How to run NetBSD on Pyra and OpenPandora?

[openbsd98324]

Hello,

BSD operating systems are extremely good. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD have outstanding performances and are high quality software.
This makes BSD ideally suited for any use, namely servers, desktop, gaming,... media centers.
NetBSD would/could/... be well suited for Pyra and OpenPandora. It has a great desktop and the hardware support is pretty ok.
Example: Raspberry PI.
One can run anything on the PI using NetBSD. It is extremely stable. If you never heard of PKGSRC, please have a look, this is fantastic package manager from source.

The type of ARM is not officially supported. Anyhow, the NetBSD would run on the Pyra and OpenPandora with some little modifications.

I am trying to get NetBSD to run on this openpandora. NetBSD with desktop would be more advanced, ... stable, and faster than Linux.
I created ext2, with the netbsd kernel but I guess autoboot.txt cannot load a kernel7.img of BSD ?
I created the ld0a., edited config in the ext2 to try to boot netbsd.

Any ideas are welcome.

Please find the image of my current arm netbsd desktop, including base, comp, and the kernel (ready out of the box for SD/MMC).

http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.2/evbarm-earmv7hf/binary/gzimg/armv7.img.gz

 

[netcat]

NetBSD zealots!!

Gotta respect em...

Sorry I can't help you though.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

BSD seems really cool, but I failed to get it (think it was OpenBSD) working properly (drivers for a gui or network on my old X200). Interested in seeing it running on a Pyra though.

 

[openbsd98324]

BSD seems really cool, but I failed to get it (think it was OpenBSD) working properly (drivers for a gui or network on my old X200). Interested in seeing it running on a Pyra though.

What is the networking PCI card of your Lenovo ThinkPad X200 ?
You can still use a dongle in case. You will certainly get a beautiful Xorg desktop on it. see xsrc <-- X11/Xorg works fine on NetBSD.
Try this /boot.cfg

banner=Welcome to NetBSD Banner
banner=========================
banner=
banner=------------------------------------------
menu=Boot safe normally without i915:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;userconf disable i915drmkms;boot
menu=Boot Vesa 0x17f:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;vesa 0x17f;boot
menu=Boot normally:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;boot
menu=Boot single user:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;boot -s
menu=Boot rescue safe normally without i915:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;userconf disable i915drmkms;boot -s
banner=------------------------------------------
banner=------------------------------------------
menu=Boot safe Install gz without i915:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;userconf disable i915drmkms;boot netbsd-INSTALL.gz
banner=------------------------------------------
menu=Boot Rescue hd1a Disk without i915:rndseed /var/db/entropy-file;userconf disable i915drmkms;boot hd1a:netbsd
banner=------------------------------------------
menu=Drop to boot prompt:prompt
default=1
timeout=15
clear=1

Once booted, you can install any software with pkgin or automatically from source with pkgsrc:

export PKG_PATH="http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/pkgsrc/packages/NetBSD/amd64/9.1/All/" ;   pkg_add -v pkgin
pkgin install links mpg123

(and so on.).
To multiboot NetBSD or OpenBSD, you can still install grub (e.g. on amd64). NetBSD offers grub as well - if needed.


It is better to use NetBSD on ARMs for gaming, desktops.,... and so on. NetBSD desktop is better than the OpenBSD one.
NetBSD works very well on ARMs. in general.

The only thing is how to remove autoboot.txt to get the normal boot of NetBSD.

Have a look ... fine, isn't it?

 

[netcat]

Exactly the kind of wm I was keen to escape but now it looks attractive. Not too blingy suggests speed & stability. I was thinking it's olwm or some kind of cde or nextstep clone but now i notice the kde logo. I am flabbergasted.

Do you consider linux bug-ridden bloatware?

 

[openbsd98324]

Exactly the kind of wm I was keen to escape but now it looks attractive. Not too blingy suggests speed & stability. I was thinking it's olwm or some kind of cde or nextstep clone but now i notice the kde logo. I am flabbergasted.

Do you consider linux bug-ridden bloatware?

bloatware? well, Linux it is. Soon you will have to deal with Wayland too.

The major difference is that the BSD projects make sure that the users can compile everything from source. This is the major advantage.
See PKGSRC: https://www.pkgsrc.org/

I prefer a custom evilwm. it just works fine. FLTK is okay.

pkgsrc is a framework for managing third-party software on UNIX-like systems, currently containing over 17,900 packages. It is the default package manager of NetBSD and SmartOS, and can be used to enable freely available software to be built easily on a large number of other UNIX-like platforms. The binary packages that are produced by pkgsrc can be used without having to compile anything from source. It can be easily used to complement the software on an existing system.

pkgsrc is very versatile and configurable, supporting building packages for an arbitrary installation prefix, allowing multiple branches to coexist on one machine, a build options framework, and a compiler transformation framework, among other advanced features. Unprivileged use and installation is also supported.

NetBSD already contains the necessary tools for using pkgsrc; on other platforms you need to bootstrap pkgsrc to get the package management tools installed.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

@openbsd98324 Thanks for your reply. I'll give it another go (don't have a lot of spare time to fiddle with it now). Hoping to get a Framework laptop in a few months time, so will likely try it then.

 

[openbsd98324]

@openbsd98324 Thanks for your reply. I'll give it another go (don't have a lot of spare time to fiddle with it now). Hoping to get a Framework laptop in a few months time, so will likely try it then.

