While tidying up the cabinet in my studio, I found this box with 3 CDs. Alpha, of course, refers to the architecture. And there's a long story behind it that made me smile - which I'll publish on one of my blogs soon.

#FreeBSD #NetBSD #Debian #Alpha

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A CD jewel case labeled by hand with several operating system names and versions: "FreeBSD 5.3", "NetBSD 2.0", "Debian 'Testing' Sarge", and "ALPHA". The case insert contains 3 TDK CD-R Speed-X discs. The handwriting suggests the CD contains installation or boot media for Alpha architecture systems.

I think I need more reasons to use #OpenBSD. I used to be a heavy user, even used to run it on my laptop, but currently manage zero installations.

I also think I should give #NetBSD a fair shake, I've only ever installed it twice, and never really given it a chance.

Using OpenBSD is easy, I'll probably convert my wireguard router over to it.

But any suggestions on NetBSD use cases? I mean this from the context of a heavy #FreeBSD user with a massive emphasis on jails.

#BSD #UNIX

Is there a good #NetBSD supported #retrocomputing arch/platform that doesn't require soldering or idle 100W power draw? I know, a miracle.

I used to have a living room with racks of SGI and Sun and other machines 25 years ago. Don't really want to go nuts like that again, I'm OK with a few toys and not all-the-toys.

I can emulate, thankfully, but something cool about making "junk" useful again.

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱/𝟬𝟲/𝟬𝟮 (Valuable News - 2025/06/02) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/06/02/valuable-news-2025-06-02/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱/𝟬𝟲/𝟬𝟮 (Valuable News - 2025/06/02) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/06/02/valuable-news-2025-06-02/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

#Today I am looking forward to:
- a new series of penetration tests for a client
- provisioning testing for #NetBSD in VMs for server and C #development (via Emacs)
- #painting acrylic on canvas board to get started
- learning more about the Royal Game of Ur, that I just learned about this past weekend

@disser @ed1conf @paul_ipv6 @robpike In 1983 when Siemens introduced Unix (SINIX) on a mini computer series I was picked for training. We were taught that vi is ALWAYS there. Still use it ;) vi, on #OpenBSD, #NetBSD and #Alpine Linux.
Back then I also read a German translation of K&R’s “Programmieren in C”. I don’t do C any more, but I’m learning Go.

#NetBSD #m68k now has binary packages for clang and llvm.

https://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/m68k/10.0_2025Q1/All/

Does anyone want to give them a try?

Épisode 3 de la saga #NetBSD et #virtualisation avec #NVMM! À très vite sur https://twitch.tv/ahp_nils ! #sysadmin #devops #twitchfr #twitchstreamer #TwitchStreamers #BSD #qemu

Come September, there will be a gathering of #BSD developers and users in Zagreb, Croatia -- #eurobsdcon 2025.

See https://2025.eurobsdcon.org/ for details, and you can submit your talk or tutorial at https://events.eurobsdcon.org/2025/cfp until 2025-06-21.

See you in Zagreb!

#conference #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #unix #development #devops #freesoftware #libresoftware @EuroBSDCon

The #RaspberryPi hurdle that #OpenBSD fell at was its installer.

Despite it presenting two different partition table editors, I couldn't persuade it to just simply use the already existing single UFS volume that was already there. It just does not seem to cater for the idea that one might want to install to the same removable DASD that one is using, with boot, system, and swap as already defined. It either led me down a path where it zapped the existing partition table, and all of the install files, or demanded that there be another solid-state medium to install to.

Which is sad, because a Pi with just a TF card and a single purpose is still a significant use case.

Whereas in NetBSD's sysinst, choosing to install to the same system is the first option on its third menu, after picking the installer language and choosing to install.

This is a 2 horse race being comfortably won by #NetBSD, currently. I've not tried #FreeBSD yet.

#PartitionTables

This was not supposed to be when I was doing #NetBSD adjustments to #redo, #nosh, and #djbwares at all. That was supposed to be on the *next* #RaspberryPi.

This was *supposed* to be the point at which I checked that the #OpenBSD parts of the code, untested since before COVID Lockdown, still worked.

(There are a lot of changes in 1.41.)

