Share your NetBSD experience (for FreeBSD users)

YYY__ said:
What would you do with those smartphones if you could install NetBSD? ??
Click to expand...
Well, provided that the Wi-Fi works, similar to a Raspberry, such a device could be a little server in the private home network serving as ftp, dlna, samba server or whatever, accessible and configurable through ssh from your PC. As those smartphones all have a slot for micro SD cards, I guess enough additional space for storage could be achieved. Just an idea.
 
YYY__ said:
Note: Battery-powered devices ready to catch fire if you keep them plugged in permanently.
Click to expand...
Thanks for the info, but could someone answer the original question, please? Or has nobody ever tried to flash NetBSD to a smartphone, or can at least rule out it's not possible in the first place?
 
cabriofahrer said:
Thanks for the info, but could someone answer the original question, please? Or has nobody ever tried to flash NetBSD to a smartphone, or can at least rule out it's not possible in the first place?
Click to expand...

forums.freebsd.org

FreeBSD Forums Rules

This section contains general FreeBSD Forums rules which should be followed by all members in order to keep the quality of these forums on a high level. Though many of the FreeBSD development members read this forum, we cannot always guarantee that we will get to your questions in a timely...
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
7. We will not allow technical/support questions about any operating system other than FreeBSD anywhere on this forum. That includes the Off-Topic forum. Always ask technical/support questions about other operating systems on the forums or mailing lists associated with those operating systems.
Click to expand...
 
I don't have a problem installing everything from the start and configuring the system
(on NetBSD i was also compiling some apps from pkgsrc)
What makes me crazy is the crazy slow pkg download speeds !
This is insane !

SR_Ind said:
Bumping up this thread :)

Long time FreeBSD user here.
I am moving away from FreeBSD. Sort of.
I will be watching, but focussing more on NetBSD.

The thing is this.
FreeBSD nowadays works very well on desktop. Kudos to the FreeBSD team. If you have a mainstream hardware (HP/DELL/LENOVO) that is in the market for last 2-3 years, then FreeBSD will work wonderfully.

Now the reason for chipping in here.
My primary work is IoT applications and Edge computing.

There I find that NetBSD has better support for peripherals.

So, I made a trade off.
Desktop ? Windows is fine to get things done. Even Debian which I have in dual boot mode.

Since, I have to get my products out, I need a platform where junior firmware engineers can start off with quick prototyping.

FreeBSD is breeze to install and setup.
But for a widely used tinkering board like Raspberry Pi (lot of people have mentioned in the thread here), FreeBSD does not have support for Bluetooth, WiFi, DSI, CSI.
Even the SPI support is not there.

FWIW, FreeBSD Bluetooth is broken even of mainstream AMD64/x86-64 platform.

NetBSD is a pain to install.
But once that is done, I found most peripherals working except SPI.

If I were to prototype a outdoor sensing platform on Raspberry Pi or any such widely available ARM SoC, I really don't care about CSI and DSI.
So, here the deal breaker was lack of radio networking support.

Most smart sensors in the market work with Bluetooth Low Energy.

I'm getting down to writing a NetBSD SPI driver that can be accessed from user space daemons. I can live with that.

So, it will be a slightly outdated NetBSD desktop working with half a dozen ARM SoC running NetBSD.
I wish it were FreeBSD.

I don't know.
It doesn't make any sense to me why FreeBSD Foundation wants to lose the IoT market.

But as I mentioned FreeBSD will be on constant watchlist.
Click to expand...
 
I don't like the fact that, with pkgsrc, I have to manually change the umask from 027 to 022 when running`make && sudo make install`. Otherwise I end up with binaries I can't execute.
 
In general good, I found it more dificult that FreeBSB for customize...
As desktop user .. dont like it , too slow
As server..dont try it yet
 
Cath O'Deray said:
Do you get acceptable speeds
Click to expand...

If you look at christhegreek’s posts many are about poor network performance at his location.

For example:

forums.freebsd.org

Packages download speed is ultra slow ! 00's slow ! I could actually compile from source these packages and still would be installed faster.