For usb/pendrive/memstick on 64bits, here is the magic: http://cdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.2/images/NetBSD-9.2-amd64-install.img.gz

Have fun!

 

[netcat]

bloatware? well, Linux it is

linux is like an omelette. you decide to make (administer) it yourself, it looks like shit (more like scrambled eggs) but the overall taste is relatively pleasant. BSD is like making an omelette out of tofu.

 

[openbsd98324]

linux is like an omelette. you decide to make (administer) it yourself, it looks like shit (more like scrambled eggs) but the overall taste is relatively pleasant. BSD is like making an omelette out of tofu.

Well, the source code rules.

The NetBSD kernel is smaller, more efficient. The userland is as well.

Less lines of codes -- better.

 

[netcat]

i hate eggs btw

 

[openbsd98324]

Eggs are really healthy

playing Megalomania on hatari on NetBSD.
Epoch #2. already.

That game was really cool.

 

[ClockworkCoder]

MegaLoMania! That brings back memories.

Tofu makes a great (no)cheese sauce - I'm not vegan, but I really like it.

The trouble with Linux is that it's almost become too successful. Corporate sponsorship and politics often weigh heavily, and it does have a rather too large monolithic kernel - I don't mind having to work a little extra to get a *BSD working, as I'd know that it would be a pretty slick-by-comparison experience. Only other thing holding me back is how long it can take for ports to be updated - I stopped using Mint / Ubuntu years ago because of too many "dependancy hell" experiences, and I suspect if I want to use the latest version of a certain package, I may have similar problems with BSD. Although I don't install as much now as I used to.

Looks like someone has been spending a huge amount of time to attempt to reduce it (the Linux kernel) down though:

Massive ~2.3k Patch Series Would Improve Linux Build Times 50~80% & Fix "Dependency Hell" - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

 

[openbsd98324]

MegaLoMania! That brings back memories.

Tofu makes a great (no)cheese sauce - I'm not vegan, but I really like it.

The trouble with Linux is that it's almost become too successful. Corporate sponsorship and politics often weigh heavily, and it does have a rather too large monolithic kernel - I don't mind having to work a little extra to get a *BSD working, as I'd know that it would be a pretty slick-by-comparison experience. Only other thing holding me back is how long it can take for ports to be updated - I stopped using Mint / Ubuntu years ago because of too many "dependancy hell" experiences, and I suspect if I want to use the latest version of a certain package, I may have similar problems with BSD. Although I don't install as much now as I used to.

Looks like someone has been spending a huge amount of time to attempt to reduce it (the Linux kernel) down though:

Massive ~2.3k Patch Series Would Improve Linux Build Times 50~80% & Fix "Dependency Hell" - Phoronix

www.phoronix.com

That's why lot of people run back to Slackware nowadays.

It is better to stick to Unix/BSD. It has the Unix philosophy.

** concerning "little extra", there is just nothing to do, in order to get it work. It works out of the box, really. It is BSD. - Once, Dave told me: "NetBSD just works and I know how it works".
/boot.cfg is given above in case you have special video card.

 

[netcat]

my concern is leveraging hardware acceleration

 

[levi]

That depends on exactly what you mean by acceleration. Are you referring the extra opcodes the more modern processors have? Compilers generally discover that during their configuration phase, and use them by default. Or are you referring to perhiferals like graphics cards? Graphics cards are generally fairly old tech these days so you just need something that talks openGL and you're away, but the compiler can't help there. Any other weird thing you'll need specific software to talk to that and to use it.

 

[netcat]

I was thinking of graphics cards. iiuc leveraging the hardware is a work in progress on pyra running linux. when I was running bsd and even Linux on zaurus the drivers dictated my hardware. now we have an soc so if bsd doesn't support a chipset you might be sol.

 

[openbsd98324]

my concern is leveraging hardware acceleration

On ARM, Netbsd does quite good with acceleration. You saw that it works. However, we cannot get for the moment ioquake3 on it, on PI.
We await for the next netbsd for raspberry pi 4.

Concerning AMD64, ...i386, it depends very much the machine. You can ask the channel which video card is best supported.

When people will go Wayland, more developers will go BSD and make better drivers. Imagine that the results are done by a very small size dev team.
OpenBSD is roughly <60-100 persons only. They do quite much, no? There is no C++ any longer, this is a great benefit.

 

[openbsd98324]

You edited your post. Ok, let's write anyhow.

I was thinking of graphics cards. iiuc leveraging the hardware is a work in progress on pyra running linux. when I was running bsd and even Linux on zaurus the drivers dictated my hardware. now we have an soc so if bsd doesn't support a chipset you might be sol.

You have a Zaurus? with netbsd, how do you boot it?
I have one, but never got 2 min to try to run netbsd on it.

I moved it to andromeda debian with icewm, which does not let netbsd to boot like it ought to.
I should have move the base OS directly to netbsd, without flashing to the boot for Linux.

 

[netcat]

No my friend ran NetBSD on the Zaurus (and a few other ubscure hardwares) i just ran cacko linux. I mean I run cacko linux. The Z is not legacy until i get my Prya.

FreeBSD had four developers for the longest time. That's the best team imo, four super talented domain experts. All key men. That's why it's so good.