from Hacker News

Running NetBSD on IBM ThinkPad 380Z

by jaypatelani on 12/17/24, 4:51 AM with 63 comments

by Aldipower on 12/17/24, 9:35 AM
In my basement are quite some old but for the time powerful unix machines. SGI Indigo2, Sun Fire, a Pentium II with Knoppix Linux or my Samsung Laptop from 2010 with Ubuntu 16.04. They all boot up quite fast into a nice looking and snappy X Window system. Fantastic machines. Until.. You try to open a web browser, if there is even a modern one available. If you try to open a modern web browser on those machines, you suddenly get a feel how bloated our modern software and web is! Although the SGI has the original Netscape Navigator installed, that is quite some fun in terms of historic reasons.
by bitwize on 12/17/24, 5:20 AM
And you can learn how to hack the NetBSD kernel just by reading the man pages. That's how good BSD documentation is.
Those screen shots make me 90s in my pants. That's what a real powerhouse workstation looked like in my college years.
by donquichotte on 12/17/24, 8:46 AM
I recently installed NetBSD on a Thinkpad T430s, it is surprisingly snappy and usable, except when firefox is running.
With i3wm, tmux and helix with clangd it is a capable development machine with a surprisingly modern feel, only the compile times give away that the machine is from the early 2010s. Even WiFi is working, and pkgsrc is fast and well-stocked with the newest software.
by jmclnx on 12/17/24, 1:37 PM
I like seeing all these NetBSD articles ob various sites. That OS, especially 10.0 seems to work great. I recently started using NetBSD again because I finally got a couple of free "older" thinkpads. My old hardware failed about 5 years ago and the Laptop I replaced it with has troubling hardware for both Open/NetBSD.
The 2 "new" systems (T430, T61) runs NetBSD without any issues. FWIW, if running a BSD you may want to add your dmesg here:
https://dmesgd.nycbug.org/
Also curious, what is that file manager in the print ?
by justmarc on 12/17/24, 7:33 AM
A lovely ride down memory lane. These IBM machines were all works of old, beautiful computing art.
by reidrac on 12/17/24, 9:46 AM
> It may not be mainstream enough for a daily driver, but I think it's the ultimate UNIX to put on a spare, underpowered machine.
Kind of my feelings when I run OpenBSD on an old desktop back in early 2000. It was a Pentium 133MHz IIRC and I had it as a text only (although it run X11 with WindowMaker just fine), for text things, learning, tinkering with services, and things like that.
It felt UNIX, whatever that really means.
by aaaaaaron on 12/17/24, 10:34 AM
> It doesn't overwhelm you with thousands of packages and dozens of boot services right in a fresh install. On the contrary, it does only what you tell it to do. It puts you in charge and makes you feel like you can understand it top to bottom.
Just like Arch Linux and Gentoo, of course.
by rfmoz on 12/17/24, 8:53 PM
I just came across this article after reading what's new in SystemD v257
It's a miracle how simple NetBSD still is, a few foo=NO in /etc/rc.conf and a check with ps auxc after rebooting, that's all.
by bch on 12/17/24, 7:10 AM
> It may not be mainstream enough for a daily driver
Horses for courses - it's my daily driver for development and administration. To be fair though, I relegate the vast majority of consuming the web to a mobile device.
by _joel on 12/17/24, 9:31 AM
Fond memories of running a nascent Gentoo on my X21 (old one!). I still yearn for how snappy that machine was, even 20 years later. That had a bit more grunt to it, however. PIII 700.
by LAC-Tech on 12/17/24, 10:20 AM
Enjoyed this write up. I really need to get some machines to run NetBSD on, I find virtual machines to be such a chore.
Has also encouraged me to take another look at xterm.
by AshamedCaptain on 12/17/24, 8:57 AM
> In general it's safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition.
Right until there is an update or anything and a bootloader or one of its required files gets written past the 8GB barrier, rendering your system unbootable.
by 1vuio0pswjnm7 on 12/17/24, 11:07 PM
"It doesn't matter to operating systems, but confuses some bootloaders. In general it's safer to use a smaller root partition and a separate one for /home. However, NetBSD worked just fine off a single full-disk partition."
A favourite component of NetBSD for me has always been the i386 bootloader. Perhaps it is personal taste but I have not found another one that I like better.
"Even NetBSD comes with some bloatware ;-) To save as much RAM as possible, you can turn it off by adding to /etc/rc.conf:
```
   inetd=NO
   postfix=NO
   cron=NO
   virecover=NO
   makemandb=NO
   powerd=NO
   syslogd=NO"
```
Isn't powerd off by default
For example, if install provided sets from https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-9.4/i386/binary/set...
Look at https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/etc/d...
"You can also reduce the amount of consoles by commenting them out in /etc/ttys."
By default only one tty is enabled
Look at https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/etc/e...
NetBSD might have some "bloatware" but _the user must enable it_ first
Everything is off by default. That is one of the things that makes NetBSD great IMHO
"I was able to fix it by adding usermod disable wss to the bootloader line."
Does he mean userconf
Another option is comment the driver out in the kernel source and recompile
For example https://ftp.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD/NetBSD-release-9/src/sys/a...
"... I think it's the ultimate UNIX to put on a spare, underpowered machine."
100%
Some folks who are not "developers" or gamers use underpowered computers every day
I've used it for decades as a daily driver
by Borg3 on 12/17/24, 9:00 AM
I wonder if that memory usage is with X running. If yes, then Im very impressed. 32MB with X is very decent result.
by wkat4242 on 12/17/24, 8:03 AM
> It doesn't overwhelm you with thousands of packages and dozens of boot services right in a fresh install. On the contrary, it does only what you tell it to do. It puts you in charge and makes you feel like you can understand it top to bottom.
Yeah I feel the same way though to a lesser extent about FreeBSD.
It's a great OS that doesn't try to do too much and push the latest fads on you like the mainstream Linux distros. But it's also very useable as daily driver and it is that for me.
The only thing I don't like is that it gets bloated with lots of linuxisms if you try to use something like gnome or bsd. Dbus and pulseaudio, stuff like that. It makes for a bit of a weird mix and match.