Packages download speed is ultra slow ! 00's slow ! I could actually compile from source these packages and still many of them would be installed faster. I live in Greece and pkg download speed is awful.
forums.freebsd.org forums.freebsd.org
 
I have been trying NetBSD on my 8 year old Asus ROG. Also have been trying OpenBSD, GhostBSD, NomandBSD, FreeBSD and HardenedBSD. I tried both NetBSD 9.3 and 10.0, and neither would boot. I saw some errors flying by about problems with my hardware, but since I couldn't get to a prompt to look at the log files, I couldn't figure them out. That's a pity, I was hoping to at least give it a try. Maybe if I can find some other hardware to run it on, I can give it a try in the future. Could not get wifi working on this machine on any of the BSDs except OpenBSD 7.4/7.5. Strange? But OpenBSD seems to like this machine. Go figure.
 
Share your NetBSD experience. Video and HDMI Audio Sound do work on the Raspberry Pi 4B hardware with NetBSD 10.0 ; 2 downloads 1 written to micro SD card, the 2nd download written to a USB flash drive stick. The boot up from the micro SD card, will then resize the USB flash drive stick to use all the available space for NetBSD file system. (takes a little extra time during first boot)
https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com/2024/05/netbsd-aarch64-100-install-on-raspberry.html
YMMV.

FreeBSD or GhostBSD install (download image and write to a USB flash drive) and additional setup of a USB SSD either USB to SATA cable or a USB 3.0 Ugreen M.2 Case
https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com/2024/01/january-19-2024-howto-download.html

Patch FreeBSD or GhostBSD kernel source code /usr/src with Marcos Devesas Campos patch files for VCHIQ HDMI audio sound for Raspberry Pi 4B.
https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com/2024/01/hdmi-audio-sound-patches-into-ghostbsd.html

https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com/2024/01/january-19-2024-howto-download.html
use
write_image_dd_to_da1.sh
shell script file to download FreeBSD 14.0-RELEASE image or GhostBSD-Arm64 image

https://ghostbsd-arm64.blogspot.com/2023/12/how-to-install-ghostbsd-arm64-into-usb.html
Directions to boot from an image file written to a USB Flashdrive Stick. Connect a blank USB SSD and proceed to create disk partitions on the USB SSD. Next create ZFS file systems on the USB SSD. Copy files from the USB Flash drive stick to the USB SSD ZFS file system. Modify a few of those files to match the USB SSD environment and setup the selected boot file image and freebsd configuration files for that USB SSD environment. When finished the steps, shutdown operating system, remove USB flash drive stick, reboot on the USB SSD ZFS file system. Now you have a FreeBSD/GhostBSD-Arm64 workstation with a 250Gb or 1Tb to use for your next fun projects.

Best of luck with your new toy and enjoy the Freedom of using FreeBSD on your Raspberry Pi 4B or 400 keyboard model BCM2711 SOC. Some day internatl Wifi will work and Video Core IV GPU accelartion will be enabled. Fred
 
wb7odyfred said:
Some day internatl Wifi will work and Video Core IV GPU accelartion will be enabled.
Click to expand...
And when will that be? Do you have any concrete information on that, or is that mere speculation / wishful thinking? I could just test on my Raspberry Pi 3, that NetBSD 10 now finally supports the internal WiFi (that was not the case in 9.3 and 9.4) and sound. So would it not be possible to somehow copy those drivers from NetBSD and port them to FreeBSD?
 
Hi, I wanted to share the NetBSD system with desktop environment freshly installed on real hardware testing, it looks to be a lightweight and very end-user friendly system, consumes low machine resources...

NetBS.png
 
My cases with NetBSD:

2008-2010: small office "server" with one small and one big HDD for Windows XP virtual machine with financial software, accessed via RDP. Of course XEN Dom0 with hvm virtualization. Reason: experiments and comforable backupping: filesystem snapshot -> mounting snapshot -> backupping vm .img file -> unmounting snapshot.

2009: tried install on old IBM Thinkpad 600e with Pentium III (or II?) with 384 mb ram for desktop purposes. Linux on other notebook as router, usb bluetooth dongles for PAN...