This was *supposed* to be getting me a vanilla Pi in a non-fancy case running #OpenBSD, nosh, and djbwares; sitting in a corner quietly.

NetBSD, now.

The second attempt — coming soon — thus has promise. The errors were mainly the holes in the code that I'd left ready inside if defined(__NetBSD__) blocks, and hadn't coded for how NetBSD does things. I am from that experience expecting few problems with building #djbwares .

I'm doing half-hour-long backups at stages during the installation process, this time.

#nosh #redo #RaspberryPi #NetBSD

As an aside here, I note that I got #redo compiled for arm64 with no changes, apart from disabling pod2man for the manual pages because I forgot to install it, and was partway through compiling #nosh for arm64 when I lost everything due to a crash that put #NetBSD's UFS1 partition into an unrecoverable state.

There are some errors that even after all these years #fsck cannot fix.

#RaspberryPi

The firmware on a #RaspberryPi 4 does not mind if one changes the partition types of the #FreeBSD and #OpenBSD FAT volumes to EFI system, matching #NetBSD in spirit if not in modern partitioning scheme.

OpenBSD again almost fell at the hurdle here. It is extraordinarily sensitive to the status of its UFS1 partition. Touch it, or attempt to use a fresh one made from scratch, and its booloader thinks that it is talking to an esp device instead of to an sd device, and fails. This is a very strange dependency.

NetBSD, in contrast, did not bat an eyelid when I splatted about 5GiB of home directory, dotfiles, and tooling onto its UFS1 volume, using pax on another machine which had the TF card in a card reader.

NetBSD also auto-fixes the backup copy of the EFI partition table after its device re-sizing step. It didn't bat an eyelid, again, when I adjusted the initial card myself ahead of time using FreeBSD's #gpart recover.

#UEFI #PartitionTables #pax

This is good, because installing and using #TianoCore #UEFI firmware in place of u-boot seems to be the only way to get the #OpenBSD boot loader to recognize the #RaspberryPi's on-board display and a USB keyboard.

It is otherwise insistent on using the UART, which makes it impossible to press that "any" key to get the boot loader to stop so that one can type the magic incantation to get the kernel proper — in its turn — to use the display and keyboard. It too defaults to using the UART.

This is a Pi 4 in a PiHut "modular" case, still resembling that #Blakes7 prop. It's not designed for DB9 sockets, but it has HDMI and USB holes, plus optional plastic shields for covering them to just let power and Ethernet in when the Pi is in production.

Maintenance with just a keyboard and monitor is the goal. OpenBSD barely cleared this first hurdle of controlling its boot loader.

(It fell at a subsequent hurdle, which is why I'm now trying #NetBSD and #FreeBSD.)

#DASD #PartitionTables

دوستانی که علاقه‌مند به کار با سرور‌های شبه یونیکسی هستن، یکی از فعال‌های #BSD داره #سرور_مجازی رایگان با سیستم‌عامل‌های خانوادهٔ‌ #بی‌اس‌دی و البته خانوادهٔ #سولاریس میده. بقیه کسایی که سرور مجازی گرفتن گفتن خودش هم راهنمایی می‌کنه. پیوند مستقیم رو این‌جا نزاشتم تا خودتون کمی زحمتش رو بکشید. چیزی که باید جستجو کنید #BoxyBSD هست.

کسی که این سرور‌ها رو میده، @gyptazy هست.

#نرم‌افزار_آزاد #FreeBSD

#OpenBSD #OpenIndiana #Solaris #NetBSD #RunBSD #vps #سرور

Using #netbsd reminds me so much of when I first used linux - everything feels understandable and transparent without the layers of complexity that tends to haunt modern linux distribution.

#FreeBSD's FAT16 partition is 50MiB, and #NetBSD's FAT32 partition is 80MiB. These comfortably take additional files.

FAT32 is technically superior, with the variable-length root directory, but for DASD volumes whose whole purpose is to contain a couple of tens of boot loader files it's not much of a practical advantage here. And indeed on the downside, the FATs are an order of magnitude bigger.

#OpenBSD's FAT16 partition in contrast is a tiny 8MiB. #TianoCore UEFI firmware, approximately 4MiB, does not fit on it without deleting stuff.

