Arcan 0.7.1 – Minutes To Midnight

https://arcan-fe.com/2025/12/27/arcan-0-7-1-minutes-to-midnight/

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD

Booting NetBSD 10.1 installation from floppy sets, then downloading and installing over ipv6 from an http mirror. All on a 486DX2-66Mhz.

#netbsd #retrocomputing #486 #ipv6

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NetBSD 10.1 booting from floppy sets on a Gotek floppy emulator

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NetBSD kernel downloading at 337.21 KiB/s

There we go. Have a modern web browser (midori) working on a 2008 netbook, with an 1.6GHz Atom processor and 1Gbyte of RAM, all thanks to the magic of BSD. First page to fire up is of course @exquisite

#RunBSD #NetBSD

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A netbook displaying the exquisite.social "About" page

Is the bug collection of #NetBSD at https://gnats.netbsd.org/ available in some other form where there would be working links to each response?
-- does not look so; search for PR number "56944" on https://www.netbsd.org/support/query-pr.html goes to the URL listed below.
- - -
Am reading currently https://gnats.netbsd.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=56944 linked from https://wiki.netbsd.org/zfs/ ; of course #ZFS is involved, why else? (Scrolling the base64-encoded string fast enough to be near-blur is trippy!)

Related: https://gnats.netbsd.org/57558 .

The @bsdcan Call For Papers (CFP) is open until January 17th, see https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html

The holidays can be a great time to get that submission done! #bsdcan #openbsd #netbsd #freebsd #freesoftware #libresoftware #ottawa

Want to know more about #bsd and the conferences? See https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html (and links therein)

Also: indico mail problem has been fixed

@resuna @GrantMeStrength Pity that was lost! What language did you use?

Apologies for the ESR references in this link, but it includes many stories of Trek code bases:

http://www.catb.org/~esr/super-star-trek/sst-doc.html

And there's still a #Trek in the #NetBSD source tree, under /usr/src/games/trek .

@rqm tetris(6) is also part of rescue(8) so you may be able to use it even in a machine that is not so OK! :)

There is also this PR that is probably one of the nicest ones: PR misc/31370 https://gnats.NetBSD.org/cgi-bin/query-pr-single.pl?number=31370

#netbsd

It turns out my mysterious app crashes on #NetBSD i386 were in fact due to a bug in the i915 driver. I can disable it on boot and the programs work, but of course screen resolution is off this way. Any known workarounds?

@rqm TIL!

```
vsis$ which tetris
/usr/games/tetris
```

wow #NetBSD *rules*!

I like #NetBSD so far. Even despite my stupid mistakes with pkgsrc. And not only because THERE IS TETRIS BUNDLED

#netbsd

The #NetBSD pkgsrc system for building packages is pretty neat. Took me about 30 minutes to figure it all out and I never really used NetBSD before.

Still the official docs could be improved upon but #OpenBSD set the bar pretty high for user-friendliness.

@subnetspider The #NetBSD equivalent is the rather verbose atactl <dev> identify

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# atactl wd0 identify Model: ST16000NM002H-3KW133, Rev: RE03, Serial #: ZYD078A8 World Wide Name: 5000C500E81DDD6D Device type: ATA, fixed Capacity 16 Tbytes, 31251759104 sectors, 512 bytes/sector Cylinders: 16383, heads: 16, sec/track: 63 Physical sector size: 4096 bytes First physically aligned sector: 8

The #NetBSD 🚩community is amazing! 🔥
Let's come together to reach the foundation's $50,000 year-end goal. Your contribution directly drives the project's future and innovation. Every donation helps!
https://netbsd.org/donations/
#NetBSD #OpenSource #FOSS #Donate
#outreach

My go-to is #WindowMaker though. Or, on super low end devices (486), ctwm (default in #NetBSD and #OpenBSD I think.

I investigated some #NetBSD/i386 bulk build failures for Go packages. They all failed with the same error, which is sus. Reported it as https://github.com/golang/go/issues/76815, and it turned out to be an actual linker bug that was fixed today! 🤩

#NetBSD 10.1 was released on December 16 2024 - exactly one year ago.

Not a bad anniversary. Post your favorite stories and/or functionalities of NetBSD in the replies, I am curious to see who is using it and for what...

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱/𝟭𝟮/𝟭𝟱 (Valuable News - 2025/12/15) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/12/15/valuable-news-2025-12-15/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday

@rperezrosario #netbsd

I understand the strain on maintainers, but it's still sad to see #FreeBSD culling so many 32bit packages. #OpenBSD suffers from the same problem. It seems #NetBSD will remain the platform where you can still e.g. get a working web browser for a legacy system (#Arcticfox). Same applies to the Linux world.

Hard to show with a screenshot, but the GameCube controller does work with games that use SDL2 for joystick access on #NetBSD Wii.

Added support for GameCube controllers on #NetBSD Wii. A new driver exposes the four GameCube controller sockets as HID devices that work with SDL / SDL2 as joystick devices.

Trying #NetBSD/amd64 on an old, cheap Dell Inspiron laptop.

So, I found this netbook and decided to fix it.

First step was easy: I tested NetBSD on it. (because it's a netbook, you see? 😜)

But the unit is in a sorry state. A USB port is so rusty that it doesn't work. I left the battery in a recycling point of my city because it was not safe to handle. Lots of keys from the keyboard doesn't work at all, etc, etc.

Let's see if I can find good parts for it. If you know where I can purchase parts for a Toshiba NB105 (NB100 series) in Spain or the EU, please let me know.

#NetBSD #netbook #toshiba #ToshibaNB100 #ToshibaNB105

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A screenshot of a computer, with a terminal emulator window. A fetch program was ran displaying NetBSD.

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A close-up photo of a USB port. The USB port seems to be very rusty.

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A small netbook with a keyboard and a mouse attached.

Today I learned #netbsd has openpam and I don't quite know what to do with it...

https://man.netbsd.org/NetBSD-10.x-BRANCH/openpam.3

The Call for Papers for #bsdcan is open, see https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html for some background (f you want to explain to less BSD-savvy friends) #bsdcan #bsd #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #freesoftware #libresoftware #development #sysadmin #devops #conference

@netbsd #NetBSD

Latest 𝗩𝗮𝗹𝘂𝗮𝗯𝗹𝗲 𝗡𝗲𝘄𝘀 - 𝟮𝟬𝟮𝟱/𝟭𝟮/𝟬𝟭 (Valuable News - 2025/12/01) available.

https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2025/12/01/valuable-news-2025-12-01/

Past releases: https://vermaden.wordpress.com/news/

#verblog #vernews #news #bsd #freebsd #openbsd #netbsd #linux #unix #zfs #opnsense #ghostbsd #solaris #vermadenday