from Hacker News

A critical look at NetBSD’s installer

by jaypatelani on 6/4/25, 3:19 AM with 38 comments

  • by rahen on 6/4/25, 7:09 AM

    Interesting perspective. sysinst could certainly use better ergonomics, but I wonder whether he’s really approaching NetBSD like a typical user would - someone after a classic Unix experience on modern hardware.

    With an old-school Unix mindset myself, I’ve always found the CLI installers of OpenBSD and Alpine Linux cleaner, more straightforward and in line with that philosophy. Honestly, I’d rather see sysinst replaced by something along those lines.

  • by jmclnx on 6/4/25, 12:08 PM

    A rather fair review and the partitioning step can be confusing to new users. A first time user should read the Guide a few times and maybe refer to it during install. It renders fine on a smartphone.

    https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/

    One thing to note, if you create a separate /usr and/or /var partition, y0u really should (must) add this line or similar line to /etc/rc.conf

    critical_filesystems_local="/var /usr"

    otherwise you will get odd boot errors/warnings, Dir order does not matter.

  • by JSR_FDED on 6/4/25, 5:48 AM

    Great that you took the time to do a thorough and constructive write up!

    The perspective of an otherwise knowledgeable user who is new to something is incredibly valuable.

  • by rickcarlino on 6/4/25, 5:44 AM

    I appreciate the Gemini:// cross posting.

  • by sam_lowry_ on 6/4/25, 6:58 AM

    I wonder how the screenshots were taken. The installer run in a VM?

  • by JdeBP on 6/4/25, 3:45 PM

    For completeness, as I pointed out on the FediVerse: The article has things backwards when it comes to partition table schemes. It's the older firmwares that place the requirement on what partitioning scheme is used; not the newer ones. So the suggested change to one of the forms, as it stands, would be telling users the wrong thing.

    And Ed Maste has confirmed that FreeBSD is quite happy to accept non-U.S. keyboard layouts, contrary to the implication that NetBSD accepts them where FreeBSD has not. Even more ones, that is. (-:

    * https://mastodon.social/@emaste/114625612735189948

  • by hulitu on 6/4/25, 6:07 PM

    > Yes, since /usr and /var are initially of size 0, one can deduce that allocating no space to it will probably make the installer discard them

    Why would the installer discard them if you created them ? Do what i mean, not what i say ?