Got my hands on an old Mac Mini G4 PPC and immediately installed NetBSD 10 #macppc. Good docs of course, including specific to the G4. Once you get the hang of partioning for Open Firmware 3, pretty straight forward. My first Apple product 😂
#BoxyBSD is a non-profit VM & service provider for the open-source community with a focus on BSD based Systems like #FreeBSD, #OpenBSD and #NetBSD. BoxyBSD also provides additional services like webhosting, git, email and DNS solutions for #opensource projects to give valuable things back to the community.
sometimes i miss simpler days. this is a fresh install of netbsd in a vm. /sbin/init is 36K. there is no desktop environment beyond vanilla x11 with ctwm. by all appearances, this could pass for #retrocomputing.
I vividly remember when, less than 20 years ago, they used to ask me, "Why do you want to do this with Linux|Free|Open|NetBSD when it can be done with Windows? Everyone uses it!" Today, the question is similar but different: "Why do you want to do this on Free|Open|Net|DragonflyBSD when it can be done with Linux? Everyone uses Linux for this!"
The problem is precisely this: if everyone is doing it, do we really take it for granted that it's the best solution? I stay informed and have everything in production: all the BSDs and many Linux distributions, choosing the best tool each time, in my opinion, to achieve a result.
Why people always feel the need to conform to everyone and everything, and continue to decide what's better based on trends, personal beliefs, or social conventions, will forever remain a mystery to me.
I have a small little (old) netbook with VIA VX800 GPU.
It had been running #Debian for 14 years. The openchrome driver for this machine broke in Debian 12 (segfault). I don’t blame the the Debian team, it seems that Linux is moving away from X11 towards Wayland, which is sensible for new machines.
But I like to keep this old machine running, it does its job well at 800x480px. NetBSD 9.2 works fine out-of-the-box. And it runs #emacs fast enough.
Hey #BSD friends. I want to try some bsd as my daly driver. Work and everything and I need some help to find live systems to try on my hardware. Any recomendation? #freebsd, #openbsd, #netbsd will work for me.
BSDCan 2024 will be held 31 May - 1 June (Fri-Sat), 2024 in Ottawa,
at the University of Ottawa. It will be preceded by two
days of tutorials on 29-30 May (Wed-Thu).
Also: do not miss out on the Goat BOF on Tuesday 28 May.
For the safety of speakers and attendees, this conference will again
follow the mask policy outlined at https://bsdcan.org.
"Code generated by a large language model or similar technology, such as GitHub/Microsoft's Copilot, OpenAI's ChatGPT, or Facebook/Meta's Code Llama, is presumed to be tainted code, and must not be committed without prior written approval by core."
Hey there #FPGA hackers! If you want to do open source FPGA development on #NetBSD, now you can! I've just made pkgsrc packages for YosysHQ's icestorm, nextpnr-ice40, and yosys.
NetBSD has been broken on the hpcmips platform for any release after NetBSD 7...
On my WorkPad z50, recent kernels (past about NetBSD 9) won't find PCMCIA devices. There also seems to be some general problem with binaries built for the vr41xx MIPS CPUs causing segfaults.
There's a NetBSD developer interested in finding out what's wrong, but I really don't have the resources (and patience) for the required testing all by myself.
So is there anyone out there with one of the supported machines (WorkPad z50 and NEC MobilePro seem to have been reasonably common in the West) and some time to spare to run NetBSD test kernels and report back results?
Full hardware list is at https://wiki.netbsd.org/ports/hpcmips/supported_machines/
The old netbsd-hpcmips mailing list was deemed too low-traffic a couple of years ago, and all discussion about these systems is now on port-mips: https://www.netbsd.org/mailinglists/#port-mips
I think this stance is exactly right. Until the copyright and licensing issues with LLMs have been tested in courts, it is a huge risk to be including LLM-generated code. Especially when the LICENSE is such a defining part of the project.
To those that ask “but how will they know”—ultimately, they cannot, but having a clear policy like this sets expectations upfront; just like they have a policy not to include GPL-licensed code.
Ok, folks, here's NetBSD/virt68k booting multi-user after running through the installer (but not configuring anything because this was just a smoke test).
If you too have #BSD (#OpenBSD, #FreeBSD, #NetBSD or related) material you want to present and would like to go to #Ottawa end May to start of June to do that and hang out with other BSD people, go to https://www.bsdcan.org/2024/papers.php and follow the submission instructions until Monday February 12th.