetBSD people over a ${beverageOfChoice}, and likely food

A few of us will be meeting at Beany Greens around 7pm - right next to Liverpool Street - https://www.daisygreenfood.com/location-beany-green-broadgate

Beany's features an "upbeat Aussie vibe", which I assume means any poisonous spiders will be smartly dressed and conversation will be erudite with the occasional profanity

I'll have a vintage bright green NetBSD Wasabi Slinky spring :)

Just on the offchance

Anyone around #London tomorrow (3rd Sep) fancying meeting random #NetBSD people over a ${beverageOfChoice}, and likely food

A few of us will be meeting at Beany Greens around 7pm - right next to Liverpool Street - https://www.daisygreenfood.com/location-beany-green-broadgate

Beany's features an "upbeat Aussie vibe", which I assume means any poisonous spiders will be smartly dressed and conversation will be erudite with the occasional profanity

I'll have a vintage bright green NetBSD Wasabi Slinky spring :)

@pertho

NETWORKING in Mewburn rc is a woolly concept and it does not help that it also has a magic tertiary meaning sometimes of an early/late divider.

The woolly $network target in van Smoorenberg rc has similar problems.

Most people who have come after Mewburn rc and van Smoorenburg rc have split the idea up.

The #unbound service is ordered before a name-services milestone in my system. The #systemd people order it before nss-lookup.

https://freedesktop.org/wiki/Software/systemd/NetworkTarget/

#NetBSD #FreeBSD #nosh #rc

Day 2

Set up the console environment:

* Install 'pkgin' to manage binary pkgs
* 'doas' for root privileges
* Forward root mail to my user
* 'intel-backlight' to control brightness
* Set 'terminus' as console font
* Modify root crontab to run '/etc/daily' at noon
* Accelerate keyboard repeat rate
* Enable intel-microcode updates
* Configure ssh...

https://www.dwarmstrong.org/netbsd-ssh-keys/

#40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

@mirabilos

As an aside: I don't know what your dd(1) is based upon, but if it's the traditional BSD #dd it should be possible to adapt this patch for #FreeBSD 10.3 dd to it, and you could become only the second person in history to have a dd with getopt(3).

I'm going to write a #NetBSD dd patch too.

I have boldly predicted that the world will add getopt to dd just before Sol goes red giant, even though avant-garde 4BSD changed ps(1) to getopt in 1990. (-:

https://github.com/jdebp/trueos/commit/8f870d5510f63a48ebab4633744e0b1a662f6ae9

#MirBSD

@linuxandyarn i think @stefano might be able to answer this. Or someone from #NetBSD community who has this setup.

@felimwhiteley @joeress @tubsta @latenightlinux
@fedops

Might I suggest a look at the BSDs? NetBSD has declared no AI, but is the most mysterious one. @stefano and @dwarmstrong are doing cool stuff with it.

Linux is living long enough to become the villain.

In a systemd suit.

edit: tags!

#RunBSD #40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD

A very goog morning to start testing the cryptographic device driver on #NetBSD with the help of Petizo, the coolest hacker ❤️.
Disk level encryption is what we all need in these days.
#privacy #FreeSoftware #CGD #encryption

Alt...

Petizo, small bodeguero dog is on Luis lap. Two laptops on a round, exterior table of a rural area house. The screens show the netbsd installer and the Cryptographic Device Driver man page in on the other. Two stickers one of GNU Health and the other "Hacking 0100 Freedom" on the top of the laptops

Hey #FreeBSD #NetBSD folks,

which mailing lists should one subscribe for technical development, discussions and diffs (such as tech@, ports@ for #OpenBSD)?

Ok, time to branch out in my #HomeServer configuration by switching the media server from #Debian to #NetBSD. (FreeBSD is embracing AI, so bleh.) Looks like the options are #MiniDLNA, which I played with once before, and #Gerbera and #MediaTomb, which I haven't.

Has anyone compared the three, especially on NetBSD, and to you have recommendations? I don't plan to run a desktop environment on the host.

Nullfs mounts are pretty neat. I'd like to use them in OpenBSD.

#openbsd #netbsd

I'm copying my pinned post from Twitter which reminds me of fun times with lovely people. I'd just left an AsiaBSDCon dinner with everyone in Tokyo:

#FreeBSD, #NetBSD, #OpenBSD? :'D

The super duper 8-way #chess tournament on my computer is almost done! And then I'm seriously considering giving #NetBSD another try...

⚠️ Planned obsolescence. After looking in my old and defunct computers, I found an Intel 7260 wireless card compatible with #NetBSD, and I was excited to plug it into my Thinkpad, when I noticed that this Lenovo uses a smaller socket 😕
It's a pity to see the impact tha techology waste has the environment because greedy corporations.
#RightToRepair #PlannedObsolence

Alt...

Two PCI wireless cards side by side on top of a motherboard. The one inserted in the motherboard has a different size making it incompatible with the other one,

Day 1

With the release of NetBSD 11.0, and reading about the neat things people are doing with it (particularly on minimal hardware such as @stefano and the #littlefedi project), I want to explore this BSD in more detail. Hence "40 Days of NetBSD", where the plan is to poke around the system a bit each day for the next 40 days to gain a deeper appreciation for the OS and Unix tools.

NetBSD now installed on my Thinkpad T480s. Let's go!

https://www.dwarmstrong.org/netbsd-encrypt-install/

#40DaysOfNetBSD #NetBSD #RunBSD

Alt...

Output of the 'pfetch' command on a fresh install of NetBSD 11.0 on a Thinkpad T480s.

Giving a new life to my X270 with NetBSD. Inspired by @stefano and @dwarmstrong
Coming from fvwm in OpenBSD, 15 minutes in and already like ctwm #netbsd

Alt...

ThinkPad X270 running NetBSD 11

dropQbsd porting from OpenBSD to FreeBSD almost complete: testing phase now. Same scripts run on both systems. mksh adopted for full BSD portability. Next challenge: include NextBSD.

The philosophy stays the same: few lines of code, no virtualization, dead-simple configuration. Compartmentalization without virtualization, built on BSD primitives. Most threat models, minimal attack surface.

https://git.sr.ht/~nobraininside/dropQbsd

#dropQbsd #openBSD #freebsd #netbsd #bsd #qubesOS #openSource #cybersecurity

Google Summer of Code 2026 Reports: Port the Enlightenment desktop environment to NetBSD - Project by Dimitris Gounaridis #GSoC #NetBSD https://blog.netbsd.org/tnf/entry/gsoc2026_enlightenment

Alt...

Logo for NetBSD OS

Oh duh, #ctwm supports opaque/live moving/resizing windows! How did I miss this all this time? XD

(in ~/.ctwmrc -- )

# hide window contents while altering windows for performance
#NoOpaqueMove
#NoOpaqueResize
#(comment those two out and reload)

I can't blame the #NetBSD folks for making the more performant option the default, even though I had opaque move/resize in (checks notes) 1995. ;)

(Of course, some folks might run the OS on older machines than that. It's technically possible!)

Now if I can just figure out how to move windows with the keyboard. Like, not a few pixels at a time, but snapping to the edges of the screen and other windows like you can in KDE Plasma. ;)