Also amazing that this thing did not OOM-kill processes all over the place; even before I started compiling I did a pkgin upgrade on the poor box, which took .. a few hours. I'm all outta swap, real low on RAM, and yet it somehow got through this .. #NetBSD for the win, I guess.

Says top:

Memory: 56M Act, 27M Inact, 11M Wired, 15M Exec, 820K File, 2076K Free
Swap: 128M Total, 128M Used, 4K Free / Pools: 23M Used / Network: 23K In, 34K Out

Finally installed XFCE on my gaming PC running #NetBSD. (Well, it dual-boots, so it's either gaming or NetBSD.)

Damn, XFCE looks beautiful in HiDPI.

Also, surprisingly, the best browser on #NetBSD today is ... Chromium! Works really well if you can get it to build.

3 more days!

BSDCan 2026 is now accepting submissions for the June 2026 conference, see https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html and links therein for instructions.

Submissions deadline is January 17, 2026, the conference runs tutorials June 17-18, talks June 19-20.

#bsdcan #conference #freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #bsd #development #networking #freesoftware #libresoftware

Do you want to come to #ottawa and tell a bunch of #BSD geeks about what you enjoy doing?

Submit to BSDCan 2026!

Our submissions deadline is January 17, 2026, see https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html

Tutorials: June 17-18, 2026
Conference: June 19-20, 2026

More about the BSD conferences: https://nxdomain.no/~peter/what_is_bsd_come_to_a_conference_to_find_out.html

#freebsd #netbsd #openbsd #conference #development #sysadmin

5 days left to get your @bsdcan talk submitted! Join your friends in Canada to discuss the state of the *BSDs. See talks by leaders of our industry, parents of the Internet, and that person you've been seeing on mailing lists for years!:

https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html#main

#runbsd #netbsd #freebsd #openbsd #dragonflybsd #sysadmin

Judging by the number of #NetBSD bugreports, i386 gets 3x as many reports as eg. arm:

Category             critical  serious non-crit  TOTAL           Median TTC
port-arm                    8       36        7       51      2m 28d 20:02:56
port-i386                  34      105       52      191      7m  6d 15:28:21

I don't think this says #i386 is 3x as problematic as arm, but may have a lot to do with the size of the userbase.

FreeBSD soft-ditched i386, Debian is hard-ditching it, OpenBSD has nobody to compile ports... Yet the stats seem to indicate demand.

Not quite dead yet.

#RUNBSD #retrocomputing

During the January holidays, I replaced #Debian with #NetBSD and moved the root partition to an external USB drive, so the microSD is used only for /boot.

It runs pretty fast, but I can’t think of anything it could run that Linux couldn’t.

For now, I’m just playing with the OS itself, trying to write ARMv6 assembly and playing Hack on this machine.

BSDCan 2026 is in #ottawa June 17 - 20, 2026.

The submissions deadline is January 17, 2027. See the Call for Papers page https://www.bsdcan.org/2026/papers.html for instructions on how to submit.

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 @bsdcan #bsdcan #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #freesoftware #libresoftware #conferences

I'm going to assume running multiple automated test frameworks on a 1-core #NetBSD Pi will eventually eat itself out or starve or something. Have not heard from the #Zabbix agent in an hour or so.

The Pi wifi worked until it started failing with loss of connection. I moved the SD card to a second 0W with a plugin RJ45. Restarting test suite. Dag.

Alt...

Pretty busy CPU chart for a day or so thrashing multiple tests.

Instructions for installing #NetBSD on the Wii U: https://mail-index.netbsd.org/port-powerpc/2026/01/10/msg003724.html

We should modernize the #NetBSD website.
Example:

Log Message:
Add support for the Nintendo Wii U.

#NetBSD

Two more #NetBSD systems going 11.0 BETA - a creaky 686 and a teeny Pi 0W. It's been months since I managed to write a bootable SD card for the little Pi; the 2026 image worked like a champ.

Alt...

Neofetch screen grab from NetBSD 11 BETA with a 2-screen 686 processor.

Alt...

Neofetch screen grab from NetBSD 11 BETA with a 1-core Raspberry Pi 0W.

#OpenBSD 5.4 on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100.
While 6.0 was the last version to support Zaurus, X breaks in 5.5. I don't have a working network card yet, but hopefully will soon.
#NetBSD still supports the Zaurus, but I wasn't able to install it.

Alt...

OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 PDA running spectrwm.

Alt...

OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 PDA running qvwm.

Alt...

OpenBSD on a Sharp Zaurus SL-C3100 PDA running tmux.

@AnachronistJohn

Running #NetBSD ...? 😉

Finally:

===> Installing binary package of qgis-3.44.5

#NetBSD
#PkgSrc

AI models don’t really 'get' the BSDs. As a result, they often provide incomplete, imprecise, or flat-out wrong answers by defaulting to Linux paradigms. When it comes to illumos-based systems, they just completely lose the plot.

This is becoming a serious issue for the BSDs and illumos ecosystems. We are seeing entire websites flooded with AI-generated tutorials and guides that are totally incorrect. Most people don't realize this; they follow the instructions, fail, and then assume that the BSDs doesn't work well or are 'unstable' because they have supposedly changed since the guide was written.

Luckily, some people eventually find my blog, reach out, and finally understand what's actually going on. Others, unfortunately, end up on major social sites or comments, claiming that these systems are broken.

In 2026, one of our greatest challenges will be teaching people how to vet their sources and filter information.
And I see this as a very, very uphill battle.

#IT #SysAdmin #FreeBSD #NetBSD #OpenBSD #illumos #News #UnderstandingText #Disinformation

Today, I fixed a #NetBSD bug report from 2005. Better late than never, I guess.

https://gnats.netbsd.org/30837

New year, same love for clean code. 🧡

I saw @netbsd 🚩was short $327 on their 2025 funding goal, so I sent a donation to start 2026 on a high note.

Wishing the team a great 2026.

Wishing all BSD users Happy New Year ahead!

#NetBSD #Unix #OpenSource #linux #sysadmin #runbsd

Let it build
Let it build
Let it buiiiiiiild
#NetBSD

What it looks like booting #NetBSD on the Wii U for the first time https://youtu.be/pfNySZMSvLQ

It's alive! SMP kernel up and running on #NetBSD Wii U.

This evening in "cli snippets for things I learned":
To more easily upgrade to #NetBSD -current, you can

1) build and install sysupgrade:

# cd /usr/pkgsrc/sysutils/sysupgrade
# make && make install

2) Then point it to the daily snapshots at:

# sysupgrade fetch https://nycdn.netbsd.org/pub/NetBSD-daily/HEAD/latest/$(sysctl kern.machine_arch)

3) Follow the rest of the sysupgrade steps found at
https://www.netbsd.org/docs/guide/en/chap-upgrading.html

Be warned that sysupgrade etcupdate is long, boring, but important.

#RunBSD

#NetBSD 11 getting closer: "Timeout for showstoppers (before they will be downgraded) december 28, trying to move on to RC1 before the end of december."
https://wiki.netbsd.org/releng/netbsd-11/

Console works on the Wii U gamepad too, although it doesn’t quite fit with the default font size. #netbsd

Here's #NetBSD booting on a Nintendo Wii U (natively, not vWii!) https://youtu.be/ZLPe5g9j_Ss

Arcan 0.7.1 – Minutes To Midnight

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

#FreeBSD #OpenBSD #NetBSD

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

Alt...

A netbook displaying the exquisite.social "About" page