Ironically, it is preceded by twice that amount, 16MiB, in free space not allocated to any partition. It's possible to delete the 8MiB Microsoft partition and re-create a 23MiB one, as long as one saves and restores the contents.

#UEFI #DASD #PartitionTables #RaspberryPi

It's interesting to see who the early adopters in the BSD world are when it comes to various things. Such as the partitioning on their #RaspberryPi installer images.

#OpenBSD has an old "MBR" partition table. No container partitions, just a UFS1 volume in an OpenBSD primary partition and a FAT16 volume in a >1024cyl Microsoft primary partition.

#FreeBSD has an old "MBR" partition table. It too has a FAT16 volume in a >1024cyl Microsoft partition. It has container partitions, though, with an even older BSD disklabel in a FreeBSD primary partition and a UFS2 volume contained inside that.

Waving hello from the 21st century, #NetBSD has an EFI partition table. No container partitions, of course. There is a FAT32 volume in an EFI System partition, and a UFS1 volume in a NetBSD partition.

#UEFI #DASD #PartitionTables

Oh that was easy. Installs just fine, no worse than Linux. Not everything works out of the box but I just need ethernet so good enough for now!

Great work #netbsd team! From my searches I expected more... hoop jumping.

Installing netbsd on an intel mac mini 🤞wish me luck!

#netbsd

I try on #NetBSD again.

Alt...

I still cannot use the network.

NetBSD/C/syscalls question. Certain NetBSD syscalls contain a PAD argument, which the syscalls.master documentation states:

PAD     argument not part of the C interface, used only for padding

Does this mean that a user-land assembly program must still push an empty argument onto the stack for the PAD argument? Or does it only exist in kernel function declaration for the syscall?

#netbsd #syscalls

Some photos of Nagoya *BSD Users' Group and Japan NetBSD Users' Group booth at Open Source Conference 2025 Nagoya (Japan) held on May 31.
We demonstrated some retro machines such as #NetBSD/macppc on Mac mini, NetBSD/evbarm on Raspberry Pi 3, NetBSD/i386 on Fujitsu laptop with old good Pentium CPU, NetBSD/evbppc on Nintendo Wii and #OpenBSD/luna88k and #FUZIX on LUNA-88K2 at the booth.
I also had a small talk about OpenBSD/luna88k and FUZIX. #oscnagoya

I boot up #NetBSD from the install image, and it has sshd, Postfix, and inetd running before I even get to set the superuser password. Fortunately, by default it's only listening on the SSH port, on both TCP/IP v4 and v6.

But given the amount of SSH attempts per second one has to fend off nowadays, and given that whether sshd is running is a configurable option in sysinst, it's a bit off that sshd is on until the installer turns it off, or one manually turns it off.

It's not even as if it's arguably useful at that point. The only non-service account in the account database at the time is root, and root login over SSH is disabled.

The same goes for inetd and Postfix. Those seem like something that should be off at first until the installer/administrator turns them on, too.

This is an operating system bootstrapped from an installation DASD, which hasn't done any installing at all yet. It has no business delivering mail or being ready for TELNET or finger.

#ComputerSecurity #SSH

In a little more than a week, people like me will be heading to #Ottawa for #bsdcan.

You can still register for the conference at https://www.bsdcan.org/2025/registration.html, and browse https://www.bsdcan.org/ for info.

#openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #unix #development #networking #devops #sysadmin #experience #conference

I had set up my old old laptop as terminal for 9front by drawterm.
Lenovo S21e, NetBSD
and
Vampire4 StandAlone !!, this is new(^_^)
#9front
#drawterm
#netbsd
#vampire4standalone

@lemgandi that's just Chris Barnatt who does gloss over things in a noob-friendly way.

"#Linux" is literally the #OS equivalent of a #Diesel engine as it's customizeable and resizeable from a single cylinder tiny unit that has less displacement than a pint to a giant heavy fuel oil ship diesel who's displacement is measured in cubic meters and everything in between.

• So people can have anything from tiny to huge and from minimalist to fancy with only hardware requirements and their own patience limiting them.

(Some folks will say #NetBSD is a two-stroke becaise it can be made to run on anything!)