2011-12: on old server started making samba share, then forgot about it. It was eating power whole year for nothing.

2010 - 2016: home NAS with samba, nfs, torrents, print and scan server, owncloud, Xen DomU VMs. Works fine.

Good things for me:
- filesystem snapshots from ancient times;
- clean design;
- stability;

Bad things:
- no ZFS at that time;
- upgrading with pkgsrc with pkg_rolling-replace;
- no desktop virtualization.
- old ipfilter.
 
sidetone said:
For FreeBSD users, and those who've ever used FreeBSD, share your NetBSD experience. Including, if you've used NetBSD for complementary use with FreeBSD, such as needing hardware support for access.

Keep in mind: Thread why-is-freebsd-not-more-like.66591. For other discussion and technical help about NetBSD, use daemonforums.org, unitedbsd.com or NetBSD mailing lists.


Trying NetBSD
I've tried NetBSD before 2016, but had trouble with the network card, so couldn't continue. The network card had to be physically removed for it to boot up. I don't remember if that was the wireless card which didn't work with it, which I needed at that time.


NetBSD as a desktop
My first time using NetBSD successfully on the desktop was in February or March of 2018 until May or June of that year. It was likely the 7.1.2 release in mid March, or 7.1.1 of the end of the previous year.

NetBSD, by default, mounts the kernel and pty on their own filesystem.

NetBSD pkgsrc uses a file rather than an ncurses menu for configuring its ports. It has less ports, but they're sturdy and seemed less complicated or simpler. Their dependency choices were set from a file, rather than from an ncurses menu.

My desktop froze up a lot from Internet browser's runaway processes. This hasn't happened on FreeBSD, until more recently, as it became a frequent occurrence with Firefox: this was largely fixed by limiting the amount of RAM of the (login) user account which this program ran under.

Native audio only allowed 1 application to play at a time on NetBSD. It used EsounD (Enlightened Sound Daemon; ESD) or PulseAudio more often than oss or sndio. Former member Sensucht94 showed me a link which shows how to use ESD to take audio from multiple applications, and output it for the speaker.

At the time, I've heard that the 8 series (including while it was current) of NetBSD uses an improved native sound server which allows multiple sound sources to play at the same time.

Their ttys file was simple, as it used xdm_enable="YES" for turning on xdm. It has been reported that FreeBSD could also be configured with this, but I haven't gotten it to work like that.

The desktop of NetBSD was in very low resolution. If this was the default that could have been adjusted, I didn't know how to.

Since then, it has been said that the Video display and sound system on NetBSD have been improved.


The time I've used NetBSD for legacy and specialty hardware support
I used NetBSD, in an attempt to use legacy and specialty hardware in 2022, after my computer broke. The attempt was to get a 32bit PC with IDE cables with an old SATA card to access a SATA harddisk. It was a RAID card, which use was attempted in JBOD (Just a Bunch of Disks) mode.

The /dev/ directory was overwhelming to use, because it listed all possible devices, whether they were loaded or not, instead of autoloading drivers when needed.

In this, the people in the NetBSD IRC rooms were friendly and eager to help.

It turns out, that my RAID card was bad. Then, tried another solution of using a USB to SATA cable, for my laptop on FreeBSD, which the harddisks were damaged and important data couldn't be accessed.


Related:
According to https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-co...nterface-Device-HID-Support-in-FreeBSD-13.pdf, NetBSD and OpenBSD have had the improved HID stack for a while, that is recently being implemented in FreeBSD.


Related threads:
Click to expand...
10 years ago NetBSD was my favorite BSD by far. Nowadays I'm a Puffy believer though.
build.sh is a very nice build system. And you can run it to cross-compile NetBSD from just anywhere. It's quite cool. You could crosscompile a NetBSD/macppc build from a x86 Linux distro.
NetBSD developers also developed RUMP Kernels, that was a very cool implementation of Unikernels.

The OS is comfortable for every UNIX guy, and, if your hardware is supported, running it will be just a breeze.
I currently run it on my PowerBook G4 and I'm quite happy with it.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top