Something i found really cool Japanese tongue twister
#NetBSD #RunBSD
https://youtu.be/J76S5q_ETfo

Toot from pkgsrc/www/firefox-139.0.1 under NetBSD/amd64-current. #pkgsrc #NetBSD

Curious if the #unix geek #community I seek is simply those coding Unix-like operating systems, like perhaps my favorite #NetBSD.

I should consider joining that community by contributing and the shared struggle and collaboration joys.

I’ve wondered and dabbled before but never really did anything with contributing to the project. It may be time to do it for reals.

I have a spare RPi 2 (model B v1.1) and 3 (B v1.2)... think I'll try #OpenBSD and #NetBSD on them to tinker with. Last time I tried OpenBSD was on my Ultra 5 back in, um, probably ~2008 (I should boot it and see what version is on it, if I can find suitable cables).

It looks like NetBSD runs on the Pi2 and OpenBSD needs >= Pi3 so I'll do them that way round I guess.

#RunBSD

Some random photos from OSDay 2025. I gave a talk about the BSD family and why to use them in 2025.

2/X

#OSDay #OSDay25 #OSDay2025 #Conference #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #OpenSource #OSS

Alt...

Me, standing up and presenting myself. "I solve problems"

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Me and my wife, smiling while listening to an interesting presentation

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One of the staff members asking me something about AI

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The trophy - I won :-)

Some random photos from OSDay 2025. I gave a talk about the BSD family and why to use them in 2025.

1/X

#OSDay #OSDay25 #OSDay2025 #Conference #RunBSD #FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD #OpenSource #OSS

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Group photo of the OSDay staff and speakers

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My laptop, with the BSD Cafe sticker, is projecting the BSD Cafe logo

Alt...

Me, giving my opinion about the Evolution of Open Source

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Me, explaining why I think we lost the value of stability

Mal wieder ein etwas besserer #Golem #BesserWissen #Podcast zur Geschichte und Entwicklung von #Unix; inspiriert von Vorläufer #Multics sowie die modernen Nachfahren #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD, #NetBSD und #MacOS sowie am Rande auch dessen Neuinterpretation #Linux.

"Podcast Besser Wissen: Von Multics zu Unix"
https://www.golem.de/news/podcast-besser-wissen-von-multics-zu-unix-2505-196557.html

#Betriebssystem

@Wintermute_BBS @VoidLinux I ❤️ #NetBSD (and the other BSDs too). Use it daily.

@arosano @justine I set up a virtual #NetBSD instance on #Hyperv. The virtual drive is 1GB. I have about 280MB of free space to play with.

Hacker Public Radio BSD Overview https://lobste.rs/s/uvozyb #dragonflybsd #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd
https://hackerpublicradio.org/eps/hpr4388/index.html

@justine I recently got a cheap thinkcentre just to have a dedicated (not dual-boot) #NetBSD desktop

@claudiom @justine

I tried #NetBSD on a cheap second hand HP desktop, and I was pleasantly surprised to see an X11 login and full desktop environment come up right after installation. 🤓

@justine #NetBSD rocks on the desktop. People who say otherwise have probably never even tried it. #RunBSD

Another great episode of #BSDNow is out!

https://www.bsdnow.tv/613

@bsdnow @Tubsta

#Podcast #RunBSD #BSD #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD

⚠️ Resources got restocked:

- Two new nodes in Netherlands
- One new node in Ukraine
- Extended resources on nodes in Germany

@gyptazy is now improving the self-service portal and then we can go straight to the 1k free boxes :)

#RUNBSD #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #MidnightBSD #DragonflyBSD

@farooqkz

The idea that one can just restart X servers and whatnot without rebooting has, apart from the re-executing process 1 thing which is one of the few new things in this area in recent years, been around longer than Linux itself has.

On old minicomputers and Big Iron multiuser systems not rebooting was *normal*, and that's the sort of mindset that Unix inherited.

It used to be a thing a couple of decades ago back when the BBC and others were running their WWW sites on commercial Unices to go to a particular WWW site that figured out the system uptimes and graphed them. The WWW sites running #Solaris et al. had uptimes measured in years. A stark contrast at the time to the likes of Microsoft IIS.

#Unix #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD